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The 19th century glassblower’s intricate sculptures of marine life are a window on the ocean 150 years ago, says ecology professor Drew Harvell

In the 1860s, when the Bohemian glassblower Leopold Blaschka began sculpting models of underwater creatures, the Industrial Revolution, population growth and climate change had yet to take their toll on marine biodiversity. Over three decades, using techniques that still baffle experts, Leopold and his son, Rudolf, handmade about 10,000 marine sculptures, each one rendered in minute detail: impossibly delicate anemones, livid orange cuttlefish – creatures at once alien and unnervingly lifelike.

In a world before scuba diving, underwater photography or ocean life surveys, the Blaschkas’ models proved an invaluable educational resource, with universities worldwide purchasing collections of glass specimens. One of the largest, with 570 models, belongs to Cornell University in the US, where until recently it was all but forgotten, stowed in a warehouse in a state of disrepair. As a young professor in the 1990s, Dr Drew Harvell began cataloguing the collection, discovering a “time capsule” of 19th-century marine biology. “There’s value in the entire collection,” she says. “It’s what you could see 150 years ago, frozen in time.”

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Every hour 10,000 people are born. Fortunately a new crop of eco innovations will help tackle the pressures on our planet

The regularity with which I’m contacted by population worriers – people who think it’s pointless discussing green energy, climate change and ethical pensions when the elephant in the room is actually the new human in the room – is impressive. They say that the planet needs fewer people. End of.

The numbers are indeed eye catching. Today there are 7 billion humans alive (twice the number who were alive in 1965) – and each hour we add 10,000 more. By 2050, UN demographers predict, there will be at least 9 billion of us putting a strain on life-sustaining resources.

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The shipping industry burns fossil fuels on a grand scale, and scarcely even tries to reduce its emissions

A seafaring adage goes: “If the winds are shifting, adjust your sails.” But even with the disturbing winds of climate change, the shipping industry, with its combustion of fossil fuels (accounting for 2.4% of global emissions), remains outside binding emissions-reduction agreements.

There have been some eco efforts, but the Carbon War Room points out that ship owners feel little need to green their fleets, as those hiring the vessels pay the fuel costs. When the price of bunker fuel (the sludgiest oil left over from refining) drops, as it has, eco resolve disappears.

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A pioneer of marine science in Australia says this could be the end of the reef as we know it, even if we act now.

Digital tracking of creatures from tiny birds to whales offers up new data on the epic trips some species make, and their role in ecology and economics

Aristotle thought the mysterious silver eel emerged from the earth fully formed. The young Sigmund Freud could not understand how it reproduced, and modern biologists puzzled for years over whether it ever returned to the Sargasso Sea, where it was known to breed.

Last year a team of Canadian scientists found conclusive proof of that extraordinary journey. They strapped tracking devices to 38 eels and followed as they migrated more than 900 miles at a depth of nearly a mile to the Sargasso, in the Atlantic near Bermuda. This year French researchers used geolocators to watch them descending European rivers and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading for the same spot.

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Change in government’s energy policy blamed for job losses just as solar power eclipses coal in electricity generation

The solar power industry says it has seen the loss of more than half its 35,000 jobs due to recent changes in government energy policy, just at a time when solar power has eclipsed coal as a major generator of Britain’s electricity.

Experts believe ministers had cut subsidies too far and too fast, praising the “seismic”, record-breaking growth of solar in recent years.

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Among elite mountain climbers, summiting Everest sans oxygen has become the latest challenge in an already grueling journey

Another climbing season has finished on Mount Everest, with the inevitable tales of tragedy and triumph.

Since 2000, an average of seven people a year have died on Everest. The past two years were especially grim: 19 people were killed by an earthquake-triggered avalanche in 2015, and 16 died in 2014.

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A plane powered only by the sun travels to New York City for a photoshoot at the Statue of Liberty, ahead of crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The UK spends more than £2bn on cut flowers per year, but around 90% are imported. Now a new breed of growers are determined to grab more of that market, by persuading the public that local and seasonal are the ways to go

Georgie Newbery sometimes has to dodge a hunting barn owl when she rises at 5am to harvest flowers on her seven-acre plot near Wincanton in Somerset. Picking sweet rocket, foxgloves and cornflowers as dawn light streaks over the fields may sound idyllic, but grabbing a cup of tea on a late-May afternoon after despatching her exclusively British-grown posies and bouquets, Newbery laughs at the thought. “If you imagine it’s all standing around in a flower garden with a Roberts radio and a robin singing, you couldn’t be more wrong,” she says, possibly a little tartly.

Related: Is crowdfunding the future of horticulture?

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Vehicles are the source of a third of the air pollution in the Chinese capital, which restricts their use during episodes of heavy smog. Electric cars, buses, scooters and bicycles offer an alternative, cleaner form of transport

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South Uist The plant’s uses are many, but the sight of a sunlit field full of daisies is perhaps what we should value most

Daisies are one of our best known and most widely distributed wildflowers, and maybe this is why we sometimes pass them by with barely a second glance. This morning, though, they have stopped me in my tracks and brought a smile to my face.

They line the edge of the path, spangle the open grassland, and have so thoroughly covered one fenced pasture that almost all signs of grass have vanished beneath a blanket of white. In the warm sunshine each and every one turns a bright and open face skywards, a response that gave them their name “day’s eye”.

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Batteries, microgrids, and the possibility of self-sufficiency are now real options for individual households, and in some cases, whole towns.

A group of 13 Nobel prize-winning scientists warn leaving the EU poses a "key risk" to British science.

Australia's migratory shorebirds have just flown 5,000 kilometres northward to stopover in the Yellow Sea. What will they find when they arrive?

Comedian says she put out an announcement because of the need to protect oceans and the reef, and cannot understand what the fuss is all about

The US talkshow queen Ellen DeGeneres is bewildered her call to protect the Great Barrier Reef has sparked a backlash in Australia.

DeGeneres made headlines earlier in the week with the release of a video public service announcement as part of the Remember the Reef campaign.

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Astronaut Tim Peake is recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

From satellites giving information about soil quality to robotic fruit monitoring and water quality sensors for oysters - agricultural technology is being taken up at a rapid rate among Australia's farmers.

More than 80% of the world's population lives under light-polluted skies, a study suggests.

A team of scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information in Boulder, Colorado have produced a digital atlas of the Earth that shows the levels of light pollution. The atlas makes use of low-light imaging now available from the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, calibrated by thousands of ground observations. Light pollution is so severe in some parts of the world that a third of human beings cannot see the Milky Way

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