Burning, drifting, and being devoured by insects, Canada’s Boreal forest is shrinking and climate change is to blame.
Second only to the South American Amazon forest, the Boreal forest is vital to ensuring the future of planet Earth, reports AFP. The forest which encircles the arctic and stretches across Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Alaska has in recent times been weakened by forest fires, the melting of permafrost, an insect infestation, warming temperatures and drifting trees.
36 years since a catastrophic meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant unleashed one of the world's worst nuclear disasters, now "mutant" black frogs are spawning in the vicinity.
The species of frog found in this area, known as the Eastern tree frogs (Hyla Orientalis) typically have bright green skin but now many have sprung up with dark or pigmented skin.
A study published in Evolutionary applications details the research surrounding these frogs' evolution. Scientists believe that darker skin might help the frogs survive in the exclusion zone.
A team of American virologists has identified a covid-like virus that is lurking in Russian bats and they fear that it is "completely resistant" to all the coronavirus vaccines available on the market.
The pathogen is called Khosta-2 and it was found that it can "latch onto human cells with ease in the same way as the Covid virus."
It is classified as a sarbecovirus, a member of the coronavirus family, and nothing is known about it other than the fact that it is related to SARS-CoV-2, the strain responsible for Covid.
Who doesn't know about the asteroid that killed dinosaurs? We've all pretty much grown up in the information that the otherworldly object was behind the extinction of the mighty lizards. But what if that wasn't completely true?
A new major study claims that dinosaurs were "already dying" back when they got wiped out by the giant asteroid.
When dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, their range of species was already drastically shrinking, as per the study done on dinosaur eggs in China.