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Although busy hives filled with honeybees tend to dominate mainstream imagery and conversations about bee populations, 90 percent of the insects are actually solitary creatures that prefer to live outside of a colony. This majority, which is comprised of tens of thousands of species, are also superior pollinators in comparison to their social counterparts because they’re polylectic, meaning they collect the sticky substance from multiple sources, making them even more crucial to maintaining crops and biodiversity.

Wednesday I was featured on IBA's English news magazine Closeup with Leah Zinder. Here's the entire program.

A full moon is set to occur closer to the Earth on Friday evening than it has done for the past 15 years. The Moon's elliptical orbit means its distance from the Earth is not constant. It will be a little over 350,000km away as it passes over the northern hemisphere, which is about 30,000km closer than usual. If the sky is clear it will appear brighter and larger than usual, say astronomers. Closest path Friday's full moon could appear up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons this year, Nasa said. The Moon's orbit is elliptical,...

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), October 2004 in Washington, DC.(AFP/File/Stephen Jaffe)

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Two decades and $3.3 billion in the making, an international exploration of majestic Saturn begins this month when a spacecraft slips through a gap in the shimmering rings to enter orbit. Culminating a nearly seven-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey through the solar system, the Cassini spacecraft will fire its engine Wednesday night to slow down and allow itself to be captured by Saturn. The maneuver will inaugurate a four-year, 76-orbit tour of the giant planet and some of its 31 known moons, including huge Titan. To scientists, Saturn and its spectacular rings are a model of the...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 14 The Sharpest View of the Sun Credit: SST, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Explanation: This stunning image shows remarkable and mysterious details near the dark central region of a planet-sized sunspot in one of the sharpest views ever of the surface of the Sun. Just released, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope now in its first year of operation on the Canary...