In the middle of the 19th century, sending a message across the Atlantic was still a distant ambition. Telegraph lines had already begun shrinking distances on land, but an ocean presented a different problem. A signal travelling through thousands of miles of cable could arrive so weak that ordinary instruments struggled to detect it. William…
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…
Not everyone who closes their eyes and hits the bed at night goes to sleep. Some end up transitioning into a dream-like state that has them waking up while feeling hazy, lazy and heavy, with no feelings of rest and freshness. But is it the dreams that weigh you out or does it have something…
Oyster farmers across Hiroshima Prefecture are pulling up their rafts this season to find that most of what they cultivated has not survived. In several coastal districts, mortality rates have reached as high as 90%, far above the usual seasonal loss of 30% to 50%. Producers in the city of Higashihiroshima have reported losses at…
For more than a century, Yosemite’s mountain lakes became home to millions of trout that had never naturally reached those waters. Fish stocking began in 1877 and eventually put more than 33 million fish into the park, transforming habitats that had evolved without aquatic predators. The change came at a cost for the Sierra Nevada…
A spider web can look like a single delicate sheet of thread, but its construction is far more complicated. Different strands are made for different jobs, with some providing the strength needed to hold the web together and others stretching to trap prey. Orb-weaver spiders are particularly good examples of this division of labour. Their…
Harrison’s H4 chronometre. Image Credit: Jordiferrer/Wikipedia The first clockmaker did not have to guess what time it was. Long before gears, wheels and moving hands appeared, people had already learned to track the passage of a day by watching the Sun, Moon and stars. Sundials, water clocks and other simple devices gave earlier societies ways…
A rainbow of light forms because different wavelengths travel through a prism or water droplets at different angles. Scientists have now shown that sound can be made to behave in a way that splits a broadband acoustic signal into separate frequency components that travel in different directions or come to rest at different positions within…
Plastic alternatives made from renewable materials often struggle to match the strength, heat resistance and processing ability of conventional plastics. A new bamboo-based bioplastic takes a different approach, reorganising cellulose at the molecular level to produce a material that is both strong and easier to shape. The researchers used a hydrated zinc chloride and formic…
PC: Wikipedia, Wilson44691 – Own work, Public Domain About 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, a year lasted roughly 372 days rather than 365, meaning each day was around half an hour shorter than it is today. The research team examined the growth layers of a single fossilised rudist bivalve, Torreites sanchezi,…
