With intensifying global warming and climate change, drought has become a major threat to global agriculture, impacting crop yields and food security. To survive such adverse events, plants have evolved several strategies. One such strategy to counteract water scarcity is ‘stomatal closure,’ where stomata — the tiny pores on leaf surfaces responsible for gaseous exchange…
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves, using the US National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observatories. The merger produced a final black hole more than 225 times the mass of our Sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was observed during the…
Alison Francis Senior Science Journalist RBG Kew The renovation will begin in 2027 and will take an estimated five years It’s a makeover on a massive scale – it involves moving 1,300 plants, replacing 16,000 panes of glass and cleaning up hundreds of tonnes of iron. This is the ambitious £50m plan to renovate the…
Alien worlds found in the “habitable zone” of their star may still not be right for life PandorumBS/Alamy The number of planets capable of hosting alien life may be smaller than we thought, thanks to a new understanding of how water levels drive a planet’s climate. Below a certain level, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…
Joe Daniel Price via Getty James Canton spent two years sitting beneath an 800-year-old oak tree near his home in Essex, watching acorns fatten and butterflies land on the massive knurled grey trunk. Sometimes he sat in the branches too. Canton, a lecturer at the University of Essex, recalls how it helped him feel a…
Mark Poynting Climate reporter, BBC News Getty Images Reservoirs in the Midlands are showing lower levels than usual The East and West Midlands have officially entered drought, joining the North West and Yorkshire, after yet another hot and dry spell of weather. The announcement by the Environment Agency follows England’s driest start to the year…
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves using the US National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LIGO observatories. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our Sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run…
For this ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week, we gaze upon the field of stars that is NGC 1786. This object is a globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy that is approximately 160,000 light-years away from Earth. NGC 1786 itself is in the constellation Dorado….
Listen to the sounds three different plants might make if they were stressed Animals react to sounds being made by plants, new research suggests, opening up the possibility that an invisible ecosystem might exist between them. In the first ever such evidence, a team at Tel Aviv University found that female moths avoided laying their…
Octopus Mother by Kat Zhou Kat Zhou This alien and extraordinarily intimate image provides a rare glimpse of a Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) mother and her potential offspring at the Blue Heron Bridge dive area, off Florida’s West Palm Beach. After mating, these solitary animals hide themselves far away to get on with the…
