Alcohol, explained in 35 maps and charts

Learn about one of the world's favorite beverages with these amazing visuals.

Continue to article...

This Spider Wears Its Victims Like a Hat

Continue to article...

Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate experts

Policies aimed at limiting climate change by boosting the burning of biomass contain critical flaws that could actually damage attempts to avert dangerous levels of global warming in the future. That is the stark view of one of Britain’s chief climate experts, Professor John Beddington, who has warned that relying on the cutting down and burning of trees as a replacement for the use of fossil fuels could rebound dangerously.

Continue to article...

Vandals smash beehives, killing 500,000 bees

Bees are rapidly disappearing around the U.S., and that could be potentially devastating, because bees are essential to the production of many major food.

Continue to article...

NASA released a new image showing Antarctica's melting iceberg

The image was captured by NASA's Landsat 8 satellite.

Continue to article...

Dozens Of 130 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs Found In China

Construction workers made a beautiful discovery on Christmas Day in Ganzhou, China when uncovered a nest full of dinosaur eggs. Ganzhou city is known as the 'city where dinosaurs were born' and according to local media. Archaeologists have dated the eggs at around 130 million years old. The eggs were like Christmas present from the past discovered on December 25. The construction workers were working on a construction of a secondary school when they saw a group of oval-shaped rocks on the ground where they were using explosives.

Continue to article...

British Polar explorer Ben Saunders echoes Shackleton as he abandons quest to cross South Pole unassisted

The British Polar explorer Ben Saunders gave up his quest to cross the South Pole echoing Sir Ernest Shackleton’s words that it was better to return home as a ‘live donkey’ than a ‘dead lion’. Mr Saunders, 40, was forced to abandon his mission to cross Antarctica unassisted after ‘ferocious’ weather conditions left him without enough food to complete his journey.

Continue to article...

More than 40 cars involved in crash on US-31, closing southbound lanes

A crash involving more than 40 cars closed southbound US-31 at Colby Street in Whitehall for about two hours Friday afternoon. The accident happened close to Holton Road. Muskegon Township Police Chief Dave Wypa, said, fortunately, there were only three injuries in the wreck. Wypa says all of those hurt were in the same car. They were taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

Continue to article...

‘Happy New Year’ in European languages

Learn how to wish a "Happy New Year" in German, French, Spanish, Italian and other languages with my neatly coloured map!

Continue to article...

'It's shocking, it's horrendous': Ellen MacArthur's fight against plastic

Trophies from her past glories as a competitive yachtswoman are placed discreetly around the 16th-century building on the Isle of Wight, the base of Dame Ellen MacArthur’soperations today. On a blackboard in one of the meeting rooms, the targets of a different passion are spelled out. From uncovering the scale of plastic pollution in the oceans to targeting the textile waste of the fashion industry, MacArthur, who in 2005 broke the solo record for sailing round the world, is dedicating her life to saving it.

Continue to article...

Whole of England to be mapped with lasers to tackle flooding and illegal waste dumps

England’s entire landscape will be mapped with lasers to tackle flooding, help conservation work and even track illegal waste dumps, the Environment Agency said. Under plans unveiled by the government agency, aircraft equipped with laser scanners will map all 130,000 sq km of the country in 3D, including rivers, fields and national parks, by 2020.

Continue to article...

Pictures of the Year 2017

Photographers help a Rohingya refugee to come out of Nad River as they cross the Myanmar-Bangladesh border in Palong Khali, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

Continue to article...

It’s so cold in Calgary, it’s too chilly for penguins at the Calgary Zoo

It just keeps getting colder in Calgary. It was even too cold for the penguins to go outside at the Calgary Zoo on Friday.

Continue to article...

Turkey: where pampered cats are top dog

Selim can often be spotted surveying his neighbourhood, a stone’s throw away from the Galata tower and down the hill from bustling İstiklal avenue. He looks content, his expanding belly and long orange hair neatly combed.

Continue to article...

3+ months after Maria, barely half of Puerto Rico has power

Puerto Rico authorities said Friday that nearly half of power customers in the U.S. territory still lack electricity more than three months after Hurricane Maria, sparking outrage among islanders who accuse the government of mismanaging its response to the Category 4 storm.

Continue to article...

How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches

Type the words “climate change” into Google and you could get an unexpected result: advertisements that call global warming a hoax. “Scientists blast climate alarm,” said one that appeared at the top of the search results page during a recent search, pointing to a website, DefyCCC, that asserted: “Nothing has been studied better and found more harmless than anthropogenic CO2 release.”

Continue to article...

Trump says cold weather disproves global warming. His own White House disagrees.

Just as spring means the flowers bloom, winter means Donald Trump’s climate denial blossoms. On Thursday, President Trump posted a tweet suggesting that the current cold snap across the United States disproves evidence of climate change. Of course, it’s called “global” warming for a reason — as this map shows, even though it’s cold here, it’s unusually warm pretty much everywhere else in the world.

Continue to article...

Waste Not, Want Not: Drink Beer To Feed Fish And Help Save The Planet

Industry trailblazers are trying to reduce the energy and resource costs of aquaculture. Possible solutions include using brewery waste, algae, insects or even carbon dioxide to feed the fish we eat.

Continue to article...

Westminster Abbey's attics yield a treasure trove of stained glass

Archaeologists clearing attics to create new museum space find 30,000 stained glass shards, some dating back to 13th century

Continue to article...

Magical new 4,500 year old finds add to 'oldest toy collection in the world'

An ancient doll and a mythical animal were buried with a child from the Okunev culture in the Bronze Age.

Continue to article...

Pictures of the Year: Environment

Men feed seagulls along the Yamuna river on a smoggy morning in New Delhi, India, November 17.

Continue to article...

Is this the future? Dutch plan vast windfarm island in North Sea

Advanced plans by Dutch power grid aims to build power hub possibly at Dogger Bank whose scale would dwarf current offshore sites

Continue to article...

Octopuses are so clever, scientists missed a species right under their noses

The giant Pacific octopus you saw at the aquarium last month? It might not have actually been a giant Pacific octopus.

Continue to article...

Parts of Canada colder than Mars and Antarctica

Mars, Antarctica or Mount Everest Base Camp might be warmer alternatives for some Canadians on Thursday, as the country faces an epic cold snap that has plunged the mercury to record-setting lows in many regions. Environment Canada issued a slew of extreme cold weather alerts Thursday, with forecasts calling for daily highs in the -20 to -30 degrees Celsius range in many major cities. However, overnight temperatures and wind chill factors are expected to make it feel much, much colder – in the neighbourhood of -40 C in some places, according to several warnings.

Continue to article...

American reams: why a ‘paperless world’ still hasn’t happened

The long read: In a world seduced by screens, the future of paper might seem uncertain. But many in the industry remain optimistic – after all, you can’t blow your nose on an email.

Continue to article...

A robot photographed an ancient urn at the bottom of lake that's been spitting out mysterious artifacts

Since the 1920s, pottery spanning thousands of years has turned up in Lake Biwaka. Archaeologist don’t know why. A robot has photographed a nearly intact ancient urn at the bottom of Japan’s largest freshwater lake, according to Japanese national paper the Asahi Shimbun. Over the last century, a number of pottery pieces representing a huge range in timeline have been recovered from Lake Biwako in central Japan; archaeologists have no idea why.

Continue to article...

Germany has so much renewable energy it is paying people to use electricity

German energy consumers were paid to use power over the Christmas period, thanks to a slump in demand, warm weather and plenty of wind power on the grid, trading data shows. Power prices slipped into negative territory on 24 December and again on 26 December, according to the website of the EPEX Spot, which is Europe’s biggest power trading exchange. Germany’s massive investment in renewable energy – partially thanks to the introduction of the 2014 Renewable Energy Act – has in recent years triggered a drop below zero on several occasions.

Continue to article...

The Amazon town, a coral reef, big oil, and a catastrophe waiting to happen

Anchored in shallow, cloudy waters just a few hundred yards from the mangrove swamps that dominate this wild and empty coastline, the fishermen rolled in their nets. The three men had spent five days at sea and their catch glittered on the deck. “It’s good fishing,” said Cleyton Celeiro, 26, who feeds his wife and two children with money earned on trips to the Amapá state coast, on the far north-eastern corner of the Amazon. “It’s beautiful, I like it. I’m proud to be a fisherman.”

Continue to article...

China Signals Slower Growth Is Acceptable to Tackle Debt, Smog

China can achieve a goal of doubling the size of its economy by 2020 even if annual expansion slows to 6.3 percent, according to a senior Communist Party official, signaling a greater willingness to tackle debt and pollution at the expense of growth. In its blueprint for 2016 to 2020, China set a minimum annual growth target of 6.5 percent for the five-year period to achieve the goal of doubling gross domestic product from 2010 levels. But over the weekend, Yang Weimin, an official from the Communist Party committee overseeing economic policy, said annualized growth of 6.3 percent in 2018-2020 would do.

Continue to article...

Barbuda fears land rights loss in bid to spread tourism from Antigua

As the tiny island destroyed by a hurricane tries to rebuild, the PM of neighboring Antigua aims to revoke centuries-old rights

Continue to article...

'Coral bleaching is getting worse ... but the biggest problem is pollution'

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef is the largest barrier reef in the western hemisphere – an underwater wilderness stretching over 700 miles along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. One of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Americas, the reef is home to a dazzling variety of coral and more than 500 species of fish, and provides a livelihood for more than a million people. But now, a combination of mass tourism and poor waste management has left the reef increasingly vulnerable to climate change, placing this natural wonder in serious trouble.

Continue to article...

What Is It Like to Be a Bee?

A philosophical and neurobiological look into the apian mind.

Continue to article...

Experts say we should tax meat eaters the same way we tax smokers

If your burger ends up costing as much as a plate of caviar, you may decide to explore vegetarian options. As global demand booms, a tax on meat may be a way of discouraging overconsumption and paying for the environmental damages of the livestock industry, a new report suggests. But critics believe it would disproportionately affect the poor.

Continue to article...

Synthetic rhino horns are being created to flood markets and eradicate poaching

Since 2007, instances of rhino poaching in South Africa have increased by 9,000 percent, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The non-profit conservation group Save the Rhino estimates that 1,054 of the animals were illegally killed in 2016. To battle this horrifying trend, biotech startup Pembient hopes to undermine black market sales by creating synthetic rhino horns that are practically indistinguishable from real horns, down to the molecular level.

Continue to article...

Before the Iron Age, Most Iron Came From Space

New research is showing just how coveted meteoritic iron was in the Bronze Age. Earth is not short of iron—the metal makes up much of our planet’s core and is the fourth most abundant element in the crust. But actually getting that iron out to use it—to make tools, for example—hasn’t always been a simple process. Most iron is packed away in ore, and you have to know how to smelt it to produce the metal, long prized for its strength and workability. Humans didn’t really master the process and produce iron at a large scale until around 1200 B.C...

Continue to article...

Nothing to See Here, Just a Functional Knife Made of Fish

That was a fish, once. Tuna specifically. Katsuobushi—repeatedly smoked, fermented fish—holds the record as the hardest food on earth, bearing more in common by the end of its processing to petrified wood than to sealife.

Continue to article...

Erie sees record-shattering 53 inches of snow in 30 hours

OK, this is taking "White Christmas" a bit too far. The National Weather Service in Cleveland reported the lake-effect snowfall that inundated Erie over the weekend and Christmas — and continues to fall — can now count itself as the most intense in Pennsylvania history. Erie received 34 inches of snow on Christmas Day, not only breaking the all-time city Christmas record of 11 inches but also breaking the all-time daily snowfall record, which was 20 inches on Nov. 22, 1956.

Continue to article...

World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam

The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10%, British charity Oxfam said in a report released Wednesday. Oxfam published the numbers as negotiators from 195 countries met in Paris to wrangle over a climate rescue pact.

Continue to article...

Precious Gems Bear Messages From Earth’s Molten Heart

We may covet gemstones for their beauty, but their real value lies in what they tell scientists about the extreme forces at work deep underground.

Continue to article...

Scientists Say Humans' 'Lack of Empathy' Is Leading to Global Species Annihilation

No bells tolled when the last Catarina pupfish on Earth died. Newspapers didn’t carry the story when the Christmas Island pipistrelle vanished forever. Two vertebrate species go extinct every year on average, but few people notice, perhaps because the rate seems relatively slow—not a clear and present threat to the natural systems we depend on. This view overlooks trends of extreme decline in animal populations, which tell a more dire story with cascading consequences...

Continue to article...

Five things to consider about glitter this Christmas

Once unleashed, glitter gets everywhere – not just in your house, but into the environment. Time to call a halt to the glitter explosion.

Continue to article...

Living on thin air: microbe mystery solved

A discovery that microbes in Antarctica can scavenge hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the air to stay alive in such extreme conditions has implications for the search for life on other planets.

Continue to article...

Gigantic Sculptures of Cats Wearing Helmets by Kenji Yanobe

The Japanese sculptor Kenji Yanobe is known for his large-scale robotic and nightmarish toys. But animals too have always played an important role in Yanobe’s work too. And in his latest work titled Ship’s Cat, Yanobe has created a series of large-scale cat sculptures in various positions wearing protective helmets.

Continue to article...

More than 200 dead, 70,000 flee as tropical storm devastates southern Philippines

More than 200 people are dead and 160 missing after a tropical storm devastates the southern Philippines.

Continue to article...

Roman Empire Maps

So I found these maps recently of the Roman Empire. The first has some interesting details about the Roman provinces in general while the second is far more detailed and carefully constructed. If y…

Continue to article...

Queensland man to face court over death of 5.2-metre crocodile

A man is expected to face court in central Queensland next month accused of shooting dead a 5.2-metre saltwater crocodile. The reptile was found floating in the Fitzroy River near Rockhampton on 21 September. A 31-year-old Etna Creek man has been issued with a notice to appear in the Rockhampton Magistrates Court on 12 January on one count of unlawfully taking a protected animal.

Continue to article...

Salamander genome gives clues about unique regenerative ability

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have managed to sequence the giant genome of a salamander, the Iberian ribbed newt, which is a full six times greater than the human genome. Amongst the early findings is a family of genes that can provide clues to the unique ability of salamanders to rebuild complex tissue, even body parts. The study is published in Nature Communications.

Continue to article...

Philippines storm kills more than 100

Tropical Storm Tembin brings flash floods and mudslides to the southern island of Mindanao.

Continue to article...

Bird Imitates Zipper Noise

Continue to article...

5 Animals On The Verge Of Going Extinct, From Sumatran Rhinos To Polar Bears

Some of Earth’s creatures are on the brink of extinction and might disappear in our lifetimes.

Continue to article...