By: Ayla Fudala If you’ve ever seen bees flying around at night, there’s a good chance they’re so-called “ZomBees”—honey bees whose brains are under the control of tiny fly larvae growing inside their bodies. Yes, you read that correctly. Get up close and personal with Zombie flies and ZomBees. Image A shows an adult Zombie fly. Image B shows the Zombie fly laying eggs in a honey bee’s abdomen. Note the size difference between the two insects. Image C s ...read more

A blue jet caught on camera over the Bay of Bengal. (Credit: ESA) In Earth’s upper atmosphere, blue jets, red sprites, pixies, halos, trolls and elves streak toward space, rarely caught in the act by human eyes. This mixed-bag of quasi-mythological terms are all names for transient luminous events, or, quite simply, forms of lightning that dance atop thunderstorm clouds. Airplane pilots have reported seeing them, but their elusive nature makes them hard to study. But ESA astrona ...read more

A whale stranded on shore. (Credit: littleny/Shutterstock) The solar storms that fling waves of charged particles toward the Earth may be to blame for the stranding events that leave whales dying on shore for unknown reasons. It’s not a new hypothesis, but now researchers from NASA, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) plan to combine datasets on these seemingly disparate events to see if a statistical link between solar fla ...read more

Globular cluster 47 based on data from FORS1. (Credit: ESO) Some black holes are small. Some black holes are giant. But oddly enough, in the cosmic fight between innocent passing stars and voracious black holes, scientists have never found a mid-sized black hole. Until now. The star cluster 47 Tucanae, located about 13,000 to 16,000 light years from Earth, is a dense ball of stars. Hundreds of thousands of stars compacted into a 120 light-year span give off gamma rays and X-rays and more energ ...read more

Photo: flickr/Pabak Sarkar We’ve reported on several phone-related medical conditions, from “nomophobia” (fear of being out of cell phone contact) to the consequences of swallowing your phone, case and all. In this case study of two patients, doctors report yet another condition, which they call “transient smartphone blindness.” TSB is caused by a combination of lying on your side while looking at your phone in a dark room. The result is temporary blindness i ...read more

Nearly the full length of Lake Powell on the Colorado River in southern Utah and northern Arizona is visible in this photograph shot by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, on Sept. 6, 2016. The view is toward the southwest. Water flow is from the lower right toward the top. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) When I first spotted this stunning image on NASA’s Earth Observatory site, it stopped me dead in my tracks. It’s a view over Lake Powell on the Co ...read more

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(Credit: lexaarts/Shutterstock) A recent article published in the Daily Mail critical of climate science has drawn sharp criticism from multiple climate researchers. The controversy concerns a paper, published in 2015 by a team of NOAA researchers led by Thomas Karl, that revealed a purported “pause” in global warming was nothing more than an artifact of incomplete data. Now, the Daily Mail has published an article based on an exclusive interview with former NOAA empl ...read more

A still image from a dashcam video caught by Glendale, Wisconsin police officer at 1:29 a.m. Monday. (Credit: Glendale Police Department) Dash cam footage of a meteor streaking over the Midwest on Feb. 6 is collecting views and instigating an envy of regional night owls who witnessed the event live. The National Weather Service detected the meteor around 1:29 a.m. It flew over Lake Michigan between Sheboygan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The meteor was spotted as far south as Kentucky and as f ...read more

The African puff adder kills more people with its venomous bite than any other snake on the continent. To find prey, it doesn’t need to go hunting; the snake simply lies in wait and attacks small animals that wander past. An ambushing puff adder is both camouflaged and unsmellable to predators. This snake is not goofing around—but it does like to stick its tongue out. Researchers discovered that puff adders in the wild waggle both their tongues and their tails to lure ...read more