Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Dogged Dieting: Low-cal canines enjoy longer life
The first completed diet-restriction study in a large animal shows that labrador retrievers fed 25 percent less food than those allowed to eat as much as they desired tend to live longer and suffer fewer age-related diseases.
- Paleontology
Ancient Whodunit: Scientists indict wee suspects in ancient deaths
Evidence locked in 180,000-year-old sediments suggests that a toxic algae bloom was the cause of death for a large group of mammals that were fossilized intact on an ancient lake bottom.
- Animals
Rebranding the Hyena
Zoologists are hoping that long-term ecological studies of the spotted hyena will assist in dispelling the animal's undeservedly bad reputation.
- Animals
Big-Eyed Birds Sing Early Songs: Dawn chorus explained
Researchers report a strong relationship between eye size and the light intensity at which birds start to sing in the morning.
- Paleontology
Older Ancestors: Primate origins age in new analysis
A controversial new statistical model concludes that the common ancestor of primates lived 81.5 million years ago, about 16 million years earlier than many paleontologists have estimated.
- Animals
Maneless lions live one guy per pride
The male lions of Tsavo National Park don't grow manes but they're no wimps—they're the only male lions found so far that rule big prides of females alone, without help from some buddies.
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- Ecosystems
Deprived of Darkness
From anecdotal reports of little-studied phenomena, researchers suspect that artificial night lighting disrupts the physiology and behavior of nocturnal animals.
- Ecosystems
Climate Upsets: Big model predicts many new neighbors
The biggest effects of climate change during the next 50 years may not be extinctions but major reshuffling of the species in local communities.
- Animals
Toxic Tools: Frogs down under pack their own poison
An Australian frog can synthesize its own protective poison, rather than obtain it from the insects it eats.
- Plants
Trees dim the light on spring flowers
Early spring flowers and the sugar maples they grow under use different alarm clocks to get going in the spring, which can make life hard for the flowers in northern forests.
- Animals
Lamprey Allure: Females rush to males’ bile acid
An unusual sex attractant has turned up in an analysis of sea lampreys, and it may inspire new ways to defend the Great Lakes against invasive species.
