Science

An ant (Camponotus renggeri), infected by a fungus, bites into a liverwort plant while holding onto nearby moss with its claws.Photo: IMA Fungus journal The so-called zombie-ant fungus has long fascinated scientists because of the way it takes control of infected ants, forcing them to bite plants before they die. Now, researchers in the Amazon…

Female birds have shorter lifespans than male birds, researchers find Female mammals usually live longer than males, but a 27-year study of North American birds has found the opposite pattern in birds.Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) analyzed more than 563,000 bird-banding records and found that adult female birds had a 12.4%…

As concerns over plastic pollution continue to grow, a 14-year-old student in Brazil has developed a sustainable alternative using materials that would otherwise be discarded. Lucas Tadao Sugahara Wernick, a student from Curitiba in the southern state of Paraná, created biodegradable food trays made from cassava peels and araucaria tree residues. Designed as a substitute…

The deep ocean has a way of turning ordinary events into unanswered questions. Far below the waves, sounds travel through water in ways that can make distant sources appear much closer or far stranger than they really are. In 1997, a powerful low-frequency noise recorded across the Pacific Ocean created one of the most unusual…

Image(s): Florida Key Isaland/Canva Imagine erasing almost every insect and small animal from an island, then watching nature rebuild itself from scratch. That was exactly what a team of ecologists did in the Florida Keys during one of the most influential ecological experiments ever conducted. In 1966, researchers enclosed tiny mangrove islands in enormous plastic…

The Pacific Ring of Fire, the horseshoe-shaped belt of volcanoes circling the Pacific Ocean, may have played a far bigger role in shaping Earth’s past climate than previously understood. Findings show that some of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 12,000 years, many originating from this seismically active region, align closely with major glacial…

The fossil record has a habit of reshaping ideas that once seemed settled. In the Late Cretaceous, long before the extinction of the dinosaurs, small mammals occupied a world dominated by much larger reptiles. Most left behind little more than isolated teeth and fragments of bone, making it difficult to understand how they were related…

Richard Feynman’s most enduring quote was never intended as a memorable slogan. It came from his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, where the Nobel Prize-winning physicist spoke about the principles that should guide scientific research. Among his remarks, one sentence has outlived the rest: “The first principle is that you must…

For generations, indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh had been using a spice in their food for its citrusy, tongue-tingling flavour. The native plant was a part of their world and that’s all they knew. But today, the small spice is helping 200 families gain a livelihood while also protecting agricultural land.On autumn mornings, residents of…

Fourteen-year-old Sharvi Mahajan has developed NeuroDrive Alert (Picture: Young Scientist Lab) Sharvi Mahajan, a 14-year-old Indian-American student from California, has been named among the 10 finalists of the 2026 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Mahajan has developed a system to predict driver fatigue before it leads to accidents.Sharvi, an eighth-grade student at Bernardo Heights Middle School,…