What if food scraps, discarded branches and seashells could help produce drinking water from the air? Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new class of biomass-based hydrogels that can capture atmospheric moisture and release it as clean water using relatively mild heat. The approach, described in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced…
The fossil of Arctobatrachus urdensis as documented in 1948 (A–C), its skull as it appears today (D), and a reconstructed illustration (E). Scale bar: 10 cm. Credit: Schoch et al., 2026. Nearly 80 years ago, a British expedition discovered the battered remains of a giant fossil on the peak of an Arctic island. Unable to…
The foxes reduced seabird populations, which meant less nutrient-rich guano reached the islands. Arctic foxes introduced to more than 400 Alaskan islands for fur changed far more than the local wildlife. According to a study published in journal Science, by preying on seabirds, they disrupted the flow of nutrients from the ocean to land and…
An elephant in musthPhoto: Canva In the annals of controversial scientific experiments, few stories are as disturbing as that of Tusko, a 14-year-old Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962, Tusko became the subject of an experiment that would go down in history as one of the most infamous animal studies…
The 14th century warrior’s skull was broken in 61 places. (University of Bradford photo) A skeleton uncovered beneath Scotland’s Stirling Castle may be the first confirmed archaeological evidence of a person killed by a trebuchet. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the remains belong to a defender who appears to have been killed during a…
In 1987, a British naturalist became the first professional warden of a remote Seychelles island In 1987, British naturalist Ian Bullock arrived on remote Aride Island in the Seychelles to become its first professional warden. Just one year later, the groundwork he established helped make possible an important conservation project: 29 endangered Seychelles warblers were…
After commercial whaling nearly erased them, blue and fin whales are slowly reclaiming the southeast Atlantic Commercial whaling killed an estimated 350,000 blue whales and 725,000 fin whales during the 20th century. More than 40 years after commercial whaling ended, however, the two largest whale species are slowly returning to parts of their former range…
There is a stretch of the South Pacific Ocean so remote that the closest people to it are usually astronauts orbiting 400 kilometres overhead, not sailors or fishermen. This is Point Nemo, a spot 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land in every direction, and for more than five decades it has served a purpose most…
Representative Image of floating seaweed farms operating alongside offshore wind turbines in the North Sea (AI-generated image) A vessel recently sailed through the Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm off the Dutch coast to collect the first-ever harvest of seaweed grown between operating turbines, marking a milestone for a project testing whether offshore wind farms can…
Representative Image of diverse jellyfish species drifting through Japanese coastal waters (AI-generated image) In 2018, 13-year-old Ryoya Sugimoto was watching marine life from the docks of Tanabe Bay in Wakayama, Japan, when he spotted jellyfish he could not identify. He had been fascinated by jellyfish since childhood, after being stung by a blue button jellyfish,…
