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October 26, 2012 The ornithomimus dinosaur was built like a 400-pound ostrich and lived about 75 million years ago. But recent research suggests the adult dinos had big, showy, colorful feathers with quills that were most likely used for sexual displays or courtship.

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October 25, 2012 Why do some leaders make little difference to organizations and countries while others turn out to be indispensable? Research suggests that what's key isn't personality or even the historical moment, but the organizational structure that produces the leader.

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October 25, 2012 The co-author of a controversial study linking diet soda consumption to blood cancers says his study's findings fall into a gray area — between a clear relationship between diet soda consumption and cancers and no relationship at all. That, he says, is "the natural process of science."

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October 24, 2012 We drink a lot of diet soda in this country, so when researchers disavowed a study linking aspartame to rare cancers just before publication, we took notice. The whole issue illustrates what makes scientific studies so confusing to the public. We'll keep you posted on this.

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October 24, 2012 "One common property we see in animal groups from schooling fish to flocking birds to primate groups is that they effectively vote to decide where to go and what to do," says an evolutionary biologist. But like human leaders, successful animal leaders know they can't get too far ahead of their constituents.

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October 24, 2012 Because we had better food, our brains grew bigger than those of our primate cousins, scientists say. Early humans cooked, which makes meat and veggies more digestible and nutrients more available to the body. Plus, there was all that chatting and chewing around the campfire.

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October 23, 2012 Whales are among the great communicators of the animal world. They produce all sorts of sounds: squeaks, whistles and even epic arias worthy of an opera house. But in the mid-1980s, one beluga whale did something that had never been documented before: It imitated human speech.

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October 19, 2012 Could prebiotics, the food for the good bacteria known as probiotics, have more benefits than a dose of the microbes, particularly for people with serious health problems like preemies? A researcher working with pigs is trying to figure that out.

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October 15, 2012 Researchers have developed a clever new method to detect the chemical that causes the annoying itch. But urushiol isn't all bad. It's also behind the shine of beautiful Japanese lacquerware.

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