A wildfire started by three vagrants with drugs in their possession spread quickly in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles on January 16th, 2014. The plume of ash and smoke blanketed much of the metropolitan area and prompted air quality warnings, along with concerns about long-term effects to the climate.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured these images of the Colby fire just before (top) and just after noon on January 16. The morning image is clearer because the scene was centered under the satellite, while the afternoon image is fuzzy because the satellite was observing from an angle.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been explaining the value of spying on the American public throughout history, as a way of deflecting concern about his administration and government overreach. Critics will dismiss his claims along the lines of 'why it was wrong when Bush did what I do but it is right for me to do it now' rationalization, so he should instead leverage the value spying has in public health.

Traditional surveillance methods for detecting infectious diseases such Dengue Fever and Influenza take weeks because it relies on doctors reporting cases. Today, people tend to Google for an online diagnosis before visiting a GP and a paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases says Internet-based surveillance can be a big help.

A new slave-making ant species from the eastern USA quite literally means 'to pillage'. The listing in Zookeys tell us of the new ant Temnothorax pilagens – pilere is plunder in Latin.

Temnothorax pilagens is different from other slave-making ants, like the famous slave-hunting Amazon Ants whose campaigns may include up to 3000 warriors, the new slave-maker is minimalistic in expense, but most effective in result. The length of a “Pillage Ant” is only two and a half millimeters and the range of action of these slave-hunters restricts to a few square meters of forest floor.

Researchers have decoded the whole genome sequence of one widespread species and it turns out to be remarkably big -  6.5 gigabytes, largest animal genome sequenced so far. 

The honor goes to Locusta migratoria, the most widespread locust species. We all know about locusts: a single locust can eat its own bodyweight in food in a single day which is, proportionately, 60 times a human's daily consumption. They are capable of inflicting famine and wiping out livelihoods when they swarms, which can cost countries billions of dollars in lost harvests and eradication efforts.

By observing a high-speed component of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, an extraordinarily dynamic cluster with a total mass greater than 10¹⁵ (a million billion) times the mass of the sun or more than 1,000 times the mass of our own galaxy, researchers have detected for the first time in an individual object the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a change in the cosmic microwave background caused by its interaction with massive moving objects.  \

Even "minimally buzzed" drinkers and drivers are more often to blame for fatal car crashes than the sober drivers they collide with, reports a University of California, San Diego study of accidents in the United States . 

UC San Diego sociologist David Phillips and colleagues examined 570,731 fatal collisions, from 1994 to 2011, using the official U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database because it is nationally comprehensive and because it reports on blood alcohol content (BAC) in increments of 0.01 percent.

They focused on "buzzed drivers," with
blood alcohol content
 of 0.01 to 0.07 percent, and, within this group, the "minimally buzzed", a blood alcohol content
of 0.01 percent.