Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Life
Biology’s big bang had a long fuse
The fossil record’s earliest troves of animal life are the result of more than 200 million years of evolution.
- Life
Cretaceous Thanksgiving
A fossilized feathered dinosaur dined on bird not long before its own demise.
- Life
DNA to flutter by
The complete genetic instruction book for making monarch butterflies contains information about how the insects manage their long migration to Mexico.
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- Animals
Lost to history: The “churk”
More than a half-century ago, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center outside Washington, D.C., engaged in some creative barnyard breeding. Their goal was the development of fatherless turkeys — virgin hens that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. Along the way, and ostensibly quite by accident, an interim stage of this work resulted in a rooster-fathered hybrid that the scientists termed a churk.
- Life
Immune cells function beyond battle
Cells lining the intestines take cues from immune cells and gut bacteria when deciding whether self-defense or metabolism is more important.
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- Life
How both macho and meek persist
Research in voles demonstrates one way that evolution preserves two divergent strategies in a single population.
- Life
Chromosome glitch tied to separation anxiety
The finding is the latest in a series linking extra or missing gene copies to mental conditions.
- Tech
Hooking fish, not endangered turtles
A tuna fisherman has taken it upon himself to make the seas safer for sea turtles, animals that are threatened or endangered with extinction worldwide. He’s designed a new hook that he says will make bait unavailable to marine birds and turtles until long after it’s sunk well below the range where these animals venture to eat.
- Life
Two steps to primate social living
Evolutionary shifts about 52 million and 16 million years ago led to the group structures observed today, researchers argue.
- Life
A gland grows itself
Japanese researchers coax a pituitary to develop from stem cells in a lab dish.
