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A dried lakebed in Chad exhales roughly 27.7 million tonnes of phosphorus-rich dust each year. Trade winds carry it 5,000 kilometres to the Amazon, where it fertilises soils that would otherwise starve. Every year, a river of dust lifts off a dry lakebed in northern Chad, climbs into the atmosphere, and drifts west across the Atlantic until some of it settles on the canopy of the Amazon. The load reaching the basin is estimated at around 27.7 million tonnes, and it carries the phosphorus [...]

Dangerous bacteria forming protective biofilms threaten Brazil's booming aquaculture industry, raising questions about farm management and food safety in warm-water systems. A study published in Microbial Pathogenesis has identified four Flavobacterium species among 11 bacterial isolates associated with Brazilian aquaculture fish. Six isolates were F. oreochromis , while the collection also included F. davisii , F. indicum and F. inkyongense . The work links several of these bacteria to [...]

On September 3, 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to his laboratory at St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, and began sorting through plates of Staphylococcus . On one dish, a mold colony had appeared. Immediately around it was a clear zone where the bacteria had failed to grow. The American Chemical Society's historical account dates Fleming's return and observation to September 3 , rather than the September 28 date repeated in many later retellings. On [...]

The most fuel-efficient way to reach the Moon, it turns out, is to fly straight past it. Not into orbit, not into a landing approach. Past it, skimming within 73 kilometres of the surface before looping back through a gravitational sweet spot halfway between the two worlds. This is the counterintuitive answer that a team of researchers from Portugal, France, and Brazil arrived at after sifting through roughly 30 million simulated routes, a haul that dwarfs anything previously attempted in lunar [...]

Inexpensive material compresses light, paving the way for photonic microcircuits in the terahertz range There's a mineral called bustamentite that almost nobody studies. It forms in flat hexagonal plates, grows readily in warm water, and turns up as an unwanted contaminant in perovskite solar cells. For decades it sat at the margins of materials science, useful mostly as a precursor for more fashionable compounds. Then a group of physicists decided to look at it very carefully in the [...]

Campos úmidos and veredas rank among Brazil's most carbon-dense ecosystems — and its most vulnerable. Protecting these peat-forming wetlands is essential not just for national carbon accounting and global climate targets, but for securing water availability, safeguarding biodiversity, and building resilience across Brazil's most threatened biome. The Amazon gets all the credit. It always has. When scientists talk about South America as a carbon sink, when policymakers argue about [...]

Did Nature’s Only Straight Lines Kickstart the Human Mind? Quartz crystals have been turning up at hominin sites for the better part of a million years. Twenty of them surfaced alongside Homo erectus remains at Zhoukoudian in China, deposited at least 600,000 years ago and possibly earlier. Six nearly complete prisms appeared in an Acheulian layer in India. More showed up at Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, at Gudenushöhle in Austria, in the Kalahari Desert. None of them had been carved, [...]

There's a fungus that grows on rocks in Chernobyl. Thrives there, actually, feeding on radiation. Extremophiles, they're called—organisms that live in places nothing should survive. Your hair faces something similar, in a way. Not gamma rays, exactly. Just the relentless daily bombardment of UV, pollution particles, heated styling tools, and general atmospheric nastiness. Except hair can't evolve. It's dead protein. Once keratin degrades, that's i; no cellular machinery [...]

Picture a rat, roughly 250 grams, dropped into the home cage of a much larger, territorial male. The resident lunges, pins, and dominates for 10 minutes before the intruder is allowed to retreat behind a wire mesh barrier. Two days later it happens again, with a different aggressor in a different cage. And again. And again. Four sessions over a week, each with an unfamiliar bully. By the end, the smaller rat is measurably more anxious, reluctant to venture into exposed spaces, its behaviour on [...]