Billions of small, jellyfish-like creatures known as “by-the-wind sailors” have washed ashore all along the west coast of North America this summer, from southern California to British Columbia. Images…
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Environment – Articles, Analysis, Comment
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Converting renewable energy into electricity is one thing; converting it into fuel is quite another. The vast majority of global energy demand is for fuel, and a renewable source could help us heat our…
Bamboo, a common grass which can be harder to pull apart than steel, has the potential to revolutionise building construction throughout the world. But that’s not all. As a raw material found predominantly…
Exactly a year ago, the world was wrestling with the possibility of another US-led military assault on an Arab state, following the horrific gas attacks in Damascus, Syria. When US military action did…
Octopuses grow quickly, have lots of tasty flesh and are found all over the world. As the world’s supply of fish diminishes while the number of humans keeps increasing, it seems these creatures would make…
Brazil’s Atlantic forest – Mata Atlântica – is one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots, rivalling even the Amazon. Running on and off for several thousand kilometres along the coast, the forest…
Public bikesharing schemes are sprouting up in towns and cities worldwide. The bikes are generally provided without helmets, and this has led to concerns regarding the risk of serious head injuries. It…
The discovery of a 4,000-year-old wine cellar in Israel has provided the best direct evidence yet of the raucous, boozy celebrations that were a key part of the region’s culture at the time. The cellar…
Conservationists have recently become very excited about financial incentives. The idea is to pay people to do things that will help biodiversity, for example, where farmers are paid not to till crops…
Algae isn’t just found in your garden pond or local river. Sometimes it explodes into vast “blooms” far out to sea, that can be the size of a small country. Such algal blooms can match even a rainforest…
Landslides don’t attract the same media attention as more familiar geological hazards such as earthquakes and volcanoes. And yet they can be just as disastrous and, in fact, 2014 has been a particularly…
There seem to have been a dozen or so explanations for why the Earth’s surface has warmed at a slower rate over the past 15 years compared to earlier decades. This is perhaps not so surprising given the…
The Gobi Desert in East Asia conjures images of a remote landscape, with nomads riding across the steppe. In fact, today it is home to herders and farmers, the world’s fastest-growing economy, vast copper…
A development of 750 new homes in the small town of Ilfracombe on England’s north Devon coast has been approved by the local council. The news would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the identity of the…
It’s been suggested that a recent fall in recycling rates is due to green fatigue, caused by the confusing number of recycling bins presented to householders for different materials. Recycling rates would…
One of China’s major genetically modified food projects is now to all intents and purposes dead and buried. The expiry on August 17 of the biosafety certificates issued to strains of GM rice developed…
Just over ten years ago the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” for a globe totally transformed and dominated by humans, a state he suggested we were in…
The world’s oceans are plagued with the problem of “dead zones”, areas of high nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) in which plankton blooms cause a major reduction of oxygen levels in the water…
Whenever I tell people I work with solar cells I am asked the same two questions: are they ever going to be really cheap? And can you get me some? While the answer to the second question is no, the answer…
Transportation continues to generate a large proportion of emissions worldwide, even as emissions from other areas of the economy fall. In the EU, transport accounts for around 30% of CO2 emissions, and…
The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris ssp. altaica), also known as the Siberian Tiger, is among the world’s rarest and most endangered cat species. The largest and northernmost tiger, it is believed only around…
There has been a huge increase in attention recently to the problem of wildlife poaching, mostly from the stream of grisly stories from Africa about rhino and elephants illegally killed for their horn…
The Sydney Opera House is proof that Danish architects like to do things differently. As do some Danish zoos, who kill giraffes for conservation. And now there is a Danish proposal to create a zoo there…
It is great news that the National Trust has bought Hambledon Hill, a Iron Age hill fort in southwest England, for the nation. Now the expertise of its in-house archaeologists and conservators can be used…
Journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot recently wrote a powerful polemic against the concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital, arguing that they were leading us on a neoliberal “road…