Europe

An Italian woman mistakenly discarded a winning lottery ticket worth one million euros. Sanitation workers meticulously searched over six tons of rubbish to find it. The ticket was recovered intact after a day-long, coordinated search operation. The woman had misunderstood a message displayed on a lottery terminal. This remarkable recovery ensured she could claim her…

Europe’s forests are losing biomass at a rate scientists describe as unprecedented. A new satellite-based study has found that forests across the continent have lost, on average, 46% more aboveground biomass per hectare each year since 2018 than they did during the previous three decades.The change is significant because forest biomass represents stored carbon. When…

Napoleon Bonaparte (Image: Wikipedia) Success often gets pictured as quick decisions and instant reaction, striking the moment an opportunity appears. Napoleon Bonaparte understood something quieter than that. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” the line widely credited to him goes. Rather than rushing to intervene the moment things start going wrong…

Quote of the day by Socrates Modern life often measures success by having more, a bigger house, a better job, the latest phone. A line widely credited to Socrates pushes back on that instinct directly. “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less,”…

PC: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Julia-Marlen Schiefelbein Construction work in historic city centres often reveals traces of earlier lives, though only occasionally do archaeologists encounter objects that shed light on the personal beliefs of medieval communities. That has happened at Berlin’s Molkenmarkt, where excavations by the Berlin State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments have produced…

Quote of the day by Giorgia Meloni (AP photo) Being dismissed by other people rarely feels like an advantage in the moment. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman prime minister, argued that it can genuinely become one. “To the women of this nation I want to say that being underestimated is a great advantage, because often…

Europe’s shrinking Donbe river has hit power supply, transport and businesses Europe’s major rivers are shrinking as extreme heat and drought continue across the continent, creating several issues. Falling water levels are reducing electricity production, disrupting the transport of goods and affecting businesses that depend on rivers.From the Rhine in western Europe to the Danube…

The Deep Time team, deep inside the Lombrives Cave in the French Pyrenees. Image Credits: @HumanAdaptation via X On March 14, 2021, fifteen volunteers, seven women and eight men aged between 27 and 50, entered the Lombrives cave in the French Pyrenees to begin a 40-day experiment with no clocks, no phones, no natural light…

Halfway along the Afsluitdijk, the 20-mile dam that has separated the salty Wadden Sea from the freshwater IJsselmeer since 1932, sits a small blue building that most drivers passing over the dam never notice. Since November 26, 2014, when King Willem-Alexander switched it on, this building has housed the world’s first reverse electrodialysis power plant,…

New fossil discoveries at Gran Dolina cave in northern Spain show that cannibalism practised by an ancient human relative called Homo antecessor was not limited to children, as earlier evidence had suggested. Researchers recovered two dozen bones and teeth belonging to this now extinct species, which lived in Europe between roughly 1.2 million and 770,000…