Lichen is a famous biological partnership — but it might actually be a threesome and other top stories.

• Lichen is a famous biological partnership — but it might actually be a threesome

  Wolf lichen (Letharia vulpine), a lichen species studied by a team of University of Montana researchers, shows that some of the world's most common lichen species actually are composed of three partners, not the widely recognized two. (Tim Wheeler) Traditionally, scientists have likened lichen to a married couple: The crusty growths found on trees and rocks are actually composite organisms, formed by the symbiotic partnership between an algae and a single fungus. But a new study throws a wr..

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• Stunning New Map Of The Brain Shows 97 Previously Unknown Regions

  

  Research published Wednesday in the journal Nature unveiled a stunning new map of the brain containing 180 areas, 97 of which were previously unknown. With data gathered by the latest technological advancements used in the Human Connectome Project by the National Institutes of Health, the team of researchers focused on the entirety of the brain versus one part of the cerebral cortex, including all four biological properties — architecture, connectively, function, topography — to develop the col..

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• Discovering the 'final frontier' of our universe

  

  While we may be exploring strange new worlds, like exoplanets beyond our solar system, and seeking out the potential for life on them, these aren't the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Rather than the manned spaceships we've always associated with space exploration in science fiction, our new understanding of galaxies and the universe are being pushed forward by telescopes, in space and on the ground. Researchers comb the immense data the telescopes provide and their findings are giving us ne..

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• In Africa, Birds and Humans Form a Unique Honey Hunting Party

  

  Photo Orlando Yassene, a Yao honey-hunter, holding a male greater honeyguide that was temporarily captured for research in the Niassa National Reserve in Mozambique. Credit Claire Spottiswoode Their word is their bond, and they do what they say — even if the “word” on one side is a loud trill and grunt, and, on the other, the excited twitterings of a bird.Researchers have long known that among certain traditional cultures of Africa, people forage for wild honey with the..

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• Dark Matter Stays Dark

  

  The incredibly sensitive LUX dark-matter detector, buried under a mile of rock, has come up empty on its 20-month search for dark matter — further narrowing down the possible characteristics of the strange substance. Researchers presented the results today (July 21) at the 11th Identification of Dark Matter Conference (IDM2016) in Sheffield, U.K., which gathers together researchers seeking to understand dark matter, the mysterious material that appears to make up more than four-fifths of the uni..

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• Watch Earth Spin Through a Full Year in This Spectacular Time-Lapse Video

  

  Talk about "As the World Turns": A sped-up video of Earth spinning through space shows a dizzying array of clouds and continents from a satellite located 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away. The time-lapse video of 3,000 images shows pictures taken every 2 hours. The pictures come courtesy of the EPIC camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. The satellite is located at a gravitationally stable spot in space between the Earth and the sun known as a Lagra..

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• Mars rover has flashy new tricks: self-guided lasers

  

  NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity just added another trick: autonomous laser shooting. For the first time ever for a robot planetary mission, Curiosity can autonomously target potentially interesting rocks and soil, shoot a laser and camera at the objects through the rover’s ChemCam, and send the information tens of millions of miles back to Earth.Before now, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calf., would select samples from Curiosity’s images and manually direct the C..

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• Some Microbes Have Been With Us Since Before We Existed

  

  Around 10 million years ago, a population of African apes diverged down two paths. One lineage gave rise to gorillas. The other eventually split again, producing one branch that led to humans and another that forked into chimpanzees and bonobos. This is the story of our recent evolutionary past. It’s also the story of some of the microbes in our guts.We have tens of trillions of bacteria and other microbes in our guts—at least one for each of our own human cells. Some species within this microb..

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• A baby planet created one of the moon's largest impact basins

  

  You might be more familiar with the Imbrium Basin than you think. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you probably see the famous Man in the Moon (pictured above) quite often. The face's right eye is actually known as the Mare Imbrium, a dark lava plain within the Imbrium Basin.Schultz based his study on the markings, which are pronounced enough to be visible from Earth even if you're only using a small telescope, found inside the impact crater. One set of markings that radiate out from the..

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