Across lowland peatand flooded woodsyou sway,rounded crownspiercing canopieswith chestnut orbsthat flicker in the sun.Juices,jams,wines,ice creams,roofs and carpets,lanterns,dreams.How many thingsconnectedwith your existence.We cut you downwith extreme prejudice,severing the rootsthat bind all thingsto this land.Wistfully you whisperthat if we wouldonly holdour bodies close,then your treasureswould be oursto keep. An example of the moriche palm from Calanoa Lodge […]

Using mercury as a propellant for manoeuvring satellites in Earth’s orbit has been outlawed by a UN resolution before it ever made it into orbit. The ban follows interest in mercury-thruster technologies, which could have seen the toxic heavy element fall back to Earth from the upper atmosphere, posing significant environmental and health risks. Ion […]

Following the publication of the major natural history texts in the new print technology and the dispute amongst humanists concerning the errors in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, the next major developments were not driven by a direct interest in botany as botany, but by a desire to reform the teaching and practice of medicine. In their personal […]

For the first time, quantum mechanical interactions between molecular vibrations have sped up the reaction between two compounds. Huilin Pan and Kopin Liu from the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences (IAMS) in Taipei, Taiwan, made some vibrations of singly deuterated methane react faster with chlorine at ambient temperature using ‘quantum phase control’. ‘Our new […]

MIT’s School of Science welcomes postdocs Malena Rice and Eva Scheller, recipients of the 2022 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 31 by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to […]

Note: This is the final article in a four-part interview series featuring the work of the 27 MIT Climate Grand Challenges finalist teams, which received a total of $2.7 million in startup funding to advance their projects. This month, the Institute will name a subset of the finalists as multiyear flagship projects. Advances in computation, […]

Excited water molecules can rid themselves of their extra energy by producing slow electrons, the kind that can damage DNA. When molecules collide with high-energy projectiles like x-rays or γ-radiation, it can knock out one of their core electrons. To return to an energetically more stable state, one of the molecule’s higher energy electrons jumps […]

In studying a unique class of ultra-hot exoplanets, NASA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers may be in the mood for dancing to the Calypso party song “Hot, Hot, Hot.” That’s because these bloated Jupiter-sized worlds are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot […]

Weaver birds that eat seeds flock together and nest in colonies more commonly than those species that eat insects, suggests new research by an international team of scientists led by the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. For the first time, the study statistically supports an influential ecological hypothesis on social behaviour first proposed […]

Licorice is more than a candy people either love or hate — it may play a role in preventing or treating certain types of cancer, according to researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago. Gnanasekar Munirathinam and his research team are studying substances derived from the licorice plant Glycyrrhiza glabra to determine if they could be […]