The sky may not seem like a promising place to find life. But in the 1920s, scientists flew planes across the United States and caught floating spores.

A century later, the living atmosphere remains a fairly mysterious place. On Monday, researchers reported that on flights over Japan, at altitudes as high as 10,000 feet, they had caught hundreds of different types of bacteria and fungi. The team estimated that the microbes had flown over 1,200 miles when they were captured. Most intriguing of all, some of the species might be able to cause diseases in people.

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In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned to their young to climb on their backs for a ride.

Generations of primatologists have followed up on Dr. Goodall’s work, discovering over 80 meaningful gestures made by not only chimpanzees, but also bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

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The human brain, more than any other attribute, sets our species apart. Over the past seven million years or so, it has grown in size and complexity, enabling us to use language, make plans for the future and coordinate with one another at a scale never seen before in the history of life.

But our brains came with a downside, according to a study published on Wednesday. The regions that expanded the most in human evolution became exquisitely vulnerable to the ravages of old age.

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Rain may have been an essential ingredient for the origin of life, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Life today exists as cells, which are sacs packed with DNA, RNA, proteins and other molecules. But when life arose roughly four billion years ago, cells were far simpler. Some scientists have investigated how so-called protocells first came about by trying to recreate them in labs.

Many researchers suspect that protocells contained only RNA, a single-stranded version of DNA. Both RNA and DNA store genetic information in their long sequences of molecular “letters.”

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When people suffer severe brain damage — as a result of car crashes, for example, or falls or aneurysms — they may slip into a coma for weeks, their eyes closed, their bodies unresponsive.

Some recover, but others enter a mysterious state: eyes open, yet without clear signs of consciousness. Hundreds of thousands of such patients in the United States alone are diagnosed in a vegetative state or as minimally conscious. They may survive for decades without regaining a connection to the outside world.

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