A small box of honeybees once became an unusual passenger aboard the space shuttle Discovery. In 1984, Nasa sent thousands of honeybees into orbit to see how they would behave when gravity was no longer guiding their movements. The experiment was less about honey and more about a basic piece of bee life: building a…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, co-founded The Primary School in East Palo Alto, California in 2016. The school was designed to serve the low-income families. The tuition-free private school aimed to support the “whole child” through wraparound services such as dental checkups, wellness coaching, and early-intervention screenings. For more than ten years…
Discarded Christmas trees Discarded holiday trees collected from living rooms across Alabama are finding a second life along the Gulf of Mexico, forming the foundation of a student-led coastal restoration campaign. Discarded Christmas trees collected from homes across Alabama are getting a second life along the Gulf of Mexico, helping form the base of a…
Representative Image of the Fort Peck buffalo herd grazing across a vast 33,000-acre prairie (AI-generated image) In 1987, tribal leaders on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana began working to restore buffalo to Assiniboine and Sioux lands, reviving an animal central to their culture, spirituality and way of life. Two years later, the tribes…
Representation of fluorescent dye tracing the hidden underground water pathways of Mammoth Cave’s aquifer. Image Credits ChatGPT. Rain that falls miles beyond the national park can sink into the ground through sinkholes, travel through hidden underground passages and eventually emerge within the Mammoth Cave system. A major groundwater-tracing programme helped scientists uncover this hidden connection,…
Composite image of chimpanzee (left) and bonobo (right). Credits – Wikimedia Commons A bonobo named Louise at a sanctuary in Japan helped document the longest-lasting social memory recorded outside our species. When shown a photograph of her sister Loretta, whom she had not seen in more than 26 years, Louise stared intently at the familiar…
Michael and Lynne carried out much of the renovation themselves. (Pictures: Homes.com) A former bank building in Detroit, Michigan that sat vacant for about a decade has been turned into a two-bedroom home after a couple spent years restoring it by hand. The unusual property, built in 1925, is now on the market for $1.3…
Phoenix coated 36 miles of roads to fight extreme heat Painting city streets with a light-coloured, reflective coating can cool the asphalt underneath, but it can also increase heat exposure for people walking on the road. That unexpected trade-off emerged from a major trial in the American Southwest. In 2020, the City of Phoenix Street…
A Boeing 737 aircraft that was originally the part of the Canadian Airlines fleet now lies nearly 90 feet underwater and serves the role of an artificial reef for marine life. The 100-foot jet was decommissioned by Air Canada due to age and structural problems, stripped of all usable components and the airframe was donated…
In 1994, Steve and Terri Irwin bought 3,500 acres to restore dwindling Koala habitat. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons. In 1994, Steve and Terri Irwin made a conservation investment that began with a simple idea: if koalas were losing habitat, protecting the animals alone would not be enough. That year, Australia Zoo bought 3,500 acres at…
