During the midday Friday prayer hours on March 28, 2025, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar along the Sagaing Fault. With an epicenter close to Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, it was the most powerful earthquake to strike Myanmar in more than a century and the second deadliest in its modern history. The cause…
A new commentary published in Nature Communications by Dr James Bradley, Reader in Environmental Science at Queen Mary University of London, and his team reveals a dramatic and concerning shift in the Arctic winter. During a fieldwork campaign in Svalbard in February 2025, researchers encountered exceptionally high temperatures, widespread snowmelt, and blooming vegetation. Svalbard, warming…
New research in Plants, People, Planet indicates that bread wheat’s micronutrient content can be increased by cultivating it with a specific type of fungus. When investigators grew different types of wheat with and without the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus Rhizophagus irregularis, they observed that crops grown with fungi developed larger grains with greater amounts of phosphorus…
Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Link et al/Biology Letters The researchers say the terror bird did not survive the encounter Teeth marks made on the leg bone of a large avian reptile known as a terror bird 13 million years ago suggest an even bigger predator may have killed it, scientists say. Terror birds…
Artist’s impression of an encounter between an ancient caiman and a terror bird Julian Bayona Becerra About 13 million years ago in a vast South American wetland, colossal predators clashed. The fossilised bone from an enormous flightless bird found in Colombia shows tooth marks made by a giant caiman. Andrés Link at the University of the…
Mollisonia, a Cambrian period marine animal, may have been an early arachnid Junnn11 @ni075 CC BY-SA 4.0 The brain of a sea creature that lived over 500 million years ago was organised like that of a spider – suggesting that arachnids may have not evolved on land as previously thought. Mollisonia lived during a period…
A leaf-toed gecko from Rábida Island Rory Stansbury/Island Conservation A tiny gecko has been rediscovered on Rábida Island in the Galápagos, where it was believed to have been wiped out by invasive rats. The leaf-toed gecko (Phyllodactylus maresi), whose adults are just 8 centimetres long, was previously only known to have existed on Rábida from…
The remains of landscapes thought to have formed when ancient rivers flowed across East Antarctica have been discovered – and could help predictions of future loss from the ice sheet. Researchers led by Durham University, UK, examined radar measurements of ice thickness and found extensive, previously unmapped, flat surfaces buried beneath a 3,500 km stretch…
New University of South Australia research is providing evidence of biological triggers of oil production in oats, a discovery that will help processing and potentially drive further demand for Australian-grown oats. While Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of oats, high oil content in oat grains creates challenges during milling, reducing processing efficiency and limiting…
Beneath the scales of Australia’s iconic monitor lizards (commonly known as goannas), scientists have discovered an unexpected secret: a hidden layer of bony skin structures known as osteoderms. These structures, which have been long overlooked, may hold the key to understanding how these ancient reptiles not only survived but thrived in one of the world’s…
