Why a Climate Deal Is the Best Hope for Peace

Soon after the horrific terror attacks in Paris, last Friday, our phones filled with messages from friends and colleagues: “So are they going to cancel the Paris climate summit?” “The drums of war are beating. Count on climate change being drowned out.” The assumption is reasonable enough.

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Watch as Patrick Stewart Recites a Poem with a Yorkshire Dialect

In a scene from TOWN with Nicholas Crane, Patrick Stewart, of Star Trek and X-men fame, gets nostalgic over his childhood and recites a poem in his native Yorkshire dialect. His mother and aunt would recite the poem around Christmas time every year which is probably why he still remembers it many years later. Stewart was born in Mirfield - a small town in West Yorkshire England.

Wildlife conservation on ice: frozen zoos to save animals

On the edge: Disease and habitat loss is decimating wild amphibian populations globally, with more than 200 species needing urgent intervention through captive breeding, says Dr. Simon Clulow. In a south-eastern suburb in Melbourne, there’s a zoo. It has no visitors, and there are no animals anywhere inside it. Rather, the Australian Frozen Zoo houses living cells and genetic material from Australian native and rare and exotic species. This place, and others like it, could be a big part of the future of conservation. Department of Biological Sciences’ Simon Clulow and his colleagues make the case for ‘biobanking’ in a recent piece in Conservation Letters. Clulow is keen to stress that this doesn’t mean getting rid of conventional zoos or captive breeding programs. “Captive breeding has had some wonderful successes, and there will always be a huge place for it,” he says. PhD student and lead author Lachlan Howell agrees. “It was captive breeding that brought the giant panda back f...

California’s surge of large wildfires: a multi-dimensional fire challenge

September 21, 2021 Accumulating fuels and rising populations are contributing to California’s large, destructive fires. Climate change has helped fuel California’s surge of unusually large and destructive fires by exacerbating heat waves and droughts , but climate is not the only factor contributing to the surge. More than a century of fire suppression has caused excessive amounts of dead trees, leaf litter, and dried brush to build up in forests. Meanwhile, California’s increasing population means that many more people now live and work in areas that are prone to fire. The consequences of all the fires are remarkable, even from space. The false-color image at the top of the page shows burn scars left by large fires that burned in recent years, including the two largest incidents on record in California: the August fire complex and the Dixie fire . The image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on September 21, 2021. ...

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