Huge vehicles are popular with drivers, but their wider impacts on road safety and the environment must be tackled
No one who walks, cycles or drives around London, or many of the world’s big cities, could fail to notice the vastly increased size of the typical car. A type of vehicle once associated with rural settings and outdoor lifestyles is now ubiquitous. Heavily marketed as sports utility vehicles (SUVs), supersize cars are among the key consumer trends of recent decades. In 2022, they accounted for 46% of global new car sales.
For manufacturers, these vehicles are big earners due to higher profit margins. For those inside them, they offer more space and a higher vantage point. But for those on the outside, SUVs have obvious downsides. The threat that they pose to pedestrians is one. Research shows that children are 77% more likely to die if struck by an SUV compared with other cars, due to their size and structure – particularly their raised bonnets. This finding was highlighted in an announcement from the London mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, that such risks are being scrutinised as part of a wider review into SUVs’ environmental impact. This evidence will provide the basis for policy proposals that are expected to include higher charges for owners.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/16/2026 - 13:40
03/16/2026 - 13:08
Hard choices lie ahead for Downing Street if higher fuel prices spark resentment and trigger a renewed cost of living crisis
Seventy years ago this winter, the streets of Britain fell eerily quiet. After one last panic buying spree, many garages shut, and traffic even in the heart of London dwindled away. The formal introduction of petrol rationing had begun, limiting drivers to 200 miles’ worth a month – with exceptions for farmers, doctors and vicars – after the Suez crisis blocked fuel supplies from the Gulf.
Ancient history now, of course – or it would be if it weren’t for what looks increasingly like the US’s own version of Suez: a great power starting a war it seemingly doesn’t know how to finish, against an enemy it woefully underestimated. If the strait of Hormuz – the vital shipping lane now rendered unsafe for shipping by Iranian drones and mines – cannot soon be reopened, then Britain could be only weeks away from needing to ration fuel, the former BP executive (and government adviser) Nick Butler warned on Monday morning.
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03/16/2026 - 11:00
Exclusive: Claire Earley’s son Rex spent six weeks in hospital after contracting E coli from contaminated lake
Realtime pollution alerts are needed across Windermere urgently, campaigners have said, as the mother of a seven-year-old boy who kayaked on the lake described how he nearly died after contracting a dangerous strain of E coli from contaminated water.
Claire Earley’s son Rex spent six weeks in hospital, and underwent two emergency operations, after a family kayaking trip on Windermere last August.
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03/16/2026 - 09:00
Electric vehicles reduce exposure to global oil price shocks and shift energy consumption to electricity largely produced domestically, expert says
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Australia could reduce its reliance on foreign fuel by more than 1bn litres a year if it replaced 1m petrol-fuelled cars with electric vehicles, as experts say boosting EV adoption is part of securing the nation’s long-term economic security.
Hussein Dia, a professor of transport technology and sustainability at the Swinburne University of Technology, said electric vehicles can play a meaningful role in improving Australia’s energy sovereignty, as well as contributing to the national net zero emissions goal.
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03/16/2026 - 08:05
Recording of humpback whale from 1949 could also provide new understanding of how the huge animals communicate
A haunting whale song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it is the oldest such recording known.
The song is that of a humpback whale, a marine giant beloved by whale watchers for its docile nature and spectacular leaps from the water, and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, said researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
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03/16/2026 - 07:03
Food production in many African countries depends heavily on fertiliser imported from the Gulf through the strait of Hormuz
Countries in Africa, where farmers depend heavily on imported fertiliser and a large share of household income goes on food, are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East, experts have said.
The conflict has drastically disrupted trade through the strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane not just for oil and gas but also for fertiliser, which is produced in vast quantities in the Gulf.
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03/16/2026 - 07:00
The Trump administration’s cuts to biodiversity funding have imperiled species, habitats and the people who defend both. Now the world is seeking a new way forward
On 22 January 2024, at the inauguration of the current Liberian president, Joseph Boakai, the US-based Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley paid tribute to the west African nation’s tropical forests – one of the places where, she said, “our fathers came / centuries ago, and planted our umbilical cords / deep in the soil”.
The forests of Liberia are among the most diverse on the planet, home not only to humans and their ancestral ties but also to rare species such as forest elephants, pygmy hippopotamuses and western chimpanzees. They are also chronically threatened by industrial development, including illegal logging and mining.
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03/15/2026 - 09:00
The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination
They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation were allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the civil war, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal, landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen.
Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma between 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.
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03/15/2026 - 08:00
No species is a ‘villain’ – and even humans’ least favourite creatures are part of a web that makes all life possible
A wasp has just flown into your kitchen. Do you: a) scream and run away; b) roll up a magazine and try to bash it; or c) open a window and usher it outside? Now imagine it’s a bee – do you respond in the same way?
Our emotional responses towards the other animals on this planet are diverse, complicated and often irrational, and our contrasting perceptions of wasps and bees is a fantastic example. Bees are positively associated with honey, flowers and pollination, while wasps are negatively associated with stings, pain and annoyance – all this despite the fact that bees obviously can sting, while wasps are important pollinators, too. It’s the same for other animal pairs: sharks are mindless killers, while dolphins are paragons of benevolence; vultures are ugly and sinister, while eagles are majestic. I’m here to say that we’ve got them all wrong.
Jo Wimpenny is the author of Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature’s Least Loved Animals
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03/15/2026 - 05:00
Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation
Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming brick building in a Dallas business park.
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, “de-extinct” via the birth of three new pups.
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