Science

The Amazon rainforest is never truly quiet, and its endless chorus of chirps, whistles and calls may carry far more information than humans realise. Scientists studying wildlife in the Peruvian Amazon have uncovered a remarkable network in which birds and primates pick up information from one another’s alarm calls when predators appear. Small canopy birds…

Asteroid breakup 800 million years ago may have triggered impacts on Earth, the Moon and Mars (AI photo) A massive asteroid that broke apart around 800 million years ago may have sent a huge number of rocky fragments towards Earth, the Moon and Mars, according to a new study led by researchers at the Southwest…

Cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae is known to have played an ancient role in establishing Earth’s atmosphere. They love warm temperatures, lots of sunlight and slow-moving water. Florida’s year-round climate provides all of this and more. When rivers, lakes and estuaries are loaded with excess nitrogen and phosphorus, often due to agricultural runoff and improperly treated…

Zoe Kissane says the birds often ate at seed spills around agricultural operations (Supplied: Murdoch Univeristy) Scientists tracking endangered Carnaby’s black cockatoos across Western Australia’s Wheatbelt over three breeding seasons found worrying levels of chemical contamination in the birds’ food. Four out of five seed samples tested positive for pesticides, with some containing chemical levels…

In 1970, Soviet scientists began drilling into the ground on the Kola Peninsula in the far northwest of the country, hoping to reach deeper into the earth than anyone before them. Almost two decades later, in 1989, the project hit its final depth of 12,262 metres, making it the deepest vertical borehole ever created by…

Albert Einstein (Image: Wikipedia) Some people move through the world treating almost everything as ordinary. Others notice something remarkable in the same ordinary details. A line widely credited to Albert Einstein names that exact split. “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as…

On a cold November morning in 1957, a small stray dog that had wandered the streets of Moscow became part of one of the defining moments of the early Space Age. Her name was Laika. She was placed inside Sputnik 2, a spacecraft built in haste after the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik just…

We live in a world where everything, from the blood running in our veins to the oceans spanning our planet, is polluted by plastic in one way or the other. We see mountains of plastic rubbish growing day-by-day. We are currently facing a massive environmental crisis as humanity produces over 460 million tonnes of plastic…

An image of the rediscovered coral reef by Gérard Zinzindohoué (Photo: Gérard Zinzindohoué) A deep-water coral reef off the coast of West Africa that was believed to be dead for six decades has been discovered alive and thriving more than 50 metres below the ocean surface.The forgotten reef was first identified off the coast of…

Artificial intelligence has transformed wildlife photography, allowing people to sharpen blurry images, remove distracting branches and enhance colours with just a few clicks. But scientists now say these seemingly harmless edits could have unintended consequences far beyond social media. A new commentary published in Nature Ecology & Evolution warns that AI-enhanced bird photographs are beginning…

7,000-year-old fish traps show hunter-gatherers brought fish to Norway’s mountains centuries before farming Ancient hunter-gatherers carried live brown trout past steep waterfalls to stock empty mountain lakes in Norway 7,000 years ago, creating managed fisheries whose descendants are still being caught by local anglers today.Archaeologists at the University of Oslo discovered well-preserved wooden fish traps…

Sending humans to Mars is one of Nasa’s greatest ambitions, but the journey presents enormous challenges. A round trip could take well over a year, exposing astronauts to dangerous cosmic radiation, muscle and bone loss caused by microgravity, psychological stress and the need to carry vast amounts of food, water and supplies. To tackle these…