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Charlie Alliston should have had a front brake but 18mph is a cautious speed and double standards are at work here

A heavy-handed prosecution against a cyclist for manslaughter has failed but a charge of “wanton and furious driving” has succeeded.

In 2016 more than 400 pedestrians were killed on UK roads. Each a terrible tragedy to those involved and almost all avoidable. One of these casualties, Kim Briggs, died after a collision between herself and a teenage cyclist, Charlie Alliston.

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The UK contributes to a sophisticated new radar to map the Sun's impacts on Earth's high atmosphere.

Big Wasp Survey encourages volunteers to build homemade traps then send dead wasps to entomologists to monitor populations

Drowning wasps in beer in the name of science may seem a socially acceptable way to exterminate a seasonal pest. But a citizen science survey “harnessing the public’s dislike of wasps” has been criticised for its “hateful language” and for unnecessarily killing rare insects.

The Big Wasp Survey is encouraging 2,000 volunteers to build homemade bottle traps before posting the dead wasps to entomologists to produce a clearer picture of the much-maligned insect’s decline.

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Wildlife protection has become an increasingly dangerous business as rangers face armed gunmen and poachers

Three rangers have been killed in separate countries in a deadly month for wildlife defenders.

A ranger at Serra da Capivara national park, in Brazil’s north-eastern Piaui region, was killed by hunters on 18 August. Edilson Aparecido da Costa Silva and two other colleagues were patrolling the park when they were ambushed by a group of four armed men who are believed to have been hunting in the park illegally. Costa Silva was killed in the shootout that followed, while the other two rangers were injured.

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Farmer sends gift of sausages to thank Wiltshire firefighters who rescued piglets and two sows from fire in barn

A farmer whose piglets were saved from a barn fire has served the animals up as sausages to thank the firefighters who rescued them.

The baby pigs and two sows were freed by firefighters from Pewsey in Wiltshire when a barn went up in flames in February.

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A new study finds a stark contrast between Exxon’s research and what the company told the public

Read all of these documents and make up your own mind.

That was the challenge ExxonMobil issued when investigative journalism by Inside Climate News revealed that while it was at the forefront of climate science research in the 1970s and 1980s, Exxon engaged in a campaign to misinform the public.

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London’s historic food market also aims to achieve zero landfill with biodegradable packaging and compostable leftovers

London’s Borough Market is to introduce free drinking water fountains as part of a new pledge to phase out sales of all single-use plastic bottles over the next six months.

The renowned foodie haven – the only fully independent market in the capital – is aiming to become the UK’s biggest food shopping destination that is entirely plastic-free.

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Coordinated by environmental finance group Market Forces, shareholders in Origin Energy have filed a series of resolutions with the oil and gas major.

Glastraeth, Gwynedd A vastness of light and water, the sea’s immensity and the intimacy of the creeks, overwhelms the self

Among the glittering spillways, a vastness of light and water, the self is overwhelmed by the immensity of mountains and sea, and the intimacy of samphire lawns, sea aster flowers and creeks. We wander into the salt marsh with sheep, a drift of Canada geese, an egret sharpening its idea of the strike, a group of Romany foragers, a raven and a story.

When the monastery at Bangor-is-y-Coed was sacked in the early seventh century, on account of its allegiance to the Pelagian heresy, the surviving monks fled to what is now the magically circular walled church of Llanfihangel-y-Traethau on a little hill above the Dwyryd and Glaslyn estuary.

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Murdoch media's "Monkey's uncle" thinks solar towers and storage are intermittent. But its performance during eclipse shows otherwise.

CEFC extends $90m corporate loan to Cleanaway, its first major transaction with a leading Australian waste management company.

Forecasts for solar PV installations in China for 2017 rise to 40-45 GW.

Nissan says its next-gen model LEAF – still the world's most sold all-electric vehicle – will be unveiled September 9.

Solar on U.S. homes and businesses will grow 10% a year, displacing $2 billion of grid-based power by 2025. But Australia leads the way.

Andrews government unveils first of renewable energy auctions – for 650MW of wind and solar – and announces two new big solar farms, the 100MW Bannerton Solar Park near Robinvale in the Sunraysia district, and the 38MW Numurkah Solar Farm near Shepparton.

Last week, it was claimed EV's are responsible for more global warming emissions than petrol cars, suggesting Tesla isn’t a ‘green’ company.

Environmentalists and tourist operators have criticised the release of a new management plan for the Whitsunday region in north Queensland just months after Cyclone Debbie caused massive environmental damage.

ARENA funds 30MW battery to be built in South Australia to help grid security, and be the first of a series of renewable-based mini-grids to keep the lights on.

Big sewer pipes take all sewage to a place where it is treated. This place is called a sewage treatment plant. Flickr/Dean Hochman, CC BY-SA

This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

Where does my poo go when I flush the toilet? Does it go into the ocean? – Clancy, age 4, Austinmer, NSW.

When you press the flush button, your wee, poo, toilet paper and water go down a pipe called a sewer. The toilet flushes the wastes down the sewer pipe. The sewer pipe from your house also collects and removes other wastes. This might be soapy water from baths and showers, or water left over from washing dishes and clothes. Together, all of these wastes are called “sewage”. The pipes they travel through are called “sewerage pipes”. People sometimes get “sewage” and “sewerage” mixed up.

The wastes from your house flow downhill. They join those from other homes and flow into bigger sewer pipes. Some of these pipes are bigger than a bus! If you live in a big city the wastes from thousands of people looks like a river of sewage.

The big sewer pipes take all the sewage to a place where it is treated. This place is called a sewage treatment plant. All towns and cities have these. They are like a big factory where any harmful materials are removed. This is a very important part of our city life.

This video shows how a sewage treatment plant in England works. Flushing is fun, but there are some things you should never flush down the toilet – like baby wipes. Flickr/GoonSquadSarah, CC BY

Sewage contains lots of germs and if people come into contact with it, it can make them very sick. The treatment also removes things that people have flushed down the toilet. This includes things like toys, jewellery or even money. There are some things you should never flush down the toilet, like baby wipes – even if it says “flushable” on the packet – because they clump up and cause big problems for the sewerage system.

The sewage is cleaned in the treatment plant. This can take many days. It makes sure that harmful parts of the sewage are removed. Chemicals are added to kill as many germs as possible. Then the treated water is released into a local river or even the ocean. If you live near the coast your treated sewage probably goes into the ocean.

This is a bottle of recycled water from Singapore. It was made from treated sewage and is safe to drink. Flickr/Tristan Schmurr, CC BY

The treated sewage is cleaned to make sure that it does not cause environmental problems. This means that it should not harm the plants and fish that live in the river or ocean where it is released. If the sewage is not fully treated it can cause water pollution. It also should not make people sick if they swim in the river or ocean. Scientists test the water and the sewage wastes to make sure that it is OK.

Some treated sewage can be used to make energy or recycled to make water that can be used in factories or farms. Some countries, including parts of Australia, can even make water from treated sewage that is safe enough to drink. Singapore makes “recycled” drinking water out of treated sewage that is even purer than the level that the World Health Organisation (which is a group that makes a lot of suggestions about what’s healthy and what’s not) says is safe to drink.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter by tagging @ConversationEDU with the hashtag #curiouskids, or
* Tell us on Facebook

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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Ian Wright does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The total solar eclipse that captivated the United States this week was more than just a celestial spectacle (and a reminder to take care of your eyes). It was also a valuable lesson in how to manage electricity grids when a crucial generation source – solar power, in this case – goes temporarily offline.

The last total solar eclipse to pass over the US was in 1979, a year when President Jimmy Carter was in the midst of the energy crisis and struggling with ballooning oil prices. In response, he made a concerted shift to greater energy independence through alternative energy sources such as solar.

In 2017, almost the whole world is grappling with the transformation of the electricity industry and the move to renewable energy.

Read more: Scientist at work: why this meteorologist is eager for an eclipse.

Eclipses have – and always will have – a lot to teach us. While this eclipse did not cause major disruption to the US electricity network, it gave system operators a better understanding of how future intermittencies can be managed.

The path of the eclipse, shown relative to the positions of major US solar power installations. US Energy Information Administration

Despite the rapid decline and rebound in solar power output during the event, operators were able to manage without a hitch. Their thankless task reminds us of the importance of having resilient and robust electricity systems with sufficient backup capacity.

Solar plants lost around half of their ability to generate electricity during the two and a half hours of the eclipse, dipping and rising almost three times faster than the average rate at which power stations can ramp their output up and down. The shortfall was covered largely by gas-fired power plants, and extra hydro capacity.

California faced a particularly tough challenge because of its relatively high level of renewable energy; last year 10% of the state’s electricity came from solar photovoltaic (PV) power.

California’s solar output during the eclipse. California ISO

Given the recent scrutiny on Australia’s beleaguered electricity grid, it makes sense to ask how our power system would fare if faced with the same challenge. Take a walk through almost any suburb and you’ll see dozens of solar panels glinting from roofs. How much have they destabilised our grid? Would we pass the eclipse test?

System managers and market operators such as the Australian Energy Market Operator already intricately balance demand and supply levels throughout the day, and must deal with unexpected outages at power stations, extreme weather events (think of South Australia), and increasingly predict how the share of intermittent generation from renewable resources will be matched and secured.

According to the Clean Energy Council, Australian renewables provided 17% of the country’s electricity generation in 2016. In world terms that looks rather unimpressive. But this figure does not reflect the growing impact of behind-the-meter solar PV that is slowly but surely reducing reliance on grid electricity during the day.

As outlined in a previous FactCheck, Australia has the highest proportion of households with PV systems on their roof of any country in the world, at over 15%. (However our total energy produced from solar is somewhat less than Germany, Italy, Belgium and Japan, which have a propensity for larger systems).

Of course, all this distributed solar adds to the complexity for utilities and grid operators, and underpins why we have technical rules and connection standards to ensure that households connecting individual systems to the grid do not cause unintended consequences for local network areas. As the forecasts for rooftop solar installations continue to be revised upwards, AEMO nevertheless remains sanguine about the potential for grid disruption:

…it is technically feasible to integrate this amount of rooftop PV into the network over the forecast horizon, through a mix of market, network, and non-network (such as storage) solutions to address issues such as increasing variability in system demand, low daytime demand, and increased ramping at morning and afternoon electricity system peaks.

Utilities themselves are acutely aware of the “non-negotiable social contract of keeping the lights on”, as mused by Frank Tudor, chief executive of Western Australia’s regional utility Horizon Power, in an opinion piece written before the eclipse. The emboldened South Australian government may take further comfort in the fact that its newly minted 150-megawatt Aurora Solar Energy Project would come into its own during such weather interruptions (more often due to clouds than eclipses), with its capacity to store solar power in molten salt storage tanks, to be dispatched as required during peak periods.

Lean and green machines

The eclipse also underlines how crucial the innovations in technology and data analytics will be in ensuring that electricity grids can still operate seamlessly as the share of renewable energy grows.

We are seeing this already in many small, isolated power networks across the country, where microgrids, particularly in coastal tourist towns with a proclivity for clean technology, are already pushing the limits of hosting capacity and driving utilities to explore big data solutions to assist with the integration of increased levels of solar PV.

One such example is the sky camera trial being conducted in Carnarvon, Western Australia, that will track weather patterns and anticipate cloud cover to help with grid stability. The trial is using machine learning to help predict the impact of weather on the grid, and to balance the fluctuations with other energy sources, thus helping the network to withstand such events without losing reliability.

Read more: Five things the east coast can learn from WA about energy.

With our energy systems becoming ever more distributed and decentralised, the US eclipse provides another of nature’s lessons on the need to be smart about creating resilient networks.

The next total solar eclipse for Australia will be in 2028, and will pass straight over Sydney. In the meantime, a hybrid eclipse will cross Australia’s northwest in April 2023.

Time will tell how much of an impact these events will have on our power grids. But given the importance of electricity for our health, wealth, transport and so much more, let’s hope our system operators and policy makers aren’t blindsided.

Dev Tayal also works as a strategist for Horizon Power.