A Space Daily column

Life Signs

Nature and earth science

Life Signs is where Space Daily looks down instead of up. Animals, ecosystems, and Earth science, with a bias for peer-reviewed studies over press-release hype. The living world turns out to be at least as strange as anything in orbit.

Materials

Researchers picked oyster, mussel and cockle shells off Irish beaches, crushed the 3 kinds of shell into grains, and dropped them into water carrying rare earth metals at concentrations similar to badly polluted industrial runoff. The oyster grains took up as much as roughly 1.5 grams of metal for every gram of shell.

Discarded oyster shells absorb rare earth metals at rates exceeding their own weight, suggesting an unlikely solution to cleaning up industrial contamination.

Sep 11, 2026

Science

Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only active volcano known to erupt natrocarbonatite, the coolest lava on Earth: it flows at roughly 500–590°C, against 1,100°C or more for Hawaiian basalt. Fresh flows look black or dark brown in daylight, then react with rain and atmospheric moisture until the mountainside turns chalk-white—as though someone spilled milk over the lava.

Ol Doinyo Lengai’s 500–590°C carbonate lava flows black, then atmospheric moisture and rain transform its unstable minerals into pale, rapidly weathering surfaces.

Sep 11, 2026

Farm News

A Mother Jones reporter put a gallon of water behind every California almond in 2014, and when the Pacific Institute checked the claim against USDA yields and UC Davis irrigation data, the real number came in even higher, 1.6 to 1.7 gallons a kernel, so the argument had to move somewhere else

A viral statistic about California almonds turned out to be true—and worse than anyone thought.

Sep 11, 2026

Science

Germany set up 75 insect traps across the country, sequenced roughly four billion fragments of DNA from what they caught, and identified 10,803 species, while statistical modeling suggests the samples already captured evidence of roughly 32,000, most still unidentified for lack of a reference DNA barcod

Germany's insect census reveals a hidden world: nearly 32,000 species may exist in the country, but science has barely begun to catalog them.

Sep 10, 2026

Science

Only two northern white rhinos are left, a mother and daughter who cannot carry a calf, and after 39 laboratory embryos and six transfers into surrogate mothers not one of the attempts has held

Thirty-nine pure northern white rhino embryos have been produced, and as of April 2026 six of them had gone into southern white rhino surrogates in Kenya without producing a lasting pregnancy. Every recent egg collection has come from one animal, a 26-year-old female called Fatu.

Sep 10, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Wind turbines across the United States kill an estimated 234,000 birds a year. Window glass kills about 599 million, which is to say the country’s windows account for more dead birds in one day than every turbine standing in it accounts for in seven years.

The debate over wind turbines' impact on birds rests on a false comparison—one that obscures a far deadlier culprit hiding in plain sight.

Sep 10, 2026

Science

Researchers placed 650 geophones along Yellowstone’s roads and sent a vibrating truck to 110 different spots to deliberately shake America’s most-visited supervolcano, and the echoes revealed a layer 2.4 miles down that is roughly 86 percent solid rock.

What lies beneath Yellowstone's surface—and how close is the molten rock to breaking through?

Sep 10, 2026

Physics News

Physicist Bhupal Dev at Washington University used the debris from GW170817 — the 2017 neutron star merger — to squeeze new limits on axion-like particles, treating the hot post-collision remnant as a natural forge for dark-matter candidates

Physicist Bhupal Dev and colleagues have used the multi-year record of GW170817 — the 2017 neutron star merger seen in both gravitational waves and light — to tighten bounds on axion-like particles, treating the hot post-collision remnant as a natural forge for dark matter candidates.

Sep 9, 2026

Epidemics

French, Russian, and German researchers thawed sediment from nine sites of Siberian and Kamchatkan permafrost and revived thirteen previously undescribed viruses, the oldest of them from ground beneath a Yakutian lake bed dated to more than 48,500 years, and the reason every one of the thirteen can infect nothing but amoebae is a decision the team made before the first sample went into the dish

Scientists resurrected viruses frozen for 48,500 years, but deliberately chose to study only those that infect single-celled organisms—a safety decision that reveals how researchers navigate the ethics of reviving ancient pathogens.

Sep 9, 2026

Water World

In 2022, a robot submarine spent two weeks mapping the floor of Norway’s biggest lake, hunting for the ammunition a factory had dumped there between the 1940s and the 1970s. On the last day of the survey it found a wooden boat instead, 410 meters down and up to 700 years old.

What should have been a routine hunt for toxic waste instead unveiled a medieval ghost ship sealed in the depths for centuries.

Sep 9, 2026

Science

One hydrophone sitting 891 meters down in Monterey Canyon, wired to shore by 52 kilometers of cable, recorded 2,111 days out of 2,192 between July 2015 and June 2021, and humpback song climbed from 34 percent of days to 76 while blue whale song fell away after a marine heat wave.

A single hydrophone bolted to the seafloor of Monterey Bay has produced six years of near-continuous acoustic data on baleen whale behavior, and the sound it…

Sep 9, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Between 2013 and 2017, four snow leopards in eastern Nepal were fitted with collars that logged their position every four hours, and the map that came back was 6 to 97 times bigger than earlier range estimates for Nepal. Three of the cats spent up to a third of their time in India or China.

The invisible borders humans draw for wildlife mean nothing to snow leopards—and conservation maps built on guesswork are proving dangerously wrong.

Sep 9, 2026

Earth News

Between July 2021 and April 2023, Antarctica gained about 695 billion tonnes of ice-sheet mass—the largest 22-month increase in the satellite-gravity record—and a Nature study traces the exceptional East Antarctic snowfall to persistent warming in the tropical western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometres away.

A Nature study links an exceptional Antarctic mass gain to tropical warmth that redirected moisture towards East Antarctica, temporarily interrupting a longer-term decline.

Sep 9, 2026

Science

Date seeds dug out of Herod’s fortress at Masada and three other Judean desert sites sat in storage at room temperature for decades, and when a team soaked thirty-three of them and potted thirty-two, six grew into living palms whose seed shells date to between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE once a correction for modern carbon absorbed during growth is applied

Seven ancient Judean date seeds have been germinated and genotyped. That the seeds grew is not what the one critic to respond on the paper's own page contests. What he questions is whether the radiocarbon dates record when they grew.

Sep 8, 2026

Science

Fourteen drone flights over one ice-free point in the South Shetland Islands counted 38,080 chinstrap penguin nests where researchers once tallied nearly 90,000 breeding pairs by hand, meaning more than half the colony has disappeared in roughly three decades

A thriving penguin colony that once numbered nearly 90,000 has collapsed to half its size, offering a grim snapshot of how rapidly Antarctic ecosystems are unraveling.

Sep 8, 2026

Space Medicine

In 2024, Julia Low’s team at RMIT sat 54 volunteers in a virtual reality reconstruction of the International Space Station and had them sniff vanilla, almond and lemon, and the two sweet smells came through noticeably stronger inside the simulated spacecraft than in a plain room

Fifty-four volunteers sniffed vanilla, almond and lemon inside a VR reconstruction of the ISS. The two sweet smells came through stronger in the simulated spacecraft — the opposite of what astronaut complaints about bland food would predict.

Sep 8, 2026