In 2021, Nasa grew Hatch chile peppers aboard the International Space Station for the first time, producing edible fruit after 137 days in microgravity. The Plant Habitat-04 experiment was designed to test whether a fruiting crop could survive and produce food in orbit, an important step towards growing fresh produce during future missions to the…
Representative Image of a caterpillar guarding wasp larvae and aggressively swinging its head at approaching predators (AI-generated image) A species of parasitic wasp has evolved one of the strangest survival strategies in the insect world, turning its caterpillar host into a living bodyguard for its own young. The wasp, from the genus Glyptapanteles, lays as…
Representative Image of biodegradable plastic made from sugarcane and maize waste (AI-generated image) Onndinadaho Rasilwela, a chemical engineering graduate from South Africa, has won top honours at the 2026 Green Youth Indaba for developing a biodegradable plastic from agricultural waste. A member of the Tshwane University of Technology’s Student Women Economic Empowerment Programme, Rasilwela received…
High in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, communities are reviving an age-old practice to answer a modern water crisis: they are ‘marrying’ glaciers. As natural glaciers shrink and meltwater becomes less reliable, local people are carrying pieces of ice from existing glaciers to carefully chosen sites, where male and female ice are brought together and buried…
In 2023, researchers tested whether a building could be cooler than the air outside while still relying on natural ventilation. The experiment used two insulated boxes in California to study how radiative cooling, thermal mass and temperature-driven airflow could work together without fans or mechanical systems. The test box had an uninsulated aluminium roof covered…
NASA’s Hubble captures Saturn’s mysterious 10-sided atmospheric wave at its south pole (Image: X/ @NASAHubble) Saturn has revealed another strange feature in its atmosphere, and this time it is hiding around the planet’s south pole. New observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have captured a giant, evolving 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling the southern pole of…
A pair of cotton pants is not usually considered scientific equipment. Yet across Switzerland, thousands of them spent weeks underground as part of an unusual experiment into the condition of the soil beneath people’s feet.More than 1,000 volunteers took part, burying underwear and teabags at sites ranging from private gardens and farmland to grasslands and…
Image Credit: Left/The Wire/Right/CNN A cockroach producing something resembling milk sounds like an unlikely subject for serious scientific research. Yet one species has developed a remarkably unusual way of nourishing its young. The Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, gives birth to live offspring rather than laying eggs, and its developing young feed on a milk-like…
Harvard neuroscientists have kept tiny clusters of human brain cells alive in laboratory dishes for more than five years, setting a new record that could change how researchers study the human brain. The peppercorn-sized brain organoids, each containing more than one million cells from the cerebral cortex, survived for roughly three times as long as…
With countries fighting wars and natural calamities sweeping away civilisations, it seems a global collapse might be a spark away. But the possibility of entire humanity vanishing off the face of Earth seems a little less plausible with the years of effort we have spent preparing solutions for such situations. However, not everyone can be…
