#Environment

🌊 Our planet is so beautiful. #oceans #environment #nature

An oil spill off the UAE coast has prompted beach closures after a crude oil tanker reportedly struck an Iranian-laid naval mine in early October. The UAE says containment efforts and environmental assessments are

Climate-responsive architecture isn't an architectural style. It's an approach to designing buildings that respond appropriately to their environmental conditions. And considering Nigeria's climate, it should be fundamental to our architectural practice. Design sustainably🌿

An oil spill from a damaged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz has reached the UAE’s beaches, forcing their closure in Ras Al Khaimah until further notice and raising environmental concerns.

The White House and President Trump are taking a major victory lap after a new study claims that paper straws are worse for the environment than their plastic counterparts. Paper straws were supposed to be the environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, but a new study finds they release six times the amount of carcinogens than plastic straws and contribute to twice as much environmental acidification. Trump has long criticized paper straws and the environmental policies he calls the "Green New Scam." In February 2025, he signed an executive order directing the federal government to stop purchasing paper straws and develop a strategy to eliminate their use.

🇧🇸 As Patron of The Bahamas National Trust, King Charles is visiting Bonefish Pond National Park in New Providence. The visit will highlight one of the Bahamas' environmental restoration & climate-resilience projects, while also demonstrating the vulnerability of low-lying island communities to climate change & the importance of effective environmental stewardship. His Majesty have an opportunity to see first-hand the restoration of the Park's unique wetland ecosystem & hear from those involved in its protection, management, conservation & education.

Google illegally cleared an estimated 250,000 trees across 330 hectares of forest in Muhos, northern Finland, to prepare for a new AI data center before completing mandatory environmental impact assessments And another 150,000 trees felled at Otanmäki

Tennessee is home to unmatched natural beauty. Our mountains, fertile farmlands, and clean rivers and aquifers define who we are. But behind closed doors, decisions are being made that risk turning our state into a national disposal ground for toxic nuclear waste. My position is clear and non-negotiable: Tennessee is not a dump site. My opponent, Marsha Blackburn, supports making dumping nuclear waste in our communities and brags about supporting more fossil fuels. What’s more disgusting is she denied funding for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals. It’s no surprise when she’s in the pockets of Big Oil and Big Data, but it’s unacceptable. Out-of-state corporate interests and backroom deals shouldn't decide the safety of our soil, our water, or our children's future. We need leaders who prioritize community safety and environmental accountability, not short-sighted profit for the few.

Good morning champs Robots and Physical AI systems must learn from genuine real-world conditions—not just clean, controlled environments. That includes rain, reflections, low light, and other everyday variables that change how a place looks and behaves. @vangrid_io converts ordinary smartphone footage of real locations into textured 3D models (delivered as GLB files) for use in AI, robotics, and world models. One recent bounty offered $1,410 for footage of a wet stretch of the Isar riverside steps at dusk—capturing the stone edges, railings, waterline, puddles, and low-light reflections that dry daytime scans would miss. Once a capture is accepted, the footage is processed into a textured 3D model. Reconstruction typically takes 30 minutes or more. The open question is how much visual and environmental detail survives that conversion. For Physical AI, a useful model needs to preserve more than basic geometry. Real-world conditions—wet surfaces, reflections, lighting, and surface properties—matter just as much as the shape of the place itself.

Environmental campaigners and the local water company United Utilities have come up with a plan to build a huge sewage tunnel at Lake Windermere coming at a cost of more than £3.6 billion. The plan is not yet approved but there are two proposals to fund the project: either taxpayers or United Utilities customers in the north west pay. Lake Windermere is England’s largest natural lake and a UNESCO World Heritage site but has also been at the epicentre of the arguments over sewage. We spoke with the CEO of United Utilities Louise Beardmore. #News #Channel4News #LakeWindermere #Sewage #UK

In 2003, Station Casinos signed a deal with a California tribe to build a casino. After 23 years of legal battles and environmental reviews, the $725 million North Fork Mono Casino in Madera opened today. It looks *exactly* like Durango in southwest Las Vegas.

We’re going Beyond the Surface with the first episode of our Voyage to Early Access series! 🌊 Explore how narrative and environmental storytelling play a role in shaping Subnautica 2 ⬇️

For the first time, we're watching plants breathe in real time. Plants "breathe" through minuscule openings on their leaves known as stomata—a term derived from the Greek word for "mouths." These tiny pores perform a critical balancing act: they open to allow carbon dioxide (CO₂) to enter for photosynthesis, while simultaneously permitting water vapor to escape into the atmosphere through transpiration. This ongoing compromise influences a plant's growth rate, water requirements, and overall resilience, especially in challenging environments. Historically, scientists faced significant limitations in studying this dynamic process directly. They could either observe stomatal movements under a microscope (often in artificial or uncontrolled settings) or measure overall leaf gas exchange (which reflects aggregate behavior but obscures microscopic details). A recent breakthrough from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign overcomes this divide with an innovative system called Stomata In-Sight. This integrated tool combines three key technologies in real time: - A live confocal microscope (specifically laser scanning) that captures high-resolution, three-dimensional images and videos of living stomatal cells and pores without damaging the tissue. - Precise gas exchange sensors that quantify CO₂ uptake and water loss (stomatal conductance, photosynthesis, and transpiration) from the same leaf section. - A controlled environmental chamber that maintains specific levels of light, humidity, temperature, and CO₂ to simulate real-world conditions. By linking microscopic stomatal aperture changes (tracked via machine-learning image analysis for dozens of pores simultaneously) with whole-leaf physiological responses, researchers can now observe how individual stomata behave and contribute to the plant's overall performance under varying scenarios. The implications are profound, particularly for agriculture. Water scarcity remains the primary constraint on crop yields worldwide. By identifying the genes and mechanisms that govern stomatal efficiency—such as opening/closing speed, density, or aperture size—scientists can develop breeding strategies for crops that conserve water more effectively while maintaining or boosting photosynthesis. This could lead to varieties better equipped to withstand drought, heat, and other effects of climate change, ultimately supporting higher food production with fewer resources. Stomata In-Sight represents a major advance in plant science, transforming our ability to study—and ultimately engineer—plants that not only endure environmental stress but actively help humanity adapt to a changing climate. [Crawford, J. D., Mayfield-Jones, D., Fried, G. A., Hernandez, N., & Leakey, A. D. B. (2025). Stomata in-sight: Integrating live confocal microscopy with leaf gas exchange and environmental control. Plant Physiology, 199(4), kiaf600. DOI: 10.1093/plphys/kiaf600]

Often called Old Man’s Beard it is exceptionally sensitive to air pollution, so their presence on Hangman indicates high air quality & clean air in the local #environment. #Lichen is a symbiotic partnership between a fungus & an alga working together.

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web.

good morning AI is only as smart as the world it can understand. That’s why @vangrid_io is an interesting project to watch. As Physical AI continues to evolve, one major challenge remains: helping intelligent systems understand real-world environments through reliable spatial data. Vangrid’s approach to 3D reconstruction, sensor networks, and real-world data infrastructure points toward a future where AI can do more than process information on a screen. It can build a better understanding of the physical world around us. What makes this narrative exciting is the potential connection between distributed data collection and more capable AI systems. Better environmental data could help machines interpret spaces, recognize objects, and interact with real-world surroundings more effectively. The next chapter of AI won’t exist only in digital environments. It will be built through the connection between data, physical spaces, and intelligent machines. Physical AI needs real-world intelligence — and infrastructure like @vangrid_io is worth keeping an eye on.

JUST IN: Google forced to halt work in Finland after illegally clearing 250,000 trees for a new data center, according to the Guardian. Every tree that occupied the 815-acre site just a few months ago is now gone. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) has ordered Google to stop work on the Muhos and Otanmäki sites after it cut down the trees before the environmental impact assessment was completed. Google’s Finland manager, Antti Järvinen, has apologized but says they were acting on "the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time." Muhos and Otanmäki are a $17 billion Google AI project. President Trump has criticized Google for taking the projects overseas instead of investing in the United States.

DARPA funded UC Berkeley research starting in the late 1990s on Smart Dust, targeting cubic-millimeter wireless sensor nodes for environmental monitoring and military sensing applications. Related later work produced Neural Dust prototypes, millimeter-scale implantable sensors powered by ultrasound for recording nerve and muscle activity in animal tests. Hitachi separately developed sub-millimeter passive RFID chips, as small as 0.05 mm, for item tracking and authentication. #SmartDust #DARPA #NeuralDust #RFID #Nanotech

The ocean absorbs around 30% of human-induced CO₂ emissions and 90% of excess heat generated by climate change. But factors such as warming, acidification and pollution are disrupting such functions. A new @UN report calls for better data to guide ocean-based climate technologies: