Life

  1. Neuroscience

    Restoring Recall: Memories may form and reform, with sleep

    Two new studies indicate that memories, at least for skills learned in a laboratory, undergo a process of storage and restorage that depends critically on sleep.

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  2. Animals

    Bad Bubbles: Could sonar give whales the bends?

    Odd bubbles of fat and gas have turned up in the bodies of marine mammals, raising the question of whether something about human activity in the oceans could give these deep divers decompression sickness.

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  3. Animals

    Carnivores in Captivity: Size of range in wild may predict risk in zoo

    A survey of zoo reports of troubled animals suggests that the minimum size of a species' range predicts how well it will adapt to captivity.

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  4. Paleontology

    Some trilobites grew their own eyeshades

    The 380-million-year-old fossil of a trilobite strongly suggests that members of at least some trilobite species were active during the daytime, a lifestyle that scientists previously had only suspected.

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  5. Plants

    Bean plants punish microbial partners

    In a novel test of how partnerships between species can last in nature, researchers have found that soybeans punish cheaters.

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  6. Ecosystems

    Killer Consequences: Has whaling driven orcas to a diet of sea lions?

    Killer whales may have been responsible for steep declines in seal, sea lion, and otter populations after whaling wiped out the great whales that killer whales had been eating.

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  7. Animals

    Leashing the Rattlesnake

    Even in the 21st century, there's still room for old-fashioned, do-it-yourself ingenuity in experimental design for studying animal behavior.

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  8. Paleontology

    Ratzilla: Extinct rodent was big, really big

    Scientists who've analyzed the fossilized remains of an extinct South American rodent say that the creatures grew to weigh a whopping 700 kilograms.

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  9. Animals

    Risk of egg diseases may rush incubation

    Bird eggs can catch infections through their shells, and that risk may be an overlooked factor in the puzzlingly early start of incubation.

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  10. Plants

    Glitch splits hermaphrodite flowers

    In a newly proposed scenario, polyploidy may trigger perfectly good hermaphrodite plants to evolve gender forms.

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  11. Paleontology

    Fossils’ ear design hints at aquatic lifestyle

    New studies of distinctive skull structures in fossils of one of Earth's earliest-known four-limbed creatures suggest the animal could hear best when it was underwater.

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  12. Animals

    Skin Chemistry: Poison frogs upgrade toxins from prey

    For the first time, scientists have found a poisonous frog that takes up a toxin from its prey and then tweaks the chemical to make it a more deadly weapon.

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