Science

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…

Deep in the forests of Mozambique, finding a wild bee nest can begin with a sound. Yao honey hunters use a distinctive call to attract greater honeyguides, small birds capable of leading people towards bee colonies hidden inside trees. The relationship has been passed down for generations, but new research suggests the birds are not…

Henrietta Lacks (Image Credit: Wikipedia) In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American woman, was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. During her treatment, doctors removed tissue from her tumour for research without telling her or obtaining her permission. The cells behaved unlike any human cells scientists had successfully maintained before: they…

Asian palm civet. Image Credit: Bernard DUPONT/Wikipedia Kopi luwak is one of the world’s most unusual coffees because its production begins inside the digestive system of an animal. The coffee is made from beans eaten and later excreted by the ‘Asian palm civet,’ a small mammal found across parts of South and Southeast Asia. The…

A power cut in Texas left Arya Gurumukhi and her family without heat for days during the severe winter storm of 2021. She was young, but the experience stayed with her. The problem was no longer an abstract question about climate or energy systems. It was something she had experienced inside her own home. Gurumukhi…

Representative Image of a tensegrity robot navigating obstacles during a search-and-rescue mission (AI-generated image) Ankan Das is a 15-year-old sophomore at Oviedo High School in Florida, but his latest science-fair project looks more like something from a robotics laboratory than a school classroom. For his Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair project, Das built a…

Antarctica holds more than 60% of the world’s meteorites, but warming could make thousands disappear into the ice (PC: AI Generated) More than 60% of all meteorites ever found on Earth have been recovered from Antarctica, where dark rocks can remain exposed on bright blue-ice fields for thousands of years. Now, climate warming is putting…

A Dutch plant is turning a huge agricultural waste stream into renewable electricity and fertiliser. BMC Moerdijk in the Netherlands processes around 420,000 tonnes of poultry manure each year, using thermal conversion to generate electricity for the farms supplying the manure and enough additional power for around 45,000 households. The process does not end after…

Ella Lu. Image Credit: Chris Ayers/Society for Science Ella Lu, a 17-year-old student from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has found a way to bring two different interests of ‘art’ and ‘computer science’ together. As a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics(NCSSM), Lu developed a system that can study how objects are…

In the 1990s, a predatory flatworm was released in Samoa to control giant African snails An aggressive predatory flatworm introduced to Pacific islands during the 1990s to control agricultural pests has pushed native land snail species toward extinction, turning a planned biological control program into an ecological disaster. The New Guinea flatworm (Platydemus manokwari) was…