Quote of the day by Nikola Tesla (Image: Wikipedia) Every generation grows up surrounded by things that would have seemed genuinely impossible only a few decades earlier. A technology that once amazed an entire population can become so ordinary that people stop noticing it exists at all. Nikola Tesla, the inventor and engineer whose work…
Scientists have pieced together the deepest genetic history of the North American bison ever assembled, using DNA drawn from 115 animals that lived before the species was pushed to near extinction in the 20th century. As per the findings, led by researchers at the University of California, and featured on the cover of the 6…
A decade ago, more than 99% of sunflower sea stars vanished from the depths of the ocean. Now, the discovery of a long-lost colony of these organisms is offering new hope for the region’s kelp forests.Sunflower sea stars, known as Pycnopodia helianthoides, may look like an aesthetic and purely decorative feature on the ocean floor,…
Dog parents, this is your ‘told you’ moment! All those times you felt your dog sensed your mood before you even said a word, that wasn’t nothing. The time when you were crying your heart out and your baby just rested on your lap? That was him reading you. Not guessing. Not just picking up…
Brian Ekstrom and Lance Downing pulling the beach seine to collect juvenile fish at a restoration site on the lower Columbia River A routine dredging project on the Lower Columbia River has become a major long-term experiment to see whether dredged sediment can be used to restore lost wildlife habitat.In October 2020, engineers pumped 225,000…
In 1922, biologist Olaus J. Murie entered Alaska’s vast wilderness to study caribou, beginning a body of field research that would eventually influence how scientists and park managers understood wildlife as part of interconnected ecosystems. Murie had been hired by the US Biological Survey as a wildlife biologist and spent much of the early 1920s…
Across the United States, glyphosate is applied across an enormous area of farmland each year. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, an average of 298 million acres of cropland receives glyphosate applications annually, giving a sense of how routinely the herbicide enters agricultural landscapes. Much of the attention around glyphosate has centred on weeds…
On 21 August 2017, the afternoon light at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, began to fade. For the people gathered there, the approaching darkness was an astronomical spectacle. For the animals living outside in the zoo’s enclosures, it was something rather different: daylight was suddenly behaving as if evening had arrived. Researchers had prepared…
Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland A single third of the world’s agricultural land is responsible for roughly two-thirds of all farming-related biodiversity loss and the loss of natural carbon storage, according to a global study published in Nature Food.The research, led by scientists from Leiden University’s Institute of…
The only total solar eclipse of 2026 is happening today, 12 August, as the Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow across the Northern Hemisphere. The main path of totality will stretch through Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain and a small part of Portugal.For people standing inside that…
