Science

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…

Representative Image (Canva) Some stars can make repeated close passes around supermassive black holes, losing part of their material each time while surviving to return again. These encounters produce bursts of light, or flares, that can recur months or even years apart. But astronomers have been puzzled by a pattern seen in some of these…

Dr. Savannah Ulalian Bishop photographs an archaeological amphora (Picture: KOC University) Imagine an ancient amphora recovered from the seabed after centuries underwater. It may be cracked, covered with deposits or missing large sections. Restoring such an object is difficult without causing further damage.To overcome this problem, researchers at Koc University in Turkiye have developed a…

A nest box occupied by a Eurasian scops owl might seem an unlikely place to find a live snake, yet that is exactly what researchers repeatedly encountered in central Türkiye. Across six breeding seasons, they inspected 109 owl nests and found the small worm snake Xerotyphlops vermicularis in 44% of them. The reptiles were not…

In the process of striving for our long-term objectives, it may be easy to lose sight of the significance of the tasks at hand. However, James Clerk Maxwell provided a different outlook, stating that even regular work could be associated with an ideal much bigger than the situation itself. He says, “Happy is the man…

A small teabag may not seem like much of a solution to polluted drinking water, but for Minnesota student Vick Tan, it became the centre of a science project that went far beyond the classroom. Tan helped develop a simple-looking pouch designed to capture arsenic from contaminated water, using a mix of cellulose fabric, crushed…

A small box of honeybees once became an unusual passenger aboard the space shuttle Discovery. In 1984, Nasa sent thousands of honeybees into orbit to see how they would behave when gravity was no longer guiding their movements. The experiment was less about honey and more about a basic piece of bee life: building a…

After nearly 20 years without a confirmed sighting, scientists in Barbados have finally rediscovered the world’s smallest-known snake. According to the Associated Press, the tiny Barbados threadsnake was found beneath a rock during an ecological survey in central Barbados, bringing an end to a search that had seen researchers turn over hundreds of rocks in…