"No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all." Many more people in Japan can identify that quote now than would have been the case two months ago. In 1947, when Albert Camus' novel "The Plague" first appeared, it was interpreted allegorically. World War II had shattered the world. A plague seemed an all-too-fitting metaphor for man's bleak fate among the ruins.

Science hasn't been giving us a tremendous amount of good news these days. We've screwed up the environment so badly, it's hard to even call it an environment anymore. And that's coming back to bite (or sting) us: Bee populations, which we rely on to pollinate our crops, are plummeting. But science is also coming to the rescue, by gluing QR codes to bumblebees' backs and tracking their movements with a robotic camera. Researchers have created a system that tracks individual bees as well as the dynamics of whole colonies exposed to imidacloprid, a neurotoxin that belongs to the infamous neonicotinoid group of pesticides.