Representative Image of diverse jellyfish species drifting through Japanese coastal waters (AI-generated image) In 2018, 13-year-old Ryoya Sugimoto was watching marine life from the docks of Tanabe Bay in Wakayama, Japan, when he spotted jellyfish he could not identify. He had been fascinated by jellyfish since childhood, after being stung by a blue button jellyfish,…
Solar Panel Waste: The Unknown Side of Solar Power Discarded solar panels could become a major global waste problem, with as much as 402 million tonnes of photovoltaic (PV) waste expected by 2060. But if these panels are recycled properly, the materials inside them could create almost $1 trillion (£770 billion) in economic value.According to…
Quote of the day by Guglielmo Marconi/Image: AI Generated Two inventors can build something genuinely new and end up asking very different questions about it afterwards. One asks only whether it worked, whether it sold, whether it earned money or recognition, and stops there, satisfied. The other asks a harder question years later, once the…
In one of the first studies of its kind, scientists have claimed that the organisms living inside the gut of psychopaths may be the drivers of their peculiar behaviour. The research team has claimed that they have discovered a link between the specific balance of microflora in the gut and psychopathic behaviour.As detailed in the…
Quote of the day by Thomas Edison: The inventor’s words on persistence explain why a dead end can become a reason to search for another solution. Two people can rack up an enormous number of failed attempts at the same problem and describe that experience in completely different terms. One counts every dead end as…
Newfoundland introduced moose for food in the region more than a century ago. Today, about 110,000 of their population are reshaping the island’s forests, eradicating them slowly. Initially, the animals had been brought in as a dependable source of meat, but the expansion of the herd has unleashed somewhat of an ecological juggernaut on the…
Food insecurity remains a daily reality for more than 300 million people across Africa, and the high cost of imported potassium fertiliser is part of the problem. Nearly all of the world’s potash is mined in Canada, Russia and Germany, leaving African farmers reliant on expensive, distant supply chains and a fertiliser that leaches quickly…
In September 1968, three months before Apollo 8 carried the first humans around the Moon, two Central Asian steppe tortoises had already made the same journey and returned home alive. According to Nasa, the tortoises launched aboard the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, travelling alongside wine flies, worms and plants as…
Representative Image of floating seaweed farms operating alongside offshore wind turbines in the North Sea (AI-generated image) A vessel recently sailed through the Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm off the Dutch coast to collect the first-ever harvest of seaweed grown between operating turbines, marking a milestone for a project testing whether offshore wind farms can…
Spring changes the sound of the countryside. Fields that have spent the winter covered in crop residue are opened up, machinery moves across the soil and much of the vegetation disappears within days. For bats hunting after sunset, that seasonal shift can alter where food is easiest to find.That became apparent in a two-year monitoring…
On a small island off the coast of Sweden, a tragedy lay buried for thousands of years, hidden in the depths of a cave. Buried under ancient sediment, were the bones of a young woman and a fetus, estimated to be around 32 to 34 weeks of gestation.The shocking discovery was made by archaeologists in…
A sediment core pulled from the seabed off West Antarctica has preserved evidence of a forest that grew near the South Pole about 90 million years ago, when the continent was warm enough to support a wet, temperate ecosystem. The core contains fossilised roots, pollen and spores from vegetation that lived at a latitude of…
