Stories by Susannah F. Locke

Buying Green: 9 Environmentally Inventive Products

Carbon-friendlier alternatives for your life

Six Images of Nano-scale Worlds

Artist Michael Oliveri captures the tiniest products of materials science

Stock-Market Strategy Halts Fishing Collapse

Novel way to fight the decades-long decline of fish populations

Buying Green: Products for Sustainable Living

Flashlights that power themselves, bags that dissolve, and more

Exoplanet orbiting red giant gives hints of Earth's future

Bug vs. bug: How do mosquitoes survive deadly viruses unscathed?

Space shuttle Endeavour creates sonic booms over California as it comes in for a landing

Residents of southern California were treated to a pair of sonic booms as the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour passed overhead yesterday en route to its safe landing at Edwards Air Force Base...

How did turtles get their shells?

Ever wonder how a turtle got its shell? You're not the only one. Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have long been stumped by the question. But a recently unearthed turtle fossil, the oldest on record, may hold the answer...

Smut spammer ordered to pay Facebook record $873 million

The never-ending war against spam scored a rare victory recently when a federal judge in San Jose, California ordered a prolific spammer to pay Facebook a whopping $873 million in damages for unleashing a torrent of unsavory messages on the social network's members...

Ocean turning to acid at lightning speed

Increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is making the Pacific coast acidic far more rapidly than previously believed, potentially wreaking havoc for creatures living in it that are unable to tolerate the swiftly changing environment.  

Ecologists at the University of Chicago tracked the acidity of the Pacific off an island close to Washington state over the course of eight years...

Troubled waters: striped bass moms pass on harmful pollutants to babies

The striped bass population in San Francisco Bay has been plummeting since the 1970s and now scientists know why: fish moms are passing down damaging pollutants in the water to their young, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

Candid criminal: Undercover psychologists find bad behavior may be contagious

Attention, shoppers: If the cart you selected has a handle greased with Vaseline, you may be an unwitting participant in an undercover experiment.

Ditto if you find an envelope stuffed with cash hanging out of a mailbox...

Pygmy tarsier, a tiny primate, rediscovered in Indonesia

The tiny Furby-like pygmy tarsier, presumed to be extinct, was found during a recent expedition to Indonesia. And the cuddly, huge-eyed nocturnal critter is the very definition of cute.

Cancer drug cures Type 1 diabetes in mice

Dancing with the robots: Austrian hexapods

Move over, HAL, there's an entire brigade of rock 'em, sock 'em robots in town. They're dexterous, graceful, and they can . . . dance ?

This hot YouTube video features a bunch of hexapods (six-legged robots) getting down to the beat with choreographed bounces, splits and shimmies for the third annual hexapod robot dance contest...

How bleach kills germs

India's Chandrayaan 1 enters lunar orbit

The Indian space probe Chandrayaan 1 adjusted its orbit around the moon in one of its final maneuvers before releasing a lunar impactor.

Chandrayaan 1 entered into an elliptical orbit around the moon on Saturday, 17 days after blasting off from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota...

Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change

When sea ice disappears some polar inhabitants advance, whereas others retreat

Do Migraines Lower Breast Cancer Risk?

Hormones or pain pills may be the key

Flying on a Wing and ... Paper

Paper airplane contest awards the flimsy fliers that are a cut above the rest