Representative image (Photo credit: AP) NEW DELHI: Before a baby’s first breath, life depends on an extraordinary organ that most people rarely think about – the placenta.Acting as the baby’s first life-support system, the placenta delivers oxygen and nutrients, removes waste products, protects the developing fetus and produces hormones essential for sustaining pregnancy.Yet, despite its…
Deep inside the cloud forests of Mexico, certain patches of bark and rotting wood begin to glow a faint, ghostly green once darkness sets in. The source is not the trees themselves but tiny mushrooms growing on them, fungi capable of producing their own light through a chemical reaction inside their cells. For years, very…
That empty plastic water bottle sitting in your recycling bin might have a second life ahead of it, one that involves powering an electric vehicle, a smartphone or even a renewable energy storage system. Researchers at Penn State University have developed a new method to convert waste PET plastic, the same material used in most…
A tiny asteroid no wider than a football pitch has been quietly puzzling astronomers for years, and a Chinese spacecraft is now closing in on the answer. The asteroid, called Kamo’oalewa, is one of only a handful of objects known as Earth’s quasi moons, small bodies that circle the sun in near lockstep with our…
Nearly four decades after the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, the abandoned reactor remains one of the most hostile places on Earth. Radiation levels that would prove lethal to most forms of life still linger in parts of the exclusion zone, making it an unlikely setting for biological discovery. Yet among cracked concrete, rusting steel and contaminated…
While early birds existed in a time period when dinosaurs dominated, they were feathered, capable of gliding or flying, but looked nothing like the birds we have today. Unlike birds like pigeons, robins and eagles, which have short fan-shaped tails, these ancient birds possessed long, bony tails inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. The transition from…
Studies show that the ancient timber circle, dubbed “Seahenge,” was built in 2049 B.C. It was excavated from a salt marsh near a beach on England’s east coast in 1999. (Image credit: Holmes Garden Photos/Alamy) A mysterious wooden monument buried beneath the Norfolk coast may have been built more than 4,000 years ago in an…
A white dwarf is usually thought of as the quiet remnant left behind after a star has exhausted its fuel and shed much of itself into space. By that stage, any worlds that once orbited nearby are expected to have faced a violent fate. Yet one planetary system roughly 80 light-years from Earth appears to…
Scientists Thought Ravens Followed Wolves for Food. They Were Wrong. Ravens Predict Them For decades, biologists believed ravens found their next meal by shadowing wolves across the landscape until the predators made a kill. A new study in and around Yellowstone National Park suggests the birds are using a far more sophisticated strategy.Instead of constantly…
Archaeologists have been excavating the area for ancient secrets since the 1980s Archaeologists have uncovered what could be a 5,000-year-old ritual circle hidden beneath peat on a Scottish island, all without digging into the ground.Using advanced geophysical scanning equipment, researchers from Historic Environment Scotland (HES) detected a ring of buried pits beneath Machrie Moor on…