Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

To learn more about a bizarre, zombie-like behavior recently discovered in honeybees, researchers are now tagging the "zombees" with tiny radio trackers. When infected by parasitic maggots of the scuttle fly, the bees apparently desert their hives at night and cluster near outdoor lights, wandering in increasingly erratic circles on the ground before dying.

The parasite could be controlling the honeybees and making them abandon their hives—or perhaps the infected bees are "committing altruistic suicide" to protect their hive mates, said entomologist John Hafernik of San Francisco State University.

Hafernik and colleagues are gluing tiny radiofrequency identification tags—each no bigger than a piece of glitter—onto about 500 infected honeybees. The bees come and go from their hive through a small tube fitted with laser scanners, which register when the insects leave, and whether or not they return.

The researchers hope to find out whether the infected bees abandon the hive exclusively at night, a time when bees don't normally fly outside. If so, it could be a clue that the parasites are mind-controlling their victims.

From www.nationalgeographic.com.
Read more here.

Ten percent of the Russian government's income comes from the sale of vodka.

The ferocious Scottish wildcat, which can grow to the size of a dog, could be extinct in the wild in a few months. Reviews of cameras, eyewitness reports and road kills have caused the Scottish Wildcat Association to produce a report stating that there are only around 40 left in the wild.  Although a different report suggests that there are over 400 wildcats left, the situation is still grave for this emblem of Scotland. The wildcat, Felis silvestris grampia, has been outbred by feral domestic cats, of which there are as many as 100,000. Plans to neuter the feral cats are being put into action in the hope that this will reduce the pressure on the wildcats, which are currently only found in the Cairngorms and the Black Isle.

Geysers are produced when a heat source under the Earth's surface, usually a magma chamber, heats water on its way up to the surface. Thy are therefore defined as minor forms of extrusive volcanic activity. When not active, they may look like a bubbling pool of hot water; however, when the pool fills up with superheated water then the geyser will erupt in a plume of boiling water and steam. These features can be found in many locations, including New Zealand, Iceland (where Geysir, which gave its name to these features, is found), and Yellowstone National Park in the USA, where the geyser Old Faithful (below) is a popular and regularly-erupting tourist attraction.

Click here to watch Strokkur erupting several times in sequence.

More information about Strokkur in Iceland and Lady Knox geyser in New Zealand can be found on the respective pages of this site.

Pluto is as big as Russia.

You've almost certainly heard of volcanoes, but did you know that there are more than a million volcanoes under the sea as well? In fact, that's how many islands form. When hot magma in the Earth's crust breaks through the ocean floor due to intense pressure, it is called a submarine volcanic eruption. Over hundreds of years, the volcano increases in size as every time the volcano erupts, magma solidifies on the top. When the volcano gets so big that it breaks the surface of the ocean, a volcanic island is formed. This occurred in the 1960s off the coast of Iceland when the island Surtsey literally erupted out of the sea. The Galapagos Islands and the Hawaiian Islands, among others, were also formed in this way. Below is a picture of Surtsey during its eruption.

When submarine volcanoes are still submarine, however, they are often the sites of hydrothermal vents, or black smokers. Water, hydrogen sulphide, and other minerals pour from these springs at temperatures of about 350°C. These hot waters host an ecosystem complete with giant clams, mussels, tube worms, and other creatures, that use sulphur, not sunlight, to live.

Watch a short video clip about hydrothermal vents here.

Watch an erupting submarine volcano here.

In New York, there are more Italians than in Rome, more Irish than in Dublin and more Jewish than Tel Aviv. That's globalisation for you!

Years of rubbish dumping on a beach in MacKerricher State Park in California have resulted in a strange phenomenon - a beach made out of glass pebbles. At first glance, Glass Beach looks like an ordinary beach (see below), but is actually composed of the fragments of rubbish that was dumped there in the early 20th century. Over many decades the pounding waves have worn down the detritus on the beach into small, rounded, coloured glass 'trinkets'. Nature's way of recycling!

Alaska is the northernmost, easternmost and westernmost state in the USA! This seemingly impossible fact is true because Alaska is the only state that enters the Eastern Hemisphere, making it both the easternmost and westernmost.