Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.

The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.

Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the Commons Environment Audit Committee (EAC) last week

Like most Australian native species, the carnivorous northern quoll has evolved in a landscape absent of the bufotoxin. That is, until the cane toad was introduced in 1935 in a futile attempt by Queensland’s sugar cane industry to control bugs eating their crops.

Since then, the toads have spread across the northern parts of Australia. Prof John Woinarski, a leading conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University, says cane toads have – alongside feral cats and habitat clearing – been a major factor in pushing the northern quoll to endangered status.

“Quolls are very effective predators,” he says. “They’re the largest marsupial predator across much of the north of Australia.

“But when they try and kill a cane toad, they grab them by the back of the head just where the toxin glands are mostly concentrated. They die remarkably quickly and it’s an agonising death.”

PARIS—Protests roiling U.S. universities have ignited a fierce debate over where to set the limit between acceptable criticism of Israel and speech that encourages antisemitism and violence.

In France, government authorities are stepping in to draw the line. Courts have ruled that public speech condoning the Oct. 7 attack or legitimizing Hamas as a resistance movement amounts to condoning terrorism—a crime under French law, punishable by up to seven years in prison. French prosecutors are investigating politicians on the far-left, union officials and hundreds of other people for allegedly condoning terrorism and inciting antisemitism since October.

The dry season is about two months longer than it was when Janzen arrived in the 1960s. Climate change is making seasons more unpredictable and weather more erratic across the planet. And that’s posing new risks to the sanctuary scientists like Janzen and Hallwachs have created at ACG.

María Marta Chavarría, ACG’s field investigation program coordinator, describes the unpredictability as “el alegrón de burro.” Strictly translated from Spanish, it means “donkey happiness.” Colloquially, it describes a fake-out: short-lived joy from a false start.

Chavarría, who speaks with the upbeat tilt of an educator excited to teach, explains it like this, “A big rain is the trigger. It’s time! The rainy season is going to start!” Trees unfurl new leaves. Moths and other insects that eat those leaves emerge. But now, the rains don’t always last. The leaves die and fall. That has ripple effects across the food chain, from the insects that eat the leaves to birds that eat the insects. They perish or move on. And next season, there are fewer pollinators for the plants. “The big trigger in the beginning was false,” Chavarría explains. “They started, but no more.”

Andrew Tate, notable for making controversial statements, exceeded his reputation’s expectations after claiming that being intimate with women defined a man’s queer sexual identity.

Taking to his X page (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday (April 24), Andrew wrote: “Sex is for making children.

“Any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay.

"The pace of adaptation is too slow to keep up with climate change," said Julie Etterson, a University of Minnesota Duluth Biology professor and researcher.

Etterson's research reveals that warming temps are stressing our forests.

"We have been thinking about what we can do now to help our forests transition as climate changes around them," she said.

And if that help doesn't arrive soon, she and other researchers say the deep, dark boreal forests we know in northern Minnesota could become mostly grasslands within the next 50 years.

The planetary danger signals are increasing. Climate scientists are beginning to worry we may be at a terrifying juncture, where the climate shifts dramatically from one state to another. An abrupt global warming episode, during which climate changes happen in decades, not centuries, and interrelated tipping points cascade into one another amplifying the sudden shift in the world climate, pushing the planet out of the temperate sweet spot we humans have been lucky enough to live in.

Could this sudden shift happen? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

We can see it in the ice core record. About 11,500 years ago, during the Younger Dryas era, temperatures in Greenland leapt 10 degrees Celsius in a decade, with the rest of the world seeing a matching jump to a new state in a matter of decades, not centuries.

Sea levels rose rapidly by tens of meters, driven by Greenland ice melt and other ice loss in the Arctic and Antarctic. An entire area of northern Europe, Known as Doggerland, which linked the United Kingdom to Europe, disappeared forever beneath the waves. Until the shock of the Younger Dryas warming, my ancestors could have walked from Scotland to the Netherlands.

Chemical company Avina Clean Hydrogen Inc. has purchased the last available water supply from the Nueces River of South Texas, raising concerns of regional scarcity as reservoirs dwindle and drought persists.

Avina’s Nueces Green Ammonia plant plans to separate the hydrogen from water, convert it to ammonia and export it as a high-tech fuel alternative to oil and gas. It’s one of several such projects currently proposed in Texas, driven by federal subsidies. Governments and scientists say this technology plays an important role in the transition away from fossil fuels.

But officials in the nearby city of Corpus Christi have warned that the project could threaten water supply for more than 600,000 regional customers.