By Alok Jha and Laurence Topham24 December 2013 (The Guardian) – Every coast or sea we have visited in Antarctica, we have seen penguins. They come to the shoreline to investigate our ship as we sail past, they hop on and off ice floes, flocks of them fly in formation through the water. Night or […]
By Tony Barboza23 October 2013 (Los Angeles Times) – Exposure to the pesticide DDT could be playing a role in high rates of obesity three generations later, a new study says. Scientists injected pregnant rats with DDT and found no change in their levels of obesity or their offspring. But by the third generation, more […]
By Bill Hoffman28 November 2013 (Sunshine Coast Daily) – Lindsay Dines has been watching dead mutton birds wash in at Teewah for more than a month. He knows death is part of their migratory fate. Their long, figure eight of the Pacific that starts in Tasmania, touches the northern hemisphere Aleutian Islands, and then California […]
WASHINGTON, 23 November 2013 (AP) – A major U.S. power company has pleaded guilty to killing eagles and other birds at two Wyoming wind farms and agreed to pay $1 million as part of the first enforcement of environmental laws protecting birds against wind energy facilities. Until the settlement announced Friday with Duke Energy Corp. […]
By Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent 17 October 2013 (theguardian.com) – The number of wild birds in the UK is still falling, despite efforts to protect them by changing farming practices. Conservationists have urged the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, to use the money newly available from the EU’s common agricultural policy to step up protection measures. […]
By Andrew Darby7 October 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – Turns out it’s the little things we need to worry about in climate change. When they’re in trouble, a great polar ecosystem may be, too. The oceans are now absorbing so much carbon dioxide they are acidifying at an unprecedented rate, according to the International […]
By Madison Park, Dayu Zhang, and Elizabeth Landau3 October 2013 HONG KONG (CNN) – A thumb-sized wasp with an orange head has killed dozens of people in China and injured more than 1,500 with its powerful venomous sting. The Asian giant hornet, known scientifically as Vespa mandarinia, carries a venom that destroys red blood cells, […]
By Margaret Cronin Fisk28 August 2013 (Bloomberg) – BP Plc lost a renewed bid to suspend payments from the court-supervised program administering its settlement of claims tied to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. An investigation of alleged wrongdoing at the Mobile, Alabama, claims assistance center didn’t find “any credible evidence of fraud,” U.S. […]
The UK Farmland Bird Indicator, 1970-2011, showing differing trends for specialist and generalist species. Data are from the RSPB, BTO, JNCC, and Defra. The numbers in brackets refer to the number of species in each group. Specialist species have decline by over 60% in 40 years. Graphic: RSPB 22 May 2013 (RSPB) – Trends in […]
By Alex Kirby24 August 2013 LONDON (Climate News Network) – They may not look very appetizing, but they are what sustains much of the marine life in the southern ocean. Antarctic krill, usually less than 2.36 inches long, are the primary food source for many species of whale, seal, penguin and fish. But there’s a […]
