A man who decided to keep every piece of plastic he threw away for an entire year ended up with a collection of 4,490 pieces, turning a simple personal experiment into a wider effort to reduce everyday plastic waste. Instead of allowing wrappers, packaging and other discarded items to disappear into the bin, he saved…
A new study reveals that wolves brought back to Isle Royale National Park are building a self-sustaining population. Researchers observed the wolves from September 2018 to September 2023 after the National Park Service released 19 animals captured in Minnesota, Michigan and Ontario. The population grew steadily during this period, reaching a minimum of 27 wolves…
The study was conducted in Little Rock Lake, an 18-hectare undeveloped, unfished lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin. A large curtain divides the lake into 2 similar basins. From the surface a lake might look like it is not changing at all but underneath it is a very different story. Scientists demonstrated how important fallen trees…
Published in Science Advances, the study draws on comparisons of biological brains and experiments on artificial neural networks to suggest a new framework for understanding the evolution of intelligence. For decades, the human brain was like some evolutionary skyscraper: ancient instincts on the bottom, emotions in the middle, and sophisticated reasoning on the top. That’s…
Mathematician and programmer Mary Tsingou Menzel When mathematician and programmer Mary Tsingou Menzel sat down in 1952 at Los Alamos National Laboratory to code a complex physics problem on one of the world’s earliest digital computers, she was breaking new ground. Her work helped make possible a landmark experiment that went on to influence chaos…
On the edge of the Mojave Desert, rows of solar panels now cover ground that once looked much like the surrounding landscape: pale sand, scattered vegetation and long stretches of exposed soil. The Gemini solar project, northeast of Las Vegas, was built across about 20 square kilometres and contains roughly 1.8 million panels. Before construction,…
One year after beavers were released into the wild at Studland in Dorset, their activity has dramatically reshaped part of the local landscape A pair of wild beavers released in Dorset have transformed a dense woodland into a bright, wetland habitat within just 12 months of arriving in their new home. Data shared by the…
China’s Taihu Lake sees improved water quality over past 10 years A field trial using a two-stage nanobubble treatment system across a 3,300-square-metre section of Taihu Lake in eastern China reduced a key measure of toxic cyanobacteria by nearly 90 per cent within 20 days. Published in the journal Environmental Research and indexed on PubMed,…
Floating wetlands slash wastewater greenhouse gas emissions Installing a floating wetland planted with native vegetation on an Australian municipal wastewater lagoon cut methane emissions by up to 66 per cent, according to the results of a two-year field trial. Published on 25 August 2026 in the Journal of Environmental Management, the peer-reviewed study looked at…
Alexander von Humboldt spent much of his life travelling through landscapes that most Europeans of his era knew only from maps, then trying to understand what connected the things he encountered. He climbed mountains, measured temperatures and atmospheric pressure, recorded plants and minerals and compared conditions across different elevations. His work eventually led him to…
A team of Dutch engineering students has won first place at a major international hackathon with an idea that tackles two problems at once: plastic waste and a lack of safe, affordable housing. The project, ManufacturingBox, was developed by students from the University of Twente and took top honours at the World Federation of Engineering…
Researchers have located the planet’s largest known octopus nursery deep off the Californian coast, documenting 5,718 animals in 2.5 hectares and estimating about 20,000 around Davidson Seamount. Known as the Octopus Garden, the nursery is located about 10,500 feet below the surface off Central California. According to a statement released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium…
