Supercharged bacterial clones appear responsible for new cases of scarlet fever.

A spider 1 millimeter long can stretch its web back and fling it forward at an acceleration rate 100 times that of a cheetah. The snapping action, which allows it to surprise unsuspecting flies and mosquitoes as they cruise by, relies on a silk spring mechanism that surpasses anything humans have designed, scientists say.

Nearly 10 months after reports surfaced of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, scientists still do not know how it originated. Most scientists believe the virus, called SARS-CoV-2, jumped from an animal to humans. In February, an analysis published in the journal Nature found the new coronavirus had a genome 96 percent similar to one found in bats, suggesting it occurred naturally.

Eighty-year-old Roland Pagan watched through binoculars while wildfires devoured his home in Juniper Hills, Calif. “The ferocity of this fire was shocking,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It burned my house alive in just 20 minutes.”

Kathy Nyman, a 59-year-old nurse from Rochester, Minn., and her husband, a physician, both received COVID-19 diagnoses at the end of May. They recovered, and after testing negative, donated plasma twice at Mayo Clinic to support research into a treatment doctors hope will help patients recover from the disease faster.

Nyman said she is “really grateful that God brought us through it” and wants to do what she can to support research on the virus.

During harsh Antarctic winters, temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit with winds up to 87 miles per hour. To stay warm, emperor penguins squeeze together in compact huddles that can include thousands of birds. But it turns out they don’t bunch together randomly.

André Van Mol, a family physician in Redding, Calif., said he watched as pressure to embrace transgender ideology in medicine “came up like a snowstorm seemingly out of nowhere, just in the past few years.” Endocrinologists, pediatricians, and other specialists suddenly found professional organizations supporting gender reassignment, while the federal government demanded that the U.S. healthcare system provide and pay for it.