Kaia Minn at the National Academy of Inventors conference. Image Credit: kaiaminn.com A discarded citrus peel is not the sort of thing most people would associate with restoring forests. But for 13-year-old Massachusetts inventor ‘Kaia Minn,’ it became the starting point for a simple idea with potentially far-reaching environmental uses. Minn has developed a ‘biodegradable…

Philip Fearnside’s research has calculated the costs of losing the Amazon on account of deforestation, dams and highways The Amazon rainforest has been described in terms of its enormous size, biodiversity and importance to the global climate. But for Philip Fearnside, understanding the forest has also meant asking a more practical question: what does it…

​Representative Image of fluorescent scorpions glowing across a desert landscape after dark (AI-generated image) In 1945, an Arizona State University professor began wandering the desert at night, hunting scorpions that glowed under his black light, and few people around him understood why. That professor, Herbert L Stahnke, was already the nation’s leading authority on scorpions…

Representative Image (AI-generated) A tiny concentration of a synthetic hormone was enough to trigger a dramatic ecological change in a remote Ontario lake. In 2001, scientists began adding the synthetic estrogen 17α-ethynylestradiol (EE2) to Lake 260 in northwestern Ontario, maintaining concentrations of about 5 to 6 nanograms per litre. The experiment continued for seven years,…

Deep in the Caxiuanã National Forest in northern Brazil, a patch of rainforest the size of a football pitch tells the story of what a drier Amazon might look like. Since 2002, scientists have suspended nearly 6,000 transparent plastic panels above one hectare of pristine forest, diverting roughly half the rainfall away from the soil…

Representative Image (AI-generated) A river can carry a contaminant far beyond the point where it enters the water, but predicting exactly how quickly that material will travel is not always straightforward. In 2010, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), working with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, conducted a dye-tracing experiment on a 41.2-mile…

A green mamba specimen from São Tomé Island that dates back to 1885 has been found after decades of being regarded as lost, which gives scientists a rare opportunity to revisit the identity of one of the Gulf of Guinea’s most mysterious snakes. Adolfo Möller found the specimen during an expedition to the island, after…

Quote of the Day by Marie Curie Marie Curie is remembered as one of the most important scientists in modern history, yet a single letter from 1895 offers a genuinely striking glimpse into her real priorities. Ahead of her marriage to Pierre Curie in July that year, someone had offered to give her a wedding…

Since 2015, British Columbia has killed 200-300 wolves annually to help endangered caribou populations recover. Recently, the provincial government has proposed extending its decade-long wolf cull program by five more years in areas that are home to 15 declining woodland caribou herds. But according to scientists, the deforestation, not the wolves, is the main driver…

In the depths of the Grand Canyon, scientists were trying to give native fish a better chance of survival, by taking other fish out of the Colorado River. A four-year fish-removal experiment conducted between 2003 and 2006 dramatically changed the composition of fish being caught in one section of the river. According to a 2011…