Green & indigenous News

Pioneering University of Stirling-led research has revealed the diverse and damaging impact Himalayan balsam has on river ecosystems.

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Bushfires are strongly driven by weather: hot, dry and windy conditions can combine to create the perfect environment for flames to spread across the landscape.

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Winter weather took hold across the Indo-Gangetic Plain in early January 2026, bringing dense fog and cold temperatures to much of the flat, fertile lands that span from Pakistan and northern India to Bangladesh.

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To understand how global warming could influence future climate, scientists look to the Paleogene Period that began 66 million years ago, covering a time when Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were two to four times higher than they are today.

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Jessica Hill
Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — Nathan Chasing Horse, the former “Dances with Wolves” actor accused of sexual abuse, was temporarily thrown out of court Monday after he disrupted proceedings with demands he be allowed to fire his defense attorney a week before trial.

Judge Jessica Peterson in Las Vegas ordered his jury trial to proceed next week as planned.

Chasing Horse has pleaded not guilty to 21 charges, including allegations that he sexually assaulted women and girls and that he filmed himself sexually abusing a girl younger than 14. Prosecutors allege he used his reputation as a spiritual leader and healer to take advantage of Native American women and girls over two decades.

Peterson ordered him removed from court Monday for trying to speak over her. He argued that his attorney, Craig Mueller, did not come to visit him and did not file timely. He asked that a public defender who previously represented him be his attorney.

Mueller, a private defense attorney, told the court his client was ready and privately told the judge that one of his investigators had visited with Chasing Horse. He declined to comment to The Associated Press.

Best known for portraying the character Smiles A Lot in the 1990 movie “Dances with Wolves,” Chasing Horse was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, which is home to the Sicangu Sioux, one of the seven tribes of the Lakota nation.

After starring in the Oscar-winning film, according to prosecutors, Chasing Horse began propping himself up as a self-proclaimed Lakota medicine man while traveling around North America to perform healing ceremonies. When he was arrested in 2023, he was living in a North Las Vegas house with his five wives, according to prosecutors.

The case sent shock waves across Indian Country. The original indictment was dismissed in 2024 after the Nevada Supreme Court ruled prosecutors abused the grand jury process when they provided a definition of grooming as evidence without any expert testimony. However, the court left open the possibility of charges being refiled, and a new indictment was brought later that year.

Prosecutors claim Chasing Horse led a cult called The Circle, and his followers believed he could speak with spirits. His victims went to him for medical help, according to a transcript from a grand jury hearing.

Prosecutors expect the trial to last three weeks. It is scheduled to begin Monday.

The post ‘Dances with Wolves’ actor Nathan Chasing Horse disrupts court week before sex abuse trial appeared first on ICT.

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A virus relies on the host's translation machinery to replicate itself and become infectious. Translation efficiency partially depends on the usage of a codon, or sequence of three nucleotides, that matches the cellular pool of tRNA, key molecules in translation. Using rare codons that are poorly supported by the cellular tRNA pool tends to induce ribosome pausing and mRNA instability, often weakening the virus.

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Drugs that act against bacteria are mainly assessed based on how well they inhibit bacterial growth under laboratory conditions. A critical factor, however, is whether the active substances actually kill the pathogens in the body. Researchers at the University of Basel have presented a new method for measuring how effectively antibiotics kill bacteria.

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During heat waves, everyday life tends to feel more difficult than on an average day. Travel and daily movement are no exception.

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Conventional vaccine adjuvants primarily rely on molecular binding and biochemical stimulation to activate immune responses, which often leads to limited efficacy in elderly or low-responsive populations. How to introduce physical regulation into immune activation remains an open challenge.

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Heat waves are becoming commonplace, and so too is high humidity, which can strain the electrical grid, hurt the economy, and endanger human health. But the global prevalence of record-breaking humidity events, some of which approach the physiological limit of what humans can safely handle—and all of which go beyond local expectations and adaptations—has not been widely studied.

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Severe winds, snow and freezing temperatures buffeted Europe with the arrival of Storm Goretti on Thursday, prompting forecasters from Britain to Germany to issue weather warnings.

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For the first time, scientists have answered a longstanding question in cell biology about a partnership of proteins called the "KICSTOR–GATOR1 complex" which operates as a control system inside our cells, telling them when to grow and when to stop based on nutrient availability (especially amino acids).

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A Northwestern Medicine study has revealed a previously unknown connection between two fundamental cellular processes, offering fresh insight into how human cells build and maintain chromatin, according to findings published in Molecular Cell.

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The conservation of genome regulatory elements over long periods of evolution is not limited to vertebrates, as previously thought, but also in echinoderms (invertebrates). This is one of the most notable conclusions of a study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which expands our knowledge of the mechanisms governing genomic regulation and biological evolution.

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Extreme weather events have become significantly more common in the Arctic over recent decades, posing a threat to vital polar ecosystems, according to new research by an international team of scientists.

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Pathogens can create sticky situations. When microbes invade the body to cause an infection, often one of their first lines of attack is to cling tenaciously to the surfaces of targeted human cells.

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Australian researchers have discovered a hidden climate superpower of trees. Their bark harbors trillions of microbes that help scrub the air of greenhouse and toxic gases.

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In Earth's fossil record, soft-bodied organisms like jellyfish rarely stand the test of time. What's more, it's hard for any animal to get preserved with exceptional detail in sandstones, which are made of large grains, are porous, and commonly form in environments swept by rough storms and waves. But about 570 million years ago, in a geologic time interval called the Ediacaran period, strange-looking, soft-bodied organisms died on the seafloor, were buried in sand, and fossilized in incredible detail.

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Common pollutants are disrupting energy production at the cellular level in wild seabirds, potentially affecting fitness, new research reveals. The study, published in Environment & Health, focused on Scopoli's shearwaters breeding on Linosa, a small and remote volcanic island in the Sicilian Channel. Scientists found that widespread contaminants such as mercury and certain PFAS compounds affect the function of mitochondria, tiny cellular powerhouses that generate energy for activities from flight to reproduction.

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At the 2025 global climate summit, COP30, held in Belém, Brazil, one decision stood out with major consequences for Africa: countries agreed on a new set of progress indicators.

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Greenland, the largest island on Earth, possesses some of the richest stores of natural resources anywhere in the world.

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When engineers and planners design roads, bridges and dams, they rely on hydrological models intended to protect infrastructure and communities from 50- and 100-year floods. But as climate change increases the frequency and severity of floods, existing models are becoming less and less reliable, new Cornell research finds.

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UBC Okanagan researchers have created a new two-layer membrane filtration system that can significantly reduce the amount of micro and nanoplastics that leak from landfills into local water basins.

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The river Rhine is estimated to carry between 3,000 and 4,700 metric tons of macrolitter—pieces of litter larger than 25 millimeters in size—towards the North Sea every year, according to research published in Communications Sustainability.

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Marine heat waves (MHWs) are periods of unusually warm sea temperatures, recognized as one of the fastest emerging climate-related drivers of change in the ocean.

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