Green & indigenous News

In a quiet laboratory, a team of atmospheric scientists and engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently gathered around a workstation to watch as little floating speckles, illuminated by a curtain of green light, swirled into a haze, then wisp of a cloud.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

Bioengineered E. coli bacteria can now produce a group of compounds with anticancer, anti-HIV, antidiabetic and anti-inflammatory activities. The Kobe University achievement is the result of a rational design strategy that yields a platform for the industrial production of drug candidates.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Amelia Schafer
ICT

RAPID CITY, South Dakota — In a letter addressed to tribal leaders and citizens of federally recognized tribes, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem denied claims of enrolled tribal citizens being detained by immigration officials and said to date, no ICE operations have occurred on tribal lands.

In Noem’s letter obtained by ICT, she calls the claims of the detainment of enrolled citizens of federally recognized tribes “false,” “misrepresenting facts and spreading misinformation.” The letter was sent out to tribal leaders on Feb. 12.

“Let me be unequivocal, ICE’s mission is singular and clear: to apprehend and remove individuals who are unlawfully present in the United States,” Noem said in the letter. “ICE does not target, and will not target, Native Americans or any U.S. citizens based on appearance, ethnicity, or community affiliation. To date, there have not been any ICE operations in tribal lands.”

ICT has collected accounts of several Native people being detained by ICE with documentation. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Red Lake Nation have both issued public notices saying tribal enrolled citizens were detained by immigration officials in Minneapolis. Standing Rock noted one tribal citizen’s detainment, while Red Lake noted three detainments of enrolled citizens.

Peter Yazzie, a Navajo Nation citizen, was caught on video being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Arizona on his way to work in mid-January. Yazzie told ABC15 that he was detained despite showing documentation of his Certificate of Indian Blood document, drivers license and birth certificate. The Navajo Nation confirmed the incident and responded on Jan. 16 by calling for increased communication and accountability from ICE.

“Federal agencies must ensure their agents are properly trained to recognize tribal identification and to respect the civil and constitutional rights of Native people,” said Buu Nygren, President of the Navajo Nation in a statement then.

Just outside Minneapolis in January, Red Lake Nation descendant Jose Ramirez was detained by ICE. Ramirez’s aunt recorded him on Facebook live being dragged out of her vehicle by agents. He was taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Building for further processing and released 6 and a half hours later.

‘I felt like I was kidnapped’: Ojibwe man recounts ICE detainment

During historic immigration raids across the country, particularly in Minnesota, tribal leaders and Native people have voiced concerns regarding the detainment of tribal descendants and enrolled citizens.

The Red Lake Nation in Minnesota voted to pass a resolution restricting ICE from its lands in late January.

In South Dakota, several Oceti Sakowin (Lakota, Dakota, Nakoda) tribes have recently banned ICE from their tribal lands in response to community members’ fears. These same tribes banned Noem from their tribal lands in 2024 while she served as governor of South Dakota, in response to multiple derogatory statements made towards tribal leaders and families.

However, some tribes have entered into 287g contracts with the Homeland Security department allowing for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to delegate state and local law enforcement personnel the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under ICE’s direction.

“I’ve heard of tribes that that do have cartel presences on their land because there’s such large land bases and are welcoming those type agreements,” J. Garrett Renville, chairman of the Coalition of Large Tribes and Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, told ICT. “It’s probably more controversial to even enter into those type of agreements, but essentially it does keep ICE activity away… and it delegates that authority to the local law enforcement to carry out.”

Prior to the Noem’s letter, Renville spoke with ICT about what he’s been hearing from Coalition of Large Tribes members and Sisseton Wahpeton citizens. Coalition of Large Tribes is a membership group of the tribes with large landbases.

“Each tribal leader and tribal councils have their own way of approaching these type of things,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to go about it at this point because ultimately we’re all still here. And so those are the types of things I think each individual tribe has to take into consideration on the type of actions that they want to take to keep their people safe. So I respect that.”

Fearing ICE, Native Americans rush to prove their right to belong in the US

As for the legality of banning ICE from tribal lands, Renville said his understanding is that ultimately if immigration officials have a signed, federal judicial warrant, they can come onto tribal lands to serve out that warrant.

“Sisseton, our interactions with our federal partners have been more along the lines of cooperation and acknowledgement,” he said. “For instance, we had a federal warrant come down this past summer. So instead of the FBI coming to serve that warrant, they contacted our local law enforcement and we said we’ll serve the warrant and we’ll hand them over.

So Sisseton has that kind of interactions with our federal partners and even with our State.”

In the Feb. 12 letter, Noem said when reviewing the Congressional Record from the Biden administration era, she found records of tribal leaders testifying to cartel and cartel affiliates operating on tribal lands and requests by leaders for government assistance in cartel removal.

“I was disappointed when some of those same leaders took tribal council action to ban ICE from your reservations, making false claims that tribal members have been detained by ICE, misrepresenting facts and spreading misinformation,” she stated in the Feb. 12 letter. “Please don’t turn away the very help you asked for from your testimony to different Congressional Committees just a few years ago.”

Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out was unavailable for a comment on the letter. The letter was sent to the tribe’s lawyers.

Tribes in the southwestern United States and California have noted cartel presence, as discussed during a June 2023 House Committee on Natural Resources hearing regarding cartel impacts on tribal land.

During a June 4, 2023 testimony, John Nores, a retired game warden Lieutenant of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, noted cartel presence or impact on Northern California’s Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes.

“Given an estimated hundreds of thousands of cartel operatives that have infiltrated reservations across the American West, and the extremely limited number of tribal enforcement personnel responsible for covering massive territories, tribal police forces cannot effectively combat this problem alone,” Nores said.

Noem continued, saying under President Donald Trump, immigration control seeks to do what the last administration “failed to do,” which she said is a lack of law enforcement and removal of violent undocumented immigrants.

“My senior advisor on Indian affairs and Intergovernmental Affairs teams is always available to take your call and answer your questions,” she said before ending the letter. “I look forward to your continued partnership.”

David Flute, Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, is the Department of Homeland Security’s senior advisor on Indian affairs. Flute previously served as Noem’s secretary of tribal relations in South Dakota while governor of the state.

Page 1 of 2 of the statement from the Secretary of Homeland Security to the Leaders Citizens and Members of Federally Recognized Tribal Nations. Credit: Screengrab/ICT

Page 2 of 2 of the statement from the Secretary of Homeland Security to the Leaders Citizens and Members of Federally Recognized Tribal Nations. Credit: Screengrab/ICT

The post Kristi Noem: ‘ICE does not target, and will not target, Native Americans’ appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

Public concern over the total failure of the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant on Wellington's south coast has been growing, despite this week's announcement of an independent review.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Have you ever seen a hibiscus flower? Although its petals have a range of colors, what makes the trumpet-shaped flower more beautiful is the central stalk, which houses the anthers that produce pollen grains. Powdery in structure, this pollen is commonly bright yellow or golden in color. During my childhood, I often touched the stalks of these fascinating, bright red flowers, which caused the "golden dust" to stick to my fingers.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

University of Queensland research has revealed that double-stranded RNA-based biopesticides (dsRNA) sprayed on plant leaves can travel right down into root systems. Led by Dr. Chris Brosnan at UQ's Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Science, the work also disproves a long-standing misconception that dsRNA directly enters plant cells. The research is published in Nucleic Acids Research.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Agriculture is on the cusp of its most profound transformation in a century. Just as the Green Revolution shifted farming from sun and soil to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, we are just beginning another revolution: returning to an agriculture based on biology rather than chemistry. This isn’t new knowledge; rather, it’s wisdom refined over millennia that we temporarily abandoned. If we embrace it, this transition could restore ecosystems, strengthen rural economies, and secure a healthier food future for all. For most of human history, farming relied on natural systems: the symbiosis between plants, soil and sun. That changed in the 20th century when synthetic fertilizers and pesticides made soil little more than a prop to hold up a plant that was externally fed everything it needed, and was stripped of its biodiversity. The approach boosted yields, but at enormous costs that we’re just now beginning to grasp fully: degraded soils, contaminated water, rising chemical input dependence (and correlated rising costs to farmers, even as food gets cheaper), which all result in collapsing farm economics and ecosystems. The system is locked in a treadmill of toxicity and debt. Sheep graze in the vineyard at Paicines Ranch. Image courtesy of Paicines Ranch. Nature’s intelligence Regenerative agriculture offers a path forward, and away from agrichemicals and bare ground. It builds on thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge, farmer-led innovation, organic farming and agroecological science that challenge chemical dependency and center biology in agriculture, while avoiding rigid prescriptions that risk turning principles into ceilings.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

SeaCast is an innovative high-resolution forecasting system for the Mediterranean that harnesses AI to deliver faster and more energy-efficient predictions than traditional models. Unlike existing global AI models, which operate at lower resolutions and primarily rely on ocean data, SeaCast integrates both ocean and atmospheric variables, capturing complex regional dynamics. A paper describing the system is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.

Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump Administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA to restore the program’s funding and “promptly take all steps necessary to reverse” the termination. The agency had two months to appeal.

Though that deadline passed last week, the Trump administration is still holding out. Two FEMA officials told Grist that the agency has taken no apparent steps to revive BRIC in compliance with the December court order. As a result, state and local governments across the country are holding critical projects in limbo as they await a resolution.

The officials who spoke to Grist requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from agency leadership. Separately, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency complies with court orders, but did not respond to questions about the future of BRIC.

FEMA’s deadline to appeal the judge’s ruling was February 9. On Tuesday, a coalition of state attorneys general accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on compliance. (Those attorneys represent the states behind the original lawsuit over BRIC, which resulted in the December ruling.)

“Over two months have passed and Defendants have offered no indication to Plaintiff States, the public, FEMA’s regional offices, or apparently even Defendants’ own attorney that they have complied with the Order,” attorneys for almost two dozen states wrote in a court filing on Tuesday. The states asked the judge to compel FEMA to follow the order and make BRIC funding available.

BRIC actually launched during the first Trump administration, but most of its funding came from the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That money endowed more than 2,000 projects nationwide. At the time of the April memo shuttering the program, FEMA told Grist that BRIC “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.” (The acting FEMA director who issued that memo, Cameron Hamilton, lost his job a few weeks later after telling Congress that he didn’t think Trump should abolish the agency.)

The BRIC pause is one part of an overall freeze on the agency’s disaster mitigation spending. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, has placed the agency under a de facto spending moratorium, requiring Secretary Kristi Noem’s sign-off for any expenses over $100,000. The agency has not approved any new disaster mitigation projects, has refused to process paperwork for projects that were already in progress, and has been slow even to reimburse communities for the cost of disaster recovery, a core activity mandated by Congress.

When a group of around two dozen states sued to stop the cancellation of the program in a Massachusetts federal court, FEMA claimed that it was not canceling BRIC. Instead, it said in a court filing that it “ha[d] not ended” the program and “continue[d] to evaluate whether to end the … program or to revise it,” even as it acknowledged it had not made new funding available.

The judge rejected that argument and issued an injunction preventing the agency from stopping the program. Judge Richard Stearns, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in an order that the law “entitle[s] the States to a certain measure of funding for mitigation projects each fiscal year.”

The state attorneys general allege that FEMA has not provided states, grantees, or regional offices with any new information about the future of the program — nor has it made two years of suspended BRIC funding available to states. The plaintiff states said in Tuesday’s court filing that a senior agency official had told them FEMA is “still in the process of connecting with leadership about how BRIC will operate and on what timelines.”

Two agency employees who work on disaster adaptation confirmed the states’ allegation that FEMA has not yet restored the program. The decision on how to proceed appears to rest with senior Homeland Security officials, they added.

“I haven’t heard a word internally, at all,” one of the officials told Grist.

The December court order found that the states could suffer irreparable harm if BRIC projects that were already underway lost funding or collapsed due to an abrupt shutdown. The state attorneys general are now arguing that FEMA’s recent delays further threaten those projects. Attorneys for the states said that FEMA has refused to provide updates on the status of frozen projects, even when state officials have warned that projects are in jeopardy. The states submitted more than a dozen affidavits showing that FEMA has declined to provide updates for stalled projects, including a seismic retrofit for a rural California hospital and a pair of public school safe rooms in Wisconsin.

The Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Everett, just outside of Boston, were relying on around $50 million in BRIC money to fund an ambitious flood protection project. The cities were going to build a flood barrier and storm surge control project that would prevent tidal flooding in a floodplain that contains a high school, a rail line, and a regional produce distribution center. The barrier would have doubled as an expansion of a park that will be submerged by high tides in the coming years.

But FEMA paused the project’s funding last spring, after the April memo. Since then, the effort has been in limbo. The pause has meant that the two cities lost out on $50 million in matching money from a state fund. After a year in stasis, local officials are weighing whether to split the project into separate stages, pursuing the storm surge system alone while punting on the other parts.

“We could just put it on a shelf and wait for federal funding, or we could attempt to break the project into phases,” said Emily Granoff, who leads the project and is the deputy director of housing and community development for the city of Chelsea.

“This project needs to happen,” she added, “but we don’t have the information we need.”

President Trump and Secretary Noem have said they want the federal government to play a smaller role in disaster recovery, but disaster experts told Grist that destroying BRIC will jeopardize that goal. That’s because BRIC projects ultimately reduce disaster recovery costs by funding more resilient infrastructure before it’s needed.

“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience,” said Leo Martinez-Diaz, the director of the climate and sustainability program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the only thing that ultimately reduces the losses.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Despite court order, a critical FEMA program remains frozen on Feb 17, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

Just as for humans, sufficient sleep supports learning and coping for horses. A recent study at the University of Helsinki indicates that short periods of REM sleep impair horses' perseverance and performance in demanding learning tasks. In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, an entirely new learning test suited to field conditions was developed to measure the learning capacity and motivation of horses in their own enclosures and other familiar environments.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan returns to the Mongabay Newscast to share his experience creating his new book, Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science, and Restoring the Planet from specialty publisher Braided River. This book documents the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of nine Indigenous communities worldwide, featuring contributions and essays from many members of these communities, along with Yüyan’s own photography. TEK, Yüyan says, isn’t exactly traditional so much as it is ecological knowledge that is place-based. While it draws on thousands of years of knowledge, it also innovates in society as we know it, and can offer social, cultural and ecological benefits that neoliberal economics does not. For example, visitors to the Pacific island nation of Palau receive a stamp in their passport that declares they will protect the reef (one of the largest marine protected areas in the world) for all the people and the grandchildren of Palau. The country’s governance structure quite literally integrates family in policing the marine protected area. Yüyan describes what happens if you go hunting in the MPA: You’ll probably get stern shaming from your Aunty, and the whole community will know about it. “The real magic that I discovered [in Palau] as I started talking to people was that the traditional governance structure that they’re all used to over there is what makes it work. What makes it work is family ties.” Many of the Indigenous communities featured in the book are sovereign nations or part thereof, for whom “laws and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Growing lettuce in the Arctic as a business venture? One Greenland entrepreneur believes in the idea, selling his house to get start-up capital in a gamble he's hoping will pay off.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Human-driven climate change intensified rainfall that triggered Spain's deadliest natural disaster in a generation when flash floods hit the Valencia region in 2024, a new study showed on Tuesday.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

On Friday, Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee released their first draft of a 2026 Farm Bill, the “Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026,” amid increasing frustration from U.S. farmers around high input prices and challenging market conditions.

The 2018 Farm Bill expired in 2023, and Congress has since been unable to pass the omnibus legislation, which serves to both support U.S. farming and provide a safety net for the food insecure. Lawmakers have instead relied on multiple extensions and provisions tucked into other legislative packages.

The draft includes a wide range of provisions impacting agricultural trade, farmer access to credit, research, forestry, rural development.

The new bill makes fewer changes to the farm bill’s largest sections, called titles, because many of those changes and extensions were made using other pieces of legislation last year. However, the 802-page draft includes a wide range of provisions impacting agricultural trade, farmer access to credit, research, forestry, rural development, and more.

A path forward for this new bill remains elusive, since Democrats have said they won’t vote for it if Republicans don’t agree to roll back the SNAP cuts they made last year. Nevertheless, the Agriculture Committee, led by Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), has planned a markup—where components of the bill will be debated and edited—for Feb. 23. As the negotiations ramp up, there are several policy changes in the legislation that will draw attention, debate, and pushback.

The Big Titles

Republicans have already made major changes to SNAP and boosted commodity payments in the One Big Beautiful Bill. They also extended conservation programs in the bill that ended the government shutdown. So changes to the four biggest titles of the bill—Nutrition, Crop Insurance, Commodities, and Conservation—are minimal.

For example, the Environmental Quality Incentives and Conservation Stewardship programs were reauthorized last year, so the new bill doesn’t need to fund them again. Instead, it makes small changes to which practices farmers can adopt in conservation programs, especially around precision agriculture.

The latest farm bill proposal does reauthorize the Conservation Reserve Program, which was not included in other funding packages last year. It maintains a cap of 27 million acres for the program over the next five years.

The Most Controversial Provisions

The draft bill includes text from the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, a provision that would make it harder for individuals to sue pesticide companies based on claims that their products cause cancer and other illnesses. Health advocates had expected this, because Thompson had clearly indicated his support for the measure. Bayer, which has been battling thousands of lawsuits over its flagship weedkiller Roundup causing non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, has led lobbying efforts on the provision.

“House Republicans can’t credibly claim to back an agenda that supports public health or protects kids while advancing a bill that weakens protections from pesticides and hands more power and profits to foreign pesticide manufacturers.”

Lawmakers attempted to get a similar provision included in an EPA funding bill last month, but Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) led a fight to remove it. Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda also pushed Republicans to oppose it. The provision will likely be debated during markup, and the group MAHA Action already launched a campaign urging lawmakers to remove it.

“House Republicans can’t credibly claim to back an agenda that supports public health or protects kids while advancing a bill that weakens protections from pesticides and hands more power and profits to foreign pesticide manufacturers,” Geoff Horsfield, legislative director at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said in a statement. EWG’s statement also pointed to other provisions in the bill that could overturn state and local laws restricting the use of pesticides in public places like parks and areas near schools.

The bill also includes a section that would overturn state laws that have rankled industry, including California’s Proposition 12, which bars the sale in California of pork from hogs raised in gestation crates anywhere. Democrats have largely opposed these efforts. But in September, a handful of Republicans also expressed opposition to overturning such laws, which, they argue, would violate state rights and open the door for other countries to expand their market in the United States.

The National Pork Producers Association, however, has pushed hard for the legislation. Other groups of farmers support keeping laws like Proposition 12, which they argue create opportunities for smaller farms by building established markets for higher-value meat.

“Farmers have already made financial investments in more humane pork, and this Farm Bill would devastate many farmers,” Pennsylvania hog farmer Brent Hershey said in a statement released by the American Meat Producers Association.

Nutrition

The bill does not include any big changes to the administration of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, but it does mandate that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) make permanent a pilot program that allowed shoppers to use their benefits for online shopping. Hunger groups have long pushed for this, because it can increase food access.

The draft bill also directs the USDA to move forward with helping states transition to chip-enabled benefit cards, to better ensure that benefits are used by those individuals who are entitled to them. This would cut down on skimming, where individuals steal benefits from those who need them by copying user data collected by payment terminals and then using the funds. The farm bill proposal would set a six-month deadline for the USDA to propose a rule that increases EBT card security.

Closely following the January release of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the bill also includes a proposal to reform the guideline process, by expanding the timeline of each iteration, installing a separate panel to select the questions the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) compiles research on, and upping transparency reporting requirements.

Some of these changes have nutrition experts worried, though, given the criticism of the administration’s handling of the recent guidelines. The latest guidelines largely discarded the findings of the DGAC, which typically operates under a transparent process with several opportunities for public comment. Instead, these guidelines were published with a separate scientific report that was not subject to the same public scrutiny before the release.

Local Food

Lastly, the provisions of the bill with the most bipartisan support are likely to be local food programs, many of which overlap with nutrition and health initiatives. However, advocates say the bill falls short of guaranteeing funding for most of those programs.

The bill maintains funding for the popular Local Agriculture Market Program, which includes grants that help farmers turn their crops into higher-value food products and supports farmers market initiatives. It makes changes to the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) to allow SNAP users to buy additional types of fruits and vegetables, such as frozen and canned, but does not increase funding for the popular bipartisan program, which groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest pointed to as a significant failure in the draft farm bill.

Most significantly, lawmakers included most of a bill introduced by Representatives Rob Bresnahan (R-Pennsylvania), David Valadao (R-California), and Pingree, which had strong bipartisan support. Their marker bill, called Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act, would create a permanent program modeled after the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchasing Assistance (LFPA) programs.

Under the draft farm bill, the new program would be eligible for up to $200 million in annual funding and be run by state, local, or tribal governments.

Both programs were created by the Biden administration during the pandemic to help more schools and food banks buy fresh food directly from small and mid-size farms in their region. Those programs were set to end by 2026, but Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins cancelled them early, eliminating more than $1 billion that farms had expected to receive.

Under the draft farm bill, the new program would be eligible for up to $200 million in annual funding and be run by state, local, or tribal governments.

The problem, said Mike Lavender, the policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), is that unlike the original marker bill, which proposed $200 million in appropriations on top of $200 million in mandatory funding, it does not offer any mandatory funding, and ensuring money gets appropriated every year is increasingly difficult. “An authorization of appropriations is essentially an empty promise,” Lavender told Civil Eats. (Another program included in the bill that would fund local meat processing also lacks mandatory funding.)

During NSAC’s annual gathering in D.C. for meetings with members of Congress and federal agencies, multiple farmers said that the Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act was a top legislative priority. Ed Dubrick, an independent Illinois farmer who raises chickens, turkeys, and sheep and sold to his local food bank through LFPA, told Civil Eats that it felt like one of the first USDA programs that really worked for small farms.

“It was absolutely tremendous for us,” he said. “By having that consistent market for our product, it allowed us to invest in infrastructure, capacity, production, transport, storage, all those things.”

Regardless of whether the local food program makes it through the markup, the entire farm bill draft will face political challenges. Democrats have already said they won’t back it without a reversal of SNAP cuts, and the Senate has yet to put forward its own proposal.

And with midterm elections in November, razor-thin margins in the House of Representatives, and other legislative priorities this year, it is not clear whether House leadership would bring the proposal to the floor for a vote.

The post Here’s What’s in House Republicans’ ‘Skinny’ Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.

From Civil Eats via This RSS Feed.

Solar radiation warms and illuminates our planet. It is the primary driver behind the movement of clouds and wind, helps keep us warm, and governs activity through daily and seasonal cycles. However, over the past 30 years, a complex combination of reduced atmospheric aerosol pollution (tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere), global warming, and changes in cloud cover has led to a significant increase in solar radiation levels in Europe, according to a new study co-authored by the University of Málaga (UMA), the University of Murcia (UMU), and Solargis, a solar-sector company specializing in data and software.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

Deforestation and land use change can accelerate the spread of zoonotic diseases — infectious illnesses that can spread from animals to humans — including malaria and COVID-19. While habitat restoration is crucial for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change, new research suggests counterintuitively that it can also temporarily increase the risk of certain zoonotic diseases in some areas. Human encroachment into wild spaces for development and agriculture increases contact with disease-spreading wildlife. In Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, for example, researchers found mosquitoes were more likely to feast on humans when their natural hosts became scarce as a result of deforestation. Despite a global push to restore degraded ecosystems, scientists have known little about how restoration affects zoonotic disease risk. To fill that gap, Adam Fell with the University of Stirling in Scotland, and lead author of a new study, conducted a large meta-analysis of scientific literature, case studies and policy reports. “We only found something like 39 [relevant] studies, out of thousands that we looked through,” Fell told Mongabay in a video call. The results were very context-dependent, he said. In some cases, reforestation actually increased the spread of zoonotic diseases in the short term. One explanation offered by researchers is that rodents — a common vector for infectious disease — are among the first colonizers in a disturbed landscape, and with them can come an uptick in zoonotic diseases like hantavirus. In the long term, Fell added, ecosystems tend to find balance as larger animals, like ungulates and bobcats, return…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the decade. Data released by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that 1,325 square kilometers of forest clearing were detected between Aug. 1, 2025 — the start of Brazil’s deforestation year — and Jan. 31, 2026. That is down from 2,050 square kilometers during the same period a year earlier and represents the lowest figure for this interval since 2014. Over a longer horizon, the picture is similarly positive from a conservation perspective. Alerts for the trailing 12 months totaled 3,770 square kilometers, compared with 4,245 square kilometers at this time last year, also the lowest since 2014. These figures come from INPE’s DETER system, which uses near-real-time satellite imagery primarily to guide enforcement. While less precise than annual surveys, DETER is widely regarded as a reliable indicator of short-term trends. Accumulated deforestation for Aug 1-Jan 31 in recent years according to INPE’s DETER alert system. Image by Mongabay Data from INPE’s DETER and Imazon’s SAD detection systems showing deforestation in the Legal Amazon (“Amazonia”). Image by Mongabay Speaking at a press conference announcing the data last week, Environment Minister Marina Silva said the decline reflects coordinated government action. She noted that most high-deforestation municipalities have now joined federal initiatives aimed at curbing illegal clearing. “Of the 81 municipalities with the highest deforestation rates, 70 have already made this…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Minority House Republicans raised legal concerns, but the extension passed anyway and advanced out of the Capitol.

From News Stories via This RSS Feed.

In a January memo, U.S. Secretary of Defense ordered the Pentagon to do a line-by-line review of 8(a) contracts worth over $20 million.

From News Stories via This RSS Feed.

New research shows that short periods of extreme heat and drought during flowering could become one of the biggest threats to global wheat production in the coming decades. As the climate changes, farmers around the world are facing more frequent and intense weather extremes.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Monday is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day, an Alaska State holiday honoring a Lingít activist who testified before Alaska’s territorial legislature in Juneau to demand civil rights for Alaska Native people.

From News Stories via This RSS Feed.

An international research team, including VUB data scientist Yannick Jadoul, has shed new light on the rhythmic nature of sexual behavior in bonobos. By precisely analyzing the tempo of movements during sex, researchers aim to better understand which building blocks of rhythm and communication are present in other species—and what this implies for the evolution of uniquely human traits such as speech and music. The study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Repair efforts in Kwigillingok have been ongoing since Typhoon Halong hit in October. But relocation remains a long-term goal for the community.

From News Stories via This RSS Feed.

In 2025, Williams Jr. won the race for the first time in two decades. This year, the Akiak musher and his team have hit their stride, coming off a third-place finish in the Kuskokwim 300 and multiple sprint race victories.

From News Stories via This RSS Feed.

On a cool spring morning in a northern forest, the ground feels soft underfoot. Mist hangs between the trunks, and the air smells of wet leaves and old humus; the slow alchemy that keeps a forest alive. Beneath the surface, billions of microbes break down organic matter and hair-thin roots exhale, releasing steady pulses of carbon dioxide. This process, known as soil respiration, is one of the largest carbon fluxes on the planet, usually so stable it feels almost like a steady heartbeat.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.