Much like an unexpected free dinner will distract you from the leftovers sitting in your fridge, this summer’s cicada emergence will turn predators away from their usual prey. During the 2021 Brood X emergence, Zoe Getman-Pickering, a scientist in Lill’s research group, found that as birds swooped in on cicadas, caterpillar populations exploded. Spared from … Read more
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Parts of the United States are about to experience a rare natural phenomenon with the simultaneous emergence of two enormous adjacent broods of periodical cicadas. More than a trillion of these noisy bugs are set to pop out of the ground starting around April. The two broods – one … Read more
Ah, the sounds of summer. Splashing waves at the beach, a lawn sprinkler spinning deliriously, the bells of an ice-cream truck … and the constant buzz of cicadas. If you live in certain states, get ready, because they’re coming back in 2024. Cicadas, winged insects with an especially loud song, have a weird life cycle. … Read more
One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that … Read more