Environment

In case you didn’t know, bee popullations all around the world are dwindling. The disorder which is causing this massive decline in bee numbers is called CCD – colony collapse disorder. In 2012 alone, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder (CCD) wiped out about half of honeybee hives [read more here]. What happens in CCD [...]

Penguins are remarkable animals that have always garnered attention. For one they’re extremely cute (always an advantage in a world where humans are at the absolute top of the food chain), then they’re extremely fascinating to study. If you’re to closely look at the wings of a penguin, intuition would immediately tell you that these [...]

Renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, are gaining ground fast against fossil fuels in terms of energy production, but unfortunately not that fast as we’d hoped for. One big obstacle in the way of renewable energy is storage. A refined look at an older idea that dates back from the XIX century seeks to [...]

When you think about a spider, you usually imagine a big, silky, web used to trap unfortunate insects. But a new study conducted by biologists of the Kiel University and the University of Bern has shown that about half of all spiders have found an alternative to that and don’t use web at all. These [...]

In April, the Russian space agency launched the Bion-M craft which carried quite a few mice, gerbils, newts, snails and some microfauna into Earth’s orbit. The experiment was designed to test how weightlesness affect them and how these organisms adapt in the process. The craft returned back to Earth on May 19th in an otherwise [...]

Buried deep at some 2.4 kilometers beneath the surface, in the vicinity of an underground mine near Ontario, Canada, scientists have stumbled across what may actually be the oldest water on Earth. Isolated for more than a billion years, the water pocket holds invaluable clues that may hint how ancient life formed, while also shinning hope that [...]

Serving as one of the strongest metaphors nature has to offer, at the later stages of its evolution the caterpillar – a soft bodied, not very pretty, ground based insect – morphs into a butterfly – a majestic flying insect of varying coloring and shape. What exactly goes inside the chrysalis the caterpillar wraps itself with for the many [...]

A bit late with on this story, but considering the importance of this rather unfortunate milestone, it’s best you all hear it again. On the 9th of May NOAA reported CO2 levels of 400.03 parts per million (ppm), which is a level unseen for three million years. This is the first time in human history that atmospheric [...]

Researchers at the  Cambridge-based National Institute of Agricultural Botany have cross-bred an ancient species of wheat with a modern variant to produce a new strain that is not only stronger (i.e. more resistant to pests), but which also yields a higher productivity. Preliminary tests found the ‘superwhat’ could outperform modern wheat variants by as much as [...]

With the world’s population hitting the magic seven billion a mere few years ago, new solutions are required to feed the growing number of hungry people, estimated at being almost one billion strong at the moment or one in every seven people being hungry, according to the World Hunger Education Service. A panel of experts [...]