August may look like a busy month in a garden, meadow or city park, but for honeybees, late summer can be surprisingly difficult. New research from the University of Sussex has found that honeybees expend more effort and gain less energy while collecting nectar in late July and August than during much of spring. The…
In late 2028, Nasa plans to send something unusual towards Mars, a spacecraft carrying a working nuclear reactor designed to generate electricity for propulsion in deep space. Space Reactor-1 Freedom is intended to test nuclear electric propulsion beyond Earth orbit, where conventional solar power becomes increasingly difficult to use. The spacecraft will not land on…
For his project, Kang trained AI models to detect patterns associated with neurodevelopmental disorders from a large public dataset of retinal images. Instead of one approach, he used several techniques to improve the performance of the models. What if a simple picture of the eye could help doctors diagnose neurodevelopmental conditions earlier? For 17-year-old Edward…
A pile of discarded cashew shells would normally have little to do with international shipping. In Maharashtra agricultural leftovers are being fed into reactors that can turn them into usable fuel, gases and biochar. The technology comes from an unusual India-Denmark partnership built around the Viking biomass gasifier developed at the Technical University of Denmark….
The Moon’s south pole may contain small pockets where some Earth microbes could remain alive after being carried there by astronauts or spacecraft. A new Nasa study has mapped parts of the region where five types of bacteria and fungi may withstand lunar conditions for at least a day, with the hardiest organism potentially lasting…
Representative Image (Canva) Some stars can make repeated close passes around supermassive black holes, losing part of their material each time while surviving to return again. These encounters produce bursts of light, or flares, that can recur months or even years apart. But astronomers have been puzzled by a pattern seen in some of these…
Dr. Savannah Ulalian Bishop photographs an archaeological amphora (Picture: KOC University) Imagine an ancient amphora recovered from the seabed after centuries underwater. It may be cracked, covered with deposits or missing large sections. Restoring such an object is difficult without causing further damage.To overcome this problem, researchers at Koc University in Turkiye have developed a…
A nest box occupied by a Eurasian scops owl might seem an unlikely place to find a live snake, yet that is exactly what researchers repeatedly encountered in central Türkiye. Across six breeding seasons, they inspected 109 owl nests and found the small worm snake Xerotyphlops vermicularis in 44% of them. The reptiles were not…
In the process of striving for our long-term objectives, it may be easy to lose sight of the significance of the tasks at hand. However, James Clerk Maxwell provided a different outlook, stating that even regular work could be associated with an ideal much bigger than the situation itself. He says, “Happy is the man…
Cricket on a plant (Image Credit: Canva) In 2005, scientists conducted an unusual experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to investigate how microgravity affects reproduction and early development. According to a NASA technical publication on ISS research, crickets were fertilised in orbit, allowing scientists to observe embryos and larvae that began developing under microgravity….
