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Jonathan Garaas ha aprendido algunas cosas en tres temporadas de la apicultura de patio trasero: Las abejas son fascinantes. Son complicadas. Y mantenerlas con vida no es fácil.Cada dos semanas, el abogado de Fargo abre las colmenas para comprobar las abejas y la búsqueda de los ácaros varroa, las plagas que chupan la sangre de las abejas y pueden transmitir enfermedades. Si ve muchos de los parásitos del tamaño de un alfiler, se aplica un tratamiento químico.

Our planet is nestled in the center of two immense, concentric doughnuts of powerful radiation: the Van Allen radiation belts, which harbor swarms of charged particles that are trapped by Earth's magnetic field. On March 17, 2015, an interplanetary shock - a shockwave created by the driving force of a coronal mass ejection, or CME, from the sun - struck Earth's magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, triggering the greatest geomagnetic storm of the preceding decade. And NASA's Van Allen Probes were there to watch the effects on the radiation belts.

One of the most common forms of space weather, a geomagnetic storm describes any event in which the magnetosphere is suddenly, temporarily disturbed. Such an event can also lead to change in the radiation belts surrounding Earth, but researchers have seldom been able to observe what happens. But on the day of the March 2015 geomagnetic storm, one of the Van Allen Probes was orbiting right through the belts, providing unprecedentedly high-resolution data from a rarely witnessed phenomenon. A paper on these observations was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Aug. 15, 2016.

La materia oscura, la misteriosa sustancia que constituye la mayor parte del universo material, sigue siendo tan elusiva como siempre. Aunque los experimentos sobre el terreno y en el espacio todavía tienen que encontrar un rastro de materia oscura, los resultados están ayudando a los científicos a descartar algunas de las muchas posibilidades teóricas. Tres estudios publicados a principios de este año, que utilizan seis o más años de datos de Rayos Gamma de la NASA del telescopio espacial Fermi, han ampliado la caza de la materia oscura de la misión usando algunos enfoques novedosos.

Future climate warming will likely cause only minor cuts in energy output at most U.S. coal- or gas-fired power plants, a new Duke University study finds.

The study -- the first of its kind based on real-world data -- rebuts recent modeling-based studies that warn rising temperatures will significantly lower the efficiency of power plants' cooling systems, thereby reducing plants' energy output. Those studies estimated that plant efficiencies could drop by as much as 1.3 percent for each 1 degree Celsius of climate warming.

This year is on track to see Americans’ consumption of bottled water outpace their soda drinking for the very first time. According to Euromonitor, a market research firm, the average American will buy 27.4 gallons of bottled water, compared to 26.2 gallons of soda drinks.

Is this a good thing? It’s hard to argue that less consumption of sugary products is a bad thing. However, Americans aren’t necessarily replacing soda with water — for the most part, they are simply buying more bottled water.