EntoPedia is a wearable digital collection system designed by Junfei Teng to reframe insect 'collecting' as documentation, turning everyday encounters into moments of observation, learning, and shared knowledge without physical capture. The project received the 2026 French Design Awards Gold (Professional) in Product Design, Educational Toys & Games, recognizing its approach to ecological education through wearable interaction and community-built datasets.
Citizen Zoo Volunteers across London are being enlisted to grow a threatened wildflower vital for bees, butterflies and rare moths, in an effort to stop one of the capital's rarest plants from disappearing. Conservation group Citizen Zoo launched the project to restore tower mustard, which is thought to survive at only two sites in the capital and about 30 in England. Volunteers will cultivate the herb at home before it is replanted at locations across Greater London.
Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable new planet about 146 light-years away which is Earth-sized and has conditions similar to Mars. The candidate planet, named HD 137010 b, orbits a sun-like star and is estimated to be 6% larger than Earth. An international team of scientists in Australia, the UK, the US and Denmark identified the planet using data captured in 2017 by the Nasa Kepler space telescope's extended mission, known as K2.
"I started wondering how our city environments potentially shape wild animals," Raffaela Lesch, a biologist from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the study's senior author, told SFGATE. "How might the environment where we live change them in a way that might be similar or the same to domestication? That's really the idea that sparked this work with the raccoons."
When a total solar eclipse plunged North America into darkness on the afternoon of April 8, 2024, the songbirds in Bloomington, Ind., suddenly fell silent. In the middle of the forest, the only sounds biologist Kimberly Rosvall could hear were the croaks of nocturnal frogs and the distant howl of a coyote. But when sunlight returned after four minutes of night, the songs did, too, as hundreds of birds greeted the morning in unison with a cheerful dawn chorus.
