For decades, the Taklamakan Desert has symbolised one of nature’s harshest environments, a vast expanse of shifting sand where strong winds, scarce rainfall and extreme temperatures make vegetation difficult to establish. Today, however, new technology is changing how restoration is carried out. Across parts of China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, drones are being deployed to…
In February 2015, British endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh entered the freezing waters of Antarctica’s Ross Sea wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, completing a series of five short but record breaking swims in temperatures as low as minus 1.7 degrees Celsius. The swims were not simply a personal endurance challenge. Pugh, who serves…
Iran hands down death penalty indictment against Trump over Khamenei death Iran has issued an indictment against US President Donald Trump over the killing of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian media reported on Tuesday.Tehran prosecutor Ali Salehi said indictments had been completed in 140 cases linked to the war, including 74 involving the…
M.C. Davis spent close to 90 million dollars buying up 54,000 acres of heavily logged land in the Florida Panhandle, turning what timber companies had stripped bare into one of the largest private nature preserves in the southeastern United States. Since founding what he called Nokuse Plantation in 2000, Davis and his team have planted…
Punjabi man Moti Johal stopped his van and rushed to save an autistic toddler amid heavy traffic in Surrey. Moti Jahal is overwhelmed as his video of saving a child at a busy Surrey crossing in Canada has gone viral and everybody is praising him for his split-second decision to stop his car and pick…
On a remote island in the Marshall Islands, a concrete dome built more than four decades ago holds roughly 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste left over from the United States’ Cold War-era nuclear testing programme. Known officially as Runit Dome and locally as The Tomb, the structure was built between 1977 and 1980 to…
In 1998, a Tucson resident named Brad Lancaster took a saw to the curb outside his home and cut six openings into it, creating small channels to divert rainwater off the street and into the space between the sidewalk and the road. Cutting into a public curb without permission was against city rules, and Lancaster…
Netanyahu, Trump, Zelenskyy TOI correspondent from Washington: For more than three years, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Iran have unfolded as separate geopolitical dramas. On Tuesday however, the two appear closer than ever to becoming chapters of the same story.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived…
James Aren Duckett and Dominick Anthony Occhicon (AP Photo) Florida is preparing to carry out two executions on Tuesday, becoming the first US state in nearly a decade to execute two inmates on the same day. If both lethal injections go ahead, it will also mark Florida’s first same-day executions since 1964 and the first…
Rare Andean bear was captured on camera near the headwaters of Parapeti River (Fundacion Natura Bolivia photo) The rare Andean bear, locally known as the jukumari, has been spotted again near the headwaters of Bolivia’s Parapeti River. The sighting has given conservationists fresh hope because the species is rarely seen in the wild. Its presence…