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Insects are amazing, but sometimes they’re annoying (and even dangerous): First it was bedbugs, now it’s fire ants.

Ants can be formidable. Fire ants (they got the name “fire” because they sting) used to be found outdoors in warm climates, but now they’ve moved to the city. Once they’re in the city, they form massive supercolonies with thousands of queens and millions of workers. One researcher found a supercolony as long as a city block. City ants are also more aggressive and more likely to swarm.
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Float it, don’t toss it – Plastic can be a problem in many ways, including polluting the ocean. To solve the transportation problem AND the pollution problem, build a boat out of discarded plastic bottles.

Just such a boat–the “Plastiki”–made from over 12 thousand plastic bottles, completed a 4 month, 9,000 mile, voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. It followed the path of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a sea of trash about 5 times the size of the UK that floats just below the surface between California and Hawaii.
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In the wake of the oil spill catastrophe, researchers are searching harder than ever for energy alternatives. It turns out that Bacteria can help clean up the spill and it can also play a part in our use of solar energy in the future.
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Some incredible vaccines are arriving soon, including one that could help you quit smoking and another that might prevent women from getting breast cancer. And new DISSOLVING microneedles mean they won’t hurt, either.

Researchers say they’ve developed a vaccine prevents breast cancer from developing in mice–will it work for human women? BBC News quotes immunologist Vincent Tuohy as saying, “We believe that this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines have prevented many childhood diseases. If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer.”
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