Is someone sitting in a cave somewhere laughing maniacally and pushing buttons on his weather machine? So much abnormal weather.

An interview with a meteorologist reveals his theory about the July 26 rain, and includes his prediction for more heavy rain soon.

The water is warmer. There doesn’t seem to be enough food for the seabirds and fish. Some are breeding later in the season. Scientists aren’t sure that it’s global warming just yet.

Scientists find the secret behind monarch butterflies’ ability to migrate long distances without getting lost.

Since my mom first entered the hospital, she has been moved from one section to another relative to her stability. She was in the intensive care unit for a few days, graduated to critical care, and is now in transitional care. These units have the sickest patients, most of them elderly.

She is mostly asleep when I’m there, so I bring lots of reading material. The book I chose, The Goodbye Summer, by Patricia Gaffney, features characters in an assisted-living kind of home. Normally, I find her work very entertaining, but this time, under the circumstances, the book made me even sadder. So I was blinking back tears yesterday, which was not a good thing for my mom to see when she woke up. No wonder she told me to go home.

Because I’m spending so much time at the hospital with my mom, I’m eating mostly sandwiches.

The sudden violence of a microburst can cause a plane to crash. But it took many years before aviation safety officials recognized its dangers.

Rickets appears in the Inuit, who live in regions that have low sunlight.

It used to be that cutting the glare was the main function of sunglasses. Then they became a fashion statement. These days, your shades can also be your digital music player and, if you wish, the device that allows hands-free cell phone use.

From Squid Labs, rope embedded with sensors that signal when it has developed weaknesses.