A rhesus monkey eats watermelon, provided by zookeepers, at the Kamla Nehru Zoological Gardens in India in May 2012. Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Nell Greenfieldboyce Nell Greenfieldboyce is a NPR science correspondent.
Generating artificial lightning in Nikola Tesla's laboratory. Bettmann/Corbis hide caption
A school of Blue Tang fish swimming together off the Caribbean island of Bonaire. It has long been assumed that the schooling behavior of fish evolved in part to protect animals from being attacked by predators. David J. Phillip/AP hide caption
A polar bear on fresh ice in the Hudson Bay in November 2007. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said a voluntary halt to bird flu research should stay in effect. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption
A government official in Bali, Indonesia, holds a chicken before administering an injection to cull it as a precautionary measure in April to prevent the spread of bird flu. Firdia Lisnawati/AP hide caption
Chickens are under quarantine in Tepatitlan, Jalisco State, Mexico. The Mexican government declared a national animal health emergency July 2 in the face of an aggressive bird flu epidemic that has infected nearly 1.7 million poultry. Hector Guerrero/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Vietnam has contained the fatal bird flu cases that raged in the late 2000s, but it is still struggling with new cases of the virulent disease. Here, a poultry trader loads live chickens onto his motorbike on March 16 at a market outside Hanoi. Hoang Dinh Ham/AFP/Getty Images hide caption
Author Dorothy Parker works at her typewriter in 1941. After her death at 73, Parker's ashes were stored in a file cabinet until being interred at NAACP headquarters in Baltimore. AP hide caption