World

A researcher following scuba divers for this project Most scuba divers believe they rarely touch fragile seabed ecosystems, yet underwater observers tracking hundreds of tourists found that more than 40 per cent of their physical contacts caused visible damage to living coral structures.Research published in The Conversation by marine scientists and dive professionals revealed that…

Representative Image (AI-generated) Around 1200 BCE, several of the eastern Mediterranean’s most powerful civilisations, including the Mycenaean kingdoms, the Hittite Empire, Canaanite city-states and parts of New Kingdom Egypt, began experiencing a period of dramatic decline. Historians have long debated whether warfare, invasions, earthquakes, internal unrest or climate change played the biggest role in this…

Dutch microbiologist Professor Henk Jonkers holds a sample of self-healing concrete, an innovation that uses bacteria to repair cracks automatically. Concrete is the backbone of modern civilisation, supporting everything from homes and skyscrapers to bridges, tunnels and dams. Yet even this remarkably strong material has a costly weakness. Tiny cracks inevitably develop over time because…

Top US military commander in Middle East advised halting Hormuz bombing After nearly two weeks of sustained attacks around the Strait of Hormuz and repeated warnings from President Donald Trump that military action could intensify, the US abruptly paused its bombing campaign on Friday. The decision, according to multiple reports, was driven less by diplomacy…

For much of its history, the San Joaquin River carried cold mountain water through California’s Central Valley, supporting forests, farms and some of the southernmost populations of Chinook salmon in the western United States. That connection began to disappear after the construction of Friant Dam in the 1940s, when large sections of the river were…

Most 11-year-olds spend their free time playing sports, video games or hanging out with friends. Nehemiah Turner chose something entirely different. The Florida boy has become the first child to complete more than 100 volunteer hours in the Jacksonville Humane Society’s Pawsitive Reading programme, where children read aloud to shelter dogs and cats waiting for…

In 1975, Jake Jabs took the bold decision to make an $80,000 investment, which later led to the emergence of a multimillion-dollar company from a weak furniture business. The 95-year-old founder and chief executive officer of the American Furniture Warehouse took over the struggling company when it was just on the brink of going bankrupt…

A tiny puffin chick has achieved something conservationists on England’s south coast had not witnessed in three decades. After 15 weeks of careful monitoring by National Trust volunteers and seabird expert Dr Richard Caldow, the chick was photographed emerging from a rocky crevice at Dancing Ledge on Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck. The sighting marks the…

When traversing the hills of Wonogiri in Central Java, today’s visitors might take the dense areas of greenery in stride. The springs nourish nearby villages, the farms have sufficient water for numerous harvests, and the slopes covered with trees conceal the bare ground that used to be visible before. However, very few would think of…

Wars have been fought over land, over succession, over a woman said to have launched a thousand ships toward Troy. Opium got its own war twice, in 1839 and again in 1856, but not the kind that name suggests. Britain went to war for the right to keep selling opium into China, after the Qing…