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With most major European cities well-served by trains and buses, bringing US transit up to par would cost $4.6tn
The only train station in Houston, the US’s fourth-largest city and one of the fastest-growing conurbations in the country, is a diminished, morose sight. Intercity trains arrive at this squat, shed-like Amtrak building, which cringes in the shadows of roaring highways, just three times a week.
That such a meager train station could ostensibly serve a metropolitan area of about 7 million people is a stark symbol of how the sprawling, car-dominated US has fallen behind cities around the world where people can rely on extensive, high-quality public transport to get around.
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In the UK capital, Bomb Crater Pond is full of wildlife, while scientists studying land obliterated by recent Russian blasts 1,500 miles away have seen ‘how quickly nature begins to heal itself’
In February 1945, towards the end of the second world war, a German V2 rocket struck Walthamstow Marshes in east London. The explosion tore a crater into the marshland. Left untouched, it slowly filled with water, sediment … and life. Today, this wartime scar has become a thriving pond.
“It’s small but it really punches above its weight,” says Luke Boyle, a ranger for the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, as he kneels at the edge to examine aquatic plants sprouting their early spring shoots. “We can’t manage the hydrology here, so it is actually a vital part of the ecosystem – it supports a range of plants, insects and amphibians, more than you might expect,” he says.
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Glyphosate is currently sprayed on cereal and pulse crops to dessicate them and make them easier to harvest
A new trade deal with the EU could lead to restrictions on the use of the controversial weedkiller glyphosate on UK food crops.
The full-spectrum herbicide, which kills almost every plant it touches, is often sprayed on wheat, oats and other cereal and pulse crops shortly before harvest to desiccate them and make them easier to handle.
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Wastewater from nearly 40,000 people and businesses pumped straight into sea as territory still has no treatment plant
Raw sewage from nearly 40,000 people and businesses is being pumped straight into the sea because the British overseas territory of Gibraltar does not have, and has never had, a wastewater treatment plant.
For decades, untreated sewage has poured into the Mediterranean from the southern tip of the peninsula at Europa Point, where the government of Gibraltar says there are “high levels of natural dispersion”.
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Powerstock Common, Dorset: I’m hopeful that the mixed habitats here and bright weather will bring them out in their droves – and I’m not disappointed
The recent pulse of warm, sunny weather has encouraged butterflies to fly in large numbers in Dorset. They were everywhere when I visited Powerstock Common: the moment I opened the car door, a brimstone fluttered sulphur-yellow over the parking area, lifted on a stream of blackcap song.
Bright as butter in the sunshine, it’s possible that brimstones are the species that inspired the word “butterfly”. When this one settled on a hazel, its underwings merged green among the new leaves, the colours indicating it was a male. Females are much paler, sometimes almost white. Both sexes have a pair of browny-orange spots on their wings, which are foxed like the page edges of an old book.
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Exclusive: ‘Fish sludge’ in coastal waters now has nutrient levels equivalent to those in untreated effluent of country the size of Australia, report finds
Norwegian fish farms are filling fjords and other coastal waters with nutrient pollution equivalent to the raw sewage of tens of millions of people each year, a report has found.
Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025.
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Appeal launched to buy Nottinghamshire cottage, where tree was planted in 19th century, and turn it into heritage centre
Campaigners have launched an appeal to try to save for the nation the mother tree of perhaps the most popular cooking apple in the world.
The original bramley apple tree, which grows in the garden of a cottage in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, is for sale, with the cottage put on the market by its owner, Nottingham Trent University.
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Group that worked with AOC and Bernie Sanders seeks to counter claim that climate policy is politically toxic
Americans do not care about the climate crisis, only economic issues: that’s the message some wonks have put forth in the past year, as the Trump administration has dismantled environmental protections. But the shift away from climate is misguided, an influential group of progressives is arguing.
“The climate crisis is a core driver of the cost-of-living crisis and instability we see across the economy,” says a new policy platform from left-leaning thinktank Climate and Community Institute (CCI).
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In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled the pins and then left on his bicycle. How did he do it?
At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid state had taken that from him, along with everything else it took from everyone.
One evening in August 1971, Wilkinson stood in the gym at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, foil in hand. He was facing his coach Vincent Bonfil, a 25-year-old Englishman who had represented Britain as a reserve at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, and who was now in Johannesburg finishing a master’s thesis in metallurgy. They were working on a technique in which both fencers lunge simultaneously, and the one who reads the other’s move a split second earlier wins the point. They came at each other. Wilkinson’s foil caught the edge of Bonfil’s sleeve. There was a pop.
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Australia’s biobanks store everything from seeds of native plants to the cells and tissue of threatened animal species
In the mudflats of Swan Bay, Victoria, royal spoonbills sweep their paddle-shaped bills through shallow water. Nearby, under the grass-covered roof of the Queenscliff marine research centre, a team of scientists from Deakin University are trying to bring the ecosystems those birds and many others rely on back from the brink.
Some of that involves associate professor Prue Francis’s beakers – filled with bubbling brown gunk – that are bathed in red light inside a fridge equipped with sensors, alarms and a backup generator.
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