Feed aggregator

A new class of antibiotics has been discovered by analysing the bacterial warfare taking place up people's noses, scientists report.

Massive increases in fines for riding without a helmet or running a red light are just the latest in the city’s ignoble history of deciding cyclists are a problem

It’s almost five months since fines for various cycling infractions, including riding without a helmet, cycling dangerously or jumping a red light were massively increased in New South Wales. Some fines went up from $71 to $425 (£40 to £240). Riders were also obliged to carry ID. At the same time, a new law spelled out minimum passing distances drivers should give riders when they overtake bikes.

Are cyclists feeling much safer? It’s fair to say the impact has been mixed. In May it turned out that while police had by then energetically handed out 1,500 of the new fines to cyclists, mainly over helmet use, just four motorists had felt the force of the law for close overtakes. There were also reports of overzealous enforcement of the rules, including a dangerous cycling citation for someone trackstanding at a red light.

Continue reading...

Jupiter's giant storm is somehow heating the planet's upper atmosphere - possibly by means of sound waves - astronomers discover.

As Philae, the robotic lander, is finally switched off and the world says goodbye.

George McRobie, who has died aged 90, was the last surviving founding member of Practical Action, an international organisation harnessing technology to help developing countries. He was a close associate of the economist EF Schumacher (my late husband, known as Fritz, who was the author of the influential text Small Is Beautiful) and for many years they worked together, initially at the National Coal Board and then, in 1965, in setting up the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), now known as Practical Action.

When Fritz died suddenly in 1977, George stepped in to become chairman of the organisation, and worked tirelessly to maintain the momentum they had generated. His contribution to both the green movement and the appropriate technology movement as a whole was immense. In 1981 George completed Small Is Possible, the last of Fritz’s trilogy of books, which laid out how the ideas and theories on sustainability in the first two books, Small Is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed, could be applied to everyday life.

Continue reading...

Koalas have quickly learned to use wildlife passageways to cross busy roads in Australia's Queensland state as they move between habitats.

Filipino government body gives 47 ‘carbon majors’ 45 days to respond to allegations of human rights violations resulting from climate change

The world’s largest oil, coal, cement and mining companies have been given 45 days to respond to a complaint that their greenhouse gas emissions have violated the human rights of millions of people living in the Phillippines.

In a potential landmark legal case, the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines (CHR), a constitutional body with the power to investigate human rights violations, has sent 47 “carbon majors” including Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP Billiton and Anglo American, a 60-page document accusing them of breaching people’s fundamental rights to “life, food, water, sanitation, adequate housing, and to self determination”.

Continue reading...

Over-budget and behind schedule, the €10.5bn nuclear reactor has faced problems that some say could be repeated in the UK

On granite cliffs overlooking the Channel is France’s most famous building site. If all goes to plan, by the end of the decade this rocky outcrop will house the biggest and most powerful nuclear reactor in the world.

The technology behind the European pressurised reactor (EPR) is meant to be safer than anything that has gone before. But the project is more than three times over budget and years behind schedule, and France’s nuclear safety authority has found weaknesses in the reactor’s steel.

Continue reading...

BusinessGreen: Record six-month period sees UK secure €10.4bn (£8.7bn) of investment in offshore wind projects, but installation rate slows

The European offshore wind industry has enjoyed a record six months of investment, according to new figures released today by trade body WindEurope.

In the first six months of this year Europe’s offshore wind projects attracted €14bn of investment, split across seven projects and financing a total of 3.7GW of new clean energy capacity.

Continue reading...

The crashed remains from Flight MH370 could be as much as 500km further north than the current search area, argues a new modelling study.

Professor Monica Grady describes the final days of communication with the Philae lander

Scientists have used high-power X-rays to "see inside" an exquisite and complete dinosaur specimen.

Campaigners say company behind Keystone XL plans to send hundreds of supertankers of crude oil down the Atlantic coast with fears for potential spills

Environmentalists are again taking aim at the company that proposed the Keystone XL pipeline this time for another of its projects they fear would send hundreds of supertankers laden with crude oil down the Atlantic coast to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.

TransCanada is behind the Energy East pipeline project, a 4,600km pipeline, or nearly 3,000 miles, that would carry crude oil from tar sands in Western Canada to the East Coast, where it would then be shipped to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. When completed, the project would carry 1.1m barrels of crude oil every day from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada.

Continue reading...

Photographs from the Eyewitness series

Continue reading...

A new study from my colleagues and I vindicates climate models, which are accurately predicting the rate of ocean heat accumulation

For those of us who are concerned about global warming, two of the most critical questions we ask are, “how fast is the Earth warming?” and “how much will it warm in the future?”.

The first question can be answered in a number of ways. For instance, we can actually measure the rate of energy increase in the Earth’s system (primarily through measuring changing ocean temperatures). Alternatively, we can measure changes in the net inflow of heat at the top of the atmosphere using satellites. We can also measure the rate of sea-level rise to get an estimate of the warming rate.

Continue reading...

Tesco is removing several lines of John West tuna from its shelves. So what varieties are sustainable, how should they be caught and from where?

For those who want to shop responsibly, fish is the PhD. Ideally, we would rely on retailers to make the judgment. Just this week, Tesco decided to remove “a number of core John West lines” from its shelves after concluding that the company’s tuna does not meet its standards.

Continue reading...

An orangutan copying sounds made by researchers offers new clues to how human speech evolved, scientists say.

With all the costs and risks involved, the spectre of George Osborne’s energy policy could haunt Britain for decades

George Osborne’s reputation as a master political tactician may have gone the way of Leave’s £350m a week for the NHS, but the spectre of his misguided energy policy could haunt Britain for decades, and at Hinkley in north Somerset, for millennia.

Theresa May’s government urgently need to seize the opportunity to minimise the damage, an opportunity which only lasts while her government can portray them as the last regime’s errors, and disown them.

Continue reading...

Catch them all - and maybe spare a thought for the trees. Matthew Corley/Shutterstock.com

Anyone who has been outdoors in a populated area in the past month will be aware of the massive success of Pokémon GO, which has rocketed to the top of the gaming charts.

People have been avidly collecting Pokémon creatures in various media formats for two decades, so it was a logical move to use smartphone technology to turn the franchise into a “mobile augmented reality” (MAR) gaming app.

It has proved to be an economic as well as a social phenomenon, sending the market value of its owner Nintendo soaring to US$39.9 billion. But the game was not actually developed by Nintendo; it was created by Google spin-off Niantic, which also built Pokémon GO’s popular MAR predecessor, Ingress.

Similar to Pokémon GO, Ingress is a reality-embedded sci-fi game in which players interact with real-world objects that are overlaid (using smartphone cameras) by a veneer of simulated characteristics.

In a new paper published in the journal Restoration Ecology, we argue that MAR games such as these can be a force for good in ecology and conservation, rather than being a cause for concern, as others have argued.

The key is not to lament or rail against the popularity of gaming or augmented reality, but rather to embrace what makes them a success. They tap into people’s sense of fun and competitiveness, and they get people into the great outdoors – and this is all stuff that can encourage people to embrace nature.

The problem

The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Populations of plants and animals have declined, leading to local losses and global extinctions, as a result of habitat destruction, harvesting, invasive species, and pollution.

Yet although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. The environmental writer George Monbiot has ascribed society’s ongoing destruction of the environment to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.

This “eco-detachment” has been described as a symptom of our modernised, urbanised world, in which new technology both dominates peoples’ interests and simultaneously increases society’s ability to damage the environment.

But what if augmented reality – from MAR apps on smartphones to HoloLenses – could be harnessed in a positive and proactive way, to reconnect the wider public to nature and so unlock their inherent biophilia?

What if a smartphone game was created that focused not on features of the cityscape, but rather on “gamifying” nature, wildlife, and human interactions with the natural environment?

Such a game would lead its players to actively choose to experience nature. They would connect to it, and protect it (as an in-game reward), and thus understand its value.

Ingress enthusiasts. Hey, at least they’re outdoors, right? R4ph4ell-pl/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Getting more of society to connect with nature has long been an elusive dream of environmentalists. More than a decade ago, a group of leading conservation biologists famously found children were far more expert at recognising Pokémon characters than they were at identifying common wildlife groups. The problem isn’t with spotting “species” per se – it’s that they were mainly exposed to the electronic ones and not the real ones.

This issue of where people invest their attention is crucial. Ingress now has more than 7 million active players, and has been downloaded by 12 million people since its release in 2012. The fact that the game requires you to get out and about means it encourages players to locate, recognise, and identify with an array of cultural icons they might otherwise ignore.

Egress!

So here’s the challenge: to create a new version of Ingress (let’s call it “Egress”), that is educational and positive, as well as popular. It might also use augmented reality to visualise environmental changes, either good (restoration) or bad (damage), in people’s local landscapes. To be a hit, it would need to both capture an audience and to foster a community. And it could even generate data for citizen science projects.

There are lots of possibilities for how an app such as this could work. Perhaps it might involve using smartphones to photograph, locate, and automatically “tag” species within a landscape; or to identify rare plants or insects; or detect signs of animal activity (diggings, droppings, and so on). The crucial point is that although its focus would be on ecology and nature, it needs to also incorporate a fun gaming element – sort of like a high-tech version of those old birdwatching handbooks, but one that offers more kudos for spotting rarer species.

A recent editorial in Nature highlighted some of the potential uses of Pokémon GO, Ingress and others, suggesting that MAR games might even be used to discover and describe new species.

Who doesn’t want a new animal or plant to be named after them? Such citizen science activities would strengthen links between research, conservation, and the community.

What Ingress and Pokémon GO have shown is that it is possible to get millions of tech-savvy people out of their living rooms and basements and actively engaging with the wider world. While it’s impossible to guarantee that any project will go viral, this recent experience with MAR shows that people really can be persuaded, in large numbers, to get outside and explore.

That’s surely the first and most necessary step towards getting people to reconnect with, and care about, nature in the digital age.

Barry W. Brook receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

NSW network operator unveils plans to fast-track installation of solar and battery systems up to 30kW, saving customers more than $200 on applications.