I am always repeating the mantra that we should “work hard and play hard”. But is having fun professionally productive? As someone who studies animal behaviour I sometimes look to my experimental subjects…
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Environment – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 3801 - 3825 of 4510 articles
Demon vs killer shrimp sounds like the latest CGI movie to come out of Hollywood. But in fact these are two particularly pernicious crustaceans that have been making their way westward across Europe from…
It’s no surprise that dirty air kills. In fact, air pollution was recently placed in the top ten health risks faced by human beings globally. In the UK high concentrations of polluting particles cost health…
Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. – Lewis L Strauss, chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954. When Strauss first coined the phrase above he was thinking…
Chemicals are all around us. They are crucial in all manner of industries, from agriculture to food to cosmetics. Most people give little thought to how these chemicals are made – and certainly very few…
It has long been news that overfishing persists in many of the world’s oceans. Fish and invertebrate stocks have been over-exploited for our ever-hungry, growing human population, leaving some species…
Ten years on from the devastating Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami, our understanding of very large earthquakes has grown enormously. From satellites monitoring changes on the Earth’s surface to drilling…
Ten years ago we witnessed one of the worst natural disasters in history, when a huge earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered a devastating tsunami which swept across the Indian Ocean. An estimated…
At Christmas, size is everything: so says an online “oven selector guide”. And it is true, ovens are designed and optimised for roasting large birds. As a result, they are typically oversized for regular…
Since it was completed 100 years ago, the Panama Canal has been the only shipping route through the land mass of the Americas. Controlled by the US for most of its history, it allows ships to navigate…
It was our 14th expedition to the trenches of the Pacific Ocean, where depths can exceed 10,000m. And it was due to be our last for the foreseeable future. We had been aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s…
Ask people to describe what they associate with butterflies, and you will probably get an image of a sunny summer’s day, with a beautiful peacock drifting gently on the cooling breeze. Ask the same question…
My wildlife friends and I often talk about what species we would bring back from extinction. I am torn between the dodo and the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. This was once a speculative…
Devoted followers of international wrangling on climate change will see much that they recognise in the five-page text emanating from the UN climate talks in Lima. The “parties” (countries) have long accepted…
There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. The doubters range from the conspiracy theorist to the sceptical scientist, or from the paid lobbyist to the…
A major change is coming to our skies. From next March, pilots will be able to determine their own routes and plan to fly direct from point to point. Currently, flights must plan to follow explicitly defined…
It is often said that humans have caused the Earth to warm at an unprecedented rate. However researchers have discovered another period, some 55m years ago, when massive volcanic eruptions pumped so much…
Two weeks of international climate negotiations in Lima, Peru, are over, with an agreement pulled out of the bag at the eleventh hour. While Lima has been seen by many as a mere curtain-raiser to talks…
The unintended consequences of our agricultural food system – polluted air and water, dead zones in coastal seas, soil erosion – have profound implications for human health and the environment. So more…
A dramatically-named “weather bomb” exploded across the UK in the past week, bringing winds gusting up to 144mph on outlying islands. But despite the cool name these “bombs” are more common than you might…
There are five trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans, weighing a total of 268,000 tonnes. That’s according to a paper by an international team of scientists who took a substantial amount of…
As all good Monty Python fans know, water technologies feature large in the legacy of benefits left by Roman civilisation. But while aqueducts, sewers and baths retain an obvious presence in the landscape…
The climate science might be gloomy but at least governments seem to be doing something about it. The number of laws passed to address climate change is steadily increasing across the world. By last year…
Is solar power the technology of the future? It is certainly the fastest-growing energy generation technology in the UK. By the early 2020s, according to a new report, it will be cost-competitive with…
There are at least 268,000 tonnes of plastic floating around in the oceans, according to new research by a global team of scientists. The world generates 288m tonnes of plastic worldwide each year, just…