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96m water-saving shade balls released into LA reservoir – video
The final tranche of 96m black plastic shade balls is released into the Los Angeles reservoir at Sylmar, to help improve water quality and prevent evaporation. The LA water and power department began pouring the balls into the water two months ago, as can be seen in the first clip, and the final balls are introduced this week.
The idea was conceived in 2007 in an effort to prevent the reservoir becoming contaminated with bromate, a substance formed when chemicals in the water react with sunlight. The balls are a relatively low-cost solution, at $34.5m, and are expected to save about $250m over 10 years, and prevent 300m gallons of water evaporating
Produced but never eaten: a visual guide to food waste
Whether the wastage is measured in tonnes of spoiled goods, hectares of agricultural land or household expenditure, the scale is frightening
Continue reading...'Slippery customer': police snare carpet python in London park
Met officer tweets details of snake chase in Wandsworth, which came a day after two royal pythons were found in Twickenham
Police have captured a “feisty” 1.5-metre snake that was on the loose in south London. Officers were called to a park in Wandsworth where the carpet python was found slithering along the edge of a fence.
In a series of tweets, Supt Steve Wallace of the Metropolitan police revealed how a team of three officers snared the “slippery customer” – thought to have been an escaped or dumped exotic pet – using a ballistic bag.
How to overtake cyclists – the video all drivers should watch
The Highway code requires vehicles to give cyclists at least as much space as a car - but many cars endanger lives by ignoring this. Chris Boardman features in a new YouTube video that aims to help change that
“Socialism,” wrote the 1970s Chilean politician José Viera Gallo, “can only arrive by bicycle.” That’s why Jeremy Corbyn cycles everywhere. And come the revolution, prime minister Corbyn will see to it that this land of ours will be festooned with bike paths. Not the usual “crap” ones, oh no, the Corbynite cycleways will be clause IV bike paths, nationalised, surfaced with butter-smooth tarmac and wider than a wide thing.
Until then, we’ve got to make do with less then wholesome conditions, and that means sometimes sharing the road with tonnes of tin driven by texting, speeding, tweeting motorists.
Continue reading...Australia sets 2030 emissions reduction target
Diary of an urban peregrine falcon nest in Chicago – in pictures
Rare images of wild peregrine falcons chart their entire nesting cycle from brooding to hatching and finally fledging from their tower block home. Images by Luke Massey
Continue reading...Green Army Round Four
Extension to ecological community assessment timeframe
Night parrot capture and tagging hailed as 'holy grail' moment for bird lovers
The area of south-west Queensland where the elusive nocturnal parrot, presumed extinct, was caught is now to be protected
The elusive night parrot, a species thought to be extinct for about 100 years, has finally been captured and tagged by scientists as part of a pioneering project to safeguard the remaining ground-dwelling birds.
Aside from two dead parrots found over the past 25 years, the night parrot had not been captured since the 1890s and was presumed extinct by many bird experts.
Continue reading...20 Million Trees Competitive Grants Round Two
OMG… Greenland’s ice sheets are melting fast
An urgent attempt to study the rate at which Greenland’s mighty ice sheets are melting has been launched by Nasa. The aim of the six-year project, called Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG), is to understand how fast the world’s warming seas are now eroding the edges of the island’s vast icecaps. Warming air temperatures are already causing considerable glacier loss there, but the factors involving the sea that laps the bases of its great ice masses, and which is also heating up, are less well understood.
Greenland contains vast reservoirs of ice which, if completely melted, would raise world sea levels by more than six metres. However, some influences on its current dramatic melting are poorly understood. Hence the decision to launch OMG, an acronym that the project leader, Joshua Willis, admits he “barely squeezed past the censors”.
Continue reading...Where are the world's ants? First ever map detailing 15,000 species launched
Four-year project maps location of species, with Australian state of Queensland found to host the greatest number of native species
The world’s first ever ant map showing the distribution of the tiny industrious creatures around the globe was launched on Thursday by the University of Hong Kong in a bid to shed more light on the insect world.
The colourful interactive online map which took four years to complete, displays the geographic locations of nearly 15,000 types of ants, with the Australian state of Queensland home to the highest number of native species at more than 1,400.
Continue reading...Fresh for Spring in the Lachlan River
Chairs' Update 6 August 2015 | Commonwealth Marine Reserves Review
Wasp masters turn enslaved spiders into zombies to build their nests
Parasitic wasp larvae drug their orb spider hosts into altering their normal webs to create a perfect nest for them to transform into adult wasps
People associate wasps with memories of picnic invasions, BBQs under siege, and painful stings. There is a lot more to these much-maligned insects though, and with more than 100,000 different species, their life histories range from the quietly unobtrusive to the bizarre and gruesome. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology documents one such disturbing example of wasp larvae that takes control of their unfortunate spider hosts.
The Japanese scientists behind the study thought the host-parasite relationship between the wasp Reclinervellus nielseni (most wasps have only a scientific name) and its orb-weaver spider host Cyclosa argenteoalba could help us understand how parasitic organisms alter their host’s behaviour.
Continue reading...Draft Outcomes-based conditions policy and guidance
National Taxonomy Grants 2016–2017 Research and Capacity-Building Grants
Are plants intelligent? New book says yes
A new book, Brilliant Green, argues that not only are plants intelligent and sentient, but that we should consider their rights, especially in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction
Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.
For centuries Western philosophy and science largely viewed animals as unthinking automatons, simple slaves to instinct. But research in recent decades has shattered that view. We now know that not only are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants thinking, feeling and personality-driven beings, but many others are as well. Octopuses can use tools, whales sing, bees can count, crows demonstrate complex reasoning, paper wasps can recognise faces and fish can differentiate types of music. All these examples have one thing in common: they are animals with brains. But plants don’t have a brain. How can they solve problems, act intelligently or respond to stimuli without a brain?
Northern Territory Offshore Net and Line Fishery
Flying Ant Day: the science behind the summer swarms
Did a swarm of frisky flying insects put a dampener on your weekend barbecue? Well, there’s a good reason – for a brief period each summer, millions of flying ants appear in Britain for a short frenzy of mid-air mating. This year, what’s known as Flying Ant Day fell on Sunday and colonies were spotted erupting out of pavements, spilling into gardens, bedrooms, on to sofas and even riding the London Underground.
Flying Ant Day is actually a bit of a misnomer, says Professor Adam Hart of the University of Gloucestershire. A flying ant survey he has run with the Royal Society of Biology since 2012 has found that the idea of one synchronised 24-hour period of emergence is a myth. Sometimes they come out over a few days, or even weeks.
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