London CNN — As the climate crisis makes it difficult to grow many food crops, some scientists and entrepreneurs are looking beyond our planet for solutions. Abu Dhabi-based startup StarLab Oasis, spun off from Texas-based Nanoracks, wants to grow seeds in space to develop plant varieties that can survive on a less hospitable Earth. In … Read more
European eels used to make up more than half of the total fish biomass in European rivers, but their numbers have declined dramatically over the past twenty-five years due to overfishing, parasites, barriers to migration and changes in ocean currents. (Photo: Robert Nunn, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0) European eels travel three to six thousand miles … Read more
Male Philomena prominens jump off females after mating to avoid being eaten. Pictured is a spider from the genus Uloborus, the same genus as P. prominens. (Photo: Robert White, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Sexual cannibalism, in which the female eats the male after mating, is common in many spider species. Don Lyman of Living on … Read more
Want to know something funny? We don’t really know how our planet formed. We have a broad general idea, but the finer details are much harder to decipher. We have a model that is currently accepted as the most likely explanation so far: that the Earth was formed by the gradual accretion of asteroids. But … Read more
The search for life on Mars may have just become much more complicated. As rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance search the surface for traces of ancient life, new evidence reveals that we may have to dig much deeper to find them. Any evidence of amino acids left over from the time Mars may have been … Read more
Date of broadcast: week of June 24, 2022 stream / download this segment as an MP3 file A baby who sleeps on his back, following the recommendations of the Safe to Sleep campaign to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. (Photo: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), … Read more