Category: 7. SciTech

If you’ve ever heard a loud, distant booming noise with no obvious explanation like a thunderstorm or a car backfiring, then you might have experienced a skyquake.  Skyquakes have been reported around the world and locals have different names for them in different regions.  Near Seneca Lake in… Continue Reading

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week – from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Scientists have warned that a “more contagious” variant of the Covid… Continue Reading

Crinkles and divots in the surface of Earth on Türkiye’s Central Anatolian Plateau are the smoking gun for a newly discovered class of plate tectonics. Beneath a depression called the Konya Basin, Earth’s crust is slowly dripping deeper into the planetary interior, a process that is gradually… Continue Reading

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The sight of solar panels installed on rooftops and large energy farms has become commonplace in many regions around the world. Even in the gray and rainy UK, solar power is becoming a major player in electricity… Continue Reading

Many large mammals have lost genetic diversity, often thanks to the actions of people shrinking their populations. The implications can be severe because without genetic diversity, a population does not have a “genetic database” to fall back on to adapt to environmental change. The Iberian lynx… Continue Reading

The flurry of private contracts became part of a “kleptocratic” regime, according to one 2017 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Nearly all of the ISDS claims have their roots in contracts, laws or other agreements made during this period. For the farmers and villagers… Continue Reading

If you’ve seen tabloid news stories about Jesus’s face appearing in a piece of burnt toast or Michael Jackson’s visage peering out from the clouds, then you’ll know that you’re far from the only one to see faces all over the place.  Psychologists put this down to ‘pareidolia’… Continue Reading

In the Wasatch Mountains of the western US on the slopes above a spring-fed lake, there dwells a single giant organism that provides an entire ecosystem on which plants and animals have relied for thousands of years. Found in my home state of Utah, “Pando” is a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen… Continue Reading

A group of researchers at the University of Tokyo have spent years testing the limits of chemical bonds. And now, after years of work, they’ve finally explored an idea originally proposed in 1931: a chemical bond formed using just a single electron. This, of course, poses quite a… Continue Reading