Science

Researchers have located the planet’s largest known octopus nursery deep off the Californian coast, documenting 5,718 animals in 2.5 hectares and estimating about 20,000 around Davidson Seamount. Known as the Octopus Garden, the nursery is located about 10,500 feet below the surface off Central California. According to a statement released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium…

Beneath the quiet lawns and weathered headstones of a small cemetery in Ithaca, New York, scientists have uncovered one of the most astonishing bee discoveries in recent memory. In a carefully studied 1.5-acre section of the cemetery grounds, researchers estimated that about 5.5 million wild, ground-nesting bees live in a dense network of underground nests….

Seven-year-old Alyssa was looking for bugs and collecting rocks at a Calgary playground when she noticed something unusual in one of the boulders surrounding the park. A dark shape embedded in the stone caught her attention, prompting the young palaeontology enthusiast to take a closer look. What began as an ordinary search during a trip…

A man who decided to keep every piece of plastic he threw away for an entire year ended up with a collection of 4,490 pieces, turning a simple personal experiment into a wider effort to reduce everyday plastic waste. Instead of allowing wrappers, packaging and other discarded items to disappear into the bin, he saved…

Almost 10 years after the tanks went under, researchers from Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok did some diving to see what had grown up around the man-made reef sites. Battle tank is made for war. It is built to cross tough terrain, take a beating and dominate a battlefield. But what if the battlefield disappears and…

Waste coffee grounds and discarded oyster shells could be turned into a useful construction material. The mixture used spent coffee grounds (SCG) as its main filler, with oyster shells added to strengthen the granular structure and GGBS-based alkali-activated materials used as the binder. Because SCG particles are highly compressible, the researchers added oyster shells in…

Soldiers on both sides stand behind fences and in between are thousands of landmines. For more than 70 years, humans have not ventured into a 155-mile-long corridor that divides two nations, North and South Korea. While boundaries and borders can ward people off, nature is above all such regulations. This is probably why a space…

A thirsty bat sweeps over a pond, listens to the echoes returning from its surface and drops closer to drink. But what happens when that same acoustic signal comes from something that only looks like water to its echolocation system? Scientists have found that bats can be surprisingly easy to fool. In controlled experiments, smooth…

Australian brook lamprey. Image Credit: David Moffatt In 2022, Australian ecologist Dr Luke Carpenter-Bundhoo set out to study how the Black Summer bushfires had affected ecosystems in K’gari, Queensland. Instead, while surveying a creek, he encountered an unexpected creature: an eel-like fish with seven gills and a mouth lined with circular rows of teeth. The…

PC: University of Nebraska–Lincoln From university laboratories in Germany to beetle specimens collected from dung in China, Patrick Urban’s career has focused on insects that are easy to overlook. The German biologist specialises in dung beetle taxonomy and ecology, with particular attention to the Onthophagini group found across the Palearctic and Indomalayan regions. His work…