Stories by Susanne Bard

A study of adults learning a new language found that speaking primarily activated regions in the left side of the brain, but reading and listening comprehension were much more variable

The wrinkle-faced bat covers its face with a flap of skin, seemingly as part of its courtship rituals.

A duckbill dinosaur jawbone found in Morocco means that dinosaurs crossed a large body of water to reach Africa.  

The ancestors of today’s dogs already exhibited some playfulness, which became a key trait during domestication.

Blue whales off California’s coast sing at night—until it’s time to start migrating, and they switch to daytime song.

Butterflies, fish and frogs sport rear-end eyespots that reduce predation. Painting eye markings on cows similarly seems to ward off predators.

Compared with traditional lineup techniques, a series of two-faces-at-a-time choices led to more accurate identification by study witnesses.

Art museums are filled with centuries-old paintings with details of plants that today give us clues about evolution and breeding practices.

Vaccination used against smallpox during the Civil War reveals the identity of the distantly related virus used to keep troops disease-free.

White-throated sparrows made a change to their familiar call that quickly spread across Canada.

The psychological state of children may need special attention during COVID-19 impacts and isolation.

Dehydrated blood that could be kept at room temperature for years may be possible thanks to a sugar used to preserve donuts—and made by tardigrades and brine shrimp so they can dry out and spring back with water.

Horses picked out photographs of their current keepers, and even of former keepers whom they had not seen in months, at a rate much better than chance.

Oxpeckers riding on rhinoceroses feast on ticks, and their calls warn the nearsighted herbivores about approaching humans.

Humboldt squid can rapidly change the pigmentation and luminescence patterns on their skin by contracting and relaxing their muscles, possibly to communicate.

To make it in urban areas, birds tend to be either large-brained and able to produce few offspring or small-brained and extremely fertile. In natural habitats, most birds brains are of average size.

The bilateral organism crawled on the seafloor, taking in organic matter at one end and dumping the remains out the other some 555 million years ago.

They’re not born pregnant like tribbles, but swamp wallabies routinely get pregnant while pregnant.

In an example of how sea noise can harm species, exposed shore crabs changed camouflaging color sluggishly and were slower to flee from simulated predators.

Studies on very old vegetation in the Amazon basin show active management hundreds of years ago on species such as Brazil nut and cocoa trees.

Increasing or decreasing the altitude of aircraft by a few thousand feet to avoid thin layers of humidity could make a major reduction to contrails’ contribution to climate change.

Art created by Australian Aboriginal people used organic carbon-free pigments, but wasp nests above or below the art can be used for radiocarbon dating that supplies boundaries for the age of artworks.

Ice cores from a Tibetan glacier reveal the first deposits of industrial revolution pollution, starting in layers dated to about 1780.

Most feral dogs that did not run away from humans were able to respond to hand cues about the location of food—even without training.