For the last 20 years, the National Audubon Society has encouraged people to go into their backyards or to their local parks and count the birds they see. It's called The Great Backyard Bird Count. It began in the U.S. and Canada. Now, 130 countries participate in the global data-gathering weekend.

The flu is making rounds, and health officials across Washington say that 2017 is shaping up to be a severe season. “It’s never too late to get the flu shot," said Edie Jeffers, spokeswoman for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. Each year, the flu vaccine is reformulated to match the latest strain of influenza. "This year, it’s an especially good match for the flu that’s in circulation," she said. "So people that do get the flu shot, even if they do get sick, their symptoms are likely

The Burke Museum is getting a new exhibit: A Tyrannosaurus rex skull. Seattle paleontologists unearthed the fossils in northern Montana last summer. It began when two museum volunteers, Jason Love and Luke Tufts, found fragments of large bones belonging to a carnivorous dinosaur. Greg Wilson led the expedition and is Burke Museum’s adjunct curator of vertebrate paleontology. He says the excavation team had a feeling they were on the trail of a T. rex. Hear him describe it:

What does it mean to age? When are we over the hill? And what are the side effects of a longer lifespan? On our most recent episode of Sound Effect on KPLU , we explored the idea of aging with Dr. Dan Gottschling .

Cancer researchers, doctors and survivors gathered Wednesday at hundreds of summits across the country to give guidance to the federal government’s cancer "moonshot.” At the summit in Seattle, hosted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, “Big Data” emerged as a priority.

An incredibly rare Northwest butterfly has been listed as a species that qualifies it for federal protection. It’s small, and at first glance, it's mostly white. It’s called the Island Marble butterfly.

Orange, grapefruit, lemon and lime orchards are being wiped out across Florida from a plague called citrus greening disease. A team of scientists from Washington State University in Pullman is studying the bacterium that causes the condition. They hope to find a cure. David Gang, a biological chemist at Washington State University, said the bacterium that causes greening disease is transmitted by a psyllid , a winged insect about half the size of a fruit fly, which spreads it from tree to tree.

Children who are raised in a bilingual home appear to have a head start in building the part of the brain that deals with everything from impulse control to mental flexibility. These findings are in a new study that’s out of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

A new study shows that some one-on-one attention paid to Latinas can boost the likelihood they will be screened for breast cancer. For the study, low-income Latinas were visited by a S panish- speaking health care worker called a " p romotora" who provided them with information about getting a mammogram. After the visit, the women received a follow-up phone call, reminding them to make an appointment. The findings show that more than 19 percent of the women who received this one-on-one attention