Author: Ranveer Kumar

The actor and environmentalist says that shark populations “are critical to ocean health and resiliency.” He probably won’t be tuning in to public decision-making Tuesday on the measure, but one of Hollywood’s biggest stars backs a shark-protection measure that’s making its way through the Hawaii Legislature. Leonardo DiCaprio on Thursday tweeted his support of House Bill 553, which would establish as an offense intentionally and knowingly “capturing, entangling, or killing” a shark in state marine waters as well as impose penalties and fines. “Shark populations are in global decline and are critical to ocean health and resiliency,” DiCaprio said. “I support…

Sir Ivor Roberts says East Africa ‘critically undermined’ by extremist groups ISIS is “growing stronger” through its use of the illegal ivory and illicit sugar trades to fund terrorists in East Africa, according to a new report by a former British ambassador. Extremist fighters and terror campaigns are being paid for through the unlawful activities which are becoming “more sophisticated”, said Sir Ivor Roberts, a former British diplomat in Lebanon and head of counter-terrorism in the Foreign Office. He makes these claims in his report An Unholy Alliance: Links Between Extremism and Illicit Trade in East Africa, produced for non-government organisation the Counter Extremism…

Figures show 77 companies received $8.2bn under tax changes related to Covid relief and yet almost every one let workers go Fossil-fuel companies have received billions of dollars in tax benefits from the US government as part of coronavirus relief measures, only to lay off tens of thousands of their workers during the pandemic, new figures reveal. A group of 77 firms involved in the extraction of oil, gas and coal received $8.2bn under tax-code changes that formed part of a major pandemic stimulus bill passed by Congress last year. Five of these companies also got benefits from the paycheck…

At the dawn of a new decade, we take stock of advances and unmet needs in the oncology pharmaceutical market. What will it take to deliver innovation to patients over the next ten years? Over the past 50 years, the outcomes for people diagnosed with cancer have transformed. In 1970, of those diagnosed with cancer in the United States, approximately half would have been alive five years later. For those diagnosed in 2009, the figure was closer to 70 percent.1 Such a transformation in outcomes has arrived through a combination of public-health measures (such as smoking education), improved healthcare (such as…

From the mid-20th century, the US’s Sugar Research Foundation launched an all-out offensive in defence of sugar, financing hundreds of studies that presented it in a favourable light. It caused untold damage to humanity. Some 67 years ago, at the beginning of February 1954, 52-year-old Dr Henry Bohn Hass, a specialist in organic chemistry who would in 1969 be awarded the gold medal of the American Institute of Chemists, attended the eighth general meeting of the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists, in Denver, Colorado. At the time, he was president of the US’s Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), a position he…

Adescription of a newly discovered species of carnivorous dinosaur, named the ‘one who causes fear’, or Llukalkan aliocranianus, has appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Vertebrate Paleontology. Around 80 million years ago, as tyrannosaurs ruled the Northern Hemisphere, this lookalike was one of 10 currently known species of abelisaurids flourishing in the southern continents. A fearsome killer, Llukalkan was “likely among the top predators” throughout Patagonia, now in southern Argentina, during the Late Cretaceous. This was due to its formidable size, as it could grow up to five metres long, extremely powerful bite, very sharp teeth, huge claws on their feet,…

By analyzing 25 years of pesticide use data from the United States, researchers have found that the toxicity of pesticides to nontarget invertebrates, including pollinators, has increased markedly, even though the volume of pesticides used has gone down. The study, published April 1 in Science, challenges the common assumption that the impacts of environmental pesticides have gone down over time. “The use of pesticide as interpreted in media and by politicians and by scientists is that they very often talk about the amounts that are used, and that these amounts go down, implying that the environmental risk is also reduced,”…

The FSOC focused on climate for the first time since Congress established the body in 2010. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday called climate change “an existential threat” and the biggest emerging risk to the health of the U.S. financial system, pledging to marshal regulatory forces to guard against its harmful effects. Yellen made the promise during her inaugural appearance as the head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators tasked with policing Wall Street behavior that has the potential to crash the entire economy. The council held its first public meeting under Yellen’s leadership Wednesday and focused…

The demise of the Aral Sea is a tragic tale often told. Less known is the peril facing Central Asia’s largest remaining lake, Balkhash in eastern Kazakhstan, a key source of drinking water in an arid region. Rapid development and expanding rice cultivation upstream in China pose a grave threat to the Balkhash basin, a new paper says, and Beijing is dodging the problem. The lake’s fate has quietly bedevilled Kazakhstan for decades. Just how bad it will get depends both on Chinese farming and the magnitude of climate change, which is all but certain to dispatch the last of the glaciers…

With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases. Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides…