Interesting Ideas

Ruabon grouse moor, Wrexham: Mating season is upon us. Will I be lucky enough to spot a courtship lek?

I’m shooting grouse on the moor today. There are two kinds here: red grouse, a gamebird reared and shot in its thousands; and its larger, rarer cousin, the black grouse. The latter is supposedly spared by a ban that remains voluntary despite catastrophic declines in recent decades. As it’s not shooting season, which runs from August to mid-December, I shoulder a camera, not a shotgun, hoping to snap one of these increasingly rare birds.

Springtime is when black grouse start to breed, so I arrive before dawn, which is when they lek – a courtship dance where they fan their tails, peck and scuffle with their rivals.

Review from non-profit finds range of scenarios of firms simultaneously lobbying for and against Pfas regulations

Some top US lobbying firms are simultaneously working both sides of the Pfas “forever chemicals” issue, raising serious conflict of interest questions and concerns that their activity is slowing states’ efforts to rein in the public health threat.

The review of six states’ lobbying records conducted by the non-profit F-Minus found a range of scenarios in which firms lobbied both sides. Most common Pfas are linked to cancer. The lobbying firm Holland & Knight works for the American Chemistry Council, which represents the nation’s largest Pfas makers, and aggressively opposes most regulations. Simultaneously, Holland & Knight lobbies for the American Cancer Society.

Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation

Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming brick building in a Dallas business park.

Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, “de-extinct” via the birth of three new pups.

Everything is wonderful and perfect and industry leading at Elon Musk companies … until it is not. We’ve seen it time and time again at Tesla, where we find out about insanely stupid decisions and distractions long after the company scrambled to fix them and went down a new route. ... [continued]

The post Total Mess at Elon Musk’s xAI, “Not Built Right” and “Being Rebuilt” — While Polluting Enormously appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Hedgehogs’ habitat is shrinking, they’re vulnerable to cars, and pesticides are affecting their food supply. Here’s how we can help them pull through

With stumpy, speedy legs, questing snouts and a fierce quiver of needles, hedgehogs are enchantingly strange, like fantasy creatures from a medieval bestiary. “It’s the nation’s favourite wild animal – every time there’s a vote or a poll, the hedgehog wins,” says ecologist Hugh Warwick, AKA “Hedgehog Hugh”, author of the Cull of the Wild and hedgehog champion.

Carmaker’s decision to drop NissanConnect EV app on relatively recent cars fuels warnings from experts

Owners of some Nissan Leaf electric vehicles are angry after the carmaker announced it would shut down an app that lets them remotely control battery charging and other functions.

Drivers of Leaf cars made before May 2019 and the e-NV200 van (produced until 2022) have been told that the NissanConnect EV app linked to their vehicles will “cease operation” from 30 March. This means they will lose remote services, including turning on the heating, and some map features.

Mohammed Ahmed Sayed Mohammed is among those redeploying his skills for a local recycling company that is cleaning up the Nile

At 6am, Mohammed Ahmed Sayed Mohammed steers his boat from al-Qarsaya island through Cairo’s Nile waters towards the capital’s riverside clubs. Fifteen years ago, he searched for fish. Now he hunts plastic bottles.

“The fish fled from the plastic chokehold,” said Sayed, who has lived on the Giza island since arriving from Assiut, further south on the Nile, as a 14-year-old fishing apprentice. He never returned to his village, marrying locally and raising three children who now live alongside him with their 12 grandchildren on the island housing 200 families.

The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination

They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation were allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the civil war, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal, landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen.

Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahomabetween 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.

Exclusive: Lough Neagh, which supplies drinking water for 40% of NI, contains genes resistant to last-resort antibiotics

Genes capable of creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs have been detected in the UK’s largest lake, which supplies drinking water to about 40% of Northern Ireland.

Testing of water from Lough Neagh, which has a surface area 26 times bigger than Windermere, found genes resistant to a wide range of antibiotics, including carbapenems – drugs reserved for life-threatening infections when all other treatments have failed.

As the QuitGPT movement gains momentum, should people concerned about the environmental impacts of AI consider opting out?

• Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint

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It’s only a few years on from the release of ChatGPT but the race to plug artificial intelligence into everything has sparked a surge in datacentres, with escalating environmental costs.

Globally, datacentre power demand is growing four times faster than all other sectors, according to the International Energy Agency, and is on track to exceed Japan’s electricity use by 2030.

Ozone destroys colony-specific odor signals and leads to attacks within the colony To the Point Attack: Ants exposed to ozone are attacked by their nestmates, even though they are part of the colony themselves. Different smell: Ozone destroys colony-specific scent signals by breaking down alkenes with carbon-carbon double bonds. Even slight changes ... [continued]

The post Air Pollution Causes Social Instability in Ant Colonies appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Following what the Department of Energy (DOE) has described as the highest fuel price jump in the country’s history, with pump prices rising by as much as P24 (~$0.55) per liter this week due to global supply disruptions, Vingroup has launched its “Trade Gas for Electric” campaign. The initiative is ... [continued]

The post Vingroup Shielding Filipino Motorists from Historic Fuel Price Hikes with Campaign appeared first on CleanTechnica.

During its March 12 investor day in New York, Lucid Group announced a sweeping financial and product strategy that signals a departure from its status as a niche luxury manufacturer. CleanTechnica attended the event’s webcast live. Marc Winterhoff, the Interim CEO at Lucid, opened the event indicating immediately how the ... [continued]

The post Lucid Investor Day Report: “We Are Building for the Future” appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The US offshore wind industry is still alive and kicking with multiple gigawatts' worth of clean electricity heading for the nation's grid.

The post Trump’s Offshore Wind Nightmare Has Become Reality appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Last week, Jennifer Sensiba wrote about the chaos created by NEVI funding disruption. In the final year of the program, Trump put an illegal freeze on releasing funding, interrupting progress. However, while the administration’s disruption in funding was destructive, the speed of the program made it vulnerable to that disruption. ... [continued]

The post US Fast Charging Needs to Focus on Moving Faster appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

Tesla revealed its Semi (semi truck) nearly a decade ago. Many of us hoped for and expected a quick move to market and rapid scaling up. However, the process has gone much more slowly than I think anyone anticipated. However, when I saw news that Mone Transport is now engaged ... [continued]

The post Why Is The Tesla Semi Still In Pilot Program Stage? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Cuba, with the help of China, is embracing renewables because they are the best way to defeat embargoes on fossil fuels.

The post When Fossil Fuel Supplies Falter, Interest In Renewables Increases appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Zoox sort of feels like “The Little Engine That Could.” For years, Waymo and Tesla have gotten almost all of the attention in the US for their robotaxi plans and progress — as well as Cruise, a bit, before it shut down. However, Zoox slid onto the scene sort of ... [continued]

The post Zoox Coming to Dallas & Phoenix, Partnering with Uber in Las Vegas & Los Angeles appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The European Union’s policies and rationale slapping tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) may be a bit better than the USA’s, but they are also quite dubious. One interesting thing the EU is doing now is allowing exemptions for EVs produced in China for European brands. Why should they get exemptions? ... [continued]

The post CUPRA Tavascan EV Exempted from EU Tariffs on Chinese EVs appeared first on CleanTechnica.