After a cup of coffee is brewed, the grounds left behind are often discarded as waste. But researchers have found a way to turn them into a useful material for concrete. A 2023 study examined whether spent coffee grounds (SCG) could replace part of the sand used in concrete after being converted into biochar through…

Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Image Credit: Ron Van Oers/Wikipedia Communities living beside Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park have planted 4,053 agroforestry trees across 40 hectares of land, beginning the restoration of a damaged buffer zone around one of Africa’s most important rainforest landscapes. The work aims to improve habitat, support local livelihoods and reduce pressure on…

Nearly 100,000 sea urchins have been removed from three coastal sites in northern Norway by almost 500 volunteers working to bring back underwater kelp forests. Between April 2024 and May 2026, Rissa Citizen Science organised 23 restoration events at Sørsjetéen, Telegrafbukta and Øksfjord, with divers spending more than 20,000 minutes underwater clearing urchin barrens. The…

Restoring grazing by native large herbivores such as bison can produce sustained increases in native plant diversity In 1987, 30 bison from the Fort Riley Military Reservation were brought to Konza Prairie in Kansas. Nearly three decades later, researchers found that native plant species richness had increased by 103% at the local scale and by…

Singapore has turned part of a reservoir into a giant renewable-energy installation, covering about one-third of Tengeh Reservoir with more than 122,000 floating solar panels spread across 10 floating islands. The 45-hectare Sembcorp Tengeh Floating Solar Farm has a capacity of 60 MWp and generates electricity used to support five local water-treatment plants. The project…

A fossil found in southern Brazil is giving researchers a closer look at the reptiles that lived near the beginning of the archosaur lineage, the group that would eventually include dinosaurs and crocodile-line animals. The animal has been named ‘Silescelida acristata’ and is identified as an early-diverging eucrocopodan archosauriform from the Middle Triassic. A recent…

Representative Image (AI-generated) Microplastics are now found across aquatic environments, creating a difficult challenge for water-treatment systems that must remove tiny plastic particles without generating more waste. A new approach investigated in 2026 takes an unusual route: instead of treating water-treatment waste as something that simply needs to be discarded, researchers turned it into a…

Ancient Polish burial reveals man with 2 skulls, 42-tooth necklace and battle axe (Image Credit: X/ @sputnik_brasil) Archaeologists investigating a Roman-period cemetery in Poland made an unexpected discovery when they came across a burial that was thousands of years older than the surrounding graves. Instead of a Roman-era burial, they found the nearly complete skeleton…

Image Credit: Brad Leue/AWC Australia’s effort to bring digging mammals back to an 8,000-hectare wildlife sanctuary has produced changes below the surface. Researchers studying Scotia Sanctuary in south-eastern Australia found that 8 years after reintroduced mammals were given access to areas, the communities of insects emerging from the soil had changed. The mammals, including greater…