Science

Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) SuBastian is deployed from the research vessel Falkor (too) in the South Atlantic during the expedition. Image Credit: Alex Ingle / Schmidt Ocean Institute An international team of marine scientists has discovered 31 new species in the ocean’s vast midwater zone during an expedition in the tropical South Atlantic off the…

Atolls can take up to 30 million years to form, but these tiny coral islands now support 31 million seabirds across the Indo-Pacific (PC: AI Generated) Atolls may look like tiny rings of sand and coral scattered across warm tropical oceans, but they are far more important than their small land areas. These unusual natural…

Representative Image of asteroid (585349) Eeuwes traveling through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (AI-generated image) A 1.5-kilometre asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter now carries the name of Astrid Eeuwes, a Dutch amateur astronomer from Nijmegen who spends much of her time studying micrometeorites, tiny particles of space material that…

Marie Curie once offered a powerful message about self-belief, perseverance and the importance of finding a purpose in life: “We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.” Curie wrote these words in a letter to her brother Joseph on March 18, 1894, when she…

Reconstructed Triassic landscape at the Museum am Löwentor, Stuttgart (Germany), with Chiniquodon theotonicus (left), Batrachotomus kupferzellensis (right), and, poorly visible in the foreground below the water table, a large temnospondyl. Image Credit: Ghedoghedo/Wikipedia A 236-million-year-old fossil from Argentina may have provided the earliest evidence yet that an animal on the evolutionary lineage leading to mammals…

Avocado (single and halved). Image Credit: Ivar Leidus/Wikipedia Avocados growing in Nicaragua may carry a remarkable record of ancient human migration across the Americas. A new study published in ‘Plants, People, Planet’ has found that several avocado varieties growing in Nicaragua are genetically distinct from the commercial varieties commonly found today and are more closely…

Prairie dog, Image: AI Generated The black-footed ferret is North America’s rarest mammal, with only about 300 estimated to survive in the wild at the end of 2015. The species has been listed as endangered since 1967, and its survival is closely tied to prairie dogs, which provide almost all of its food as well…

Nasa-backed SPARK project could send tiny ‘aerobots’ into caves on Saturn’s moon Titan( PC: AI Generated) Nasa has backed a new concept that could send small flying robots into caves on Saturn’s moon Titan. The project, called SPARK, proposes lightweight vehicles known as aerobots that could be released by a larger spacecraft and guided through…

Hawaii’s native Hawaiian stilt, known as aeʻo, has made a remarkable recovery after decades of population decline pushed the bird to roughly 200 individuals in the 1940s. Habitat loss, hunting and introduced predators had severely affected the long-legged wetland bird. More than five decades of legal protection, wetland restoration, predator control and monitoring have since…

Alfred Drummond-Herdman, a 27-year-old trainee lawyer in Edinburgh, has turned his bedroom into an unusual fungal observation space, filling terrariums and plastic containers with cowpats, grouse droppings and rabbit pellets to document the fungi that grow on them. His fascination with dung-dwelling fungi began during the pandemic after he encountered cowpats covered with mushrooms in…