Monika Mondal

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.

Once a resistant gene comes into the environment, it can jump from animal to human pathogens and vice versa. Meaning, there are no geographical or biological boundaries to the spread of AMR.

Emmanuel Umpula Nkumba grew up near the mines in Katanga, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mineral-rich eastern province, in the early 2000s. He recalls that cobalt mining was not a popular job amongst locals, citing the “hard work”

For the last three years, Naveen Chandra has been spending most of his days running simulations at the Research Institute for Global Change in Japan. He is trying to recreate the last 50 years of the earth’s atmosphere on a supercomputer roughly the size of an auditorium.

The Indian government wants to supply solar PV to its domestic market and the world. But dependence on its geopolitical rival for components and technology makes it a challenging task.

Up until a few years ago, Sanjeet Pahan didn’t consider visiting a doctor for his skin. But by 2020, small pink lesions had started appearing on his feet. Now, the spots, which resemble red grapes in some places and small berries in others, have spread, reaching all the way up to his face.

Janki Devi, a 26-year-old woman who survives on the daily wages earned by her husband, lives in a small house by the Assi River, a tributary of the River Ganga in the holy city of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. The house has the unmistakable stench of sewage. Outside, the Assi flows by in its darkest possible shade.
Devi’s toilet is a makeshift arrangement on the uplifted bank of the Assi. Household sewage goes directly into the river. “I just throw the garbage and everything in the river. What oth...