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Hot weather saw solar briefly take over from gas as the number one energy source

Britain’s heatwave has helped break several solar power-generation records, and over the weekend the renewable energy source briefly eclipsed gas power stations as the UK’s top source of electricity.

While new solar installations have virtually flatlined over the past year, a run of largely cloudless days has seen a series of highs for power generation by the sector.

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Turning the 4,000 live-aboard yachts around the world into a research fleet.

Like opposing civil rights and gay marriage, climate denial will drive voters away from the GOP

The Republican Party is rotting away. The problem is that GOP policies just aren’t popular. Most Americans unsurprisingly oppose climate denial, tax cuts for the wealthy, and putting children (including toddlers) in concentration camps, for example.

The Republican Party has thus far managed to continue winning elections by creating “a coalition between racists and plutocrats,” as Paul Krugman put it. The party’s economic policies are aimed at benefitting wealthy individuals and corporations, but that’s a slim segment of the American electorate. The plutocrats can fund political campaigns, but to capture enough votes to win elections, the GOP has resorted to identity politics. Research has consistently shown that Trump won because of racial resentment among white voters.

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Both cities are seeking ways to transport expanding populations without impacting their historic centres, yet the simplest solution is staring them in the face

Sometimes politics really does overlook the obvious, and there’s a fine example just now in those two great centres of clear thinking and clogged traffic, Oxford and Cambridge. Here is the problem. The country wants, and badly needs, to build on these cities’ success in tech, bioscience and other industries: 129,000 new jobs and 135,000 new homes are planned in and around them over the next decade or so. But first you have to plan how to transport all the new people, and none of the usual answers works.

Even if new roadbuilding were an answer in any city, it can’t be in these two. Their historic centres are inviolable, their electorates implacable. Gone, thank God, are the days when plans could be drawn up for a new highway through Christ Church Meadow. More buses? Both cities’ centres are already choked with them. Metros? Vastly expensive and disruptive, years to build, and couldn’t hope to serve most of the journeys people will need to make.

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Four people have died seeking a bounty hidden in the Rockies, with only a riddle as a guide. As the casualties mount, the millionaire who buried the treasure insists it’s not a hoax

Sacha Johnston was inching along a dirt road in a narrow canyon in northern New Mexico. “Just guide me,” Johnston said to her search partner, Cory Napier, who directed Johnston and her white Toyota 4Runner. “This road can be brutal.”

The pair had come to this starkly beautiful place, at the base of the Sangre De Cristo mountains, to hunt for a treasure rumored to be worth upwards of $2m.

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As our cities become more crowded and our roads more congested it becomes harder and harder to efficiently get from one place to another. What can be done? Dr Tanya Latty explains how nature might have the answer.

The intricately-woven webs of a mass colony of tent spiders create an eye-catching display in a nature reserve at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia.  Australian Museum arachnologist Graham Milledge told the ABC the webs were built over wet grassland and low-lying vegetation. 'At the top of the cone in the web is where the spider has its little retreat, that's where it sits waiting for prey and often there's a lot of detritus and leaves there to camouflage the spider'

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2 July 1918 The plant may be rare, but where it does occur it will choke up a small pond of shallow stream

The water soldier, even in the Fens, is a rare plant, and though at one time it occurred in scattered localities in Lancashire and Cheshire, it has vanished from nearly all its old stations. Most of the year the plant is submerged, but at the time of flowering it rises, a clump of stiff, aloe-like leaves, above the surface of the water. Where it does occur it is often plentiful, and will choke up a small pond or shallow stream, and this was the condition in which I found it, or rather was shown it by a local botanist, not many miles from Manchester. The pond, it is true, was small, but very little water was visible, so densely were the leaf-clumps crowded together. From the centre of many of the prickly-leaved rosettes rose the delicate white flowers. Locally, from its serrated leaves, it is called the water pine; but water aloe is an even more descriptive title. Griddon, who, by the way, does not mention this particular locality, states that it used to grow in the “Infirmary Pond,” so we may certainly reckon any water soldiers that appear in our local pits as old inhabitants.

Related: The stranglers: the five plants threatening Britain's waterways

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The best thing our political leaders can do to keep a lid on electricity prices is to help create stable, bipartisan energy and climate-change policy.

Otley, Wharfedale: A pair of mute swans build their riverside nest in an exposed spot, untroubled by their urban neighbours

The distance to the end of my garden from the back of my “new” house (I moved in eight months ago) is about the length of a cricket pitch. Beyond it there is a lush line of trees and an intractable tangle of bramble, bindweed and balsam, which drops steeply down to the banks of the River Wharfe.

Along this stretch of the Wharfe there is a corridor in which trees, weeds and animals have free rein, a sort of riparian republic buffered from the human world. Living within the breathing space of the river is fantastically noisy and eventful, like being in a Yorkshire jungle. Swifts scream above the trees, scything through clouds of midges and mosquitoes; kingfishers and grey wagtails flash their colours in the green; beetles clatter against the bright windows at night; the screeches of little owls often pierce my dreams.

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ElectraNet proposes new link from S.A. that it says will unlock more low-cost renewable energy sources, reduce reliance on expensive gas, and help fill the gap caused by the retirement of more coal generators in NSW.

Ford names former global head of battery electric vehicle distribution, Kay Hart, as new CEO/president of Australia and NZ.

Reducing plastics when shopping for food, toiletries and travel products should be easy – so why is it so difficult?

A few months ago, my partner and I went snorkelling off the coast of Indonesia. We dove off tiny deserted islands and swam in the deep with giant manta rays, but what I remember most vividly about that trip was not the stunning coral or dazzling array of colourful, curious fish; it was the sheer amount of garbage in the water.

Shopping bags, plastic cups, toothpaste tubes, orange peel, all manner of human debris followed the currents; waves and waves of junk pooling in the shallow waters. In these parts of the reef, the water was cloudy and full of so much microscopic debris that it stung the skin. I remember watching a majestic giant turtle swim through the gloom as my head bumped against an old Coke bottle bobbing on the surface of the water.

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"I think we just became a real car company!" Elon Musk says Tesla has met 5,000/week Model 3 production target.

Proposed Tesla big battery in California will be more than 8 times bigger than the current world's biggest in South Australia. And there's more.

Keen gardeners and home cooks meet for a neighbourhood food swap; pizza's on the menu at a Victorian cheese factory; girl guides make shopping bags; and a rescue dog sniffs out truffles

If you live in a remote area of Victoria the government will subsidise your off-grid fuel needs ... and not if you power your off-grid home with solar.

City of Sydney adds 500kWh Tesla battery to new solar council depot, both to make the depot self sufficient and as part of Transgrid demand management trial.

A Grattan Institute report has found renewable energy investment could offer a path to lower rates, but they won't drop below 2015 prices. Lucy Percival, Associate, Grattan Institute Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

High brown fritillary population rises due to harsh winter and sunny spring

The combination of a harsh winter and sunny May and June has given the population of the UK’s most endangered butterfly, the high brown fritillary, a welcome boost.

Volunteers have been counting rare butterflies in a wooded valley on the Devon coast, which has been the focus of a project to encourage species such as the high brown fritillary.

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