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Eddie Keogh / Reuters Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
Across time and place, our species’ life span is remarkably consistent.
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Bernadett Szabo / Reuters Can Electrically Stimulating Your Brain Make You Too Happy?
When doctors can directly access patients' cerebral reward networks, someone has to decide just how good people should feel.
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Martin Parsekian / Wildlife Conservation Society / The ... The Weird Scientific Illustrations That Shaped Pop Culture
A century ago, a small but influential group of artists and researchers teamed up to discover and introduce strange new species to the public.
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Mike Hollingshead / Corbis / Getty Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth
A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.
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George Rose / Getty American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why
Climate change explains only 20 percent of the movement.
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Yuri Gripas / Reuters Can an Archive Capture the Scents of an Entire Era?
A molecular record of smells could give future generations a sense of the past.
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Confusion Over the New Ebola Outbreak
A mistranslation is spreading misinformation about the news from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Noah Berger / Reuters Did Global Warming Really ‘Pause’ During the 2000s?
A new study explains why the controversial hiatus doesn’t amount to much.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Why Does Heat Kill Cells?
The answer to a longstanding mystery suggests that proteins are far more malleable than previously thought.
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Yuri Gripas / Reuters The Myth That Humans Have Poor Smell Is Nonscents
The idea is a 19th-century myth that was started by scientists who never actually measured our ability to detect odors.
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Reuters An Albatross Census From Space
Researchers are using high-resolution satellite images to count the large birds on remote islands.
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Phil Noble / Reuters A Decade Later, a Patient Finds Out Her Genetic Test Was Wrong
Should scientists give results to participants in research studies if they haven’t been validated in a clinical lab?
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NASA / ESA / VLA/ Chandra / Spitzer ... The Ultimate Cosmic Mashup
Astronomers combined telescope observations across the electromagnetic spectrum to produce a glittering new image of the Crab Nebula.
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USDA Agricultural Research Service The Making of a Friendly Microbe
The ability to hold back its destructive side has allowed one bacterium to repeatedly colonize the bodies of animals.
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Sandy Ong What Happens to Bears After They're Rescued From Bile Farming?
The Vietnamese government believes it can stomp out the illegal industry within the next few years. If it succeeds, it will need to find new homes for hundreds of bears.
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Charles Dharapak / AP Now That We Can Read Genomes, Can We Write Them?
A group of scientists is pushing ahead with plans to build whole genomes—including human ones—from scratch.
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Danielle Dufault / Royal Ontario Museum Meet Zuul, Destroyer of Shins—a Dinosaur Named After Ghostbusters
It came from a giant Montana quarry, not Sigourney Weaver’s fridge.
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Reuters What Is America's Secret Space Shuttle For?
It’s not clear what the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B is supposed to do—or if it’s worth its hefty price tag.
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Ben Nadler / Princeton University Press A Graphic Novel About 17th-Century Philosophy
A father-son writing and illustration team tells the story of the Western thinkers that fell afoul of the church at the dawn of modernity.
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Wits University / John Hawks A New Addition to the Human Family Tree Is Surprisingly Young
Homo naledi was alive between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, which complicates the story of human evolution.
