Image: AI representation of a way to turn astronaut poop into a sterile, odour-free material that could be recycled For astronauts travelling far beyond Earth, even the most ordinary human waste becomes a serious engineering problem. On a long-duration mission, there is no convenient rubbish collection, unlimited storage space or easy way to send unwanted…
Dog waste is usually treated as an unpleasant urban problem, something to be collected, bagged and thrown away. But researchers are investigating whether it could instead become a source of renewable energy. A new study has examined dog faeces as a feedstock for producing biohydrogen and methane through anaerobic biological processes. The research, published in…
Arctic ice with flags of countries participating in Operation Ice Camp 2026 and Havguard’s communications device, enclosed in a polycarbonate pressure vessel The Arctic sea is becoming noisier and harder to reach. Beneath its frozen surface, cracking ice, marine mammals and passing ships create a constantly changing underwater soundscape. For scientists trying to understand this…
Representative Image (AI-generated) What happens when young forest communities spend more than a decade growing in air with unusually high levels of carbon dioxide and ozone? Scientists in Wisconsin set out to find the answer by changing the atmosphere around these communities and tracking how the trees responded over 11 years. The experiment, known as…
An atomic force microscopy scan of a nanometer-sized device developed by Carnegie Mellon scientists that demonstrates a new form of the Hall effect. For more than a century, the Hall effect has been taught with a simple picture that electricity flows through a material, a magnetic field pushes the moving charges sideways, and a voltage…
Image: ResearchGate/François Génier Deep in the rainforests of Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea, a deceptively simple field technique helped reveal beetles that science had never formally recognised. Canadian entomologist François Génier, from the Beaty Centre for Species Discovery at the Canadian Museum of Nature, surveyed the island’s dung beetles using traps baited with animal dung. The…
Moroti Adegboyega. Image Credit: Jonas Borg / Stockholm Water Foundation A 17-year-old Canadian student has developed an AI-powered robot designed to tackle one of the most persistent forms of water pollution i.e plastic. The project, called ‘Ecoferroquatics,’ uses artificial intelligence, robotics and a magnetic liquid known as ‘ferrofluid’ to identify and remove plastic from water…
Off the coast of southwest England, the small island of Lundy was once a textbook case of how invasive rats can devastate seabird colonies. By the late 1990s, puffin numbers had crashed to just 13 breeding pairs, and many other seabirds had abandoned the island altogether. In 2002, conservationists launched an ambitious rat-eradication project to…
Winter on Mars is not simply a season of plunging temperatures and long polar nights. As the planet moves into winter, its atmosphere begins to change with it. Carbon dioxide, the dominant gas in the Martian atmosphere, can freeze directly onto the ground or fall as snow, building temporary polar caps that hold a substantial…
Japanese researcher Tokuji Unno wins the Ig Nobel Prize for a study on blowing the nose. Have you ever wondered whether there is a right way to blow your nose? A Japanese researcher spent years studying exactly that question — and nearly five decades after publishing his findings, his work has now won an Ig…