Science

Eight Namibian cheetahs arrived in India Saturday, decades after their local extinction, in an ambitious project to reintroduce the spotted big cats that has divided experts on its prospects.

Officials say the project is the world's first intercontinental relocation of cheetahs, the planet's fastest land animal.

Sixty-two million years ago, a mother gave birth to a baby. Overcoming the shock of birth in a matter of minutes, the baby began to explore the world around it. The baby started to suckle from its mother, a natural instinct shared by all animals of its kind, the mammals.

Each day it grew, and after a month or two, it began feeding for itself on a diet of shoots and leaves. It would have become independent shortly after, but tragedy struck. After only two-and-a-half months, it died.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has detected its highest concentrations yet of organic molecules, in a potential signal of ancient microbes that scientists are eager to confirm when the rock samples are eventually brought to Earth.

While organic matter has been found on the Red Planet before, the new discovery is seen as especially promising because it came from an area where sediment and salts were deposited into a lake -- conditions where life could have arisen.

Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.

But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, you might picture a virus as a nasty spiked ball – a mindless killer that gets into a cell and hijacks its machinery to create a gazillion copies of itself before bursting out. For many viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the “mindless killer” epithet is essentially true.

But there’s more to virus biology than meets the eye.

Economic growth and globalization have connected the world’s most distant places. Rapid trade and transport have boosted economic growth globally, but not without consequences: many species have been introduced to new regions, far from where they evolved.

Alien species are those introduced by humans to regions outside their natural range. Invasive alien species are a growing concern for both the environment and economy.

Most albatrosses mate for life but shy males who avoid confrontation are more likely to get dumped, researchers said Wednesday, adding it was the first time personality had been shown to predict divorce in a wild animal.

Wandering albatrosses, which traverse the Southern Hemisphere and have the largest wingspan of any bird at more than three metres (10 feet), are among the most monogamous animals.

A second US death was linked to monkeypox on Tuesday as health authorities published a study describing how two previously healthy young men experienced inflammation of the brain and spinal cord as a result of the virus.

There have been nearly 22,000 US cases in the current global outbreak, which began in May, but new infections have been falling since mid-August as authorities have distributed hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses.