Kyoto, Japan -- Periodical cicadas have one of the strangest life cycles in the animal kingdom. The 17-year cicadas spend 99.5% of their lives underground in an undeveloped nymph state, which is the longest strictly regulated juvenile period among insects.

Then in the spring of their 17th year, they simultaneously emerge and the males scream above ground for their four to six week-long adult life. Exactly how these insects are able to control when they mature and emerge has remained a mystery.

The long life cycle of periodical cicadas makes rearing nymphs for study extremely difficult. Recently, however, a collaborative team of researchers from both Japan and the United States, including a team from Kyoto University, was motivated to tackle this conundrum.

New study tracked eight bumble bee species in the wild across eight years. Scientists recorded which flowers bees visited and calculated macronutrients in pollen from 35 flower species. They found bee species occupy two distinct diet groups: one prefers protein and another prefers fat and carbs. Findings could help conservationists design pollinator gardens with flowers that meet bees’ nutritional needs.

New research warns of declining access to safe, reliable and affordable water in the U.S., urging for better water tracking tools and immediate policy reforms.

Using a cutting-edge adaptive optics system developed at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, a growing planet outside our solar system has been discovered to inhabit a gap in a disk of dust and gas. The images provide a glimpse of what our solar system likely looked like during its infancy.

A newly developed highly sensitive detector is making it possible for the first time in decades to expand the search for dark matter, the elusive particles believed to make up roughly 85% of the universe but that have never been directly observed in a lab. The advance could either generate the first direct evidence of dark matter or rule out broad classes of theories that have yet to be tested.

New results from OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, reveals why some gray asteroids reflect light at different wavelengths, like red or blue, more strongly. How these asteroids reflect light at red and blue wavelengths can give deeper insights into the evolution of rocky bodies in the solar system.

Despite advancements in hardware, AI, and machine learning, deploying robots in dynamic, real-world settings—and getting them to do what we want—remains difficult. Cristian-Ioan Vasile, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University, has received funding through the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program to develop structured methods for assessing the capabilities of learning-enabled agents and use that information to improve planning and coordination of robots working in teams.

Certain types of biochemical processes can impair the immune system’s ability to recognize and kill cancer cells. Purdue University’s W. Andy Tao and his associates have developed a new way to study these processes. They demonstrated the validity of their method in experiments involving leukemia and rare liver cancer cell lines.

Tao and 10 co-authors published the details of their new method Aug. 1 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Their work provides a system for tracking and identifying the various types of proteins and an unheralded but widely secreted class of bioparticles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) that can compromise immunotherapy.