The police arresting another “terrorist” This is utterly risible. Shame on Labour. Shame on Britain.

What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ

Onobrychis cornuta Fabaceae North of Iran, Mazandaran Yesterday Elevation 3200m #Fabaceae #botany

This remarkable structure at Jingxin Temple in Shanxi showcases one of the most extraordinary achievements of traditional Chinese wooden architecture the Dougong bracket system Built entirely through mortise-and-tenon joinery, the structure relies on precisely fitted wooden components rather than iron nails or adhesives. Layer upon layer of interlocking blocks and brackets distributes the roof’s weight downward while maintaining stability and structural balance

Well that's awkward.

"Feargal Sharkey brands '£100billion' cost of nationalising water 'nonsense'." And that is because it is nonsense, pure unadulterated, made up nonsense. mirror.co.uk/news/feargal-sh…

Meanwhile, bennettinstitutesussex.org/s…

Back in Victorian days, it was considered quite fancy for gardeners to build something they called a stumpery. It's a pile of dead stumps and logs, often stacked roots-up, arranged in a shady damp corner and left to rot on purpose. The Victorians built them to show off ferns, but they also turn out to be some of the best wildlife habitat you can make. The first one went up in 1856 at Biddulph Grange in England, where a gardener took the stumps left from clearing land and stacked them ten feet high along a sunken path. The fern craze was at its peak, and the rotting wood made perfect planting pockets. King Charles has a famous modern stumpery at Highgrove built from sweet chestnut roots. What the Victorians treated as decoration, nature treated as a feast. As the wood breaks down it feeds fungi, mosses, and beetles, including stag beetles whose grubs live in deadwood for years. Toads, salamanders, and small mammals move into the damp gaps. A single rotting log can support an astonishing variety of life. To build one: find a shaded corner, stack stumps and logs with the roots facing up and out, leave plenty of gaps, and tuck ferns and moss around the base. Then walk away and let it rot. You make a sculpture out of dead trees, and everything in the yard moves in.

“Sizewell C new nuclear – The Unanswered Questions”, what is known, what it is impossible to know, and what the government continues to keep secret about Sizewell C. A story of secrecy, obfuscation and deception. stopsizewellc.org/sizewell-c…

Omphalogramma souliei (Primulaceae) Now, Yunnan

America lectures the world about human rights. It sends State Department reports grading other countries on their treatment of citizens. It imposes sanctions when governments fail to meet its standards. It funds NGOs and democracy promotion programs and civil society organizations to improve conditions for ordinary people in countries it has decided need improvement. Meanwhile. 530,000 Americans file for medical bankruptcy every year. 100 million Americans carry medical debt. 28 million Americans have no health insurance at all. The country writing the human rights report card cannot guarantee its own citizens the right to see a doctor without financial ruin. This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense. This is institutional, structural, deliberate hypocrisy, the kind that requires enormous energy to maintain. The kind that produces entire think tanks and media ecosystems to explain why the richest country on earth simply cannot afford what every other rich country provides as a baseline. Cannot afford it. While spending over $1 trillion a year on the military that enforces the lectures.

Japanese architecture is truly remarkable.

The stunning Viola allchariensis, a steno-endemic of the Allchar site in North Macedonia growing on highly arsenic-thallium mineralised soils.

Papua New Guinea Sets Up Protected Ocean the Size of UK–Over 77,000 Square Miles goodnewsnetwork.org/papua-ne…

En 1925, Le Corbusier propose de raser le Marais. Pas une ruelle. Pas un îlot. Le quartier entier. 240 hectares de Paris rive droite, du Temple aux Halles, condamnés sur le papier. À la place : dix-huit gratte-ciel en croix, soixante étages, posés sur une dalle traversée d'autoroutes. Il appelle ça le Plan Voisin, du nom de l'avionneur qui le finance. L'idée tient en une phrase : la vieille ville est malade, il faut la remplacer. Hôtels particuliers, hôtel de Soubise, ruelles médiévales, tout disparaît. Le Corbusier y voit du progrès. Une ville pour l'automobile, l'air, la lumière. Le projet ne verra jamais le jour. Trop radical, trop brutal, refusé en bloc. Aujourd'hui, le Marais est l'un des quartiers les plus visités d'Europe. Ses hôtels du XVIIe siècle, ses cours pavées, tout ce que Le Corbusier voulait effacer fait sa valeur. Le Paris qu'on aime tant a failli tenir dans dix-huit tours de béton. Qu'est-ce qui fait qu'on décide qu'un quartier mérite d'être sauvé, ou rasé ?

Thursday morning, an Israeli airstrike struck the home of Mona Khalil in Mansouri, South of Lebanon. The home itself was modest. But what it sheltered was extraordinary. For decades, while many spoke about protecting nature, Mona lived that commitment every single day. From her small house overlooking the sea, she became the guardian of a coastline, the protector of countless sea turtles, and a voice for creatures that could not speak for themselves. She chose to stay. She stayed through uncertainty, through fear, through danger. She stayed because the beach she watched over was not just a stretch of sand. It was a sanctuary. A place of life. A place worth defending. Mona was seriously injured and her assistant suffered burns. Both are thankfully in stable condition. Yet the tragedy goes far beyond their wounds. With war reaching a woman whose life’s mission has been to protect life, something deeper is injured, a part of our humanity is wounded. Violence does not distinguish between a fighter and a conservationist, between a military position and a nest of endangered turtles, between those who destroy and those who dedicate their lives to preserving. Mona Khalil spent years protecting one of Lebanon’s most fragile treasures. Today, it is Mona who needs protection. And perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay her is to ensure that her courage, her mission, and her love for this land survive long after the smoke has cleared ❤️🇱🇧 #lebanon #humanity #truth #worldenvironmentday2026

🌱 A new plant species, Ophiorrhiza xishuiensis, has been described from the Danxia landform region of southwest China. 🔍 This species has frequently been misidentified as related species in the past, prompting the publication of a new identification key: doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.27…

Once upon a time, it was “no mow may” 8 years later, it’s our family pride and joy. Our once a year cut meadow is taking shape again for another year of stunning displays. Even for some neighbours follow suit 😍 #meadow

The United States has more than 90,000 dams on its rivers. Many of them no longer generate power, hold back floods, or serve a purpose at all. They just sit there, aging, holding the water back. Take one out, and the ecological recovery can happen breathtakingly fast. In 2024, the largest dam removal in American history finished on the Klamath River, where four dams came down along the Oregon-California line. Within days, Chinook salmon were pushing into water they hadn't reached in generations. By the fall of 2025, they had climbed all the way into the upper basin, spawning in streams that had been sealed off for more than a hundred years. Damon Goodman, a regional director for California Trout, put it plainly: the rivers "seem to come alive almost instantly after dam removal." Maine's Penobscot tells the same story. After two dams came down, the river herring went from a few thousand fish a year into the millions, and with them came back the eagles, ospreys, and otters that live off the run. A dam is one of the few environmental problems you can fix by subtraction. Take the wall away, and the river seems to remember what it was.

Western Australia, where the soils have so few nutrients our plants went carnivorous.... WA is home to the greatest number of native carnivorous plant species anywhere in the world. Many only found in the Wheatbelt. 📸 me & H. Innes