World

Baby holding mother’s hand (Representative Image, Canva) A complex surrogacy dispute involving California, Alaska and Texas intensified after surrogate McKenna West gave birth in Texas to a baby with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe and life-threatening congenital heart condition. The baby was born on August 12 and is receiving specialised medical care. According to…

18-year-old Bianca Adler turns back 400m from Everest summit, returns a year later to make historyPhoto: Bianca Adler/ Instagram In the pre-dawn darkness of the world’s highest mountain, an 18-year-old from Melbourne stood on top of the world. Bianca Adler had just become the youngest Australian to summit Mount Everest, completing a feat that had…

Australia’s camel population is difficult to count, partly because the animals are scattered across an immense stretch of desert and semi-desert country. Estimates have placed the feral herd anywhere from about 300,000 to one million, depending on the year and the method used to survey it. Their presence is a legacy of a very different…

Preble’s meadow jumping mouse (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Colorado’s efforts to protect the threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse are gaining momentum as conservationists work to restore the streamside habitat the tiny species depends on. In northern Colorado, restoration has focused on improving riparian areas, reconnecting streams with their floodplains and encouraging landowners to protect suitable habitat….

In the quiet pools of the New York Aquarium, a groundbreaking experiment was unfolding. It was 2001, and a team of scientists was about to test a question that had long fascinated researchers: could beluga whales, the white Arctic cetaceans known for their expressive faces and complex social lives, recognise themselves in a mirror?Over the…

Stories about social change tend to focus on the people at the top of the story, the prominent leaders, the large institutions, the wealthy donors whose names end up in the headline. MacKenzie Scott, who has given away tens of billions of dollars since 2019, pushed back on that habit directly in her own words….

Representative image of historical coins spilling out of a broken bowl in a kitchen (AI generated) When Robert and Betty Fooks bought South Poorton Farm in West Dorset in 2019, they knew the 17th-century long house would need extensive work before it felt like home. What they did not expect was to find a piece…

Fossils from Wyoming are revealing how forests responded when Earth experienced one of its most intense episodes of global warming around 56 million years ago. A new study, published in the journal Science on August 13, 2026, reconstructs the structure of forests during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, and finds that their canopies became…

An Egyptian archaeological mission has uncovered three tombs from different periods at the Sheikh Sobi archaeological site in the Bahariya Oasis. The discovery adds new evidence to the long history of the desert region, where archaeologists have already found tombs linked to rulers and priests from ancient Egypt’s Late Period. The newly uncovered burials include…

A variety of corals form an outcrop on Flynn Reef, part of the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns, Queensland, Australia. Credits – WIkimedia Commons The last two years have been a tale of two extremes for the Great Barrier Reef.” In 2025, the northern region of the reef experienced its biggest annual decline in coral…