A nest box occupied by a Eurasian scops owl might seem an unlikely place to find a live snake, yet that is exactly what researchers repeatedly encountered in central Türkiye. Across six breeding seasons, they inspected 109 owl nests and found the small worm snake Xerotyphlops vermicularis in 44% of them. The reptiles were not…

Aerial view of the orange peel-treated area (right) and untreated pasture (left), surveyed by Princeton researchers. In the late 1990s, an unusual conservation experiment began in Costa Rica when ecologists proposed using orange peels and pulp to help restore a badly degraded piece of land inside a national park.For this, orange juice company Del Oro…

In 1999, American teacher Ronald Sakolsky was teaching English in Luoyang, China, when a television report about Yin Yuzhen, a woman battling desertification in Inner Mongolia’s Mu Us Sandy Land, moved him deeply. He decided to help and spent about two months raising $5,000 through a US-based charity to support Yin’s tree-planting work. The money…

Larry Walters could not take any photo as his flight turned chaotic but this photo was taken by his girlfriend before the flight. The Internet still can’t believe that a Los Angeles man in 1982 tied a few balloons to a lawn chair and flew in the sky for 45 minutes. Larry Walters became a…

A small teabag may not seem like much of a solution to polluted drinking water, but for Minnesota student Vick Tan, it became the centre of a science project that went far beyond the classroom. Tan helped develop a simple-looking pouch designed to capture arsenic from contaminated water, using a mix of cellulose fabric, crushed…