“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”Whether those words belong to the Dalai Lama, an ancient African proverb or simply to every exhausted human who has ever lain wide awake at 2 AM listening to that infamous high-pitched whine, the debate over its authorship continues. What…
What appears to be an ordinary cemetery in upstate New York has turned out to be home to one of the most remarkable pollinator discoveries in recent years. Researchers from Cornell University have found an estimated 5.5 million mining bees living beneath East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. The vast underground aggregation of native…
PC: Manchester Museum, BBC The landscape around Wilmslow appears unremarkable at first glance. Commuter trains pass nearby, housing estates edge ever closer to open ground, and modern Cheshire carries on with little hint of the distant past beneath its feet. Yet hidden within this corner of north-west England lies a place that has repeatedly produced…
Scientists have achieved a remarkable feat by enabling mouse eyes to perform part of the photosynthetic process using specially designed eye drops derived from spinach leaves. The experimental treatment, developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore, was created to combat dry eye disease, a condition that affects millions of people worldwide. Rather than…
Ask almost anyone to name the highest point on Earth and the answer will likely be Mount Everest. Towering above the Himalayas at 8,848 metres (29,029 feet), Everest has long been celebrated as the world’s tallest mountain. Climbers dream of reaching its summit and geography textbooks have cemented its place in popular imagination.Yet there is…
15-year-old Nigerian student Raheema Auwal-Panti is attracting international attention for an innovation that tackles two major challenges at once, plastic pollution and menstrual-product accessibility. The founder of PantiPads, a biodegradable sanitary-pad initiative launched in 2025, has developed menstrual products made from agricultural waste materials that would otherwise be discarded. Her project uses cassava peelings, banana…
As heatwaves become more frequent and intense around the world, scientists are exploring new ways to keep buildings cool without increasing energy consumption. Researchers at the University of Sydney, working with startup Dewpoint Innovations, have developed a nano-engineered coating that reflects up to 97% of sunlight and stays significantly cooler than conventional surfaces. The experimental…
More than five decades ago, Apollo 14 carried an unusual payload into deep space when hundreds of tree seeds accompanied the mission on its journey around the Moon. While astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell explored the lunar surface in February 1971, command module pilot Stuart Roosa remained in lunar orbit with the seeds packed…
The history of science is crowded with people whose ideas arrived before the rest of the field was ready for them. Tibor Gánti belonged somewhere in that uneasy category: respected in small circles, barely recognised outside them, and for years almost absent from wider discussions about how life began. His work circulated quietly through Hungarian…
Asteroid alerts often sound more dramatic than the actual risk they pose. This time, NASA is tracking asteroid 2026 HW2, a building-sized space rock currently moving through Earth’s orbital neighbourhood. Travelling at nearly 44,000 kilometres per hour, the asteroid is expected to make its closest approach to Earth around 4:30 pm IST today. Despite the…
