Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”More…

More than 1,600 pairs of wading birds and ducks have had their nests destroyed by flooding in a wildlife catastrophe in the Cambridgeshire fens. Nearly 600 pairs of increasingly scarce ground-nesting waders – lapwing, snipe and redshank – have lost eggs or chicks in the flooding on the Ouse Washes…More…

Ten new clean, green ‘eco-towns’ will be built by 2020. And pigs might fly, say critics. They argue that the government is bulldozing through a programme that will create the slum estates of the future.This is how it will be. Across the fair face of Albion, to the ringing of bells and the soft murmur of doves, appears a leafy flush of eco-towns. They are sun-dappled utopias, urban dreamworlds in which no human need is unfulfilled. Wildlife romps through bird-loud glades.More…

Ottery St Mary The first beaver dam to be built in England for 800 years has been erected on the River Tale in Devon by a pair of the rodents that were brought from Bavaria last year.John-Michael Kennaway, of the Escot Estate in Ottery St Mary, where staff created a two-acre home with ponds and woodland along a section of the river for the two-year-old beavers, said that building the 6ft dam out of mud, bark and twigs meant that the animals were likely to be breeding.More… 

Blackbirds and greenfinches have been identified as the next native birds likely to suffer a devastating population slump.An evolutionary family tree has shown they are closely related to species of birds that have already undergone a severe decline.Animal family trees have been shown previously to pinpoint amphibian species at risk but it is the first time that one has been created for British birds.More… 

The current system for coping with high rainfall and swollen rivers is fundamentally flawed and it is still unclear who is responsible for drainage, said the Local Government Association.“There are glaring gaps in this country’s readiness to cope with widespread and prolonged flooding,” said Paul Bettison, chairman of the LGA’s environment board.More… 

A roe deer with a single horn in the middle of its head has found fame as the “Unicorn” of Tuscany.The 10-month-old deer was born in captivity at the Centre of Natural Sciences, a nature reserve near Prato.While single-horned deers have been spotted before, this particular buck has a uniquely central horn, thought to be the result of a genetic flaw.More… 

Global warming is a fact whatever its deniers - encouraged by a cool year - have to say.

The deniers of global warming are about to latch on to a new argument. The world is cooling. And they are right - well, slightly.

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A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

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Honeybee populations are threatened worldwide. Could conserving native black bees in northern Europe help avert the crisis?

The small, windswept island of Læsø lies in the Kattegat, just off the Danish mainland. Moors, heather and meadows blanket its interior, and sand dunes hug its rugged coastline. A couple of thousand people inhabit the farms, villages and ports scattered along the shore. It is also the setting for an ambitious experiment to try to save northern Europe’s indigenous honeybee.

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