The Guardian

Researchers ‘have no idea’ why red crabs off Panama might be behaving in such a way, says a biologist: ‘Nothing like this has ever been seen’

Descending in a submersible in waters off Panama, scientists noticed something strange happening near the seafloor. It was a drifting fog of sediment, disturbed by something below. Diving deeper, the scientists found the cause: crabs, thousands of them, swarming in a way never before recorded.

“We just saw this cloud but had no idea what was causing it,” said Jesús Pineda, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author of a paper on the crabs published on Tuesday.

As cycling’s popularity has increased, there has been a cultural shift away from fun and experiences towards a macho world of speed and Strava

I came across an interesting film the other day. It was linked from Sidetracked, a beautiful, outdoors lifestyle-y type magazine. The kind you buy in a bookshop rather than a newsagent, full of long-form journalism and photo essays, not product reviews and top 10 lists.

The video was of one woman, Lael Wilcox, talking about her experience cycling the Arizona Trail. She was racing, trying to get the best time, but on her own in a self-supported attempt.

Snake expert rejects suggestion that the 7.5m python might have killed itself

A python caught in Malaysia and first thought to be the longest snake in captivity has lost both its run at the title and its life.

Two people working for the department that trapped the animal said it was remeasured at 7.5 metres, just 17 centimetres short of first place.

If Jayden Burleigh, 22, did die as a result of the redback bite, it will be the first such fatality in more than 60 years thanks to the introduction of antivenom

A 22-year-old Australian has died after being bitten by a redback spider in what may turn out to be the first such death since the antivenom was introduced 60 years ago.

Jayden Burleigh, from Sydney’s northern beaches, was reportedly bitten while walking on the north coast of New South Wales last week.

Documentarian’s message rings especially loud for Australians, who have the privilege and duty to look after this natural wonder

“Do we really care so little about the Earth on which we live that we don’t wish to protect one of its greatest wonders from the consequences of our behaviour?”

Related: Greg Hunt rebuked by Attenborough film-maker after upbeat verdict on Great Barrier Reef

There are now 3,890 animals roaming the forests of Asia but the increase may be down to improved survey methods

The number of tigers in the wild has risen for the first time in more than a century, with some 3,890 counted in the latest global census, according to wildlife conservation groups.

The tally marks a turnaround from the last worldwide estimate in 2010, when the number of tigers in the wild hit an all-time low of about 3,200, according to the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum.

In 2006, Eli Reichman began photographing a ranching community in the fracking fields of western North Dakota. For the last decade, he has documented the cultural and social breakdown of an agricultural community being pressured to compromise in order to stay on land originally homesteaded by their ancestors in the early 1900s.

• To learn more about his work and upcoming documentary, Hinterlands, check out Reichman’s Kickstarter page
  

Three decades after the nuclear disaster, the concrete protecting the reactor is starting to crack. Yet people still live there – and a new virtual reality project will take many more inside the ‘death zone’

At first they thought it was just a fire, then the chickens started to turn black. When it comes to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, everyone has a vivid detail that is snagged in the memory; the absurdities or the obscenities. It might be the local village that, once evacuated, was claimed by a mob of pigs. Or the way milk would turn to white powder whenever the residents of Pripyat (the town built a few hundred metres from the doomed power plant) would attempt to churn butter. Or the cat that refused to be stuffed into a suitcase by its owner, who couldn’t bear to abandon his pet during the mass exile, 36 hours after the explosion. Who can forget that 70 Belarusian villages had to be buried under the ground? Or that Soviet soldiers shot every dog, in case it wandered, toxically, into a neighbouring city? Or that many of those same men risked their lives hoisting flags on the roofs of buildings every few weeks, whenever the old ones were chewed to lace by the radioactive breeze?

For many, it is the story of a 23-year-old pregnant woman, married to one of the brave and reckless firemen who put out the blaze at reactor number four in the early morning of 26 April 1986. Doctors at the Moscow hospital to which he was transferred warned her not to hug her husband. She refused, tending to him even when the nurses would no longer enter the room where he lay, naked, under a sheet of thick plastic. Two months after he died, she visited the cemetery where he was buried in a matryoshka nest of coffins: one zinc and, within that, one wooden. She knelt at his grave and promptly went into labour. At her late husband’s suggestion, she named the baby Natashenka. Due to the radiation, Natashenka was born with cirrhosis of the liver and congenital heart disease. She died less than four hours later in a tragedy of appalling symmetry: a child both conceived and destroyed in her parents’ lingering embrace.

‘Dramatic’ shift in polar motion attributed to effects of global warming and the impact humans are having on the planet

Global warming is changing the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new Nasa study has found.

Melting ice sheets, especially in Greenland, are changing the distribution of weight on Earth. And that has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, which is called polar motion, to change course, according to a study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.

With meat prices expected to soar, agricultural entrepreneurs believe invertebrate livestock can provide the protein we need. But will the mainstream ever be ready to eat mealworms?

It could be the tumbledown, moss-covered drystone walls marking the boundaries of land that has been farmed since the arrival of the Norse settlers. Or the gentle meanderings of the river Eden through the shadows of the Cumbrian fells. Or the proximity of the Settle-Carlisle railway line. All in all, Thringill Farm seems an unlikely setting for a 21st-century food revolution.

Yet just past the 17th-century farmhouse, an incongruous sound offers a clue of unusual goings-on. From behind the large wooden door of a heavily insulated room in the corner of an outbuilding comes the distinctive rhythmic chirping of crickets. The mating call, more usually heard in the Mediterranean than in the Pennines, reveals the location of the UK’s first edible-insect farm.

The environment is the new battleground for human rights, and activists are getting caught in the crossfire – particularly in Honduras, where two were killed last month

Since her mother’s murder a month ago, Bertha Isabel Zuniga Cáceres has scarcely had time to grieve. The 25-year-old student is adamant that her mother, Berta Cáceres Flores, will not become just one more Honduran environmental activist whose work was cut short by their assassination.

“Development in Honduras cannot continue happen at the expense of indigenous peoples and human rights,” says Zuñiga Cáceres, who met today with members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Honduran officials in Washington DC to call for an independent investigation into her mother’s killing. She also requested greater protection for her family and members of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, the human rights group her mother co-founded.

Advertising watchdog dismisses complaint from US electric car maker about UK company’s green energy claims

Tesla, the US electric car and battery maker, has lost the latest round of a long-running spat with UK energy company Ecotricity.

The company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, had lodged a complaint with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about claims on Ecotricity’s website that it supplies “Britain’s greenest energy” and “greenest electricity”. On Wednesday, the ASA dismissed the complaint - agreeing with Ecotricity that the claims are correct.

It’s been six months since the 5p charge was introduced for single-use plastic bags. So what have we learned?

It is six months since the introduction of the 5p charge for single-use plastic carrier bags in England, the last part of the UK to implement a charge. Here are six things we have learned since then:

Conservationists say Indochine tigers are ‘functionally extinct’ as they launch action plan for reintroduction

Tigers are “functionally extinct” in Cambodia, conservationists conceded for the first time on Wednesday, as they launched a bold action plan to reintroduce the big cats to the kingdom’s forests.

Cambodia’s dry forests used to be home to scores of Indochinese tigers but the WWF said intensive poaching of both tigers and their prey had devastated the numbers of the big cats.

Between 1984 and 2009 the weight of female bears in Ontario fell by over 10% while climate change meant they had 30 fewer days a year to hunt seal on ice

Three decades of melting sea ice has led to significant weight loss among the world’s southernmost population of polar bears, new data from Canadian researchers suggests.

“It’s a red flag,” said Martyn Obbard, a scientist with the Ontario provincial government and co-author of a recently published study in the journal Arctic Science.

Study finds protecting a single type of herbivorous fish could be crucial to the recovery of reefs from damage related to climate change

Limiting the take of just one type of fish could protect coral reefs around the world from the most serious immediate impacts of climate change, researchers have found.

Studying Caribbean coral reefs, Peter Mumby and colleagues from the University of Queensland found that enforcing a rule limiting the fishing of a single type of herbivorous fish – parrotfish – would allow coral reefs there to continue to grow, despite bleaching and other impacts associated with climate change.

Disposal and decommissioning of plants in EU’s 16 nuclear nations outstrips available funds by €120bn, European commission study reveals

Europe is facing a €253bn bill for nuclear waste management and plant decommissioning which outstrips available funds by €120bn, according to a major stock-take of the industry by the European commission.

The sum breaks down into €123bn for the decommissioning of old reactors and €130bn for the management of spent fuel, radioactive waste and deep geological disposal processes.

Leak in pipeline being built by energy giant Spectra could lead to shutdown – or worse – at the New York state power station, experts say

Across a narrow swath cut by bulldozers and chainsaws through the woods of Westchester County, New York, triangular yellow flags are clotheslined between pairs of trees. The flags trace the eventual path of the gas pipeline that the energy giant Spectra is building through the area, escorted at times by police and harried by local residents worried by its proximity to a decaying nuclear power plant.

If that pipeline leaks or breaks, say experts, its contents could detonate and destroy the switchyard that sits 400ft from the gas line. Entergy, which runs the Indian Point power station, said the plant could be quickly shut down in such an event. Nuclear engineer Paul Blanch is not so sure. Blanch, who has previously consulted for Entergy and now assists an organization calling for the pipeline to be stopped, said that assertion is a best-case scenario. In the worst case, he said, the reactors could melt down. And he believes Entergy and Spectra have not fully considered that worst-case scenario.

Long-tailed tit returns to the top 10 most commonly seen garden birds for the first time in seven years, results from the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch show

A mild winter has boosted the number of small birds visiting UK gardens, with the long-tailed tit returning to the top 10 most commonly seen species for the first time in seven years, according to results from the world’s largest garden wildlife survey.

Recorded sightings of the tiny, sociable tit rose by 44% on 2015 figures and the species was seen in more than a quarter of participants’ gardens. Other small garden bird species that are thought to have benefitted from the warmer weather include the great tit and coal tit.

With the ice cover down to 14.52m sq km, scientists now believe the Arctic is locked onto a course of continually shrinking sea ice

A record expanse of Arctic sea never froze over this winter and remained open water as a season of freakishly high temperatures produced deep – and likely irreversible – changes on the far north.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre said on Monday that the sea ice cover attained an average maximum extent of 14.52m sq km (5.607m sq miles) on 24 March, the lowest winter maximum since records began in 1979.