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As the vaquita – the world’s smallest porpoise – plunges toward extinction, scientists have a tough decision ahead of them: to attempt a super risky captive breeding programme or not?

Today, there are approximately 7.3 billion people on the planet – and only 60 vaquitas. The vaquita has seen its population drop by 92 percent in less than 20 years in Mexico’s Gulf of California as the tiny porpoises suffocate to death one-by-one in gillnets. Now, scientists with the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita (CIRVA) are cautiously moving forward on a once unthinkable option: captive breeding.

“We have no idea whether it is feasible to find, capture and maintain vaquitas in captivity much less whether they will reproduce,” said Barbara Taylor, one of the world’s foremost experts on the vaquita with NOAA. “The uncertainties are large.”

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Nathan McLaren, an electrician, captured the moment a 3.3m long shark breached out of the water behind a surfer on the east coast of Australia

A once-in-a-lifetime photograph has caught the moment a great white shark breached its entire body out of the water behind an oblivious surfer.

The photograph was taken by Nathan McLaren on Tuesday as he watched surfers off Swansea Heads, just south of Newcastle in New South Wales.

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Italy's tomatoes and Thailand's potent chillies, although closely associated with these nations, have their historical roots elsewhere, a study reveals.

Heavy rain hits the capital on Tuesday, leaving cars submerged in flood waters in Wallington, south London. Three people became trapped in their cars. One was rescued by the London Fire Brigade and the two others managed to escape from their vehicles before the firefighters arrived. Almost a month’s rainfall fell in one hour

• Lightning strike injures man and two children as torrential rains hit UK
  

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Image met with accusations of fearmongering, but after two fatal shark attacks in five days, Brett McCarthy says risk of mauling is ‘now clearly a public safety issue’

The editor of the West Australian newspaper has defended the paper’s controversial front page, which featured a photoshopped image of children being chased out of the surf by a shark under the headline “Will it take this?”

It followed calls from the paper for the Barnett government to restart its controversial shark cull policy after two fatal shark attacks in five days.

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Imagine a unique set of scales that measures the value of life. If a single human were on one side, how many chimpanzees (our closest genetic relatives) would need to be on the other side before the scales tipped in their direction?

This may seem like an abstract, irrelevant or even offensive question to some people. But it was made horrifically real by the death last week of Harambe, the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla who was shot after a young boy fell into his enclosure.

Zoo handlers were faced with the agonising decision to take Harambe’s life to ensure the young boy would not lose his. The response to this event online has varied from anger, to sadness, through to considerations of how much choice the zoo’s staff really had. How do we decide what our own lives are worth compared with other species?

Perhaps we can try to frame the comparison in relative terms. There are 7.4 billion human beings on the planet, whereas Western lowland gorillas are critically endangered. Does a human life hold more value than that of a member of a critically endangered animal species?

Harambe’s death suggests that the instinctive answer is yes, but is there a point at which some people’s moral scales might tip the other way? Our research suggests there might be.

The concept of ‘moral expansion’

No one expects an easy answer to this question. But the fact that we can even ask it shows that our moral sensibilities have expanded beyond the boundaries of our own species.

Many of us feel a deep moral responsibility not just to protect our fellow humans, but to guard the moral rights of entities the world over. This change, which has spanned the past few centuries, has resulted in some serious ethical challenges to the ways we interact with other species and the environment.

Recently, animal rights organisations in the United States have fought for the legal personhood status of chimpanzees like Tommy, while animal advocates have petitioned the United Nations for a Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes since 1993.

In the meantime, a river in New Zealand has been officially granted legal personhood status (similar to the status given to corporations), making the river a legal “person” with its own rights and interests under law.

In line with the concept of compassionate conservation, these examples highlight the narrowing of the gulf between the moral rights of humans, non-humans and the environment.

For supporters of these causes, human rights and corresponding moral standing should no longer be restricted to humans.

Are you willing to sacrifice?

The legal semantics are interesting, but what about when it really comes to the crunch? Our recent research has examined how widely people spread their moral concern to others. We found that this is a key predictor of the type of moral decision-making that compares the value of a human life to that of another animal.

We asked people the following question: how many other human beings would need to be in danger before you sacrificed your own life to ensure their survival? But our research didn’t stop at humans.

We also asked how many chimpanzees would need to be at risk. How many ants? How many redwood trees?

Responses to these questions were as varied as the responses to the shooting of Harambe.

Some people said they would sacrifice their life if it meant that just a few chimpanzees would keep theirs. Others said it wouldn’t matter how many animals or trees were in danger; a human life was simply worth more.

We found that we could predict people’s responses to specific questions based on their position on what we call the “moral expansiveness scale” (you can find out your own score here). Those whose moral outlook stretched further beyond humans were more likely to say they would sacrifice themselves to benefit other animals or nature.

A moral dilemma

Human beings are becoming increasingly morally expansive. As a species we are adopting a moral standard that represents ethical and altruistic responsibilities on a global scale. This is reflected in the extension of human rights to chimpanzees and the granting of legal rights to elements of our natural environment.

However, this trend is accompanied by an escalating moral conflict. The extension of our moral boundaries is happening just as the global human population is growing exponentially, leading to tension and competition over scarce resources.

As a consequence, we are increasingly likely to face ethical dilemmas over the value of human versus non-human life. It won’t be in the form of a quick decision to kill an animal to save the life of a child. These dilemmas will play out in courtrooms and parliaments, as human needs are pitted against environmental ones, and as the battle for natural resources brings threats of deforestation and species extinction.

As we edge ever closer to the brink of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, perhaps we need to consider just exactly what a human life is worth.

Complete our survey to find out how morally expansive you are.

Brock Bastian receives funding from The Australian Research Council.

Daniel Crimston, Matthew Hornsey, and Paul Bain do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Constitutional expert George Williams says section 51 of the constitution could be used to to halt the coalmine on environmental grounds

Constitutional expert George Williams said the commonwealth could use an “export” power to stop the Shenhua Watermark mine from going ahead on environmental grounds.

The power, contained in section 51 of the constitution, could be used to regulate mining and production in Australia where the product was destined for export.

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Wenlock Edge The blackbird’s wings have the flutter of panic as he tries to navigate through the house to find an escape

The unmistakable fan-snap of feathers announces the arrival of a visitor. A dark blur up the stairs, a spike of electric current. There is a palpable disturbance to the order of things when there’s a bird in the house; perhaps that’s why it’s associated with ill omen. The blackbird hops through the back door following a trail of breakfast cereal.

We have become familiar to each other. We share the same space in the backyard where he forages, and we leave crumbs and titbits. It could be that he was born in the garden and has known us all his life, as did his parents. Now he has a nest and a brood of chicks to feed, we listen to him sing; we live in parallel and have retreated to our separate worlds, until now.

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Webs of tens of thousands of arachnids combine to form thick netting above trees in north-western Tasmania in ‘mass ballooning event’

Deluged homeowners in Tasmania’s north-west are not the only residents of the waterlogged area to seek higher ground.

Vast translucent covers have formed above trees in towns such as Westbury in the wake of storms and the state’s worst floods in 40 years.

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Much of the 'smart cities' rhetoric is dominated by the economic, with little reference to the natural world and its plight. Ase from www.shutterstock.com

Back in the 1960s, the influential urban planner and journalist Jane Jacobs put American cities under the microscope. Jacobs was aiming to explain, and suggest ways of remedying, the hollowing out, or “doughnut effect”, which left previously well-functioning city centres rundown and devoid of new blood.

The effect was less dramatic in Australian cities, which had few, if any, residential populations in their central business districts until comparatively recently. And many of the innermost suburbs that surrounded the CBDs were industrialised and yet to feel the decline of manufacturing.

Of course, today the situation is completely reversed across Western cities. The emergence of the service economy and explosive growth of professional classes are promoting gentrification and squillion-dollar property values.

Jacobs’ conditions for a vibrant city life were that districts must serve at least two functions to attract persons of different purposes around the clock. Further, blocks must be small, with many opportunities for pedestrians to interact and a diverse range of buildings. Finally, there needed to be reasonable density. The idea was that “vitality” had a lot to do with chance encounters.

Digital entanglement Digital interconnectivity is increasingly taken to be a measure of a city’s vitality. Ekaphon Maneechot from www.shutterstock.com

Jacobs’ encounters have now been supplemented if not entirely supplanted by social media. Enter some Italian researchers who hit upon the idea of mining “big data”. In this case, they used mobile phone calls cross-referenced to satellite-derived records such as Open Street Map to gauge where precisely this feverish activity was happening across six of Italy’s large cities. (In corroboration of Jacobs’ thesis, the best places were found to be “day end points” with concentrations of office workers at large, as well as small streets and blocks with historic buildings.)

There’s a sense that this “interconnectivity” is becoming a signal of city vitality/vibrancy. The two elements are becoming entangled like subatomic particles.

Moreover, it’s a natural fit with the vogue for blending IT with strategic planning. The new ministerial portfolio, cities and digital transformation, exemplifies this.

Smart city buzz

You don’t have to venture far into urban policy space before coming across the idea of the “smart city”. There’s a near-continuous run of conferences on the topic and even a Turnbull government plan. The plan features, among other measures, a blend of big-data thinking, with “better benchmarking of city performance”, and the prescriptions set out in Edward Glaeser’s 2013 book, Triumph of the City.

Glaeser views cities as places where human ingenuity can flourish and skills are developed and refined – a combination driving economic and technological advance. He believes increased densification, including a “vertical city” with yet higher stacks of buildings, is integral to achieving these objectives.

Glaeser, however, illustrates complexities in this debate. Jacobs opposed the view that high-rise cities create beneficial interactions. And concern is growing that increased reliance on digital communication will radically reduce urban human interaction.

Reckoning with a cantankerous planet High-rise cities face particular problems in a warming world. zhangyang13576997233 from www.shutterstock.com

Smart cities need to be “resilient” if they’re to counter, for example, Paul Gilding’s “great disruption”. This includes life-threatening heat, desiccation and killer peri-urban fires. High-rise cities may prove to be the least adaptable human constructions in an era of fundamental change and add considerably to the urban heat island effect

Should an economic perspective – like this, for instance – remain the main if not the sole focus for cities? This in a year when atmospheric carbon reached an irreversible 400ppm; the Great Barrier Reef’s coral is bleaching; wildfires have destroyed towns and cities in Canada; India has recorded its hottest day on record 51°C; Paris has been heavily flooded; and sea-level rise threatens to inundate Silicon Valley, the spiritual home of start-ups – not to mention our home-grown variety of storm surge, erosion and flooding.

Is there something we’re missing? In the rhetoric surrounding smart cities it’s difficult to unearth specific reference to the natural world and its current plight. And when there is, it’s often a few throwaway lines about the value of green space in protecting biological diversity and threatened species.

Contrast this with the growing awareness of the benefits to our psyche of exposure to the natural world (even acting as a boost to productivity in the workplace).

Set these observations against the revelation that today’s children – the inheritors of the smart city – are spending less time outdoors than prisoners. This has occurred in a generation for whom the environment is unlikely to be mainstream given that their reality is ultimately what appears on a screen. Digital connectivity in low-amenity vertical communities is likely to prove a poor substitute for the kind of city Jacobs advocated.

Reconnecting kids and others requires rejigging our perspective, as well as starting to look out for vestiges of wildlife that has sought refuge in our cities. And providing for local food production is as big as big data itself, but that’s something for another day.

Peter Fisher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

In a message for Australia, the actor and chatshow host says she’s a big fan of ‘your beautiful, great, wonderful Great Barrier Reef, which is home to my favourite fish, Dory’. The video is part of the Remember the Reef campaign that coincides with the release of her latest film, Finding Dory. DeGeneres provides the voice of Dory in the sequel to 2003’s critically acclaimed Finding Nemo. Disney will work with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and the Great Barrier Reef marine park authority to help raise awareness of the reef’s decline. For more information visit rememberthereef.com

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Oxford University study could shed light human brain function and whether facial recognition is an innate or learned ability

A tropical fish can tell one human face from another despite lacking a brain section that homo sapiens and other “smart” animals use for this task, scientists said Tuesday.

The astonishing ability was demonstrated in experiments with eight archerfish, a tropical species best known for spitting pressurised water jets to shoot prey out of the air.

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SEX-REVERSED LIZARDS: The latest research on an Australian lizard that reverses its sex when exposed to high incubation temperatures has scientists stumped.

Footage of Bryde's whales feeding has been caught on camera.

Coal has provided us with some stunning fossils. Bart Bernardes/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

As the world moves to combat climate change, it’s increasingly doubtful that coal will continue to be a viable energy source, because of its high greenhouse gas emissions. But coal played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution and continues to fuel some of the world’s largest economies. This series looks at coal’s past, present and uncertain future, starting today with how it’s formed.

Love it or hate it, coal played a crucial role in launching us into the modern world by fuelling the Industrial Revolution. The byproducts of that role were, of course, the rise of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and dangerous levels of air pollution in the big coal-fuelled cities.

But despite its insidious influence on the climate and our health, coal has a lesser-known positive side to its otherwise dark soul. It has provided us with some stunning fossils.

Geologists have known for centuries that coal is an accumulation of plant material that, once buried in the Earth’s sedimentary layers, gets compressed by gravity into a denser, compact form. Yet, in recent years, scientists have hotly debated the early phases of coal formation.

The discussion hinges on whether coal formed due to the absence of certain organisms that actively break down the woody tissues of dead trees, or whether other non-biological factors were the reason.

Contested origins

Coal starts its cycle of formation with the accumulation of plant material in swamps or bogs. Decaying plant matter that builds up at the bottom of bogs or swamps is called peat. After other sedimentary layers bury the peat deposit, the weight of these sediments builds up and compacts it.

Other chemical and physical processes also alter the peat, including pressures exerted by tectonic forces as continents move and crash into one another. These processes eventually turn the layers of compacted peat into rock we can mine.

Pure black coal, richer in organic carbon and tempered by heat and pressure, is called anthracite. Brown coal, or lignite, is mostly just compressed peat and has more sediment mixed in with plant matter.

Coal has formed as very large deposits at certain times in Earth’s prehistory. So much so that Reverend William Conybeare, the esteemed British geologist of the early 19th century, first named the Carboniferous or “carbon-bearing” period (359 million to 299 million years ago) after the distinctive coal deposits of Britain in his book of 1822.

These great coal swamps formed in what were the Earth’s first great forests. They were home to many varieties of giant amphibians and early reptiles and huge insects, as global oxygen levels were very high at this time.

Scientific treasures from coal: the Iguanodon dinosaur display in Brussels Museum of Natural Sciences. Brussels Museum of Natural Sciences website

For many years, scientists believed that coal formed in such large deposits at these times because certain fungi that helped break down the lignin, or woody tissues, had not yet evolved. The molecular clock estimates for the appearance of these fungi, called Agariomycetes, suggest they should appear in the Permian period (299 million to 252 million years ago), after the formation of the vast Carboniferous coal deposits.

A new theory

But this doesn’t account for the huge amounts of coal that formed in much later geological periods, such as the Cenozoic, over the past 65 million years. And a new study, led by Matthew Nelsen of Stanford University, takes issue with this model, as well as presenting a new hypothesis for coal formation.

The study authors argue that coal formed in the Carboniferous period consists dominantly of plants such as horsetails, or Lycophytes. These trees grew to enormous sizes and their periderm, or outer cuticles of the trunk, lack lignin, so wouldn’t be affected by the absence of lignin-degrading fungi. Their argument points to the biochemical composition of the plants having little to do with how coal accumulates.

The distribution of coal deposits through time is seen in the chart below of the estimated total volume of coal in North America. Large deposits of coal also accumulated during the age of dinosaurs (Mesozoic Era, from 252 million to 66 million years ago) and during the first half of the Cenozoic period (between 66 million and 30 million years ago), well after the predicted first appearance of lignin-degrading fungi.

Terrestrial coal accumulation in North America, through time. Note the large peaks during the Carboniferous ‘C’ and early Cenozoic ‘Pg’. Taken from the paper by Nelsen et al. (2016). Prof. Kevin Boyce, with permission.

The paper argues that tectonic factors are the most likely reason such big coal deposits built up at certain times. Large basins fill up with thick sedimentary piles when continents collide and mountain-building occurs. Some really excellent fossils have been found in such coal deposits, although the acidity of coal often dissolves bones.

The best-preserved fossils are those caught in the cleaner sediments laid down by streams between coal seams. Such fossils are routinely uncovered as part of coal mining. Several of the large fossil amphibians that lived in the Carboniferous swamps have been found this way.

A famous site at Nyrany in the Czech Republic was discovered because the director of the natural history museum there had coal delivered to heat his room. Splitting the coal sometimes yielded well-preserved fossils of early amphibians, so he could add scientifically significant specimens to his collections without leaving his office.

Perhaps the most famous fossils found in a coal mine were uncovered at Bernissart in Belgium. Many skeletons, representing 33 individuals of the large plant-eating dinosaur Iguanodon, were found there in 1878. These skeletons were among the first complete dinosaurs ever found.

Although coal is much maligned because of its byproducts from combustion, the factors responsible for coal accumulation also give us fossil treasures from the past. To stop coal mining would undoubtedly mean many good fossils remain in the ground. But the long-term health of our planet is a bigger priority.

This is the first article in our series on the past, present and future of coal. Look out for others in the coming days.

John will be online for an Author Q&A between 2:30 and 3:30pm AEST today (Wednesday 8 June, 2016). Post any questions you have in the comments below.

John Long receives funding from The Australian Research Council

Christopher Abbott says orderly evacuation seen during Japan’s Fukushima incident would not work as well in western societies

Western societies would not respond well to a Fukushima-style nuclear disaster due to a lack of public information, a leading disaster expert has warned.

Christopher Abbott said he firmly believed that the public ought to be better educated over the hazards and risks they may face.

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Janet Russell asks the right question (Letters, May 30). What has happened to the report on shale gas by the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC)? When Professor Cowern and I gave evidence in February, we were assured that the report would be published no later than May. We have also been told unofficially that the CCC has accepted our data on fugitive emissions of methane and that shale gas is two times worse than coal from a climate change perspective. We also submitted a further paper towards the end of March, indicating that over half of the rise in atmospheric levels of methane seen globally since 2007 is due to oil and gas, notably shale extraction in the US, and that this is obscuring the rise in methane emissions from the Arctic. I suppose it would be highly embarrassing for the government if its “dash for gas” was found to be incompatible with our climate change commitments, agreed by the UN but implemented via EU legislation. Embarrassing unless the government accepted the scientific case and announced it was going to abandon fracking and invest in renewables.
Dr Robin Russell-Jones
Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

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Longer days helped solar panels generate 50% more electricity than coal across the whole of May, analysis shows

Solar power in the UK produced more electricity than coal across the whole of May, the first ever month to pass the milestone, according to research by analysts at Carbon Brief. Solar panels generated 50% more electricity than the fossil fuel across the month, as days lengthened and coal use fell. Solar generated an estimated 1,336 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in May, compared to 893GWh output from coal.

Coal was once the mainstay of the nation’s power system but the rapid rise of solar panels and of climate change concerns has seen its use plummet, leading to a series of milestones in recent weeks.

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Up to 85% of the corals in the Chagos Marine Reserve of the British Indian Ocean Territory are estimated to have been damaged or killed in the current global bleaching event.

My lifelong friend and colleague Mike Croxford, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer of recycling in his native Wales. The Welsh government’s current recycling performance – at 60% it is fourth in Europe – owes much to Mike, who was a founder member of the Zero Waste movement worldwide and of the Zero Waste International Trust.

His interest in recycling began in 1980, while running the Augusta Street youth project in Cardiff. The young people started collecting newspapers to improve their standing among local people and to fundraise to run events for the community. The project turned into the Community Support Anti-Waste Scheme (CSAWS) that in 1986 initiated the first citywide collection scheme in the UK.

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