Staten Island! Riverdale! The Brood II cicadas of the East Coast are not something to anticipate anymore; they're something crawling out of the ground and shedding their skins all over the map. Exclamation points are out on cicadamania.com and cicadas.info, while magicicada.org keeps soberly logging the sightings, 500 at a batch: shed skins in Brooklyn, nymphs in Princeton, hordes in Virginia and southern Maryland as the full, swarming emergence moves north, right on schedule.

Chambered nautilus! Flying satellite! Supernova mystery! Cycad fossils! Ancient art! Geoengineering recognition! Black scientists! Mastodon extinction! And crazy birds think they can fly around with nail heads? That's crazy! It's your Monday Science Watch, where we watch science—explosively!