For more than a hundred years, scientists believed only one species of rabbit lived across the Iberian Peninsula, with at most two regional types. A new study has overturned that idea completely. Researchers from Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom have found that what looked like a single rabbit is actually two separate species that…
Nico Williams (Image: Wikipedia) A winner’s medal usually gets read as proof of what an athlete just achieved on the pitch. Nico Williams, the Spanish footballer, read his differently. “I run very fast, but I can’t run as fast as my mother,” he said. “Because she once escaped death and crossed the Sahara Desert from…
For decades, archaeologists believed that while early humans had learned to control naturally occurring fires more than a million years ago, they only mastered the ability to create fire much later. A remarkable discovery in southeast England is now challenging that timeline. Tiny fragments of iron pyrite, found alongside heat-damaged stone tools and ancient hearth…
Image(s): Guinness World Records For Wally Funk, the dream of becoming an astronaut began long before women were welcomed into America’s space programme. In 1961, the gifted pilot completed the same gruelling medical and psychological tests given to NASA’s first astronauts as part of the pioneering Mercury 13 programme. Despite outperforming many of her male…
For nearly two decades, a handshake agreement saved the Amazon from the chainsaws. Soy traders promised not to finance cropland carved out of deforested Amazon territory after 2008, and it worked.Deforestation-linked soy expansion fell from one-third of annual growth to nearly nothing. It was, by any measure, a rare victory for voluntary corporate restraint. However,…
When Tyler and Lauren Bouldin bought an abandoned stone house in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, they knew restoring it would be a long and unpredictable project. The 1830s property had damaged interiors, overgrown grounds and years of neglect to undo. What they did not expect was that the land surrounding their future family home had become…
Forest bathing sounds like an ancient tradition, but it is actually younger than the personal computer. The practice known as shinrin-yoku was coined in Japan in 1982, not passed down through centuries. It began as a public health idea rather than a spiritual one, aimed at a country that was mostly forest but rapidly urbanising,…
More than 2,200 years before satellites, GPS and space missions revealed the Earth’s true size, an ancient Greek scholar calculated the planet’s circumference using nothing more than a stick, sunlight and basic geometry. Around 240 BCE, Eratosthenes, the chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria, carried out one of history’s most brilliant scientific experiments. By…
Asteroid breakup 800 million years ago may have triggered impacts on Earth, the Moon and Mars (AI photo) A massive asteroid that broke apart around 800 million years ago may have sent a huge number of rocky fragments towards Earth, the Moon and Mars, according to a new study led by researchers at the Southwest…
Some of the biggest turning points in a life do not feel significant while they are actually happening. Dwayne Johnson has described exactly that experience from his own life. “The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody, like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I thought, ‘That can be me.’ So I started…