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…
Every winter in Antarctica, emperor penguins gather in large groups called huddles to survive the cold. Temperatures can fall to -40 degrees Celsius, and strong winds make the weather even harsher. Without huddling together, these penguins would not be able to survive.But a penguin huddle is much more than a group of birds standing close…
Whales are well known for their songs. But scientists have discovered that, for some whales, those songs may also help them stay alive. A researcher from the University of Washington has found that some baleen whales, including blue, fin and minke whales, have evolved to sing at such low frequencies that killer whales, their only…
A palm-sized AI drone weighing just 40 grams has achieved an engineering first by autonomously hunting and killing a flying insect in mid-air, paving the way for a new approach to mosquito control. Developed by US startup Tornyol, the tiny drone successfully detected, tracked and intercepted a flying moth during a controlled indoor demonstration without…
Charles Darwin (Image source: Wikipedia) A bad experience is supposed to teach a lesson, yet people return to habits they already know are harmful more often than logic would suggest. Charles Darwin noticed the same contradiction and put it more bluntly than most. “An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it…
Bees have a reputation for being tireless workers, but it turns out that reputation only really applies to some of them. Researchers at the University of Illinois glued tiny numbered tags onto thousands of individual honeybees and tracked their comings and goings for almost two months across several separate colonies. What they found flips the…