The arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) makes an incredible migration each year. These small birds travel distances of more than 50,000 miles, from pole to pole, crossing through temperate and tropical regions along the way. Carsten Egevang used geo-locator tags to track some of these terns, and he shares their story with us in this tour.

Ugandan lepidopterist Perpetra Akite studies at a university in the capital city, far from the farm where she grew up. Since she began studying butterflies as a girl, the landscape of her homeland has changed radically, for butterflies as well as people. It’s change that can be measured in many ways—in the inches of rainfall, acres of forest cleared—or the span of a tiny butterfly’s wings. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports from Kigale.

By the time you read this, we will be on a plane to Costa Rica. We are filming the second installment of our insect order videos for Texas A&M University's awesome class, Insects and Human Society. Since the insects won't be buzzing around for a couple of months yet here in Oregon, we decided to go to them. Luckily, we had two plane tickets that we needed to use this year. What are two Bug Chicks to do?

Right now we're packing and planning for a trip to the rainforest to film series two of Texas A&M University's Insects and Human Society course.  We're going to be posting full episodes from the first set soon (read about it here), but in the mean time we thought we'd show you one of our favorite "Mythology and Culture" segments from the earwig video!
We paid tribute to one of the most famous scenes from Star Trek's The Wrath of Khan.  Disclaimer: No earwigs (or Bug Chicks) were injured during the filming ...

Daniel Smith and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory are looking for volunteers who are about to move to a different house to join the Home Microbiome Study. They will be asked to collect samples every other day for six weeks to monitor how microbiomes of themselves and their house change in response to one another. This data will provide valuable information on how stable our microbiomes are, and whether our microbiomes colonize our house… or our house’s microbiome colonizes us!

By Mariel Emrich, Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School
Recently, there was a study by scientists, including the co-leader Jean Bennet, and Manzar Ashtari from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania that was published in Science Translational Medicine. The study showed successful gene therapy for inherited blindness for one eye. The particular disease is called leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).

By Mariel Emrich, Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School
The American Museum of Natural History offers many after-school science courses each year. Currently, I am enrolled in “Curing Disease in the 20th Century”. The course discusses the process of developing drugs starting from molecules in nature and in the lab. Last week, we did a lab to find and grow our own bacteria.

Chevrotains have two-toed hooves and specialized stomachs that allow them to regurgitate and chew on partially digested plant matter to help breakdown undigestible cellulose -- characteristics that classify them as ruminants. Chevrotains, however, are the most primitive ruminants alive today, as evidenced by their lack of horns or antlers, their long upper canine teeth, and their three-chambered stomachs (as opposed to the typical four-chambered anatomy of other ruminants). These features, along with certain pig-like characteristics, have led some scientists to conclude that chevrotains form an evolutionary link between ruminants and nonruminants, or animals with single-chambered stomachs, such as pigs and humans.

The week surrounding Valentine’s Day makes us think about love and joy, whether we like it or not. Learning to identify people or pinpoint events and moments that make us happy is a good exercise, though. So we decided to sit down and list 5 reasons why we love being entomologists.

Gliding mammals sail silently from one tree to the next, maneuvering to their destinations with extraordinary precision and control, often in complete darkness. This unique ability is found in only about 60 species of mammals in the world, but those species include marsupials and placental animals, two very distantly related groups distinguished by the vast evolutionary differences in their reproductive systems. As a result, gliding mammals serve as a fascinating example of convergent evolution -- when similar physical and functional traits occur in unrelated species.

Insects as food is making headlines again. An article released by The Daily Mail in late January discussed how the European Union is spending 3 million Euro to explore insect protein as a food supplements, as well as using insects to combat food shortages. We decided to re-post our podcast about entomophagy (the eating of insects) in order to start the discussion here on Talking Science!