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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Animals

    Really big guys restrain youth violence

    Importing six full-grown bull elephants into a park of youngsters stopped killing sprees by young males.

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  2. Paleontology

    Bird Brain? Cranial scan of fossil hints at flight capability

    Detailed computerized tomography scans of the fossilized braincase of an Archaeopteryx show that several flight-related regions of the feathered creature's brain were highly developed.

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  3. Animals

    Anybody know this fish?

    A 2-month marine-biodiversity survey of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge concluded this week, bringing home much data and some novel specimens.

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  4. Animals

    Whys Guy

    Interested in seeing an exploding watermelon, using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream, or knowing why a hurricane spins? Physicist Mats Selen of the University of Illinois has appeared regularly on a local morning TV program to demonstrate a wide variety of physical and chemical phenomena. View video clips of these entertaining presentations. Requires Windows […]

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  5. Ecosystems

    Corals without Boarders

    The last decade has been a great era for discovering corals in the deep ocean, but a United Nations report warns that these cold, dark reefs urgently need protection.

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  6. Ecosystems

    Fish Stew: Species interplay makes fisheries management tricky in the long run

    Annual fluctuations in certain fish populations can be best understood and controlled by accounting for ecological factors, such as predation by other fish, in addition to fisheries harvests.

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  7. Paleontology

    Early life forms had a modular structure

    Fossils recently discovered in northeastern Newfoundland reveal that some of Earth's earliest large organisms had modular body plans whose main architectural element was a branching, frondlike structure.

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  8. Animals

    Trail Mix: Espionage among the bees

    Tests with two kinds of stingless bees suggest that the more aggressive species uses scent-based espionage to target raids on the milder species' food.

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  9. Ecosystems

    Deep-Sea Cukes Can’t Avoid the Weather: El Niño changes life 2.5 miles down

    A 14-year study of a spot 2.5 miles underwater off the California coast shows short-term links between surface events and an abundance of deep-water creatures.

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  10. Paleontology

    Chipmunks in Wisconsin toughed out ice age

    Analyses of DNA from chipmunks in parts of the U.S. Midwest hint that some populations of the creatures stayed in northern refuges rather than migrating south at the beginning of the last ice age.

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  11. Animals

    A first for mammals: Tropical hibernating

    The fat-tailed lemur, the first tropical mammal documented to hibernate, exploits local heat spikes to save energy during the long snooze.

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  12. Animals

    Sparrows Cheat on Sleep: Migratory birds are up at night but still stay sharp

    During their fall migration season, white-crowned sparrows sleep only about a third as much as they do at other times of the year without becoming slow-witted.

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