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Climate crisis and overfishing contributed to loss of 95% of penguins in two breeding colonies in South Africa, research finds
More than 60,000 penguins in colonies off the coast of South Africa have starved to death as a result of disappearing sardines, a new paper has found.
More than 95% of the African penguins in two of the most important breeding colonies, on Dassen Island and Robben Island, died between 2004 and 2012. The breeding penguins probably starved to death during the moulting period, according to the paper, which said the climate crisis and overfishing were driving declines.
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‘Soilsmology’ aims to map world’s soils and help avert famine, says not-for-profit co-founded by George Monbiot
A groundbreaking soil-health measuring technique could help avert famine and drought, scientists have said.
At the moment, scientists have to dig lots of holes to study the soil, which is time-consuming and damages its structure, making the sampling less accurate.
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In this week’s newsletter: Coroners can’t agree on how to count heat fatalities – and the dismantling of climate investments is leaving fragile communities exposed
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Donald Trump’s decision to boycott Cop30, withdraw the US from the Paris agreement and illegally terminate a slew of investments in renewable energy will not change the reality of climate breakdown for Americans.
In what has become an annual reporting tradition, I found myself in Arizona reporting on heat-related deaths during yet another gruelling heatwave, when temperatures topped 43C (110F) on 13 out of 14 straight days in Phoenix. Before embarking on this trip, I spent weeks combing through hundreds of autopsy reports, which I obtained from two county medical examiners using the Freedom of Information Act. Each death report gave me a glimpse into the person’s life, and I used clues from the case notes to track down friends and loved ones in the hopes of better understanding why heat is killing people in the richest country in the world.
How cyclones and monsoon rains converged to devastate parts of Asia – visual guide
The environmental costs of corn: should the US change how it grows its dominant crop?
‘Those who eat Chilean salmon cannot imagine how much human blood it carries with it’
Americans are dying from extreme heat. Autopsy reports don’t show the full story
‘Deeply demoralizing’: how Trump derailed coal country’s clean-energy revival
‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona
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Australian eco community is a sanctuary for native animals and a showcase of sustainable living
Bill Smart has never heard the word “solarpunk”. But the softly spoken 77-year-old lights up when given the definition from Wikipedia: a literary, artistic and social movement that envisions and works towards actualising a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community.
Solar refers not just to renewable energy but to an optimistic, anti-dystopian vision of the future. Punk is an allusion to its countercultural, do-it-yourself ethic.
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Glen Einich, Cairngorms: A wintry walk in the Rothiemurchus woodland is always glorious. To see some of its barer expanses starting to recover tops it off
In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes wistfully of the ancient Caledonian woods of Rothiemurchus: “Not much is left now of this great pine forest.” She had witnessed the vast fellings of both world wars to meet the need for homegrown timber; it was enough to prompt Frank Fraser Darling to say in 1949: “Our land is so devastated that we might as well have been in a battlefield … see the wreck of … Rothiemurchus that is no more.”
How I wish they could have walked with me there the other day. It was the fading of a cold snap, with snow still mottling the hills above and lying under heather clumps at our feet. In the fresh morning air, beauty lay at every turn; puddles were frozen into intricate patterns, a small lochan was a sheet of ice.
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Many now concerned about ability to make living in fast-changing climate after one of worst grain harvests recorded
Record heat and drought cost Britain’s arable farmers more than £800m in lost production in 2025 in one of the worst harvests recorded, analysis has estimated.
Three of the five worst harvests on record have now occurred since 2020, leaving some farmers asking whether the growing impacts of the climate crisis are making it too financially risky to sow their crops. Farmers are already facing heavy financial pressure as the costs of fertilisers and other inputs have risen faster than prices.
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The demand for use in cooling in Sydney alone is expected to exceed the volume of Canberra’s total drinking water within the next decade
As Australia rides the AI boom with dozens of new investments in datacentres in Sydney and Melbourne, experts are warning about the impact these massive projects will have on already strained water resources.
Water demand to service datacentres in Sydney alone is forecast to be larger than the volume of Canberra’s total drinking water within the next decade.
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At 88, the Canadian reflects on a golden era of underwater discovery and how shipwrecks and the cruel sea are the ‘greatest of all teachers’
Joe MacInnis admits there are simply too many places to begin telling the story of life in the ocean depths. At 88, the famed Canadian undersea explorer, has many decades to draw on. There was the time he and a Russian explorer and deep-water pilot, Anatoly Sagalevich, were snagged by a telephone wire strung from the pilot house of the Titanic, trapping the pair two and a half miles below the surface.
Another might be the moment he and his team stared in disbelief through a porthole window at the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 222-metre (729ft) ship that vanished 50 years ago into the depths of Lake Superior, so quickly that none of the crew could issue a call for help. MacInnis and his team were the first humans to lay eyes on the wreck.
MacInnis diving in Lake Huron, off Tobermory, Canada, in 1969. Photograph: Don Dutton/Toronto Star/Getty Images
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Even tiny ponds can create biodiversity hotspots, as well as helping out during heatwaves and heavy rain
A few years ago I created a little pond in my back garden. It’s barely bigger than a paving slab, but since the pond has been in place we have had a garden teeming with frogs, hedgehogs have taken up residence and bird life has abounded.
Not only do humble ponds like this give nature a boost; they also help to buffer climate extremes. In recent decades, Britain’s ponds have been disappearing, with research revealing that more than half of our dense network of ponds has been lost since the 1900s. Lucy Clarke and colleagues found that 58% of ponds in the Severn Vale region of the UK had been lost since the 1900s, with the average distance between ponds increasing by 25 metres over that time. Similar trends can be seen worldwide, with intensive agriculture and urbanisation obliterating these seemingly insignificant bodies of water.
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Rizik od iznenadne srčane smrti veći je i za osobe s dijabetesom tipa 1 i dijabetesom tipa 2, pokazuje nova studije. Povećanje rizika posebno je uočljivo među mlađim odraslim osobama. Iznenadna srčana smrt je kada netko iznenada i neočekivano umre zbog problema sa srcem. Općenito je rijetka kod mladih i naizgled zdravih osoba.
Mikrobi u našem tijelu ne samo da pomažu u razgradnji hrane, već utječu i na naše zdravlje. Ipak, njihov točan utjecaj nije uvijek shvaćen, posebno u prisutnosti lijekova.. Sada nova studija izvještava kako jedna od najzastupljenijih crijevnih bakterija, Bacteroides dorei, reagira na tetracikline, klasu često propisivanih antibiotika.
Rak dojke može modificirati limfne žile kroz koje putuje do drenažnih limfnih čvorova te se odatle može proširiti na druge dijelove tijela, pokazuje nova studija. Smatra se, da bi ovo otkriće moglo pomoći u razvoju ciljanih terapija koje bi mogle spriječiti ovo širenje.
Američki znanstvenici s Columbia University otkrili su da nedostatak željeza u prehrani u ranoj dobi može spriječiti imunološke stanice u plućima da proizvode ključni protein koji pomaže u borbi protiv virusnih infekcija, čak i nakon što se razina željeza obnovi.
Poremećaji prehrane kod budućih majki povezani su s povećanim rizikom od astme kod njihove djece, bez obzira na vrstu poremećaja, prisutnost istodobne depresije/anksioznosti ili vrijeme izloženosti djeteta, otkriva novo istraživanje.
Sindrom nemirnih nogu (RLS) čest je neurološki poremećaj spavanja koji karakterizira nekontrolirana potreba za pomicanjem nogu, što se često pogoršava noću. Dok je Parkinsonova bolest, progresivni neurodegenerativni poremećaj, obilježena je tremorom, ukočenošću i usporenim pokretima. Oba stanja povezana su s disfunkcijom dopaminergičkog sustava mozga, ali njihova uzročna veza ostala je nejasna.
Djeca koja su primila uobičajeno cjepivo koje pomaže u sprječavanju upale pluća imala su manju vjerojatnost da će nositi bakterije otporne na antibiotike, tvrde rezultati nove studije.
Rezultati nove studije pokazali su, da su se vrijednosti biomarkera Alzheimerove bolesti u krvi povećavale do 95% brže kod osoba s pretilošću nego kod osoba koje nisu pretile.
U nekoliko bolesnih stanja, uključujući infekcije i rak, aktivacija urođenog imuniteta i nedostatak hranjivih tvari javljaju se zajedno. Nova studija otkrila je da ova kombinacija uzrokuje jedinstvenu vrstu stanične smrti, nazvanu mitoksiperiliza.
Istraživanje provedeno u SAD-u otkrilo je da cirkadijalni ritmovi – biološki satovi tijela – mogu utjecati na ishode povezane s gripom, pružajući kliničarima uvid u to kako se biološki procesi mogu koristiti za optimizaciju skrbi za kritično bolesne pacijente s respiratornim virusnim infekcijama.
