All Stories by Susan Milius
- Animals
Not So Spineless
Looking for personalities in animals, even among spiders and insects, could add new twists to ideas about evolution and explain some odd animal behavior.
-
Furry Math: Macaques can do sums like people in a hurry
Macaques and college students showed similarities in performance on a computer test of split-second arithmetic, suggesting a common inheritance of the ability to do approximate math without counting.
- Humans
Fishing curbs can lead to profit
New economic models suggest that fishing crews that cut back long enough to let stocks rebound will find compensation in higher profits later.
- Animals
Hatch a Thief: Brains incline birds toward a life of crime
When it comes to a bird family's propensity to pilfer, a larger than usual brain for a particular body size is more important than body size alone.
- Animals
Female antelopes take the lead in courtship
Topi antelopes, with their hesitant males, reverse the usual sex roles in mammal courtship.
-
Chimp Champ: Ape aces memory test, outscores people
A young chimp outperforms college students on a test of recalling numbers glimpsed for less than a quarter of a second. With video.
- Plants
Botanists refine family tree for flowering plants
Two research teams have used the biggest array of flowering-plant genes yet to try to reconstruct the elusive evolutionary history of today's flowers.
- Plants
So Sproutish: Anti-aging gene for plants gives drought protection
A gene that can hold off the decrepitude of old age in plants offers an unusual approach to protecting crops from drought.
- Earth
Hey, What about Us?
The plight of polar bears may get most of the attention as climate change disrupts the Arctic ice, but plenty of other species, from walrus and seals to one-celled specks, are also going to see their world change radically.
- Plants
It Takes a Village: Tweaking neighbors reroutes evolution
The other residents of a plant's neighborhood can make a big difference in whether evolutionary forces favor or punish a plant's trait.
-
Eastern farms have native-bee insurance
If honeybees somehow vanished, the pockets of wild land in the Delaware Valley still harbor enough native bees to fill in and do the tough job of pollinating watermelon farms.
- Plants
Tough Frills: Ferns’ wimp stage aces survival test
A supposedly fragile stage in the life of ferns shows surprising toughness.
