Nasa just invited India to help build a permanent base on the Moon. It’s the kind of headline that writes itself — and yet, what it actually means for India is still almost entirely undecided.Nasa wants to do something considerably more ambitious than return astronauts to the Moon. It wants to start building a place…
Researchers in Michigan have helped bring the Poweshiek skipperling butterfly back from the brink of extinction after its US wild population fell to just nine in 2022. Through captive breeding, habitat restoration and carefully planned releases, more than 1,300 butterflies were released in 2025. The recovery effort has now expanded to other endangered butterflies, while…
The Fish and Wildlife Service restored peat wetlands at Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge North Carolina’s coastal peatlands are being restored to protect wetlands, reduce wildfire risks and keep carbon stored in the soil. The work is focused on bringing water back to areas that were once drained and altered for farming, timber harvesting…
Fan built her own $200 device instead of using NASA’s $50,000 clinostat. (Society for science photo) Leanne Fan, an 18-year-old student from San Diego, has been named a finalist in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search for her research into wound healing in space. Her project looks at whether red light therapy can help wounds…
A rare Australian plant last recorded in 1967 has been found alive in remote Queensland after nearly six decades (Image: AI Generated) A small Australian shrub that had effectively disappeared from the scientific record for nearly six decades has been found alive in a remote part of northern Queensland. Ptilotus senarius, a species known from…
What if food scraps, discarded branches and seashells could help produce drinking water from the air? Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new class of biomass-based hydrogels that can capture atmospheric moisture and release it as clean water using relatively mild heat. The approach, described in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced…
The fossil of Arctobatrachus urdensis as documented in 1948 (A–C), its skull as it appears today (D), and a reconstructed illustration (E). Scale bar: 10 cm. Credit: Schoch et al., 2026. Nearly 80 years ago, a British expedition discovered the battered remains of a giant fossil on the peak of an Arctic island. Unable to…
The foxes reduced seabird populations, which meant less nutrient-rich guano reached the islands. Arctic foxes introduced to more than 400 Alaskan islands for fur changed far more than the local wildlife. According to a study published in journal Science, by preying on seabirds, they disrupted the flow of nutrients from the ocean to land and…
An elephant in musthPhoto: Canva In the annals of controversial scientific experiments, few stories are as disturbing as that of Tusko, a 14-year-old Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962, Tusko became the subject of an experiment that would go down in history as one of the most infamous animal studies…
The 14th century warrior’s skull was broken in 61 places. (University of Bradford photo) A skeleton uncovered beneath Scotland’s Stirling Castle may be the first confirmed archaeological evidence of a person killed by a trebuchet. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the remains belong to a defender who appears to have been killed during a…