In 2021, Nasa grew Hatch chile peppers aboard the International Space Station for the first time, producing edible fruit after 137 days in microgravity. The Plant Habitat-04 experiment was designed to test whether a fruiting crop could survive and produce food in orbit, an important step towards growing fresh produce during future missions to the…

At 12, Shubham Banerjee was looking for a way to make Braille printing more affordable. His search began after he saw a letter asking for help for blind people during his family’s Christmas celebrations at home. When he learnt that Braille printers could cost more than $2,000, he wondered whether the technology could be built…

Harvard neuroscientists have kept tiny clusters of human brain cells alive in laboratory dishes for more than five years, setting a new record that could change how researchers study the human brain. The peppercorn-sized brain organoids, each containing more than one million cells from the cerebral cortex, survived for roughly three times as long as…

High in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, communities are reviving an age-old practice to answer a modern water crisis: they are ‘marrying’ glaciers. As natural glaciers shrink and meltwater becomes less reliable, local people are carrying pieces of ice from existing glaciers to carefully chosen sites, where male and female ice are brought together and buried…

A pair of cotton pants is not usually considered scientific equipment. Yet across Switzerland, thousands of them spent weeks underground as part of an unusual experiment into the condition of the soil beneath people’s feet.More than 1,000 volunteers took part, burying underwear and teabags at sites ranging from private gardens and farmland to grasslands and…

Image Credit: Left/The Wire/Right/CNN A cockroach producing something resembling milk sounds like an unlikely subject for serious scientific research. Yet one species has developed a remarkably unusual way of nourishing its young. The Pacific beetle cockroach, Diploptera punctata, gives birth to live offspring rather than laying eggs, and its developing young feed on a milk-like…

The Burmese python has become a symbol of two completely different conservation battles. In Florida, wildlife managers search for and remove the giant snake because its introduced population is threatening native wildlife in the Everglades. Thousands of kilometres away in Bangladesh, researchers are putting radio transmitters on the same species to understand where it moves,…

Gisat-1A is the programme’s second attempt, and its success finally gives India the capability that Gisat-1 was meant to establish. BENGALURU: When Isro’s GSLV-F17 lifted off from Sriharikota early Friday and successfully placed Gisat-1A or EOS-05 into its intended orbit, the mission did more than add another Earth observation satellite to India’s growing fleet.It ended…

Centuries after people forced a Cumbrian river into a straight, artificial channel, nature has reclaimed its original course in the Lake District, bringing endangered wild fish back to historic spawning grounds almost immediately. In the summer of 2016, conservationists restored a 1.1-kilometre stretch of Swindale Beck near Haweswater by putting its natural bends back into…

damselflyRepresenative image from Canva For much of the 20th century, the Santa Cruz River that winds through Tucson, Arizona, existed more as a memory than a living waterway. Groundwater pumping, drought and urban growth drained the riverbed, leaving long stretches of dry sand and scattered pools. Then, in a quiet but transformative experiment, treated wastewater,…