News that keep you updated
Human beings have always been drawn towards challenges that appear difficult, uncertain or even impossible. From exploring unfamiliar places to developing new technologies and solving scientific problems, progress often begins with the decision to attempt something that has never been done before. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon, once offered…
PC: Natural History Museum of Utah A fungus can turn an infected ant into what scientists describe as a real-life ‘zombie ’, taking over its behaviour in a way that helps the parasite reproduce. The phenomenon is linked to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that infects several ant species. After infection, the ant may continue behaving…
Scientists have found that Mars is not the geologically uniform ball of rock it might appear from orbit. New analysis of nearly two decades of spacecraft tracking data shows that the mantle beneath the planet’s southern highlands runs between 200°C and 400°C hotter than the mantle beneath its northern lowlands, a temperature gap wide enough…
The site was decommissioned. However, contamination remains underground. In 1967, the United States tried an unusual method to increase natural gas production. It detonated a 29-kiloton device and had an explosoion 4,227 feet below the ground in north-western New Mexico to stimulate the flow of natural gas.According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), the…
A snake bite in the late 19th century offered little certainty about what would happen next. There were attempts to counter venom with chemicals and other remedies, but no established treatment could directly neutralise the poison. Then, in France in 1894, two research teams arrived at a very different idea. Albert Calmette, working within the…
The waters off New York’s Hamptons, once immortalised as shark-infested territory in Jaws, are revealing a very different story. Researchers have confirmed a summer nursery for young great white sharks in the New York Bight, with studies showing juvenile whites repeatedly using the region’s coastal waters during their early years. NOAA lists Long Island among…
For centuries, poets have been fixated on birdsong. They called it nature’s closest approximation to music. John Keats was obsessed with the nightingale’s ‘full-throated ease’, while Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined the skylark pouring forth an ‘unpremeditated art’ of ‘shrill delight’ from the heavens. William Wordsworth heard more than a call in the cuckoo; it was…
Quote of the day by Stephen Hawking Few questions have occupied the human mind for quite as long as why the universe exists, and whether human life actually has any real purpose. For centuries, people have approached these questions through religion, philosophy and science, often arriving at genuinely very different conclusions. Stephen Hawking, one of…
Since time immemorial, humans have been consuming food derived from the land, air and water. From vegetables and birds to even crabs, there is not much we have not used to survive on. But currently, people in New England are feasting on green crabs not to survive themselves but to help the native species subsist….
In 2011, conservation teams set out on one of the biggest rat eradications ever on a tropical atoll, targeting an estimated 30,000 invasive rodents on Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific. The goal was not just to remove a pest, but to restore an entire ecosystem that had been suppressed for more than a century….
