By Bill Laurance 30 May 2017 (The Conversation) – As President Donald Trump mulls over whether to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, it is hard to imagine that he’s listening to the experts.US climate researchers are being so stifled, ignored or blackballed that France has now offered sanctuary to these misunderstood souls.One might […]
By Jonathan Watts 28 May 2017 Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade (The Guardian) – To understand why the Brazilian government is deliberately losing the battle against deforestation, you need only retrace the bootmarks of the Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett along the Amazonian border with Bolivia. During a failed attempt to cross a spectacular tabletop […]
By Damian Carrington16 May 2017 (The Guardian) – The world’s rarest marine mammal is on the verge of extinction due to the continuing illegal demand in China for a valuable fish organ, an undercover investigation has revealed. There are no more than 30 vaquita – a five-foot porpoise – left in the northern Gulf of […]
12 May 2017 (University of Exeter) – Dramatic drops in oceanic oxygen, which cause mass extinctions of sea life, come to a natural end – but it takes about a million years. The depletion of oxygen in the oceans is known as “anoxia”, and scientists from the University of Exeter have been studying how periods […]
By Lauren Frisch5 May 2017 (UAF) – In one year, sea stars have almost disappeared from Kachemak Bay, Alaska. This is likely the aftermath of a sea star wasting disease episode. The disease causes lesions, and may result in the loss of arms, making a sea star look as if it is melting or decomposing. […]
By Clive Hamilton4 May 2017 (The Guardian) – After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink […]
By Caroline Mortimer 7 March 2017 (Independent) – One of Kenya’s last tusker elephants has been killed by poachers, conservationists have said. Satao II’s body was found during a routine aerial reconnaissance by the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) near the Voi river in Tsavo East National Park, according to the Tsavo Trust, a non profit […]
By Sunita Patel-Carstairs, News Reporter7 March 2017 (Sky News) – A rhino has been shot dead by poachers who broke into a zoo and sliced its horn off with a chainsaw. Four-year-old Vince was found dead by one of his keepers at Thoiry zoo, near Paris, on Tuesday morning. One or more attackers are believed […]
By Benji Jones2 March 2017 (Mongabay) – You don’t have to travel far to discover a new species – just head to the natural history museum. At least that’s how Chris Barratt, a doctoral student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, discovered Hyperolius ruvuensis, the newest species to be named in the clad of […]
WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, 3 March 2017 (Purdue University) – New research findings show that as the world warmed millions of years ago, conditions in the tropics may have made it so hot some organisms couldn’t survive. Longstanding theories dating to the 1980s suggest that as the rest of the earth warms, the tropical temperatures would […]
