All Stories by Susan Milius
- Plants
Morphinefree Mutant Poppies: Novel plants make pharmaceutical starter
A Tasmanian company has developed a poppy that produces a commercially useful drug precursor instead of full-fledged morphine, and a research team now reports how the plant does it.
- Animals
Pirates of the Amphibian: Males fertilize eggs of another guy’s gal
For the first time among amphibians, scientists have found frogs that sneak their sperm onto egg clutches left by another mating pair.
- Plants
A new, slimy method of self-pollination
When all else fails for pollination, a Chinese herb in the ginger family resorts to something botanists say they haven't seen before: a do-it-yourself oil slick.
- Animals
Super Bird: Cooing doves flex extra-fast muscles
Muscles that control a dove's cooing belong to the fastest class of muscles known.
- Animals
Owls use tools: Dung is lure for beetles
Burrowing owls' habit of bringing mammal dung to their burrows attracts edible beetles and counts as form of tool use.
- Animals
Mom bears more sons when she gets extra bouquets
When researchers spiff up a male starling's courtship by delivering some extra bouquets to his mate on his behalf, the couple tends to produce more sons than usual.
- Earth
There’s a Catch: Recreation takes toll on marine fish
Recreational fishing isn't just a tiny, harmless nibble on saltwater-fish populations.
- Animals
Policing egg laying in insect colonies
Kinship by itself can't explain the vigilante justice of some ant, bee, and wasp workers.
- Animals
How dingoes got down under
DNA analysis suggests that Australia got its famous dingoes from a very few dogs brought along with people fanning out from East Asia some 5,000 years ago.
- Plants
Smokey the Gardener
Wildfire smoke by itself, without help from heat, can trigger germination in certain seeds, but just what the vital compound in that smoke might be has kept biologists busy for years.
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Glowing Trio under the Sea: Nitrogen fixer joins algae inside coral
A coral that fluoresces orange appears to be the first ever found to contain a symbiotic microbe that converts nitrogen into a biologically useful form.
- Plants
Lowering lilies on the tree of life
Water lilies may belong on the lowest branch of the family tree of flowering plants, along with a shrub called Amborella.
