Park bosses say they’re running visitor centers and even cleaning bathrooms as remaining staff try to keep sites open
Across the US’s fabled but overstretched national parks, unusual scenes are playing out this summer following budget cuts by Donald Trump’s administration. Archeologists are staffing ticket booths, ecologists are covering visitor centers and the superintendents of parks are even cleaning the toilets.
The National Park Service (NPS), responsible for maintaining cherished wildernesses and sites of cultural importance from Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty, has lost a quarter of its permanent staff since Trump took office in January, with the administration seeking to gut the service’s budget by a third.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
08/07/2025 - 05:00
08/07/2025 - 04:00
The recent hopeful surge of some wildlife isn’t down to us. But in an era of climatic decline, it shows the resilience of our fellow species
Butterflies flit across my vision wherever I go this summer. Screams of swifts have been unusually audible in cities. Hedges are laden with blackberries. Hordes of plump wood pigeons devour my kale. Fruit trees bow with plums and apples. There are wasps galore and each morning I’m woken by a raucous new neighbour: a herring gull that’s moved on to the factory roof next door.
Wild nature, in Britain this year, is visibly abundant. Most of us share similar stories. But is there really a blizzard of butterflies? Are there actually more swifts? Is nature in recovery after years of decline? Or is this shifting baseline syndrome in action, whereby we are so inured to decimated levels of nature that we are deceived by tiny blips of hope?
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08/07/2025 - 03:00
A new polar expedition compared samples with those collected more than a century ago by by Scott, along with voyages led by Shackleton and Borchgrevink
Three glass specimen jars full of satsuma-sized echinoderms, or sea urchins, sit on Dr Hugh Carter’s desk in the Natural History Museum. Each one, collected from the depths of the Southern Ocean by polar teams led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Capt Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink, tells a tale of heroic exploration and scientific endeavour.
Now, more than a century later, Carter, the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) curator of marine invertebrates, hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins, 50 in all, will help tell a different, increasingly urgent story of modern times: how changes in the world’s southernmost waters may be affecting marine life.
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08/07/2025 - 00:00
Release of 20 lynx over several years into Kielder Forest area would create population of about 50 animals
Releasing just 20 lynx in Northumberland would be enough to create a healthy wild population, research has found, and most people in the area would support the practice.
Northumberland Wildlife Trust has been working to see if the wild cats, which became extinct in Britain about 1,300 years ago as a result of hunting and habitat loss, could be returned to the area.
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08/06/2025 - 23:00
Soundproofing buffers at tunnel mouths to be rolled out on China’s latest magnetic levitation train prototype
Researchers hope they may have solved the “tunnel boom” problem as they prepare to roll out China’s latest prototype magnetic levitation train.
The newest version of the maglev train is capable of travelling at 600km/h (about 370mph). However, the train’s engineers have wrestled with the problem of the shock waves which occur as the train exits the mouth of a tunnel.
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08/06/2025 - 23:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 07 August 2025; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00150-5
Divergent patterns of global tuna fishing fleet dynamics among different continents
08/06/2025 - 21:20
It’s not the sisterhood busting your balls, fellas – it’s the fossil fuel interests making money from the tonnes of synthetic garbage spewed on to the planet every day
There is plastic in your balls!
Surely this should be headline news every day until the news breaks that “there is no longer plastic in your balls”, accompanied by photographs of celebration parades and ecstatic couples kissing in the streets.
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08/06/2025 - 12:09
Advancing blaze scorches 16,000 hectares near Spanish border, destroying homes and forcing people to flee
Hundreds of firefighters are battling to stop the spread of a fast-moving wildfire in southern France after one woman died and nine people were injured as the blaze scorched a vast area of the Corbières hills.
The blaze burned an area the size of Paris over one afternoon and night and was still burning on Wednesday evening, making it the second biggest fire in France in 50 years.
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08/06/2025 - 11:02
Lion that once roamed northern Africa has been extinct in the wild since 1960s
Four Barbary lion cubs were born recently in a Czech zoo, a vital contribution for the small surviving population of a rare lion that is extinct in the wild.
The three females and one male were seen playing in their outdoor enclosure at Dvůr Králové safari park on Wednesday under the watchful eye of their parents, Khalila and Bart.
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08/06/2025 - 06:08
Firefighters in southern France are tackling the country's biggest wildfire of the year so far. At least one person has died, with almost a dozen others injured and homes destroyed, according to local authorities.
The Aude prefecture said the fire was moving 'very quickly' and that nearly 2,000 firefighters were trying to bring it under control. The blaze has already burned through 13,000 hectares (32,100 acres), the local fire chief Christophe Magny told BFM TV
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