Stories by Cynthia Graber

Future wet suits with surface textures like the thick fur of otters that trap insulating air layers could keep tomorrow's divers warmer in icy waters.

Fabric dyed with indigo just found in Peru is some 1,600 years older than indigo-dyed fabrics that have been found in the Middle East.

Upending the belief that residents of ancient Central America did not practice animal husbandry, new evidence shows that people in Teotihuacán raised and bred rabbits and hares.    

Individual Greenland sharks appear to live perhaps a century longer than any other vertebrate, and might have life spans approaching 500 years.    

A 2,000-year-old latrine in China provides the first hard evidence that people carried diseases long distances along the ancient trading route.

Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University talks to Cynthia Graber about electric eel research that led him to accept 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's account of electric eels attacking horses.  
 

What looked like human-made structures underwater off Greece turned out to be millions-of-years-old concretions deposited by bacteria.

Remnants of a beer-making operation some 5,000 years old have been found in northern China.

When a species of nightshade is injured by hungry beetles, it produces sugary nectar at the wound site. The nectar attracts ants that then keep the beetles at bay.  

Mundane notes about daily life on 16 ceramic shards written about 600 B.C. at an ancient military fortress in the Negev Desert reveal that literacy had to be common.

Some white storks have stopped migrating from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the winter, because of the availability of food in landfills.

Antibiotics work against bacterial infections but are often prescribed to people with viral infections, which don't respond to the drugs. But a new gene test could show if a patient's infection is viral or bacterial.

Sophisticated computational techniques make it possible to analyze gene samples from all the bacteria in the gut at once to take a census of the species present.

Researchers were able to determine the genome of stomach bacteria that infected the famous Iceman at the time of his death, in the process giving us clues about ancient human migrations.

Closely tracking 800 people's blood glucose levels in response to meals allowed researchers to develop a predictive algorithm for individuals

A tree survey in the Amazon by more than 150 researchers led to an estimate that up to 57 percent of Amazon trees could qualify for threatened species status by 2050

Fruits growing wild in urban areas were found to be healthful and to contain lower levels of lead than what's considered safe in drinking water

Beeswax residues found on shards of stone age pottery in the Mediterranean region indicate that humans were keeping honeybees as early as 9,000 years ago

Researchers picked apart satellite imagery from two New England forest ecosystems to get a better handle on exactly what factors influence the timing of the color changes of the autumn leaves

Early human species may have had sharper hearing in certain frequencies than we enjoy, to facilitate short-range communication in an open environment. Cynthia Graber reports

Domesticated pigs had many dalliances with wild boars that added new genes to the pig population well after they had settled down on the farm

Whereas most predators kill the young or infirm, humans claim a disproportionate number of mature healthy adults of reproductive age

Researchers linked dated graffiti about droughts in a cave in China to physical evidence in the cave of the water shortages, such as changes in ratios of stable isotopes in specific layers of stalagmites

Both hemispheres are involved in the brains of people interpreting a whistled variant of Turkish, compared with a left hemisphere dominance when listeners hear the spoken language