Earth Month is ending, but these sustainability tips are evergreen

In celebration of Earth Day, Life Kit asked our audience to share their sustainability hacks – what small (or big) acts do you take in your life to center the longevity of our planet? Your responses ranged from creatively repurposing plastic bags to giving up driving altogether! While Earth Month is ending, we're sharing some of the most useful and actionable tips we received. We hope they inspire you for the rest of the year — no need to wait until Earth Day next year to adopt one of these ideas.

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A blinking fish reveals clues as to how our ancestors evolved from water to land

An unusual blinking fish, the mudskipper, spends much of the day out of the water and is providing clues as to how and why blinking might have evolved during the transition to life on land in our own ancestors. New research shows that these amphibious fish have evolved a blinking behavior that serves many of the same purposes of our blinking.

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Human-driven climate crisis fuelling Horn of Africa drought – study

Region is suffering its worst drought in 40 years after five consecutive years of below-average rainfall

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The FDA no longer requires all drugs to be tested on animals before human trials

In a victory for animal rights advocates, drugmakers can take their products to human clinical trials using alternative testing methods that don't involve animals.

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Our Way of Life Is Poisoning Us

Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage.

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E.P.A. to Propose First Controls on Greenhouse Gases From Power Plants

If the regulation is implemented, it will be the first time the federal government has limited carbon emissions from existing power plants, which generate 25 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases.

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The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study

Human beings have massively changed the Earth system. Greenhouse-gas emissions produced by human activities have caused the global mean temperature to rise by more than 1.1°C compared to the preindustrial era. And every year, there are additional emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases, currently amounting to more than 55 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

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World’s first carbon import tax gets green light

The European Parliament on Tuesday approved the world’s first “carbon tax” for imported goods, imposing tariffs based on the amount of emissions generated in their production.

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Why are we so afraid of nuclear power?

It's greener than renewables and safer than fossil fuels—but facts be damned.

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Up in smoke: Human activities are fuelling wildfires that burn essential carbon-sequestering peatlands

For centuries, society has scorned bogs, fens and swamps — collectively known as peatlands — treating them as wastelands available to be drained and developed without realizing they’re important buffers against climate-changing carbon emissions.

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Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say

Video chats like Zoom and FaceTime are great ways to stay in touch with loved ones—so great, in fact, that parrots are catching on. A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, investigated what happened when a group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones.

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Live bacteria battery

Scientists from Binghamton University have developed a technology for creating batteries with extremely long storage times without losing energy. Calculations show that such a battery can last for at least 100 years in a closed state and will give a charge after activation. The trick is that inside the battery, there are no chemical elements but a living organism - a kind of "spirit of the battery." In fact, the device is more correctly called a biogenerator because energy is generated here when the bacterium Bacillus subtilis begins to create spores.

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A Hidden Underwater Resource Is Worth Way More Than Expected, Study Reveals

Researchers have just calculated the value society gets from a common but hidden underwater resource, and found it's way higher than we ever expected.

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India has lost the second-largest forest area among all countries in five years

India lost 668,400 hectares (ha) of jungles on average between 2015 and 2020, a new report has said.

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70-Year-Old Mystery Over Bizarre 'Tully Monster' May Finally Have Been Solved

The most thorough study yet of a mysterious creature that lived 300 million years ago has ruled that it had no bones after all.

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Volcanic microbe eats CO2 ‘astonishingly quickly’, say scientists

A microbe discovered in a volcanic hot spring gobbles up carbon dioxide “astonishingly quickly”, according to the scientists who found it. The researchers hope to utilise microbes that have naturally evolved to absorb CO2 as an efficient way of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Ending the burning of fossil fuels is critical in ending the climate crisis, but most scientists agree CO2 will also need to be sucked from the air to limit future damage.

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What AI Means For Animals

The ethics of artificial intelligence has attracted considerable attention, and for good reason. But the ethical implications of AI for billions of nonhuman animals are not often discussed. Given the severe impacts some AI systems have on huge numbers of animals, this lack of attention is deeply troubling.

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Black bear breaks into vehicle, guzzles 69 cans of pop | CBC News

A woman on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast awoke to a sticky situation last Thursday when she found a bear with a sweet tooth had broken into her car and crushed dozens of cans of soda she had left there overnight. 

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Fears for England’s frog and toad population after drought

Conservationists blame changing weather patterns as low numbers of amphibians found across country

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Mosquito Saliva Can Actually Suppress Our Immune System, Study Finds

We know mosquitoes are a serious threat to our health as human beings– in fact, they're the world's deadliest animal, with mosquito-borne diseases responsible for more than a million deaths a year.

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After 18 years, Europe's largest nuclear reactor starts regular output

Finland's much-delayed Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor, Europe's largest, began regular output early on Sunday, its operator said, boosting energy security in a region to which Russia has cut gas and power supplies.

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Apple to Use 100 Percent Recycled Rare Earth Elements by 2025

Multinational technology company Apple will use 100 percent recycled rare earth elements for magnets in its devices by 2025. Silicon Valley giant Apple announced last week to boost the use of recycled cobalt for all Apple-designed batteries and recycled Rare Earth Elements (REE) for magnets to 100 percent by 2025. Additionally, the company estimates that all Apple-designed printed circuit boards will use 100 percent recycled tin soldering and 100 percent recycled gold plating by that time.

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Plastic wrap made from seaweed withstands heat and is compostable

A thin material made from seaweed can handle high temperatures but only takes a few weeks to break down in a composting bin

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Climate change: How can Paris adapt to 50°C heat waves?

A fact-finding mission makes 85 recommendations to prevent the French capital from becoming uninhabitable for part of the year.

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Clean Energy Is Thriving in Texas. So Why Are State Republicans Trying to Stifle It?

Texas leads the nation for generating the most electricity from solar and wind and plays an outsized role in manufacturing electric vehicles. A slew of new bills could change that.

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Invasive ‘stinknet’ growing in the Phoenix-area creating headaches for homeowners

You may have seen it around the Valley and thought it was a wildflower, but Globe Chamomile, or ‘stinknet,’ is an invasive plant. Over the years, more and more Arizonans have been complaining about how much there is, given that when it dries out, it becomes fire fuel.

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Tornado alley is expanding — and scientists don’t know why

Tornadoes are becoming more frequent in populated parts of the United States and are often occurring as damaging clusters — a development seen in recent deadly outbreaks from Alabama to Michigan. The number, damage and deadliness of individual tornadoes has held roughly steady over the past 50 years, federal experts with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration told The Hill.

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California’s ‘big melt’ has begun and could bring perilous flooding with it

Spring has offered California a welcome reprieve from the record rains and historic snowfall that hammered the state in recent weeks, but a new danger wrought by the warming weather looms large. The state’s enormous snowpack will soon begin to melt – and communities are bracing for waters to rise yet again. Trillions of gallons of water packed within the record level of snow blanketing the Sierra Nevada range are expected to rush into rivers and reservoirs as the weather heats up, heightening flood risks in areas already saturated by the state’s extremely wet winter.

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Global wind energy will exceed 1 TW by the end of 2023

Global wind energy will pass the 1-terawatt (TW) threshold for installed capacity by the end of 2023, according to the newest market outlook from Wood Mackenzie.

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Environmental Justice Advocates Urge California to Stop Issuing New Drilling Permits in Neighborhoods - Inside Climate News

The first thing Nalleli Cobo wanted to do when she heard the oil well in her South Los Angeles neighborhood was shutting down was scream. She had so much pent-up energy she didn’t know what else to do. Cobo grew up breathing foul-smelling, toxic emissions from an oil production site just 30 feet from her home. She sometimes caught whiffs of chocolate and citrus, which she thinks came from chemicals used to mask the fetid smell.

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Your water may be full of "forever chemicals" — and the EPA isn't even testing for many of them

The term "forever chemical" might sound ominous, but there is a good reason for that. Formally known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), so-called forever chemicals are used in hundreds of common products for water-proofing and stain-resistance. They're also linked to a tremendous number of health problems, including liver and fertility issues.

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Could the dodo come back from extinction?

The dodo's genome has been sequenced from a DNA sample, but that's just the first hurdle to overcome in bringing a species back from the dead

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Emissions From Banned Ozone-Destroying Chemicals Are Mysteriously Rising

Thirty years after countries agreed to ease up on the use of chemicals damaging the ozone layer, there are promising signs that the ozone will be fully recovered by the 2060s. But we’re not out of the woods yet. A study published this month in Nature Geoscience shows that emissions from dangerous gases banned in the 1980s are actually on the rise today—with implications not only for the ozone layer but for climate change as well.

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A rare Texas wildflower gets protection under the Endangered Species Act

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declared the bracted twistflower, native to the Edwards Plateau, a threatened species, a month after putting another Texas plant on the endangered list.

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Three species of extremely primitive spider discovered in China

Mesothelean spiders diverged from all other spiders long before the first dinosaurs – three species of these living fossils have just been identified in western Hunan province

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Will flying ever be green?

On 16 December 2021, a group of men dressed in the sober, branded casual wear of the Silicon Valley startup gathered on the asphalt at an airstrip outside Salinas, California. In front of them stood a black shiny capsule on three spindly legs, which resembled the offspring of a suppository and a golf trolley, with a V-tail like a humpback whale. Its single cross-span wing had four banks of three rotor blades – six at the front and six at the back – which made the sound of a loud hairdryer.

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Do We Need Armageddon to Create Sustainable Societies?

There’s a narrative that the climate crisis will lead us down one of two pathways. The road towards sustainability, where a radical social transformation is triggered so that each person’s needs are met within environmental limits. Or, the road towards armageddon — where we continue full steam ahead with business of usual, which leads to some apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario where everyone dies. It’s a crude narrative that wouldn’t be out of place in a budget sci-fi film.

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Walmart plans own EV charger network at U.S. stores by 2030

Walmart Inc plans to have its own network of electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 to tap into the growing adoption of EVs in the United States.

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One million human deaths linked to factory farming, set to double by 2050

The excessive use of antibiotics in factory farming is causing the premature deaths of nearly one million people and $400 billion in global economic losses each year, according to a report titled Global Public Health Cost of Antimicrobial Resistance Related to Antibiotic Use on Factory Farms published today by World Animal Protection.

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Baseball home runs could increase by 10% in the next 80 years. Here's why

Home runs are becoming more frequent in Major League Baseball (MLB) due to climate change, a new study finds. "There's a very clear physical mechanism at play in which warmer temperatures reduce the density of air," study co-author Justin Mankin(opens in new tab), an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, said in the statement. "Baseball is a game of ballistics, and a batted ball is going to fly farther on a warm day."

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A dramatic new EPA rule will force up to 60% of new US car sales to be EVs in just 7 years

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to make a groundbreaking announcement this week that will make the majority of new US car sales EVs by 2032, according to a breaking New York Times scoop.

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See what a year looks like in Svalbard, Norway, the fastest-warming place on Earth

Melting fjords, increasing avalanches, imperiled wildlife. Our photographer documented the effects of climate change through all four seasons in Svalbard, Norway.

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Over-consumption in the world’s richest countries is destroying children’s environments globally, new report says

The majority of wealthy countries are creating unhealthy, dangerous and noxious conditions for children across the world, according to the latest Report Card published today by UNICEF Office of Research - Innocenti.

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US states consider ban on cosmetics with 'forever chemicals'

A growing number of state legislatures are considering banning the sale of cosmetics

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Dozens of Democrats press Biden on soot pollution

A total of 88 House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday said the Biden administration’s proposed standards for soot air pollution are not stringent enough.

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Harvard professor’s fossil fuel links under scrutiny over climate grant

Colleagues and students query role of Jody Freeman, who won prestigious research grant despite sitting on ConocoPhillips board

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Colorado River Basin reservoirs still face grim outlook despite healthy snowpack

Many Colorado reservoirs could see some recovery, but the system's two largest reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, still face grim prospects.

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India's relocated cheetah gives birth to first cubs in the country in 70 years

A three-year-old cheetah who was one of eight radio-collared cats relocated from Namibia to India's Kuno National Park has given birth to four cubs. Video showed the baby cubs, who were born on Wednesday, in a pre-release enclosure yawning while cuddled close together.

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Barking with Joy: Happy Books About Dogs That Will Lift Your Spirits

This article showcases our top picks for Happy Books About Dogs. We reached out to industry leaders and experts who have contributed the suggestions within this article (they have been credited for their contributions below).

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Neuralink’s FDA Troubles Are Just the Beginning

Facing animal abuse investigations, Elon Musk’s neurotech company is stumbling

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