Life

  1. Earth

    Obama administration should lead energy transition

    R.K. Pachauri, an engineer and economist by training, is director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, India, and a corecipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC periodically issues consensus reports on the science of climate change. Senior editor Janet Raloff spoke with him about changes he hopes to see from the Obama administration.

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  2. Life

    Life: Science news of the year, 2008

    Science News writers and editors looked back at the past year's stories and selected a handful as the year's most interesting and important in Life. Follow hotlinks to the full, original stories.

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  3. Life

    Genes & Cells: Science news of the year, 2008

    Science News writers and editors looked back at the past year's stories and selected a handful as the year's most interesting and important in Genes & Cells. Follow hotlinks to the full, original stories.

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  4. Life

    Dinosaur day care dads

    A new study shows some male dinosaurs may have been the primary caretakers of their young.

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  5. Humans

    Primates get a neural facial

    New brain-imaging studies indicate that similar brain areas coordinate face recognition in people, chimpanzees and macaque monkeys, suggesting that a face-sensitive brain system evolved early in primate evolution.

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  6. Health & Medicine

    Bacteria help themselves in damaged lungs

    An antibiotic produced by a bacterium acts as a molecular snorkel to help with breathing. The bacterium infects and kills many people with cystic fibrosis, and plugging the snorkel could lead to treatments.

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  7. Ecosystems

    Thwarting Tree Poachers

    A new federal rule makes it harder to destroy protected forests.

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  8. Life

    Aging gets with the program

    A study on yeast organisms reveals checkpoints in the aging process: the buildup of certain lipids and fatty acids, and the health of the cell's powerhouses. Drugs could target these checkpoints.

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  9. Life

    Extreme preservation gives fly’s eye view

    The cell-by-cell detail of a 45 million-year–old retina is preserved in amber

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  10. Life

    Hawaii’s honeyeater birds tricked taxonomists

    DNA from old museum specimens reveals evolutionary look-alikes.

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  11. Life

    Study raises worries for zoo-born elephants

    Study of captive-born females finds big survival gap between zoo natives and elephants in native ranges.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Gene could drive species separation

    Newly identified fruit fly gene provides evidence for “cheating genes” that may cause species schisms

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