All Stories by Susan Milius
- Life
Letting parasites fight could help battle drug resistance, too
Helping one strain of malaria trounce another in lab mice demonstrates a way of avoiding the evolution of drug resistance.
- Life
Cities create accidental experiments in plant, animal evolution
To look for evolution in human-scale time, pick a city and watch a lizard. Or some clover.
- Health & Medicine
In malaria battle, indoor bug spraying has unintended consequence
Years of spraying indoors may inadvertently have push malaria-spreading mosquitoes to venture outdoors for a bite.
- Animals
‘Kermit Sutra’ gets seventh amphibian mating position
Bombay night frogs’ unusual mating protocol features indirect sperm transfer and female croaks.
- Ecosystems
Ocean plankton held hostage by pirate viruses
The most abundant photosynthesizers on Earth stop storing carbon when they catch a virus.
- Life
By leaking light, squid hides in plain sight
Glass squid camouflage their eyes with wonderfully inefficient bioluminescence.
- Life
Fruit fly’s giant sperm is quite an exaggeration
Giant sperm, about 20 times a male fruit fly’s body length, could make the insects the champs of supersized sexual ornaments.
- Animals
Some animals ‘see’ the world through oddball eyes
Purple urchins, aka crawling eyeballs, are just one of several bizarre visual systems broadening scientists’ view of what makes an eye.
- Health & Medicine
Scientists wrestle with possibility of second Zika-spreading mosquito
It’s hard to say yet whether Asian tiger mosquitoes will worsen the ongoing Zika outbreak in the Americas.
- Life
Gut microbe may challenge textbook on complex cells
Science may finally have found a complex eukaryote cell that has lost all of its mitochondria.
- Plants
Here’s what a leaf looks like during a fatal attack of bubbles
Office equipment beats synchrotrons in showing how drought lets air bubbles kill the water-carrier network of veins in plant leaves.
- Animals
Male giant water bugs win females by babysitting
Female giant water bugs prefer males already caring for eggs, an evolutionary force for maintaining parental care.
