An interdisciplinary team of experts in green chemistry, engineering and physics at Flinders University in Australia has developed a safer and more sustainable approach to extract and recover gold from ore and electronic waste. Explained in the leading journal Nature Sustainability, the gold-extraction technique promises to reduce levels of toxic waste from mining and shows…
A fireball captured on a dashcam in South Carolina Kathryn Rose Farr via Facebook Sightings of a fireball streaking down from the sky were reported by eyewitnesses in several south-eastern US states on the afternoon of 26 June. The American Meteor Society’s website has logged at least 142 reports about the fireball event from observers…
Some ash trees have genetic variants that confer partial resistance to ash dieback FLPA / Alamy Ash trees in the UK are rapidly evolving resistance in response to ash dieback disease, DNA sequencing of hundreds of trees has shown. The finding is good news, says Richard Buggs at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the…
To save elephant populations from extinction, the international community banned the sale of their ivory — but selling mammoth ivory remains legal, and the two are difficult to tell apart, especially for non-experts. This leaves a possible loophole for sellers of poached ivory to exploit. Now stable isotope analysis could provide a cheap, rapid option…
Today, all non-Africans are known to have descended from a small group of people that ventured into Eurasia after around 50 thousand years ago. However, fossil evidence shows that there were numerous failed dispersals before this time that left no detectable traces in living people. In a paper published in Nature this week, new evidence…
In general, evolution is a long, slow process of tiny changes passed down over generations, resulting in new adaptations and even new species over thousands or millions of years. But when living things are faced with dramatic shifts in the world around them, they sometimes rapidly adapt to better survive. Scientists recently found an example…
Climate change and habitat loss are affecting animal populations around the world and reptiles such as South Australia’s own endangered pygmy bluetongue are susceptible to higher temperatures and declining long-term rainfall trends. Flinders University scientists are working on securing a sustainable future for the burrow-dwelling endemic skink (Tiliqua adelaidensis) by assessing their suitability to cooler…
Cats prefer to sleep on their left side. This is the conclusion drawn by an international research team that analyzed several hundred YouTube videos of sleeping cats. The researchers see this bias as an evolutionary advantage because it favors hunting and escape behavior after waking up. The team from the University of Bari Aldo Moro…
Helen Briggs Environment correspondent, BBC News•@hbriggs Getty Images Ash dieback is a disease of ash trees, caused by a fungus Ash trees are fighting back against a disease that has ravaged the British countryside, new scientific evidence shows. When ash dieback arrived in 2012, predictions suggested up to 85% of ash trees could be lost….
A newly discovered species of dinosaur is now on display at London’s Natural History Museum. Researchers have named this new species Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae, a speedy, two-legged herbivore, 64 centimetres tall and 180 cm long that lived about 145 million to 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period. New Scientist spoke to Susannah Maidment, a…
