Get ready for the cicada invasion.

Sometime around Memorial Day, in the declining hours of daylight, swarms of male cicadas will rise up en masse from the soil, where they’ve lived for 17 years sucking on plant roots underground. They’ll emerge as nymphs, and begin shedding their exoskeleten in a process called “molting,” revealing wings and an adult body. Then partly flying, partly walking, they’ll start a mad dash up houses and trees to avoid predators. Once safe in the treetops, they’ll spend the remaining months of their lives engaged in a chorus of mating calls, searching for a partner to help continue their gene pool. The females will follow shortly.

Learn more here.

New findings strongly indicate that scientists have found the Holy Grail of physics, the Higgs boson, an elusive particle believed to be responsible for giving mass to matter. If discovered and proven, Higgs could change the way we understand the origins of the universe.

Commander Chris Hadfield’s tweets are literally out of this world. Nearly every day the astronaut tweets out photos and observations from space to his 500,000 plus Twitter followers and gives them a glimpse at his life in orbit.

Learn more about his social media use here.

What if we found extraterrestrial life on another planet…but it actually originated on Earth?

That’s exactly what NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection is trying to prevent. It’s mission: to ensure the spacecrafts we’re sending into outer space are biologically “clean, and that Earth life doesn’t spread to planets like Mars.

The first baby has been cured of HIV, researchers announced Sunday. The case was publicly unveiled at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

The infant, who is now two and a half years old, was born to a “high-risk” mother in Mississippi. The mother was not diagnosed with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) until delivery, and therefore did not receive the typical prenatal treatment for the disease that could have prevented transmission to the baby.

Confirmation of the baby’s HIV status came from Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University. Go here for the conversation with Dr. Luzuriaga about her team’s research.

How much water goes into ski resorts’ snow-making process? Check out this graph to put it into perspective and learn more here.