For the fourth year in a row, about a third of honey bee hives in the United States have died off during the winter. That’s an estimate of the proportion of managed colonies killed by all sorts of mishaps, from diseases and the dreaded Varroa mite, not to mention bad weather and just plain bad luck. The estimate comes from a preliminary release of data from phone and online surveys by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As to what happened to honey bees last winter, beekeepers reported that bad weather played an unusually large role compared with previ...

Science News contributing editor Alexandra Witze describes what it took to synthesize ununseptium, element number 117.

Laura Sanders follows up on a story first reported from the Society for Neuroscience’s 2009 meeting.

The current H1N1 influenza shares many similarities with the 1918 pandemic influenza.

Deleted Scenes Blog: Biomedical reporter Nathan Seppa describes latest chapter in controversy created by now debunked research.