Science

Space and its mysterious world never fail to surprise humans. According to the latest report, 14 years after touching down on the Red Planet, NASA’s Curiosity rover has snapped a photo of a mysterious honeycomb-like texture on the Martian surface, lending yet another mystery to an ever-expanding list of Martian geological features.NASA’s veteran Curiosity rover…

Charles Darwin (Image source: Wikipedia) A bad experience is supposed to teach a lesson, yet people return to habits they already know are harmful more often than logic would suggest. Charles Darwin noticed the same contradiction and put it more bluntly than most. “An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it…

Bees have a reputation for being tireless workers, but it turns out that reputation only really applies to some of them. Researchers at the University of Illinois glued tiny numbered tags onto thousands of individual honeybees and tracked their comings and goings for almost two months across several separate colonies. What they found flips the…

Bees are among the world’s most important pollinators, helping sustain ecosystems and supporting the production of many fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Yet bee populations have been declining for years due to habitat loss, pesticides, diseases, parasites and climate change. More recently, another potential threat has entered the conversation: the rapid expansion of data centres….

A small mark on an ancient jaw has opened a window into a moment of violence from a time far removed from written history. The remains of an early Homo sapiens individual from Qafzeh Cave in Israel have revealed signs of a serious facial injury, likely caused by a sharp stone tool. What makes the…

Dipterocarp forest at the Danum Valley Field Centre. Borneo’s tropical forests, dominated by trees from the Dipterocarp family, have some of the highest canopies in the world, with some trees reaching 100 meters Simply cutting back aggressive climbing vines in logged tropical forests allows the tree canopy to recover three times faster than planting new…

It’s not just humans that are at risk of extinction due to global warming, it’s the Earth, too. In research conducted over a period of 40 years, scientists have uncovered evidence that challenges long-held assumptions about forest soils.While on the first glance, the Harvard Forest seems like an ordinary woodland filled with oak trees, there…

Volunteers hand-collect native tree seeds from Scotland’s remote woodlands to help restore the country’s endangered Atlantic rainforest and native forests. In one of Scotland’s largest citizen-led woodland restoration efforts, around 100 volunteers have spent the past three years hand-collecting more than 11 million rare native tree seeds from remote forests, islands and rugged coastlines. The…

A prediction made by Stephen Hawking some 50 years ago has just come true and now, scientists are trying to understand how it reinforces fundamental principles of modern physics. A collision between two black holes about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth has provided the most precise observational evidence ever obtained for a prediction presented by…

There is a particular sound that belongs to the Alps in summer. It drifts across mountain meadows, echoes from rocky slopes and sometimes arrives before the animals themselves come into view. The ringing of cowbells has become so closely associated with Switzerland, Austria and parts of southern Germany that many visitors assume the bells exist…