Adrian Villellas
Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center modeled a Mars propellant plant turning Martian air and buried ice into 300 metric tons of methane and oxygen, and power generation was 59 percent of its landed mass
Invasive strawberry guava has spread across Hawaii since it arrived in 1825, and researchers used drones to drop a tiny Brazilian insect on it nearly five times faster than ground crews
Isle Royale wolves were rebuilt from 19 animals, and one brother-and-sister pair produced at least 12 pups, yet a five-year study still gives the population a better than 80 percent chance of lasting 20 years
Two olive ridley sea turtles laid the first sea turtle nests ever recorded on the U.S. West Coast in Orange County, and biologists moved 204 eggs indoors before Hurricane Polo’s surf arrived
Thousands of starlings are forming huge shape-shifting clouds over Poland, and a Polish ornithologist says cleverer birds can lead less clever ones to feeding grounds where they are more exposed to attack
Florida pays python hunters up to $30 an hour plus $50 for each snake and $25 for every extra foot, and one contractor warns it is unrealistic to move there thinking you can make a living doing this
An abandoned village in Galicia with 12 stone houses was listed for 0 euros, but the broker says the deal is a 50-year concession and the town puts the bill for roads, water and power at up to €3 million
A tiny spotted cat that a Bolivian man fed noodles, rice and eggs, thinking it was a kitten, turned out to be Leopardus tilcayo, the first new wild cat species scientists have described in more than a century
According to psychology, loneliness combined with social isolation may cost men about 5.8 years free of depression or anxiety after 50, and in a study of 277,489 adults healthy habits narrowed the gap for isolation but not for loneliness
Someone laying a patio in northern Denmark dug up the country’s largest known Viking silver hoard, 18.5 kilograms of bracelets, bars and coins, and one bar is scratched with a runic word experts have never seen before
Only about one in three Arctic tundra shorebirds come back to the same breeding area each year, against two in three elsewhere, and at the tundra’s northern edge it falls to one in ten, a Max Planck study found
Someone paid C$200 at a yard sale in southern Ontario for E.J. Hughes’ Okanagan Lake, and the painting sold for C$402,500 at auction in 2007, months after the reclusive British Columbia painter died














