Science

PC: LinkedIn Profile of Aadit Krishna A Union County teenager has developed a floating water-purification system designed to tackle PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a class of persistent chemicals called ‘forever chemicals’. Aadit P. Krishna, whose research focuses on decentralised water purification, developed HelioPure as a solar-powered platform that can operate on surface water. The…

In 1896, American electrical engineer William Hadaway received the first patent for an electric stove, marking an important step in the development of electric cooking. His patent came just four years after Canadian executive Thomas Ahearn put together the first electric range in 1892, as cooking technology was moving beyond wood, coal and gas. According…

Thecacera sesama. Image Credit: Ho-Yeung Chan An accidental encounter by a student during a recreational dive has led to the formal description of a ‘tiny new sea slug’ from the waters of north-eastern Taiwan. ‘Ho-Yeung Chan’ first noticed the animal while diving and later helped establish that it belonged to a species previously unknown to…

Quote of the day by Richard Feynman (Image: Wikipedia) Not knowing the answer to a question can often feel like a weakness. In school, at work and even in everyday conversations, people may feel pressure to appear knowledgeable and confident, even when they are uncertain. American physicist Richard Feynman viewed uncertainty very differently. Known for…

In September 2007, the European Space Agency launched roughly 3,000 tardigrades into low Earth orbit aboard the Biopan-6 platform on the FOTON-M3 mission. Known as water bears, these microscopic animals were dried into a dormant state before being exposed directly to the vacuum of space, alongside doses of solar and cosmic radiation, for ten days…

Kaia Minn at the National Academy of Inventors conference. Image Credit: kaiaminn.com A discarded citrus peel is not the sort of thing most people would associate with restoring forests. But for 13-year-old Massachusetts inventor ‘Kaia Minn,’ it became the starting point for a simple idea with potentially far-reaching environmental uses. Minn has developed a ‘biodegradable…

​Representative Image of fluorescent scorpions glowing across a desert landscape after dark (AI-generated image) In 1945, an Arizona State University professor began wandering the desert at night, hunting scorpions that glowed under his black light, and few people around him understood why. That professor, Herbert L Stahnke, was already the nation’s leading authority on scorpions…

Representative Image (AI-generated) A tiny concentration of a synthetic hormone was enough to trigger a dramatic ecological change in a remote Ontario lake. In 2001, scientists began adding the synthetic estrogen 17α-ethynylestradiol (EE2) to Lake 260 in northwestern Ontario, maintaining concentrations of about 5 to 6 nanograms per litre. The experiment continued for seven years,…

Representative Image (AI-generated) A river can carry a contaminant far beyond the point where it enters the water, but predicting exactly how quickly that material will travel is not always straightforward. In 2010, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), working with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, conducted a dye-tracing experiment on a 41.2-mile…

Since 2015, British Columbia has killed 200-300 wolves annually to help endangered caribou populations recover. Recently, the provincial government has proposed extending its decade-long wolf cull program by five more years in areas that are home to 15 declining woodland caribou herds. But according to scientists, the deforestation, not the wolves, is the main driver…