An insect outbreak has left Siberia’s forests dead while also transforming the region into a tinderbox where wildfires are now spreading beyond human control. The trees burning across Krasnoyarsk this year were, in a lot of cases, already dead. Not from the fire or the drought, but because of a small moth.Dendrolimus sibiricus, the Siberian…
From ash to wildflowers: two decades of controlled burns on one Kansas prairie (representative image). Image Credits: ChatGPT When Mike Moddrell purchased 320 acres of land in southwest Douglas County, Kansas, in 2002, the land was tired. In the years of neglect, weeds and cedar trees had invaded the land. More than two decades later,…
Asteroid Apophis will pass within 32,000 kilometres of Earth’s surface on 13 April 2029, a distance closer than the ring of geostationary satellites that orbit our planet. The flyby, visible to the naked eye across parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, is the closest known approach by an object of this size that scientists have…
For decades, the story of human brain evolution has centred on meat. Increasing consumption of animal protein and fat has long been credited with powering the dramatic growth of the human brain over four million years. According to the new study published in Science, titled ‘A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution’, researchers…
The Moon has absorbed billions of impacts over roughly four billion years, most from meteoroids whose origin, mass and impact velocity remain permanently unknown. The object expected to strike near the Einstein and Bell craters on Wednesday, 5 August, breaks that pattern entirely. According to Nasa, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage from a January…
For ten months, twelve crew members lived and worked at Concordia Station, one of the most remote research outposts on Earth. Cut off from rescue, sunlight and the outside world for much of the year, the team wore sensors that quietly recorded every close encounter between them. Researchers paired this data with regular psychological check-ins…
Representative Image of the Chicxulub asteroid striking Earth amid devastated prehistoric landscapes (AI-generated image) Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid roughly 10 kilometres wide slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, gouging out the Chicxulub crater and triggering the most devastating mass extinction event in the history of complex life on Earth. Non-avian dinosaurs,…
The Moon does not travel across the sky at a constant pace. Its speed changes throughout each orbit, a detail ancient astronomers noticed long before they had the mathematics to explain it fully. More than two thousand years ago, the makers of the Antikythera Mechanism found a way to reproduce this unevenness using bronze gears…
In northeastern Spain, the spread of zebra mussels continues to baffle water management experts, keeping them on alert over the damage to water infrastructure caused by these invasive species. Their presence in reservoirs, irrigation canals and water distribution networks has begun to disrupt water supplies, especially in Catalonia’s Lleida province, as per a report by…
Published in the journal One Ecosystem, the research provides the first systematic assessment of the Southern American Coastal Shallow Subtropical Lakes What if lakes could warn us about an environmental disaster? These freshwater systems may be giving off subtle biological signals long before the fish start dying off, the algae bloom on the water, or…
