Science

John Young and the preserved corned-beef sandwich displayed at the Grissom Memorial Museum in Indiana. NASA astronaut John W. Young secretly carried a freshly made corned-beef sandwich on rye into space during the Gemini III mission on March 23, 1965, hiding it in a pocket of his spacesuit. Nearly two hours into the flight, Young…

More than 1,500 people helped researchers count seals and sea lions on California’s Año Nuevo Island by studying thousands of drone photographs. The citizen science project ran for 212 days, with volunteers counting about 94,000 image tiles. Researchers then compared the volunteer counts with counts made by experts. According to the study published in Plos…

The eco-moorings used at Studland Bay are designed to avoid that movement across the seabed (Photo: National Trust via The Guardian) At England’s Studland Bay, damage to seagrass caused by traditional boat anchors has fallen sharply after eco-moorings were introduced, with scars in one trial area shrinking by 94% between 2021 and 2025. Researchers say…

Massachusetts is restoring Century Bog, a former cranberry farm in Plymouth and Wareham, to complete protection of Red Brook from White Island Pond to Buttermilk Bay. The restored wetland and stream channel could benefit about 60 conservation-priority species, including “salter” brook trout that move between freshwater and saltwater estuaries. Source link

A striking yellow-and-black spider has turned up in Cheshire for the first time (Image Credit: Chester Zoo) A striking yellow-and-black spider has turned up in Cheshire for the first time, giving conservationists another glimpse of how Britain’s wildlife is responding to a changing climate. The discovery was made during a biodiversity survey on the Chester…

The discovery also has implications far beyond Lassen Volcanic National Park. Astrobiologists study extremophiles to understand the physical and chemical boundaries within which life can survive In the steaming pools of California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, life has found a way to thrive where most cells would begin to fall apart. Hidden in geothermal waters,…

Representative Image of a subalpine grassland transitioning from grasses to shrubs under warming conditions over 29 years (AI Generated Image) A 29-year climate-warming experiment in Colorado has documented a major shift in a subalpine grassland, with shrubs increasing by 150% while grasses and forbs, including wildflowers, declined by about 28%. The findings come from one…

For years, sand dredged from the Mississippi River was removed to keep one of America’s most important waterways navigable. At one restoration site, engineers found another use for that material, building islands. The US Army Corps of Engineers has completed a $25 million habitat restoration project at McGregor Lake in Wisconsin, where about 500,000 cubic…

Representative Image of a pair of white dwarfs orbiting closely, surrounded by a cosmic background and X-ray emissions (AI Generated Image) An international team led by Indian astronomers has identified a pair of white dwarfs locked in an extraordinarily tight orbit that is shrinking faster than that of two other well-known systems of the same…

PC: Dr Joshua Copping/ University of Cambridge Solar farms can provide renewable electricity while also supporting wildlife when managed carefully. A study of six solar farms in the East Anglian Fens found that bird abundance and species richness varied with site management. Researchers surveyed 23.2 km of transects across the solar farms and 15.2 km…