Aerial view of El Ojo island. Image Credit: Argentina Government El Ojo, a remarkably circular floating island in Argentina’s Paraná Delta, has become one of the region’s strangest natural sights. Measuring about 120 metres across, the island sits inside an almost perfectly circular body of water and appears to move independently of the surrounding wetlands….
Atolls can take up to 30 million years to form, but these tiny coral islands now support 31 million seabirds across the Indo-Pacific (PC: AI Generated) Atolls may look like tiny rings of sand and coral scattered across warm tropical oceans, but they are far more important than their small land areas. These unusual natural…
Around 1745, mimosa arrived in the United States as an ornamental tree, prized for its fragrant pink flowers, delicate foliage and unusual habit of folding its leaves at night. What began as a garden favourite, however, did not stay neatly within gardens. Albizia julibrissin escaped cultivation and gradually established itself along roadsides, clearings, flood plains…
For nearly two decades, there was no sign of beavers along Strawberry Creek in Great Basin National Park. Then, in 2024, park staff discovered evidence that one had returned, several quaking aspen trees had been freshly cut down beside a beaver dam analogue, a human-built structure designed to imitate the ecological effects of a natural…
Image(s): Left/Department of Physics, MIT/Right/MoM-BH*-1 A Hyderabad-born astronomer who left engineering school at 18 and counts Test cricket among his favourite pastimes is now helping scientists look deeper into the earliest chapters of the Universe. Rohan P. Naidu, an MIT Pappalardo Fellow in Physics, is the lead author of a new Nature study that examines…
Venkata Vasamsetty (middle) has been in the US for 30 years and has been a Green Card holder since 2013. Venkata Vasamsetty, who has lived in the US for 30 years and is a Green Card holder, has been detained by ICE in a bizarre case of immigration while her daughter Yashaswini Vasamsetty is an…
Supermassive black holes are expected to outlast proton decay, but will eventually evaporate completely. Image Credit: D. Berry/Nasa Earth is expected to remain alive for an almost unimaginable length of time, but new calculations suggest that even massive objects could eventually disappear through a process similar to Hawking radiation. Scientists at Radboud University in the…
A wildfire in Utah has become the focus of an unusual airborne investigation, after towering clouds of smoke and hot air pushed towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Nasa aircraft are chasing these smoke-filled formations to understand what happens when an intense fire effectively starts generating its own weather. The clouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus…
Stephen Hawking‘s words offer a genuinely powerful reminder that a difficult situation rarely means every single possibility has actually disappeared. “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at,” he said. “It matters that you don’t just give up.” He said this in a speech to the Oxford Union…
Representative Image of asteroid (585349) Eeuwes traveling through the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter (AI-generated image) A 1.5-kilometre asteroid orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter now carries the name of Astrid Eeuwes, a Dutch amateur astronomer from Nijmegen who spends much of her time studying micrometeorites, tiny particles of space material that…