Somewhere along the East African Rift Valley sits a chain of lakes holding more than a quarter of all the surface freshwater on the planet. Most people have never heard of them. The African Great Lakes span ten countries, keep over 50 million people fed and employed, and rarely get a mention alongside the world’s…
Long before “bio-based materials” entered the lexicon of the car industry, Henry Ford was trying to answer a different question. Could farms supply more than food? Could fields also provide the raw materials for manufacturing? That idea reached its most unusual expression in the summer of 1941, when Ford unveiled an experimental vehicle with a…
Scientists reviewed 54 Asian oak species; 40 had no backup in any botanical collection A detailed study of 54 Asian oak species has found that 40 have no living backup in any botanical garden around the world. This means that nearly three-quarters of the trees could disappear completely if their wild populations are lost.One of…
Snakes aren’t simple tubes. Their bodies have five regions—including a short neck By measuring every vertebra along the bodies of 13 native Australian snakes, evolutionary biologists have discovered that a snake’s spine is much more organized than previously believed. Instead of being one long, uniform structure, it contains five distinct anatomical regions, including a surprisingly…
Scientists have transformed a simple fragment of a cicada’s wing into an optical platform capable of detecting molecular signals By coating a cicada wing with an extremely thin layer of silver, researchers in Taiwan have created a highly sensitive optical sensor that can boost very weak molecular signals by tens of millions of times.The findings,…
Representative Image of Democritus teaching early ideas about atoms in ancient Greece (AI-generated image) Two people can look at the world around them and reach completely different conclusions about what is actually there. One sees a vast, cluttered inventory of distinct things, colours, tastes, textures, each apparently real in its own right. The other looks…
Image Credit: US Environmental Protection Agency Plastic waste is a global threat to both the environment and public health, with over 400 million tons produced annually. Turning plastic into value-added chemicals holds significant promise, but the industrial adoption gets slowed down by the high costs of metal catalysts and how they become deactivated by additives….
Pic credit: Clare Kiernan Everyone loves strawberries. Almost every city has its own version of eating this sweet, bright red fruit. In London, for instance, people often like to eat strawberries dipped in chocolate. In other places, they’re folded into fresh cream, blended into smoothies, or simply eaten as they are on a warm afternoon.But…
Seungah Chung (Image Credit: Society For Science) Most of us have seen ants marching across the ground without giving them much thought. Seungah Chung saw something different. She wondered how such tiny creatures, with brains no larger than a pinhead, manage to find food and then make their way back home without getting lost.That question…
Scientists have solved the mystery of unusually high concentrations of chlorophyll detected more than 1,000 metres beneath the ocean Scientists have solved the mystery of unusually high concentrations of chlorophyll detected more than 1,000 metres beneath the ocean surface by autonomous underwater robots after years of puzzling. The discovery, which took place between 2014 and…