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Britain's fields, parks and lawns were thriving areas of fresh greenery, just before summer arrived. Then, everything was burnt to a crisp, with a yellow and golden hue and now landscapes as old as thousands of years have been revealed as green outlines against yellow backgrounds.

In the quiet pools of the New York Aquarium, a groundbreaking experiment was unfolding. It was 2001, and a team of scientists was about to test a question that had long fascinated researchers: could beluga whales, the white Arctic cetaceans known for their expressive faces and complex social lives, recognise themselves in a mirror?

Beneath the towering peaks of the Alaska Range, home to Denali, North America's tallest mountain, scientists have uncovered a hidden geological feature that had gone completely unnoticed until now. Using a machine learning system to sift through years of seismic data, researchers built an expanded earthquake catalogue for the region and, within it, identified a distinct cluster of roughly 1,750 small, previously undetected earthquakes arranged in an almost perfectly straight line, stretching 250 kilometres from northwest to southeast beneath south central Alaska.

A spider web can look like a single delicate sheet of thread, but its construction is far more complicated. Different strands are made for different jobs, with some providing the strength needed to hold the web together and others stretching to trap prey.

A rat can appear completely silent while making a sound that falls far beyond the range of human hearing. Around 50 kilohertz, these ultrasonic vocalisations are produced during play, social interactions and other rewarding situations, and tickling can bring them out in particularly high numbers.

Plastic alternatives made from renewable materials often struggle to match the strength, heat resistance and processing ability of conventional plastics. A new bamboo-based bioplastic takes a different approach, reorganising cellulose at the molecular level to produce a material that is both strong and easier to shape.

A rainbow of light forms because different wavelengths travel through a prism or water droplets at different angles. Scientists have now shown that sound can be made to behave in a way that splits a broadband acoustic signal into separate frequency components that travel in different directions or come to rest at different positions within a material.

Sixteen years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill injured extensive coral habitats in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are developing new ways to help these fragile ecosystems recover. According to NOAA Fisheries, a recent restoration mission combined laboratory-reared corals, specialised technical diving and newly designed equipment to return corals to the deep seafloor.

Not everyone who closes their eyes and hits the bed at night goes to sleep. Some end up transitioning into a dream-like state that has them waking up while feeling hazy, lazy and heavy, with no feelings of rest and freshness.

Scientists have pieced together the deepest genetic history of the North American bison ever assembled, using DNA drawn from 115 animals that lived before the species was pushed to near extinction in the 20th century. As per the findings, led by researchers at the University of California, and featured on the cover of the 6 August issue of Science, this offers the first genomic baseline for what healthy bison diversity looked like before hunting, new diseases, habitat destruction and government eradication campaigns reduced the population from tens of millions to a few hundred.