Physics News
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 13 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Space
Why does removing rats and stoats from a scatter of small offshore islands bring back flightless parrots and ground-nesting seabirds that had not bred on the mainland for over a century?
Wood Pile
How did a treeless volcanic island in the North Atlantic, stripped of its birch forests by Viking axes over a thousand years ago, begin clawing woodland back onto slopes of black ash and wind?
Water World
How does reintroducing a dam-building rodent to a drought-prone valley raise the water table, cool the stream, and store more carbon in the floodplain than the surrounding forest?
Africa News
How did an East African community, told to fence wildlife out for conservation, instead grant grazing rights across shared rangelands and see lion, elephant and giraffe numbers climb alongside their cattle herds?
Tech Space
How did a London physician stop a cholera outbreak that killed more than 500 people in ten days by mapping deaths on a Soho street grid and removing the handle from a single water pump in 1854?
Tech Space
In 1869, a Swiss physician named Friedrich Miescher isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers at a Tübingen clinic, called it 'nuclein', and unknowingly became the first person to hold purified DNA in his hands, 84 years before Watson and Crick built their model
Tech Space
Astronauts returning from six-month ISS missions come home measurably taller, gaining up to 5 centimetres as spinal discs decompress in microgravity, and the extra height disappears within days once gravity crushes the vertebrae back into place
Terradaily
How did a Chinese plateau the size of France cut the yellow silt flowing into its downstream river from 1.6 billion tonnes a year to 300 million?
Tech Space
In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 Venus probe was destroyed just 294 seconds after launch when an Atlas guidance antenna fault exposed a missing overbar in the rocket’s ground-guidance program
Tech Space
How does a city-state of 6.1 million people with almost no natural freshwater meet up to 40 percent of its water demand with water that once went down the drain?
Earth Observation
A single lightning flash recorded over the southern US in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres across three states in a matter of seconds, a horizontal bolt long enough to reach from Boston to Washington DC, and satellite instruments only exist to measure it because ground observers cannot see that far
Tech Space