Monika Mondal

As climate change picks up pace, trees are often hailed as frontline defenders — natural carbon sinks that combat rising emissions
“Trees are behaving differently across the world,” Geetha Ramaswami of the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) said. Ramaswami is the team lead of SeasonWatch, a citizen science project that monitors tree phenology — the timing of flowering, fruiting, and leafing — across India. “We’re seeing them flower earlier, leaf earlier, and even shift their geographic rang...

Black holes are famously invisible, which is why astronomers took a long time to directly detect what had long been theorized. In September 2015, researchers first sensed the chirp of a gravitational wave caused by the merger of two black holes over 1.3 billion light-years away.

Imagine you’re playing football on a large, grassy ground. The game ends and you take a break, and that’s when you notice a coin you’d had in your pocket fell out somewhere. If you set out trying to find it by yourself, you’ll take a long time and you probably won’t even succeed. But if you recruit all your frien...

In a new assessment, plants have emerged as the most economically impactful invasive species worldwide as well as as the costliest group vis-à-vis the cost of management, demanding $926.38 billion in 1960-2022.

Vienna: In 2022, Jake Watson sent an unusual email to a neurosurgeon in Vienna: “Can we have some pieces of brain from the operating theatre?”

Chapter 7 : Trees can help fight climate change : but what about their problems?

High up on the rocks and dry earth of Everest, a small plant is helping researchers monitor atmospheric mercury levels. About a decade ago, Ruoyu Sun from the Institute of Surface-Earth System Science, Tianjin University, started studying the concentration of mercury in that plant, Androsace tapete, which adds a layer of tiny leaves on top of the last every year.

The findings of a new study challenge some long-held assumptions in urban ecology
In 2016, when Juan Diego Ibáñez-Álamo at the University of Granada in Spain met Kaspar Delhey, an expert in bird coloration at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, a new collaboration was born.

In late 2019, a wave of billions of desert locusts flew into western India through Pakistan. Their journey had already spanned several thousand kilometers since they first erupted in the arid plains of East Africa.

DNA is often seen as the blueprint of life—carrying the code to govern the development and traits of an organism—but “there are things beyond the DNA sequence,” says Xiaoqi Feng, a plant geneticist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).
Through a mechanism called epigenetics, the instructions in DNA can be edited without changing the underlying code. Chemical modification is one way this can be done.

A boom in genomics and tracking technologies in miniature is allowing researchers to delve into insect migration with astounding precision

If the aviation sector was a country, it would be among the world’s top 10 greenhouse-gas emitting nations. Air travel is one of the most polluting modes of travel for its relatively higher carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions and the effects of vapour trails and gases it deposits in the atmosphere.

Mass earthworm deaths after the devastating 2018 floods in Kerala, southern India, are linked to their migration, a study has found1. Scientists say the soil dwellers moved downhill probably in search of moisture to cope with a rare dry period following extreme rains which saw numbers proliferate.

“Most people are scared of them. Why would you want to look at something that’s scaly and has a creepy crawl?” Levi Storks, assistant professor at University of Detroit, asked this with a chuckle. Yet that’s exactly what got him interested in lizards when he was a child. He would catch them, pet them, and spend hours observing them.

Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination.