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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

When a Harvard study pinged thousands of people at random moments, minds were wandering elsewhere nearly half of all waking hours — and people were measurably less happy while their attention was away than while it stayed where their body was

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Flora and Fauna

In the 1930s bedbugs had nearly vanished from developed homes, and their global comeback since the late 1990s is traced largely to the insects evolving resistance to the very insecticides that once wiped them out

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Climate Science

In 1854, John Snow removed the handle from a single water pump on Broad Street in Soho and the cholera outbreak that had killed 616 people in ten days effectively stopped, a decision made decades before anyone accepted that water could carry disease.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Climate Science

Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, and roughly two-thirds of their neurons live in their arms, meaning each limb can taste, decide, and problem-solve without checking in with the central brain.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

We tend to think a full year should feel long, but memory researchers find the brain stores mainly what is new — which is why the years feel shorter as life grows predictable and the internal camera quietly switches off

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Psychologist John Bowlby developed attachment theory after the World Health Organization commissioned him in 1950 to study children orphaned across post-war Europe, finding early separation left marks that lasted decades

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Psychologists distinguish being liked from being known, and the two run on separate skills: warmth and good questions can be performed for anyone, but being known means letting one person see the parts you have no charming version of

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Flora and Fauna

A single female German cockroach in a warm kitchen can produce enough descendants in one year to number in the hundreds of thousands, which is why the ones you see are only the overflow of a population hidden behind the cabinets

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Climate Science

In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from a two-week holiday to find a mould had drifted onto one of his Staphylococcus plates, and the clear ring where the bacteria had died became the accidental beginning of the antibiotic era.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Climate Science

In 1952, Rosalind Franklin exposed a strand of hydrated DNA to an X-ray beam for 62 hours in a King's College basement, and the photograph that came out — labelled simply Photo 51 — showed a dark cross so cleanly helical that Watson recognised the structure the instant Wilkins slid it across the desk.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026

Flora and Fauna

We assume spiders wander indoors from the garden, but most house spiders are a distinct species that has lived alongside humans for so long it rarely survives outside, spending its entire life in the corners of the rooms we build

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 18, 2026

Flora and Fauna

The humble housefly tastes with its feet, detecting sugar the moment it lands, and it lives only two to four weeks, spending that short life within a few hundred metres of where it hatched

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 17, 2026

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