Groundwater reserves beneath High Mountain Asia (HMA) often called the ‘Asian water tower’ are depleting at an alarming rate, according to a new satellite-based study. The region provides water that supports farming, cities, and ecosystems in more than a dozen downstream countries and is a critical resource for hundreds of millions of people. But as…
PC: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS Nearly 12 billion years ago, the Milky Way was still in its infancy, assembling itself from smaller collections of stars, gas and dark matter. During that turbulent period, another galaxy came within its gravitational reach and was eventually absorbed, leaving traces that have survived to the present…
Sophie Adenot’s first spacewalk was supposed to be about replacing an antenna. Instead, the 18 August outing left the French astronaut with two milestones to carry back inside the International Space Station: becoming the first French woman to walk in space, and an unfinished repair that will require another trip outside. Adenot and Nasa astronaut…
PC: Dhruv Varun Cohen ’26/Cornell University Thousands of hours of rainforest recordings are helping scientists teach artificial intelligence to recognise Amazonian birds that can be difficult to identify by sound alone. In Colombia, Cornell researchers have been collecting acoustic data from cattle ranches, rubber agroforestry plots and forest to build a clearer picture of which…
PC: Long overdue: a new, widespread, species of Pristimantis (Anura, Strabomantidae) from the Chocó region and the synonymy of Pristimantis subsigillatus For more than a century, a frog living across the forests of western Ecuador and southern Colombia carried the wrong scientific name. It was not hidden in some unexplored corner of the rainforest, either….
Image: Society for Science/Chris Ayers Photography At just 18, Jaeho Lee has already taken on a mathematical problem that reaches far beyond the classroom. A student at Spring Branch Academic Institute in Houston, Texas, Lee was named one of the 40 finalists in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, after studying the structure of affine…
There are moments when a simple disagreement quietly turns into something larger. A conversation stops, assumptions take over and a distance begins to grow between people who may once have understood each other well. Sometimes the separation is deliberate, created to protect a boundary or avoid conflict. At other times, it happens almost without anyone…
For centuries, lake sturgeon have moved quietly through the rivers and lakes of the Great Lakes region, growing slowly and aging in a way that has been difficult to measure. Their lives can stretch far beyond those of most freshwater fish, but just how far has remained uncertain. New research now suggests that some may…
Snow-covered mountain ranges of the Montagne Noire. Image Credit: Von Christian Ferrer/Wikipedia Nearly 400 fossils discovered in southern France are giving scientists a detailed view of marine life that lived close to the South Pole about 470 million years ago. The fossils belong to the newly described Cabrières Biota, an Early Ordovician fossil site in…
In a vineyard in Italy’s Puglia region, rows of grapevines grew beneath something more usually associated with power stations than agriculture: photovoltaic panels. The arrangement changed the amount of sunlight reaching the vines, but it also altered what was happening much closer to the ground. Soil stayed wetter, temperatures were less extreme and the air…
