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• A Dog of Many Words
• 170,000 Years Ago: The Birth of Fashion
• $14,000 in Tuition—A Dollar at a Time
• A School Where Every Day's a Snow Day
• Cast a Spell, Pay a Tax
Brazil's Ant-Eaters
Most people try to keep ants off their food. The folks in Silveiras, Brazil, hunt for ants as their food. Queen ants—or içás, as they're known to locals—are considered a delicacy in this town of 6,000, where people have eaten them for generations. Some enjoy them raw off the muddy ground—one resident says it "tastes like mint"—or cook them to serve with traditional Brazilian dishes. The içás are also believed to have antibiotic properties. Last season, though, the number of ants dwindled. Residents blame pesticides sprayed on eucalyptus trees, whose cellulose is used in paper products. Brazil's growing economy has made trees a good business for Silveiras. But some locals fear that the changing landscape may be destroying the ant-eating tradition. There's one place, though, where the içás are thought to be safe from pesticides: "People say there are a lot of içás in the cemeteries," says one içá salesman, "because they eat people's brains."
A Dog of Many Words
How much can dogs understand? It turns out, quite a bit—with the right training. Chaser, a border collie in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has learned 1,022 nouns—mostly names of toys; she has the largest vocabulary of any known canine. Chaser's owner, psychologist John Pilley, has trained her about five hours a day since 2004, teaching her two words every 24 hours. (Children learn 10 words a day and leave high school knowing 60,000 words.) After Chaser reached the 1,000-word mark, Pilley turned his attention to verbs, teaching Chaser to "paw," "nose," or "take" an object—so he could give her basic verb-object commands that could be a step toward learning grammar. Pilley says his goal is to increase communication between people and dogs. "How far we'll be able to go, we don't know," says Pilley, "but we think we are on the frontier."
170,000 Years Ago: The Birth of Fashion
While our early ancestors were probably not squeezing into skinny jeans, new research suggests they did care about clothes. A study from the University of Florida concludes that modern humans began wearing clothing 170,000 years ago, roughly around the same time as the second-to-last Ice Age, 180,000 years ago. Clothing enabled modern humans to migrate from Africa into colder climates, a major development for the species. So how did the scientists figure this out? By analyzing the evolution of lice and noting when head lice began to part ways genetically from clothing lice. "Because [lice] are so well adapted to clothing," lead scientist David Reed says, "we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn't exist until clothing came about in humans." Reed says humans' ability to use clothing ranks up there with other major innovations that pushed the species forward over time, like the ability to develop hunting strategies, control fire, and use stone tools.
$14,000 in Tuition—A Dollar at a Time
Smashing windows and setting placards on fire was how some British college students expressed their anger in November over tuition hikes. But Nic Ramos, a sophomore at the University of Colorado, found a less violent way to protest rising tuition costs: by paying his entire spring semester bill—all $14,309.51 of it—with one-dollar bills (plus a fifty-cent coin and a penny). He says tellers in the bursar's office were stunned—and slightly exasperated—when he walked in with a 33-pound duffel bag full of cash last month. According to a spokesperson for the university, it took three people nearly an hour to count the money. Last year, cash-strapped states across the U.S. raised tuition for state universities; California students faced one of the biggest increases, 32 percent. Ramos, an economics major, says his idea to pay in dollars started as a joke. "But when I thought about it more," he says, "I wanted to give the school a different way to look at tuition"—one dollar at a time.
A School Where Every Day's a Snow Day
With lockers, classrooms, and science laboratories, this Minturn, Colorado, public school is like many others. But 6th- to 12th-graders from as far as New Jersey, Virginia, and Michigan flock to Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy for one reason: It's the only public winter-sports school in the U.S. Since its founding in 2007, Vail has churned out several Junior Olympics champions and a Winter Olympian. Though the 90-student school must meet state academic guidelines, skiing, snowboarding, and other winter sports are taken seriously. Academic workloads are lighter in the winter, when students may miss weeks of school to compete around the world, and more rigorous in the fall and spring. "We do some unusual things to make time for our sport," says Anne Strong, a senior, "but the curriculum is still very demanding and the teachers hold us to it."
Cast a Spell, Pay a Tax
Witches, astrologers, and fortune-tellers of Romania, it's time to pay your taxes. Until now, these professions weren't listed in the Romanian labor code, letting them work tax-free. But a new law subjects them to a 16 percent income tax, prompting some to hurl poisonous mandrake plants into the Danube River and cast spells on the government. Superstitions are no laughing matter in Romania—the land of the medieval ruler who inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula—and have been part of its culture for centuries. President Traian Basescu has been known to wear purple on certain days, supposedly to ward off evil. Before he was toppled in 1989, Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had their own personal witch. Witches are typically called upon to cure illnesses, cast love spells, tell the future—even cause death. But because they've often faced discrimination, witch Melissa Minca says she's "happy that we are legal." She and a few other witches celebrated the tax by throwing corn into the icy Chintila River.
