Word: swarmming
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Last year, a swarm of yellow-clad demonstrators massed in Bangkok, taking over the international airport and virtually paralyzing the Thai capital for a week. Today, the color of protest is red. As bigwigs from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) began gathering at a seaside resort near Bangkok on Feb. 26 for an annual summit, thousands of anti-government protesters wearing crimson shirts congregated at the Thai Prime Minister's office, demanding that Abhisit Vejjajiva hold elections soon. Thursday marked their third day of protest, and the red-hued demonstrators vowed not to cease until their demands...
...ever walked through a swarm of gnats at a picnic, you have some idea of what it's like to navigate the mass of debris that circles our planet in low-Earth orbit. Space planners have long warned that the growing belt of cosmic junk would eventually lead to collisions, and on Tuesday it happened, when an American satellite and a defunct Russian satellite totaled each other 500 miles above Siberia. This has sparked new worries that space is simply becoming too dangerous a place to travel. Things aren't nearly that severe yet - but they're getting worse...
...Since the cease-fire, the tunnelmakers have become more brazen. They dig in plain sight of the Egyptian border watchtowers and Israeli surveillance aircraft, with a large bubble of tattered plastic over each entrance. Thousands of Gazans swarm around the pitted, sandy area because the tunnels are now the enclave's biggest source of employment. The men carry shovels, ropes and stacks of wooden slats used to reinforce the tunnels where cave-ins are nearly as big a danger as Israeli bombs. Others emerge from the plastic bubbles carting away goods destined for merchants throughout Gaza, who placed orders weeks...
While some mosquito species mate at dusk, A. aegypti engages in daytime rendezvouses. A male flies into a swarm to scope out potential mates, chasing a few specimens (see one such chase here) and checking them out at a range of 1 to 2 cm. If the female has recently mated, she'll rebuff the male's advances, but once a love connection is made, the two will adjust their wing speeds: females typically beat their wings at about 400 Hz, or beats per second, and males flap at a frequency of about 600 Hz; however, when two potential mates...
Last week, geologists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) announced they had recorded a "notable swarm of earthquakes under way since Dec. 26 beneath Yellowstone Lake." The strongest tremor among the hundreds in the past week measured 3.9 on Dec. 27; most of the readings above 2.8 were felt by park employees and visitors around the lake area. The activity relaxed in magnitude early this week but then flexed upward again to top 3.0 by early New Year's Eve. "This December 2008 earthquake sequence is the most intense in this area for some years," YVO reported, "and is centered...