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**FILE** Scott Crocoll holds a dead Indiana bat in an abandoned mine in Rosendale, N.Y., in this January 2009 file photo. Bats afflicted with deadly “white-nose syndrome” might be able to make it through winter with the help of heated boxes placed in hibernation caves, a pair of researchers say. The biologists stress that the boxes being tested this winter are not intended to cure mysterious affliction, which has killed upward of a half million bats in three winters from New England to West Virginia. But, in an article published online Thursday in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, they suggest the little heated havens could help stricken bats preserve enough precious energy to survive hibernation season. (AP Photo/Mike Groll, File)