Vol. 201 No. 4
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More Stories from the February 26, 2022 issue

  1. Animals

    Scientists vacuumed animal DNA out of thin air for the first time

    The ability to sniff out animals’ airborne genetic material has been on researchers’ wish list for over a decade.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Antimicrobial resistance is a leading cause of death globally

    In more than 70 percent of the 1.27 million deaths caused by antimicrobial resistance, infections didn’t respond to two classes of first-line antibiotics.

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  3. Animals

    An Arctic hare traveled at least 388 kilometers in a record-breaking journey

    An Arctic hare’s dash across northern Canada, the longest seen among hares and their relatives, is changing how scientists think about tundra ecology.

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  4. Archaeology

    Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws

    Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.

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  5. Animals

    A new device helps frogs regrow working legs after an amputation

    A single treatment shortly after adult frogs lost part of their legs spurred regrowth of limbs useful for swimming, standing and kicking.

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  6. Artificial Intelligence

    How AI can identify people even in anonymized datasets

    A neural network identified a majority of anonymous mobile phone service subscribers using details about their weekly social interactions.

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  7. Climate

    Satellites have located the world’s methane ‘ultra-emitters’

    Plugging leaks from methane ultra-emitters would make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions — and be cost-effective for those countries, scientists say.

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  8. Planetary Science

    Machine learning points to prime places in Antarctica to find meteorites

    Using data on how ice moves across Antarctica, researchers identified more than 600 spots where space rocks may gather on the southern continent.

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  9. Animals

    Gory footage confirms orca pods can kill adult blue whales

    For the first time, three recorded events show that orcas do hunt and eat blue whales using coordinated attacks that have worked on other large whales.

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  10. Astronomy

    The James Webb Space Telescope has reached its new home at last

    The most powerful telescope ever launched still has a long to-do list before it can start doing science.

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  11. Animals

    Male elephant seals aim to get huge or die trying

    Males will risk death to eat and grow as large as possible, since only the biggest males mate. But females aim for long-term survival.

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  12. Archaeology

    A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe

    Balkan groups collected and ate wild cereal grains several millennia before domesticated cereals reached Europe.

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  13. Humans

    50 years ago, freezing sperm faced scientific skepticism

    In 1972, scientists debated the long-term viability of frozen sperm. Fifty years later, children have been conceived with sperm frozen for decades.

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  14. Animals

    Vinegar eels can synchronize swim

    Swarming, swimming nematodes can move together like fish and also synchronize their wiggling — an ability rare in the animal kingdom.

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  15. Planetary Science

    Earth has a second known ‘Trojan asteroid’ that shares its orbit

    A recently found space rock is about one kilometer wide, orbits ahead of Earth around the sun and will stick around for at least 4,000 years.

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  16. Oceans

    The past’s extreme ocean heat waves are now the new normal

    Marine heat waves that were rare more than a century ago now routinely occur in more than half of global ocean, suggesting we’ve hit a “point of no return.”

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  17. Health & Medicine

    Genetically engineered immune cells have kept two people cancer-free for a decade

    Long-lasting leukemia remission prompts doctors to call CAR-T cell therapy a ‘cure’ for some.

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