Once upon a time giant apes lived around the karst plains of what is now southern China. They stood  three meters tall and weighed 250 kilograms. They were the largest apes ever to have lived on Earth. Then Gigantopithcus blacki, which resembled upsized versions of orangutans, went extinct. Why this happened has long been a mistery, but scientists now say they know the answer. And this answer, they add, holds a key to the conservation of today’s endangered species. “The story of G. blacki is an enigma in paleontology — how could such a mighty creature go extinct at a time when other prima ..read more

Photo: Pexels/James Guetschow The Sun’s energy is effectively limitless. While resources such as coal or gas are finite, if you are able to capture and use solar power it doesn’t prevent anyone else from also using as much sunshine as they need. Except that isn’t quite the full story. Beyond a certain size, solar farms become large enough to affect the weather around them and ultimately the climate as a whole. In our new research we have looked at the effect such climate-altering solar farms might have on solar power production elsewhere in the world. We know that solar power is affe ..read more

Photo: Pexels/Dids Microplastics are everywhere, including our food. And this includes not only seafood, as we have known for a while, but practically all sources of protein as well, according to scientists at Ocean Conservancy in the United States. They have found, as they explain in a study, that microplastic particles have contaminated nearly 90% of 16 common protein sources tested in the United States, including seafood, pork, beef and chicken. Even tofu and different plant-based meat alternatives were found to contain these tiny particles. For their study, the scientists purchased samples ..read more

Climate solutions that rely on agrivoltaics—the practice of integrating solar panels into farm fields and ranches—can offer benefits because they boost clean energy production while sharing space with cows and crop rows. What’s been less clear is how yields might be affected in a world of growing demand, but a new paper that reviews 54 such operations, all over the planet, offers insight on the ways that agrivoltaics might best be used. The researchers from Bern University of Applied Sciences and Agroscope, the Swiss center for agriculture, looked at solar panels on land used for everything fr ..read more

Photo: Pexels/Caio Spent coffee grounds are no longer any use for making coffee, but they can still be of great use in other ways. They can be reused to pave roads and one day they could help prevent neurodegenerative diseases, for example. But there is more. Engineers in Australia have devised a technique for making concrete nearly 30% stronger by mixing it with waste coffee grounds turned into biochar through a low-energy process called pyrolysis, which involves heating organic waste in the absence of oxygen. “The concrete industry has the potential to contribute significantly to increasing ..read more

Photo: Pexels Honey bees, along with other insects, have fallen on hard times across the planet owing to habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change. In tandem, honey yields have also been on the decline since the 1990s. A definitive answer as to the reasons for this decline has remained elusive, but scientists at Pennsylvania State University say they might finally have found it after analysing a half century’s worth of data from across the United States on such variables as average yield per colony, land use, land productivity, herbicide use, climate and weather anomalies. We have already ..read more

Photo: Rawpixel Coast redwoods – enormous, spectacular trees, some reaching nearly 400 feet, the tallest plants on the planet – thrive mostly in a narrow strip of land in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Most of them grow from southern Oregon down into northern California, snugged up against the rugged Pacific coast. They have grown by slowly responding to moisture and rich alluvial soil over millennia, combined with a genetic payload that pushes them to the upper limits of tree height. They are at risk – down to perhaps 70,000 individuals, falling from at least a half-million ..read more

Photo: Pexels/Markus Spiske Climate change is posing an existential threat to life as we know it on the planet and yet not only do many people lack a sense of urgency but governments seem reluctant to take decisive actions as well. Could it be because we are hard-wrired to do so by nature? This is a question to which Tim Waring, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Maine, and his team wanted to find the answer. Over the last 100,000 years, they note, groups of people have used more and more types of resources with ever greated intensity over time until they began to interfere with na ..read more

Photo: Pexels/Hugo Herrera Human activities have been wreaking havoc on the environment, destroying biodiversity from top to bottom, which is to say from apex predators like tigers to little insects. Birds have not been spared either and new research is raising the alarm about our feathered friends. On once relatively remote islands like Hawaii, Tonga, Mauritius and the Azores human impacts, including deforestation, hunting and the introduction of invasive species, have resulted in the extinction of numerous bird species, the dodo being the most famous example, according to researchers. “While ..read more

Photo: Pexels/Steve Europe’s “wolf problem” is fast becoming a source of social and political tension. Relative conservation success across the continent has led to calls for action from worried politicians and farming and hunting groups. And the European Commission has now proposed a change in their international status, from “strictly protected” to “protected”, which could allow people to hunt wolves. However, changing the protection status may not be the best solution, especially as only three of the nine wolf populations in the EU have reached favourable conse ..read more