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Showing posts with the label 2015

Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
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Three-quarters of the UK's butterflies have declined in the past 40 years, according to a report by the charity Butterfly Conservation

The study, State of the UK's Butterflies 2015, suggests 76% of resident and regular migrant butterflies have declined.  Some common species have suffered what the charity calls "major slumps".  Thousands of data-gathering volunteers enabled scientists to build up this long-term national picture.  And Butterfly Conservation and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), which helped produce this report, encouraged the public to take part in surveys to help monitor trends in UK biodiversity.While the main conclusions suggest a bleak outlook for the insects, the research did reveal some rare species were benefiting from targeted conservation.  According to Richard Fox, of Butterfly Conservation, one of the lead researchers, this was thanks to landscape-scale projects - protecting and restoring threatened habitats, such as managed wildflower-rich grasslands and heath-lands.  The threatened Duke of Burgundy butterfly, for example, has seen a recent increase i...
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Global average temperatures in 2015 likely to be the warmest on record, according WMO

Data until the end of October showed this year's temperatures running "well above" any previous 12 month period.  The researchers say the five year period from 2011 to 2015 was also the warmest on record.  The rise, they state, was due to a combination of a strong El Nino and human-induced global warming.  The WMO said their preliminary estimate, based on data from January to October, showed that the global average surface temperature for 2015 was 0.73 degrees C above the 1961-1990 average.  Their scientists also found that global temperatures were approximately 1 degree C above the 1880-1899 period, mirroring a recent finding by the UK Met Office.The record-breaking five year period from 2011 to 2015 was 0.57C above the average for 1961-1990. The WMO said that levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached new highs. In the northern hemisphere, the spring of 2015 saw the three-month global average concentration of CO2 cross the 400 parts per million...
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An image of warring foxes won 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition

Warring fox Taken by beginner Don Gutoski, the photo catches the minute a red fox pulls away the corpse of its Arctic cousin taking after a savage assault in Canada's Wapusk National Park.  "It's the best picture I've ever taken in my life," Don told.  "It's the heads' symmetry, the bodies and the tails - even the demeanor on the appearances."   The two creatures' extents cover at Wapusk, which embraces the shore of Hudson Bay in Manitoba.  What's more, if the bigger red gets a quick look at the Arctic inhabitant, it will attempt to originate before the northern species.  Untamed life guides in the recreation center had talked about seeing the contention, yet this is thought to be one of the first situations where it has been archived on camera. Kathy Moran, who sat on the judging board, said the scene's awfulness was shockingly downplayed.   "It doesn't appear to be bloody by any stretch of the imagination. On the off c...
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