A nation-wide honeybee crisis is under way in the United States. Lately bees have begun to rapidly disappear in24 states across the country. For reasons unknown, bees are flying off in search of nectar and pollen and simply never returning to their colonies.

Bees are extremely social insects; they never desert their young or bee queens. Researchers argue that bees are most probably dying during their search for nectar. A range of theories is also investigated, including a virus and poor bee nutrition. Researchers are looking into a group of pesticides that were banned in European countries to find out whether the chemical preparations(still used in the U. S.) are somehow causing damage to bees' born ability to find their way back home. According to yet another theory, the losses may have resulted from a massive attack by mites, which have repeatedly damaged bee colonies in the past.

The bees disappear as pressure has been building on the U. S. bee industry. The costs to maintain hives are continuously rising. The bee business becomes less profitable as a result. According to estimates by the Agriculture Department, the number of hives has dropped by a quarter over the last twenty years, and the number of beekeepers decreased by half. Beekeepers also have to deal with the problem of suburban spread as they search for areas where bees can hunt for nectar to stay healthy and feel good during the pollination season.

A terrible epidemic breaks out in The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus, shortly after hundreds of dead rats are discovered all over the town. The recent bee mystery, already nicknamed a "colony collapse disorder" by U. S researchers, seems to somewhat resemble the situation described in the novel. We can only hope that the "bee plague" will not take shape of a problem of global proportions.

The latest in cat research reveals that the lovely animal seems to have a basic grasp on both the laws of physics and the ins and outs of cause and effect.

According to a newly published study, cats seem to be able to predict the location of hiding prey (猎物) using both their ears and an inborn (天生的) understanding of how the physical world works.

In a recent experiment, Japanese researchers taped 30 domestic cats reacting to a container that a team member shook. Some containers rattled (发出响声); others did not. When the container was tipped over, sometimes an object fell out and sometimes it didn’t.

It turns out that the cats were remarkably smart about what would happen when a container was tipped over. When an object did not drop out of the bottom of a rattling container, they looked at it for a longer time than they did when the container behaved as expected.

“Cats use a causal-logical understanding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects,” lead researcher Saho Takagi says in a press release. The researchers conclude that cats’ hunting style may have developed based on their common-sense abilities to infer where prey is, using their hearing.

Scientists have explored this idea with other lovely creatures: babies. Like cats, babies appear to engage in what’s called “preferential looking”—looking longer at things that are interesting or unusual than things they perceive as normal.

When babies’ expectations are not met in experiments like the ones performed with the cats, they react much like their animal friends. Psychologists have shown that babies apparently expect their world to obey the laws of physics and cause and effect as early as two months of age.

Does the study mean that cats will soon grasp the ins and outs of cause and effect? Maybe, Okay, so cats may not be the next physics faculty members at America’s most important research universities. But by demonstrating their common sense, they’ve shown that the divide between cats and humans may not be that great after all.

Conventionally butterflies were regarded not as fascinating subjects for close observation but as symbols of shallowness. But Eleanor Granville treated them with scientific seriousness.

In her thirties, though suffering from a marriage where the husband was violent and even turned her family against her, Granville sought comfort by studying moths and butterflies. She travelled around the countryside with local girls, beating bushes to catch falling larvae (幼虫), and recruited her servants as assistants to collect specimens (样本). Because of unusual generosity in paying for a fine specimen, she soon accumulated a substantial collection of butterflies. After bringing larvae home, she meticulously logged their growth, providing some of the earliest detailed accounts of insect life cycles.

However, wandering the countryside with a collecting net was considered weird behavior for anyone back then, let alone a woman, and she was accused of going out dressed like a “gypsy”.

Besides her own extensive research, Granville exchanged letters and butterflies with other collectors. Another enthusiast William Vernon reported that she had owned “the noblest collections of butterflies, all English, which has shamed us”. She sent 100 examples to the Royal Society and also sent James Petiver, England’s most celebrated butterfly expert, boxes of carefully pinned butterflies, including several that had been previously unknown, and notably the one later named the Granville fritillary whose wings carry striking brown and yellow patterns, a species of special concern due to the decline of the total number under the influence of food loss and hotter weather.

Eleanor Granville remains the only British naturalist to have left their name to a native butterfly species. A pioneer in the study of entomology (昆虫学), Cranville helped make it an academic subject. Regretfully, only two moths and a butterfly of Granville’s precious specimens are still preserved in London’s Natural History Museum. Her name lives on the butterflies she loved.