Science

The study began with an unusual marine worm, Olavius algarvensis. The little animal has neither a mouth nor a digestive tract. Long before humans learned how to turn petroleum into bottles and bags and packaging, nature had already invented her own plastic. These natural polymers have been made for hundreds of millions of years hidden…

In 2011, Ivy was released into a Massachusetts marsh as a tiny seven-gram Blanding’s turtle after spending her first months in human care. Then she disappeared. For more than a decade, there was no confirmed sign of the turtle, leaving conservationists with no way of knowing whether she had survived. According to the Commonwealth of…

Rhinocyllus conicus (Image Credit: Canva) A biological control programme launched in the United States more than five decades ago has become a cautionary example of how attempts to manage invasive species can produce unexpected ecological consequences. According to a USDA Forest Service assessment of invasive species in the Southwest, the thistle seedhead weevil (Rhinocyllus conicus)…

In the sun-drenched hills of Andalusia, Spain, an unlikely team of firefighters is making headlines. They don’t carry hoses, wear helmets, or race to blazes in red trucks. Instead, they have four legs, long ears and a simple mission: eat grass. Meet the “firefighting donkeys” of Doñana National Park, a group of 18 rescued animals…

The milestone was achieved on Wednesday by the Chinese private space company LandSpace China has successfully recovered the first stage of an orbital rocket on land for the first time, marking a major step in Beijing’s efforts to develop reusable launch technology and reduce the cost of putting satellites into space.The milestone was achieved on…

Lord Shiva Statue Unveiled (CERN official) For those who don’t know, CERN is Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). It is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland (near Franco-Swiss border). It is the lab where scientists accelerate particles to almost the speed of light. But beyond this…

A floating and rotating ‘garbage island’ of an estimated area of 1.6 million square kilometres lies between Hawaii and California, according to a scientific estimate published in 2018. The area of the island is said to be larger than Para and nearly three times the size of metropolitan France. What exists here is a plastic…

A 15-year-old Massachusetts student is exploring an unusual way to make polluted water cleaner: using discarded animal bones. Tina Jin, a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, developed a filtration system that uses ground cow, lamb or pig bones arranged in multiple layers to target different contaminants in water. Her research focuses on places where…

Zainab Nathani, a high school junior from Niles, Illinois, has designed a material that can pull drinkable water straight out of humid air, powered entirely by sunlight. Studying at Niles Township West High School, she built her project around emulsion-templated composite biogels, porous, bio-based structures engineered to trap moisture from the atmosphere and release it…

Finnegan McGill. Image Credit: Chris Ayers/Society for Science Finnegan McGill has spent more than four years turning a concern about declining bird populations into a working piece of technology. This 18-year-old student from Tucson, Arizona, developed a device known as ‘A-BiRD’ (Automated Bird Recognition Device) which could help in identifying birds by their calls and…