Western Australia abandons shark cull
The state of Western Australia is abandoning a controversial shark-culling programme, but has also gained the right to deploy deadly baited lines for animals that pose an “imminent threat”. Read more
The state of Western Australia is abandoning a controversial shark-culling programme, but has also gained the right to deploy deadly baited lines for animals that pose an “imminent threat”. Read more
The 18 great earthquakes that have struck Earth in the past decade hold ominous lessons for western North America, a top seismologist has warned. Many of these large quakes — including the 2004 Sumatra quake that spawned the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2011 Tohoku disaster in Japan — were surprisingly different from one another despite their similar geologic settings. Read more
The walls of the Geological Survey of Canada’s Vancouver office are, not surprisingly, plastered with maps. There’s one of the country of Canada, one of the province of British Columbia, and even a circumpolar Arctic map centered on the North Pole. Read more
The European Commission has backed down from plans to label fuels derived from tar sands as more polluting than other fuels. Read more
The world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant that can capture its carbon dioxide emissions officially launched today in Canada – marking a milestone for so-called ‘clean coal’ technology. Read more
Earth’s wild vertebrate populations have dropped to one-half the size they were in the 1970s, according to an analysis of more than 3,000 species. Read more
US President Barack Obama has vastly increased marine protection in the Pacific by declaring 1 million square kilometres of ocean part of a giant marine reserve. Read more
Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean last week dropped to an annual minimum 5.02 million square kilometres according to satellite observations by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Read more
Despite a slowdown in recent years in the rate of global warming, the world remains on a pathway to substantial and potentially disruptive climate change. Read more
Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Read more
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