Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Scheme helping people in England connect with nature led to better mental health, report finds A major scheme helping people in England connect with nature led to big improvements in mental health, a report has found. The prescribing of activities in nature to tackle mental ill health has benefited thousands of people across England, a government-backed project has shown. Continue reading...

ELM Mobility joint venture by Prodrive and Astheimer Design aims for 10,000 one-person quadricycles by 2030 Two British automotive companies have teamed up to build thousands of electric delivery vehicles in the UK – the latest in a line of businesses attempting the risky push into vehicle manufacturing after several prominent failures. The motorsport manufacturer Prodrive and Astheimer Design have said they plan to build 10,000 of their one-person delivery vehicles by 2030, with production planned for the UK. Continue reading...

Nuclear is costly, risky and slow, Ramana says. Why then, he asks in his new book, do governments still champion it? You would be forgiven for thinking that the debate on nuclear power is pretty much settled. Sure, there are still some naysayers, but most reasonable people have come to realise that in an age of climate crisis, we need low-carbon nuclear energy – alongside wind and solar power – to help us transition away from fossil fuels. In 2016, 400 reactors were operating across 31 countries, with one estimate suggesting roughly the same number in operation in mid-2023, accounting for 9.2% of global commercial gross electricity generation. But what if this optimism were in fact wrong, and nuclear power can never live up to its promise? That is the argument the physicist MV Ramana makes in his new book. He says nuclear is costly, dangerous and takes too long to scale up. Nuclear, the work’s title reads, is not the solution. This wasn’t the book Ramana, a professor at the University of British Columbia, planned to write. The problems with nuclear are so “obvious”, he wagered, they do not need to be spelled out. But with the guidance of his editor, he realised his mistake. Even in the contemporary environmental movement, which emerged alongside the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, there are converts. Prominent environmentalists, understandably desperate about the climate crisis, believe it is rational and reasonable to support nuclear power as part of our energy mix. Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by MV Ramana is out now Continue reading...

New data reveals the virus has spread to endangered species in Antarctica – yet the H5N1’s risk to biodiversity, farming and human health is little explored With at least 280 million birds dead since October 2021, the highly infectious H5N1 strain of avian flu has devastated poultry and caused the biggest sudden drop of the world’s wild bird population in decades. The millions of wild birds killed includes tens of thousands of endangered and endemic species – and tens of thousands of mammals have died too. Today, new data, published in Nature Communications, documents the disease’s spread to the southernmost tip of the planet – the Antarctic region – where it has inflicted significant die-offs in elephant seals and fur seals. This outbreak has affected every continent except Oceania, and yet there has been little coverage of the impact on global biodiversity and farming systems – or of potential risks to human health. Continue reading...