Fiction from "Nature" magazine, May 2012 issues

All stories are online. All are flash fiction length. Only Darabi's really worked for me.

1. 3 May: Mohsen H Darabi's "Loyalty beyond seasons" (A); download; humor: Curious case of a romance where man & woman "come into season" at different times each year!
2. 10 May: Jeff Samson's "The appropriate response" (B); download: Wonders of computer technology as it will transform the classroom of the future.
   
   Too geeky & there are already too many stories of the ilk.
3. 17 May: Alex Shvartsman's "Ravages of time" (B); download: A story with starfaring ships, the details of which I didn't really get. Highlight of the story is a meeting of a decades-separated man & his mother, where mother is younger than the son because of time dilation.
4. 24 May: Robert Scherrer's "The common app" (B); download: A future where universities admit students based on their genes rather than ability, & parents try for their wards' admissions while the kids are still toddlers. Has snobbish overtones.
5. 31 May: Monya Baker's "On the edge" (B); download: A family walking somewhere in the wastes of a post-apocalypse world meets a robot that offers to escort them to a nearby settlement.
   
   She'll destroy the robot at the first opportunity she gets, but I didn't really catch why. Was there a history of such robots hunting people? Why would someone build an advanced robot to hunt in a primitive world? Robot certainly didn't do anything suspicious that I could see.

Related: Stories from Nature.