Let's say you're a parasitic ant queen eyeing the colony of another species. But ants will attack anything that smells like trouble, and boy, do you smell like trouble.

So you execute a simple plan:

1. Hide your scent by rubbing one of the colony's workers all over your body
2. Stealthily infiltrate the nest
3. Ambush the queen and spray her with chemicals from your abdomen
4. Sit back and watch as her daughters tear her to bits
5. All hail the usurper!

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/17/science/parasitic-ant-queen-workers-kill-mother

#science #ants

Live birth in toads! Is a thing! Three newly described species of tree toads give birth to toadlets, at least 40 or more at a pop and each just a few millimeters long.

They're in a genus that's known for live birth but were previously all lumped together as one species: Nectophrynoides viviparus. However, new analysis of hundreds of museum specimens (yay museums!) and recordings of their calls identified them as three different species in that genus.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/13/science/tree-toad-three-species-live-birth

#science #scicomm

Massive relatives of modern kangaroos once roamed Australia, and about 50,000 years ago, First Peoples may have collected the animals' fossils.

In my latest for CNN, researchers revisit a cut in a tibia from an extinct giant kangaroo, finding that the mark was made after the bone dried out and fossilized. This counters prior interpretations of the mark as a sign of butchering, proposing instead that First Peoples collected fossils.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/27/science/australia-first-peoples-fossils

#science #australia #paleontology

Big thanks to the folks at CBC's Quirks and Quarks for having me on as a guest to talk about Rise of the Zombie Bugs! It was great fun chatting with host Bob McDonald about my favorite zombifiers and what we can learn from them about parasitism, neuroscience and evolution.

Scroll down their page to check out the book trailer, edited and animated by @monospace!

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/oct-25-zombies-wolves-methane-screaming-9.6951725

#science #zombie #books #bookstodon

Heads up, NJ/NY folks! 'Tis the season for zombie science, and on Friday Oct. 24 I'll be at WORD Bookstore in Jersey City talking with Nicholas Ciavatta about zombie ants (and the zombie-ant fungus that inspired "The Last of Us"), zombie roaches, zombie caterpillars, zombie cicadas and more.

How many different ways are there to make a zombie? Come find out! It's free!

RSVP: https://mindyweisberger.com/events/

Graphic by the very awesome @monospace

#science #zombie #halloween #newjersey #books

Ever seen a spooky glow called a will-o'-the-wisp hovering in a swamp, bog or cemetery? Wet places where organic things decay are gassy as hell, fueling these eerie lights.
But what provides the spark? Microlightning that jumps between electrically charged bubbles of methane, according to a new study that I covered for CNN.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/08/science/will-o-the-wisp-microlightning

#science #chemistry #halloween

Polar explorer Ernest Shackleton called his ship one of the strongest to ever visit Antarctica; he blamed its sinking in 1915 on rudder damage, after the vessel had been trapped and mangled by pack ice.

In my latest for CNN, new analysis of records and journals suggests that a structural flaw may have doomed the HMS Endurance from the start, and that Shackleton knew about it all along.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/06/science/endurance-ship-sinking-structural-weakness

#science #antarctica

It was great talking to Tom Ireland of The Biologist (magazine of The Royal Society of Biology) about Rise of the Zombie Bugs, and what scientists learn from zombifying organisms about parasite-host relationships, behavior manipulation and neuroscience.

Read the Q&A: https://www.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/the-rise-of-the-zombie-bugs

Plus! The book's 30% off (today's the last day) at @HopkinsPress with code HMOR25 https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/53677/rise-zombie-bugs

A stunner of an Archaeopteryx fossil preserves SO MUCH soft tissue, including scales on its toe pads and a group of flight feathers never seen before in Archaeopteryx. Called tertials, they lie between the elbow and the body, and play a key flight role in modern birds.

In my latest for CNN, lead study author and paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor explains how these feathers confirm a longheld hypothesis that Archaeopteryx was capable of powered flight.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/science/archaeopteryx-fossil-includes-feathers

#science #fossil

When insect fossils are this intact, just looking at them makes you go WHOA. Plus, preserved body structures reveal how their group evolved!

In my latest for CNN, I wrote about how a truly stunning cicada fossil from Germany's Messel Pit places singing cicadas in Europe earlier than expected, by millions of years. Its large abdomen hints that males had a roomy resonating chamber, for producing louder songs.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/13/science/oldest-singing-cicada-fossil-europe

#science #fossils #insects #germany #paleontology