(Courtesy the D-Brief blog at Discover)

Mmmmmm….science……

• That thing at the top of a this post? That’s a bat’s tongue. Specifically, a nectar-feeding bat’s tongue. And for the first time, we know how it works.
• Numerous languages across Europe and Asia — English included — may all be descended from a common tongue from around the time of the last Ice Age. Which means that some of the words you’re reading here have origins that go back 15,000 years.
• If you live on the Eastern Seaboard between Connecticut and North Carolina, things are about to get a whole lot noisier. And crunchier and squishier, too. The 17-year cicadas are here.
• Sticking to the topic of bugs: Honeybees have been dying across the country from a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, a disaster both for the bees and the farmers who rely on them to pollinate their crops (and for all of us who eat those crops). A new study finds that the disorder can’t be tied to any one cause.
• Plants can talk to each other? Not really, but they can communicate.
• Boneworms sound pretty gross: they feed on the skeletons of dead whales. Thing is, they don’t have mouths, or even guts. It looks like they dissolve the bones they eat by producing acid; its still not clear how they injest the resulting goo.
• Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing threat to global health; bugs like NDM-1 and KPC are spreading fast and getting worse. A protein found in breast milk might help make some drug-resistant bacteria less resistant.
• High blood pressure is all about the effects of salt and cholesterol, right? Maybe not. A new computer model suggests that high blood pressure can be completely explained by stiffening of our arteries as we age, something that has nothing to do with what we eat.
• Researchers have come up with a way to vaccinate rats against heroin addiction.
• Birds evolved from dinosaurs. But how did feathers evolve? Like this: