Science

British Columbia reservoirRepresentative image from Canva In the summer of 2026, workers and residents around the Williston Reservoir in northern British Columbia witnessed something that sounded like folklore: a large, forested island broke free from the shoreline, drifted across the lake, disappeared from view, and then turned up again about 30 kilometres away, still carrying…

Pine martens are making a remarkable return to south-west England after disappearing from Exmoor for more than a century, with conservationists capturing the first confirmed evidence that the reintroduced animals are breeding in the wild. A remote trail camera recorded a female pine marten with four kits on Exmoor, signalling that an ambitious effort to…

With countries fighting wars and natural calamities sweeping away civilisations, it seems a global collapse might be a spark away. But the possibility of entire humanity vanishing off the face of Earth seems a little less plausible with the years of effort we have spent preparing solutions for such situations. However, not everyone can be…

In an age when information moves faster than ever, distinguishing between what is true and what people simply want to believe has become increasingly important. People can form strong opinions about science, health, politics, technology and everyday events, sometimes accepting claims because they fit what they already believe. Astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson…

A camera on the Philippine island of Mindoro captured one of the country’s rarest birds, confirming that the critically endangered Mindoro bleeding-heart pigeon still survives in the wild. The bird was spotted in August in the Puerto Galera rainforest, and is the first confirmed photograph of the species Gallicolumba platenae in two decades, according to…

When Lilah Mehta entered a biomedical research laboratory at Yale University as a 16-year-old high-school pupil, her main goal was to explore the biological questions that had interested her since her ninth-grade science classes. Two years later, the New Canaan resident and King School student in Stamford has reached an academic milestone rarely achieved before…

PC: Harris & Ewing/Wikipedia In 1921, a 14-year-old boy working in an Idaho potato field imagined something almost impossible: sending pictures through the air in the same way radio carried sound. His name was Philo Farnsworth, and the vision he had would eventually lead him towards electronic television. Farnsworth believed pictures could be transmitted as…

At 12, Shubham Banerjee was looking for a way to make Braille printing more affordable. His search began after he saw a letter asking for help for blind people during his family’s Christmas celebrations at home. When he learnt that Braille printers could cost more than $2,000, he wondered whether the technology could be built…

NASA’s Hubble captures Saturn’s mysterious 10-sided atmospheric wave at its south pole (Image: X/ @NASAHubble) Saturn has revealed another strange feature in its atmosphere, and this time it is hiding around the planet’s south pole. New observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have captured a giant, evolving 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling the southern pole of…

In 2021, Nasa grew Hatch chile peppers aboard the International Space Station for the first time, producing edible fruit after 137 days in microgravity. The Plant Habitat-04 experiment was designed to test whether a fruiting crop could survive and produce food in orbit, an important step towards growing fresh produce during future missions to the…

High in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, communities are reviving an age-old practice to answer a modern water crisis: they are ‘marrying’ glaciers. As natural glaciers shrink and meltwater becomes less reliable, local people are carrying pieces of ice from existing glaciers to carefully chosen sites, where male and female ice are brought together and buried…

A pair of cotton pants is not usually considered scientific equipment. Yet across Switzerland, thousands of them spent weeks underground as part of an unusual experiment into the condition of the soil beneath people’s feet.More than 1,000 volunteers took part, burying underwear and teabags at sites ranging from private gardens and farmland to grasslands and…