From an underground "forest" to spectacular orchids, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, discovered 74 new plants and 15 fungi last year.

Many of the mysterious species were found in unlikely places, such as on the top of a volcano or clinging to Antarctic rocks.

The new finds need immediate protection and at least one will probably already have been lost, the scientists say.

About three-quarters of undescribed plants are threatened with extinction.

Keir Starmer has said he is “up for the fight” of defending the “nanny state” as he announced plans to improve child health under a Labour government, including supervised toothbrushing in schools.

The Labour leader said that children were “probably the biggest casualty” of the Tories’ sticking-plaster approach to politics over the past 14 years, adding that, if the government were a parent, they could be charged with neglect.

“I know that we need to take on this question of the nanny state,” he told reporters. “The moment you do anything on child health, people say ‘you’re going down the road of the nanny state.’ We want to have that fight.”

Ahead of a visit to a children’s hospital, Starmer criticised the Tories’ record on child health. “They’re probably the biggest casualty of sticking-plaster politics in the last 14 years,” he said. “Frankly, if parents had treated children as badly as the UK government has, they would probably be charged with neglect. It’s that bad.”

Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization and a prime example of our impact on Earth. Almost 40% of our planet's ice-free land surface, most of which was previously forested, is now dedicated to agriculture. As our demand for food increases, so does agricultural deforestation, which is widely viewed as one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity.

Yet, the magnitude of agriculture's impact on biodiversity varies widely across the world. Take birds, for example. While many species in the Ecuadorian Amazon are highly sensitive to deforestation, most birds in Costa Rican agricultural landscapes seem more tolerant.

Research from the Indian Himalayas has reported some bird species even benefit from agriculture at certain times of the year. So far, this variation has mostly been explained by how 'natural' the agricultural landscapes are, for instance, how much forest cover remains, or how frequently synthetic fertilizers are used. But this reasoning does not adequately explain the full story.

A new study led by Peking University and involving 49 institutions from around the world reports that, beyond the 'naturalness' of agricultural landscapes, regions differ inherently and predictably in how sensitive their bird communities are to agricultural deforestation.

A new research paper published in Biology Letters has revealed that picrodontids—an extinct family of placental mammals that lived several million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs—are not primates as previously believed.

The paper—co-authored by Jordan Crowell, an Anthropology Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center; Stephen Chester, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center; and John Wible, Curator of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History—is significant in that it settled a paleontological debate that has been brewing for over 100 years while helping to paint a more clear picture of primate evolution.

For the last 50 years, paleontologists have believed picrodontids, which were no larger than a mouse and likely ate foods such as fruit, nectar, and pollen, were primates, based on features of their teeth that they share with living primates. But by using modern CT scan technology to analyze the only known preserved picrodontid skull in Brooklyn College's Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory, Crowell, the lead author on the paper, worked with Chester, the paper's senior author, and Wible to determine they are not closely related to primates at all.

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal reveals new evidence for standard gravity breaking down in an idiosyncratic manner at low acceleration. This new study reinforces the evidence for modified gravity that was previously reported in 2023 from an analysis of the orbital motions of gravitationally bound, widely separated (or long-period) binary stars, known as wide binaries.

An ancient mangrove forest with trees that towered up to 130 feet high has been discovered over 20 million years after a volcanic mudflow smothered it in what is now Panama, a new study reveals.

Researchers first discovered the fossils in 2018 during a geological expedition on Barro Colorado Island (BCI). The island sits in Panama's human-made Gatun Lake, which thousands of ships cross every year as they cruise through the Panama Canal. BCI once formed part of a hilly landscape that became partly submerged in 1913, when engineers dammed the Chagres River to build the canal, and was set aside as a nature reserve in 1923. Today, the tropical forests of BCI are some of the most intensively studied in the world.

Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task. As we explored in a previous post, it would take between 1000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Alpha Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology). On top of that, there are numerous risks when traveling through the interstellar medium (ISM), not all of which are well-understood.

Under the circumstances, gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion (aka. lasers) appear to be the only viable option for reaching neighboring stars in this century. Proposed concepts include the Swarming Proxima Centauri, a collaborative effort between Space Initiatives Inc. and the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) led by Space Initiative's chief scientist Marshall Eubanks. The concept was recently selected for Phase I development as part of this year's NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

When imagining corals, the picture that comes to mind is usually a stationary one: a garden of rock-like structures covering sections of the ocean floor. Reef conservation efforts typically focus on preserving established coral and protecting them from known stressors such as pollution, overfishing and runoff from coastline populations.

However, new research near Miloliʻi in the southwestern part of Hawai'i Island shows that identifying and protecting marine ecosystems, both down-current and up-current of coral reefs, specifically areas where coral larvae are more likely to survive and thrive, is crucial to future coral conservation and restoration efforts—especially as reefs face increasing pressure from the devastating effects of climate change.

The research, completed by Arizona State University scientists and their collaborators, appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.