Eight million bottles' worth of Champagne grapes wiped out by freak hailstorms

hampagne has become the latest French wine growing region to feel the wrath of the heavens after freakishly violent hail storms wiped out the equivalent of eight million bottles of grapes and roughly €125 million (£110m) of fizz. The extent of the damage emerged barely a week after hailstones “the size of pigeons’ eggs” devastated thousands of acres of prime vineyards in Bordeaux, prompting the French government to promise support for winegrowers, some of whom have lost their entire crop.

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Climate Change Made Zombie Ants Even More Cunning

The parasitic fungus that drives ants to sabotage their own colonies has adapted to zombify their quarry better in different climates.

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Mystery of Earth's Missing Nitrogen Solved

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown environmental source of the element

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Japanese Whalers Killed 122 Pregnant Whales and 114 Babies Last Summer

Japanese research vessels harpooned, killed and necropsied 333 Antarctic minke whales during an annual hunt last summer — and 122 of those whales were pregnant.

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10 massive corporations going big on solar power

Sustainable Energy looks at the top 10 corporations in the U.S. by their installed capacity of solar power.

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Halogen light bulbs could disappear from Australian stores within two years

Halogen lights will disappear from Australia within two years, as the industry and federal government pivot towards more efficient and environmentally-friendly LED lighting. A ban on halogen bulbs, which use four times the energy of LED globes, was announced last month at a meeting of state and federal environment ministers. The ban is to come into effect from September 2020 but the bulbs could start disappearing from retail stores in as little as 12 months, according to the industry’s peak body, Lighting Council Australia.

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The Silence of the Bugs

Is an insect Armageddon afoot?

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Mysterious wolf-like animal found in Montana igniting online speculation

A mysterious creature was shot and killed in Montana earlier this month. The wolf-like animal had long grayish fur, a large head and an extended snout. Although it looked similar to a wolf, its ears were too long. A rancher near Denton, Montana, shot the strange animal on May 16, according to the Great Falls Tribune. Wildlife officials are stumped.

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Global warming linked with rising antibiotic resistance

New research suggests rising temperatures are encouraging antibiotic resistance in cities across the United States. Until now, health researchers assumed antibiotic resistance was primarily the result of overprescription and overuse. But a new study suggests climate change is also to blame. "The effects of climate are increasingly being recognized in a variety of infectious diseases, but so far as we know this is the first time it has been implicated in the distribution of antibiotic resistance over geographies," Derek MacFadden, an infectious disease specialist and...

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Bumblebees confused by iridescent colors

Iridescence is a form of structural colour which uses regular repeating nanostructures to reflect light at slightly different angles, causing a colour-change effect.

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Meet the 'hero rats' clearing Cambodia's landmines

The sun is barely up when Thoeun Theap pulls into a clearing in the thick Cambodian bush with a giant African rat on the seat beside him. In a few minutes the two will be out there beyond the treeline, scouring the earth for the remnants of a war Mr Theap fled almost 40 years ago. He spends most mornings out here in no man's land with his team of pouched rat handlers from APOPO and de-miners from the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC). A step in the wrong direction could see them lose a leg.

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Newest NOAA weather satellite suffers critical malfunction

Cooling system isn’t cooling, knocking key sensors offline. By Scott K. Johnson.

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McDonald's shareholders vote against plastic straw study

McDonald's shareholders Thursday turned aside a proposal to take the first step toward a ban on plastic straws. A shareholder proposal backed by a consumer group received only 7.65% of the vote at the company's annual meeting. The measure would have required McDonald's to prepare a report to shareholders about the business risks of using plastic straws.

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Antibiotics in Meat Could Be Damaging Our Guts

The F.D.A. banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals last year. One organic cattle farmer is sure the ban is being flouted.

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Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don’t Fix Climate Change by 2023

A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years. By Scott Alden.

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Brazil backs 'Guardians of the Amazon' in their war on loggers

Rio de Janeiro: In a rare move, Brazil is providing armed back-up to indigenous people protecting the world's most threatened tribe from illegal loggers, a decision that campaigners lauded as a "landmark" in efforts to halt deforestation in the Amazon.

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Could recent supernovae be responsible for mass extinctions?

Two nearby supernovae that exploded about 2.5 and eight million years ago could have resulted in a staggered depletion of Earth's ozone layer, leading to a variety of repercussions for life on Earth. By Julia Demarines.

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Curious cat hangs on to van at 60 mph

The Nebraska Humane Society said staff had never seen anything like this until KETV NewsWatch 7 showed them the video. Now, there’s a ‘cat chase’ for updates on the feline or someone who may know what happened. “My daughter says, ‘There's a cat on that van,’ and I was like, ‘Oh no, that's a raccoon,'” recalled Ronda Rankin. “When my husband pulls up closer, I'm like, ‘Oh my God, no, that's a cat.’”

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Australia completes world's largest cat-proof fence to protect endangered marsupials

The world’s largest cat-proof fence has been completed in central Australia, creating a 94 square kilometre sanctuary for endangered marsupials. The 44km fence – made of 85,000 pickets, 400km of wire and 130km of netting – surrounds the Newhaven wildlife sanctuary, a former cattle station that has been bought by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. Endangered species such as the bilby, the burrowing bettong and the mala (also known as the rufous hare-wallaby) will have a chance to replenish their populations inside the massive sanctuary, safe from Australia’s feral cat epidemic.

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8 African cities are aiming to be carbon free by 2050

The continent is highly vulnerable to climate change - but it's starting to fight back.

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Human race just 0.01% of all life but has eradicated most other living things

Groundbreaking assessment of all life on Earth reveals humanity’s surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact

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Shell faces shareholder challenge over climate change approach

Royal Dutch Shell faces a shareholder challenge over climate change this week, as investors insist oil and gas firms should offer more transparency and action on carbon emissions. A growing number of pension funds have backed a resolution at Shell’s AGM on Tuesday that calls on the company to set tougher carbon targets that are in line with the goals of the Paris climate deal.

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Ethanol Is a Never-Ending Gravy Train for Corn Farmers and Ethanol Producers. But What About the Rest of America?

What angers me are the legislative and regulatory mandates that force us to buy gasoline that is 10 percent ethanol—even though it gets lower mileage than 100 percent gasoline, brings none of the proclaimed benefits (environmental or otherwise), drives up food prices, and damages small engines. In fact, in most areas, it’s almost impossible to find E-zero gasoline, and that problem will get worse as mandates increase.

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Turning carbon dioxide into rock - forever

Nested in the snow-covered mountains of western Iceland, a maze of turbines and pipes belches thick billows of steam. This mammoth structure is responsible for providing power to a country where 100% of the electricity comes from renewable sources. The Hellisheidi power station, 25km (15 miles) outside Reykjavik, is Iceland's main geothermal plant, and is one of the largest in the world.

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Something killed a lot of sperm whales in the past—and it wasn’t whalers

Sperm whales are a genetic puzzle. The deep-diving, squid-eating giants that inspired Moby Dick are found in every ocean, where they can mate with partners from around the world; as such, they should be quite genetically diverse. Yet, their genetic diversity is actually very low, hinting that something killed a lot of them off in the past. And that something wasn’t whalers.

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Bees are being 'driven to the edge' as humans and climate change destroy their havens

A third of Irish bee species are threatened with extinction with bumblebee populations falling year-on-year due to removal of hedgerows and ditches, use of pesticides and insecticides and climate change. Tomorrow is the first ever global World Bee Day and experts hope an EU ban on insecticides linked to declining bee populations will help prevent further deterioration of the vital pollinators here. Local authorities and homeowners could also help by planting bee-friendly flowers including snowdrops...

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Cairo: A Type of Love Story

Raising a family during a revolution.

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Investigation Reveals Tyson Foods as #1 Culprit in Largest "Dead Zone" on Earth

Nearly 9000 square-miles of ocean along the Gulf Coast is uninhabitable by marine life. Loaded with agricultural toxins and devoid of oxygen, it’s the largest “dead zone” in US history, and last summer it got even bigger. We’ve known the cause of the ecological “dead zone” for decades — fertilizer run-off from Big Agriculture via the Mississippi River — but a new investigative report identifies the number one polluter by name, Tyson Foods.

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Climate change on track to cause major insect wipeout, scientists warn

Global warming is on track to cause a major wipeout of insects, compounding already severe losses, according to a new analysis. Insects are vital to most ecosystems and a widespread collapse would cause extremely far-reaching disruption to life on Earth, the scientists warn. Their research shows that, even with all the carbon cuts already pledged by nations so far, climate change would make almost half of insect habitat unsuitable by the end of the century, with pollinators like bees particularly affected.

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10 rivers are responsible for 90% of the plastic in the ocean

Around 90 percent of the plastic polluting our oceans comes from just ten rivers, a new study has shown. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, with the remaining two — the Nile and the Niger — in Africa. The report, conducted by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, was based on dozens of reports, as well as the debris collected at 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers.

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Can Bringing Back Mammoths Help Stop Climate Change?

If you managed to time travel back to Ice-Age Europe, you might be forgiven for thinking you had instead crash-landed in some desolate part of the African savannah. But the chilly temperatures and the presence of six-ton shaggy beasts with extremely long tusks would confirm you really were in the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known as the Ice Age. You’d be visiting the mammoth steppe, an environment that stretched from Spain across Eurasia and the Bering Strait to Canada.

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Common fungal infections are 'becoming incurable' and causing more deaths than malaria or breast cancer worldwide, say researchers

Common fungal infections are “becoming incurable” with global mortality exceeding that for malaria or breast cancer because of drug-resistant strains which “terrify” doctors and threaten the food chain, a new report has warned. Writing in a special “resistance” edition of the journal Science, researchers from Imperial College London and Exeter University have shown how crops, animals and people are all threatened by nearly omnipresent fungi. By Alex Matthews-King.

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NASA’s Jim Bridenstine Agrees Humans Are Responsible for Climate Change

It's no secret that the Trump administration has filled cabinet positions and other senior staff jobs with people who reject or ignore established climate science. On Monday, for example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington that he’s “not going to get into the climate debate.” He also said he could not endorse climate research by one of his own agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose satellites...

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Mysterious rise in banned ozone-destroying chemical shocks scientists

A sharp and mysterious rise in emissions of a key ozone-destroying chemical has been detected by scientists, despite its production being banned around the world. Unless the culprit is found and stopped, the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from damaging UV radiation, could be delayed by a decade. The source of the new emissions has been tracked to east Asia, but finding a more precise location requires further investigation.

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A Close-up View of the "Dandelion" (Taraxacum officinale)

by Brian Johnston

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New labelling helps UK shoppers avoid plastic packaging

Iceland is among the first supermarkets to introduce the new ‘trust mark’ that shows shoppers which food packaging has no hidden plastic in it. A new plastic-free “trust mark” is being introduced today, allowing shoppers to see at a glance whether products use plastic in their packaging. The label will be prominently displayed on food and drink products, making it easier for consumers to choose greener alternatives. UK supermarket Iceland and Dutch supermarket chain Ekoplaza - which introduced plastic-free aisles earlier this year – will start using the new labelling, alongside Teapigs teabags, but campaigners hope others will follow suit.

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Non-Human Animals Can Mentally Replay Past Events: Study

A team of Indiana University researchers has reported the first evidence that non-human animals (rats) can replay a stream of multiple episodic memories. The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

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Almost half of Australian big business moving to renewables

Almost half of Australia’s large businesses are actively transitioning to cheaper renewable energy, including many going off the grid by building their own generators and battery storage, as power bills threaten their bottom line. A new report by the Climate Council details the increased speed of a business-led transition to renewables as power bills have increased. The average household and small-business energy bill is more than 80% higher than a decade ago. Gas prices have increased threefold in five years.

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Huge Fissures open on Hawaiian Volcano | Pictures

Lava erupts from a fissure east of the Leilani Estates subdivision during ongoing eruptions of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii.

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Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench

Planet or Plastic? : Even one of the most remote places on Earth couldn't hide from the scourge of plastic trash.

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'Incredible' bioluminescence gives California coastline an eerie blue glow

A dense bloom of bioluminescent algae off the coast of southern California has lit up the Pacific Ocean with an eerie and fantastical neon blue glow, sending photographers and spectators to the beach at night in hopes of witnessing the natural phenomenon. The algal bloom, also known as a red tide, was observed this week lighting up the waves along a 15-mile stretch of coastline.

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Remains of ancient horse discovered at Pompeii

For the first time ever, archaeologists have been able to cast the complete figure of a horse that perished in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii. The "extraordinary" discovery was made outside the city walls, in Civita Giuliana to the north of Pompeii proper, the site's directors announced this week. Excavation in the area revealed what archaeologists identified as a stable, complete with the remains of a trough.

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This NYC high-rise building cleans the air like trees do

SoHo remains a super-trendy neighborhood in New York City, but a new high-rise in the neighborhood just might make the area smell a little sweeter. 570 Broome, designed by Turkish architect Tahir Demircioglu’s hot boutique architecture firm Builtd, is using a unique combination of two emerging technologies to constantly clean the air around the building — an attractive and welcome feature for a building that is located adjacent to the Holland Tunnel.

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Tesla’s giant battery in Australia reduced grid service cost by 90%

Tesla’s giant Powerpack battery in Australia has been in operation for about 6 months now and we are just starting to discover the magnitude of its impact on the local energy market. A new report now shows that it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it has already taken a majority share of the market.

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When will the next ice age happen?

Throughout Earth’s history, climate has varied greatly. For hundreds of millions of years, the planet had no polar ice caps. Without this ice, the sea level was 70 meters higher. At the other extreme, about 700 million years ago, Earth became almost entirely covered in ice, during an event known as “Snowball Earth.” What causes these swings in the planet’s climate? Lorraine Lisiecki investigates.

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The Last Days of the Blue-Blood Harvest

Every year, more than 400,000 crabs are bled for the miraculous medical substance that flows in their veins—now pharmaceutical companies are finally committing to an alternative that doesn't harm animals.

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The scientist still fighting for the clean fuel the world forgot

In the closing weeks of 2008, the US Department of Energy invited politicians and press to a dedication ceremony for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. The state-of-the-art lab, backed by $125 million in federal funding, filled the top floor of a glimmering glass office building that reflected the grand hopes for advanced biofuels.

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Belgium: Gassing of baby chicks at Brussels airport sparks outrage

Belgian politicians and animal rights activists have slammed the gassing of 20,000 chicks at Brussels Airport. The animals were meant to be flown to Kinshasa. Airport firefighters refused to take part in the killing. About 20,000 chicks were killed off to end their suffering after their flight from Brussels to Kinshasa was delayed, leaving the transport container on the tarmac over an unusually hot weekend.

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A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next

The world’s most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers. The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren’t just man’s best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market.

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Peruvian Amazon Loses Over a Million Hectares: Official

Peru is one of 17 "megadiverse" countries on Earth, which together contain 70 percent of the world's biodiversity, according to the UN's environmental agency. The Peruvian Amazon lost nearly two million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2016, or more than 123,000 hectares a year, figures made public Tuesday by the ministry of the environment.

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