Science

David Beckham took up beekeeping during lockdown, inspired by his son Cruz.Image credit: Millie Pilkington / Country Life​ David Beckham, the football icon who took up beekeeping during the Covid-19 lockdowns, now produces his own honey at his Cotswolds home, according to The Standard. His hobby comes as experts discuss the potential effects of managed…

Carbon dioxide is abundant but chemically inert, which makes it difficult to turn into useful polymers. A study describes a closed-loop platform that uses carbon dioxide with bicycloalkanes to make high-performance, recyclable polyesters. They used bicyclic butane, or BCB, and bicyclic pentane, or BCP, monomers in a direct alternating copolymerization. A simple organic catalyst initiated…

High in California’s Sierra Nevada, a conservation project changed the future of a disappearing amphibian. In 2001, staff at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks began removing non-native trout from selected lakes and streams, restoring water bodies that had historically been home to mountain yellow-legged frogs but were naturally fishless. By 2011, nearly 44,000 trout…

Representative Image of a subalpine meadow shifting from herbaceous plants to shrub-dominated vegetation due to climate warming (AI-generated image) For 29 years, researchers artificially warmed a subalpine meadow at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, to examine how sustained temperature increases affect ecosystems above and below ground. The results, published in the Proceedings…

Astronomers have reported the first direct detection of radio emission from an exoplanet, tracing the signals to the young gas giant β Pictoris b, located approximately 64 light-years from Earth. Using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, researchers identified recurring radio bursts and localised their source to the planet rather than its host star. The emission…

Pet cats may spend much of their time close to home, but their hunting can have a large local effect on wildlife. Researchers worked with citizen scientists to track 925 pet cats from six countries and examined where the animals moved and what types of prey the cats kill. The cats had remarkably small home…

Incendiamoeba cascadensis can reproduce at 145°F, setting a heat-tolerance record for complex life. Image: NPR/Felix Mikus. Scientists have discovered a previously unknown amoeba in the geothermal streams of California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park that can reproduce at temperatures reaching 145°F (63°C). Named Incendiamoeba cascadensis, the organism has set a new heat-tolerance record for known eukaryotic…

Nasa astronaut and flight engineer Kate Rubins checks out radish plants growing on the space station as part of an experiment to evaluate nutrition and taste of the plants (Image: Nasa) Researchers from Nasa Kennedy Space Centre and partner institutions Noetic Strategies, Amentum, Bennett Aerospace and Sierra Space have published the first microbial analysis of…

Credit: L. Maquet, Observatoire de Paris In 2013, astronomers discovered two narrow rings around Chariklo, a 250-kilometre-wide minor planet orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, marking the first time rings had been found around such a small body. Nine years later, the James Webb Space Telescope observed the same system during a rare stellar occultation and…

Representative Image (AI-generated) What started as piles of concrete blocks on the seafloor off Prince Edward Island soon became a magnet for marine life. Researchers began installing the artificial oyster reefs in 2021 to test whether they could provide some of the ecological functions lost from areas where eelgrass no longer grew. Within two years,…