Susan Cosier

Chicago

Science and environmental journalist. Words in Science, Scientific American, WSJ, New York Times for Kids, National Geographic, Undark, & others. she/her

Articles

Soybean Lab Scheduled to Close After USAID Cuts Gets a Year-Long Reprieve

1 week ago | insideclimatenews.org | Susan Cosier

A lab focused on developing soybean farming in Africa was scheduled to shutter in April, a casualty of the Trump administration’s USAID cuts. Then a donor stepped in. Founders Pledge, an international nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs, announced that an anonymous donor offered the Soybean Innovation Lab just over $1 million to continue its work. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign lab was one of 17 USAID-funded Feed the Future labs around the country.
Illinois Delays a Project Meant to Keep Asian Carp Out of the Great Lakes

2 weeks ago | insideclimatenews.org | Susan Cosier

One stretch of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Joliet, Illinois, is what freshwater biologists call a pinch point. Here, at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam, workers are preparing a site for barriers to keep invasive bighead and silver carp from infiltrating the Great Lakes. If enough of them slip by before the project is complete, the fish could cause irreversible damage to the largest freshwater system on earth.
Illinois Delays a Project Meant to Keep Asian Carp Out of the Great Lakes

2 weeks ago | ecotopical.com | Susan Cosier

Welcome to EcoTopical Your daily eco-friendly green news aggregator. Leaf through planet Earths environmental headlines in one convenient place. Read, share and discover the latest on ecology, science and green living from the web's most popular sites.
Calling the Midwives

1 month ago | chicagohealthonline.com | Susan Cosier

Fact checked by Jim LacySierra Bartlett wanted a water birth. It was 2021, and she was living in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, 20 weeks pregnant with her first child. She had recently learned that West Suburban Medical Center offered water births with the midwives who attended births there. Hesitant at first, Bartlett, who is Black, wanted to be careful about who she entrusted with her care; maternal death rates for Black women are up to four times higher than for white women nationally.
In the Great Plains, Landowners Are Banking On the Lesser Prairie-Chicken’s Survival

1 month ago | audubon.org | Susan Cosier

Dallas May can’t help but feel that something is missing. For more than a decade he’s been working to restore shortgrass prairie habitat to support wildlife on his family’s 20,000-acre ranch in southeast Colorado. His family rotationally grazes their Limousin cattle to give native grasses time to rest and recover, moving the 800 ebony and caramel-colored cows from pasture to pasture to feed on buffalograss and blue grama that grow near sand dropseed and little bluestem.
Wisconsin Weighs Sandhill Crane Hunts to Protect Crops Despite a Nonlethal Option

1 month ago | audubon.org | Susan Cosier

Roughly 15 years ago Dave Mickelson began to see flocks of Sandhill Cranes floating gently onto his Wisconsin farm, their long legs extended like aircraft landing gear. Spring after spring the elegant birds returned, plucking seeds from the rows of corn and soybeans he’d just planted. “If you see cranes in your field, it gets your blood pressure up a little bit,” he says. Mickelson wasn’t alone.
The Soybean Innovation Lab Is Set to Close in April After Trump Cuts

1 month ago | insideclimatenews.org | Susan Cosier

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an island in a sea of farmland where corn and soybeans grow, sits the Soybean Innovation Lab. The institution, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future initiative, helps advance soybean production in sub-Saharan Africa, assisting farmers there and developing markets for soybean farmers in the United States. And it’s scheduled to close in April.
The Soybean Innovation Lab Is Set to Close in April After Trump Cuts

1 month ago | ecotopical.com | Susan Cosier

Welcome to EcoTopical Your daily eco-friendly green news aggregator. Leaf through planet Earths environmental headlines in one convenient place. Read, share and discover the latest on ecology, science and green living from the web's most popular sites.
‘Marine Snow’ Studies Show How the Ocean Eats Carbon

Nov 28, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Susan Cosier

From the sunlit top 200 meters of the sea, plankton carcasses, excrement and molt particles constantly drift toward the depths. As this so-called marine snow sinks, the bits can clump together or break apart, gain speed or sink more slowly, or get eaten up by bacteria. They descend through darker, colder and denser waters, carrying carbon with them and settling on the bottom as biomass. The oceans absorb billions of tons of carbon every year, a process crucial to account for in climate models.
A New Dawn for Birds at Chicago’s McCormick Place

Nov 20, 2024 | allaboutbirds.org | Susan Cosier

From the Winter 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now. On a warm morning in October 2024, Dave Willard, the retired bird collections curator for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, walked briskly along a glassy façade on the Lake Michigan shoreline, looking for fallen birds. The building made of glass is McCormick Place, the convention center infamous to birders for being the place where close to 1,000 migrating songbirds met their deaths on Oct. 5, 2023.