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Damien Hirst's butterflies: distressing but weirdly uplifting
Butterflies made Damien Hirst's career and this is how he repays them: in a stark, white, windowless room in Tate Modern, hundreds of insects pull themselves from their pupae only to die there a few days later, surrounded by gawping tourists.
For some visitors to Hirst's blockbuster retrospective, it is not the rotting cow's head surrounded by flies, the sheep in formaldehyde or the giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts that makes them feel queasy. It is the installation in Room 5, where tropical butterflies futilely flit around the boxy space, eventually falling to die on the floor, where they are promptly scooped up by security staff.
Continue reading...F1 fuel-saving flywheel to be fitted to London's buses
A fuel-saving flywheel first developed for use in Formula One racing cars, but abandoned before it could be used due to a regulation change by the sport's administrators, will soon be retrofitted to a handful of London buses.
Six prototype buses owned by Go-Ahead, one of the UK's largest buses operators, are currently being fitted with the flywheels for a trial beginning later this year in and around Putney, south-west London.
Continue reading...How wildlife is thriving in the Korean peninsula's demilitarised zone
• In pictures: wildlife in the DMZ
• The world's most dangerous nature reserve
A thin green ribbon threads its way across the Korean Peninsula. Viewed from space, via composite satellite images, the winding swath clearly demarcates the political boundary between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Its visual impact is especially strong in the west, where it separates the gray, concrete sprawl of Seoul from the brown, deforested wastes south of Kaesong. In the east, it merges with the greener landscapes of the Taebaek Mountain Range and all but disappears.
From the ground, the narrow verdant band manifests as an impenetrable barrier of overgrown vegetation enclosed by layers of fences topped by menacing concertina wire and dotted with observation posts manned by heavily armed soldiers. That a place so steeped in violence still teems with life seems unimaginable. And yet, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is home to thousands of species that are extinct or endangered elsewhere on the peninsula. It is the last haven for many of these plants and animals and the centre of attention for those intent on preserving Korea's rich ecological heritage.
Continue reading...Iceland's volcanoes may power UK
The volcanoes of Iceland could soon be pumping low-carbon electricity into the UK under government-backed plans for thousands of miles of high-voltage cables across the ocean floor.
The energy minister, Charles Hendry, is to visit Iceland in May to discuss connecting the UK to its abundant geothermal energy. "We are in active discussions with the Icelandic government and they are very keen," Hendry told the Guardian. To reach Iceland, which sits over a mid-ocean split in the earth's crust, the cable would have to be 1,000 to 1,500km long and by far the longest in the world.
Continue reading...Is the EU taking its over-fishing habits to west African waters?
Mauritania's waters are crowded. Twenty-five miles out to sea and in great danger from turbulent seas are small, open pirogues crewed by handfuls of local fishermen, taking pitifully few fish. Also here within 50 miles of us are at least 20 of the biggest EU fishing vessels, along with Chinese, Russian and Icelandic trawlers and unidentifiable pirate ships.
Continue reading...SSEE April technical session Toxins in the Environment
World water day – in pictures
Appetite for shark fin soup 'causing decline of blue sharks in UK waters'
The demand for shark fin soup in Asia is probably the major cause of the alarming decline of blue sharks off the British coast and much of the Atlantic, the authors of a new study claim this week.
Scientists from the UK and Portugal have tracked the ocean predators to busy fishing grounds, where they believe they are being deliberately targeted by fishermen with "walls of death" from long-line fishing that can stretch as long as 100km.
Continue reading...How do we know how warm or cold it was in the past?
• See all questions and answers
• Read about the project
Scientists today measure the Earth's surface temperature using thermometers at weather stations and on ships and buoys all over the world. Such thermometer records cover a large fraction of the globe going back to the mid-19th century, allowing scientists to determine a global average temperature trend for the last 160 years.
Before that time not many thermometer records are available, so scientists use indirect temperature measurements, supported by anecdotal evidence recorded by diarists, and the few thermometer records that do exist. Scientists must rely solely on indirect methods to look back further than recorded human history.
Continue reading...Too many deer for too few people – a self-defeating study of the Highlands | George Monbiot
I've read too many daft reports in the course of this job, but I don't remember any as self-defeating as this. This morning the Scottish Gamekeepers' Association launches its study on the economic importance of red deer to Scotland's rural economy. It succeeds in demonstrating the opposite of what it sets out to prove.
The association represents people working for the big estates of Scotland, which are visited at certain months of the year by a small number of exceedingly rich people, who come to shoot stags or grouse.
Continue reading...SSEE - Technical Session Peak Resources
Does building turbines use more energy than they produce?
Critics of wind energy often claim that the energy used to construct a wind turbine outweighs the energy produced during its lifetime in operation. This is not correct. An evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy in 2010, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years, concluded that the average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines. It also found that the average "energy payback" of a turbine was 3-6 months.
A life-cycle analysis published in 2011 by Vestas, a Danish turbines manufacturer, of a 100MW onshore windfarm consisting of 33 3MW turbines concluded, unsurprisingly, that the siting of the turbines is crucial in maximising the energy return ratio. "Doubling the distance to the grid from 50 km to 100 km typically increases [negative]
Continue reading...Fishing skippers and factory fined nearly £1m for illegal catches
An inquiry into the UK's largest fishing scandal has uncovered "serious and organised" criminality by Scottish trawlermen and fish processors in an elaborate scam to illegally sell nearly £63m of undeclared fish.
Three large fish factories and 27 skippers have pleaded guilty to sophisticated and lucrative schemes to breach EU fishing quotas, in what one senior police officer described as "industrial level" deception.
Continue reading...Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science
• Heartland claims fraud after leak of climate documents
The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.
DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an "insider" at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.
Continue reading...The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
• Live Q&A: What does the Himalaya glacier study mean for climate change?
• In pictures: the best images of the Earth from space
The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
Continue reading...Penn State defies Facebook campaign calling for it to drop climate lecture | Leo Hickman
In an uncharacteristically angry post at the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin has hit out at a "shameful attack on free speech". It relates to a Facebook campaign which is calling on Pennsylvania State University to "disinvite" Professor Michael E. Mann, the director of its Earth System Science Center, from giving a lecture next week entitled: "Confronting the Climate Change Challenge."
The Facebook campaign has been initiated by a seemingly conjoined group called the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee. Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress has investigated the people behind it and describes it as a "coal-industry astroturf group". Here's a video from the Common Sense Movement's "I Am Coal" campaign, which gives an insight into its worldview...
Continue reading...Glacier thief arrested in Chile
• In pictures: The world's melting glaciers
Climate change sceptics have acquired a new explanation for why glaciers are retreating: it's not global warming, it's theft.
Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.
Continue reading...Climate Skepticism - your chance to learn about effectively countering Climate misinformation!
China's largest freshwater lake dries up
For visitors expecting to see China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang is a desolate spectacle. Under normal circumstances it covers 3,500 sq km, but last month only 200 sq km were underwater. A dried-out plain stretches as far as the eye can see, leaving a pagoda perched on top of a hillock that is usually a little island. Wrapped in the mist characteristic of the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, the barges are moored close to the quayside beside a pitiful trickle of water. There is no work for the fisheries.
According to the state news agency Xinhua, the drought – the worst for 60 years – is due to the lack of rainfall in the area round Poyang and its tributaries. Poor weather conditions this year are partly responsible. But putting the blame on them overlooks the role played by the colossal Three Gorges reservoir, 500km upstream. The cause and effect is still not officially recognised, even if the government did admit last May that the planet's biggest dam had given rise to "problems that need to be solved very urgently".
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