Sophie Adenot’s first spacewalk was supposed to be about replacing an antenna. Instead, the 18 August outing left the French astronaut with two milestones to carry back inside the International Space Station: becoming the first French woman to walk in space, and an unfinished repair that will require another trip outside. Adenot and Nasa astronaut…
PC: Dhruv Varun Cohen ’26/Cornell University Thousands of hours of rainforest recordings are helping scientists teach artificial intelligence to recognise Amazonian birds that can be difficult to identify by sound alone. In Colombia, Cornell researchers have been collecting acoustic data from cattle ranches, rubber agroforestry plots and forest to build a clearer picture of which…
Image: Society for Science/Chris Ayers Photography At just 18, Jaeho Lee has already taken on a mathematical problem that reaches far beyond the classroom. A student at Spring Branch Academic Institute in Houston, Texas, Lee was named one of the 40 finalists in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search, after studying the structure of affine…
PC: Long overdue: a new, widespread, species of Pristimantis (Anura, Strabomantidae) from the Chocó region and the synonymy of Pristimantis subsigillatus For more than a century, a frog living across the forests of western Ecuador and southern Colombia carried the wrong scientific name. It was not hidden in some unexplored corner of the rainforest, either….
There are moments when a simple disagreement quietly turns into something larger. A conversation stops, assumptions take over and a distance begins to grow between people who may once have understood each other well. Sometimes the separation is deliberate, created to protect a boundary or avoid conflict. At other times, it happens almost without anyone…
Snow-covered mountain ranges of the Montagne Noire. Image Credit: Von Christian Ferrer/Wikipedia Nearly 400 fossils discovered in southern France are giving scientists a detailed view of marine life that lived close to the South Pole about 470 million years ago. The fossils belong to the newly described Cabrières Biota, an Early Ordovician fossil site in…
Representative Image of an apple orchard with solar panels providing shade while generating electricity (AI-generated image) In 2022, researchers running a field experiment in southern France found that moving solar panels installed above an apple orchard sharply reduced sunburn damage on the fruit. The system, known as a dynamic agrivoltaic setup, tilts photovoltaic panels through…
What happened to the reindeer on St. Matthew Island is a classic story of wildlife boom and bust. In 1944, the US Coast Guard corralled 29 Nunivak Island reindeer on a barge and floated the animals north to the island, more than 200 miles away to one of the most remote places in Alaska. While…
Harmful algal blooms can turn freshwater ecosystems into dangerous environments, but researchers at Florida Atlantic University are developing a novel way to tackle one of the nutrients that helps drive them, excess phosphorus. Rather than removing algae after a bloom has already formed, the team is developing 3D-printed adsorbent structures designed to capture phosphate directly…
There is a difference between knowing something and being able to see what might come next. Knowledge gives people facts, experience and established ways of understanding the world. Imagination works in a less certain space, where an idea can be considered before there is evidence to prove whether it will work. Albert Einstein often spoke…
Overview of Hibernophis breithaupti (UW11120 on two blocks), showing holotype (UW-11120-A) and paratype (UW-11120-B) specimens as exposed on the surface. Image Credit: Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society A snake fossil discovery in Wyoming has given palaeontologists an unusually close look at the lives of these ancient reptiles. Four complete skeletons belonging to a newly…
Image: Wikipedia/AI-Refined Throughout time, man has always searched for his rightful place within nature. Man is one and the same biological entity as every other living thing, but he possesses unique capabilities of reasoning and questioning which distinguish him from all other species and give him a special vantage point within nature. This idea was…
