Science

In 1987, a British naturalist became the first professional warden of a remote Seychelles island In 1987, British naturalist Ian Bullock arrived on remote Aride Island in the Seychelles to become its first professional warden. Just one year later, the groundwork he established helped make possible an important conservation project: 29 endangered Seychelles warblers were…

After commercial whaling nearly erased them, blue and fin whales are slowly reclaiming the southeast Atlantic Commercial whaling killed an estimated 350,000 blue whales and 725,000 fin whales during the 20th century. More than 40 years after commercial whaling ended, however, the two largest whale species are slowly returning to parts of their former range…

Solar Panel Waste: The Unknown Side of Solar Power Discarded solar panels could become a major global waste problem, with as much as 402 million tonnes of photovoltaic (PV) waste expected by 2060. But if these panels are recycled properly, the materials inside them could create almost $1 trillion (£770 billion) in economic value.According to…

​Representative Image of diverse jellyfish species drifting through Japanese coastal waters (AI-generated image) In 2018, 13-year-old Ryoya Sugimoto was watching marine life from the docks of Tanabe Bay in Wakayama, Japan, when he spotted jellyfish he could not identify. He had been fascinated by jellyfish since childhood, after being stung by a blue button jellyfish,…

Newfoundland introduced moose for food in the region more than a century ago. Today, about 110,000 of their population are reshaping the island’s forests, eradicating them slowly. Initially, the animals had been brought in as a dependable source of meat, but the expansion of the herd has unleashed somewhat of an ecological juggernaut on the…

Quote of the day by Thomas Edison: The inventor’s words on persistence explain why a dead end can become a reason to search for another solution. Two people can rack up an enormous number of failed attempts at the same problem and describe that experience in completely different terms. One counts every dead end as…

In one of the first studies of its kind, scientists have claimed that the organisms living inside the gut of psychopaths may be the drivers of their peculiar behaviour. The research team has claimed that they have discovered a link between the specific balance of microflora in the gut and psychopathic behaviour.As detailed in the…

Quote of the day by Guglielmo Marconi/Image: AI Generated Two inventors can build something genuinely new and end up asking very different questions about it afterwards. One asks only whether it worked, whether it sold, whether it earned money or recognition, and stops there, satisfied. The other asks a harder question years later, once the…

Representative Image of floating seaweed farms operating alongside offshore wind turbines in the North Sea (AI-generated image) A vessel recently sailed through the Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm off the Dutch coast to collect the first-ever harvest of seaweed grown between operating turbines, marking a milestone for a project testing whether offshore wind farms can…

Food insecurity remains a daily reality for more than 300 million people across Africa, and the high cost of imported potassium fertiliser is part of the problem. Nearly all of the world’s potash is mined in Canada, Russia and Germany, leaving African farmers reliant on expensive, distant supply chains and a fertiliser that leaches quickly…