Science

For centuries, poets have been fixated on birdsong. They called it nature’s closest approximation to music. John Keats was obsessed with the nightingale’s ‘full-throated ease’, while Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined the skylark pouring forth an ‘unpremeditated art’ of ‘shrill delight’ from the heavens. William Wordsworth heard more than a call in the cuckoo; it was…

Quote of the day by Stephen Hawking Few questions have occupied the human mind for quite as long as why the universe exists, and whether human life actually has any real purpose. For centuries, people have approached these questions through religion, philosophy and science, often arriving at genuinely very different conclusions. Stephen Hawking, one of…

Since time immemorial, humans have been consuming food derived from the land, air and water. From vegetables and birds to even crabs, there is not much we have not used to survive on. But currently, people in New England are feasting on green crabs not to survive themselves but to help the native species subsist….

Six decades ago, Dutch elm disease swept across the United States, killing an estimated 100 million American elms that once shaded streets, parks and college campuses from coast to coast. The fungus, carried by bark beetles, turned majestic, vase-shaped trees into dead standing skeletons and changed the look of countless towns. Now, in a bold…

In 2011, conservation teams set out on one of the biggest rat eradications ever on a tropical atoll, targeting an estimated 30,000 invasive rodents on Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific. The goal was not just to remove a pest, but to restore an entire ecosystem that had been suppressed for more than a century….

In 2003, Nasa researchers reported that freshwater snails carried into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle had mated and reproduced during their mission, allowing their gravity-sensing organs to develop entirely under microgravity. According to the study published in PubMed, tittled ‘Otoliths developed in microgravity‘ formed part of the results of the STS-90 Neurolab Spacelab mission, a…

In 2005, five thick-toed geckos left Earth aboard the unmanned Russian spacecraft Foton-M2, embarking on a 16-day orbital flight with no access to food or water. The mission, a joint undertaking between Nasa and the Russian Academy of Sciences, was designed to test whether a reptile species could serve as a viable model for studying…

In January 1960, Nasa launched the rhesus monkey Miss Sam aboard a Little Joe rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia, to test the launch escape system built for Project Mercury. The flight was designed to confirm that the escape tower could pull the capsule clear of its booster during an abort, a safeguard critical to any…

Representative Image of Chosha praecursor, an early insect with paddle-like abdominal appendages in a prehistoric landscape (AI-generated image) Today, insects occupy nearly every terrestrial environment on Earth and account for more described species than any other animal group, yet the earliest stages of their evolutionary history remain poorly documented. A newly described species from western…

The universe has fascinated humanity for centuries, but understanding it requires more than simply looking at the stars and planets. Galileo Galilei, one of history’s most influential astronomers and scientists, offered a powerful way of thinking about nature, arguing that the universe could be understood only by learning the language in which it was written….