Meet ‘MOXIE’, a small Nasa device that for the first time made oxygen from the Martian atmosphere (Image: AI Generated) For the first time, a machine made by humans produced oxygen on the surface of another planet. It did not happen inside a futuristic Mars base or through the work of astronauts in bulky spacesuits. … Read more
Breeding scheme to produce backcross males and (b) possible inheritance patterns of self-sacrificial mating traits. Credit: Biology Letters (2026) Male Australian redback spiders perform an acrobatic somersault during mating that sends their abdomen directly toward the female’s fangs. Scientists have now found that this deadly self-sacrifice behavior comes from a surprisingly simple genetic region.In a … Read more
For someone sleeping on the street, a backpack may be little more than a way to carry the few belongings they have left. But the Backpack Bed turns that familiar object into something far more meaningful: a portable place to sleep. Designed for people experiencing homelessness, the emergency shelter combines mobility with protection, allowing users … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Romania has placed its energy sector under a nationwide 30-day state of alert after the Danube river levels fell to exceptionally low levels. This has forced Unit 1 at the Cernavodă nuclear plant offline and put Unit 2 under continuous review.Emergency river works have kept Unit 2 online for now, but the latest hydrological outlook … Read more
On 21 August 2017, the afternoon light at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, began to fade. For the people gathered there, the approaching darkness was an astronomical spectacle. For the animals living outside in the zoo’s enclosures, it was something rather different: daylight was suddenly behaving as if evening had arrived. Researchers had prepared … Read more
Brian Ekstrom and Lance Downing pulling the beach seine to collect juvenile fish at a restoration site on the lower Columbia River A routine dredging project on the Lower Columbia River has become a major long-term experiment to see whether dredged sediment can be used to restore lost wildlife habitat.In October 2020, engineers pumped 225,000 … Read more
Representative Image (AI-generated) In 2019, researchers identified Koskarlı Cave near Trabzon, in Türkiye’s eastern Black Sea region. According to a study published in the journal Antiquity, later excavations at the cave revealed a 12,900-year-old hunter-gatherer layer containing a hearth, stone tools and personal ornaments. The findings provide rare archaeological evidence of human activity in the … Read more
Echo 1 passes over NASA’s Goldstone Tracking Station on August 12, 1960, with the antenna and star trails visible. (Nasa photo) Exactly sixty-six years ago from today, on August 12, 1960, NASA launched Echo 1A, a 100-foot-diameter balloon that became the agency’s first successful communications satellite. Unlike modern communication satellites, Echo 1A did not actively … Read more