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Lois Robinson Stretching his hand out to catch the stars, he forgets the flowers at his feet

Trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and single-celled organisms travel the globe high in the atmosphere. Scientists ar...
16/06/2025

Trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and single-celled organisms travel the globe high in the atmosphere. Scientists are discovering they play a vital role in the weather and even our health.
Clouds are our lifelong companions. Sometimes they drift overhead as wispy filigrees. On other days, they darken the sky and dump rain on us. But for all our familiarity with these veils of water vapour, they have been keeping a secret from us. Clouds are actually floating islands of life, home to trillions of organisms from thousands of species.
Along with birds and dragonflies and dandelion seeds, a vast ocean of microscopic organisms travels through the air. The French chemist Louis Pasteur was among the first scientists to recognise what scientists now call the aerobiome in 1860. He held up sterile flasks of broth and allowed floating germs to settle into them, turning the clear broth cloudy. Pasteur captured germs on the streets of Paris, in the French countryside and even on top of a glacier in the Alps. But his contemporaries balked at the idea. "The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic," one journalist told Pasteur at the time.

Gardens packed with blooming flowers or adorned with neat insect hotels, are extremely popular. But are these highly cur...
10/06/2025

Gardens packed with blooming flowers or adorned with neat insect hotels, are extremely popular. But are these highly curated creations actually helpful – or would it be better to allow nature to take its own course?
When she's not leading garden-based learning at Cornell University's School of Integrative Plant Science in New York, Ashley Louise Miller Helmholdt is a mum who likes to garden. She has a few different gardens on her property, as well as a patch of lawn for her son to play on where clover occasionally crops up. "I have a little plot that's just wild," she says. "I have a native plant and pollinator garden. So I have a little bit of everything."
Miller Helmholdt doesn't consider herself a master gardener by any means. Still, she has "a bit of background in this" and knows that a biodiverse, native plant-based garden, even with some so-called "weeds" in it, bolsters the biodiversity in her local ecosystem.

MaterialistsCeline Song's bittersweet debut, Past Lives, was nominated for two Oscars in 2024. For her follow-up, Song h...
03/06/2025

Materialists
Celine Song's bittersweet debut, Past Lives, was nominated for two Oscars in 2024. For her follow-up, Song has moved from a delicate semi-autobiographical drama to a glamorous romantic comedy with an A-list cast. Dakota Johnson plays a New York matchmaker who is blunt about her clients' value as potential partners: what matters, she says, is exactly how rich, tall and good-looking people are. But in her own love life, should she choose her poor ex (Chris Evans) over a wealthy new suitor (Pedro Pascal)? Materialists may be more conventional than Past Lives, but Song told Time that she wanted to make a film about the pursuit of love. "When people say it's not important, I ask, 'Not as important as what?' When you watch a movie, we don't all know what it's like to save the world. But we know what it's like to fall in love. It's the biggest drama in our lives. It's vital, and we need to talk about it more."

Released on 13 June in the US, Canada, India, Poland and Turkey

In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its nat...
27/05/2025

In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north. The project was a grand failure – but 50 years on, the idea still won't completely go away.
To the west of Russia's Ural Mountains lies a picturesque body of water called Nuclear Lake. It's difficult to access, and visitors have to travel north by boat along the Kolva and Visherka rivers from the small town of Nyrob, where the tsars once exiled their political opponents. The lake itself, which is about 690m (2,300ft) at its widest point, is not linked directly to the dozens of nearby waterways, and the final approach is on foot along a boggy track. To get to its shores, you have to pass rusting metal signs warning you are entering a "radiation danger zone" and that drilling and construction are forbidden. Large earth mounds snake around the edge of the lake.

Locals and ecologists are troubled by the potential impacts a looming seawall could have on the biodiverse Japanese isla...
15/05/2025

Locals and ecologists are troubled by the potential impacts a looming seawall could have on the biodiverse Japanese island of Amami Ōshima. So is there another way to protect its beach?
Rising before dawn on an early summer day in July 2022, Hisami Take took a walk along Katoku beach in Amami Ōshima, an island nestled in the far south of Japan. Looking along the beach, she saw an animal track on the sand stretching from the ocean, then U-turning back into the water.
The track, she says, likely belonged to an endangered loggerhead sea turtle that is known to come ashore to lay eggs. "This year, no eggs were found. Maybe the shiny orange construction rope is signalling the turtles to turn away."

Icebergs as large as cities, potentially tens of kilometres wide, once roved the coasts of the UK, according to scientis...
28/04/2025

Icebergs as large as cities, potentially tens of kilometres wide, once roved the coasts of the UK, according to scientists.
Researchers found distinctive scratch marks left by the drifting icebergs as they gouged deep tracks into the North Sea floor more than 18,000 years ago.
It's the first hard evidence that the ice sheet formerly covering Britain and Ireland produced such large bergs.
The findings could provide vital clues in understanding how climate change is affecting Antarctica today.

The scientists searched for fingerprints of giant icebergs using very detailed 3D seismic data, collected by oil and gas companies or wind turbine projects doing ocean surveys.

People could see the thunderstorm, but they couldn't see what was going on inside it. Trillions of pollen particles, suc...
21/04/2025

People could see the thunderstorm, but they couldn't see what was going on inside it. Trillions of pollen particles, sucked up into the clouds as the storm formed, were now being splintered by rain, lightning and humidity into ever-smaller fragments – then cast back down to Earth for people to breathe them in.
It was around 18:00 on 21 November 2016 when the air in Melbourne, Australia, turned deadly. Emergency service phone lines lit up, people struggling to breathe began flooding into hospitals, and there was so much demand for ambulances that the vehicles were unable to reach patients stuck at home. Emergency rooms saw eight times as many people turning up with breathing problems as they would normally expect. Nearly 10 times as many people with asthma were admitted to hospital.

31/03/2025

Moving endangered rhinos to new areas is a vital part of their conservation. War-torn helicopters from the Vietnam war are airlifting the creatures to safety.
Zipping through the skies over South Africa, a 1,300kg (2,865lbs) horned herbivore is dangling by its feet from a helicopter. It may be a shocking sight to behold but, within the last decade, the use of helicopters in rhinoceros conservation has been gaining momentum in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.
Black rhinos are critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). However, thanks to conservation efforts, their numbers are on the rise. Today, black rhinos have a population of roughly 6,500 – up from the 1990s' low point of less than 2,500, when poaching and habitat loss drove the species to the edge of extinction.

Moving endangered rhinos to new areas is a vital part of their conservation. War-torn helicopters from the Vietnam war are airlifting the creatures to safety.
Zipping through the skies over South Africa, a 1,300kg (2,865lbs) horned herbivore is dangling by its feet from a helicopter. It may be a shocking sight to behold but, within the last decade, the use of helicopters in rhinoceros conservation has been gaining momentum in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.
Black rhinos are critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). However, thanks to conservation efforts, their numbers are on the rise. Today, black rhinos have a population of roughly 6,500 – up from the 1990s' low point of less than 2,500, when poaching and habitat loss drove the species to the edge of extinction.



When Betsy Williams goes to the loo, she likes to know her p*e won't go to waste. For the last 12 years, she and her nei...
20/03/2025

When Betsy Williams goes to the loo, she likes to know her p*e won't go to waste. For the last 12 years, she and her neighbours in rural Vermont, US, have diligently collected their urine and donated it to farmers for use as fertiliser for their crops.
"We're consuming all of these things that have nutrients in them, and then a lot of the nutrients that are passing through us can then get recycled back into helping create food for us and for animals. So to me, it's logical," Williams says.
Williams takes part in the Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program (UNRP), a programme run by the Rich Earth Institute (REI), a non-profit based in Vermont. She and 250 of her neighbours in Windham County donate a total of 12,000 gallons (45,400 litres) of urine to the programme each year to be recycled – or "p*ecycled".
Windham County's p*e-donations are collected by a lorry and driven to a large tank where the urine is pasteurised by heating it to 80C (176F) for 90 seconds. It is then stored in a pasteurised tank, ready to be sprayed on local farmland when the time is right to fertilise crops.

It is a world cut off from our own by thick blankets of floating ice, but some scientists are taking the plunge to learn...
14/03/2025

It is a world cut off from our own by thick blankets of floating ice, but some scientists are taking the plunge to learn how these frozen depths are changing.
There is a 70cm-thick (28in) layer of ice capping the surface of this lake, in a remote corner of Lapland, northern Finland. Gathered around a hole cut into the ice is a group of around 20 people, p*ering down into the inky depths with some trepidation. The seemingly lifeless water below the ice has a temperature only slightly above 0C (32F). Some of them are about to jump down there to venture under the ice.
Sophie Kalkowski-Pope is one of the divers preparing to visit this strange, upside-down world where she will swim below a ceiling of smooth ice. The marine biology graduate from the University of Queensland, Australia, is part of an ice-diving training party that has gathered here. She is wearing a dry suit and anticipating the initial cold shock when that frigid water will hit the exposed skin on her face.

Previous research suggested one vital part of this conveyor belt could be headed for a catastrophic collapse.Theoretical...
07/03/2025

Previous research suggested one vital part of this conveyor belt could be headed for a catastrophic collapse.
Theoretically, warming water around Antarctica should sp*ed up the current. This is because density changes and winds around Antarctica dictate the strength of the current. Warm water is less dense (or heavy) and this should be enough to sp*ed up the current. But observations to date indicate the strength of the current has remained relatively stable over recent decades.
This stability persists despite melting of surrounding ice, a phenomenon that had not been fully explored in scientific discussions in the past.

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