Patna: A monumental banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) located on the Indian Tobacco Company (ITC) campus in Munger has been identified as one of the world’s oldest scientifically dated living trees with its age estimated at around 700 years through radiocarbon dating.The discovery followed a survey conducted by the Bihar Biodiversity Board in 2022, which examined…
Science classes are often remembered for textbooks, diagrams and memorising formulas. Mark Rober wants children to remember something different, namely the excitement of discovering how the world works. The former NASA engineer and one of YouTube’s most popular science creators has launched a free educational initiative worth $60 million aimed at making science engaging, hands-on…
Australia’s inland edges are still, almost indifferent to change, where heat sits over the ground for long stretches and movement feels slow even when it is not. Yet in these same places, something introduced nearly a century ago has been steadily rewriting its own limits. The cane toad arrived with a very specific job attached…
Confucius (Image: Wikipedia) There is a moment that arrives for many people after they leave school or university. The exams are over. The certificates have been collected. The years of structured learning come to an end. For a while, it can feel as though education itself has finished.Then life gets involved.A job changes. Technology changes….
For decades, dinosaurs like Velociraptor have dominated our imagination as fast-moving predators that chased prey across dusty landscapes. But deep in the fossil-rich rocks of southern Patagonia, scientists have uncovered a very different kind of raptor, one that may have spent much of its life standing quietly beside rivers, waiting for fish.The newly identified dinosaur,…
Somewhere beneath the frozen soils of the Arctic, life has been waiting patiently for millennia. Long before the rise of modern civilisation, before the construction of the Great Pyramids, and even before many of today’s ecosystems existed in their current form, microscopic organisms became trapped within layers of permafrost. Locked away in permanently frozen ground,…
For decades, Neanderthals were thought to be our less sophisticated cousins who communicated through basic sounds and simple gestures. Yet, a fresh scientific review is shaking things up, arguing that Neanderthals might’ve had a language almost as complex as ours. Researchers looking at genetic, archaeological, and fossil clues suggest that the beginnings of spoken language…
On a stormy evening in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven died in Vienna after years of declining health that had already pulled him out of public life. He had been confined to bed for months, struggling with swelling, jaundice, and exhaustion that made even small movements difficult. By then, his hearing loss was already part of…
Jane Goodall (Image: Wikipedia) Some quotes feel unusual because they move against instinct. The line often attributed to Jane Goodall is one of them.When people encounter behaviour they strongly disagree with, the natural reaction is often criticism. Sometimes it is anger. Sometimes it is avoidance. In many situations, people simply stop talking to one another…
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons, and for decades scientists have assumed that these cells are the primary drivers of memory and cognition. However, a new study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that another type of brain cell, long considered little more than support tissue, may play a…
