Unlike most bees, which hibernate during colder months, honey bees remain active all winter long despite the freezing temperatures.

A honey bee colony’s ability to survive the winter depends on their food stores of honey. Once the colony begins to run out of honey, the worker bees force the useless drones from the hive, to maintain the food store.

As temperatures drop, the honey bee workers form a cluster around the queen and brood, keeping them warm. Bees on the inside of the cluster can feed on the stored honey. If surrounding temperatures rise, the bees on the outside of the group separate a bit, to allow more air flow. As temperatures fall, the cluster tightens, and the outer bees pull together.

As it gets colder, the worker bees actively ...

These tiny water bears, called Tardigrades (meaning "slow stepper"), are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals. They have been sighted from mountaintops to the deep sea, from tropical rain forests to the Antarctic.

Tardigrades are notable for being perhaps the most durable of known organisms; they are able to survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C), pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without foo ...

Nearly 11 kilometers deep, the ocean is still a noisy place, according to scientists that have eavesdropped on the deepest part of the world's ocean, and instead of finding a sea of silence, discovered a cacophony of sounds both natural and caused by humans.

For three weeks, a titanium-encased hydrophone recorded constant ambient noise from the ocean floor at a depth of more than 36,000 feet, or 7 miles, in the Challenger Deep trough in the Mariana Trench near Micronesia. The ambient sound field is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far, as well as distinct moans of baleen whales, and the clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.

The hydrophone also picked up sound from ship propellers. Challenge ...

There’s an innovative new light technology that's trying to change the way people think about "artificial light." In Italian company called CoeLux has developed a new light source that recreates the look of sunlight through a skylight so well that it can trick both human brains and cameras.

It’s a high tech LED skylight that’s designed to provide "sunlight" for interior spaces cut off from the outdoors. One of the main ideas behind it is that to create realistic sunlight, you can’t just simulate the sun… you need to recreate the atmosphere as well.

The scientists who invented the light figured out how to use a thin coating of nanoparticles to accurately simulate sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere and the effect known as Rayleigh scattering ...

If you want to be an effective science teacher, demonstrations are a must in the classroom. If you want to grab the attention of a young student then make it obvious, as shown in this visualization of a magnetic field!

What sets Homo sapiens apart from other animals? Among other things, our chins do. That piece of bone sticking out from your jaw is somewhat of a mystery - one that's inspired a diversity of wild theories to explain its purpose, according to a paper published this month in Evolutionary Anthropology.

The author of the paper dismisses a number of these explanations, such as the possibility that the chin serves as a sexual signal (such traits usually only appear in one sex - like the mane of a male lion). Another proposal is that the chin acts to protect your throat - an idea the paper's author also shoots down, because for this to be a substantial advantage, humans would have to be constantly punching each other in the face.

So the mystery rem ...

Bats have an uncanny ability to track and eat insects on the fly with incredible accuracy. But some moths make these agile mammals miss their mark. Tiger moths (left), for example, emit ultrasonic clicks that jam bat radar. Now, scientists have shown that hawk moths (right) and other species have also evolved this behavior. The nocturnal insects - which are toxic to bats - issue an ultrasonic "warning" whenever a bat is near. After a few nibbles, the bat learns to avoid the noxious species altogether. Interestingly, the sound-producing apparatus is typically located at the tip of the moth's genitals. ...