Prairie dog, Image: AI Generated The black-footed ferret is North America’s rarest mammal, with only about 300 estimated to survive in the wild at the end of 2015. The species has been listed as endangered since 1967, and its survival is closely tied to prairie dogs, which provide almost all of its food as well…
Nasa-backed SPARK project could send tiny ‘aerobots’ into caves on Saturn’s moon Titan( PC: AI Generated) Nasa has backed a new concept that could send small flying robots into caves on Saturn’s moon Titan. The project, called SPARK, proposes lightweight vehicles known as aerobots that could be released by a larger spacecraft and guided through…
Alfred Drummond-Herdman, a 27-year-old trainee lawyer in Edinburgh, has turned his bedroom into an unusual fungal observation space, filling terrariums and plastic containers with cowpats, grouse droppings and rabbit pellets to document the fungi that grow on them. His fascination with dung-dwelling fungi began during the pandemic after he encountered cowpats covered with mushrooms in…
Eastern box turtle (Image Credit: Canva) Finding a turtle nest in the wild is far more difficult than it sounds. Smithsonian researchers studying Eastern box turtles in Virginia have been using a combination of technology and surprisingly simple tools to locate nests and understand what happens to the eggs after they are laid. Their unusual…
Just like everything else in the world, even food is coming to have its own trends. From a Mediterranean diet to a protein-rich diet, people are trying everything on the internet to be able to achieve their “ideal” body. Recently, scientists used a “gene gun” to shoot pig DNA into produce to create a protein-packed…
A rare Australian plant last recorded in 1967 has been found alive in remote Queensland after nearly six decades (Image: AI Generated) A small Australian shrub that had effectively disappeared from the scientific record for nearly six decades has been found alive in a remote part of northern Queensland. Ptilotus senarius, a species known from…
Nasa just invited India to help build a permanent base on the Moon. It’s the kind of headline that writes itself — and yet, what it actually means for India is still almost entirely undecided.Nasa wants to do something considerably more ambitious than return astronauts to the Moon. It wants to start building a place…
Researchers in Michigan have helped bring the Poweshiek skipperling butterfly back from the brink of extinction after its US wild population fell to just nine in 2022. Through captive breeding, habitat restoration and carefully planned releases, more than 1,300 butterflies were released in 2025. The recovery effort has now expanded to other endangered butterflies, while…
What if food scraps, discarded branches and seashells could help produce drinking water from the air? Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new class of biomass-based hydrogels that can capture atmospheric moisture and release it as clean water using relatively mild heat. The approach, described in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced…
The 14th century warrior’s skull was broken in 61 places. (University of Bradford photo) A skeleton uncovered beneath Scotland’s Stirling Castle may be the first confirmed archaeological evidence of a person killed by a trebuchet. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the remains belong to a defender who appears to have been killed during a…
After commercial whaling nearly erased them, blue and fin whales are slowly reclaiming the southeast Atlantic Commercial whaling killed an estimated 350,000 blue whales and 725,000 fin whales during the 20th century. More than 40 years after commercial whaling ended, however, the two largest whale species are slowly returning to parts of their former range…
There is a stretch of the South Pacific Ocean so remote that the closest people to it are usually astronauts orbiting 400 kilometres overhead, not sailors or fishermen. This is Point Nemo, a spot 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land in every direction, and for more than five decades it has served a purpose most…
