Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Monkey in the mirror
Monkeys with implanted head devices use mirrors to inspect themselves, perhaps signaling self-awareness.
- Life
A thousand points of height
A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.
- Life
A salty tail
Just adding sodium can stimulate limb regrowth in tadpoles, a study finds, raising the possibility that human tissue might respond to relatively simple treatment.
- Physics
Being single a real drag for spores
Launching thousands of gametes at once helps a fungus waft its offspring farther.
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- Life
Lone Star cats rescue cousins in Sunshine State
Florida panther numbers have tripled since the introduction of females from Texas injected vital genetic diversity, a new report says.
- Life
X-rays in 3-D show nanosized details
A new X-ray microscope technique peers inside materials to reveal their inner nature.
- Health & Medicine
Main malaria parasite came to humans from gorillas, not chimps
Using DNA from fecal samples, researchers show that the infection was not passed to Homo sapiens by its closest primate relative.
- Health & Medicine
Vital flaw
Liver cells that inherit the wrong number of chromosomes often do just fine, and may even have some advantages.
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- Planetary Science
Life’s cold start
Primordial molecules could have replicated themselves in a slushy place, new experiments suggest.
- Life
Minimolecule may explain how antidepressants work
Research finds that Prozac increases levels of a microRNA and may explain why the drugs take several weeks to work.
