Nell Greenfield Boyce

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 aunts 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.

Nell Greenfield Boyce,

NPR News.

The Pleiades is also known as the Seven Sisters.

But even if you look with just binoculars, this cluster clearly contains a lot more than seven stars.

Luke Bauma is with Carnegie Science in Pasadena, California.

He and some colleagues used data from three different observatories to trace the motion and chemical compositions of stars, letting them find more than 3,000 related stars that have similar ages and makeups and that used to be closer together.

Nell Greenfield Boyce, NPR News.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has been tracking the impact of an eruption of solar material and magnetic fields.

It's the kind of space weather that can potentially mess with electrical grids or satellites.

But fans of the aurora borealis are hoping for a repeat of Tuesday night when sky watchers saw ghostly reds and greens as far south as Texas and Florida.

If you want to try to catch them, go to a dark spot, and a digital camera can be more sensitive to light than your naked eye, so you might want to try snapping some images of the sky.