Representative Image of diverse jellyfish species drifting through Japanese coastal waters (AI-generated image) In 2018, 13-year-old Ryoya Sugimoto was watching marine life from the docks of Tanabe Bay in Wakayama, Japan, when he spotted jellyfish he could not identify. He had been fascinated by jellyfish since childhood, after being stung by a blue button jellyfish,…
Newfoundland introduced moose for food in the region more than a century ago. Today, about 110,000 of their population are reshaping the island’s forests, eradicating them slowly. Initially, the animals had been brought in as a dependable source of meat, but the expansion of the herd has unleashed somewhat of an ecological juggernaut on the…
Solar Panel Waste: The Unknown Side of Solar Power Discarded solar panels could become a major global waste problem, with as much as 402 million tonnes of photovoltaic (PV) waste expected by 2060. But if these panels are recycled properly, the materials inside them could create almost $1 trillion (£770 billion) in economic value.According to…
In one of the first studies of its kind, scientists have claimed that the organisms living inside the gut of psychopaths may be the drivers of their peculiar behaviour. The research team has claimed that they have discovered a link between the specific balance of microflora in the gut and psychopathic behaviour.As detailed in the…
Quote of the day by Thomas Edison: The inventor’s words on persistence explain why a dead end can become a reason to search for another solution. Two people can rack up an enormous number of failed attempts at the same problem and describe that experience in completely different terms. One counts every dead end as…
Quote of the day by Guglielmo Marconi/Image: AI Generated Two inventors can build something genuinely new and end up asking very different questions about it afterwards. One asks only whether it worked, whether it sold, whether it earned money or recognition, and stops there, satisfied. The other asks a harder question years later, once the…
Food insecurity remains a daily reality for more than 300 million people across Africa, and the high cost of imported potassium fertiliser is part of the problem. Nearly all of the world’s potash is mined in Canada, Russia and Germany, leaving African farmers reliant on expensive, distant supply chains and a fertiliser that leaches quickly…
There is a stretch of the South Pacific Ocean so remote that the closest people to it are usually astronauts orbiting 400 kilometres overhead, not sailors or fishermen. This is Point Nemo, a spot 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land in every direction, and for more than five decades it has served a purpose most…
Spring changes the sound of the countryside. Fields that have spent the winter covered in crop residue are opened up, machinery moves across the soil and much of the vegetation disappears within days. For bats hunting after sunset, that seasonal shift can alter where food is easiest to find.That became apparent in a two-year monitoring…
A sediment core pulled from the seabed off West Antarctica has preserved evidence of a forest that grew near the South Pole about 90 million years ago, when the continent was warm enough to support a wet, temperate ecosystem. The core contains fossilised roots, pollen and spores from vegetation that lived at a latitude of…
