Leon Wang, the 17-year-old Connecticut student (Image Credit: Society For Science) Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the most difficult neurological disorders to treat, partly because the processes behind it can begin damaging brain cells long before symptoms become apparent. Now, a project by 17-year-old Connecticut student Leon Wang has drawn attention for exploring whether medicines…

Ossabaw Island Hogs (Representational Image Generated using AI tool) Centuries ago, Spanish explorers sailing along the coast of what is now the United States brought pigs with them as a practical food supply. Some escaped, while others were deliberately released so future expeditions would find animals waiting when they returned. On Ossabaw Island, a barrier…

Icebergs in Antarctica (Image Credit: Canva) Antarctica may look like a vast, frozen and unchanging landscape, but deep beneath its thick ice lies a surprisingly active world. In 2007, scientists reported findings based on measurements collected by NASA’s ICESat satellite between 2003 and 2006, revealing major changes in the surface of the West Antarctic Ice…

Beneath the surface of the Great Barrier Reef, a 165-tonne building is being slowly reshaped by the environment around it. The Coral Greenhouse, an underwater installation at John Brewer Reef, was designed to work with the sea rather than simply sit on the seabed. Coral can grow across its surfaces, fish can move through its…

August may look like a busy month in a garden, meadow or city park, but for honeybees, late summer can be surprisingly difficult. New research from the University of Sussex has found that honeybees expend more effort and gain less energy while collecting nectar in late July and August than during much of spring. The…

In late 2028, Nasa plans to send something unusual towards Mars, a spacecraft carrying a working nuclear reactor designed to generate electricity for propulsion in deep space. Space Reactor-1 Freedom is intended to test nuclear electric propulsion beyond Earth orbit, where conventional solar power becomes increasingly difficult to use. The spacecraft will not land on…

For his project, Kang trained AI models to detect patterns associated with neurodevelopmental disorders from a large public dataset of retinal images. Instead of one approach, he used several techniques to improve the performance of the models. What if a simple picture of the eye could help doctors diagnose neurodevelopmental conditions earlier? For 17-year-old Edward…

A pile of discarded cashew shells would normally have little to do with international shipping. In Maharashtra agricultural leftovers are being fed into reactors that can turn them into usable fuel, gases and biochar. The technology comes from an unusual India-Denmark partnership built around the Viking biomass gasifier developed at the Technical University of Denmark….

A major orange juice processing project in Brazil is taking an unusual approach to one of the industry’s biggest waste streams: turning citrus wastewater into renewable energy. Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) is building what it describes as the world’s largest plant dedicated to producing biogas from citrus effluent at its industrial facility in Bebedouro, São…

The Moon’s south pole may contain small pockets where some Earth microbes could remain alive after being carried there by astronauts or spacecraft. A new Nasa study has mapped parts of the region where five types of bacteria and fungi may withstand lunar conditions for at least a day, with the hardiest organism potentially lasting…