Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Animals

    Wild chimpanzees give first aid to each other

    A study in Uganda shows how often chimps use medicinal plants and other forms of health care — and what that says about the roots of human medicine.

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  2. Plants

    A leaf’s geometry determines whether it falls far from its tree

    Shape and symmetry help determine where a leaf lands — and if the tree it came from can recoup the leaf’s carbon as it decomposes.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Humans have shockingly few ways to treat fungal infections

    It's not quite as bad as The Last of Us. But progress has been achingly slow in developing new antifungal vaccines and drugs.

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  4. Animals

    This tool-wielding assassin turns its prey’s defenses into a trap

    This assassin bug's ability to use a tool — bees’ resin — could shed light on how the ability evolved in other animals.

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  5. Environment

    Skyborne specks of life may influence rainfall patterns

    A study of weather on a mountain in Greece reveal that bioparticles in the sky may drive fluctuations in rainfall patterns more broadly.

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  6. Animals

    Chimp chatter is a lot more like human language than previously thought

    Chimpanzees combine hoots, calls and grunts to convey far more concepts than with single sounds alone. It may be a first among nonhuman animals.

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  7. Plants

    Putrid plants can reek of hot rotting flesh with one evolutionary trick

    Some stinky plants independently evolved an enzyme to take the same molecule behind our bad breath and turn it into the smell of rotting flesh.

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  8. Oceans

    Before altering the air, microbes oxygenated large swaths of the sea

    Hundreds of millions of years before oxygen surged in the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, swaths of oxygen winked in and out of existence in the ocean.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Lining medical stents with hairlike fuzz could fend off infections

    Implanted tubes that transport bodily fluids can get gross. A lab prototype suggests a new vibration-based way to keep them clean and prevent infection.

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  10. Animals

    Ancient poems document the decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise

    The porpoise is critically endangered. Ancient Chinese poems reveal the animal’s range has dropped about 65 percent over the past 1,400 years.

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  11. Animals

    Frog ribbits erupt via an extravagant variety of vocal sacs

    Shape matters as well as size in the great range of male frog show-off equipment for competitive seductive serenades.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    A man let snakes bite him 202 times. His blood helped create a new antivenom

    A new antivenom relies on antibodies from the blood of Tim Friede, who immunized himself against snakebites by injecting increasing doses of venom into his body.

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