What If A Drug Could Make Your Blood Deadly To Mosquitoes?

A pesky mosquito sips some of your blood. Hours later, the blood-sucker drops dead, poisoned by the very blood it just slurped down. That may sound too good to be true, but it's a tantalizing possibility, according to research published this week in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The study points to a potential new tool to fight malaria: the medication ivermectin. Studies conducted in the 2000s, including one in 2010, show that malaria-carrying mosquitoes die after feeding on individuals who have ingested the drug.

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This is the environmental impact of your Easter egg

Those concerned about the rampant consumerism of religious holidays now have another thing to consider – the environmental impact of Easter eggs. Not only has Easter egg packaging been deemed excessive in a new report, analysis by a team of scientists at the University of Manchester has revealed the huge carbon footprint associated with chocolate production.

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Wind and solar make more electricity than nuclear for first time in UK

Windfarms and solar panels produced more electricity than the UK’s eight nuclear power stations for the first time at the end of last year, official figures show. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions also continued to fall, dropping 3% in 2017, as coal use fell and the use of renewables climbed. Energy experienced the biggest drop in emissions of any UK sector, of 8%, while pollution from transport and businesses stayed flat.

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Swedish Billboard is quite Literally for the Birds

How one company turned a building facade into a bustling bird buffet.

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The world’s largest desert has got even bigger because of climate change

The Sahara Desert has grown significantly over the past century, and climate change is largely to blame, according to a new study. Analysing data collected since 1923, a research team examined the different factors that contributed to changes in rainfall in the Sahara region. They found the desert, already around the size of the US, had expanded by about 10 per cent over the period covered by this data.

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Why Did a Venomous Fish Evolve a Glowing Eye Spike?

A newly discovered “lachrymal saber” could illuminate relationships between an order of deadly fishes

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A major oil company just agreed in court that humans cause climate change. It sets a new precedent.

Last week, a federal judge at the US District Court for the Northern District of California held a five-hour tutorial to lay the scientific foundation for two lawsuits against the five biggest oil companies in the world.

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Why you might want to rethink chocolate eggs this Easter

There's another reason you might feel guilty about your Easter egg binge — more water is used to produce chocolate than any other food product, a university expert is warning.

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Elephant 'smoking' footage baffles experts

Animal in India may have been trying to ingest wood charcoal and blowing away the ash

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World lost 87 per cent wetlands in 300 years

The world has lost 87 per cent of its wetlands in the past 300 years, says a study on land degradation released at the sixth plenary session of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in Colombia on Monday (March 26).

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Cool-Season Tornadoes are Becoming More Common, Especially in “Dixie Alley”

A new study finds that the months of November to February are seeing an increase in average tornado activity, with a shift away from the Southern Plains and a ramp-up over the favored terrain of “Dixie Alley,” including Arkansas, Louisiana,...

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A Deserted, Pristine Stretch of the Amazon was Home to a Million Humans

At twice the size of India, the Amazon is massive. But although it constitutes the world’s largest remaining tropical rainforest and hosts 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity and over 30 million humans, 95 percent of it remains unexplored. The terre firme is uncharted, and, according to a new paper, it hides many archaeological secrets.

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Lockheed Martin Now Has a Patent For Its Potentially World Changing Fusion Reactor

Lockheed Martin has quietly obtained a patent associated with its design for a potentially revolutionary compact fusion reactor, or CFR. If this project has been progressing on schedule, the company could debut a prototype system that size of shipping container, but capable of powering a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier or 80,000 homes, sometime in the next year or so.

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Hotting up: how climate change could swallow Louisiana's Tabasco island

With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned

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Arctic sea ice hits second-lowest winter peak on record

Arctic sea ice has experienced its maximum extent for the year, reaching 14.48m square kilometers on 17 March – the second smallest in the 39-year satellite record.

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The Caribou and the Mosquito

The impacts of climate change ripple through ecosystems in unexpected ways.

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UN moves towards recognising human right to a healthy environment

Formal recognition would help protect those who increasingly risk their lives to defend the land, water, forests and wildlife, says the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment.

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The Paris Climate Accords Are Looking More and More Like Fantasy

Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.

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Study: wind and solar can power most of the United States | John Abraham

In order to combat climate change, we need to rapidly move from fossil fuel energy to clean, renewable energy. The two energy sources I am most interested in are wind and solar power; however, there are other sources that have great potential

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Forgotten poison: How cigarettes hurt the environment.

The growing and harvesting of tobacco poses health risks to tobacco workers and causes damage to the environment. But the production stage of cigarettes also causes widespread harm to both. It seems incredible that something as small as a cigarette butt can cause so much damage. And on its journey to its eventual demise, a cigarette butt can leave a treacherous wake. When left soaking in bodies of water like rivers, lakes and the ocean, cigarette butts produce substances called leachates, which creates what can only be called toxic sludge.

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A 25-Day, Cross Section Timelapse of a Bean Plant Set to Classical

One shot taken every 9m 36s, played at 30 FPS. Music by Strauss

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This blind, cave-dwelling fish can climb walls

Scientists have long been trying to figure out how exactly our ancestors evolved from fish to land vertebrates some 375 million years ago. Now a tiny, eyeless fish that walks and climbs up waterfalls could offer some clues... By Kaitlyn Tiffany.

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China’s building a rain-making network three times the size of Spain

Vast system of chambers on Tibetan plateau could send enough particles into the atmosphere to allow extensive clouds to form. By Stephen Chen.

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Elephant caught 'smoking' on camera leaves scientists baffled

Scientists have been left baffled by a wild elephant caught on camera blowing out plumes of smoke while consuming smouldering lumps of charcoal. Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) filmed the female elephant exhibiting the unusual behaviour at Nagahrole National Park in India. In the video, the mammal can been seen picking up lumps of charcoal with its trunk, placing the coal in its mouth, and exhaling a large cloud of smoke.

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Lab accidentally created 'city' of 180,000 mice and experimented on them without permission

A ‘mouse city’ the size of the population of York was accidentally bred by scientists following a laboratory blunder, a new Home Office report has shown. Researchers at an unnamed laboratory bred nearly 180,000 more mice for use in experiments than their license permitted, and carried out unauthorised experiments on them, yet received only a letter of reprimand.

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The Small Scottish Isle Leading the World in Electricity

Some 1.3 billion people lack regular access to electricity. With its reliable independent grid powered by wind, water and solar, a remote Scottish island could point to a solution.

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'Orange Snow' Baffles Eastern Europeans

The strange phenomenon caused by snow mixing with sand is sighted in Russia and other countries.

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14 Photos of One of the Most Amazing Migrations in the World

Hundreds of thousands of cranes gather every year at this spot.

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Asia could run out of fish by 2048, UN reports

In Asia, there will be no fish stocks for commercial fishing by 2048 if trends continue. That's one of the projections made by four new United Nations scientific reports on biodiversity that showed the Earth is losing plants, animals and clean water at a dramatic rate.

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The Kingdom of Bantar Gebang

By Alexandre Sattler // Towering mountains of malodorous, contaminated waste dominate the horizon, and among them, hundreds of families make their living. One young girl had the chance to leave the landfill and to gain an education. Now she has chosen to return, determined to change the lives of those children less fortunate than her.

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Landmarks go dark for 'Earth Hour'

Landmark buildings around the world went dark on Saturday in an international effort to draw attention to climate change. In New York, the Empire Building's lights were switched off. There was a similar sight in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower went dark. And in London, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus and the London Eye had their lights turned off, according to The Associated Press.

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With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

Operation Popeye was a secret Vietnam War-era effort to conduct covert cloud seeding over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, extend the monsoon season, and give the United States an advantage in the war. By Eleanor Cummins.

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Bio-Hackers Figured Out How to Inject Human Eyes With Night Vision, And It's Still Creepy as Hell

Back in 2015, a team of biochemical researchers in the US figured out how to give a human volunteer night vision, allowing him to see across a distance of over 50 metres in total darkness for several hours.

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Do Children With Cats Have More Mental Health Problems?

International Society of Anthrozoology conducted a research in 2017 and the results were, well kind of expected. The research showed that dogs got way more respect from their owners as compared to cats. There are hundreds and thousands of case studies and research linking to the benefits of owning a dog while for cats, there are fewer researches as compared to the previous.

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Plastic in Pacific 'growing rapidly'

A collection of plastic afloat in the Pacific Ocean is growing rapidly, according to a new scientific estimate. Predictions suggest a build-up of about 80,000 tonnes of plastic in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" between California and Hawaii. This figure is up to sixteen times higher than previously reported, say international researchers.

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San Francisco Becomes First Major US City to Ban Fur Sales

Today, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban fur following weeks of tumultuous debate between animal rights activists and retailers. The Golden City follows two other California cities— Berkeley and West Hollywood— in banning fur sales. This historic victory for animals comes after appeals from PETA and local activists, who have attended numerous committee meetings on the issue and held a rally at City Hall just a few weeks ago.

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Great Pacific Garbage Patch weighs more than 43,000 cars and is much larger than we thought

What weighs more than 43,000 cars and is twice the size of Texas? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A new analysis, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, reveals the makeup of this massive collection of floating trash in the North Pacific in a way that’s never been done before. According to the study, the patch weighs 87,000 tons — 16 times more than previous estimates — and contains more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.

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The Secret Cherry taking over Canada

Able to survive temperatures as low as -40C, Saskatchewan’s prairie cherries are tarter than traditional sweet cherries and can be eaten straight from the tree.

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'Catastrophe' as France's bird population collapses due to pesticides

Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, because insects they feed on have disappeared

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Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything Is Just Zucky.

In Menlo Park, Calif., Facebook is building a real community and testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside them?

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Plight of Phoenix: how long can the world’s 'least sustainable' city survive?

Set deep in the Valley of the Sun, the lush and sprawling ‘megapolis’ has a problem – the rivers

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Marine heatwave set off 'carbon bomb' in world's largest seagrass meadow

A marine heatwave in Western Australia in 2010 set off a massive “carbon bomb”, damaging the world’s largest seagrass meadow, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon that had been collected for thousands of years below the surface. Although Australia doesn’t currently count carbon released from damaged seagrass meadows in its official greenhouse gas emissions, if it did, the results mean those figures might need to be revised upwards by more than 20%.

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Water Shortages will put 5 Billion People at Risk by 2050, U.N. Warns

Climate change, pollution, and growing demand will put increased pressure on the world's water supplies.

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Must drink water!

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Water shortages could affect 5bn people by 2050, UN report warns

More than 5 billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050 due to climate change, increased demand and polluted supplies, according to a UN report on the state of the world’s water. The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs.

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Bill Gates has a joint venture with China Nuclear Corp to build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor

Bill Gates has a joint venture with China Nuclear Corp to build Traveling Wave Nuclear Reactor

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Are Lithuanians obsessed with bees?

Lithuanian, the most conservative of all Indo-European languages, is riddled with references to bees.

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Mats made of active proteins soak up pollution

A new way to keep proteins active outside of cells could lead to a range of uses in environments like war zones and contaminated sites.

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A Warning Cry From the Doomsday Vault

Humanity’s food security is at far more risk than you realize. By Jonas O Bergman. (Mar. 8, 2018)

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Animal Legal Defense Fund Sues Trader Joe’s for Deceptive Egg Carton Labeling

Today the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a consumer protection lawsuit in California Superior Court against Trader Joe’s Company on behalf of a Trader Joe’s egg purchaser. The action seeks to stop Trader Joe’s from deceptively labeling its cage-free eggs and misleading consumers seeking eggs from hens raised in more natural conditions.

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