Science

PC: National History Museum For more than a century, amber has helped scientists reconstruct vanished worlds by preserving tiny fragments of life that would otherwise have disappeared. Insects trapped inside these golden fossilised resins have revealed details about ancient forests across several continents, but South America remained a missing piece in that record. That changed…

Image Credit: Raphael Zufferey Nature has given us amphibians in various forms, from frogs to other multi-environment creatures, yet few things transcend the different domains of Earth as remarkably as the diving birds that inspired the MIT and EPFL researchers. For so long, scientists have long dreamt of a machine that can fly through the…

It seems like a contradiction. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, so it would be natural to assume it is also the hottest. In reality, that title belongs to Venus, where surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead. The difference isn’t about distance from the Sun but about what happens after sunlight…

For decades, Charon was often viewed as the quieter half of the Pluto system, a frozen world marked by craters, fractures and vast plains. Yet the surface photographed by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has continued to reveal hints that its history was far more dynamic than once thought.A new study published in Nature Communications, titled…

Less than a day after arriving aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Nasa astronaut Anil Menon offered a glimpse into his first hours in orbit, sharing a message that was as much about the people who helped him get there as it was about the view from space.Posting on X (formerly twitter) from the orbiting…

Traditional solar panels have transformed renewable energy, but they come with one major limitation, they are rigid, heavy and designed to sit on flat surfaces such as rooftops or solar farms. That makes them difficult to install on curved buildings, lightweight structures or unconventional designs. Researchers in the United States are now working on a…

The Guam Kingfisher is known as the “sihek” in Chamorro, the native language of the Marianas Archipelago and is the rarest species at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. The bird is classified by the IUCN as extinct in the wild, meaning a single one is not present outside the conservation centre….

Fossils from this period are displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. South Dakota is one of the most landlocked states in the United States. It is more than 1,000 miles away from both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It is hard to imagine that this dry landscape was once covered by water.But…

Scientists exposed bumblebees to low doses of a modern pesticide Scientists exposed bumblebees to low doses of a modern pesticide Scientists exposed bumblebees to low doses of a modern pesticide Scientists exposed bumblebees to low doses of a modern pesticide Scientists exposed bumblebees to low doses of a modern pesticide Bumblebees are among the world’s…

Fossils often preserve bones well enough to reveal the shape of an ancient animal, but traces of soft tissues are much less common. That is why a newly described dinosaur from north-eastern China has drawn such close attention from palaeontologists. Dating back around 125 million years to the Early Cretaceous period, the specimen offers more…