#project-glasswing

#project-glasswing

Crushed clean, dry eggshells, when scattered over the soil, are intended to stop adult gnats from laying eggs and potentially add natural fertilizer. However, they merely sit on the surface, collecting dust, while the gnats remain attracted to the damp compost.

During major floods, thousands of tiny fish convene at Luvilombo Falls in the upper Congo River Basin to undertake a peculiar vertical migration, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports.

A study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley has found that ethanol is surprisingly common in floral nectar, the sugary fuel that keeps pollinators alive. Yeast feeding on those sugars produces trace amounts of alcohol, and in this study, it showed up in 26 of the 29 plant species sampled.

Citizen Science Month is built around a goal of 2.5 million 'Acts of Science,' tying the annual event to America's 250th birthday through a simple but powerful idea: lots of small contributions can add up to something really meaningful.

'Our results show that the next 20 years are critical,' lead author Dr Rob Cooke told the Daily Mail. 'By around 2050, we reach a point where the choices we make on emissions and land use will largely determine whether Britain moves towards a much more degraded or a much more nature‑positive future.'

When faced with a choice between a box with eyes painted on it and a plain box, the gulls were slower to approach the box with eyes and less likely to peck at it.

Somebody sent to this world to try to give people hope in dark times, because without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing, and in the dark times that we are living in now, if people don't have hope, we're doomed. How can we bring little children into this dark world we've created and let them be surrounded by people who've given up?

Frogmouths have another life that few people see: like vampires, they wake at sunset and night-hunt until dawn. These stolid creatures turn into zephyrs that silently swoop, catching prey on the ground and in the air.

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.

Around a third of UK gardeners use pesticides, and our studies found that house sparrow numbers, for example, were nearly 40% lower in gardens where the pesticide metaldehyde was used. By reducing pesticide use, you can actively encourage birds back into your outdoor spaces, as they rely on invertebrates such as slugs and snails as natural prey.

This study started from a discussion with my co-author and postdoctoral researcher, Sabrina Rondeau, whose recent findings showed that these queens can survive submersion for over a week, which is extraordinary for a terrestrial insect. We wanted to understand how that's even possible.

Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years.

When Borkent stops working, biting midges risk becoming an orphan group, a term that taxonomists give for a branch of the web of life that is no longer being studied. It is a pattern playing out across the field, he says. I am one of the last few standing. It's crisis all around. As the taxonomic community ages, we are not being replaced.

When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates. Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing mosaic of wildlife.

Less than a year ago, United States company Colossal Biosciences announced it had "resurrected" the dire wolf, a megafauna-hunting wolf species that had been extinct for 10,000 years. Within two days of Colossal's announcement, the Interior Secretary of the US, Doug Burgum, used the idea of resurrection to justify weakening environmental protection laws: "pick your favourite species and call up Colossal". His reasoning appeared to confirm critics' fears about de-extinction technology. If we can bring any species back, why protect them to begin with?

On a spring day in 1694, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - the father of microbiology - used a magnifying lens to look at a candle through the dissected eye of a dragonfly. But instead of seeing 1 candle flame, he saw hundreds of tiny flames, repeated over and over. But spoiler alert - this is not how insects see. Hi, I'm Niba, and today we're going to explore how insects really see the world.

Conservationists have now persuaded landowners to cut hedges in a more gentle rotation, with sections left uncut for up to three years, to enable more eggs to survive over winter. The caterpillars emerge with the foliage in spring and hatch into adult butterflies in July. The brown hairstreak is difficult to spot as a butterfly but every winter volunteers assess its populations by counting its minuscule cream-coloured eggs, which with careful searching are visible on the bare branches of blackthorn.

Biodiversity loss is continuing at an unprecedented rate, with species becoming extinct at between 100 and 1,000 times the average pre-human, or 'background', rate. Human activities are the main cause. Although there are hundreds of local, regional and international initiatives to conserve and sustainably use species and ecosystems, many conservation scientists worry that measures such as interventions to conserve individual species or incentives to create protected areas are not supported by strong evidence from research.

The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.