Blog Posts by Melissa Knowles

If creepy-crawly flying insects are not your thing, you might want to stop reading now: Brood II has arrived. What is it? It's the infestation of cicadas that takes over the East Coast every 17 years. The insects do not bite or sting and have no intention of causing pain or damaging crops. Their only goal is to mate.

In between infestations, they stay underground for 17 years, emerging only when the ground temperature reaches precisely 64 degrees. Their emergence was delayed this time because of the East Coast's uncharacteristically cool spring temperatures. The cicadas have not been seen in these quantities on the East Coast since 1996 (before that, they showed up in 1979). Brood II has already begun in Virginia and some other Southern states. Farther north, in New York and New England, the infestation is expected to begin shortly, as summer quickly approaches.

Cicadas are easily identified by their unmistakable loud chattering noise — which has been measured at up to 94 decibels.

A little boy's dying wish came true, thanks to Dame Helen Mirren. Oliver Burton is a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome who has fought different forms of cancer for nearly his entire life. He was recently diagnosed with terminal spine and bone marrow cancer.

Oliver requested to visit Buckingham Palace and have afternoon tea with the queen of England as his dying wish. A national trust that helps cancer-stricken children says Queen Elizabeth was unable to accommodate the little boy. That's when Mirren stepped in to take her place. Mirren, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 film "The Queen," effortlessly took on the character for Oliver's sake.

First, Mirren invited the boy and his parents to see her performance of the queen in a play she's currently in called "The Audience." Following the play, the family was invited backstage to have tea and cakes, served by footmen, and meet Mirren and her corgis. Mirren remained in character during the

Every user gets a terabyte of storage. That's the big news that Yahoo! announced Monday for its photo-sharing service Flickr. So exactly how much digital memory is a terabyte? Think of it this way: If you took one high-definition photograph every hour of every day, it would take you approximately 61.5 years to fill all of that storage space. Another way to think of it: 537,731 full-quality photographs would be equal to one terabyte of storage.

In addition to offering more free storage than any other online photo-sharing or social media service, Flickr's look has been completely overhauled. No longer antiquated with blue text links and small or cropped images, the new Flickr is redesigned to let the photos shine -- allowing them to be on full display.

Beyond being able to personalize their Flickr experience with full-quality images, users may also share them across different social media platforms, including Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Plus, Android users can now get in on the

Are you looking for love, but you're not sure where to find people who are into the same things as you? Maybe you've tried online dating or the bar scene or gone on blind dates set up by well-meaning friends, yet you still find yourself single and wanting. If you're a fan of the "Star Trek" franchise and consider yourself a Trekkie, then you may be in luck.

There is an entire community of online dating sites that cater to those who speak Klingon and know more than the average person about Vulcans.

The website TrekkieDating.com claims to be "a dating community that is light years ahead of others." There's also TrekPassions.com, designed exclusively for "Star Trek" lovers. Both sites have sprung up in an effort to connect "Trek" fans who want to live long and prosper with someone just like them.

The owner of StarTrekDating.com, Oliver Gough, said regarding the popularity of these sites, "'Star Trek' fans are nerds. They know what they're looking for. Nine times out of 10 [they] post

Part of the thrill of going on vacation in the summertime is lying out by the pool and enjoying the warm weather with a good book. Sure, a few harmless squirrels may wander nearby or maybe some pesky birds may drop in looking for food, but imagine how shocking it would be if something much larger stumbled onto your property. What would you do then?

People relaxing at their vacation home in Redmond, Washington, got quite a surprise when they found a moose swimming in their pool. So they did what most of us would do to prove to our friends and family that it really happened—they turned on the video camera and pressed record.

The moose appears to be swimming nonchalantly and enjoying himself for several minutes as the startled onlookers watch from a safe distance. It casually makes its way toward the shallow end of the pool, and then eventually gets out and slowly walks past the lounge chairs, climbs over the fence, and heads back into the woods.

A woman in the background can be heard

Who needs common building materials like steel, wood and drywall when you could just use tin cans? Think I'm crazy? I'm not, and neither is the nonprofit group known as Canstruction. In fact, they're philanthropic and have taken the idea of edible art to a whole new level.

Canstruction holds design and build competitions all over the country in which participants are required to make structures using only canned goods. Contestants have created things like a toucan, a Keurig coffee maker, the Titanic, and even the video game character Yoshi from Super Mario Bros.

The group's website reads, "Wherever a Canstruction competition is held, thousands of hungry people are fed, a greater awareness of the issues surrounding hunger is brought home to the public, and a spotlight is placed on the design and construction industry giving back to the communities it helps build."

In 2010, Canstruction's design competitions brought in over 2 million pounds of food to local food banks, enough to provide

Almost weekly we talk about animals being able to experience and express humanlike emotions. Today's story falls under that category.

Eva Armstrong is one of the directors of Badass Brooklyn Animal Rescue. It is a completely volunteer-run rescue group that has saved more than 800 dogs from the kill list of high-volume pounds in the rural South.

During the group's last trip to Alabama, volunteers rescued a dachshund they named Captain Morgan because he had only one eye -- like a pirate. The night he was rescued, Captain Morgan slept at the foot of Armstrong's hotel bed. She took care of him until he was adopted by a family several months ago.

Well on May 5, Badass Brooklyn Animal Rescue had a block party reunion where Captain Morgan and Armstrong were reunited. The picture of the two of them in a warm embrace, taken by photographer Hilary Benas, went viral after it was displayed on Buzzfeed. It shows Captain Morgan, who is now called Cappy by his adopted family, resting his head on

So who has it worse, men or women? In the ongoing battle of the sexes, there has always been a debate on who feels more pain. That is the question that the Kensington Church set out to solve with a new video that discusses one very specific type of pain: childbirth.

At the beginning of the video, two men walk side by side and one says, "Did you know that according to women, childbirth is the worst kind of pain there is?" The other man says, "And did you know according to women, that us men can't handle any of it?" The men also mention that they think women are exaggerating the pain associated with giving birth.

So the two men visit Dr. Julie Masters, who places electrodes on their abdomens to simulate the contractions experienced in labor. Before the simulation begins, as Dr. Masters explains what's about to take place, one of the guys even says, "That sounds fun!"

Then the simulation starts. Each man groans, hisses and moans as the constant pain continues. The two men's wives are in