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Sandy, Bedfordshire: At the tree’s base, an autopsy of its last seconds was written in splits, snaps, rips and a broken heart

When the last storm whipped through our valley it brought down the tallest tree on the river. An old Lombardy poplar, a spire without a church, it belonged to an age when planting poplars was popular. They were the leylandii of their day, for they shot up as fast as rockets and looked like them too. They were often grown in rows as windbreaks, though nobody much thought about old age and the wind’s revenge.

For a day or so after, my eyes clawed at the air, looking for the absent shape of a tower that had been a crow’s nest for a magpie, a labyrinth for tits, a cricked neck. I saw only a wooded ridge, some houses, and sky – so much sky that it snuffed out the memory. For a day or so only, passersby stopped to inspect the toppled giant, as they might view the corpse of a beached whale.

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Tesla big battery has been been an active bidder in wholesale markets, including being a price-setter for bids at the market cap.

Craig Kelly has proved a loose cannon on the subject of EV emissions, but the government is not helping by providing misleading information to consumers.

Thousands of water stations are being installed to tackle plastic use - with users able to find them via an app.

While 2017 was a record year for solar PV in Australia, it will be completely put in the shade by what we’re likely to install in 2018.

Top brass at the world’s largest asset manager says the rules governing investments are evolving to factor in environmental risks

AusNet Services announces today that agreement has been secured with Pacific Hydro to develop a new transmission connection for the 80 MW Crowlands Wind Farm project in the Pyrenees Shire Council in western Victoria, near Avoca.

LONGi Solar announced that the independent third-party certification test organization, the company's 60-cell PERC module achieved a photoelectric conversion efficiency of 20.41%, a new world record.

Tesla among 19 groups bidding for contract to build a big battery in Darwin that will reduce the need for back-up gas generators, and smooth the way for more solar PV in the Northern Territory.

People in high-risk tsunami areas could be helped by an alarm system devised by Cardiff scientists.

UK survey finds 532 types – far more than older textbooks suggest should be out

It’s been said that spring is coloured by flowers, while the colour of winter is only in the imagination.

Not so for intrepid botanists who discovered 532 species of wildflowers in bloom across Britain and Ireland around New Year’s Day.

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Two monkeys named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua have become the first primates to be cloned.

Scientists work out how prey can escape much faster predators when hunting in the African savannah.

A new-build programme would create an intolerable burden on communities into the far future, writes Andrew Blowers; while Rose Heaney wonders why our abundant renewable energy sources are being overlooked

In 1976, Lord Flowers pronounced that there should be no further commitment to nuclear energy unless it could be demonstrated that long-lived highly radioactive wastes could be safely contained for the indefinite future. Ever since, efforts to find a suitable site for a geological disposal facility have been rejected by communities (Wanted: community willing to host a highly radioactive waste dump in their district, 22 January).

There is, therefore, little evidence to support the government’s claim that “it is satisfied that effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations”. Deep disposal may be the eventual long-term solution but demonstrating a safety case, finding suitable geology and a willing community are tough challenges and likely to take a long time. The search for a disposal site diverts attention from the real solution for the foreseeable future, which is to ensure the safe and secure management of the unavoidable legacy wastes that have to be managed. It is perverse to compound the problem by a new-build programme that will result in vastly increased radioactivity from spent fuel and other highly radioactive wastes which will have to be stored indefinitely at vulnerable sites scattered around our coasts.

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Shark conservationists see donations rise after claims the US president hates the animals.

US firm SpaceX conducts a key test ahead of the debut flight of its new rocket - the Falcon Heavy.

Two monkeys cloned using the 'Dolly the sheep' technique could bring the world a step closer to human cloning.

US start-up Rocket Lab says its recent launch put a reflective sphere in orbit.

As sceptics fretted over price, range and lack of charging stations, Australia was overtaken by the rest of the world. Now policymakers are being urged to jumpstart the industry

In Elizabeth in South Australia, they stood in a huge line, only three months ago, and spelled out HOLDEN for the helicopters. Thirteen weeks later, after the plant closed and the last car rolled away, the talk began of rejuvenation, a new owner and the promise of the electric.

The proposal, from the British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, to refit the old Holden plant to make electric cars is still just a suggestion, but it has captured the imagination of a country suddenly keen to talk. On Monday, the idea was backed to the hilt by the premier, Jay Weatherill, and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union. On Tuesday, the federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said the electric car would do to Australia “what the iPhone did to the communications sector”.

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Clean-up has collected more than 12,000 tonnes of plastic since 2015

A beach in Mumbai is looking much cleaner thanks to the efforts of local people to remove a tide of plastic waste that appears on the shore.

A regular group of people, including children, use equipment donated by Bollywood stars to scour a 3km stretch of Versova beach every weekend, and have collected more than 12,000 tonnes of plastic since 2015.

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