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Rebecca Morelle looks ahead to some of the big events in science expected in 2017.

Illegally traded endangered species that escape to form secondary populations offer opportunities for their long-term survival, a study suggests.

Cast: AdelaideSBN

New Year fireworks contributed to high pollution levels in German cities, official figures suggest.

‘Lucky’ owls are the latest animal to join Japan’s growing list of themed pet cafes but welfare groups are calling for the practice to stop

Several owl species sit tied to a makeshift wooden perch as a TV plays a loud, animated owl-themed film behind them in the dimly lit room.

This is Tokyo’s Akiba Fukurou owl cafe, filled with locals and snap-happy tourists even on a weekday morning, and as the countdown to 2017 begins, its resident owls will be petted and photographed by more Japanese customers than usual as people seek good fortune for the New Year.

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Roll with us as we have a Caddy Chat with Christy Spier from the Adelaide & Mount Lofty NRM Urban Sustainability Team. Hear about what they in supporting environmental initiatives and getting people to engage with sustainability in their own lives across metro Adelaide.

Cast: AdelaideSBN

The world's oldest known killer whale, estimated to be 105 years old, is missing and presumed dead, researchers say.

Asian elephants have faced less poaching than their African cousins but the latest grisly finds have led conservationists to worry for their survival

Even the planet’s smallest elephants, tucked away on the island of Borneo, are no longer immune to the global poaching crisis for ivory.

On New Year’s Eve, wildlife officials in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, found the bones of a beloved male elephant, nicknamed Sabre for his unusual tusks that slanted downwards like the extinct sabre-toothed tiger’s canines.

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Potentially disruptive volcanic ash clouds cross Northern Europe more frequently than previously thought, according to a new study.

What sort of wildlife will you discover in the early days of the new year?

2017 is upon us and wintry conditions will be dominating the northern hemisphere in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile the southern hemisphere will be basking in summer sunshine and the heat that goes with it. So what sort of wildlife will we all discover on our doorsteps? We’d love to see your photos of the January wildlife near you.

Share your photos and videos with us and we’ll feature our favourites on the Guardian site.

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The UK’s first commercial windfarm in Delabole has produced enough energy to boil 3.4bn kettles since it began in 1991, when people dismissed the idea. Now it’s one of more than 1,000 onshore projects across the country

From Pam the lollipop lady to the repairs for a storm-battered church roof, the fruits of wind power are not hard to find in Delabole. The residents of this Cornish village have lived alongside the UK’s first commercial windfarm since it was built in the year the Gulf war ended and Ryan Giggs rose to fame.

The Delabole windfarm marked its 25th anniversary in December, having produced enough power to boil 3.4bn kettles since the blades began spinning. Peter Edwards, a local farmer, erected the first turbines after going on an anti-nuclear march with his wife, Pip.

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India opens two world-leading clean energy projects - the world's biggest solar farm and a chemicals plant using CO2 to make baking powder.

Carbonclean is turning planet-heating emissions into profit by converting CO2 into baking powder – and could lock up 60,000 tonnes of CO2 a year

A breakthrough in the race to make useful products out of planet-heating CO2 emissions has been made in southern India.

A plant at the industrial port of Tuticorin is capturing CO2 from its own coal-powered boiler and using it to make soda ash – aka baking powder.

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Thursford, Norfolk Occasionally one blackbird would position herself so close to the glass that you felt sure she was looking at you

A friend and fellow wood-owner has built a hide in his patch that’s sunk into the ground so that windows, which are fitted with one-way glass, look out at eye-level over a nearby pond. From its interior you have the most intimate ringside views of the wildlife – which, meanwhile, hasn’t any inkling of human presence.

Related: Here for the dawn

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Timelapse video shot from a Beijing bank on Monday shows a thick cloud of yellow smog swallowing buildings as it rolls into the city. The footage was taken by Chas Pope, a British engineering consultant, and was shot over just 20 minutes. Many cities in China have been placed on ‘red alert’ due to soaring air pollution levels in the first days of 2017. Clouds of smog have forced flights to be cancelled and roads to be closed and have effectively left some people trapped in their homes.

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Charity reports 196 incidents of waste dumped in its woods and lands, bringing annual bill for dealing with rubbish in woodlands to £354,000

The Woodland Trust has suffered its worst year on record for flytipping, with almost 200 incidents of rubbish dumped in its woods and land.

The charity has spent £42,596 on clearing up 196 incidents of flytipped waste this year, bringing the overall bill for dealing with litter in its woodlands to around £354,000 in 2016. Costs are up substantially on last year, when the trust spent £31,360 on tackling flytipping, as part of an overall waste clearance bill of £192,000.

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Ancient ponds on the Greensand Ridge can produce thousands of tiny frogs – so long as the water supply holds up

There are two types of ponds along the Greensand Ridge that runs across from Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire into South Cambridgeshire. They are either lined with clay, and fill with rainwater, or they are hollows in the ground that rely on rising groundwater in the winter.

Both provide breeding opportunities for the common frog. The tadpoles have time to mature before some of the ponds dry out in late summer.

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You shouldn't have to crank up the aircon. chanus/shutterstock.com

Whether you’re a boatie or not, everyone realises the importance of keeping the water on the outside when you go sailing or fishing. The less leaky the boat, the less you have to rely on devices like bilge pumps to stay afloat.

What does this have to do with houses? Well, Australia’s homes are notoriously “leaky” – allowing the uncontrolled flow of heat into and out of the building. Our answer has been to put in more and more pumps, in the form of air conditioning. This is often promoted as a feature, rather than an indication of a poor-quality building!

Air conditioning is promoted as a feature rather than a design flaw. Wendy Miller

This creates problems for everyone.

We all know that some houses are hotter than others in heatwaves, and that well insulated and designed homes cost a lot less to operate throughout the year because they don’t rely heavily on air conditioners or heaters to provide comfort.

But did you know that relying on air conditioners to stay cool on hot summer days affects the price of electricity for everyone, all year round?

Pumping heat from one place to another takes a lot of energy, which makes air conditioners particularly power-hungry appliances. The more leaky the house, the more heat needs to be pumped out. On hot days, when lots of aircon units are operating at the same time, this creates a challenge for the electricity infrastructure.

It costs money to build an electricity network that can handle these peaks in demand. This cost is recovered through the electricity unit cost (cents per kilowatt hour). We all pay this cost, in every electricity bill we get; in fact the cost of meeting summer peak demand accounts for about 25% of retail electricity costs. This is more than twice the combined effect of solar feed-in tariffs, the Renewable Energy Target and the erstwhile carbon tax.

A house that has been well designed for its tropical climate. Wendy Miller

This means that people living in houses that are built to handle their local climate are effectively subsiding those who live in poorer-quality buildings and relying solely on the air conditioning to stay cool. Perhaps even less fairly, those who struggle to afford air conditioning and have to cope with overheating are also paying this subsidy via the electricity they do use. All this is because many people still live in leaky, poor-quality buildings.

Does this mean that air conditioners are evil and should never be used? Of course not – there is a role for very efficient air conditioners (heat pumps) in extreme weather events. But it does raise some interesting questions. Can we design and build homes that are great to live in and don’t cost the Earth to run? And, if so, why aren’t these homes the norm, rather than the exception?

You get what you ask for

The good news is that comfortable, quality homes that put minimal strain on the electricity grid are certainly possible. What’s needed is a combination of design that takes account of the local climate, appropriate building materials and quality construction practices. Some homes consume less than a quarter of the energy of their contemporaries in the same climate – it’s just frustrating that they aren’t more common.

In the past, the housing industry would say that it’s simply building the homes that people want – that Australians are mainly interested in size and location, not energy performance. Recent research, however, seems to indicate that the perspectives of real estate agents and other property practitioners could be limiting how, or if, they promote energy efficiency and other sustainability features to potential clients.

Are Australians still mesmerised by the surface bling of granite benchtops, a theatre room, or automatic gadgets? Are we starting to consider weightier issues such as operation costs, resilience and comfort? Or are we waiting until the first heatwave or the first electricity bill to realise just how good or poor our purchase decision was?

Some savvy buyers – before they sign a contract – are starting to ask about insulation, but not the more fundamental questions, like “how hot does this room get?” or “can I afford to run this house?”.

The housing sector seems to assume that if you don’t explicitly ask for something, it is not important to you. They also seem to assume that the building regulations set the standard – despite the fact the building regulations are minimum requirements, not best practice for comfort and value.

Some also actively lobby for lower standards, arguing that energy efficiency has “questionable benefits” and that requiring information to be passed on to consumers is an “unnecessary burden”.

Buyer beware – you’re on your own

What does this mean? When buying a used car or a new phone, it’s relatively easy to get the information you need – and there are quite a few consumer protection laws in place. But when we inspect a home for sale or rent, we can see the number of rooms, test the taps and light switches, and measure how far it is to the shops or school or work, but there is a huge amount we can’t see and are not told.

A real estate agent is not acting in the prospective buyer’s interest (or even necessarily in the seller’s. The seller wants the highest price in the shortest time, and the agent wants the biggest commission for the least effort. And contrary to practices in the European Union, no one is obliged (in most parts of Australia) to tell prospective buyers or renters about the home’s running costs.

There have been successes and failures in state government attempts to ensure that home buyers and renters have access to information about comfort and running costs at the time of purchasing or renting. Queensland’s Sustainability Declaration, introduced in 2010, was very short-lived, with an incoming government declaring it “useless red tape”.

In contrast, the ACT government has required an Energy Efficiency Rating for the sale or rent of residential properties since 1999, with multiple reports showing the benefits to property value and to reduced running costs. New South Wales plans to introduce a voluntary disclosure scheme in 2018, and to make it mandatory in 2020.

These schemes not only make it easier to identify homes that cost less to run, but can also drive demand for energy-efficient renovations and put downward pressure on electricity prices.

The distribution of information about housing in Australia is flawed. Real estate agents, valuers, financiers and electricity industry operators are making decisions based on very little or no information about how the quality of houses impacts on their clients, their business processes and electricity infrastructure investment.

Most importantly, owners and renters are not being informed about the quality of the houses they are buying or renting, and the impacts that particular dwellings will have on their health, comfort and wallets.

What can you do?

So is the housing sector right? Do you care about the quality of the building you live in? What is a sensibly designed and well-constructed house worth to you? What dollar value do you put on your health, safety and comfort? What value is there for your family to able to cope with heatwaves, or to pay off the mortgage sooner because of the money you save on power bills?

Which house would you buy in this suburb? Wendy Miller

You don’t need to wait for government to act. If you are looking at buying or renting a new home or apartment, ask to see the energy certificate for the dwelling. Such a certificate would have been created as part of the building approval process.

It could also be useful to ask for a thermal imaging report and air leakage report. These are tests the builder can have done to prove his quality of construction.

Is the insulation properly installed? Wendy Miller

For existing homes, you can ask the seller for a Universal Certificate, or a copy of their energy bills, or evidence of features they have installed to enhance the comfort of the house (such as receipts for insulation or window tinting).

And next time you’re visiting a friend or neighbour with heat radiating from the walls, windows and roof, and the aircon cranked at full blast, enjoy the nice cool air – because you’re helping them pay for it.

Wendy Miller receives/has received funding from the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre, the Australian Research Council and the National Climate Change Adaptation Fund. She has conducted industry funded research on building performance and the electricity network for the Australian Glass and Glazing Association, Ergon, ERM, Brisbane Airport Corporation, Metecno and various government departments.

The adventurer Sir David Hempleman-Adams calls on politicians to "grasp the nettle" on climate change.

Wildlife experts have applied for licence to release 10 animals following successful reintroductions in Scotland and England

Beavers could return to Wales for the first time in hundreds of years, after being successfully reintroduced in other parts of the UK.

Wildlife experts are submitting a licence application to release 10 beavers in the south of the country and hope the reintroduction could begin this year.

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