Extinction - the facts

Meet Magawa, The Landmine-Detecting Rat Who Just Received The PSDA Gold Medal For Exceptional Bravery Not all animal superheroes wear capes, but they do get gold medals! Magawa, a landmine detection rat who has been saving lives in Cambodia, has been awarded the PDSA Gold Medal for his bravery and devotion to duty. Awarded by the UK’s leading veterinary charity, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, this medal is the animal equivalent of the George Cross. HeroRAT Magawa (yes, that is his official job title) is the first rat in the charity’s 77-year history of honoring animals to receive a PDSA Medal. The Social Life of Forests The Social Life of Forests By Ferris Jabr Photographs by Brendan George Ko As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine.

Melting Antarctic ice will raise sea level by 2.5 metres – even if Paris climate goals are met, study finds Melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will cause sea level rises of about two and a half metres around the world, even if the goals of the Paris agreement are met, research has shown. The melting is likely to take place over a long period, beyond the end of this century, but is almost certain to be irreversible, because of the way in which the ice cap is likely to melt, the new model reveals. Even if temperatures were to fall again after rising by 2C (3.6F), the temperature limit set out in the Paris agreement, the ice would not regrow to its initial state, because of self-reinforcing mechanisms that destabilise the ice, according to the paper published in the journal Nature. “The more we learn about Antarctica, the direr the predictions become,” said Anders Levermann, co-author of the paper from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We get enormous sea level rise [from Antarctic melting] even if we keep to the Paris agreement, and catastrophic amounts if we don’t.”

Is this the end of forests as we've known them? Camille Stevens-Rumann never used to worry about seeing dead trees. As a wildland firefighter in the American west, she encountered untold numbers killed in blazes she helped to extinguish. She knew fires are integral to forests in this part of the world; they prune out smaller trees, giving room to the rest and even help the seeds of some species to germinate. “We have largely operated under the assumption that forests are going to come back after fires,” Stevens-Rumann said.

Overlooked No More: Brad Lomax, a Bridge Between Civil Rights Movements Alabama in 1963 was an epicenter of the civil rights movement, with lunch counter sit-ins, protest marches and other actions aimed at dismantling state-sponsored segregation. There, for the first time, Brad encountered signs designating some public spaces for white people and some for Black people. After graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia in 1968, Lomax considered joining the military, but as the war in Vietnam raged, with Black soldiers bearing a disproportionate share of the burden, he decided instead to attend Howard University in Washington. That year — inexplicably, it seemed — Lomax began falling as he walked. Then he learned that he had multiple sclerosis. As the disease progressed, he began using a wheelchair — and it opened his eyes to another form of discrimination.

Do These A.I.-Created Fake People Look Real to You? click 2x scroll down There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse — you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. They’re Among the World’s Oldest Living Things. The Climate Crisis Is Killing Them. Sequoia Crest, Calif. — Until a few years ago, about the only thing that killed an old-growth giant sequoia was old age. Not only are they the biggest of the world’s trees, by volume — the General Sherman Tree, considered the largest, is 36 feet in diameter at its base and 275 feet tall — they are among the oldest. At least one fallen giant sequoia was estimated to have been more than 3,200 years old. They last so long that, historically, only one or two of every thousand old-growth trees dies annually, according to Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey. Fire always was a frequent visitor to sequoia groves, but rarely a threat.

Arctic's Shift to a Warmer Climate Is 'Well Underway, Scientists Warn The Arctic continued its unwavering shift toward a new climate in 2020, as the effects of near-record warming surged across the region, shrinking ice and snow cover and fueling extreme wildfires, scientists said Tuesday in an annual assessment of the region. Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska and one of the editors of the assessment, said it “describes an Arctic region that continues along a path that is warmer, less frozen and biologically changed in ways that were scarcely imaginable even a generation ago.” “Nearly everything in the Arctic, from ice and snow to human activity, is changing so quickly that there is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” he said. While the whole planet is warming because of emissions of heat-trapping gases through burning of fossil fuels and other human activity, the Arctic is heating up more than twice as quickly as other regions. The warmth was pervasive across the Arctic.