Science

Not everyone who closes their eyes and hits the bed at night goes to sleep. Some end up transitioning into a dream-like state that has them waking up while feeling hazy, lazy and heavy, with no feelings of rest and freshness. But is it the dreams that weigh you out or does it have something…

For more than a century, Yosemite’s mountain lakes became home to millions of trout that had never naturally reached those waters. Fish stocking began in 1877 and eventually put more than 33 million fish into the park, transforming habitats that had evolved without aquatic predators. The change came at a cost for the Sierra Nevada…

A spider web can look like a single delicate sheet of thread, but its construction is far more complicated. Different strands are made for different jobs, with some providing the strength needed to hold the web together and others stretching to trap prey. Orb-weaver spiders are particularly good examples of this division of labour. Their…

Harrison’s H4 chronometre. Image Credit: Jordiferrer/Wikipedia The first clockmaker did not have to guess what time it was. Long before gears, wheels and moving hands appeared, people had already learned to track the passage of a day by watching the Sun, Moon and stars. Sundials, water clocks and other simple devices gave earlier societies ways…

A rainbow of light forms because different wavelengths travel through a prism or water droplets at different angles. Scientists have now shown that sound can be made to behave in a way that splits a broadband acoustic signal into separate frequency components that travel in different directions or come to rest at different positions within…

Plastic alternatives made from renewable materials often struggle to match the strength, heat resistance and processing ability of conventional plastics. A new bamboo-based bioplastic takes a different approach, reorganising cellulose at the molecular level to produce a material that is both strong and easier to shape. The researchers used a hydrated zinc chloride and formic…

Oyster farmers across Hiroshima Prefecture are pulling up their rafts this season to find that most of what they cultivated has not survived. In several coastal districts, mortality rates have reached as high as 90%, far above the usual seasonal loss of 30% to 50%. Producers in the city of Higashihiroshima have reported losses at…

Romania has placed its energy sector under a nationwide 30-day state of alert after the Danube river levels fell to exceptionally low levels. This has forced Unit 1 at the Cernavodă nuclear plant offline and put Unit 2 under continuous review.Emergency river works have kept Unit 2 online for now, but the latest hydrological outlook…

Representative Image (AI-generated) Sixteen years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill injured extensive coral habitats in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are developing new ways to help these fragile ecosystems recover. According to NOAA Fisheries, a recent restoration mission combined laboratory-reared corals, specialised technical diving and newly designed equipment to return corals to the deep…

MIT researchers melt resin pellets and spin them into thin, stretchy fibres designed for repeated recycling. MIT engineers have developed a new elastic yarn made from polyethylene that could offer a more recyclable alternative to conventional stretchy fibres such as spandex. The material is designed so its components can be melted together and processed into…