Feed aggregator

The Sydney Opera House and its energy supplier EnergyAustralia today announced a major partnership to help the country’s pre-eminent performing arts centre and number one tourist destination deliver its Environmental Sustainability Plan (ESP).

Technologies that use gels, liquids, and molten silicon or salt could all claim a slice of the growing renewable energy storage market

Between the political bickering following a spate of blackouts in South Australia and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeting that he had a fix, and then the South Australian government announcing that it will build a grid-connected battery storage facility, interest in renewable energy storage has never been higher.

While lithium ion batteries sold by Tesla and others are perhaps the most widely known storage technology, several other energy storage options are either already on the market, or are fast making their way there.

Continue reading...

MARINE BIOLOGY: A unique messaging system used by the crown-of-thorns starfish to 'talk' to each other could hold the key to developing a bio-control to help save the Great Barrier Reef from the marine predator's devastating attacks.

Groundwater expert Tom Crothers says Adani got special treatment for its water licence.

Complaint lodged over prospect of Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility partially funding 400km rail line

A $1bn federal loan to builders of a railway line between the proposed Adani coalmine and the coast would be a direct breach of government policy, a legal group has claimed.

Environmental Justice Australia has lodged a formal complaint with the Productivity Commission over the prospect of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility partially funding the 400km rail line.

Continue reading...

Hundreds of thousands of crown-of-thorns starfish have invaded North Queensland, devastating reefs. iStock

Crown-of-thorns starfish are one of the most aggressive reef-destroyers in the world. A single female can produce up to 120 million offspring in one spawning season, and these spiny invaders eat coral, weakening entire reef systems. They’re a serious problem in northern Queensland, and are likely to move south.

But after three years of work, my colleagues and I have made a discovery, published in Nature today, that could offer a whole new way to fight them: we have decoded the gene sequence for the crown-of-thorns’ pheromones, which prompt them to gather for mating.

The project was built on the premise that if we could tap into the communications systems of starfish, we could modify their behaviours, and then eventually set up a program to capture them.

The ultimate goal was to find a way to get the starfish to converge, so it’s possible to set traps and remove them from the reef. Currently, crown-of-thorns starfish are removed by divers, who either collect them by hand or inject them with toxic solutions. This is labour-intensive and deeply inefficient.

So how do we get them into one place? Well, we exploited their natural mating behaviour. Starfish, like a lot of other marine animals – including corals – release their eggs and sperm into the water, and fertilisation occurs externally. For starfish to do this successfully they need to form a tight cluster, so there’s a strong imperative gather in one spot, given the right stimulus.

Crown-of-thorn starfish grazing on healthy coral leaving behind dead white skeletons. Outbreaks of this starfish is one of the leading causes of coral reef destruction throughout the Indo-Pacific. Oceanwide Images How do starfish communicate?

We thought if we could figure out how starfish know how to get together, we might be able to replicate it. To find out what was going on, we put a group of crown-of-thorns starfish in a large aquarium, and waited for them to aggregate. We then set up what’s called a choice experiment.

We used a Y-shaped maze, and put new starfish at the base of the Y. The two arms of the Y contained either fresh seawater, or water that had just passed over the aggregating starfish in the other aquarium.

As expected, fresh seawater had no effect. These starfish aren’t very active animals – they just sat there. But as soon as the water from the aquarium hit them, they became highly active and moved towards the source.

That told us immediately that the aggregating starfish had changed the chemistry of the seawater in a significant way.

The next step was to actually sequence the pheromone proteins in that seawater. We then mapped these sequences back to the genome, and identified the genes that encode the pheromones that are making the starfish do this.

The beauty of this whole process is that there’s a direct one-to-one relationship between the sequence of proteins that make up the pheromones, and the gene sequence. Because genes are a lot easier to analyse than proteins, we can then look at them in great detail, and use that information in future projects.

A crown-of-thorns starfish eating a brain coral. Australian Institute of Marine Science Eco-friendly pest control

What’s particularly good about this result is that these pheromones are unique to the crown-of-thorns starfish. The genes that encode the proteins have evolved rapidly and recently, and aren’t shared by other species of starfish that we’ve looked at. It looks like each starfish has its own unique repertoire of pheromones.

This means that any attractants or bait we develop from this project will only be recognised by crown-of-thorns starfish, and won’t impact other species.

We look at this paper as phase one: the discovery of the communication pheromones. We’re now in phase two: trying to mimic those pheromones so we can develop baits for traps to remove the starfish from the reef before they reproduce.

Ultimately we’d like for fishers up and down the Queensland coast to be able to go out and fish them and make some money out of it. That could be through a bounty, or through developing some useful (or edible) product out of the starfish to sell.

We need a quicker way to remove crown-of-thorns starfish, and real incentive to get plenty of people involved. No-one knows how many there are around Australia, but there are some reefs in Queensland that have had hundreds of thousands, or even millions, removed by conservation projects. If we see those amounts on individual reefs, the true numbers across the Indo-Pacific ocean must be astronomical.

The final, most exciting aspect of this project is the possibility of wider applications. This approach hasn’t been used before in a marine environment, but it could potentially work for a wide range of invasive species. Pest organisms are a multibillion-dollar global problem – and this could mean we move beyond mitigating invasive species and actually start controlling them.

Bernard Degnan received funding from the Australian Research Council to fund this project.

Scientists in the US find traces of the most widely used insecticides in tap water for the first time.

Artist Stephen Turner lived on the egg from July 2013 until July 2014.

The EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, has ignored the scientific recommendation of his own agency to allow continued use of chlorpyrifos, despite its links to brain damage

Environmental groups have filed a complaint against the US government over its support of a pesticide linked to brain damage in children, one week after Donald Trump’s administration rejected federally backed science and reversed an Obama-era policy.

The Pesticide Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed the case against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday, seeking to force the government to follow through with the Obama administration’s recommendations to ban an insecticide widely used in agriculture.

Continue reading...

German and French governments have already required that manufacturers fix vehicles spewing high levels of toxic pollution but UK is ‘doing nothing’

The diesel-fuelled air pollution crisis should be solved by making motor companies recall and upgrade the dirty cars they sold, experts said on Wednesday.

Current UK plans are focused on making diesel drivers pay to enter cities and a possible taxpayer-funded scrappage scheme.

Continue reading...

Metricon becomes latest Australian housing developer to offer rooftop solar and storage as optional extra in new-build homes in Queensland.

“Off-grid guy” Michael Mobbs is so frustrated by the poor performance of his off-grid system in inner Sydney terrace house that he has decided to junk it and is calling for new proposals. It is a salutary lesson for others wishing to follow.

We’d like to find out about how single-use plastic bottles are recycled where you live. Share your you views and experiences from around the world

The disposal of plastic bottles is a global issue. Every year millions of single-use bottles end up in landfill sites or in our oceans and a very small proportion are recycled.

It’s estimated Americans throw away at least 50 million bottles every day. Every year, a UK household uses 480 plastic bottles, but only recycles 270 of them, according to Recycle Now, a campaign group funded by the government’s waste advisory group Wrap. A survey by Greenpeace found five out of six global soft drinks firms sold single-use plastic bottles weighing more than two million tonnes – only 6.6% of which was recycled plastic.

Continue reading...

Companies from every EU nation except Poland and Greece sign up to initiative in bid to meet Paris pledges and limit effects of climate change

Europe’s energy utilities have rung the death knell for coal, with a historic pledge that no new coal-fired plants will be built in the EU after 2020.

The shock announcement was made at a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday, 442 years after the continent’s first pit was sunk by Sir George Bruce of Carnock, in Scotland.

Continue reading...

Three recent studies point to just how broad, bizarre, and potentially devastating climate change is to life on Earth. And we’ve only seen one degree Celsius of warming so far.

Climate change is rapidly becoming a crisis that defies hyperbole.

For all the sound and fury of climate change denialists, self-deluding politicians and a very bewildered global public, the science behind climate change is rock solid while the impacts – observed on every ecosystem on the planet – are occurring faster in many parts of the world than even the most gloomy scientists predicted.

Continue reading...

The giant armadillo benefits 80 other species by providing a unique lodging and dining service in the largest wetland on Earth – the Pantanal in Brazil. Here’s a sneak peek into the lives of nature’s most amazing host and its guests

Continue reading...

The Paris agreement to limit global warming to below 2°C requires nothing short of a global energy revolution. Is this possible?

Drawing from personal experience, a look at what the new national standard for solar installation could mean for home solar and battery plans.

White-tail spider unlikely to be responsible for necrotising skin infection that led to amputation of Filipino tourist’s legs

A Melbourne man’s double amputation is likely to have been misattributed to a white-tail spider bite.

The family of Terry Pareja, a Filipino tourist, say he may have been bitten by a white-tailed spider while visiting relatives in Birchip in regional Victoria in late February.

Continue reading...

Environmental and legal groups fear impact on groundwater and accuse Queensland government of giving Indian mining company special treatment

Adani’s controversial $21bn Carmichael coalmine has been granted an unlimited 60-year water licence in what environmental and legal groups say is another example of governments giving the company special treatment.

The associated water licence, signed by a Queensland government representative the day after Cyclone Debbie tore through the state’s north, allows Adani Mining to take water from or near the Betts Creek formation when removing or draining water from the mine.

Continue reading...