Science

An astronaut caring for plants inside the Veggie growth chamber, part of NASA’s long-running research into producing fresh food during extended space missions. Growing fresh vegetables aboard the International Space Station has become a familiar part of NASA‘s efforts to support astronauts on long-duration missions. Now, researchers believe those same plants could take on a…

Tony Rinaudo, famously known as ‘The Forest Maker’ (Image Credit: Facebook/ @Australian Embassy, Ethiopia) An Australian agronomist’s simple idea has transformed one of the world’s driest landscapes into a remarkable environmental success story. According to World Vision, Tony Rinaudo, widely known as the “Forest Maker,” helped farmers in Niger regenerate more than 200 million trees,…

At just 16 years old, Canadian student Evan Budz has developed an autonomous AI-powered robot turtle that could help scientists tackle one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental problems: microplastic pollution. Inspired by the graceful swimming of a snapping turtle he encountered during a family camping trip, Budz spent nearly 4,000 hours designing and refining a…

For centuries, honey bees introduced from Europe quietly became part of life across the Americas, pollinating crops and producing honey without drawing much attention beyond farms and gardens. That picture shifted during the second half of the twentieth century after an agricultural breeding project in Brazil took an unexpected turn. What began as an attempt…

Since the first planet beyond our solar system was confirmed in the 1990s, astronomers have gone on to catalogue more than 6,000 exoplanets, yet not a single moon orbiting any of them has ever been confirmed. That long, frustrating gap in the search for exomoons may have just gotten stranger rather than simpler. While studying…

Deep beneath the Pilbara region of Western Australia lies some of the oldest and best preserved crust anywhere on the planet, and it has just revealed something unexpected about Earth’s earliest history. Volcanic rocks dating back 3.1 billion years show chemical signs that surface water had already travelled deep into the planet’s interior at that…

Honeybees have long depended entirely on flower pollen for a group of essential fats called sterols, nutrients they cannot produce inside their own bodies and cannot get from any other natural food source. As climate change and modern farming reduce the variety of flowers available to bees, access to these sterols has become increasingly scarce,…

Today, Mars is a cold, dry planet covered in dust, but scientists believe it looked very different billions of years ago, with a much thicker atmosphere, flowing rivers and lakes, and possibly even conditions that could have supported life. Over time, Mars lost most of that protective atmosphere, the planet cooled, and its water either…

Coffee is brewed billions of times every year, leaving behind mountains of damp grounds that are usually treated as little more than rubbish. Some find a second life in compost or gardening, but the overwhelming share is either burned or buried despite still containing a considerable amount of stored energy. The problem has never really…

A vial containing magnetic adsorbent material designed to remove microplastics, nanoplastics, some PFAS and other contaminants from wastewater. Scientists at RMIT University in Australia have built a reusable magnetic material that removed more than 95% of micro- and nanoplastics from water within one hour and showed early promise against some PFAS.The new water treatment technology…