A forest fire that flared anew in southern France sent 1,000 more people fleeing while overnight rain brought blazes elsewhere in the country under control, officials said on Sunday.

A walrus nicknamed Freya that attracted crowds while basking in the Oslo fjord was euthanised on Sunday, with Norway officials saying it was the only option but experts slamming an "infinitely sad" decision.

The psychologist Steven Pinker has long believed we should be more optimistic – and even current crises do not dissuade himReading and watching the media over the past year, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are facing the collapse of civilisation. We have a shrinking economy, a fuel crisis that may bring on energy rationing and forced blackouts, extreme weather events, the increased...

M Shed, BristolHow to live well, and sanely, on a freezing, dry planet bombarded with radiation, wonder two artists, whose prototype Martian house also affords a view of our increasingly challenged EarthLiving on Mars is a game for squillionaires and the agencies of superpower governments, for Elon Musk and Nasa, not the average citizen. The reason is obvious and simple: it is mind-bendingly...

Higher summer temperatures caused by climate crisis will lead to more cases of melanoma, say medicsExperts have said higher summer temperatures caused by the climate crisis will fuel an increase in cases of potentially deadly skin cancers such as melanoma.The UK recorded its highest ever temperature of 40.2C last month, as climate scientists stressed the heatwave was not a one-off and high...

Controversy over Google’s AI program is raising questions about just how powerful it is. Is it even safe?In autumn 2021, a man made of blood and bone made friends with a child made of “a billion lines of code”. Google engineer Blake Lemoine had been tasked with testing the company’s artificially intelligent chatbot LaMDA for bias. A month in, he came to the conclusion that it was sentient....

Laboratory tests following a mass die-off of fish in the Oder River detected high levels of salinity but no mercury poisoning its waters, Poland's environment minister said Saturday as the mystery continued as to what killed tons of fish in Central Europe.

The Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which studies climate resiliency, is running a pilot program to see whether a naming system for heat waves will affect the public’s perception and the way they act during a heat...

French firefighters tackled wildfires raging in the country's southeast Saturday as officials kept a wary eye on a huge blaze that appeared to be contained further west.

To feed and cool his buffaloes, Hashem Gassed must cross 10 kilometers (six miles) of sunburnt land in southern Iraq, where drought is devastating swathes of the mythical Mesopotamian Marshes.

An undersea earthquake shook part of eastern Indonesia on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of serious damage or casualties.

Breakthrough research could see some genetic cancers neutralised before they take hold and is already being used for people at riskSue Hayward was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2017. Doctors acted swiftly and she was given a hysterectomy followed by sessions of chemotherapy.But her cancer returned within a year. “I carry a mutated version of a gene known as BRCA1 which makes me...

Did Sars-CoV-2 emerge from a Huanan market stall or a lab? For the American virologist, who has been abused online for defending a ‘natural’ origin, the evidence is clearAngela Rasmussen studies the interactions between hosts and pathogens and how they shape disease. Before the pandemic, she worked on the emerging viruses that cause Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Ebola, dengue and...

Helping a hitchhiker should have given me a warm glow of generosity, but ended with me feeling like a gullible shmuckWhat’s the most money you’ve ever given a complete stranger? £20, £30, £50… maybe more? I’ve always been free and easy when it comes to handing out small change on the street, but a couple of months ago I found myself in a different league altogether. I gave a man I had...

Landfills are releasing large amounts of planet-warming methane gas into the atmosphere from the decomposition of waste and are a significant contributor to such emissions in urban areas, a study suggests.