Problem at water treatment centre left 24,000 Tunbridge Wells homes without drinking water for two weeks
A failure at a water treatment centre that left tens of thousands of Kent households without water was foreseen weeks before it happened and could have been stopped, the regulator has said.
Twenty-four thousand homes in the Tunbridge Wells area were without drinking water for two weeks from 30 November last year due to a failure at the Pembury water treatment centre.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/06/2026 - 09:48
01/06/2026 - 08:00
‘Everybody loses’ if production supercharged in country with largest known oil reserves, critics say
Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging – and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.
Trump has aggressively sought to boost oil and gas production within the US. Now, following the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, he is seeking to orchestrate a ramp-up of drilling in Venezuela, which has the largest known reserves of oil in the world – equivalent to some 300bn barrels, according to research firm the Energy Institute.
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01/06/2026 - 07:00
Reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight to reduce global heating is not a new idea. It is time to safely experiment
The world is warming fast – and our options to avoid catastrophic harm are narrowing. 2024 was the first full year more than 1.5C hotter than the 19th-century average. Emissions are still rising, with fossil fuel use expected to hit a new high in 2025. Permanent carbon removal technologies – often cited as a fix – are removing just tens of thousands of tonnes annually, almost nothing relative to the 5-10bn tonnes needed. Cutting emissions and scaling carbon removal remain essential. But they may not be enough.
As suffering grows and ecosystems unravel, more people will ask: is there anything we can do to prevent these harms? The idea of reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight to reduce warming is not a new idea. In 1965, Lyndon B Johnson’s science advisers proposed it as the only way to cool the planet. Earth already reflects about 30% of incoming sunlight; raising that fraction slightly – say, to 31% – could strengthen the planet’s natural heat shield. But how?
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01/06/2026 - 05:04
Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their winter encounters with nature
Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.
The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a whether it’s a winter flower, something lurking in a pond or a fascinating bug.
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01/06/2026 - 02:00
Behind the west’s huge appetite for the fruit lies the dark reality of environmental destruction and Indigenous exploitation in Mexico
I grew up in San Andrés Tziróndaro, a Purépecha community on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in the Mexican state of Michoacán. My childhood was shaped by water, forests and music. The lake fed us. The forest protected us. In the afternoons, people gathered in the local square while bands passed through playing pirekua, our traditional music.
That way of life is now under threat as our land is extracted for profit.
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01/06/2026 - 00:00
Every year a Chinese-dominated flotilla big enough to be seen from space pillages the rich marine life on Mile 201, a largely ungoverned part of the South Atlantic off Argentina
In a monitoring room in Buenos Aires, a dozen members of the Argentinian coast guard watch giant industrial-fishing ships moving in real time across a set of screens. “Every year, for five or six months, the foreign fleet comes from across the Indian Ocean, from Asian countries, and from the North Atlantic,” says Cdr Mauricio López, of the monitoring department. “It’s creating a serious environmental problem.”
Just beyond Argentina’s maritime frontier, hundreds of foreign vessels – known as the distant-water fishing fleet – are descending on Mile 201, a largely ungoverned strip of the high seas in the South Atlantic, to plunder its rich marine life. The fleet regularly becomes so big it can be seen from space, looking like a city floating on the sea.
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01/06/2026 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 06 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00175-w
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) management usually involves bringing multiple stakeholders together, to construct policy-relevant research programs and science-based tools for adaptive management. Here, we present the conclusions of a transdisciplinary workshop that aimed at reviewing experiences in the co-design of EBM research in MPAs. We find that MPAs represent powerful instruments for conducting real-world experiments, de facto acting as living labs in support of ocean governance.
01/05/2026 - 21:35
Suit against San Francisco-area cities Petaluma and Morgan Hill latest attack on policies that seek to rein in oil and gas
The Trump administration sued two California cities on Monday, seeking to block local laws that restrict natural gas infrastructure and appliances in new construction.
The lawsuit is the administration’s latest attack on energy policies that seek to rein in the use of fossil fuels to combat the climate crisis. California, a Democratic stronghold, has among the most aggressive climate change policies in the world.
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01/05/2026 - 19:01
Electric car sales rose by nearly a quarter to a record 473,000, or 23.4% of the overall market, says SMMT
A rise in the popularity of Chinese brands pushed total car sales in the UK above the 2m mark last year for the first time since 2019, figures reveal.
Chinese companies accounted for 9.7% of the 2m new car registrations in the UK in 2025, or 196,000 vehicles, according to preliminary figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group. That was nearly double the 4.9% market share achieved by the country’s carmakers in 2024.
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01/05/2026 - 08:43
There’s nothing more uplifting than hearing about a world-shaking, life-enhancing new development. But science shouldn’t overlook the small stuff, or stop looking for new species of cute, fluffy mammals …
People who greet the new year with hope, ambitious plans and optimised gut microbiomes might be obnoxiously apparent at the moment, but we all know they’re a minority. Most of us lurched into 2026 catastrophically depleted and grey-faced, juggling deep Lemsip dependency with a deeper overdraft and a sense of ever-deepening global geopolitical foreboding. There is, however, one thing that fills me with buoyant optimism now and always: science. I don’t understand it, but I’m delighted it’s out there, making things better.
I was booted out of my leaden year-end listlessness by The Atlantic’s list of 55 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2025. Did you know, for example, that scientists at UC Berkeley created a new colour? (It’s called “olo” and it’s sort of teal.) Or that doctors treated a baby with a rare genetic disorder with custom gene editing? There were more wonders in the Smithsonian’s list of last year’s fascinating scientific discoveries: ichthyosaurs, extinct marine reptiles, had “stealth flippers”, snails can regrow eyes within a month, and “flamingos form tornado-like vortices as they probe for prey”, which is pure poetry (it looks pretty cool too, I watched one do it on YouTube). Still on an animal theme, entomologists discovered a “bone collector” caterpillar that conceals itself in the body parts of its prey (I’m sure he’s lovely when you get to know him). 2025 was also the year science made oyster mushrooms play keyboards (sort of), astronomers discovered more than 100 moons in our solar system and medical researchers created replica womb lining and made astonishing progress towards lab-grown teeth.
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