Our Milky Way galaxy has two large satellite galaxies orbiting it. They're known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. And humans have been aware of the existence of these celestial objects for at least a millennium. Recently, researchers were curious about whether our configuration is fairly typical , or an astronomical anomaly. In other words, is our corner of the cosmos ordinary? Now a new study finds that the Milky Way and its companion galaxies are an unusual combination, but they're not one of a kind. Astronomers in the U.K. and Australia looked at thousands of galaxies to try to find an analogue of our arrangement . The search turned up two close replicas: each with a Milky Way–like galaxy accompanied by two galaxies comparable to the Magellanic Clouds. But the researchers also concluded that such arrangements are pretty rare. Only half a percent of Milky Way–like galaxies have companions like ours. The Magellanic Clouds may be transitory features. In a few billion years the Milky Way may absorb them completely. So someday our corner of the cosmos could be pretty ordinary after all.

Birds face many man-made mortal threats: windows, cats, habitat destruction , even climate change. And now, there's poison—in their bird seed. You see the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company had been in the habit of applying banned pesticides to its wild bird food products. In particular, the company applied a chemical known as Storcide II to its bird food despite a warning label for that product that reads "Storcide II is extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife."Why add a compound toxic to birds to food meant to be eaten by birds? Because Scott didn't want bugs infesting its bird food during storage . By the time Scotts stopped adding the pesticide in March 2008, the company had sold some 70 million bags of adulterated bird food. The company also submitted false documents to the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency, distributed pesticides with misleading labels and distributed illegal pesticides. As a result, the EPA slapped the company with $12.5 million in criminal fines and civil penalties . So when you put out new bird seed this winter, at least you won't be inadvertently poisoning any chirpers. Oh, and keep those cats inside, too.

The Chukchi Sea lies between Alaska and Russia just north of the Bering Strait. Shell Oil hopes to begin drilling in these Arctic waters in the next few days—if the U.S. government grants permission. The ship Noble Discoverer will drill two exploratory wells to determine what, if any, hydrocarbons are beneath the seabed—and how well drilling equipment can withstand the rigors of the far north. Those rigors include everything from swirling currents and floating ice chunks to migrating whales. There's coral there—scientists sent to the region by Greenpeace have found sea raspberry, a soft, deep sea species. Other such deep sea corals bore the brunt of BP's catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It remains to be seen whether offshore drilling in the Arctic can be any safer than drilling in balmier waters. Already, Russia spills some 30 million barrels of oil in the Arctic each year, according to Greenpeace, and that's on land. Regardless, burning oil is one of the primary causes of climate change. Such global warming has thawed the Arctic above all, opening access to yet more oil. Humanity’s thirst for oil has yet to gauge its own depths.

“What we're bringing for our users is basically an immersive experience of a huge portion of the NASA Kennedy Space Center facility.”Ryan Falor, project manager of Google's Street View. In honor of the center's 50th anniversary , Street View is adding more than 6,000 images of the Space Center, the starting point for Apollo and space shuttle missions. “So you can go into the facility , you can go into some of the large areas there, like the Vehicle Assembly Building. You can go down to the launch pad and actually go up several floors of the launch pad and see where the astronauts would walk and where they would go as they were boarding the shuttle.”The shuttle is now a thing of the past. But someday Kennedy will host a new generation of spacecraft. “When we were there we actually got to take a snapshot of these structures and these systems in place before all those transitions happened. Many of those facilities are going to be decommissioned or converted to different uses. So the opportunity to kind of capture that moment in Street View and preserve it, and make it accessible to people around the world, is I think really valuable and important.”

Here's one way bats might get their next meal: by eavesdropping on flies having sex. Bats eat a lot of seemingly undetectable flies. To find out how the winged mammals find the insects, researchers set up a video camera inside a cowshed that was home to a bat colony and lots of bugs. The video showed that bats rely on their echolocation skills to detect flies at a specific time: when they're engaged in rather noisy sex. Flies are usually quiet in bat territory and sit on cluttered ceilings in caves where background noise masks the echoes from their movement. But when flies are feeling frisky, males can't help but flutter their wings, emitting a burst of click sounds that the bats pick up on. During more than one thousand sexual encounters caught in the act on video, five percent of the insects were caught in the act by bats. The research is published in the journal Current Biology. The study shows that ignorance can be safer than carnal knowledge when predators are on the prowl.