In 1922, biologist Olaus J. Murie entered Alaska’s vast wilderness to study caribou, beginning a body of field research that would eventually influence how scientists and park managers understood wildlife as part of interconnected ecosystems. Murie had been hired by the US Biological Survey as a wildlife biologist and spent much of the early 1920s…
Brian Ekstrom and Lance Downing pulling the beach seine to collect juvenile fish at a restoration site on the lower Columbia River A routine dredging project on the Lower Columbia River has become a major long-term experiment to see whether dredged sediment can be used to restore lost wildlife habitat.In October 2020, engineers pumped 225,000…
Across the United States, glyphosate is applied across an enormous area of farmland each year. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, an average of 298 million acres of cropland receives glyphosate applications annually, giving a sense of how routinely the herbicide enters agricultural landscapes. Much of the attention around glyphosate has centred on weeds…
On 21 August 2017, the afternoon light at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, began to fade. For the people gathered there, the approaching darkness was an astronomical spectacle. For the animals living outside in the zoo’s enclosures, it was something rather different: daylight was suddenly behaving as if evening had arrived. Researchers had prepared…
The only total solar eclipse of 2026 is happening today, 12 August, as the Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow across the Northern Hemisphere. The main path of totality will stretch through Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain and a small part of Portugal.For people standing inside that…
Representative Image of a fast-setting underwater glue engineered to become stronger with age (AI-generated image) Modern life runs on adhesives, from the soles of shoes to the joints that hold furniture together, yet most of them share one stubborn weakness: they fail when water gets involved. A thin layer of water molecules naturally coats any…
A gas stove can look completely harmless when its burners are switched off. There is no flame, no heat and apparently no activity at all. But research has found that natural-gas stoves can continue releasing methane (CH₄) even when they are not being used.A study published in Environmental Science & Technology examined 53 homes in…
What began as a conversation over a bottle of wine between two Tulane University students has grown into an unusual experiment in recycling and coastal restoration. Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz, the founders of Glass Half Full, have transformed millions of discarded glass bottles into sand, material that is now being tested to help rebuild…
A dazzling new view of the Tarantula Nebula is revealing more than thousands of young stars. It is also helping astronomers investigate a puzzle about energy inside this vast stellar nursery. According to research published in the Astrophysical Journal, titled ‘Taming the Tarantula: How Stellar Wind Feedback Shapes Gas and Dust in 30 Doradus’, the…
Representative Image (AI-generated) In 2019, researchers identified Koskarlı Cave near Trabzon, in Türkiye’s eastern Black Sea region. According to a study published in the journal Antiquity, later excavations at the cave revealed a 12,900-year-old hunter-gatherer layer containing a hearth, stone tools and personal ornaments. The findings provide rare archaeological evidence of human activity in the…
