The Ghost Trees of Chicago The Ghost Trees of Chicago
The New York Times
Residents have been covering their trees in mesh to protect them from the emerging broods, and the effect is pretty eerie.
In May, parts of Chicago were covered for the first time in 17 years by a brood of buzzing, mating, crawling red-eyed cicadas. The city’s tiniest trees were ready.
Homeowners in Chicago have wrapped small trees in their yards with mesh netting, leaving the trees shrouded in white — and protected from any damage that the cicadas might inflict during the emergence of the group of cicadas known as Brood XIII. Another group, Brood XIX, emerged at the same time in southern parts of Illinois, and in many other regions of the United States.
The cloaked trees have created a mysterious and striking effect across the city and its suburbs, with purple and green leaves of Japanese maples or elms barely visible behind translucent tulle.
Botanists say that such coverings are a smart idea. As female cicadas lay eggs that gestate for the next 13 or 17 years, it can cause short-term damage to some trees and shrubs.
Tom Tiddens, supervisor of plant health care at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said that while cicadas don’t bite or sting people, they can do harm to young trees with small branches. Female cicadas make long slits in twigs, laying 20 eggs in each slit, up to 600 eggs in total.
Mr. Tiddens said that trees of about six feet or shorter with pencil-size branches can benefit from being wrapped until the periodical cicadas are gone in several weeks.
For a century, exoplanet hunters have “discovered” planets around a nearby star, only to retract the claims. But the latest find is for real.
The unidentified patient had recently returned from Africa, where the virus has caused a deadly epidemic, health officials said.
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot.
Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.
Behind the scenes at a Chicago zoo, chimpanzees who spent years entertaining humans are learning to befriend their own kind.
The agency’s top medical official was responding to rumors that Suni Williams had lost an unusual amount of weight during an extended stay in orbit.
Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.
President-elect Trump says tariffs will help American businesses, but many in the wine industry foresee few benefits and a lot of pain for all involved.
Ball pythons were long assumed to be solitary, but scientists discovered the snakes in captivity prefer each others’ company when given the chance to live socially.
The Justice Department and four Democratic state attorneys general argued that United’s takeover would limit competition and harm consumers needing home or hospice care.
It took nearly 25 years for biologists to discover that a swimming and glowing organism in the ocean’s midnight zone was actually a sea slug.