Record floods propel aggressive Mozambique tilapia throughout Mary River, compromising efforts to save ancient fish and endangered turtles
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Record floods have propelled an aggressive invasive fish species across a south-east Queensland river catchment, compromising efforts to save endangered and ancient fishes and turtles.
The Moonaboola (Mary) river catchment is home to several threatened species, including the Mary River turtle, the white-throated snapping turtle (known for breathing through its bottom), the Mary River cod and the Australian lungfish, which has survived for 150m years and is considered a living fossil.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
09/27/2024 - 10:00
09/27/2024 - 09:00
Builders already have the tools needed to build cooler homes for an increasingly hotter world
The US sweltered under record-breaking heat this year, with new research suggesting that air conditioning is no longer enough to keep homes cool. Spiraling energy demands and costs of indoor cooling now have planners looking to alternative ways to keep buildings cool – some fresh out of the lab, others centuries old.
“The amount of buildings we expect to go up in the next couple decades is just staggering,” says Alexi Miller, director of building innovation at the non-profit New Buildings Institute (NBI). “If we build them the way we built them yesterday, we’re going to use a phenomenal amount of energy. There are lots of ways we could be doing this better. It’s not all fancy, emerging technology – there’s some basic stuff we don’t do nearly enough.”
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09/27/2024 - 07:53
Phoebe Plummer, 23, receives two-year prison term while Anna Holland, 22, given 20-month sentence over incident
Two Just Stop Oil activists have been jailed for throwing tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers after one of them told a judge she would “accept whatever sentences I receive with a smile”.
Phoebe Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years in prison for causing an estimated £10,000-worth of damage to the artwork’s frame at the National Gallery in London in 2022.
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09/27/2024 - 07:37
Domesticated creatures feature heavily in contemporary contributions to Guardian column compared to diaries of 1920s
In the early 1920s, the British countryside was a place where blackbirds sang, rabbits scurried and the summer skies were animated by swallows and house martins. A century on, blackbirds still sing and ancient oaks stand proud but the landscape is dominated by sheep, cows and dogs – according to Guardian country diarists.
A study of the most-featured species in the Country Diary column from 2021-24 and a century earlier reveals a surprising dominance of domesticated creatures in the mind’s eye of the contemporary contributors.
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09/27/2024 - 06:57
Storm made landfall in Florida and moved quickly, causing deaths and about 4m power outages in multiple states
Hurricane Helene – live updates
Helene has reportedly killed at least 20 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.
The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph (225km/h) – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.
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09/27/2024 - 05:00
JD Vance had to cancel two events in Georgia on Thursday after the category 4 storm surged across the region
JD Vance has been forced to cancel two campaign events in Georgia due to the threat posed by Hurricane Helene, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s presidential bid being affected by extreme weather worsened by a climate crisis that both Trump and Vance have routinely mocked.
Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, scrapped plans to make a speech in Macon, Georgia, and then hold a rally in Flowery Branch, Georgia, on Thursday due to the hurricane, which has surged across the Gulf of Mexico and hit Florida’s west coast as a category 4 storm.
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09/27/2024 - 05:00
Climate activists opposed to the Mountain Valley pipeline were accused of breaking West Virginia’s new critical infrastructure law
Revealed: how the fossil fuel industry helps spread anti-protest laws across the US
It was around dawn on a chilly day last November when West Virginia state troopers forcibly extricated Jerome Wagner out from a 25ft-deep pit where he was locked to a drilling machine being used to finish construction of a beleaguered gas pipeline.
The veteran climate activist was trying to draw attention to the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – a 300-mile (480km) fossil fuel project mired by environmental controversies and blocked by court orders and regulatory red tape until it was pushed through by the Biden administration in mid-2023.
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09/27/2024 - 05:00
Findings come amid growing concerns about overuse of medicines in farm animals and rise of superbugs
None of the UK’s large supermarket chains are ensuring their suppliers use antibiotics in the most responsible way, an assessment by campaigners has found, despite heightened concerns about their overuse in farm animals.
Supermarkets play an important role in the fight against superbugs, because most of the world’s antibiotics are used on livestock and retailers can enforce strict standards on the farm suppliers they use. Resistant bacteria known as superbugs are rapidly developing, posing an increasing risk to human health.
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09/27/2024 - 04:00
Three-quarters plan to invest solely in continued fossil fuel production between now and 2030, research shows
North Sea oil and gas companies are failing to switch their investments to renewable energy, research has shown.
Three-quarters of the offshore oil and gas companies operating in the UK plan to invest solely in continued fossil fuel production between now and the end of the decade, according to data compiled by the analyst company Rystad.
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09/27/2024 - 03:00
High levels of antibiotics and other drugs have been found in water in the country’s most treasured and protected landscapes, raising concerns over antimicrobial resistance
Photographs by Christopher Thomond
Nestled within the Peak District national park, the stream known as Brook Head Beck meanders between undulating green hills. It is mossy and dank by the river, surrounded by the gentle trickling sound of water, the smell of leaves starting to rot underfoot, and a weave of branches overhead with leaves turning golden in the autumn chill. This place is renowned for its quaint English beauty, and the government has designated it an ecological site of special scientific interest, meaning it holds some of the country’s most precious wildlife.
Yet within this pristine-looking stream flows a concoction of chemicals that could pose a threat to the freshwater organisms and humans who come into contact with it. Recent testing found it had the second highest levels of chemical pollution in the UK – after a site in Glasgow – with concentrations of pharmaceuticals higher than inner-city rivers in London, Belfast, Leeds and York.
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