Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Earth
Animal ancestors may have survived ‘snowball Earth’
Chemical fossils in Precambrian sedimentary rock push back the first date for animal life.
- Life
Earliest whales gave birth on land
Recently discovered fossils of a protowhale help fill in gaps in the land-to-water transition.
- Chemistry
Nonstick chemicals linked to infertility
Featured blog: Infertility doubled in women who had high concentrations of commercially produced nonstick chemicals polluting their blood.
- Life
Nemo could get lost again as seawater approaches acidity
Reef fish raised at a seawater pH expected for the year 2100 don't smell their way around normally.
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- Life
Whipping fluids along in microlabs
Researchers have detailed one way for hairlike structures to drive liquid in a "lab on a chip."
- Life
Serotonin turns shy locusts into cereal killers
Serotonin can turn solitary locusts into swarming biblical-scale crop destroyers.
- Life
Triceratops may have been headbangers
Lesions on Triceratops fossils are attributed to head-to-head combat in a new study.
- Life
A honeybee tells two from three
Honeybees can generalize about numbers, at least up to three, a new study reports.
- Health & Medicine
Overly Hungry for Frogs
Frogs are shipped half-way round the world to sate human appetites for this lean white meat.
- Life
Carlsbad’s 8 million ‘lost’ bats likely never existed
Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate of extreme bat number.
- Ecosystems
Pacific Northwest salmon poisoning killer whales
A protected population of resident orcas around Vancouver Island and Puget Sound is the planet’s most PCB-contaminated mammals, says one researcher.
