Restoring damaged land can look straightforward on paper: plant trees, repair soils and wait for vegetation to return. On the ground, the work is less predictable. Young plants have to survive drought, poor soils, fire, grazing and the other pressures that caused landscapes to deteriorate in the first place.Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, known as CONAFOR,…
Four concrete barriers blocked the way for salmon that once swam freely between the Pacific Ocean and the high desert reaches of Oregon and California for more than a hundred years. The dams were removed in 2024 as part of one of the largest dam removal projects in U.S. history, letting the river flow freely…
Nuclear fusion illustration Photo: Canva Inside a steel vault at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a superheated whirl of charged particles spins in near vacuum, held in place by invisible magnetic fields. This is a fusion plasma, the same kind of matter that powers the Sun, and it is notoriously difficult to control.In a recent…
Chen Yuanhui. Image Credit: South China Morning Post Chen Yuanhui has spent more than four decades studying one of China’s rarest venomous snakes, even though his work has cost him part of a finger and repeatedly put his life in danger. The 77-year-old, widely known as the ‘Snake Doctor,’ discovered the ‘Mangshan pit viper’ and…
Image Credit: AI Generated Two Canadian students have developed a colour-changing toothpaste designed to make toothbrushing easier for children to understand. Ella Zhang and Gillian Leung, students at Havergal College in Canada, created ‘ToothTint’ as a school project that uses a natural pigment to change colour in response to conditions inside the mouth. The idea…
PC: California’s La Brea Tar Pits & Museum A small Ice Age toad hidden in the collections of California’s La Brea Tar Pits has emerged as a new species to science, giving researchers another way to read the environmental history of ancient Los Angeles. ‘Spea labreae’, the extinct spadefoot toad, was identified when Dr Alberto…
A panel of the mosaic depicts a dog named Ocean. Around 1,800 years ago, a Roman household in what is now Turkey decorated the floor of its home with a detailed mosaic showing animals and mythological figures. Among them were a cat and a dog whose names were written beside their images. Archaeologists have now…
This behaviour has often been described as elephants visiting a “grave” or mourning their dead. But scientists say the reality is more complicated. An elephant herd comes across the remains of another elephant. Instead of simply walking past, some animals slow down, approach the bones, touch them with their trunks and sniff them. In some…
Max Planck, the German physicist whose work helped lay the foundation for quantum theory, believed that science was ultimately a search for deeper and more fundamental truths. His reflections on scientific discovery reveal how strongly he valued the pursuit of universal principles rather than simply solving individual problems. In his Scientific Autobiography, Planck wrote about…
El Niño is wreaking havoc not only on humans and the climate, but also animals. From ferocious tigers to little waddling penguins, everyone has been bearing their souls with the heightening heat that remains undefeated and overpowering. Amidst this, researchers in Chile have designed an unlikely new garment for injured penguins, snug red vests threaded…
