Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Wasps drive frog eggs to (escape) hatch
A tree frog's eggs can match their response to the degree of danger: all-out mass action for snakes but less activity for one wasp.
- Animals
Beetle fights bass in mouthwash duel
A whirligig beetle duels with a hungry fish by dribbling out a repulsive chemical while the fish tries to rinse it off.
- Plants
Glitch splits hermaphrodite flowers
In a newly proposed scenario, polyploidy may trigger perfectly good hermaphrodite plants to evolve gender forms.
- Animals
Snapping shrimp whip up a riot of bubbles
High-speed video and fancy math demonstrate that snapping shrimp make so much noise by popping bubbles.
- Animals
Sexual conflict pushes species making
A novel comparison of 25 pairs of insect lineages finds that sexual conflict plays more of a role in making new species than scientists had realized.
- Ecosystems
Virtual skylarks suffer weed shortfall
A new mathematical model raises the concern that switching to transgenic herbicide-tolerant crops could deprive birds of weed seeds.
- Animals
Strange Y chromosome makes supermom mice
An otherwise rare system of sex determination has evolved independently at least six times in one genus of South American mice.
- Paleontology
Teeth tell tale of warm-blooded dinosaurs
Evidence locked within the fossil teeth of some dinosaurs may help bolster the view that some of the animals were, at least to some degree, warm-blooded.
- Animals
Toothy valves control crocodile hearts
The odd cog teeth of the crocodile heart may be the first cardiac valve known to control blood flow actively.
- Animals
Slavemaker Ants: Misunderstood Farmers?
A test of what once seemed too obvious to test—whether ant colonies suffer after being raided by slavemaker ants—suggests that some of the raiding insects have been getting unfair press.
- Paleontology
Feathered fossil still stirs debate
More than 2 years after scientists first described 120-million-year-old fossils of a feathered animal, a new analysis seems to bolster the view that the turkey-size species was a bird has-been and not a bird wanna-be.
- Plants
Team corners culprit in sudden oak death
After 5 years of mystery, California pathologists announced they may have identified the cause of a new tree disease called sudden oak death.
