Science

For a long time, the story seemed straightforward. As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels fell and the planet cooled, large ice sheets began spreading across the polar regions. Yet there was an awkward detail that never quite fitted. Antarctica became locked beneath vast quantities of ice around 34 million years ago, while the Arctic remained largely…

Artificial intelligence has created an unexpected problem. Training and running increasingly sophisticated AI models requires enormous computing power, and the data centres housing those systems are consuming electricity at an unprecedented rate. As grids struggle to keep up, technology companies and energy developers are searching for reliable power sources beyond conventional renewables. One of the…

Hotels are usually built for travellers, but some are designed for creatures no bigger than your thumb. Scientists and conservationists have spent years creating these miniature refuges for wild bees in the form of small nesting structures fitted with narrow tunnels that mimic the hollow stems and cavities many solitary bee species naturally use to…

A floating solar farm in the Netherlands is turning out to have an effect nobody quite expected; it is giving underwater life a real boost. Bomhofsplas is a large artificial lake near the city of Zwolle, and its surface is now covered with more than seventy thousand solar panels installed by the energy company BayWa…

In 2018, Chinese state media announced one of the most ambitious weather engineering projects ever proposed, an attempt to build a permanent airborne water corridor across the Tibetan plateau. Named Tianhe, meaning sky river, the plan aimed to use tens of thousands of fuel burning cloud seeding chambers scattered across an area roughly the size…

Mangrove forests are usually celebrated for one thing above all else, their ability to lock away planet warming carbon in their tangled roots and waterlogged soil. A new global study suggests that praise has been badly incomplete, and that these same coastal forests are quietly performing another job worth billions of dollars every year, cleaning…

Since 2014, a strange and violent phenomenon has been unsettling scientists and local herders across the remote Yamal and Gydan peninsulas of western Siberia. Without warning, the ground itself explodes, blasting soil and chunks of ice hundreds of feet into the air and leaving behind a massive crater that can plunge more than 160 feet…

Quote of the day by Richard Dawkins (AI-generated image) Ask most people why a chicken exists, and they will describe eggs as something a chicken produces along the way. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, flipped that relationship on its head. “The chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg,” he wrote, treating the…

Forty Thousand Cubic Meters of Fresh Water Flow from the Congo into the Atlantic Every Second. A New Study Traces Where It Goes from There. Every second, the Congo River releases about 40,000 cubic metres of freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean. That makes it the world’s second largest river by discharge. But once that enormous…

Quote of the day by Blaise Pascal (AI-generated image) Some decisions never survive being explained out loud. You know why you trust someone, why a place feels like home, why you love who you love, yet none of it holds up as a tidy argument. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, put a name…