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Rowan Williams calls on Cambridge University to divest from fossil fuels
Former archbishop of Canterbury says the university should withdraw its £5.8bn fund from from oil, coal and gas on ethical and financial grounds
Rowan Williams has called on the University of Cambridge to divest from fossil fuels, arguing that climate change is “a life-and-death question”.
The former archbishop of Canterbury and master of Magdalene college made his comments in a foreword to a 74-page report on divestment by student campaign group Cambridge Zero Carbon Society.
Continue reading...Secret of how peacocks hypnotise the ladies revealed
Invitation to comment on listing assessment for Fregata andrewsi (Christmas Island frigatebird)
Teeth marks evidence that early humans were eaten by animals
Could carbon farming be the answer for a 'clapped-out' Australia?
Farmers signing up for the carbon emissions reduction fund have to meet strict guidelines but there is significant profit and energy savings to be made
This week the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) will hold the third emissions reduction fund auction and farmers across Australia will move to the forefront of efforts to rescue a “clapped-out” country.
Australian farmers have long bought and sold their wares at auction. Sale yards were the hub of country towns and the din of a moleskin-clad auctioneer shouting over the bleating and mooing of fattened livestock has long been a familiar rural backdrop.
Continue reading...Montserrat's last two mountain chicken frogs to be reunited to save species
Conservationists pin hopes of the species’ survival on breeding the Caribbean island’s last known male and female in the wild
In what could be a fairytale ending, conservationists are hoping to reunite the last two remaining wild mountain chicken frogs living on Montserrat and help their species breed on the Caribbean island for the first time since 2009.
A project led by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust will next month take the last remaining female and “translocate” her into the territory of the last remaining male as part of a 20-year recovery plan for the species, one of the world’s largest and rarest frogs that exists on just two Caribbean islands, Montserrat and Dominica.
Continue reading...It's getting steamy in the hedgerow
Wenlock Edge Hawthorns push their little cheesy shuttlecocks, oaks are in their bronze
Cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, Jack-in-the-pulpit – these names are medieval nudges and winks about genitalia and sex. They belong to wild arum, a trick flower that jumps out of the earth with a bawdy country humour that mocks the righteous and revels instead in the rude phwoar! of April. The cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, and maybe we’ll pay for these few glorious sunny days, but we’ll make the most of them until then.
It’s getting steamy in the hedgerow. For months, trees stood in companionable silence throughout a blowy winter that leaked into a dour early spring; now they fizz with a green static as buds pop and a million leaves inflate. Hawthorns push their little cheesy shuttlecocks, oaks are in their bronze; blackthorn has been snowing for weeks, and the purple dangles of ash are out. Small birds, skirmishing through disputed branches, travel in song between trees in the neutral air.
Continue reading...Single cell slime mould can 'learn'
Monster black hole formed by trio of colliding galaxies stuns scientists
'It was anarchy': a family reflects on the Chernobyl disaster, 30 years on
Three generations explain how their lives were transformed by the nuclear explosion in 1986
It was just a regular day for Anastasia Fedosenko. It was spring, a busy time for local farmers. Nobody told her about the explosion at first.
“It was only on the third day that they said something had happened at the Chernobyl plant, but nobody knew what exactly. They evacuated pregnant women and mothers with children under five, but the rest of us just continued our normal routine, feeding and milking cows,” the 73-year-old recalls.
Continue reading...Ikea starts selling solar panels in UK stores
Swedish firm is optimistic of sales despite recent cuts to solar incentives
Solar panels will join tea lights and spider plants on sale at Ikea stores from Monday, despite huge government cuts to solar subsidies for homeowners.
Shoppers will be able to order panels online and at three stores, initially Glasgow, Birmingham and Lakeside, before the so-called Solar Shops appear in all the Swedish company’s UK stores by summer’s end.
Continue reading...Solar Impulse 2 lands safely in San Francisco after historic flight over Pacific
Plane powered only by sun flies over Golden Gate Bridge after spending 56 hours coming from Hawaii on riskiest leg of its journey around the world
A solar-powered plane accomplished a 56-hour, record-setting flight over the Pacific Ocean, flying by San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and landing in Mountain View, California late Saturday night.
Related: Solar Impulse: round-the-world flight to continue after raising €20m
Continue reading...If consumers knew how farmed chickens were raised, they might never eat their meat again
The year 2012 marked a leap forward for animal welfare in the European Union. Farmers were no longer allowed to keep egg-laying hens in barren battery cages smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. Instead, the minimum requirement now is that hens are kept in a cage the size of an A4 sheet of paper, with an extra postcard-sized bit of shared space that allows them to scratch and nest. These are known as enriched cages.
Animal welfare campaigners would like to see them abolished too, saying they barely make a difference to the birds’ ability to express their natural behaviour and live free from stress. Around half of the eggs we eat are still produced in caged systems.
Continue reading...River on fire in Greens MP's video is natural, not fracking, says CSIRO
Jeremy Buckingham says scientists ‘making excuses’ for CSG industry after footage shows him touching off sheet of flame on the Condamine river
The CSIRO has defended its independence after a Greens MP, whose footage of burning methane on a Queensland river went viral, accused the government-funded research body of “making excuses” for the coal seam gas industry.
Jeremy Buckingham, a member of the New South Wales parliament’s upper house, posted the video, which showed him lighting the surface of the Condamine river with a barbecue lighter and sending flames licking around the boat, on his Facebook page on Friday. By Sunday it had been shared 13,000 times and had 2.2m views.
Continue reading...SENG seminar - Transition to Low Carbon Economy, May 2016
US moves to sell gene-edited mushrooms fuel doubts over British ban on GM imports
American regulators have allowed the cultivation and sale of two crops modified with the gene-editing technique known as Crispr. The crops – a white button mushroom and a form of corn – are the first Crispr plants to be permitted for commercial use in the US.
The move is a boost for new technology in the creation of foodstuffs, but is expected to worsen the considerable confusion in Britain over the use of gene-editing in agriculture and the importing of crops created using such technology.
Continue reading...Why it makes sense to burn ivory stockpiles
On 30 April Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta will set fire to 105 tonnes of ivory in Nairobi National Park. Here are four reasons why it’s the right thing to do
By burning almost its entire ivory stockpile, Kenya is sending out the message that it will never benefit from illegal ivory captured from poachers or seized in transit. However, as the day of the burn approaches, commentators and experts have been lining up to condemn it. Some of the objections put forward are based on wrong assumptions; some deserve serious consideration.
Here I summarise four of the most frequent arguments being made against the burn and explain why, in my view, they are wrong.
Continue reading...Tracking to 2020 - April 2016 update
Huge coral reef discovered at Amazon river mouth
Scientists astonished to find 600-mile long reef under the muddy water in a site already marked for oil exploration
A huge 3,600 sq mile (9,300 sq km) coral reef system has been found below the muddy waters off the mouth of the river Amazon, astonishing scientists, governments and oil companies who have started to explore on top of it.
The existence of the 600-mile long reef, which ranges from about 30-120m deep and stretches from French Guiana to Brazil’s Maranhão state, was not suspected because many of the world’s great rivers produce major gaps in reef systems where no corals grow.
Continue reading...Zero-waste bloggers: the millennials who can fit a year's worth of trash in a jar
These bloggers treasure taking a sleek, modern approach to reducing waste in their efforts to save the planet – but they face their fair share of criticism, too
In pictures: how to produce nearly zero waste
Kathryn Kellogg, a 25-year-old print shop employee, spends four hours a day on her lifestyle blog Going Zero Waste. She posts on Instagram, engages with Facebook followers, and writes about homemade eyeliner and lip balm, worm composting, and shopping bulk bins – anything to avoid unnecessary waste. Her trash for the past year – anything that hasn’t been composted or recycled – fits in an 8oz jar.
Kellogg is earnest, enthusiastic, and admittedly still figuring out what it means to be zero waste. The aspiring actor has also weathered her fair share of criticism. “I’m not even that big yet and I get so much hate mail,” says Kellogg, who draws 10,000 unique page views a month and has 800 subscribers.
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