A giant, tornado-like flame may offer a cleaner and faster way to respond to oil spills at sea. In a large-scale experiment, researchersfrom Texas A&M University and the University of California, Berkeley created a nearly 17-foot-tall fire whirl over crude oil floating on water. The spinning flame burned the oil about 40% faster than a…
Eighteen-year-old Arya Satheesh, a high school student from Letterkenny in County Donegal, Ireland, has earned international recognition for inventing Eco Purge, a plant-based biodegradable plastic. The material is designed to help tackle the growing problem of microplastic pollution. As it naturally breaks down, Eco Purge releases specialised enzymes that are designed to help degrade nearby…
PC: Study: A programmable fungal platform for engineered living textiles Researchers in China have created a textile made from living fungal mycelium that can heal its own cuts, grow new surface layers on command, and biodegrade completely within weeks. The material, built from Cordyceps militaris fungus, keeps its cells alive throughout the manufacturing process, unlike…
Representative Image of astronauts investigating potential water ice reserves on the Moon (AI-generated image) Beneath the permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s south pole, scientists believe significant deposits of water ice may be buried out of reach of the instruments currently used to search for it from orbit. A new study led by researchers at…
Ant Supercolony. Image Credit: Anagoria/Wikipedia The Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) has created one of the most remarkable biological phenomena ever recorded: a super-colony stretching around 6,000 kilometres along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Portugal, Spain, France and Italy. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), these…
Alsek on July 5, 1984. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the US Geological Survey. The coastal plain of southeastern Alaska is currently witnessing a rapid transformation where water is replacing ice at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers in this region are melting, which leads to the formation of…
Black fire beetle, Melanophila acuminata. Image Credit: Prof. Schmitz/Wikipedia Black pine jewel beetles, scientifically named Melanophila acuminata, belong to a unique group of insects that exhibit pyrophilous behaviour, which means they are naturally attracted to forest fires. These beetles are primarily found across boreal and temperate forests of the north, where they play a vital…
Galileo Galilei, whose studies of falling bodies and accelerated motion laid the groundwork for the principle later demonstrated by Apollo 15 on the Moon. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons. Two people can be equally skilled at the same subject and end up producing very different amounts of lasting work. One treats the subject as a career,…
A scientist on board captured the moment the glacier crashed into the ocean. Credit: Alice Fremand Scientists aboard Britain’s flagship polar research vessel, RRS Sir David Attenborough, watched an estimated 18 million metric tonnes of ice crash into the ocean when a massive section of Greenland’s Sorgenfri glacier broke away in a single evening event.The…
An eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) attached to an upper set of artificial teeth (Source: Smithsonian Institution) In 1898, a dredging boat pulling debris from the floor of the Chesapeake Bay made a discovery that looked like something from a biological nightmare: a set of human dentures with a live oyster firmly attached to them.The unusual…
