Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Marauding gangs and political unrest since October’s polls have driven thousands of Mozambicans across the border into Malawi, despite its drought, food and fuel shortages On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Manase Madia, 50, shows his Mozambican identity card. Once a sign of pride, he does not know what to believe in any more. Over the past few weeks he has seen houses being burned down, and shops and businesses looted, including his own. He now fears for his family, which has scattered in fear. At a community ground where officials are processing new arrivals before being transferred to a shelter, Madia is one of about 13,000 people who have crossed into Malawi in the past two months, seeking refuge from post-election violence in Mozambique. The arrival of the refugees, albeit in smaller numbers, is reminiscent for people here of the civil war when almost a million Mozambicans sought refuge in the neighbouring southern African nation in the 1980s and early 1990s. Continue reading...

These tiny organisms matter. They have been used to map dark matter and improve transport networks, and they’re living all around us A few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts (Comatricha nigra), bunches of rainbow iridescence on toffee strings (Badhamia utricularis), bouffants of raspberry parfait (Arcyria denudata) – and those are just a few that have appeared on bits of wood in our urban garden. Slime moulds, or myxomycetes, spend part of their life cycle as what are known as fruiting bodies – which look a bit like tiny mushrooms, hence why they were once classified as fungi (they’re actually in the kingdom Protista). Often you will find them, at this stage, in a colony – or, well, I’d suggest galaxy, sweetshop or funfair would be more accurate for a collective noun. Lucy Jones is the author of Matrescence, Losing Eden and The Nature Seed Continue reading...

Diminutive bird breeds in Alaska and Arctic Canada and sightings in Britain are rare enough to attract a crowd If you’d asked me which rare bird I might see in Somerset in early January, the least sandpiper would have been very low on my list. Yet on a fine, bright, chilly morning here it was: running along the edge of the water like a clockwork toy, probing the mud for food with its stubby bill. This species is well-named. It is the world’s smallest wading bird, just 13-15cm long and weighing less than 30 grams – about the same as a house sparrow. Even its scientific name, minutilla, is Latin for “very small”. Standing next to a dunlin and a teal, it made them look enormous. Continue reading...

Fueled by major windstorm, Pacific Palisades fire touches museum site but officials say collection safe Follow live: Palisades blaze doubles in size to nearly 3,000 acres A rapidly spreading wildfire in southern California reached the grounds of the Getty Villa museum north of Santa Monica on Tuesday, but officials said no structures had burned and the collection was safe. The Pacific Palisades fire, fueled by a major windstorm and prompting mass evacuations in Los Angeles county, burned some trees and vegetation on site at the Getty Villa, but museum leaders said the galleries and archives were protected. Continue reading...