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A major citizen science project will spread virtual flu with the aim of understanding how to stop the real thing.

Four times larger than regular rodents, a large, tree-dwelling rat has been found in the Pacific.

Greenland wildfires, deforestation and tropical storm Harvey are among the images captured by Nasa and the ESA last month

Tropical storm Harvey in the Gulf of Mexico on 24 August. This geocolor image appears differently depending on whether it is day (right of the image) or night (left).

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The latest example, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto has a strong clean energy proposal

As soon as Donald Trump won the presidential election, people in the US and around the world knew it was terrible news for the environment. Not wanting to believe that he would try to follow through on our worst fears, we held out hope.

Those hopes for a sane US federal government were misplaced. But they are replaced by a new hope – an emerging climate leadership at the state level and a continuation of economic forces that favor clean/renewable energy over dirty fossil fuels. In fact, it appears that some states are relishing the national and international leadership roles that they have undertaken. Support for sensible climate and energy policies is now a topic to run on in elections.

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The Leuser ecosystem spans 2.6m hectares into the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. It’s the only place in the world where tigers, orangutans, rhinos and elephants coexist in the wild. But it’s under threat from agricultural industries, including palm oil

• ‘The last place on Earth’: how Sumatra’s rainforest is being cleared for palm oil

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What kind of migration patterns did ancient wombats have?

Single-Column Responsive Email Template SENG 2017 National Conference, October 18th & 19th SENG 2017 National Conference Wednesday 18th October The SENG National Conference will be held in Melbourne on Wednesday,18th October 2017. Registration is now open. Engineering Sustainable Cities will focus on engineers’ and other professionals’ contributions to developing resilience to climate impacts and other environmental challenges in major urban and regional cities. Our great Keynote speaker line up: Dr Karl Braganza -'State of the Climate' as a context for identifying and developing risk minimisation strategies and pathways Professor John Thwaites - Climate impacts on infrastructure, energy, water and Victorian Governments and community responses Mr Benjamin White - Energy future for Victoria. Vic Gov strategic direction on renewable energy, storage, efficiency and productivity. Ms Karen Cain - The Latrobe Valley Transitioning to a New Future. Professor Wasim Saman - The Transition to Zero Carbon Housing: Can we achieve it and are we on the right trajectory? The conference is structured around two main themes: Sustainable Infrastructure for a net zero GHG economy; and Resilience and community capacity building. Optional Day-2 Event - World Climate Simulation Workshop Thursday 19th October The Paris agreement finally establishes national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but are they sufficient to keep global temperatures below the critical 2 degrees C threshold? The World Climate role-play exercise enables participants to explore the dynamics of the climate and impacts of proposed policies using a model consistent with the best available peer-reviewed science. Read more. View the full program. Register nownow to secure your place! For further details, visit the Conference Website If you can't view this email click here to view online Click here to unsubscribe from this newsletter S

Barnaby Joyce may well want to paint racing stripes down the side of the Liddell coal generator, and hang dice from its smoke stacks, but the answer to Turnbull’s energy dilemma is exactly what he doesn’t want it to be: more wind and solar.

FRV reaches financial close on 100MW Lilyvale solar farm in central Queensland.

Survey of 11 European countries reveals huge government subsidies to the transport sector and for fuels such as gas

Governments of 11 European nations are providing subsidies totalling more than £80bn a year to fossil fuel industries, green campaigners have claimed.

Transport fuels account for the lion’s share of the support to fossil fuels. Many of the 11 countries surveyed encourage drivers to use diesel as it produces less carbon per mile than petrol, despite the fuel’s effects on air pollution which is particularly harmful to children. For many years, governments had incentives to prioritise the use of diesel, as it helped them meet internationally-set carbon reduction targets.

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A Chinese team corrected the potentially fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia.

Clissold Park, London Folded in on itself, the grey heron is still, only slightly moving its head to watch the water for an eel or frog

Old Spear-Face crouches in the rushes. The great grey heron has folded itself, all beak and eye, wing and leg, invisibly for such a large bird, into the watery edge of bulrushes in a park busy with people. Perhaps the people pretend not to notice the heron so the heron believes it really is invisible; they may steal a glance at each other from different realities in the same place but their gazes never meet.

Old Spear-Face is still, only slightly moving its head to watch the water for an eel or frog, while the surface reflects the finest autumn afternoon, high clouds and rumours of change in the trees. The bird’s eye, with its golden ring, has a determined look, like that of self-conscious cyclists, sellers of socialist papers, wedding photographers, proprietors of food stalls. Its wings cloak its body in plumy tassels of grey, and the scaly stick of its one leg (or so it seems) is jammed into the mud of the New river.

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"Software meets hardware" partnership aims to tap booming behind-the-meter energy market – a key part of future NEM.

The new data is a welcome sign of progress in the battle against global warming but many challenges remain, including methane from cattle

Global emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide remained static in 2016, a welcome sign that the world is making at least some progress in the battle against global warming by halting the long-term rising trend.

All of the world’s biggest emitting nations, except India, saw falling or static carbon emissions due to less coal burning and increasing renewable energy, according to data published on Thursday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (NEAA). However other mainly developing nations, including Indonesia, still have rising rates of CO2 emissions.

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ARENA tips another $4.8m into RayGen Resources, to boost manufacture and commercialisation of home-grown PV Ultra solar tower power technology.

It’s a year to the day since the entire state of South Australia was plunged into darkness. And what a year it’s been, for energy policy geeks and political tragics alike.

Parked at the western end of the eastern states’ electricity grid, South Australia has long been an outlier, in energy policy as well as geography. Over the past decade it has had a tempestuous relationship with the federal government, be it Labor or Coalition. As with water policy, the South Australians often suspect they are being left high and dry by their upstream neighbours.

Read more: South Australia’s energy plan gives national regulators another headache

The policy chaos over the carbon price left the Renewable Energy Target as a far more prominent investment signal than it would otherwise have been. South Australia carried on attracting wind farms, which earned more than their fair share of the blame for high electricity prices.

On September 28, 2016, a “once-in-50-year storm” blew over a string of electricity pylons, tripping the whole state’s power grid. While the blackout, which lasted 5 hours in Adelaide and longer elsewhere, was still unfolding, critics of renewables took a leap into the dark as part of a wider blame game.

Despite being described as a “confected conflict”, the skirmish was serious enough to prompt the federal government to commission Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s landmark review of the entire National Electricity Market, with a deadline of mid-2017.

Meanwhile, in early December, federal environment minister Josh Frydenberg was forced to backtrack after saying the Coalition was prepared to consider an emissions intensity scheme. SA Premier Jay Weatherill was unamused by the flip-flop and threatened to get together with other states to go it alone on carbon pricing.

February saw a series of “load shedding” events during a heatwave, which left some Adelaide homes once more without power and saw the grid wobble in NSW too. (It should be noted that the now infamous Liddell power station was unable to increase its output during the incident.)

Policy by tweet

It was then that Twitter entered the fray. The “accidental billionaire” Mike Cannon-Brookes was asking Solar City chief executive Lyndon Rive how quickly a battery storage system might be up and running. Rive’s cousin, a certain Elon Musk, intervened with his famous offer:

Within days, both Weatherill and Turnbull had had conversations with Musk, and Turnbull announced a “Snowy Hydro 2.0” storage proposal.

Meanwhile, Weatherill unveiled his SA Energy Plan, which the Guardian called a “survivalist fix of last resort”. We now know that the plan cost A$1 million to produce.

Then, on March 16, at the launch of a 5-megawatt “virtual power plant” in Adelaide, Weatherill had some choice words for Frydenberg who, entertainingly enough, was standing right next to him:

I’ve got to say, it is a little galling to be standing here, next to a man that’s been standing up with his prime minister, bagging South Australia at every step of the way over the last six months… And for you to then turn around, in a few short months, when there’s a blackout, and point the finger at SA for the fact that our leadership in renewable energy was the cause of that problem is an absolute disgrace.“

Frydenberg kept a notably low profile for a while after this.

Finkel fires up

In June, Finkel released his keenly awaited review. A significant number of Liberals and Nationals didn’t like his suggested Clean Energy Target, and immediately set about trying to insert coal into it.

Despite being conceived as an acceptable compromise, the Clean Energy Target was bashed from both sides. It was criticised as too weak to reach Australia’s emissions target and little more than "business as usual”, but was also “unconscionable” to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Weatherill’s next major stand-alongside was an even bigger deal than the Frydenberg stoush. On July 7, he and Musk announced that part of his earlier energy SA plan would become reality: a 129-megawatt-hour lithium-ion battery farm, to be built alongside a wind farm in Jamestown.

Speaking at a book launch, Weatherill used the f-word to describe specific media opponents of renewables, earning himself opprobrium in the pages of The Australian, and admiration in more progressive areas of social media.

Federal treasurer Scott Morrison returned fire, deriding the battery farm as “a Big Banana”.

However, there was another big announcement in Weatherill’s locker: a A$650-million concentrated solar thermal power plant to be built near Port Augusta, with potential for more.

Quietly, the “energy security target” component of the SA plan, which had been rubbished, was deferred, while a renewables-based “minigrid” on the Yorke peninsula was announced.

Whatever next?

What will happen now? “Events, dear boy, events,” as Harold MacMillan didn’t say. Musk is back in Adelaide to talk about his Mars mission, with an appearance scheduled for Jamestown. Would anyone bet against another SA government announcement? More batteries? Electric cars? Space planes…?

The Jamestown battery should come online in December (or it’s free!). Weatherill will presumably be hoping that Turnbull’s government staggers on, bleeding credibility and beefing up the anti-Liberal protest vote until the March 2018 state election, and that they continue to make themselves look a like a rabble over Finkel’s Clean Energy Target.

At the same time, he will also fervently hope there isn’t another big power crisis, and that the A$2.6 million of public money he spent making sure everyone knows about his energy plans provides effective insulation from any shocks.

Read more: Explainer: what can Tesla’s giant South Australian battery achieve?

The whole saga shows how policy windows can open up in unexpected ways. An attempt to blast a new technology fails, and a politician at state level sees no option but to act because of federal inadequacy. It’s happening in California too.

Judging by his interviews with me and the Guardian’s Katharine Murphy, Weatherill has found his signature issue – making lemonade from the huge lemon he was served last September. As another commentator wrote:

Far from being the last nail in the Weatherill government’s electoral coffin, the power crisis has perversely breathed new life into Labor’s re-election hopes… It is turning its own failures on energy security into a single-issue platform on which to campaign.

Weatherill is trying to build an innovation ecosystem for clean energy technology. Announcing a tender last month, Weatherill said his government is “looking for the next generation of renewable technologies and demand-management technologies to maintain our global leadership”.

And when do applications for that tender close? Well, it may be a coincidence, but the deadline is 5pm today – exactly a year since his state’s darkest hour.

Even countries with long-standing nuclear aims are adding wind power much faster, as Brazil, China, and India show. Those interested in the fastest way to mitigate climate change can forget nuclear.

In the ongoing furore over energy and climate policy, the energy productivity opportunity is being ignored as a solution despite its potential for energy cost reductions.

Network of car charging stations is being developed in South Australia to allow Tesla drivers to visit world’s biggest lithium-ion battery being built by Elon Musk in state’s north.

Conservationists push the UK to make its remote South Sandwich Islands a protected sanctuary.