Billions of buzzing cicadas will emerge across multiple states this spring
As winter melts away, spring begins to blossom – and buzz with the sound of cicadas.
This year, the cohort of cicadas known as "Brood XIV" will emerge from the ground and, much like many other animals during spring, begin looking for a mate.
In fact, the buzzing sound cicadas are known for is actually part of this courtship ritual, as the males produce the noise to attract females.
While this cicada phenomenon occurs every year, for Brood XIV and many other cicadas, it's a small part of multiyear, multigenerational cycles that are connected to geography, the seasons and the weather.
The cicadas of Brood XIV emerge from the ground every 17 years. This means that the last time they saw the Sun, President George W. Bush was nearing the end of his presidency and Apple was about to launch the App Store.
When exactly they will begin reaching the surface will depend on their location and the weather they will experience, according to Gene Kritsky, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati and founder of CicadaSafari.org.
In terms of weather, Kritsky said the insects emerge after the soil temperature reaches between 64 and 65 degrees and after rain has soaked the ground.
What's The Difference Between Annual And Periodical Cicadas?
When these conditions are met depends largely on where the cicadas are located.
Brood XIV – which includes fellow 17-year-cycle species Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini and Magicicada septendecula – are scattered between the South and the Northeast. Being so spread out geographically leads to variations in the timing of their emergence.
The cicadas will start emerging around the third week of April in northern Georgia, where warm weather conditions will likely hit first, according to Kritsky.
After Georgia, and if this spring should be similar to last year's, Kritsky said that Brood XIV cicadas in other states will emerge in the following roughly south-to-north sequence:
Tennessee - Fourth week of April.
Kentucky - First week of May.
Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania - Second week of May.
Massachusetts - Late May.
Kritsky said that, once the cicadas of an area begin to emerge, they will take two full weeks to come out of the ground. The insects will then be above ground and living in trees for six weeks.
After about five days of being above ground, the males will start producing their buzzing sounds. As more cicadas emerge, that buzzing sound will grow and become loud for about two weeks.
How To Watch Fox Weather
"The trees will just be screaming with all these males singing," Kritsky said. "I have measured the intensity – the highest I've ever measured is 102 decibels. Commonly, you'll see them coming in at 90 decibels. That's louder than the planes landing at Dulles."
Once the male cicadas find their mates, the females will lay their eggs in the trees. After that, all the adult cicadas begin to die. So, the buzzing sound will diminish about five weeks after the initial emergence.
As the eggs hatch and cicada nymphs are born, the nymphs of Brood XIV will drop to the ground, burrow their way into the soil, and then begin their 17-year cycle by feeding off of the roots of grass and trees, according to Kritsky.Original article source: Billions of buzzing cicadas will emerge across multiple states this spring
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Nvidia's 120W APU leak could mark the beginning of the end for laptop GPUs
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new, credible leak suggests Nvidia is cooking up something that could transform gaming laptops as we know them: A 120W Arm-based APU that combines CPU, GPU, and NPU into a single chip. If early reports are accurate, this could deliver RTX 4070–level performance in a slimmer, cooler, and more efficient package and see Nvidia take pole position in laptop chip primacy. Let's be clear—this wouldn't just be another performance play that we frequently see with new hardware iterations, but a potential design revolution that could change everything. Or nothing. The leak, first reported by YouTube channel Moore's Law Is Dead and later verified by Notebookcheck, shows an engineering sample of the chip surrounded by eight LPDDR5X memory modules. The chip integrates a custom Arm CPU and a next-gen Nvidia GPU on the same die, likely codenamed Blackwell. There's also a powerful NPU onboard, positioned to handle heavy AI workloads. What's particularly impressive is that this unified chip reportedly runs at a 120W TDP and still manages to compete with the RTX 4070 Laptop GPU in benchmarks. Sources claim Nvidia is internally comparing its new APU to a 65W-tuned 4070, suggesting near parity in gaming performance with far better power efficiency. According to Moore's Law Is Dead, the chip is scheduled to hit the market between Q4 2025 and early 2026, and Nvidia is reportedly working with Dell to bring this architecture to life in future Alienware laptops. If Nvidia's APU lives up to its potential, the entire idea of separating CPU and GPU in a gaming laptop could become obsolete. Combining the two allows for tighter integration, lower latency, and shared access to high-bandwidth memory. Thermal design also benefits since there's only one hot zone to manage instead of two. This could mean fewer fans, thinner chassis, and better battery life, all without sacrificing AAA gaming performance. Those in the know will recognize this as a similar design philosophy to Apple's M-series chips, but unlike Snapdragon or Apple silicon, this chip might bring actual desktop-class frame rates to the table. Nvidia's closest competitor here is AMD, which is preparing its own monster chip: The Strix Halo APU. AMD's APU is expected to pair up to 16 Zen 5 cores with 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units, pushing as much as 120W as well. In theory, it should be a beast. But Nvidia may have a leg up with its more efficient GPU architecture and early adoption of on-package memory. Notebookcheck notes that Nvidia's sample includes LPDDR5X soldered around the die, enabling high memory bandwidth without a separate graphics memory pool. That unified design is a big win for energy efficiency, which matters more than ever as gaming laptops strive to balance power and portability. A 120W chip still requires serious cooling, so we're not talking about fanless devices. But without the need for a separate GPU and VRAM modules, OEMs have a chance to rethink their internals. One configuration might resemble a MacBook Pro in weight but pack gaming performance that rivals today's bulkier rigs. Keep in mind that we're just speculating and thinking about what could eventually be. It would be surprising to see a dedicated Nvidia gaming laptop SoC right out of the gate, but the rumored APU could well be a starting point. That said, anything can happen, and the quoted sources do directly reference the APU as being earmarked for gaming laptops. The most likely initial application for the APU is AI. With the likes of upscaling, frame generation, real-time voice effects, and creative tools becoming more common, a strong on-chip AI engine could be the killer feature that separates Nvidia's solution from AMD and any future moves by Intel (though Intel is conspicuously absent from the APU race at the moment, with nothing in its roadmap suggesting a full-on AI or gaming APU.) With sources claiming that the chip includes an NPU powerful enough to run modern generative models and assist with GPU-accelerated workloads without the cloud, it's hard to think of any applications where it wouldn't shine, gaming or otherwise. For Dell and other partners, this is essentially an invitation to innovate, perhaps eventually leading to the first wave of 'all-Nvidia' laptops, with unified software and hardware tuned for peak efficiency. AMD Strix Halo APU could make low-end discrete GPUs obsolete — Nvidia's RTX 4060 is on notice Nvidia's affordable RTX 5060 is coming soon, but that's not the GPU I have my eyes on Dell's new laptop ditches the GPU for a discrete NPU — here's why that's a big deal
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Apple is finally doing something about its confusing OS naming conventions
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. According to recent reports from an Apple Insider, Cupertino plans to consolidate its software stack under a single branding strategy, starting after WWDC later this month. Though the company refused to comment on rumors, Bloomberg spoke with Apple insiders who confirmed that iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS will all see their disparate version names brought under a single umbrella. Like Microsoft, which named its Windows versions after the year they were released throughout the '90s and early '00s, Apple's new plan is to add the upcoming year to the end of each operating system. For example, while we currently have iOS 18 and watchOS 12 due to the respective distance in their original launch dates, they'll now be called iOS 26 and watchOS 26, respectively. This move also mirrors what Samsung did with its Galaxy phones starting in 2020, moving straight from the Galaxy S10 to the S20 that year. However, unlike Samsung, Apple will be naming for the year ahead. See also: WWDC 2025 preview: iOS 26, Apple's video game plans, Apple Intelligence, Mac Pro M4 Ultra The Bloomberberg report observes that iOS 26 will be launched in 2025, similar to how car manufacturers have operated their branding model for decades. The name changes aren't all we should expect from Cook and Co. this year, though. Early rumors suggest Apple also plans to renovate many aspects of iPad OS, bringing a more 'Mac-like' experience that includes improvements to productivity, app window management, and multitasking. Of course, a modern tech conference wouldn't be complete without an AI update. In that arena, reports say Apple could open up its AI models to third-party developers to take advantage of Apple Intelligence on supported devices. The company also reportedly has plans to launch a new 'AI-based battery management feature' to increase battery life for iPhones, whatever that's supposed to mean. Stay tuned for all the latest on June 9, when Apple leaders will take the stage at its annual developer conference. WWDC 2025 preview: iOS 26, Apple's video game plans, Apple Intelligence, Mac Pro M4 Ultra I found 5 iPad deals that save you up to $200 on a new Apple tablet Legendary Apple designer has been tasked with the impossible — what is OpenAI and Jony Ive's next move?
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
A 13th-century schoolboy's doodles show that kids have always been like that
What's the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you'll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci's hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It's your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you'll love the show. By Rachel Feltman Dating back to at least the 1st century in various parts of the world, people have used birch bark as a writing surface. It's soft and easy to scratch into with a stylus, and of course it's easy to peel off the tree. In parts of Russia, there are so many old manuscripts preserved on birch bark that there's basically a field of study devoted to them. As of 2018, archaeologists had found 1,222 specimens in Russia, and 1,113 of them were from a Medieval town called Novgorod. There's very heavy, waterlogged clay soil there that probably protected the birch bark from oxygen and decay, but it also seems like it was an especially literate place for the time period. While some of these notes use Church Slavonic, most of them are written in a vernacular dialect and many recount personal matters and everyday happenings Less than 3 percent of the Medieval settlement has actually been excavated systematically. Some estimates suggest that more than 20,000 additional notes are waiting to be discovered. But the most famous of these birch bark writings come from a single prolific artist who lived there in the 13th century. He drew epic battle scenes and mythical creatures and even rather abstract works. His name was Onfim, and he was a 7-year-old boy. Onfim's birch bark scraps show signs of schoolwork, with psalms and cyrillic alphabet exercises written out on many of them. But they also show doodles that are charmingly recognizable as the work of a bored kid at school. To learn more about Onfim's adventures (and doodles), listen to this week's episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. And if you're interested in more charming historical scribbles, check out this repository of ancient graffiti. By Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian I didn't actually learn about eels for the first time this week—I've been obsessed with them for years. Back when I was teaching in the Hudson Valley, I used to take my students to help catch and count baby eels as they migrated upriver from the Sargasso Sea. These tiny, translucent fish are glassy and delicate, with eyes and spines you can see straight through—and yet they've already traveled thousands of miles. Eels are mysterious in almost every way: we still don't fully understand how they navigate, how they reproduce, or why they live for decades in freshwater before transforming into long, lean, sex-obsessed creatures that return to the sea to die. On this week's episode I talk about eels' intersex biology, their magnetic sense of direction, and even the strange detour that eel anatomy took through the hands of Sigmund Freud. This story, for me, is not just about eels—it's also about what their biology tells us about queerness, evolution, and the history of science itself. For more of this kind of natural history, check out my new book 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.' By Sara Kiley Watson Lightning strikes millions of trees every year, and for most of them, the outcome is grim: exploded trunks, scorched roots, or a slow, quiet death from internal damage. So when I heard about a tropical tree that not only survives lightning but actually benefits from it, I had to dig in. This story takes us into the dense forests of Panama, where the towering tonka bean tree—Dipteryx oleifera—has evolved to attract lightning strikes and come out stronger after being zapped. These trees are unusually tall, with wide crowns that seem designed to draw bolts from the sky. When lightning hits, they shed pests. They also outlive their similarly-stricken neighbors, which allows them to claim more sunlight for themselves. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions about lightning and forest ecology…and hints at how climate change could shift that balance even more.
