Winter on Mars is not simply a season of plunging temperatures and long polar nights. As the planet moves into winter, its atmosphere begins to change with it. Carbon dioxide, the dominant gas in the Martian atmosphere, can freeze directly onto the ground or fall as snow, building temporary polar caps that hold a substantial…
Millions of years ago, several species produced higher frequencies, just like the native leaf grasshopper. Image Credit: Thoris Jonsson/University of Graz Jurassic World was not silent. Around 165 million years ago, forests in present day Inner Mongolia were filled with the calls of insects communicating through sounds that ranged from low tones to frequencies beyond…
A flock of White Storks. Image Credit: Society for Ecological Restoration(SER) White storks once formed a familiar part of the landscape in southern Sweden, but by 1954 the species had disappeared as a breeding bird from the country. Their decline was closely linked to dramatic changes in the countryside, where wetlands were drained and other…
In 2019, scientists at the University at Buffalo developed an electricity-free cooling system that uses a thin aluminium film coated with the polymer polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, to send heat from its surroundings through the atmosphere and towards outer space. The approach, known as radiative cooling, was designed to overcome a key challenge: making passive cooling…
Wild saiga antelope. Image Credit: Andrey Giljov/Wikipedia In 2015, Kazakhstan’s vast grasslands became the scene of one of the most devastating wildlife losses in recent history. Around 200,000 saiga antelopes died within weeks, leaving a population already weakened by poaching and earlier declines facing another impossible setback. The disaster wiped out more than two thirds…
Michigan State University botanist William James Beal buried 20 glass bottles filled with seeds In 1879, Michigan State University botanist William James Beal buried 20 glass bottles filled with seeds and sand in an effort to answer a deceptively simple question: how long could seeds remain dormant in the soil and still grow when conditions…
It has no leaves, no branches and no green parts, and spends much of its life concealed beneath fallen leaves on the forest floor. Scientists have now described a bizarre new flowering plant from Thailand, naming it Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”, for its dark, horn-like appearance. Details of the discovery were reported by Pensoft…
The research focused on nine extinct insect species related to modern crickets and katydids. For 165 million years, the sounds made by insects living alongside dinosaurs were lost to time. Scientists have now recreated some of those calls using fossilised wings, studies of living insects, computer modelling and artificial intelligence.According to Smithsonian Magazine, the research…
Representative Image of a caterpillar guarding wasp larvae and aggressively swinging its head at approaching predators (AI-generated image) A species of parasitic wasp has evolved one of the strangest survival strategies in the insect world, turning its caterpillar host into a living bodyguard for its own young. The wasp, from the genus Glyptapanteles, lays as…
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…
