August may look like a busy month in a garden, meadow or city park, but for honeybees, late summer can be surprisingly difficult. New research from the University of Sussex has found that honeybees expend more effort and gain less energy while collecting nectar in late July and August than during much of spring. The…

In late 2028, Nasa plans to send something unusual towards Mars, a spacecraft carrying a working nuclear reactor designed to generate electricity for propulsion in deep space. Space Reactor-1 Freedom is intended to test nuclear electric propulsion beyond Earth orbit, where conventional solar power becomes increasingly difficult to use. The spacecraft will not land on…

For his project, Kang trained AI models to detect patterns associated with neurodevelopmental disorders from a large public dataset of retinal images. Instead of one approach, he used several techniques to improve the performance of the models. What if a simple picture of the eye could help doctors diagnose neurodevelopmental conditions earlier? For 17-year-old Edward…

A pile of discarded cashew shells would normally have little to do with international shipping. In Maharashtra agricultural leftovers are being fed into reactors that can turn them into usable fuel, gases and biochar. The technology comes from an unusual India-Denmark partnership built around the Viking biomass gasifier developed at the Technical University of Denmark….

A major orange juice processing project in Brazil is taking an unusual approach to one of the industry’s biggest waste streams: turning citrus wastewater into renewable energy. Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) is building what it describes as the world’s largest plant dedicated to producing biogas from citrus effluent at its industrial facility in Bebedouro, São…

The Moon’s south pole may contain small pockets where some Earth microbes could remain alive after being carried there by astronauts or spacecraft. A new Nasa study has mapped parts of the region where five types of bacteria and fungi may withstand lunar conditions for at least a day, with the hardiest organism potentially lasting…