USA

Wyoming tetons Representative image from Canva Deep in the rock record of Wyoming, a layer of fossil leaves tells a quiet but powerful story about what happens to forests when the planet warms rapidly. About 56 million years ago, during a spike in global temperatures known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a lush…

Soldiers on both sides stand behind fences and in between are thousands of landmines. For more than 70 years, humans have not ventured into a 155-mile-long corridor that divides two nations, North and South Korea. While boundaries and borders can ward people off, nature is above all such regulations. This is probably why a space…

A farmer in southern Oregon transformed 70 acres of his 400-acre barley farm into a wetland in 2021, creating an unexpected refuge for wildlife while helping address agricultural water pollution. Karl Wenner, a co-owner of Lakeside Farms near Klamath Falls, worked with conservation agencies and other partners to convert flood-prone farmland into a managed wetland….

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…

Image(s): Left/Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn/American Songwriter/Right/Rattlesnake Ranch Some places become famous because of what they look like, and then there are places whose reputation comes almost entirely from the people who once gathered there. High above Yucca Valley in California’s high desert, Rattlesnake Ranch belongs firmly to the second category. Composer Jimmy Van…

PC: San Francisco State University A self-made billionaire couple gave San Francisco State University a $25 million gift, with a large portion of the donation made in XRP, making it one of the biggest cryptocurrency contributions to US higher education at the time. Chris Larsen, an SF State alumnus, and his wife Lyna Lam donated…

Each one of us spent the pandemic doing something that we normally wouldn’t have the time to. While some picked up numerous indoor hobbies, others studied hard enough to change career pathways. Benjamin Choi, a then 17-year-old kid, put his spare time during the phase to design an accessible device that does not require brain…

A restored 25-acre coastal wetland on the southern shore of western Lake Erie was used continuously by millions of aquatic animals after it was reconnected to nearby waterways, according to a four-year acoustic monitoring study led by researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The scientific assessment, published in the journal Aquatic Ecosystem Health…

Image: ResearchGate/Jack Norton A fossil that had sat inside London’s Natural History Museum since the 19th century appeared to have little left to reveal. Then palaeontology student Jack L. Norton took a closer look. While studying for his Master’s degree at the University of Portsmouth, Norton and his former supervisor, Dr Samuel Cooper, re-examined the…

PC: University of Nebraska–Lincoln From university laboratories in Germany to beetle specimens collected from dung in China, Patrick Urban’s career has focused on insects that are easy to overlook. The German biologist specialises in dung beetle taxonomy and ecology, with particular attention to the Onthophagini group found across the Palearctic and Indomalayan regions. His work…