Myra Casey, Вулиця Стрийська, 202, Львів, Львівська область, Lviv (2025)

18/09/2024

A painting of an Edwardian Hull trawler that saved the crew of its sinking archenemy is to go under the hammer on Friday.

Ellesmere sailed out of the Humber between the turn of the 20th Century and the early 1930s and had been involved in numerous brushes with Irish fishery protection vessel Muirchu before coming to her rescue.

Also included in the collection is a painting of the trawler Pharos, whose disappearance remains a mystery, and the trawler Seti, which became an early victim of World War One.

12/09/2024

Hundreds of bottles of water have been made into an art installation to celebrate a county's chalk streams.
River Droplet has been created alongside the River Frome in Frampton, near Dorchester in Dorset.

It consists of 500 bottles of water and chalky sediment taken from the river.
The artwork has been created by artist Lorna Rees and architect Amanda Moore and was commissioned by the Dorset National Landscape.

10/09/2024

Volunteers are being sought for a scheme to introduce wildlife wardens in West Devon.
The project is being launched by West Devon Borough Council on 28 September at the authority's office in Tavistock during an event from 10:30 to 15:00 BST in collaboration with Devon Wildlife Trust.
The council said work would be carried out through the scheme to improve habitats and monitor the borough's ecology with the aim of protecting and increasing wildlife locally.
Anyone interested in becoming a warden has been asked to email the council.

05/09/2024

Keeping these animals from becoming habituated and food-conditioned is one of the biggest challenges, especially as more people move into the backcountry. Servheen helped create the Bear Smart community programme to address this; it's a template for how to live in bear habitats and has already been implemented in communities across Montana. It includes securing your attractants by using bear-proof rubbish bins, putting electric fences around livestock and gardens, never leaving food outside and carrying protection when camping, such as bear spray.
Penteriani says preventative measures like these should ward off the majority of carnivore attacks. But even if one proves imminent, you can still take steps to avoid injury.

02/09/2024

Penteriani's research indicates large carnivore attacks steadily increased from 1950 to 2019 (although that may be somewhat influenced by a concurrent increase in the reporting of wildlife-human conflicts). There are a few key reasons for this. In recent decades, carnivore conservation and population recovery efforts have proven rather effective. "The population of grizzly bears is five times what it was 40 years ago in the lower 48 states," says Servheen.
Urban sprawl in high-income countries is the more concerning reason. Servheen says people who move from cities out into the countryside often don't know or take the time to learn how to respect the wildlife that lives there. This results in careless behaviour, such as having rubbish bins that aren't animal-proofed, which can ultimately turn carnivores into food-conditioned threats.

27/08/2024

There are three other common drivers for carnivore-human attacks, some of which are more preventable than others. Natural aggression-based conflicts – such as those involving females protecting their young or animals protecting a food source – can often be avoided as long as people stay away from those animals and their food.
Carnivores that recognise humans as a means to get food, are a different story. As they become more reliant on human food they might find at campsites or in rubbish bins, they become less avoidant of humans. Losing that instinctive fear response puts them into more situations where they could get into an altercation with a human, which often results in that bear being put down by humans. "A fed bear is a dead bear," says Servheen, referring to a common saying among biologists and conservationists.

20/08/2024

Following a spate of predator attacks on hikers and park rangers in the US, Ally Hirschlag investigates why animals attack humans in the wild.

Keri Bergere was on a Saturday afternoon bike ride with her friends on the heavily-forested Tokul Creek trail near Fall City, Washington, when two cougars ran out in front of them. One went off into the woods, but the other turned around and, within seconds, had pulled the 60-year-old woman off her bike. "We didn't have a chance to face off with them to scare them away or anything," her friend, Annie Bilotta, told the local news station.
The young cougar clamped down on Bergere's face and would not let go for 15 minutes. Her friends tried everything: they hit it repeatedly with sticks, brought a 25-pound (11.4kg) boulder down on its head and stabbed it with a small knife, all while Bergere kept poking it in the eyes and mouth. When the cougar finally released for a moment and Bergere could get away, her friends pushed a bike on top of it, holding it down until help arrived. Bergere survived but sustained significant, permanent nerve damage to her face.

15/08/2024

Recent work by Yardley and her colleagues, using data from Solar Orbiter, suggests that the Sun's atmosphere, its corona, plays a role in the speed of the solar wind. Regions where the magnetic field lines, the direction of the field and charged particles are "open" – stretching out into space without looping back – provide a highway for solar wind to reach high speeds. Closed loops over some active regions – where the magnetic field lines have no beginning and end – can occasionally snap, producing slow solar wind. The variability in the slow solar wind seems to be driven by the unpredictable flow of plasma inside the Sun, which makes the magnetic field particularly chaotic.
The X-class flares and coronal mass ejections seen in May transformed the interplanetary medium as they flung out material across the solar system. Solar Orbiter detected a huge spike in ions moving at thousands of kilometres per second immediately after the 20 May flare. Computers on board other spacecraft – the BepiColombo probe, which is currently on a seven-year journey to Mercury, and Mars Express, in orbit around the Red Planet – both saw a dramatic increase in the number of memory errors caused by the high energy solar particles hitting the memory cells.

12/08/2024

The storm that hit Earth in May originated from an active region of solar flares and sunspots, bursts of plasma and twisting magnetic fields on the Sun's surface, known as its photosphere. Solar Orbiter was able to see "several of the flares from this monster active region that rotated out of Earth's view", says Müller, bright flashes of light and darkened regions called sunspots on the Sun's surface.
One of the goals of Solar Orbiter is "to connect what's happening on the Sun to what's happening in the heliosphere," says Müller. The heliosphere is a vast bubble of plasma that envelops the Sun and the planets of the Solar System as it travels through interstellar space. What Müller and his colleagues hope to learn more about is where the solar wind – the constant stream of particles spilling out from the Sun across the Solar System – "blows into the interstellar medium", he says. "So we are particularly interested in anything energetic on the Sun that we can find back in the turbulence of the solar wind."

30/07/2024

Recent work by Yardley and her colleagues, using data from Solar Orbiter, suggests that the Sun's atmosphere, its corona, plays a role in the speed of the solar wind. Regions where the magnetic field lines, the direction of the field and charged particles are "open" – stretching out into space without looping back – provide a highway for solar wind to reach high speeds. Closed loops over some active regions – where the magnetic field lines have no beginning and end – can occasionally snap, producing slow solar wind. The variability in the slow solar wind seems to be driven by the unpredictable flow of plasma inside the Sun, which makes the magnetic field particularly chaotic.

17/07/2024

Around the Sun, multiple spacecraft are observing this increase in activity up close. One of those, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Solar Orbiter, has been studying the Sun since 2020 on an orbit that takes it within the path of Mercury. Currently the spacecraft is "on the far side of the Sun as seen from Earth", says Daniel Müller, project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission at Esa in the Netherlands. "So we see everything that Earth doesn't see."
The storm that hit Earth in May originated from an active region of solar flares and sunspots, bursts of plasma and twisting magnetic fields on the Sun's surface, known as its photosphere. Solar Orbiter was able to see "several of the flares from this monster active region that rotated out of Earth's view", says Müller, bright flashes of light and darkened regions called sunspots on the Sun's surface.

03/07/2024

The Sun is extremely active right now, blasting the Earth with the biggest solar storms in 20 years. This is what it is doing to the rest of the Solar System.

If you happened to look skywards on a few nights in May 2024, there was a good chance of seeing something spectacular. For those at relatively low latitudes, there was a rare chance to see the flickering red, pink, green glow of our planet's aurorae.
A powerful solar storm had sent bursts of charged particles barrelling towards Earth and, as they bounced around in our planet's atmosphere, they unleashed spectacular displays of the Northern and Southern Lights. The dazzling displays of aurora borealis were visible far further south than they might normally be – and far further north in the case of aurora australis thanks to the power of the geomagnetic storm, the strongest in two decades.

30/05/2024

In 1967, the Tijuca forest was declared a national park divided into three non-contiguous sectors: Tijuca Forest west of the city centre; Carioca, where the world wonder Cristo Redentor statue is located; and Pedra Bonita and Gávea mountains overlooking the beach. Tijuca National Park has since become the country's most visited, with more than 3.5 million visitors annually.
"Picture in your mind just for a second Rio without the forest, just the bare mountains and the seas – Rio would not be the wonderful city anymore," said Fernando Fernandez, a professor of ecology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and co-founder of conservation organisation Project Refauna.

17/05/2024

After the forest was decimated by colonial plantations, an ambitious rewilding programme is now aiming to ensure the survival of Rio de Janeiro's ancient rainforest.

One minute I'm choked by fumes under a concrete overpass. Minutes later, I'm soaked in sweat, sticky with the respiration of a forest. Now, that's not something you feel in every city – especially one with more than six million inhabitants.

Rio de Janeiro might be known for its beaches, football and Carnival, but few realise that it contains the world's largest urban forest: the Tijuca forest.

Tijuca is no typical forest. First protected in 1861 – a decade before the first national park in the United States – Tijuca forest is a 40 sq km chunk of Atlantic Forest, a once-vast biome that covered 1,000,000 sq km of Brazilian coastline. Today, roughly 15% of the Atlantic Forest remains, decimated by sugarcane and coffee plantations as well as logging by the European colonists that first stepped on Brazil's shores in the 16th Century.

06/05/2024

Heidi Mansell, engagement manager at Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust said: “It’s been wonderful that since the tray’s installation, we’ve all been on a journey where we have seen four chicks successfully fledge the nest."
She explained that the we**am "gives everyone a chance to see the wonders of nature".
Ms Mansell added: "There has been so much interest in the birds, it’s great to know that we’ll be able to get a close-up view of their antics once again and I’m hopeful that we will see more chicks in 2024.”
Dean of St Albans, Jo Kelly-Moore, said the nest was "a room with a good view".
She added: "This gives up hope for the beauty of creation and we certainly need some of that hope today."

15/04/2024

Barry Trevis, who studied breeding peregrine falcons across Hertfordshire, said the couple have not laid an egg yet.

"The peregrines will hopefully lay this week... They could be hatching by the end of April," he said.

The licensed bird ringer explained the birds "historically nest on mountain crags and cliff faces".

To simulate that environment, he installed a nesting tray with shingles, at a height of about 40 metres, on the cathedral roof.

He said the birds enjoyed the site as "there's lots of prey items around in the form of feral pigeons".

26/03/2024

A pair of peregrine falcons that had a chick in 2022 have returned to their cathedral nesting site for the third year in a row.

About 378,000 viewers watched the couple on the St Albans Cathedral website via a we**am in 2023.

The birds of prey are one of only five breeding pairs in Hertfordshire.

The falcons often remain loyal to their nest site each year, which meant the cathedral was now an established breeding ground.

11/03/2024

This settlement, which boasts a population of just 45 people in winter and is 765 miles (1,230km) from the North Pole, grew up around the coal-mining industry in the first half of the 20th Century. Today, it has some of the cleanest air on the planet.

But that is also changing – levels of methane have been growing in the air around the town, while levels of sulphate, particulates and metals are also spiking.

Another candidate for the world's most pristine air can be found on the north-western tip of Tasmania, Australia. Cape Grim, or Kennaook, where winds whip across the Southern Ocean unimpeded. As it doesn't pass over any landmasses or populated areas enroute, the air is unaffected by local sources of pollution such as exhaust fumes. Learn more about Cape Grim in this feature by Dani Wright and find out more about how the air around Ny-Ålesund is changing in this feature by Anna Filipova.

Myra Casey