Image: The Guardian/Jenny Vickers A former dairy farm in the UK has undergone a striking transformation after humans stepped back and allowed natural processes to reshape the land. At Heal Somerset, a 460-acre site in Somerset acquired by the rewilding charity Heal in December 2022, the first three years of nature recovery have brought a…

The Moon has been romanticised for centuries, but few people have ever tried to give someone a piece of it. In 2002, that idea became part of an extraordinary theft at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center, where an intern helped remove a safe containing Apollo lunar samples and other irreplaceable scientific material. The stolen collection included…

Deep inside a crystal cooled to nearly -230°C, MIT physicists have caught something rarely seen in quantum materials: two populations of electrons rebuilding themselves into wave-like order after being scattered apart by laser light, and doing so in two completely different ways. Working with erbium tritelluride, a rare-earth material known for hosting a pair of…

Scientists have traced hidden pathways through animal evolution by comparing thousands of genomes and following pieces of chromosomes that have survived for hundreds of millions of years. The study examined 5,821 chromosome-scale genomes from 4,454 species across 19 animal phyla, using 29 ancient linkage groups as markers of chromosome history. Every one of the 406…

For years, the dense loops of repetitive DNA clustered near the middle of chromosomes were treated as evolutionary clutter. According to the new study published in Nature, titled ‘Meiotic pairing through barcode-like satellite DNA repeats‘, researchers working with fruit flies have shown that this so-called satellite DNA forms a kind of barcode: a unique combination…

Representative Image (AI-generated) For humans to travel deeper into space and remain there for months or even years, they will need much more than powerful rockets. Astronauts must have a continuous supply of oxygen, water and food, while waste and carbon dioxide must be carefully managed. On short missions, these needs can largely be met…