After surviving cicada emergences and witnessing several cycles of journalism’s cicada beat, you’d think I’d have seen it all. Articles about prime number cycling and climate change, evolution and recipes. I even contributed to the pile-on in 2011, considering why bursts of cicadas don’t seem to help bird populations. All of this attention is, of course, well-deserved: [...]

Red-eyed periodic cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years, but finding out why could take millennia In ""Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don’t think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big [...]

“Periodical cicadas have the longest life cycles known for insects. They are called ‘periodical’ because in any one population all but a trivially small fraction are exactly the same age. The nymphs suck juices from the roots of forest trees and finally emerge from the ground, become adults, mate, lay their eggs, and die, all [...]

With a swarm of determined zerglings, a Brood War is currently underway on the East coast. Brood II, a cohort of slumbering cicadas, recently made their way out of the ground in the billions to outnumber the humans in their path 600 to 1 (but don’t be surprised if you don’t see any). Even more [...]