The royals across the world are known to pull numerous extravagant moves with an aim to impress. While Cleopatra made guests dine on gold plates, King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France built temporary palaces of brick and glass for a meeting. But in modern times, such grand gestures have been…
When scientists have a will, there is always a way. In a shocking yet successful project, leftover hair from haircuts that is not suitable for wigs and would have gone to waste is now being used to prevent oil and other pollutants from getting into the water and the trees.In Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay,…
In September 2022, Nasa carried out a mission that had never been attempted before: deliberately crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to change its path through space. The target was Dimorphos, a small moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid called Didymos. Neither object posed any danger to Earth, which made the pair an ideal testing ground…
Benjamin Franklin (Image: Wikipedia) Two people can spend a lifetime accumulating whatever they consider valuable and end up with completely different kinds of wealth to show for it. One collects money, property, and possessions, each one clearly priced, each one able to be counted. The other spends that same effort building something that resists being…
Representative Image of Australian magpies cooperating to remove tracking devices from one another (AI-generated image) Researchers in Queensland fitted five Australian magpies with tiny GPS trackers, hoping to map their movements and understand how age, sex or rank affected the way the flock behaved. The birds had other plans. Within about ten minutes, an untagged…
Archaeologists in China have uncovered an extraordinary alcoholic drink that remained remarkably well preserved for more than 2,000 years inside an ancient bronze bottle. The vessel, recovered from a Qin-period tomb at the Shanjiabao cemetery in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, contained about 3.74 litres of pale blue-green liquid, equivalent to nearly a gallon. Scientific…
America is quietly building a network of nuclear-powered nodes on the ocean floor that could charge drone submarines for close to three decades without a cable, a support ship or a single resupply run. The fuel behind this project is strontium-90, a radioactive by-product that has sat in government storage for decades, and the Pentagon…
Photo credit: University of Cádiz Archaeologists working near Teba in Málaga, southern Spain, have uncovered a remarkably well-preserved megalithic tomb that is more than 5,000 years old. Announced by the University of Cádiz, the structure, known as Dolmen I of the La Lentejuela necropolis stretches about 13 metres, or roughly 42 feet, and contains multiple…
Earth’s core holds far more gold than anyone can reach. More than 99.999 per cent of the planet’s stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 kilometres of solid rock, locked away within the metallic core and far beyond the reach of humankind. For decades, geologists assumed this vast reserve was permanently…
Alexander Graham Bell is best remembered for helping develop the telephone, an invention that transformed how people communicated across distance. Yet Bell himself recognised that major breakthroughs rarely belong entirely to one person. His statement, “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds”, reflects the collaborative nature of scientific progress. Bell worked…
