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Beach clean organiser wants to assess amount of masks and gloves discarded during coronavirus crisis
Volunteers in this year’s Great British Beach Clean are being asked to record the personal protective equipment (PPE) they find, to get a clearer picture of the volume of plastic masks and gloves discarded during the coronavirus pandemic and their impact on the environment.
The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), which organises the annual September event, is urging people to organise their own surveys with smaller groups of friends, family and “bubbles”, in line with government guidance.
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Data reveals just 14% of good ecological standard and none of good chemical standard
All English rivers have failed to meet quality tests for pollution amid concerns over the scale of sewage discharges and agricultural and industrial chemicals entering the water system.
Data published on Thursday reveals just 14% of English rivers are of good ecological standard, a rating that suggests they are as close to their natural state as possible.
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Castle Bytham, Rutland:These symbols of might from mite line the plough furrows where they fall to become food, or mulch
Just outside this ancient village is a little hill. There aren’t many hills here, so you tend to notice them. Back in the day, this one had a Norman castle on it. Like many, that met a torturous end. And now, like others, it has become that weird rural symbol: a scratch of ornate type on the map, and a ghost in a place name – Castle Bytham.
The broadleaf wood on top of the hill never saw the castle. These trees are slender, youthful. But they carry another, more venerable rural symbol. The wood ends hard at a field edge, where a path runs. The limbs of the trees lean over it, like spectators over a rail. And there they are: acorns, by the fistfuls and fistfuls.
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Hundreds of vessels caught logging 73,000 hours of fishing in just one month in new analysis
A vast fishing armada of Chinese vessels just off the Galápagos Islands logged an astounding 73,000 hours of fishing during just one month as it pulled up thousands of tonnes of squid and fish, a new report based on data analysis has found.
The discovery of the giant flotilla off the archipelago that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution stirred controversy and outrage in Ecuador and abroad.
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As forests evolve in the face of climate crisis, some surprising methods are being used to track how species migrate
Angelica Patterson is on the lookout, shotgun in hand, as she hikes through New York state’s Black Rock Forest. She focuses on her target high up in the canopy, then bang – a branch falls to the ground. “I can’t climb trees, building scaffolding is expensive, and using a slingshot requires a lot of skill,” she says. “A shotgun is an efficient, cheap and effective way to collect the high-up leaves that have full exposure to the sun.”
Patterson puts the northern red oak branch into a bucket of water, cutting the submerged stem to ensure that its leaves continue to function, before walking back to her laboratory in the forest.
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Number of fires in world’s biggest tropical wetlands more than doubled in first half of 2020 compared with last year
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Tyre attachment designed by four students aims to reduce road transport pollution
A device that captures microplastic particles from tyres as they are emitted – and could help reduce the devastating pollution they cause – has won its designers a James Dyson award.
The Tyre Collective, a group of masters students from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, scooped the UK prize of the international competition with their solution for the growing environmental scourge of tyre wear caused by road transport.
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Strides are being made towards an open access atlas that could predict where dangerous animal-borne viruses will next appear
How do you predict where a deadly tropical disease such as Ebola, possibly the most virulent in the world, will appear next? Since it first emerged in a small town on the edge of a Congolese forest, it has broken out in seven other African countries, often thousands of miles apart.
Sometimes it has spilled out of remote rainforest and then disappeared for years. Other times it has turned up in cities, baffling world bodies and governments that can only try to respond as fast as possible. But actually, given good data, the notoriously unpredictable zoonotic – or animal-borne – disease, which is passed to humans via primates and probably bats, may actually be quite predictable, believes David Redding, a researcher at the ZSL Institute of Zoology in London.
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Greg Langmo’s decades-old business was among those hit when a lethal strain decimated poultry barns across America
In April 2015, Greg Langmo’s five turkey farms teemed with toms, hens and chicks. His family’s decades-old business in Meeker county, Minnesota, was thriving, and the hundreds of thousands of birds he bred and sold each year were healthy.
And then, late one evening, Langmo’s phone rang. Birds in one of his barns, usually active, were sitting, unable to make the short walk to their feeders and waterers. The following morning, he found hundreds of limp, white-feathered bodies. Langmo sent some dead toms to the University of Minnesota’s veterinary diagnostic laboratory. That night, the farmer lay sleepless. Again, his phone rang. It was a vet from the lab: “You got it.”
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The protest movement’s call for meaningful participation highlights the failings of dysfunctional Westminster politics
It’s good entertainment, but that’s all it is. Seeing Boris Johnson ritually dismembered in parliament might make us feel better, but nothing changes. He still has an 80-seat majority, though less than 30% of the electorate voted for the Conservatives. We are reduced, for five long years, to spectators.
Our system allows the victorious government a mandate to do what it likes between elections, without further reference to the people. As we have seen, this can include breaking international law, suspending parliament, curtailing the judiciary, politicising the civil service, attacking the Electoral Commission and invoking royal prerogative powers to make policy without anyone’s consent. This is not democracy, but a parody of democracy.
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