Global
Good things happen every day — they just rarely make the front page. Day Mercury gathers the evidenced progress from science, medicine, the environment, the economy and society. No disaster ticker, no clickbait. How we work →
The free 'Beyond the Battle' competition opens in late September 2026 for classes of seven- to eleven-year-olds, whose panels will be judged while the tapestry hangs at the British Museum from 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027.
The sets seat 317 passengers each, meet the strictest US locomotive emissions standard and start running in autumn 2026 on the corridor between Eugene, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia.
A camera trap on Ishigaki caught land hermit crabs and Australian cockroaches eating the fruits of Balanophora fungosa at night, the first evidence that the crabs move seeds both on their claws and through their guts, Kobe University botanist Suetsugu Kenji reports in Ecology.
Lidar flights over the Brazilian states of Acre and Amazonas found 432 geometric earthworks, 396 of them undocumented, and the authors in Nature estimate the region holds 24,000 to 30,000 such structures.
Researchers led by the University of California, Santa Cruz sequenced 115 ancient and 45 modern bison for a study in Science that also found cattle ancestry in only about a third of today's animals.
A revised National Planning Policy Framework taking effect on 17 August extends protection from the last pub in an area to every pub, and requires developers to show a year of unsuccessful marketing before a conversion.
Fieldworkers in Aceh confirmed the tenth birth in the Jantho release area on 22 May 2026, fifteen years after conservationists began moving rescued Sumatran orangutans into a forest that held none.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia combined agar, zinc and tannic acid into a self-assembling edible film; in tests published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry it roughly doubled shelf life and cut water loss from 30 to 13 percent.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen announced 507,000 installations in Sydney on 14 August 2026, crediting the 30 percent subsidy with a 47 percent fall in wholesale electricity prices.
The cabinet granted the status on 30 July 2026, making the Siraya of Tainan the first lowland Pingpu people to gain legal recognition under an act the legislature passed on 17 October 2025.
The moon's shadow crossed Siberia, Greenland, Iceland and Spain on 12 August 2026, and more than 15 million people live inside the narrow band where the sun vanished completely, Smithsonian magazine reports.
The 64-year-old retired RAF pilot averaged 406.320mph over two runs at the Bonneville Salt Flats on 11 August, more than doubling the previous mark for a hydrogen combustion car.
Households within 500 metres of new transmission lines at 43 projects across Britain will receive £125 twice a year for a decade, with the first payments due in the first half of 2027.
Specialists set the Amur tigress Umit loose in the unfenced Ile-Balkhash reserve on 31 July, ten years after the country began rebuilding the forest and the prey animals a tiger needs.
Six community-managed marine protected areas now cover about 40,000 hectares between Gökova Bay and Cape Gelidonya, built up since 2019 with a three-million-dollar grant from the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme.