Nature Hub

  From - BBC World News Edited by Amal Udawatta By Kevin Gepford 20th February 2024 An army of reptilian bulldozers is helping a Galápagos island make an ecological comeback. E Española's burgeoning tortoise population – made up of the children and grandchildren of Diego, one of the archipelago's most beloved tortoise residents – is helping to restore the island's lost ecosystem. Before the arrival of humans, Española had as many as 8,000 resident tortoises. However, in the 1800s,  pirates and whalers nearly stripped Española  and neighbouring islands of their tortoises for their meat. These sailors also left behind goats, which went wild, multiplied, and devoured native vegetation. By the 1970s much of the pristine habitat was wrecked. Española was down to its last 14 tortoises; 12 females, and two males. These were brought back to the  Darwin Research Station's  breeding programme on Santa Cruz between 1964 and 1974, and were later joined by Diego who was...

  From - Sky  &  Telescope By Monica Young Edited by Amal Udawatta         In an ejection that would have caused its rotation to slow, a magnetar is depicted losing material into space in this artist’s concept. The magnetar’s strong, twisted magnetic field lines (shown in green) can influence the flow of electrically charged material from the object, which is a type of neutron star. NASA / JPL-Caltech A huge clue to understanding the mysterious, fleeting flashes of radio waves known as  fast radio bursts  (FRBs) came when one went off in our own galaxy. A highly magnetized neutron star, or  magnetar , dubbed SGR 1935+2154, emitted an FRB-like burst on April 28, 2020, and suddenly astronomers had an FRB to study in our own backyard. Since then, astronomers have been waiting for a repeat. In October 2022, they struck rich once again — and this time, they were ready. Until 2020, almost all known FRBs originated in faraway galaxies. Yet ...

      From - Knowable Magazine       By -  By    Theo Nicltopoulos       Edited by - Amal Udawatta The first interstellar interloper detected passing through the Solar System, 1l/‘Oumuamua, came within 24 million miles of the Sun in 2017. It’s difficult to know exactly what ‘Oumuamua looked like, but it was probably oddly shaped and elongated, as depicted in this illustration. CREDIT: NASA, ESA, JOSEPH OL MSTED (STSCI), FRANK SUMMERS (STSCI) On October 17 and 18, 2017, an unusual object sped across the field of view of a large telescope perched near the summit of a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The Pan-STARRS1 telescope was designed to survey the sky for transient events, like asteroid or comet flybys. But this was different: The object was not gravitationally bound to the Sun, or to any other celestial body. It had arrived from somewhere else. The mysterious object was the first visitor from interstellar space observ...

 From - Knowable Magazine By - Ute Eberle Edited by - Amal Udawatta The stories have become horribly familiar. Houses so overrun by bed bugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an  inch deep  on the floor. An airport  shutting down gates for deep cleaning  after the parasites were spotted brazenly crawling around. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bed bug detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains. For reasons that almost certainly have to do with global travel and poor pest management, bed bugs have resurfaced with a vengeance in 50 countries since the late 1990s. But recently, the resurgence has brought an added twist. When exterminators swarm out to hunt these pests, they might encounter not just one but two different kinds of bugs. Besides the common bed bug,  Cimex lectularius , which has always made its home in the Northern Hemisphere, there are now sightings of its cousin, the tropic...