Alexander von Humboldt spent much of his life travelling through landscapes that most Europeans of his era knew only from maps, then trying to understand what connected the things he encountered. He climbed mountains, measured temperatures and atmospheric pressure, recorded plants and minerals and compared conditions across different elevations. His work eventually led him to…

One year after beavers were released into the wild at Studland in Dorset, their activity has dramatically reshaped part of the local landscape A pair of wild beavers released in Dorset have transformed a dense woodland into a bright, wetland habitat within just 12 months of arriving in their new home. Data shared by the…

Seven-year-old Alyssa was looking for bugs and collecting rocks at a Calgary playground when she noticed something unusual in one of the boulders surrounding the park. A dark shape embedded in the stone caught her attention, prompting the young palaeontology enthusiast to take a closer look. What began as an ordinary search during a trip…

Published in Science Advances, the study draws on comparisons of biological brains and experiments on artificial neural networks to suggest a new framework for understanding the evolution of intelligence. For decades, the human brain was like some evolutionary skyscraper: ancient instincts on the bottom, emotions in the middle, and sophisticated reasoning on the top. That’s…

A team of Dutch engineering students has won first place at a major international hackathon with an idea that tackles two problems at once: plastic waste and a lack of safe, affordable housing. The project, ManufacturingBox, was developed by students from the University of Twente and took top honours at the World Federation of Engineering…

Beneath the quiet lawns and weathered headstones of a small cemetery in Ithaca, New York, scientists have uncovered one of the most astonishing bee discoveries in recent memory. In a carefully studied 1.5-acre section of the cemetery grounds, researchers estimated that about 5.5 million wild, ground-nesting bees live in a dense network of underground nests….

The study was conducted in Little Rock Lake, an 18-hectare undeveloped, unfished lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin. A large curtain divides the lake into 2 similar basins. From the surface a lake might look like it is not changing at all but underneath it is a very different story. Scientists demonstrated how important fallen trees…

Researchers have located the planet’s largest known octopus nursery deep off the Californian coast, documenting 5,718 animals in 2.5 hectares and estimating about 20,000 around Davidson Seamount. Known as the Octopus Garden, the nursery is located about 10,500 feet below the surface off Central California. According to a statement released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium…

Southern California anglers are seeing an unusual number of warm-water fish as rising ocean temperatures linked to El Niño and marine heatwaves bring species typically found farther south into local waters.Fishermen working in Marina del Rey and Santa Monica are catching fish species, in larger sizes, that are rarely seen in the area. Tony Villanueva,…

A man who decided to keep every piece of plastic he threw away for an entire year ended up with a collection of 4,490 pieces, turning a simple personal experiment into a wider effort to reduce everyday plastic waste. Instead of allowing wrappers, packaging and other discarded items to disappear into the bin, he saved…