Nell Greenfield Boyce

Now, in the journal Nature, a team says that in windy conditions, a microphone on NASA's Perseverance rover sometimes did more than just hear wind.

Dozens of times, it registered a distinctive pattern of electrical interference followed by the acoustic signal of a shockwave.

They say this had to have been from electrical arcs just a few centimeters long.

They want to learn more about this electrical activity to understand what risks, if any, it might pose to future human or robotic missions.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

Since the 1970s, scientists have thought that swirling dust on Mars might produce some kind of electrical discharge.

Like on Earth, clouds of turbulent volcanic ash can create lightning.

Now, in the journal Nature, a team says that in windy conditions, a microphone on NASA's Perseverance rover sometimes did more than just hear wind.

Dozens of times, it registered a distinctive pattern of electrical interference followed by the acoustic signal of a shockwave.

They say this had to have been from electrical arcs just a few centimeters long.

They want to learn more about this electrical activity to understand what risks, if any, it might pose to future human or robotic missions.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

It's hard for a young would-be queen ant to strike out on her own and try to establish a brand new colony.

So some ant species have evolved a way for female ants to basically take over existing colonies of another species.

In the journal Current Biology, researchers in Japan...

describe how a female ant will sneak into a colony, creep up to its queen, and spray a chemical onto her.

This chemical has a dramatic effect.

It makes the colony's worker ants suddenly turn on their queen, who is also their mother.

The workers unwittingly betray her, attacking her until she's dead.

Then the female intruder becomes the new queen and uses the workers to raise her own offspring.