They are the size of a football with bright orange bills, long legs, yellow-beady eyes and can fly up to 2,000 miles. While they populate American beaches today, once there was a time when American oystercatchers had been wiped out from New England.By the turn of the 20th century, these birds had gone extinct in…
Corals (Representative image) Human activity is changing coral reefs in ways that go far beyond what we can see on the surface. A new study led by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa shows that the chemicals we release into the environment are actually becoming part of coral tissue itself, and weakening corals’…
Every week, 73-year-old Dave Whitlow walks into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU in Virginia, where some of the hospital’s smallest and most vulnerable patients are fighting for their lives. For the past eight years, he has volunteered as a “baby cuddler”, gently holding premature and critically…
At first glance, it looks like an ordinary wardrobe. It has solid wooden doors, a sturdy frame and barely hints at anything unusual. Open it, though, and instead of shelves or hanging rails, there is a bed tucked inside. For hundreds of years, these enclosed sleeping spaces were part of everyday life across parts of…
Archaeologists working on farmland between the villages of Halberton and Sampford Peverell in Devon have uncovered a striking mosaic floor from a fourth-century Roman villa, along with an elaborate bathhouse that suggests the site once belonged to a family of considerable wealth. The discovery is the latest breakthrough from the Saving Halberton’s Ancient Roman Environment…
Long before modern theatres began using motorised stages and rolling sets, ancient Greek theatre builders appear to have solved the same problem using wood, stone tracks and simple wheels. New research from a team at Kumamoto University in Japan has strengthened the case that theatres from the Hellenistic period used large, moveable wooden stage structures…
A coral reef off the coast of Benin, long presumed dead, has just been found alive and full of activity, more than sixty years after scientists first wrote it off. Old surveys from the 1960s, carried out mainly to locate good fishing spots, had picked up signs of a possible deep-water reef sitting more than…
Three adults were sleeping on the floor in a house surrounded by waste, including dead rats and mice. (Picture: Durham County Council) A landlord company in County Durham has been fined £42,500 after tenants were found living in unsafe conditions, including sleeping on the floor surrounded by dead rats, mice, human waste and urine.Carter Property…
For Londoners living around Greenford Tube station, tiptoeing through floodwater to get to work was a part of their daily routine. The ticket hall found itself inundated after a heavy downpour with neighbourhoods flooded and sandbags routinely deployed to make way.The local council of Ealing, a borough in West London faced the daunting reality every…
A major railway construction project in England has uncovered a remarkable glimpse into the past, with archaeologists discovering a 1,740-year-old Roman silver coin bearing the name of Emperor Carausius. Found during excavations for the East West Rail route linking Oxford and Cambridge, the coin is helping researchers understand the timeline of ancient activity in the…