Slideshow: Greatest solar eclipse hits

Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis

See stunning images from past solar eclipses going back to the 1920s.

Launch slideshow

If you can't make it to the South Pacific's eclipse zone in time to watch the sun turn into a "ring of fire" on Thursday, you can still get in on the spectacle online.

The annular solar eclipse begins at 6:30 p.m. ET (22:30 GMT) in western Australia. Over the course of several hours, the moon's shadow will sweep across Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Pacific from east to west, fading into the sunset off the coast of South America.

Because of the relative position of moon, sun and Earth, the moon can't cover the sun's disk completely. For observers who are situated within a strip of Earth's surface that measures 100 to 140 miles (171 to 225 kilometers) wide and thousands of miles long, only the outer edge of the sun will remain uncovered. That's what produces the eerie ring of fire.

The sight will be much like what was visible during last May's annular solar eclipse, and the course of the eclipse will be similar to the Pacific path that was taken by the moon's shadow during last November's total solar eclipse.

If you are in the zone for the ring of fire, be careful: Even that slim ring of sunshine packs enough of a punch to burn your eyes, and you'll need to take precautions. Those precautions can take the form of eclipse-viewing glasses or filters, or pinhole-camera rigs that let you view the eclipse indirectly.

Caution should be the watchword as well for those who can observe the eclipse's partial phase from a wide swath of the Pacific, ranging from New Zealand to Indonesia and Hawaii, as shown in the animation below. NASA's Eclipse website provides further details, including precise time schedules for the eclipse in a variety of locales.

If you're entirely outside the eclipse zone, you won't be so sorely tempted to gaze at the sun. Instead, you can enjoy totally safe views of the eclipse online. Click on the links below for a few of the options:

Slooh Space Camera: Slooh's coverage begins at 5:30 p.m. ET, during the partial phase that leads up to annularity. Slooh's team will provide the commentary for live video feeds from Tennant Creek, Cape Melville National Park and Cairns in Australia. The show also will feature occasional shots of the unsullied sun from Arizona's Prescott Observatory. You can use a Web browser or Slooh's iPad app to tune in.

Coca-Cola Space Science Center: The Georgia-based center will provide a live video feed from Australia's Cape York starting at 5 p.m. ET.

Amateur webcams: Australian skywatcher Gerard Lazarus is gearing up to capture live video of the eclipse, and there may be other on-the-fly feeds. Follow the Twitter hashtag #ASE2013 for updates. 

Television Down Under: The eclipse is likely to make news Down Under, and it's worth checking Sky News Australia and 3News in New Zealand for TV coverage.

If you miss it: Check SpaceWeather.com, Space.com and Universe Today for images of the eclipse after it takes place. You'll also want to keep tabs on Geoff Sims (@beyond_beneath) and Colin Legg (@colinleggphoto) on Twitter.

If you catch it: Got pictures? Please feel free to share 'em with us via NBCNews.com's FirstPerson photo upload page, and we'll pass along a selection of eclipse pics.

More about the eclipse:

• All about the 'ring of fire' eclipse
• Australia to see second solar eclipse in six months
• Flash interactive: What causes a solar eclipse?

Tip o' the Log to Michael Zeiler and Amanda Bauer for eclipse tips.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

"Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew — and if Facebook and Twitter count for anything, it just might get her to Mars someday.

Abigail Harrison says she's always dreamed of being the first astronaut to set foot on the Red Planet, and she sees her campaign to get involved in space station outreach as one giant leap toward that target. 

She has enlisted one of the crew members, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, as her mentor and orbital pen pal. Her Rockethub crowdfunding campaign has passed the $20,000 mark and is shooting for a goal of $35,000 for travel and outreach. As the May 28 date for Parmitano's launch approaches, she's juggling radio interviews, Facebook updates, Twitter thank-you notes, public appearances ... and oh, that's right: high school.

"You can run yourself ragged on a campaign like this," Harrison, a sophomore at South High School in Minneapolis, told NBC News. "Last time I checked, I have seven A's this quarter. It's been harder to keep my grades up. I don't have as much free time to relax."

Somehow, Astronaut Abby manages. It doesn't hurt that her mom is a social-media maven who runs a marketing agency as @SocialNicole. "My mom has been an amazing resource to answer my questions and help me learn things during this campaign that I wouldn't have been able to learn myself," Harrison said. She also has corporate sponsors, graphic designers and public relations types on her side to keep the mission on track. But her key space connection is with Parmitano — and for that, Harrison has her mom and social media to thank.

The teenager has been an avid space fan since she was 6 or so. Two years ago, she and her mother traveled to NASA's Kennedy Space Center to see the final launch of the shuttle Endeavour. @SocialNicole participated in the mission's Tweetup, which gave a select group of Twitter users the opportunity to meet with NASA officials and astronauts, including Parmitano. She had a chat with the Italian, talked up her daughter and said she hoped they'd meet someday.

"Coming back through the airport, my mom and I turn around at security, and Luca was standing right behind us," Abby recalled. That was the beginning of a friendship that resulted in the #SoyuzAdventure outreach project.

"I will mentor you now," Parmitano told her, "and someday I will train you for your mission to Mars."

Harrison will be attending the Soyuz launch at Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as Parmitano's guest, and she plans to send back dispatches about her travels. During Parmitano's six-month mission on the space station, Astronaut Abby will be checking in on a daily basis as the astronaut's "Earth Liaison." She'll pass along what she finds out via email blasts, blog items, Facebook updates, Twitter tweets and maybe even the occasional Google+ Hangout.

The contributions she's received so far will pay for the trip to Baikonur, and she'll scale her education and outreach efforts to fit her funding.

This may not sound like the traditional path toward an astronaut career, but maybe it's the wave of the future. "It's definitely been a learning process to step away from the idea that being an astronaut is more than just math and science," Harrison said. She still has a passion for science — particularly for biology and geology. And she still has a passion to be among the first to walk on Mars. "I have a saying, 'Mars or Bust, 2030,'" she said. But she also has a passion for social interaction, and she has learned from Parmitano to work that into her career plans as well.

"Do what you love, not what you think NASA is looking for," she quoted her mentor as saying, "because NASA is looking for people who are passionate about what they do."

In 2030, Astronaut Abby will be 32 years old — which is how old Sally Ride was when she became America's first woman in space. That sounds just about right. 

More about students and space:

• NASA to launch student-built radiation shield
• Mars project is a whole new world for kids
• Students help NASA control robots from space

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Space Warps Collaboration

The green crosshairs pinpoint a gravitational lens lurking in an astronomical image.

Think you can find space warps? Astronomers have recruited thousands of citizen scientists to look for exoplanets, galaxies, moon craters and other cosmic curiosities — and now they need your help to go after one of the weirdest phenomena in space-time: gravitational lenses.

The Space Warps website gives Internet users the opportunity to sift through telescope images and spot galaxies so massive they bend the light rays that pass near them, like a lens. The venture could help crack some of the secrets of dark matter, the mysterious cosmic stuff that is more plentiful than the ordinary matter we see around us.

"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Oxford University physicist Phil Marshall, one of the leaders of the Space Warps research team, said in Wednesday's kickoff announcement.  "Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies."

Space Warps is the latest gem in Zooniverse's constellation of online citizen-science ventures — a constellation that also includes Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and much, much more. The warp-hunting effort follows the model set by those other projects: Participants are given online training exercises to sharpen their lens-spotting skills, and then they're set loose to check sky survey images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

"Computer algorithms have already scanned the images from the CFHT survey, but there are likely to be many more space warps that the algorithms have missed. Realistic simulated space warps are dropped into some images to train the volunteers how to spot them, and reassure people that they are on the right track,’ said Anupreeta More, project co-leader from Kavli IPMU in Tokyo.

Galaxy Zoo already has demonstrated that human eyes and brains are much better than automated computer software when it comes to recognizing the subtle characteristics of astronomical phenomena. Dozens of scientific papers have been spun off from Galaxy Zoo searches — including reports on the headline-grabbing blob of green gas known as "Hanny's Voorwerp."

Space Warps could well uncover similar curiosities. Warp-hunters will be able to discuss their finds with each other and with experts on the project's online forum, and even create computer models of their discoveries. A list of gravitational lenses will be published for amateurs and professionals to investigate further.  

"Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, that's really helpful to our research — we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that it's worth investigating," said Oxford's Aprajita Verma, another leader of the Space Warps team.

So what are you waiting for?

More about gravitational lenses:

• Cosmic lenses find farthest galaxy yet
• Crazy cosmic lens focuses on dark matter
• Dark energy illuminated by cosmic lens

The Space Warps collaboration currently includes Phil Marshall, Aprajita Verma, Matthias Tecza, Chris Lintott, Rob Simpson (University of Oxford), Anupreeta More, Surhud More (Kavli IPMU), Amit Kapadia, Kelly Borden, David Miller, Arfon Smith (Adler Planetarium), Jean-Paul Kneib (EPFL Lausanne), Rafael Kueng, Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich), and citizen scientists Elisabeth Baeten, Claude Cornen, Cecile Faure, Thomas Jennings, Stuart Lowe, Christine Macmillan, Julianne Wilcox and Layne Wright. Organizers say it is about to get a lot bigger.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Almost a third of America's honeybee colonies bit the dust last winter, according to a bellwether survey of bee health. But the deaths didn't fit the typical pattern for colony collapse disorder, the mysterious malady that wipes out bunches of bees all at once. Instead, researchers suggest that last summer's drought and other common-sense factors were to blame.

The annual survey of beekeepers, conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership and the Apiary Inspectors of America, found that 31.1 percent of the colonies were lost over the winter of 2012-2013. That compares with a loss of 22 percent during the previous winter, which was exceptionally mild. It's also slightly higher than the six-year average of 30.5 percent in colony losses.

The past winter's bee death rate was roughly as high as it was during the winter of 2006-2007 — when colony collapse disorder, or CCD, was at its peak. But this time, most colonies "dwindled away rather than suffering from the sudden onset of CCD," Jeff Pettis, a U.S. Department of Agriculture bee expert who worked on the survey, said in a news release announcing the results.

University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEnglesdorp, who directs the Bee Informed Partnership, listed several likely causes for last winter's spike. One prime reason is the drought that swept over the Midwest last year. "When there's a drought, the bees are in poor shape with the food," California beekeeper Randy Oliver told NBC News in March.

Honeybees may have had to rely on irrigated crops rather than wildflowers for their nectar, which could have increased their exposure to pesticides, vanEnglesdorp said. He said last year's rising corn prices led farmers to replace prairie and shrubs with cornfields, further limiting the bees' foraging areas. And for part of the year, beekeepers lacked an effective treatment for Varroa mites, a type of bee parasite that was cited last week as the biggest factor behind the nation's bee die-off.

VanEnglesdorp said all these factors left bee colonies in a weakened state for the tough winter of 2012-2013. He said the beekeepers who took their hives to California in February to pollinate almond trees suffered especially high losses. Nearly 20 percent of those beekeepers said they lost 50 percent or more of their colonies over the winter.

Pettis noted that the survey stopped tracking losses at the end of April. As a result, "the 31 percent figure likely underrepresents the losses, as we saw many weak colonies that were not actually dead," he said.

Beekeepers rebuild their colonies in the spring, so a 31.1 percent loss rate isn't quite as catastrophic as it sounds. Nevertheless, vanEngelsdorp said high winter losses are changing the way commercial beekeeping is done. "All the money you're going to make in honey goes to replacing dead colonies and keeping your colonies alive," he said. "Any money you make [as profit] will be from pollination."

More about the bees:

• Die-off blamed on combination of causes
• EPA steps up pesticide review
• NBC News archive on the bee crisis

The winter colony loss survey was funded by USDA. The 6,287 U.S. beekeepers who responded to the survey managed nearly 600,000 bee colonies at the start of the survey period, or about 23 percent of the country's estimated 2.6 million colonies. A complete analysis of the survey data will be published later this year.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

UWA

The University of Western Australia's Monica Gagliano studies how plants communicate with each other.

Studies show that basil gives a boost to chili peppers, while fennel is a real bummer. The effect has been seen even when the plants are sealed off from each other with sheets of black plastic. So does that mean that the plants are "talking" to each other through subtle vibrations? That's the kind of talk that sparks a debate — not between the plants, but between humans.

The latest study, reported in the open-access journal BMC Ecology, looked at potential communication between basil plants and chili pepper seeds. It's one of a series of experiments conducted by Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton of the University of Western Australia.

"Our results show that plants are able to positively influence growth of seeds by some as-yet unknown mechanism," Gagliano said in a news release from BioMed Central, the journal's publisher. "Bad neighbors, such as fennel, prevent chili seed germination in the same way."

Fennel plants release chemicals into the air and soil that are detrimental to most other plants, including chili peppers. Last year, Gagliano and her colleagues set up mini-gardens to study the interaction between the plants more closely. They were surprised to find that chili seeds germinated more quickly when the fennel plant was sealed off with plastic to block the transfer of those nasty chemicals. It was almost as if the baby chilis sensed that a villainous plant was nearby, and grew up faster so they'd have a better chance of fending off the fennel.

The new study looks at the flip side of plant interaction: Unlike fennel, basil is a "good neighbor" for chili plants because basil plants release chemicals that discourage weed growth. Gagliano and her colleagues found that to be the case for chili seedlings. The seeds germinated at a higher rate, even if the basil plant was sealed off with the black plastic. That led Gagliano and Renton to conclude that the seeds could still sense the presence of a friendly plant when they couldn't get the standard chemical signals.

How could this be?

"We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants," Gagliano said in the news release.

That surmise seems to fit with other findings on plant communication. Corn roots, for example, give off regular clicking sounds in the range of 220Hz (which corresponds to an A below middle C). Gagliano and her colleagues found that when young corn roots are suspended in water, they tend to lean toward the source of a continuous 220Hz tone transmitted through the water. The researchers suggested that acoustic signals could knit plants into an underground network of friends and foes.

But as Gagliano points out, no one has yet identified the precise mechanism by which one plant hears what another plant is saying. That's one of the reasons why other researchers haven't wholeheartedly embraced the idea that plants are talking to each other.

"Although the idea of plants communicating by sound is intriguing, there is still a long way to go before we know whether, and if so to whom, the woods sing!" the University of Leiden's Carel ten Cate wrote last December in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Duke University's Dan Johnson, who is studying how trees respond to drought, said it's "too early to tell" whether plants truly respond to each other's sounds.

"We have been detecting these acoustic signals for almost 50 years," Johnson told NBC News. "The idea of using those signals for communication is incredibly interesting, and there is potentially some growing support for it. But we're a good ways away from strong support for acoustic signaling between plants. ... I'm glad that somebody's working on it, but I think it's too early to say."

More about plant communication:

• Hear that sound? That's a thirsty tree
• Listen up: This is your plant talking!
• Plant uses sound to attract bats
• Flowers and bees have electrifying discussions

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A mosaic of images captured by NASA's Mars Curiosity rover on Sol 262 of its mission on Mars (May 2) shows its robotic arm in the foreground and Mount Sharp in the background. Two drill holes can be seen on the surface of the bedrock visible below the robotic arm's turret.

NASA's Curiosity rover is back at work in Yellowknife Bay, a rocky area inside Mars' Gale Crater — and if it takes good care of itself, it just might still be at work when humans hit the Red Planet.

At least that's the sentiment voiced by Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, during this week's Humans to Mars Summit in Washington. "I anticipate the first astronaut we send can go and shake Curiosity's hand," he told Monday's audience at George Washington University. If that astronaut is able to come within hand-shaking distance, the gesture would serve as a thank-you for years of service by the nuclear-powered robot, Meyer said.

Last week, Curiosity resumed contact with controllers back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after a weeks-long gap that was scheduled due to solar interference — and JPL has just finished upgrading the rover's software.

Images sent back on May 2 show the rover's robotic arm and its instrument-laden turret poised over Yellowknife Bay's bedrock. Scientist-writer Ken Kremer and his Italian colleague, Marco Di Lorenzo, assembled 13 images ("a Martian baker's dozen") into the sepia-toned panorama you see above.

"She's back and flexing!" Kremer wrote in an email. 

Within a week or so, the rover will be drilling into Martian bedrock to flesh out its scientific findings about the habitability of ancient Mars. Then it'll start heading toward Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons), a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in Gale Crater. Scientists are hoping that the layers of rock on that mountainside have recorded billions of years' worth of geological changes.

Because Curiosity is powered by a plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the rover could keep going for decades — assuming that there aren't any mechanical breakdowns, of course. That's what fuels Meyer's hope that there'll be a human-machine handshake someday.

More than 70 percent of Americans are confident that humans will go to Mars by 2033, according to a survey conducted in February by Phillips & Company for the Boeing Co. and Explore Mars, the nonprofit group sponsoring this week's summit. But one of the summit's headliners, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, said that sending astronauts to Mars can't be done without technological innovation and financial support.

"I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready," The Washington Post quoted Bolden as saying. "I don’t have the capability to do it. NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s."

Will humans ever shake Curiosity's hand? When? Register your opinion in our unscientific survey above, and voice your views in the comment section below.

More about sending humans to Mars:

• Thousands want to take one-way trip to Mars
• Mars flyby in 2018? It's so crazy it just might work
• NBC News archive on Mars

You can follow the Humans to Mars Summit via streaming video. Check out Explore Mars' channel on Livestream for on-demand videos from Monday's sessions, plus live coverage of Tuesday's sessions.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Return of the cicada

Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast prepares for an invasion.

Launch slideshow

Backyard bug-watchers are seeing the winged bugs known as cicadas come out of their holes in New Jersey and North Carolina after 17 years of underground slumber — and scientists say a full-scale outbreak may not be far behind.

"There are some pretty convincing reports coming out," John Cooley, an expert on cicadas at the University of Connecticut, told NBC News. "It's fair to say it's starting, but it's still in the very early stages. It certainly isn't going all crazy. ... When it really happens, it's not going to be like this. It's going to be shovel loads of cicadas."

Cooley maintains one of the most closely watched websites for this spring's emergence, Magicicada.org. Little bug logos are popping up on different areas of Magicicada's interactive map, which means a smattering of Internet users are seeing cicadas coming out of the ground. In some cases, they're even seeing the bugs crawling around as adults.

Cooley, however, says that we ain't seen nothing yet. "When it really happens, we expect that website will just light up," he said.

The outlook is similar on other bug-watching sites — such as Radiolab's Cicada Tracker, which is encouraging listeners to put out their own soil-thermometer setups. Those readings are considered key leading indicators for cicada activity, because researchers have found that the bugs emerge en masse when the springtime soil temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). A different temperature tracker set up by the Sutron information network for the Washington area suggests that the nation's capital still has a way to go before the cicadas come out.

Insects are expected to emerge by the billions on the East Coast, across an area stretching from North Carolina to Connecticut. This army of bugs, known as Brood II, spends 17 years feeding on plant roots underground. Sometime between late April and early June, depending on the weather, the insects burrow out of the ground as nymphs. The juveniles shed their outer skins, crawl up trees or buildings, and fly around to find their mates. The females lay their eggs, and then the adults die in droves. All this happens in the course of four to six weeks.

After another few weeks, a new generation of nymphs hatch from the eggs, drop to the ground, burrow into the soil and begin the next 17-year cycle.

Magicicada.org

An interactive map provided by Magicicada.org shows this spring's cicada sightings.

Ron Edmonds / AP

Red-eyed cicadas cluster on leaves in Annandale, VA., during the Brood X emergence of 2004. Like Brood II, Brood X comes out every 17 years - but the timing of the cycle is different.

Brood II is just one of several broods of 13-year and 17-year periodical cicadas: The last big bug outbreak featured Brood XIX, which created a huge buzz in Southern states in 2011. This year's emergence is expected to begin in the South as well, though that's not guaranteed.

"Our expectation has been that we would hear from folks in North Carolina first," said Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for the National Pest Management Association. However, the only cicada sighting she's actually been able to confirm was made in New Jersey. Although the insects tend to swarm in rural or suburban areas, there's a chance they could be sighted in urban enclaves such as New York's Central Park or the Bronx Zoo as well.

Cooley said he expected the pace of sightings to accelerate in the days ahead. "Within a week or so, it ought to really be going," he told NBC News. "Spring can't hold off forever."

When it comes, a cicada emergence can fill the skies with flying bugs, and fill the ears with a hum as loud as a jet engine or lawn mower. Those who have been through the full-frontal buzz say the experience can be disconcerting if you're not prepared for it. But cicadas are not considered a threat to humans. In fact, they can be quite delicious.

For true bug fans, the best response to the emergence is to lie back and enjoy it. "I'm looking forward to it," said Cornell University entomologist Cole Gilbert, who's expecting to catch the trailing edge of the Brood II outbreak in upstate New York. "I think it's pretty cool."

More about cicadas:

• Cicada invasion generates early buzz
• In death, cicadas boost plant life
• Tasty cicadas may sicken pets

Thanks to the rapid rise of crowdsourcing and social media, this year's event is sure to become the most tweeted cicada emergence in history: Cicada Mania suggests using the hashtag #BroodII for the 2013 outbreak, and #Cicadas for general cicada issues. If you want to see the Twitterverse from the cicadas' point of view, just follow @Brood_II. There's a Cicada Mania Facebook page for entomophiles. And if you're an entomophobe, you'll find kindred spirits on the "I Hate Cicadas!!!!!!" Facebook page.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" NBC News Science's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Steve Corniffe looks at dead bees next to a bee box at the J&P Apiary and Gentzel's Bees, Honey and Pollination Company on April 10 in Homestead, Florida. Beekeepers and scientists are trying to figure out what is causing bees to succumb to the colony collapse disorder.

This week's federally sponsored report about the mysterious disappearance of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, pointed to a complex combination of factors, ranging from parasitic mites to pesticides. But what are experts going to do about it? And what about the pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which are facing a ban in European countries?

In an email to NBC News, the Environmental Protection Agency says it's speeding up its schedule for reviewing research on neonicotinoids and their potential effects on honeybees. It's also fine-tuning existing regulatory practices and setting up new educational efforts to deal with colony collapse disorder. Here's how the EPA responded to NBC News' questions about the next steps to counter the honeybee die-off:

Are there any specific policy questions under consideration? Anything relating to the next steps in the wake of the report?

"EPA is working collaboratively with beekeepers, growers, pesticide manufacturers, seed manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, USDA and states to apply technologies to reduce pesticide dust drift, to advance best management practices, to improve enforcement guidance and to explore enhancing pesticide labeling in order to protect bees. Specifically, EPA is:

• Moving to change pesticide labels which will limit applications to protect bees and be more clear and precise.
• Moving to add warning statements to each bag of pesticide-treated seed.
• Issuing new enforcement guidance to federal, state and tribal enforcement officials to help them investigate bee kills.
• Working with the equipment manufacturer and pesticide and seed industry and USDA to develop and apply technologies to reduce pesticide dust drift during planting seasons.
• Working with USDA and other partners to promote Best Management Practices for growers and beekeeping via a new website, education and training modules for professional applicators, video, and other mechanisms
• Finally, EPA is working on a range of national and international efforts to develop appropriate tests for evaluating both exposure to and effects of pesticides on insect pollinators. EPA is also requiring new lab and field studies to inform the risk assessment process to better understand pollinator risks."

On the subject of nicotinoids, the EPA has said it's conducting risk assessments on the pesticides' effects, but is there anything more specific that can be said?

 "The agency has accelerated the schedule for registration review of the neonicotinoid pesticides due to uncertainties about these pesticides and their potential effects on bees. We have several hundred registrant studies addressing the effects of neonicotinoids to individual bees as well as colonies in field settings. In addition, the EPA has evaluated open-literature derived studies that meet the established standards for use in a regulatory context.

"If at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide."

More about the bee die-off:

• Report fuels debate over bee die-off
• Rise in bee deaths stirs up a buzz
• Neonicotinoids tied to crashing bee populations

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force's sleek, light-colored X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle can be seen tucked under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress for this week's test launch.

The U.S. Air Force's $300 million, nine-year test program for a hypersonic plane ended on a high note this week, when the last of its X-51A Waverider vehicles made the longest flight of its kind. The success was made sweeter by the fact that it followed last year's high-profile failure.

"I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in a news release.

The 14-foot-long (4.3-meter-long), scramjet-powered vehicle hit a top speed of Mach 5.1 during just over six minutes of flight on May 1, the Air Force said. That's the longest of the Boeing-built X-51A's four test flights, and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

Hypersonic scramjet propulsion has been widely touted as eventually opening up the way for flights between London and New York in less than an hour. But in reality, the first application is more likely to come in the form of super-fast cruise missiles.

Scramjet is a short way of saying "supersonic combustion ramjet." There have been many efforts through the years to perfect hypersonic aircraft — that is, vehicles that travel at speeds beyond Mach 5. But the Air Force says the X-51A is unique primarily because it used hydrocarbon fuel rather than hydrogen fuel. Without any moving parts, the fuel is injected into the scramjet's combustion chamber, where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber. The fuel is ignited in a process that's been likened to lighting a match in a hurricane.      

This week's experiment followed the flight profile used for the X-51A's earlier tests: A B-52H Stratofortress took off from California's Edwards Air Force Base, flew 50,000 feet over a Pacific test range, and then released a solid rocket booster with the plane attached. When the cruiser reached Mach 4.8, the X-51A separated from the booster and lit up its scramjet engine. The scramjet exhausted its fuel in 240 seconds. The sleek vehicle coasted for another couple of minutes and splashed down into the ocean as planned. The X-51 traveled more than 230 nautical miles and yielded 370 seconds of data, the Air Force said.

"This success is the result of a lot of hard work by an incredible team.  The contributions of Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the 412th Test Wing at Edwards AFB, NASA Dryden and DARPA were all vital," Brink said.  

All this is a huge improvement over the previous test, which ended in failure last August. During that flight, the X-51A veered off course less than a minute after launch and crashed, due to a problem with one of its control fins. The issue was resolved after a months-long investigation. The first X-51 test was successful in May 2010, resulting in a 200-second flight, but the second test in June 2011 was a disappointment. 

There's no immediate successor to the X-51A, but the Air Force has pledged to continue with hypersonic research. It says the lessons learned during the X-51A program "will pay dividends to the High Speed Strike Weapon program" at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

More about supersonic flight:

• Video: What the X-51 was designed to do
• Futuristic space plane closer to reality
• Supersonic biplane puts an end to sonic booms

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A Martian view from one of Curiosity's hazard avoidance cameras, transmitted back to Earth on Thursday, shows the shadow of the instrument turret on the rover's robotic arm.

NASA's Curiosity rover is back in business after a weeks-long communication gap caused by solar interference. The proof comes in the form of pictures transmitted back to Earth on Thursday from the 1-ton machine's vantage point at Yellowknife Bay on Mars.

"Can you hear me now? Conjunction is over. I have a clear view of Earth & am back to work!" the rover tweeted (with a little help from her entourage at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

Dozens of raw images are on display on NASA's Mars Curiosity website, featuring rocky terrain in the foreground and the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) peak known as Mount Sharp or Aeolis Mons in the background. Other Mars probes, including the Opportunity rover, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are back at work as well.

NASA's Red Planet probes were on hiatus for most of April due to an unfavorable alignment of Mars, Earth and the sun. During solar conjunction, the sun gets in the way of the communication lines between the two planets, and mission controllers generally put science operations on hold. Such conjunctions occur every 26 months. Opportunity has gone through several communication breaks during its nine years on Mars, but this is the first one to occur since Curiosity landed last August.

The spacecraft weren't completely idle during the break: Curiosity conducted in-place investigations and sent back limited transmissions via X-band radio to let controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory know that it was doing OK. Opportunity autonomously flipped its computer into safe mode during the break, apparently due to a glitch involving a routine camera check. A fresh set of software commands fixed the glitch, and on Wednesday controllers reported that Opportunity was back in working order.

Curiosity is due for its own software upgrade, and then the rover is scheduled to drill out a second sample of ground-up rock for analysis. The first sample, analyzed in March, suggested that the Yellowknife Bay environment was potentially habitable billions of years ago. Scientists want to use the follow-up sample to confirm what they saw in previous chemical analyses.

After Curiosity finishes up its work in Yellowknife Bay and its surroundings in the Glenelg area of Gale Crater, controllers plan to point the rover toward Mount Sharp, 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. The science team suspects that the mountain's many layers of rock will hold further evidence of ancient organic chemistry.

More about Mars:

• Cosmic Log archive on Curiosity
• Old phallic picture on Mars sparks new titters
• NASA lets poets send haiku to Red Planet

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The U.S. government's latest report on the mysterious disappearance of honeybees points to a parasitic mite as the biggest factor behind colony collapse disorder — and downplays the role of controversial pesticides that European officials are planning to ban.

Thursday's report from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture says there should be further research into the effects of those nerve-agent pesticides, known as neonicotinoids. But it says the studies so far have not shown it to be the biggest hazard facing the bees.

Last month, beekeepers and environmentalists filed a federal lawsuit calling for an immediate ban on two kinds of neonicotinoids — clothianidin and thiamethoxam. One of the attorneys bringing that suit, Peter Jenkins of the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, told NBC News that his group was "very disturbed" by the way the report was presented, but he also said some of the problems cited in the report supported his case.

'Complex problem'
The report says that a complex combination of causes is behind colony collapse disorder, or CCD, a term that applies to the difficult-to-explain losses that have hit U.S. honeybee colonies since 2006. In the worst cases, entire colonies have disappeared within a few weeks. That's a big problem, because the government says an estimated one-third of all food and beverages are made possible by pollination, mainly by honeybees. Pollination is said to be worth more than $20 billion in agricultural production annually.

The relatively light bee colony losses during the winter of 2011-2012 gave some experts reason to hope that the CCD situation was getting better, but experts say that last winter's losses look as if they were worse than ever.

"The decline in honeybee health is a complex problem caused by a combination of stressors, and at EPA we are committed to continuing our work with USDA, researchers, beekeepers, growers and the public to address this challenge," acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe said in a statement.

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan promised that "key stakeholders will be engaged in addressing this challenge."

Scott Bauer / USDA via AP

A worker bee carries a Varroa mite, visible in this close-up view.

The report draws upon a gathering of officials and stakeholders that took place in Alexandria, Va., last October. It says that the parasitic Varroa mite is the "major factor" behind CCD in the United States and other countries. Varroa mites latch onto the bees and feed on their fluids, weakening the insects. The mites have developed widespread resistance to the chemicals that have been used to control them. The report says more attention should be given to breeding bees that can weather the mites, and notes that gene-sequencing projects focusing on honeybees as well as Varroa mites may provide fresh insights.

Beekeepers have long known about the mite problem, as well as the other causes listed in the EPA-USDA report: poor nutrition, reduced genetic diversity, the Nosema gut parasite, emerging viruses and a bacterial disease called European foulbrood. But figuring out the role played by pesticides has posed the biggest challenge for researchers as well as policymakers.

What to do?
Recent research studies have focused on the effect of neonicotinoids, a neurotoxic type of pesticide that has become widely used because they have little effect on mammals. Most of the studies suggest that the pesticides can scramble a bee's brains — but at what level of exposure?

Some say the exposure levels used in those studies may not accurately reflect the levels that bees experience in the fields. That's the tack taken in Thursday's report: "The most pressing pesticide research questions lie in determining the actual field-relevant pesticide exposure bees receive, and the effects of pervasive exposure to multiple pesticides on bee health and productivity of whole honeybee colonies," it said.

The report says residues from a different class of pesticides, known as pyrethroids, could pose three times as much risk to bees as neonicotinoids.  

The Center for Food Safety's Peter Jenkins complained that the effects of neonicotinoids were being downplayed, but he also called attention to some of the shortcomings mentioned in the federal agencies' report. "They admitted that their labeling is inadequate," Jenkins said. "They admitted that past risk assessments and data requirements were inadequate."

He said some of the proposed policy changes — including, for instance, the introduction of better equipment for coating seed corn with pesticides — would have a positive impact. "What they don't say is that it's going to take years and years to achieve those changes," Jenkins said.

Jenkins called for an immediate tightening of regulations of pesticides. "The one factor that EPA actually has control over is the one that they refuse to regulate," he said.

The EPA is working on a new round of risk assessments for pesticides, but the results of those assessments have not yet been released. Meanwhile, the agency is due to file its response to the environmentalists' lawsuit later this month. Jenkins said Thursday's report would have "no real effect" on the legal action, which could go on for years.

More about the bee die-off:

• Rise in bee deaths stirs up a buzz
• Neonicotinoids tied to crashing bee populations
• Mites and virus team up to wipe out beehives

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.