A tree planted in memory of the late George Harrison is being replanted because beetles are slowly destroying it. » 7/22/14 9:40am 7/22/14 9:40am

Hooray, you guys! It's outdoor sunshine BBQ lake lounging tiki torch season! But you know what that means: It's also gross bugs eating you alive and feasting on your blood and giving you disfiguring welts and deadly diseases season. Bogus. » 5/27/14 4:20pm 5/27/14 4:20pm

Or, as many of us call it, sex. Hey, did you know that eighty-five percent of male insects engage in homosexual acts? About the same rate as my high school exes. Don't remind me. Ugh. » 10/24/13 10:00am 10/24/13 10:00am

If you've always wondered exactly what it looks like, inside of your flesh, when a mosquito sticks its stabby, contaminated tube-mouth in there and sucks your blood, YOU'RE WELCOME. Here's a video of it. Video of the mosquito probing around for a blood vessel (inside "a flap of mouse skin") is above, and video of the… » 8/06/13 10:30pm 8/06/13 10:30pm

Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert and advice columnist. She'll be here every other week helping to answer your filthiest questions. Are you dirty? Email her. » 8/02/13 12:40pm 8/02/13 12:40pm

If you're a resident of the American Southeast and have been noticing an unsettling and sinister smell in the out of doors lately, do not panic — it's merely the stink of millions of decaying cicada bodies, tiny corpses that mere days ago were full of vim and vigor. » 6/11/13 4:20pm 6/11/13 4:20pm

If you truly are what you eat, congratulations because you're now a bug! Even with pesticides and other poisons engineered for food, large traces of bug parts — like wings, thoraxes and heads — are getting into your food. In fact, it's likely that you eat up 1 and 2 pounds of bugs each year. At least that's the… » 6/06/13 11:10am 6/06/13 11:10am

I live in the Pacific Northwest, which means that the most interesting bug-themed event of my lifetime was side-eyeing a silverfish in my laundry room last week (slimer needed to cut the attitude tho srsly). We don't have anything big or venomous or swarmy at all ever, which makes the east coast's 17-summer cicada… » 5/28/13 3:00pm 5/28/13 3:00pm

Remember the horrible bed bug invasion that was going to plunge New York into the Age of the Insect, when all Gothamites would have to feed their mattresses to the insatiable Bed Bug Queen living in the subway tunnels? It was going to be terrible, and then, magically, bed bugs vanished from the news...until now. » 5/24/13 11:15am 5/24/13 11:15am

People who fear bugs will be especially put upon during “Swarmageddon,” and you might never have figured this out if the cicada scribes at the Washington Post, a periodical chronicling the latest developments in entomology, hadn’t taken the time to explain that people who already hate bugs hate the idea of a lot of… » 5/19/13 2:00pm 5/19/13 2:00pm

On the eve of "Swarmageddon," the name given to a cicada awakening 17 years in the making, the United Nations has released a report that highly recommends eating insects as a part of a healthy and balanced diet. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that many of the 1,900 species of insects that… » 5/13/13 5:00pm 5/13/13 5:00pm

Heads up, Tim Burton! Here's Shiyoko Nakagawa, a Japanese idol known for taking style to its limit, modeling a head full of the shed shells of cicada juveniles. All I have to say is: Good thing they're not live cicadas, because if those fools stay on a human too long they sometimes stick their (painful) proboscis… » 1/14/13 11:00pm 1/14/13 11:00pm

In "throw your tree out the window and burn all your possessions" news, it turns out the beloved Christmas Pine doubles as a half-way house for mites, moths, spiders, and something disgustingly named "bark lice". Puke/Shudder. This is giving the Christmas tree rash a run for its disgusting money. » 12/24/12 1:40pm 12/24/12 1:40pm

Researchers working on "the next big thing in disaster response" have figured out how to put a tiny backpack on a cockroach and then remote-control it through collapsed buildings to locate survivors. The roach can be equipped with a small video camera or a microphone, which can then transmit information to human… » 9/14/12 6:30pm 9/14/12 6:30pm

Bugs are literally everywhere. They're on your sheets (probably), they're waiting in the dark corners of your shoes, they're hiding in pantry doors ready to jump out at you as if they've been spring-loaded and now, if you have rosacea, they might even be crawling in your pores, dying and leaving their bacteria-bloated… » 8/30/12 11:10am 8/30/12 11:10am

We've long known that the human body is home to all kinds of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes, and now scientists have completed the first ever map of all of these semi-disgusting critters. It was not an easy job, but now the census of the human microbiome is complete and the verdict is that we're disgusting—but… » 6/14/12 9:30am 6/14/12 9:30am

Oh, hey there. Had you managed to forget about the constant threat of bed bugs for even one second? Hahaha, of course not. You are always aware that your home could be invaded at any time, turning what was once your comfort zone into your own personal nightmare mansion. Well, you should continue to be paranoid about… » 6/04/12 11:55pm 6/04/12 11:55pm

Spiders are creepy! I mean, they are kind of neat, but mostly they cause people to scurry away in fear and sometimes even emit high-pitched shrieks. Well, if you are one of the people who can't stand those little multi-legged crawlers, you might be in luck. A new study has found that it is possible to turn people from… » 5/21/12 9:15pm 5/21/12 9:15pm