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Psychologists Discover Easy Ways to Make Standardized Testing Less Biased

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 When Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was arrested in Texas for bringing the clock he made to school to show his teacher, he encountered just one of the many ways that students can suffer from stereotypes, especially in science and technology. Ethnic minorities and women often experience this pressure because they do not match expectations for what scientists looks like. But a new psychology experiment shows how stereotyped students can use that pressure to their advantage.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/brazil-standardized-test.width-990_uiZNCZG.jpg"/>
<figcaption>High school students in Brazil take a national standardized test.
 
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 Deeply ingrained stereotypes like “girls can’t do math” tend to make people underperform. It’s an effect known as stereotype threat, which arises when people fear that they’ll confirm a negative stereotype about their group. Negative stereotypes about testing can lead to lower scores on standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, harming students’ chances of getting into top schools. Yet that stereotype threat can motivate students to score higher than their socially privileged peers, according to
 <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000761">
 a study
 </a>
 coming out this November in the
 
 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
 
 by psychology professors Allison Seitchik of Merrimack University and Stephen Harkins of Northeastern University.
 

 “When they’re threatened, they can do better—as long as they know what to do,” Seitchik said.
 

 The researchers handed women college students a 120-problem math test. For some students, the instructions read that the test “has been shown to produce gender differences.” Reading this was intended to induce stereotype threat. And indeed, when students were threatened, they solved 12 problems less on average than non-threatened students.
 

 But when students were threatened and also told to use a more efficient problem solving method, they not only did as well, they correctly answered 13 more problems than non-threatened students also told to use the better method—reversing stereotype threat’s usual effect.
 

 “I thought it was pretty cool that [we]were finding the opposite of what people had found with stereotype threat,” Seitchik said. “If you just tweak their approach…you eliminate the stereotype threat effect.”
 

 Seitchik used the same experimental design as other studies of stereotype threat, but took things a step further to look at specific problem solving strategies.
 

 While psychologists have documented the stereotype threat’s effects, they still disagree on the mental process that causes it. Some argue that worries about confirming a negative stereotype take up short-term memory space which could be used for problem solving. This is called the working memory explanation.
 

 Other psychologists claim that, first and foremost, stereotyped students want to beat expectations, and that it’s this extra effort which traps them. This is known as the mere effort explanation. Giving the test their all, stereotyped students tend to choose problem solving strategies they trust most instead of the most efficient ones. Students then try to solve the whole problem on math tests instead of using logic to eliminate wrong answers—ultimately slowing them down.
 

 “In this study, the authors beautifully identified a situation” where the mere effort model explains stereotype threat, said University of Waterloo psychology professor Christine Logel, who co-wrote
 <a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-073115-103235">
 a recent review
 </a>
 of stereotype threat studies. But in other situations in which stereotypes are in play, the way stereotype threat works could depend on many other factors, she said.
 

 Seitchik’s experiment showed a way to make tests better reflect the students’ true abilities. Instructing students on the best test-taking methods—for example, using logic to eliminate answers—lets them put their extra effort to its best use.
 

 “If we can do this with females that are younger…then we can keep them in STEM,” Seitchik said.
 

 But these findings are not just relevant for gender stereotypes. It works the same for students of any gender facing negative ethnic stereotypes about academic performance. For any stereotyped group, if researchers find the problem-solving method students use when trying their hardest, a simple instruction to use a different one can raise scores, Seitchik said.
 

 Another way to make tests more accurate assessments of ability is to stop asking questions about gender and ethnicity before standardized exams, Seitchik said. Though this would not eliminate stereotype threat, it could lessen it.
 

 “Don’t ask students’ race and gender in the front page of the test,” Logel said. “It’s like flashing a neon sign that says, ‘Race is a factor on this test. Gender is a factor.’ ”
 
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Firefighters monitor a controlled burn in Yosemite National Park.

Controlled fires could actually save forests and fight climate change

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Forestry managers face what seems like an unavoidable tradeoff. Controlled burns in Western forests reduce the risk of wildfire but release carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change. But a team of ecologists recently showed that controlled burns can actually benefit the climate in the long term.Since the 1960s, attempts to suppress natural low-intensity fires led to forests overgrown with small trees and loaded with dead leaves. These act as fuels that easily accelerate a small fire into a forest-clearing inferno, though burning some fuel when winds are low and humidity is high—making a wildfire unlikely—can help prevent future disasters.In 2012, calculations suggested that restoring low-intensity fire would release more carbon than not burning. However, new computer simulations of wildfire behavior over several decades showed that prescribed burns and vegetation thinning can both reduce the risk of wildfire and trap more carbon in tree growth than an untreated forest.“When we’re actually doing treatments in the forest, you can’t just light a fire under what would generate wildfire conditions and see how your treatments burn,” said Matthew Hurteau, a University of New Mexico forestry professor and lead author of a forthcoming study in the journal Ecological Applications. “The modeling is really important because then we can look at a range of conditions under which a fire might occur and see how that interacts with the forest structure.”After surveying a northern Arizona ponderosa pine forest, Hurteau’s group modeled how the forest responded to high and low probabilities of stand-replacing wildfire, the most intense and damaging kind. They ran many simulations with randomized wildfire behavior to get a range of results for different fire prevention treatments.
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The simulations showed that when wildfire is added to the system, even the most invasive treatment, thinning and burning, trapped more carbon than it lost—after 40 years for a high probability of wildfire, and after 51 years for low probability of wildfire.John Campbell, an Oregon State University forestry professor, remains skeptical that the simulations definitively show that thinning and burning has a positive effect on the atmosphere.“I don’t think there are any studies…that are going to suggest that an actively thinned and prescribed-burn forest actually in the long term maintains higher carbon than one that isn’t,” Campbell said. However, he does not deny the treatments reduce the risk of intense wildfires.Malcolm North, a Forest Service research scientist who co-wrote the study with Hurteau, said that how a controlled burn affects the climate depends on the region. In the Pacific Northwest, where forests receive lots of moisture and fires are easier to suppress, a treated forest would not trap as much carbon, North said.“I think that Campbell’s argument is actually a very good argument in systems that are pretty productive and also where fire suppression really does tamp down the fire,” North said. “But if you go to a drier system that’s not so productive… you get a benefit” from controlled burns. In Southwestern forests, where wildfires are hard to prevent, reducing the amount of fuel through controlled burns creates forests better at both trapping carbon and resisting wildfire, he said.
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But even in wetter climates, controlled burns help forests by killing small trees, North said. Forests packed with young trees have greater competition for moisture, making all of the trees more vulnerable to drought. “If you don’t treat the forest, you can sometimes lose the very old-growth trees that you want to hold on to—the trees that hold the most carbon,” he said.By opening gaps in the canopy, controlled fires restore variety to the forest’s structure, making it more resilient to climate change, said Morgan Wiechmann, a researcher at the University of Minnesota and collaborator with North and Hurteau.“When you put in place this prescribed fire, you’re restoring some of those ecological benefits that naturally occurring fires used to give,” Wiechmann said.North said forest managers need to use fire as a tool more often. “We’re fighting a battle and we’re tying one of our arms behind our back, and frankly that arm has the Popeye muscles on it,” North said. “We need to work with the fire, and let the fire help us do some of the fuels reduction.”
Photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/3021735300/">Rennett Stowe / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)</a>

In Western forests prone to wildfire, thinning and burning treatments can help reduce wildfire risks and trap carbon in new plant growth.

Salamander Species Changes Behavior to Resist Deadly Fungus

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 A fungus disease has caused declines in over 200 amphibian species. The fungus thickens their skin, keeping them from absorbing nutrients until their hearts stop. Scientists recently developed the first treatment for the chytrid fungus which causes the disease. But there are new types of chytrid that put amphibians in the United States and elsewhere at risk if the fungus arrives on the bodies of amphibians shipped as pets. How well prepared native species are to resist new forms of the disease remains unknown.
 

 But recent ecological detective work into an usually well-hidden salamander suggests at least one species’ behavior is adapting to slow the spread of chytrid. By swabbing live California slender salamanders and museum specimens of the species collected over the last century, a team of scientists now has a better sense of what happened during the disease outbreak and how the disease changed salamanders’ social interactions.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/salamander-california_2048x1152.width-990_ahdalqh.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The California slender salamander
 
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 “It’s the same thing you see on CSI when they do a cheek swab and then test for DNA of the criminal—only it’s on the skin of the salamander,” said Carla Sette, a graduate student at the University of California-Santa Cruz and lead author of a paper in the December issue of the journal Biological Conservation.
 

 The team’s analysis revealed that when the criminal in question—chytrid species Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd)—arrived in California, it invaded rapidly over a few decades. This is important, because in other locations such as Illinois and Brazil, scientists have found that Bd stayed at a steady level for over 100 years, said Vance Vredenburg, biology professor at San Francisco State University and co-author of the paper. But the surveys of living salamanders revealed something more.
 

 California slender salamanders are nocturnal and tend to hide under logs in large clusters, nearly on top of each other, Sette said. “They’re very gregarious. You can flip a log and find almost a dozen under there,” she said.
 

 While hunting for slender salamanders, the researchers uncovered a pattern. In the populations exposed to chytrid for decades, they found smaller group sizes compared to those in areas where chytrid arrived just a few years ago. The researchers think this means the salamanders are spreading themselves out to slow the rate of chytrid transmission.
 

 However, Karen Lips of the University of Maryland, who discovered the chytrid outbreak in Central America, challenged this idea. “I think you have to rule out a lot of other examples to get to that conclusion,” she said. For instance, instead of spreading themselves out farther apart in smaller groups, there could simply be fewer salamanders everywhere, Lips said.
 

 Vredenburg said that unfortunately there are no total population data available for the species. Counting them is not as simple as tallying them up from a helicopter.
 

 “It’s not like counting buffalo,” Vredenburg said. “So that’s a good criticism. But I think it doesn’t take away from the study.” He said that his goal is to expand knowledge of less observable species, since only a minority of amphibian species is active during the day and easily countable.
 

 Furthermore, Vredenburg said he thinks the pattern of group size they observed is “more easily answered with behavior than just with density alone.” Scientists have documented a couple other behavior changes in response to chytrid, he added.
 

 In a lab experiment, toads from Florida that had been infected with Bd before avoided the side of a tank with the fungus present. Golden frogs in Panama exposed to chytrid appear to sun themselves to heat their bodies up, seeming to help protect them from the fungus, which prefers cooler temperatures. If Vredenburg’s hypothesis about the California slender salamander is correct, it could add to a growing picture of how amphibians adapt to fungal disease.
 

 But the question remains—what will happen with vulnerable amphibians if new species of chytrid, such as Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), invades North America?
 

 Vredenburg and his colleagues are currently exposing amphibians to Bsal in the lab to see which species are most susceptible to infection. Still, Vredenburg said the behavioral changes in species like the California slender salamander could help them roll with the next punch from chytrid.
 

 “It’s a really good strategy, and it might actually help them,” Vredenburg said.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tjgehling/8286541070/">
 TJ Gehling / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
 </a>

A doctor examines a mole on a patient's shoulder.

Doctors Finally Decide When a Mole Is Benign and When It's Cancerous

For over 30 years, cancer researchers have argued about moles.


 Specifically, they’ve debated at what point a skin lesion becomes a melanoma, more commonly known as skin cancer. Some claimed that lesions which looked halfway between a benign mole and a melanoma make up a class of their own, while others held that lesions can only be either harmless or cancerous, with no in-between.

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 Over 70,000 new melanomas will be diagnosed in the United States in 2015, according to the American Cancer Society. Recently, a team of researchers led by Hunter Shain of the University of California-San Francisco announced at the Society for Melanoma Research convention that they have new data that settles the debate—a better way of telling whether a lesion is on track for becoming melanoma.


 Intermediate lesions, Shain said, “are very difficult to study simply because they are difficult to identify,” Shain said. Their appearance lies in a gray zone between obviously benign and obviously malignant. When Shain and the team had eight expert dermatologists try to classify them, there was little agreement.

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 To get around this problem, the team devised a clever solution, using a characteristic of skin cancer to their advantage. Mature melanomas often lie next to skin tissue that represents earlier stages of the lesion. Taking 37 samples of melanomas from patients, the scientists micro-dissected them into their component sections—healthy skin, precursor lesion, possibly intermediate lesion, and mature melanoma.


 The researchers sequenced nearly 300 cancer-related genes in each section of the samples to discover which genes changed at which stage of development. They found that intermediate lesions had some harmless mutations but also some genetic changes that could lead to cancerous cell growth. That told them those lesions did not just look in between—their DNA actually made their behavior intermediate between a mole and a melanoma.


 The team presented their work
 <a href="http://www.melanomacongress.com/">
 at the melanoma convention
 </a>
 last month and
 <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1502583">
 published the full version of the project
 </a>
 in the New England Journal of Medicine.


 Sorting out the genetic gray zone also gave them a clearer view of how a melanoma develops. “In our study, we observe the canonical order of mutations that allow a melanocyte [a skin cancer cell] to overcome these barriers as it progresses to melanoma,” Shain said.


 In the 1980s, some researchers described an intermediate lesion as a “dysplastic nevus,” while others argued that the term would lead to confusions in melanoma diagnosis and shouldn’t be used. Shain’s team avoided using the term “dysplastic nevus.”


 David Elder of the University of Pennsylvania, who coined the term “dysplastic nevus syndrome” in 1980, attended the team’s presentation in San Francisco. “I think this is an important step forward,” Elder said. “And it does add materially to our understanding of a question that has certainly been hotly debated in our community for many years.”


 While the study’s authors didn’t use his terminology, Elder said they are basically describing the same thing. He said that at the presentation, “I asked the question, ‘Were these intermediate lesions dysplastic nevi or were they something else?’ And the response was, ‘Well, yes, they are.’” Elder agreed that using the term could distract from the study’s main message.


 Iwei Yeh of UC-San Francisco, a co-author of the study and one of the eight expert dermatologists, said that the new genetic data will allow the next stage of research to narrow the list of suspects for which mutations are most likely to lead to melanoma. Researchers could observe people with intermediate lesions and see which ones develop cancer. Then, they could use those genes as diagnostic signals for a mole on track to become malignant.


 “I think that kind of ties into this whole idea of personalized medicine,” Yeh said. “What are the individual alterations that are really contributing to the person’s cancer, and what does that mean for them in terms of their outcome?”


 Elder said this kind of study could reduce unnecessary procedures to remove harmless moles, saving time for both doctors and patients.


 “More precise diagnosis could be very valuable in more appropriate precision treatment of these lesions,” he said. “If you don’t need to do [a procedure], you don’t want to do it.”

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 Photo credit: NIH

By closely examining a range of moles and sequencing their genomes, doctors now know how moles progress to cancer.

The Bacteria That Help Bears Hibernate Could Help Cancer Patients

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 If you’ve ever thought it might be nice to just sleep through February, good news: scientists have come one step closer to understanding how bears do it.
 

 It’s long been known that bears slow down their cells’ energy use during the winter to survive on little food.  But scientists recently discovered that it’s not just the bear’s own cells that make hibernation happen—bacteria in the bears’ guts play an important role in both putting on fat in summer and slowing down their glucose use in winter.
 
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/bear_h7RSZbY.width-990_6xgBXnl.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A brown bear scratches its head.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Biologists in Sweden partnered with the Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project to take fecal samples from tranquilized bears in the summer and winter. These samples contained the collection of bacteria, or microbiome, that lives in the bears’ intestines and helps them absorb nutrients. Then they transferred the microbiome to lab mice with no bacteria in their guts to see how it affected how fast the mice gained fat tissue.
 

 In the summer, bears chow down on a broad diet of salmon, insects, and berries. These foods don’t just give them fuel—some carry specialized bacteria that help them break down and absorb fat in their food. The researchers found that the mice with “summer bear” bacteria packed on more fat compared to mice given the winter microbiome.
 

 In the winter, bears don’t eat for up to six months, and the diversity of bacteria species in their intestines dwindles. Lots of fat tissue tends to cause animals to keep sugar circulating in their blood—as in diabetes. Bears with extra winter fat were able to slow down their sugar consumption, but in the summer they could both gain weight and use glucose normally—an unusual and helpful adaptation.
 

 Are there lessons we can take from the bear’s gut that we could use to help humans with diet problems? It’s possible. Here’s what the study author Fredrik Bäckhed, from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden,
 <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35441712">
 told
 </a>
 Jonathan Webb of BBC News:
 
<blockquote>

 “I don’t think that this study will have direct implications for obesity, as the summer microbiota will make you fat and the winter insulin resistant.
 

 “But perhaps we can find clues for treating malnutrition from the summer bacteria, and help patients with anorexic disorders – including cancer patients.”
 
</blockquote>

 For more on bears’ winter sleep, check out our guide to
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bear-essentials-of-hibernation.html">
 the bear essentials of hibernation.
 </a>

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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/4283191966/in/photolist-7wutKm-vdzm2G-ykXgsw-g6MaYR-wMsfNm-kCELRJ-8AyWGY-an7oJ1-fapdiA-dV2sGu-y7K1sv-rugNBW-bQeU2t-s1PTs9-oHjMue-6yDjXw-59d27A-59daXJ-9ESqyc-932gbp-nEBsSx-qQFq4E-dis9Sy-uJVtHs-xnNVm2-nVK3cA-hbY99m-h4xz3i-ge6NBe-tRiQjA-nUq3VB-hNxPK9-dUMkSK-pS4wTT-3c7fEK-p8UVE8-nQHq8U-AhWv46-8xFjMV-4tYzm7-68L1EY-w47yQA-wfRUj9-gsPJ9A-jcbV1L-AebNkS-6TihYH-cJMXEd-A5czeL-hhc55v">
 Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)
 </a>

More Candidates Don't Produce Better Leaders, At Least for Pigeons

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 More minds together don’t lead to better ideas, at least as far as homing pigeons go. In fact, larger pigeon flocks aren’t any more accurate than small ones.
 

 Biologists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany wanted to know how a group of pigeons decides which direction it thinks home is. The process, it turns out, is more similar to this year’s messy presidential primaries than you might suspect.
 
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/pigeons-use.width-990_ItpIC7i.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A flock of pigeons.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 The researchers trained 66 pigeons to return to a loft, putting them in a basket and driving them up to 30 miles away before releasing them. When the pigeons tried to head home, they began by circling. During this time, the birds selected whom to follow, democratically choosing their leaders. Birds with ambition occasionally lurched out of the circle, trying to gain followers.
 

 To test how group size changed the dynamic, the researchers released between 2 and 20 birds at a time. The larger the flock, the longer it spent choosing a direction—but its homing behavior didn’t improve, despite the extra time and brains.
 

 The finding goes against the prevailing theory of pigeon navigation. Individual pigeons find their way using the Earth’s magnetic fields, which they sense using specialized cells with magnetic material that act as tiny compasses. Previous studies concluded that, while each pigeon doesn’t have a perfect compass, many imperfect compasses together leads to a more correct one. Yet a different principle seemed at play in this experiment.
 

 Most likely, it’s because larger flocks have more leader candidates to sort through, but the quality of the candidates isn’t any better. In fact, the researchers concluded that the pigeons didn’t seem to choose leaders based on their navigational experience, at all. They just followed the bird that happened to be acting most like a leader.
 

 “I think this is indeed likely to be the case,” said Dora Biro of Oxford University, who wasn’t involved in the study and is a member of the Oxford Navigation Group.
 

 Benjamin Pettit of the Oxford Navigation Group found previously that pigeons tend to follow the quickest bird rather than the most experienced.
 

 “The pigeons that flew fastest individually were more likely to lead flocks, regardless of the previous straightness of their homing routes,” he said.
 

 Biro said this study was “a great attempt” at better understanding flock decision making. However, the researchers should have tracked the pigeons using GPS for the entirety of their journey, she argued. Pigeons continue making decisions throughout their journey that can improve their accuracy.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nancydregan/5198614332/in/photolist-8VofVA-4jJ75y-cB9anA-9jztvA-7n9Dnc-8qeqpJ-qo3646-6oNFc8-4EpyTL-c6wvA5-zvrFz-nhjSm8-9JVNBf-praDsL-5Fp94j-qEUBJP-dQr553-71YZyw-4EkhiR-7cJ5ET-69YJWF-9GzcwT-5F9jux-d6iKHu-9CeLfU-vRiHAF-4pVTxq-4KFPYk-8QFwVS-opQLgk-9x29hE-2P9nzZ-obVmHi-7LzmJ8-6kKvxh-9Ywywq-7nNkTy-6UeidG-jkrCi9-dVqn8b-cMdWty-azHoKc-6ajPER-eDcDoa-9jwnzD-cg1RU5-5giEZ1-rTAAz6-98P4n2-oWozDT">
 Nancy Regan on Flickr (BY-NC)
 </a>

Death Valley Is Now Exploding With Color Thanks to a Freak October Storm

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 For a brief window of time, Death Valley is full of life.
 

 A storm last fall led to a so-called super bloom in the valley, with over 20 species of plants putting up their spring colors this week.
 

 The desert gold flower gives most of the national park a yellow hue, but there are many others in the mix—brown eyed evening primrose, desert five-spot, and purple mat, to name a few.
 
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/super-bloom.width-990_r4X9IcM.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Flowers bring color today to Death Valley.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 The hardy desert plants store up the necessary water for flowers, then quickly bloom while they have the resources and the weather is relatively cool. That window doesn’t last for long—by June, the average temperature is a searing 110˚ F.
 

 Here’s Tatiana Schlossberg
 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/death-valley-is-experiencing-a-colorful-superbloom.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur&amp;_r=0">
 reporting
 </a>
 for the New York Times:
 
<blockquote>

 The park gets about two inches of rain annually, so it always sees some wildflowers, though not as many or as varied. But it doesn’t take much more rain than that to completely dye the desert, [Death Valley National Park spokeswoman Abby] Wines said, making last fall’s unusually heavy rains particularly effective.
 
</blockquote>

 Last’s year’s El Niño led to the conditions for this spring’s show. In October, a storm dumped 2.7 inches of rain on Death Valley, half an inch more than the national park usually gets in a year. The resulting flash flood swept through Grapevine Canyon and damaged Scotty’s Castle, a popular park attraction. The 1930s mansion is closed for the next year.
 

 The extra rain is a reminder that the climate in Death Valley is changing. Yearly rainfall has been on the rise over the past 50 years,
 <a href="http://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&amp;pageid=546687">
 according to the National Park Service
 </a>
 . The wettest growing season on record so far was 2004-2005. That season’s astounding 6.44 inches of rain led to the last super bloom.
 

 Some of the plants, including brown-eyed evening primrose and desert gold, are already beginning to lose their flowers and produce seeds, the National Parks Service
 <a href="http://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/wildflower-update-2016.htm">
 reports
 </a>
 . Daily high temperatures are starting to reach 90˚ F. But rain showers can save the flowers from an early death.
 

 What’s more, most of the park still has yet to bloom. Flowers on higher elevations in the park haven’t opened yet—there’s still snow on the mountains. To see a patch that’s just coming into spring, the park recommends taking Greenwater Road. But the flowers in the deepest valley will lose their petals by April.
 


 For more on the wildlife in the hottest spot on the continent, check out this Nature episode, “
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/life-in-death-valley-introduction/5071/">
 Life in Death Valley
 </a>
 .”
 

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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_cooper/24796975519/">
 Marc Cooper on Flickr (BY-SA)
 </a>

Conor Gearin

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