Life
- Agriculture
As infections ravage food crops, scientists fight back
Diseases threaten important food crops like cocoa beans, wheat and citrus. Scientists are working to understand these infections — and fight back.
- Animals
Giving cats a special food may one day help people with cat allergies
Research by pet-food maker Purina aims to disable the major allergen carried in cat saliva. It’s a protein called Fel d1.
- Fossils
A flexible bone that aids mammals in chewing arose during the Jurassic
A flexible bony structure that helps with chewing may have helped give rise to the Age of Mammals, a new fossil suggests.
- Brain
Lasers make mice hallucinate
Scientists used a technique called optogenetics to make mice “see” vertical or horizontal lines that didn’t actually exist.
- Animals
Scientists Say: Hertz
Frequency is how often something repeats over a period of time. Frequency is often measured in hertz, the number of times a cycle repeats each second.
- Health & Medicine
Measles can harm a child’s defense against other serious infections
Getting the measles can leave the body vulnerable to other infections months or even years later, scientists are finding.
- Brain
This brain region may make lifelike robots creep you out
Robots that look too much like real people can be unsettling. Scientists identified a brain region that may be behind these uneasy feelings.
- Animals
Ancient crocodiles may have preferred chomping plants, not meat
Fossil teeth of ancient crocodilians suggest that some ate plants and that such green diets evolved in crocs at least three times more than 60 million years ago.
- Animals
New treatment offers hope for bats battling white nose syndrome
A fungal disease that has wiped out millions of North American bats has a new challenger: antifungal bacteria. Infected bats treated with the germs had a good chance of surviving.
- Animals
Some mama whales may whisper to keep calves safe from orcas
Even enormous whales can fear the threat that orcas pose to their babies. It now seems that some have taken to whispering to help their young stay off the killer whales’ radar.
- Earth
Record seaweed belt spanned from Africa to Gulf of Mexico
Blooms of Sargassum seaweed used to form at the mouth of the Amazon River each year. In 2011, they mushroomed in size to where they now span from South America across to Africa.
- Life
Scientists Say: Mitosis
Mitosis is a type of cell division where one cell divides into two identical copies, called daughter cells.
