Adrian Villellas
Switzerland’s Jurapark Aargau switched off streetlights in 29 towns for one night to launch a campaign against light pollution, which hurts hedgehogs and glow-worms, and a police chief says dimmer towns see no rise in burglaries
Juan, 29, chose an olive farm near Tarragona, Spain, over a Barcelona apartment costing more than $1,100 a month, and now he sells organic olive oil and grows 80 percent of his vegetables
A Burkina Faso farmer filled zaï pits with manure and grew a nearly 100-acre forest on abandoned land, and a study found termite tunnels made rain soak in 2 to 4 times faster
Uceda, a small town in central Spain, wants volunteers to excavate its hilltop castle and a buried 30-acre Islamic medina, and the archaeologists running the dig offer six weekly spots with breakfast until October 20
Moab uranium tailings have moved by train since 2009, and crews have now hauled 17 million tons from the banks of the Colorado River to a disposal cell 30 miles north at Crescent Junction
Naples Botanical Garden shows how an empty 2-liter soda bottle becomes a self-watering planter with a cotton wick, and a University of Kentucky extension guide says capillary action can lift water about 4 inches
Spain’s Doñana National Park lost over 60 percent of adult Iberian pear trees at one site in two decades, and researchers point to deer, wild boar and falling groundwater
TouchWind put a floating wind turbine with a 20-foot rotor that tilts back like a helicopter in storms on a Dutch lake, and the test asks whether wind farms can pack turbines closer together
Conservators restoring a church pulpit in Ciachcin, Poland, found a parchment the parish priest hid inside it in 1884, and it names the gilders, carpenters and apprentices history usually forgets
Dragomirna Monastery in Romania has a Greek decree over 2,000 years old set into its porch floor honoring an architect from Byzantion, and scholars have long argued over which Black Sea city issued it
Researchers in Catalonia mapped 150 records of the giant resin bee, the first non-native bee reported in Europe, and found an ornamental street tree mattered at least as much as climate
The Agua Negra tunnel plan calls for a custom machine to bore twin 8.6-mile tubes under the Andes, but the $1.5 billion Argentina-Chile project has been stuck since the IDB approved it in 2017
The Energy Department offered Vistra up to $4.2 billion for 433 more megawatts from nuclear uprates at three plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the upgrades could help keep them running 20 years past their licenses
SkyTruth’s satellite analysis estimates oil slicks cover about 610,000 square miles of ocean each year, and 16 ships appeared to be discharging oil in over 10 percent of their satellite images at sea
A DNA study of anacondas from nine countries split the green anaconda in two, with the northern green anaconda 5.5 percent apart from its twin, and critics went after its name within a month
Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur emptied into a salt mine within hours in 1980 while a Texaco rig drilled on the lake, and about 50 miners escaped, but federal investigators never pinned down the exact cause
Michigan State engineer John Dorgan ate gummy bears made with an ingredient recovered from a resin designed for wind turbine blades, and the same material can also become plexiglass, diaper polymer and new turbine panels






