A small box of honeybees once became an unusual passenger aboard the space shuttle Discovery. In 1984, Nasa sent thousands of honeybees into orbit to see how they would behave when gravity was no longer guiding their movements. The experiment was less about honey and more about a basic piece of bee life: building a…
Representational photo of a frozen optical fiber core in a glass capillary, which guides and couples light and sound waves efficiently. (Science Daily picture) Freezing liquid inside an optical fibre has helped scientists create an unusual environment where light and sound can interact more than 1,000 times more strongly than they do in ordinary optical…
After nearly 20 years without a confirmed sighting, scientists in Barbados have finally rediscovered the world’s smallest-known snake. According to the Associated Press, the tiny Barbados threadsnake was found beneath a rock during an ecological survey in central Barbados, bringing an end to a search that had seen researchers turn over hundreds of rocks in…
Henderson Island (Image credit: Canva) In 2011, Henderson Island, a remote and uninhabited island in the South Pacific, became the site of one of the largest rodent-eradication attempts ever undertaken on an island of its size. Conservationists spread about 75 tonnes of poisoned bait across the island in an effort to eliminate invasive Pacific rats,…
It seems technology is already outrunning humans not only in algorithms but also on the field. At a 100-meter sprint at the Beijing Robot Games, a humanoid robot is said to have beaten the human record of Jamaican athlete Usain Bolt. The robot named Lightning Bolt, achieved a result of 9.39 seconds, beating Bolt’s record…
Scotland is taking a new approach to laboratory plastic waste. A new recycling system has already processed around 72,000 contaminated plastic sample bottles. The technology is now being expanded to Petri dishes and pipette tips. Scottish Water has become the first utility in the world to adopt Envetec Sustainable Technologies’ GENERATIONS technology. The system disinfects…
Cortical Labs founder and CEO Hon Weng Chong at the Cortical Cloud biological data centre at NUS (Image: The Straits Times).. Singapore has unveiled a world-first biological data centre prototype that brings living human neurons into a server-rack environment, marking an unusual new step in the race to build more efficient and adaptive computing systems….
For months, the forest around Changi was being watched after dark. More than 50 volunteers, working with conservation groups and Singapore’s National Parks Board, set up cameras, collected evidence and searched for signs of one of the country’s most elusive wild cats. What they found was more significant than a handful of fleeting sightings. By…
Cactoblastis cactorum, commonly known as the Argentine cactus moth An invasive South American moth that was once released as a biological control agent in the Caribbean is now spreading across the southern United States, creating a serious ecological and economic threat to native prickly pear cactus populations. The insect, Cactoblastis cactorum, commonly known as the…
The discovery was made during a March 2026 archaeological expedition. (Photo credit: Nagaland Tribune) A pottery fragment sticking out of a rock shelter in Nagaland may have changed what archaeologists know about the region’s past. Archaeologists working in Noklak district have found evidence suggesting that people were living in the region around 3,500 years ago,…
The team used helicopters to spread cereal bait containing the rodent toxin brodifacoum (Picture: Mouse free marion) In 2016, New Zealand launched a major operation to remove an estimated 200,000 mice from the remote Antipodes Island. The mice were the only mammalian pest species on the island, but their impact on the ecosystem was…
Indian space programme (representative image) BENGALURU: August 23, 2023, gave India an image it had waited decades to see: a spacecraft settling on the Moon, its lander and rover beginning work near the lunar south polar region. But the significance of Chandrayaan-3 was perhaps easier to understand if one looked backwards.Six decades earlier, India was…
