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.

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

Science

A silk mesh recorder towed at 7 meters behind ferries and container ships logged 16,725 tows across the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, and the fault reports nobody filed as pollution data held 208 plastic entanglements, the first one a length of trawl twine off Iceland in 1957.

An accidental archive of ocean plastic emerged from six decades of maintenance logs kept by technicians who were simply noting when a plankton-sampling device malfunctioned.

Sep 8, 2026

Earth News

Beginning in 1962, NASA acquired roughly 140,000 acres around Merritt Island for Kennedy Space Center—but used only a fraction for launch operations. Since 1963, the Fish and Wildlife Service has managed most of the remaining NASA land as a national wildlife refuge, where bald eagles nest in pine trees alongside launch pads, crawlerways and sprawling solar farms.

Kennedy’s undeveloped lands and lagoon waters support a refuge established in 1963. Eagle surveys, nest rescues and protection from launch-pad lighting show what managing the shared landscape involves.

Sep 8, 2026

Materials

Used grounds from one university cafeteria in England were baked into biochar and used to filter water. Each gram pulled 4.9 milligrams of lead out of contaminated water and stripped as much as 98 percent of it.

A waste product from campus cafeterias proves remarkably effective at removing one of America's most persistent water contaminants—and it costs almost nothing to make.

Sep 8, 2026

Exo Life

Finding independently evolved microbial life on Mars would be one of history’s greatest discoveries—but Robin Hanson’s Great Filter argument gives it a darker edge. If simple life arises easily, then whatever keeps the universe silent must lie later on the road from microbes to spacefaring civilisation—and it may still be ahead of us.

A second origin of life could reshape the Great Filter argument. It would not establish that a catastrophe lies ahead: later evolutionary barriers and limits to our searches remain part of the question.

Sep 8, 2026

Materials

A material found in crab and shrimp shells ,usually thrown out by the seafood trade, was made into a gel and used as the working fluid inside a zinc battery. The zinc anode ran for more than 1,000 cycles at 99.7 percent Coulombic efficiency.

Researchers turned seafood waste into a battery fluid that outlasted conventional alternatives, suggesting a path toward cheaper, greener energy storage.

Sep 8, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Melbourne began pumping its sewage onto paddocks west of the city in 1897. The 10,500-hectare site that grew out of that arrangement now treats around 500 megaliters a day and holds close to 300 bird species, some of them flying in from Siberia, on a site where birdwatching normally requires a permit.

Where a century of treated sewage has accidentally created one of Australia's most biodiverse wetlands, drawing migratory birds from across the Arctic.

Sep 7, 2026

Science

We tend to think of oxygen as the essential requirement for animal life, but a less-than-10-celled parasite called Henneguya salminicola that lives inside salmon muscle has no mitochondrial genome and no ability to breathe, making it the first animal ever confirmed to survive without needing oxygen at all

A millimetre-long salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola has no mitochondrial genome and cannot use oxygen — the first multicellular animal ever confirmed to live its entire life cycle without breathing.

Sep 7, 2026

Science

Do any of Old Tom’s descendants survive? Geneticists drilled DNA from the tooth and jawbone of the killer whale that local accounts at Eden credited with helping the whalers run down baleen whales in Twofold Bay, and found no clear descendant among the killer whales they could sample

A 2023 ancestry study recovered 11,464 bases of Old Tom's mitochondrial genome from his mounted museum skeleton and set it into a global dataset that came to 490 mitogenomes. Separate nuclear comparisons place his closest match among contemporary New Zealand killer whales, and find that most of the variation in his genome is carried by none of the animals the team sampled.

Sep 7, 2026

Water World

A single large data centre can use an estimated five million US gallons of water a day — roughly the daily demand of a town of 50,000 people — and the AI-driven construction boom is expanding into regions where water supplies are already under strain.

Five million gallons is a high-end estimate, not typical use. Facility records, cooling design and summer peaks reveal how data-centre growth can strain local water supplies.

Sep 7, 2026

Science

The first two juvenile Montagu’s Harriers ever fitted with satellite tags in Britain were tagged in late July, days before they first flew, and by 3 September one had crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands in a single three-hour flight while the other had been killed by a train and found by the tag she was wearing

FH and HV are half-sisters by the same father, the only adult male Montagu's Harrier the RSPB knows to be breeding in the UK currently. Tracking since late July has already produced one unexpected sea crossing and one dead bird.

Sep 7, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Two Minnesota solar farms built on retired cropland were sown with native grasses and wildflowers in early 2018. Across 358 surveys through August 2022, total insect abundance roughly tripled and native bees increased twentyfold, with bees from the restored habitat also visiting soybean flowers in neighboring fields.

Planting wildflowers beneath solar panels transformed barren ground into a pollinator haven—and the bees spilled into neighboring farms, boosting crop production too.

Sep 7, 2026

Science

A researcher at a Chengdu university was bitten on the ring finger by a grass-green pitviper from Mount Emei at 22:15 on a September night, the swelling reached his elbow before he reached hospital, and the snake has now been named a species new to science, described partly from museum specimens collected in 1956 and from populations that had been identified as a more widespread relative on their looks alone

The Huaxi green pitviper was described in January 2026 from western Sichuan, where the region's green pitvipers had been called Trimeresurus stejnegeri on morphology alone. A 171-sample genetic survey of that species had skipped the region entirely.

Sep 6, 2026