In September 1968, three months before Apollo 8 carried the first humans around the Moon, two Central Asian steppe tortoises had already made the same journey and returned home alive. According to Nasa, the tortoises launched aboard the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, travelling alongside wine flies, worms and plants as…
There is a stretch of the South Pacific Ocean so remote that the closest people to it are usually astronauts orbiting 400 kilometres overhead, not sailors or fishermen. This is Point Nemo, a spot 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land in every direction, and for more than five decades it has served a purpose most…
Spring changes the sound of the countryside. Fields that have spent the winter covered in crop residue are opened up, machinery moves across the soil and much of the vegetation disappears within days. For bats hunting after sunset, that seasonal shift can alter where food is easiest to find.That became apparent in a two-year monitoring…
On a small island off the coast of Sweden, a tragedy lay buried for thousands of years, hidden in the depths of a cave. Buried under ancient sediment, were the bones of a young woman and a fetus, estimated to be around 32 to 34 weeks of gestation.The shocking discovery was made by archaeologists in…
Nagpur: Chemistry enthusiast Sagar is taking his mobile laboratory to schools to make science engaging and accessible for young learners.An applied physics student with a keen interest in chemical sciences, Sagar has spent nearly a decade collecting, purifying, and studying elements. His journey began at age 21 as a hobby of collecting everyday chemical compounds….
A sediment core pulled from the seabed off West Antarctica has preserved evidence of a forest that grew near the South Pole about 90 million years ago, when the continent was warm enough to support a wet, temperate ecosystem. The core contains fossilised roots, pollen and spores from vegetation that lived at a latitude of…
Breeding scheme to produce backcross males and (b) possible inheritance patterns of self-sacrificial mating traits. Credit: Biology Letters (2026) Male Australian redback spiders perform an acrobatic somersault during mating that sends their abdomen directly toward the female’s fangs. Scientists have now found that this deadly self-sacrifice behavior comes from a surprisingly simple genetic region.In a…
Image: Princetoniana Museum Two people can read the same explanation of something and walk away with completely different levels of confidence in what they actually know. One nods along, follows the logic, and quietly assumes that following along counts as understanding. The other insists on rebuilding the idea from scratch, alone, without notes or references,…
Quote of the day by Pythagoras: “The soul of man is divided into three parts: intelligence, reason, and..” (Image: AI Generated) Human beings are driven by a complicated mix of thoughts, desires and emotions. We can reason through difficult problems, become passionate about something we love and still experience impulses that are difficult to explain….
Astronomers discover a possible ‘black hole star’ in the early Universe, with a supermassive black hole hidden inside dense gas (PC: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT) Astronomers have identified an unusual object from the early Universe that may represent a possible early stage of a supermassive black hole. It is called MoM-BH*-1, and was observed using Nasa’s…
