Science

A juvenile and an adult Black Drongo perch on a tree branch (ANI Photo) In 1935, the Japanese South Seas Development Company made a decision that would have repercussions for Mariana Islands’ ecosystems for nearly 100 years. In search of a natural method for controlling agricultural pests, they imported black drongos (Dicrurus macrocercus) from Taiwan…

A used paper towel is rarely given a second thought. Once it has wiped up a spill or dried a surface, it usually goes straight into the bin, while the material it was made from has already passed through a much longer chain of production. International Science and Engineering Fair reported that Arnav Kodavati, a…

Max Hung Nguyen was 17 when he began looking at a problem that astronomers have been studying for decades: whether the chemical make-up of a star can offer clues about the planets that form around it. The Leland High School student from San Jose used data from Nasa’s Exoplanet Archive and the Hypatia Catalogue for…

Detail of the main Huashan Rock art. Image Credit: Rolfmueller/Wikipedia Ancient paintings covering limestone cliffs in southern China may owe their remarkable survival to an unexpected ingredient known as ‘blood.’ A new study of the ‘Huashan rock art’ in Guangxi published in the ‘Journal of Archaeological Science’ suggests that the artists used a mixture containing…

Growing up along Adobe Creek in Mountain View, Kiefer Chow spent his childhood afternoons doing something most people would call child’s play: stacking sticks and mud into makeshift dams. Years later, that same instinct would grow into something far more consequential. Alongside his sister Amelia, Kiefer founded Eco-Engineering In Action, a youth-led non-profit built on…

Marie Curie once offered a powerful message about self-belief, perseverance and the importance of finding a purpose in life: “We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.” Curie wrote these words in a letter to her brother Joseph on March 18, 1894, when she…

Stephen Hawking‘s words offer a genuinely powerful reminder that a difficult situation rarely means every single possibility has actually disappeared. “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at,” he said. “It matters that you don’t just give up.” He said this in a speech to the Oxford Union…

Atolls can take up to 30 million years to form, but these tiny coral islands now support 31 million seabirds across the Indo-Pacific (PC: AI Generated) Atolls may look like tiny rings of sand and coral scattered across warm tropical oceans, but they are far more important than their small land areas. These unusual natural…

Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) SuBastian is deployed from the research vessel Falkor (too) in the South Atlantic during the expedition. Image Credit: Alex Ingle / Schmidt Ocean Institute An international team of marine scientists has discovered 31 new species in the ocean’s vast midwater zone during an expedition in the tropical South Atlantic off the…

Representative Image of asteroid (585349) Eeuwes traveling through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (AI-generated image) A 1.5-kilometre asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter now carries the name of Astrid Eeuwes, a Dutch amateur astronomer from Nijmegen who spends much of her time studying micrometeorites, tiny particles of space material that…

Avocado (single and halved). Image Credit: Ivar Leidus/Wikipedia Avocados growing in Nicaragua may carry a remarkable record of ancient human migration across the Americas. A new study published in ‘Plants, People, Planet’ has found that several avocado varieties growing in Nicaragua are genetically distinct from the commercial varieties commonly found today and are more closely…

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…