Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Peacocks sometimes fake mating hoots
Peacocks may have learned a benefit of deception by sounding their copulation calls even when no peahens are in sight.
- Neuroscience
Brain uses decision-making region to tell blue from green
Language and early visual areas of the brain are not crucial for distinguishing colors, an fMRI study suggests.
- Genetics
Neanderthal Man
The hottest thing in human evolution studies right now is DNA extracted from hominid fossils. Svante Pääbo, the dean of ancient-gene research, explains in Neandertal Man how it all began when he bought a piece of calf liver at a supermarket in 1981.
- Microbes
Power-packed bacterial spores generate electricity
With mighty bursts of rehydration, bacterial spores offer a new source of renewable energy.
- Animals
Algal blooms created ancient whale graveyard
Whales and other marine mammals died at sea and were buried on a tidal flat in what's now in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
- Neuroscience
Girls may require more mutations than boys to develop autism
New results may help explain why more males wind up with autism.
- Life
Rivalry helps fruit flies maintain brainpower
In lab tests, males dim mentally after generations without competitors.
- Animals
The mystery of the missing fish heads
When scientists opened up the stomachs of shortfin mako sharks, they found that nearly all of the digesting fish had no heads or tails.
- Animals
Methylation turns a wannabe bumblebee into a queen
Epigenetic changes to bumblebee DNA turns a worker into a reproductive pseudo-queen, suggesting that genomic imprinting could be responsible for the bumblebee social system.
- Genetics
What your earwax says about your ancestry
Both armpit and ear wax secretions are smellier in Caucasians than in Asians, thanks to a tiny genetic change that differs across ethnic groups.
- Animals
A tiny ocean vortex, with pop art pizzazz
Coral polyps kick up a whirling vortex of water by whipping their hairlike cilia back and forth in the photography winner of the 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
- Neuroscience
Brain’s fact-checker located
A bit of brain tissue near the top of the head may be the body’s fact-checker. Called the supplementary motor cortex, this brain region monitors the body’s action and sends an alert when a mistake is made.
