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Foods and beverages containing cannabis are popular, but probing their effects is difficult. Scientists are scouring existing studies and knowledge from nutrition research to learn how these products interact with the body.
In Latin America, tens of millions of people live in territories that are governed by outlaws — from powerful drug cartels to crime syndicates. What can be done to restore legitimate law and order?
Carnivorous plants fascinate as much now as when their gruesome diet was first discovered. Molecular biology is helping botanists trace the origins of their predatory ways.
Innovative thinking has done away with problems that long dogged the electric devices — and both scientists and environmentalists are excited about the possibilities
The disorder has several different causes, researchers are learning. That finding opens the door for personalized therapies — and perhaps even effective drugs.
Millions of years of coevolution have given the insects a bag of tricks to escape their predators — from signal-jamming and decoys to acoustic camouflage
PODCAST: They started out so small, one could fit on the palm of your hand, but to make groundbreaking discoveries, physicists had to think really big — as in, vast machines with the power and capacity to reveal the tiniest building blocks of our universe (Season 2/Episode 5)
From monkeys washing potatoes to cockatoos raiding trash cans, socially spread behaviors allow creatures to adapt more rapidly to changing environments than conventional evolution would allow. But the traits are also more easily lost.
COMIC: The feisty orange-black butterfly uses a toolbox of biological tricks to find its way down to Mexico for winter and flap north again in spring. Here’s how scientists figured out those tricks — and what they don’t yet understand.
Loud road and air traffic has been linked to a greater risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. Scientists are uncovering new details about how what you hear stresses the cardiovascular system.
COMIC: Bite marks, shoe prints, crime-scene fibers: Matches to suspects are often far shakier than courtroom experts claim. Better statistical methods — among them, a little beast known as the “likelihood ratio” — can cut down on wrong convictions.
Fossilized leaves and pollen are revealing the evolutionary past of New World tropical forests. The findings are helping to reshape predictions of what might happen to these ecosystems as the climate changes.
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