Science

More than 100 years after a dam built beneath the historic Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad disrupted the natural flow of Buckhorn Creek, the waterway is running free again, and the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail now crosses it on a new 90-foot bridge. The Muskegon River Watershed Assembly (MRWA), which has led the restoration…

Fields once used for crops can become important wildlife habitat when restored to native prairie. Across Wisconsin, former farmland is being transformed with native grasses and wildflowers, creating a wider range of resources for pollinators. According to Restoring Lands, A Wisconsin Land Trust, bumblebee surveys have found greater diversity at restored sites, with some uncommon…

Concrete has a major environmental cost, while human waste creates another difficult waste-management challenge. Researchers have now brought the two problems together in an unusual laboratory experiment. A team converted treated faecal sludge into biochar and used the resulting material to replace part of the cement in concrete. The researchers tested mixtures containing 5%, 10%…

PC: Youth Service America At just 17, Vivian Liu has turned a childhood passion for origami into a worldwide movement built around one simple idea: making people feel remembered. Through Origami For Good, the teenager from Katy, Texas, has helped bring together thousands of young volunteers who fold recycled paper into cranes, flowers, animals and…

The red kite, once pushed close to extinction in Britain because of human persecution, has made one of the country’s most successful wildlife recoveries. After centuries of hunting and egg collecting reduced the UK population to fewer than 10 breeding pairs in remote Welsh valleys, a reintroduction programme launched in 1989 brought birds from Spain…

Elephant in Tanzania. Image Credit: Nevit Dilmen/Wikimedia Commons In parts of Tanzania, small farms are increasingly coming into contact with African elephants, leading to a hard conflict between wildlife conservation and rural livelihoods. A 2026 study, published in the ‘International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation’ found that most of the reported crop raids in the…

Egg and rice waste can be converted into a material for storing electrical energy. Researchers developed a nitrogen- and oxygen-co-doped porous carbon from a mixture of egg waste and rice waste and tested it for use in supercapacitors. The material was produced through pre-carbonisation followed by pyrolytic activation. According to the study published in Molecules…

For 12-year-old Yuvi Agarwal, a keyboard became more than a musical instrument after he noticed it could calm his restless dog, Bozo. The discovery inspired him to wonder whether music could also comfort animals facing the stress of life in shelters. In 2023, Yuvi turned that idea into Wild Tunes, a non-profit that brings volunteer…

The open-air study was designed to mimic future warming while maintaining natural outdoor conditions. Researchers established plots in both open and closed-canopy forest environments and planted seedlings representing 11 tree species. In a Minnesota forest, researchers turned up the heat, not for days or weeks, but for years. Beneath the trees, heating cables warmed the…

Charles Darwin, the English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed our understanding of life, also left behind observations that extended beyond biology. One of his most memorable reflections was on the value of time and how people choose to use it. His words, “A man who dares to waste one hour of…