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High-speed video captures a previously unknown process that lets a honeybee’s two-millimetre stinger pump venom even after detaching from the insect’s body. Using a clear gel that mimics human skin as a target, researchers from Macquarie University detached the stingers and then filmed them in action pumping venom
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River Lagan, Belfast: Right now you can see winter in the black-headed gull plumage, and spring in the mallards’. Yet feathers are also vital to how birds even came to exist
On my walk along the towpath, I pick up a small grey feather. It’s a flight feather, probably from the wing of a feral pigeon. I stroke it absently as I watch the birds that are swimming on the river’s surface. Steeped in autumn sunshine, the different species are also feathered with other seasons. Summer is in the fuzzy down of a late-hatched moorhen chick. Winter gleams in the white heads of the “black-headed” gulls. And, while a mallard’s emerald-green head is, as yet, tatty as old velvet, his crisply curled drake’s tails herald the coming spring.
If the story of birds is told in their plumage, then moult – the shedding and regrowth of feathers – is the turn of a page. The moorhen chick reminds me that the first chapter is about keeping warm. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, almost tucking the pigeon feather in as well. While our hair and birds’ feathersare both made of keratin, they differ in how they grow. In essence, hair extends as a single linear thread, whereas down feathers emerge frothing in all directions. As a fledgling matures, its outer feathers then lengthen, with a central shaft supporting branches that can flatten out and zip together to make a smooth surface.
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Brussels uses WTO rules to quickly impose quota, which will halve Chinese market share to 3%
The EU is to limit the number of hybrid electric vehicles imported from China to 350,000 cars a year, the European Commission has confirmed.
Imports have been soaring in the past two years; about 800,000 battery and plug-in hybrids are likely to be sold this year.
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Clear skies bring warm days and cold nights to Montenegro, while a low-pressure system moves towards Aegean Sea
Temperatures fluctuated dramatically in the Balkans last week, with unusually large differences between daytime highs and overnight lows – known as the diurnal range.
An area of high pressure over the region brought prolonged sunshine during the day, while clear skies at night allowed temperatures to drop rapidly as heat escaped into the atmosphere without cloud cover to slow the cooling.
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Exclusive: Some of £2bn savings needed from energy budget expected to come from boiler upgrade scheme, sources say
Ministers are preparing to slash the amount of money available to subsidise heat pumps as they look for ways to fund higher defence spending, sources have told the Guardian.
Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has been tasked with finding more than £2bn in savings from her budget to help pay for defence investment under a plan drawn up by the previous government.
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Food producers are adding their voices to the chorus of warnings about the vulnerability of British supply chains
“There are so many decent, capable, productive, efficient arable farmers out there, asking how they are supposed to finance the crop they are meant to be putting in the ground,” Jamie Burrows says.
Sitting in his tractor at his arable farm in Norfolk, Burrows is listing the multiple challenges facing him and other food producers.
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In the Atacama desert, the extraction of lithium – so crucial to addressing the climate crisis – comes with escalating social and environmental costs
A high-altitude desert plateau traverses Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. I am on the Chilean side, sitting in a Jeep along with two other researchers. The afternoon air is thin and brisk but the sun is piercing – a combination I am familiar with from years of living and travelling in South America’s Andean range.
The landscape is a study in contrasts and contours: broad basins suddenly cut off by sweeping curves; flat expanses sliced by near vertical ascents. The Licancabur volcano looms large above us. Vegetation and humidity levels change rapidly with the rising altitude, bringing cooler temperatures, wetter air and denser plant life.
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A Thames21 charity citizen science project helps track plastic pollution in the capital’s river
On a pale-blue Sunday morning on the foreshore of the River Thames, 40 people are searching for what others have tried to lose. Dotted across a 250-metre stretch under Hammersmith Bridge, they are combing through layers of silt, seashells and dirty driftwood to find one of the river’s most stubborn problems: wet wipes.
“People come and walk here and it looks just like mud, at a distance,” says the organiser, Dr Felicity Rhodes. “And then you get closer in and see.”
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When populations fall, fledglings can struggle to learn the right notes to attract mates. But research on how birds communicate offers hope for species’ survival
Listening to birdsong is one of life’s great joys, but when researchers heard a particular tune emerging from a tree in a Buenos Aires park, they were especially jubilant. This arrangement was among those chirped by the local rufous-collared sparrows in the 1960s, but had since disappeared from the area.
That was until scientists created a computer-generated rendition, curious to find out if birds might consider it realistic enough to imitate. Less than three months later, a local avian resident began to copy parts of the song.
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A living room encounter with a toast-loving pigeon proved a big mistake. It led to weeks of drawn curtains and crawling around on the floor to avoid its eerie and unerring gaze
The pigeon landed on the windowsill. It was shortly after dawn during the spring holidays, but I was 11 and had been up for a while eating toast and watching TV. It pecked at the window and I turned to see this bird pressed up against the glass. It was beautiful, with two dark wing bars and a navy-tipped tail. I was immediately taken with him. It wasn’t until later that I realised he wasn’t just looking inside, he was looking directly at me.
Pigeons are not that common in Somerset, and since we lived on the top floor of a house in a quiet village, our view was mostly sky, so we had come to really value sightings of them. We were having a run of beautiful mornings, and I enjoyed watching its peculiar rituals through the sash windows. The way he moved across the sill, his small dark doll’s eyes, his slightly unnatural head tilt, the way he seemed to know where he was. We certainly didn’t see pigeons as pests. Nor did we see them as threats.
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