A decade ago, more than 99% of sunflower sea stars vanished from the depths of the ocean. Now, the discovery of a long-lost colony of these organisms is offering new hope for the region’s kelp forests.Sunflower sea stars, known as Pycnopodia helianthoides, may look like an aesthetic and purely decorative feature on the ocean floor,…
Dog parents, this is your ‘told you’ moment! All those times you felt your dog sensed your mood before you even said a word, that wasn’t nothing. The time when you were crying your heart out and your baby just rested on your lap? That was him reading you. Not guessing. Not just picking up…
Brian Ekstrom and Lance Downing pulling the beach seine to collect juvenile fish at a restoration site on the lower Columbia River A routine dredging project on the Lower Columbia River has become a major long-term experiment to see whether dredged sediment can be used to restore lost wildlife habitat.In October 2020, engineers pumped 225,000…
In 1922, biologist Olaus J. Murie entered Alaska’s vast wilderness to study caribou, beginning a body of field research that would eventually influence how scientists and park managers understood wildlife as part of interconnected ecosystems. Murie had been hired by the US Biological Survey as a wildlife biologist and spent much of the early 1920s…
Across the United States, glyphosate is applied across an enormous area of farmland each year. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, an average of 298 million acres of cropland receives glyphosate applications annually, giving a sense of how routinely the herbicide enters agricultural landscapes. Much of the attention around glyphosate has centred on weeds…
On 21 August 2017, the afternoon light at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, began to fade. For the people gathered there, the approaching darkness was an astronomical spectacle. For the animals living outside in the zoo’s enclosures, it was something rather different: daylight was suddenly behaving as if evening had arrived. Researchers had prepared…
The only total solar eclipse of 2026 is happening today, 12 August, as the Moon passes directly between Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow across the Northern Hemisphere. The main path of totality will stretch through Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain and a small part of Portugal.For people standing inside that…
Representative Image of a fast-setting underwater glue engineered to become stronger with age (AI-generated image) Modern life runs on adhesives, from the soles of shoes to the joints that hold furniture together, yet most of them share one stubborn weakness: they fail when water gets involved. A thin layer of water molecules naturally coats any…
A gas stove can look completely harmless when its burners are switched off. There is no flame, no heat and apparently no activity at all. But research has found that natural-gas stoves can continue releasing methane (CH₄) even when they are not being used.A study published in Environmental Science & Technology examined 53 homes in…
A dazzling new view of the Tarantula Nebula is revealing more than thousands of young stars. It is also helping astronomers investigate a puzzle about energy inside this vast stellar nursery. According to research published in the Astrophysical Journal, titled ‘Taming the Tarantula: How Stellar Wind Feedback Shapes Gas and Dust in 30 Doradus’, the…