Often dismissed as summertime sniffles, the condition that affects a quarter of UK adults can lead to serious and life-limiting health problems
Read more: Pollen peril: how heat, thunder and smog are creating deadly hay fever seasons
Sometimes the season starts as early as mid-April; other times it’s slower to get going. But for Lisa Ventura, June is consistently the cruellest month. “I might get lulled into a false sense of security: ‘Oh, it’s the end of May, it hasn’t started yet’,” she says in a heavy tone. “Then, as if on cue, it’s June the first – and bang.”
Ventura suffers from “debilitating” hay fever. For about three months from early May, she cannot be outside for more than a few minutes before she starts sniffing and sneezing. “When it’s really bad, my eyes look like I’ve gone 10 rounds with a boxer – they are that swollen,” says Ventura.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/14/2025 - 02:00
04/13/2025 - 20:23
‘During an election campaign, the last thing you want is to catch a cold from someone – so that’s on me,’ environment minister says
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Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese have brushed off an awkward moment at Sunday’s Labor federal election campaign launch when the prime minister appeared to block a hug from the environment minister, insisting that the pair are good friends.
The interaction took place as Albanese greeted members of his frontbench in the audience, with Jim Chalmers giving him a backslap and the former PM Julia Gillard shaking his hand, before Albanese held her arm up in the air.
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04/13/2025 - 06:00
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.
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04/13/2025 - 01:00
Early reports have led experts to believe there could be a surge in the deadly invader, threatening native species
They have bright yellow legs, are about 25mm (almost 1in) long, and a single colony, if left unchecked, can “butcher” 90,000 pollinating insects in just one season.
Since the first UK sighting in 2016 of Vespa velutina – the Asian or yellow-legged hornet – beekeepers and scientists have waged a vigorous campaign to minimise the damage this invasive species can do to Britain’s biodiversity and bee colonies.
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04/12/2025 - 23:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 13 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00114-9
Progress and challenges of multi-habitat marine restoration in the eastern Aegean Sea, Türkiye
04/12/2025 - 22:14
Avadale’s one police officer says damage is heartbreaking but locals are resilient – ‘They’ll get it done’
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When Koss Siwers returned to his pub in outback Queensland nothing was where he left it and pretty much everything was coated with mud.
Residents of Adavale, 900km west of Brisbane, have started coming back to the tiny outpost after evacuations forced by widespread flooding.
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04/12/2025 - 15:00
Spokesperson acknowledges supply of flyers, T-shirts and corflutes to ‘dozens of community groups’ seeking to defeat party’s candidates
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The rightwing advocacy group Advance has acknowledged it is paying for election materials attacking the Greens to be used by third-party groups during the election campaign.
“Advance is working with hundreds of volunteers from dozens of community groups to defeat Greens candidates and we make no apology,” a spokesperson said.
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04/12/2025 - 11:30
It’s not as sensational as recreating long-dead species, but conserving modern-day fauna is far more pressing
The parable of the Mars mission: we’d rather spend trillions sending ourselves to a yet unlivable planet than look after the one we have. And swiftly on its heels, the parable of the dire wolf. We’d rather resurrect a 12,500-year-old species from the dead than save our existing wild animals. Of course we would. Recycling is boring; doing the very thing 90s science fiction movies warned us not to do is fun.
We are not quite on the verge of bringing back ancient species. But last week the PR campaign for doing so began in earnest. Colossal Biosciences – a company known for trying to revive the dodo, the mammoth and the thylacine – has unveiled three large adorable white puppies, claiming it has created “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”: the dire wolf, made famous by Game of Thrones. It invited author George RR Martin to look; he duly burst into tears.
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04/12/2025 - 11:00
An animal’s chance of survival after domoic acid poisoning is 50-50, and this year an outbreak has sickened hundreds
It was just after 8am on Tuesday, a thick morning fog still clinging to the California coastline, and SeaWorld’s animal rescue team had already made their first save of the day: a hefty, sick-looking sea lion that had been waddling dangerously close to a four-lane highway in downtown San Diego.
Now, in a private area of SeaWorld that few of the theme park’s thousands of daily visitors ever get to see, the rescue team was in full “triage” mode. Half a dozen staff members maneuvered the caged sea lion off the bed of a truck, and grabbed IV bags full of fluids and vitamins.
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04/12/2025 - 06:27
More than 600,000 people a year visit Birling Gap, part of Seven Sisters cliffs, which are vulnerable to coastal erosion
The National Trust has banned coaches from one of Britain’s most popular beauty spots in an attempt to reduce the growing numbers of people visiting the site.
Up to 600,000 people a year visit Birling Gap which is part of the Seven Sisters cliffs in East Sussex on England’s south coast.
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