Science

The record heat of 2026 made this summer exceptional for butterfly-watching. More than 100,000 volunteers fanned across Britain with notebooks this summer, tallying nearly 1.4 million common butterflies and day-flying moths. This was the second-best butterfly season of the past 16 years, according to the Big Butterfly Count. Painted ladies surged by 335% compared with…

Nikola Tesla (Image: Wikipedia) Life rarely follows a formula that can predict exactly what comes next. People make plans, set goals and try to control their circumstances, yet unexpected events can change everything within moments. Nikola Tesla, one of history’s most influential inventors, once described life in similarly mathematical terms. “Life is and will ever…

Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11,309 billion tonnes of ice since 1979. (Photo: SWNS) Greenland and Antarctica have lost a combined 11.3 billion tonnes of ice since the late 1970s, contributing more than 3 centimetres to global sea level rise, according to a new international assessment by polar scientists.As per SWNS, the comprehensive study, led…

At just 11, Anirudh Rao began looking at tornado warnings from a different angle: not how to predict storms perfectly, but how to give people more time to respond. Growing up in Colorado, where tornadoes are a recurring threat, Rao developed Revere, a prototype system combining drones and sensors that measure factors such as infrasound,…

In April, the Cow Creek wildfire tore through roughly 2,400 acres of Florida’s Goethe State Forest, leaving large stretches of pine forest covered in ash. But within just a few months, the landscape had begun to change dramatically. WUFT and University of Florida researchers report that wildflowers, saw palmettos and grasses have rapidly returned to…

Sunrise over the Colorado River. Image Credit: US Bureau of Reclamation. A 55-acre stretch along the Colorado River looked very different in 2009, when invasive salt cedar covered much of the floodplain at Cibola National Wildlife Refuge. River Partners began clearing the invasive forest and planting native trees, shrubs and herbs to bring back a…

Egypt is testing a farming system that puts solar panels above crops instead of using separate land for agriculture and electricity generation. Known as agrivoltaics, the approach is being piloted at Habiba Farm in Nuweiba, South Sinai, where elevated panels provide partial shade while crops continue growing underneath. The project is designed for Egypt’s harsh…

Sarufutsu, a village on the northernmost tip of Japan’s Hokkaido, is known for scallops. The village contributes to about 15% of the country’s entire scallop catch, and Japan eats tens of thousands of tons of the sweet, sashimi-grade shellfish. However, what people consume is the muscle, not the shell.The shells are nothing more than waste…

A butterfly once declared extinct in Britain is now at the centre of one of the country’s most striking conservation success stories. The large blue, which disappeared from Britain in 1979, has been successfully reintroduced and now occurs at 33 sites in south-west England. New figures from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme show its recorded…

The story of the Galápagos giant tortoise is one of exploitation, extinction and an extraordinary conservation comeback. Pirates, whalers and other sailors once collected the slow-moving animals from the islands as a reliable source of fresh meat, taking advantage of their ability to survive for months without food or water. On Floreana Island, relentless hunting,…