Zoe Rosenberg, a California student, is on trial over a tactic that animal rights activists consider a moral imperative. Critics say its a threat to the food supply

On a Monday afternoon in late September, Zoe Rosenberg, a 23-year-old University of California, Berkeley, student, emerged from a courtroom in Santa Rosa, California. Flanked by her lawyers, she moved briskly through the courthouse corridors, past more than 100 prospective jurors.

Pinned to her black blazer was a tiny silver chicken, glinting on the lapel.

Silicone wristbands worn by volunteers in the Netherlands captured 173 substances in one week

For decades, Khoji Wesselius has noticed the oily scent of pesticides during spraying periods when the wind has blown through his tiny farming village in a rural corner of the Netherlands.

Now, after volunteering in an experiment to count how many such substances people are subjected to, Wesselius and his wife are one step closer to understanding the consequences of living among chemical-sprayed fields of seed potato, sugar beet, wheat, rye and onion.

Former Paralympics champion says inaccessible charging points show government ‘has forgotten about us’

Campaigners including Tanni Grey-Thompson have warned that disabled drivers are at risk of being locked out of the electric car transition because of inaccessible chargers.

The former Paralympics champion and the Electric Vehicle Association England are pushing for the government to introduce standards to ensure chargers are easy to reach.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

There are three common types of turbulence – and our volatile atmosphere is making them worse

Turbulence has always been an inconvenience for airline passengers and can cause alarm for the already nervous. Part of the problem is that most of the time you cannot see it coming – pilots can run into severe clear-air turbulence in a perfect blue sky.

High in the atmosphere, where most intercontinental flights cruise to make maximum use of fuel, the jet stream can behave erratically, causing wind shear that can throw around an airliner in the sky.

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: They are shuttling between marshland every day, honking overhead, taking it in turns to take the strain

Right now, my terrace house sits directly under a flight path, belonging not to planes but to skeins and skeins of honking Canada geese. As reliable as the first misty mornings and the slow shedding of the trees, I hear that familiar harsh call as the geese pass overhead. My view of the V shapes is often cut short by the built-up limitations of my urban view, yet they are a wonder nonetheless, their shadows occasionally forming a shifting echo on the pavement below.

Most of the Canada geese here are happily resident in the UK and no longer migrate, but come autumn, with their babies big enough to fly now, an old restlessness seems to stir in them. My neighbourhood is sandwiched between areas of marshland, and the geese have begun to move more between the best roosting and feeding sites, back and forth each day, some venturing farther afield to look for new territory, honking their movement with eager, open mouths.

Around the Cook Islands, the world’s two most powerful countries are exploring the possibility of deep-sea mining for critical minerals

Deep below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the seafloor is dotted with clusters of brown and black rocks, each containing valuable metals.

The rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, hold reserves of critical minerals that could be used to power clean energy and fuel a new industrial future. In the Cook Islands, a nation halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, exploration vessels are mapping the mineral-rich seabeds.

Committee urges ministers to set out measures to reduce carbon emissions before work starts on new runways

Airport expansion plans backed by the government are putting the UK’s net zero target in “serious jeopardy”, MPs have warned.

Without new safeguards, proposals to enlarge airports including Heathrow and Gatwick could push the UK over its carbon budgets, according to a report from the cross-party Commons environmental audit committee.

Local non-profits and schools are helping students explore traditional practices paired with modern science to make food sovereignty a reality

The Blackfeet Nation is a remote and rugged landscape on the windswept plains of northern Montana. While rich in resources, the remote location and management by the federal government have made food access a challenge here.

Only four grocery stores serve the entire reservation. Fresh, healthy produce and meat options are often limited at these stores, and prices are higher than in neighboring communities, making access difficult for low–income families. Instead, highly processed foods, rich in sugars, carbohydrates and fat make up the bulk of the food choices.

Humans have been selectively breeding animals for millennia. If we can help species survive by tweaking their DNA in a lab, I say bring it on

Do you think we should genetically modify wildlife? What if we could make seabirds resistant to the flu that has been exterminating them en masse, just by tweaking their DNA a smidgen? Or make fish that can shrug off pollution, or coral that can survive warming waters? Engineer in the sorts of change that could occur naturally, given enough time, if only the wildlife would stop dying already.

Thanks to newly emerging methods, such as Crispr, these feats are within reach. Recently, conservationists met at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) 2025 World Conservation Congress where they debated GM wildlife and voted on a proposed moratorium that would stymie their release into the wild. Ahead of the meeting, a group of more than 90 NGOs issued a press release urging the IUCN to “say no to engineered wild species.” But humans have been altering the DNA of other species for millennia.

Helen Pilcher is a science writer and the author of Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-Extinction

Environment Agency rates eight of nine companies as poor and needing improvement

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England’s water company ratings have fallen to the lowest level on record after sewage pollution last year hit a new peak, with eight of nine water companies rated as poor and needing improvement by the Environment Agency.

The cumulative score of only 19 stars out of a possible 36 is the lowest since the regulator began auditing the companies using the star rating system in 2011.

The migration of Christmas Island’s red crabs is in full swing, with roads closed in some places to protect millions of the crustaceans. Every year, the crabs emerge from the forest to travel to the ocean to breed, creating a red tide across the island. The Christmas Island national park said a massive spawning event will take place around 15 and 16 November, with a second spawning in mid-December

From a red-throated loon landing on water, to good and bad hair days and an airborne squirrel, here is a selection of the finalists in this year’s Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. A winner will be announced on 9 December

In 2024, nearly a million hectares of Ukraine’s land burned. Heat, mines and shelling contributed, but footage of drones targeting firefighters has raised the question of war crimes

Natalia Pryprosta was tending to her pigs when fire swept into the village of Studenok, near the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine. There was no time. She grabbed her papers, pulled her elderly mother into a friend’s car, and tried to get the animals out of the shed. Smoke and the speed of the blaze made it impossible. She didn’t see the animals burning, but learned of their fate later.

Smoke smothered Studenok, turning the village as dark as night. Pryprosta’s neighbours fought the flames with shovels, digging in scorched earth to stop the crown fire’s advance. Firefighters arrived, but the blaze was relentless. At one point, it surged around a fire truck, trapping the crew.

Interviews with experts and key players across four countries reveal why efforts to stop the multibillion-euro trafficking industry have failed – and how to save the endangered fish

By 10am on the midsummer Day of the Ox, the city of Narita smells of charcoal and sugar. The cobbled road is thronged with visitors lining up to buy grilled eel, a traditional delicacy believed to cool the body and keep spirits up in the humid weather.

“We’ll be so sad if it becomes extinct and we can’t eat eel any more,” says a customer sitting on the tatami-mat floor in Kawatoyo, a popular restaurant specialising in grilled eel, which has been operating for more than 115 years.

Kabayaki-style eel, grilled with tare sauce, served at Kawatoyo restaurant in Narita. Photograph: Toru Hanai

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Human-wildlife conflict has now overtaken poaching as a cause of fatalities – and is deadly for people too. Some villages are finding new ways to live alongside them

• Photographs by Edwin Ndeke

At nearly 3.5-metres tall and weighing as much as a bus, you could be forgiven for assuming that Goshi – one of an estimated 30 “super-tusker” elephants left in Africa – would be easy to find. The radio tracker picking up his signal beeps encouragingly, indicating the giant bull is within 200 metres. But the dry season has turned the mass of arid acacia scrubland grey, and everything seems to resemble an elephant.

Even when they are invisible, the huge herbivores shape the landscape here. There are 17,000 elephants across the Tsavo region, Kenya’s largest protected area, which is divided in two. Each year, elephants wander huge distances between feeding grounds, following the seasonal rains as they have done for thousands of years.

Dan Zafra captured a timelapse of something he could only dream of - red sprites, also known as red lightning, flashing above the Milky Way - while photographing from the Clay Cliffs in New Zealand's South Island on 11 October. Red sprites are brief, large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorms, reaching altitudes of up to 90km. They are almost impossible to see with the naked eye and last just a few milliseconds

• ‘A perfect coincidence’: rare red lightning captured in New Zealand skies

Iida Turpeinen’s novel has been a sensation in her native Finland. On the eve of its UK publication, she talks about her compulsion to tell of the sociable giant’s plight

Iida Turpeinen is the author of Beasts of the Sea, a Finnish novel tracing the fate of a now-extinct species: the sea cow. Similar to dugongs and manatees, the sea cow was only discovered in 1741 by the shipwrecked German-born naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller but by 1768 it had already become the first marine species to be eradicated by humans.

Translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, Beasts of the Sea was described by the Helsinki Literacy Agency as the most internationally successful Finnish debut novel ever. Turpeinen, 38, a PhD student of comparative literature, is now a resident novelist at Finland’s Natural History Museum. Her book will be published in the UK on 23 October.

While Nigel Farage promotes retro plans to reopen coalmines, will he really tell thousands of clean energy workers to leave their well-paid, local jobs?

This government is bad at proclaiming what it’s for. But to find out, follow the money. Its boldest investment is in green energy, designed to create prodigious returns in economic growth, employment, training, climate action and more. So far it has been hard to sell. Wafty talk of greenness passes most people by, and “whose growth is it, anyway?” is a realistic question in a country of stagnant pay and public decay. But, this week, Ed Miliband put flesh on the green words, making jobs and projects concrete. A very big number of green jobs – 400,000 by 2030 – are set to be created in 31 “priority occupations”, from welders to production managers, plumbers and joiners, everywhere from Centrica’s £35m state-of-the-art training academy in Lutterworth to Teesside’s net-zero decarbonisation cluster.

This is what a Labour industrial strategy should look like. Nigel Farage’s retro campaign for this week’s Caerphilly byelection promises to reopen Welsh coalmines. But well-paid, clean, green-energy jobs within their home districts are what Miliband’s Doncaster North constituents want, the minister tells me, not sending young people down reopened mines. Government figures show wind, nuclear and electricity jobs pay more than most – the average advertised salary in the wind sector is £51,000 a year, against an average £37,000. Unions, once sceptical and fearful of losing jobs in unionised industries, now sign up with guarantees that any new plant getting grants must “support greater trade union recognition” and a fair work charter.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Labour would do well to remember its manifesto promise to revive Britain’s global leadership on development

With borrowing costs rising and western governments including the UK cutting their aid budgets, unsustainable debts are driving a development crisis across the global south.

In the latest evidence, Ethiopia last week faced the threat of being sued by its creditors in the English courts, after long-running negotiations about restructuring $1bn (£740m) of its debt collapsed.

They are peaceful, female-led and use sex in everyday interactions. Now a new conservation scheme could offer a lifeline to our critically endangered close relatives living on the Congo river

A few dozen large nests appear in the mist of equatorial dawn, half-hidden behind a tangle of vines and leaves. That is where the bonobos sleep, 12 metres above the ground. But it has rained all night, and the primates are in no hurry to get up. It is 6.30am when the first head emerges. It gives a cry, a sharp bark, and another silhouette unfolds from its cocoon of branches. And then another. Within five minutes, the whole group is awake – yawning, stretching, straightening. Their features are fine, their limbs long and delicate, their build less stocky than that of chimpanzees, their closest cousins.

Bonobos live on the left bank of the Congo River

Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are reshaping them.

Bird migrations rank as one of nature’s greatest spectacles. Thanks to GPS tracking, scientists are uncovering extraordinary insights into ancient and mysterious journeys – and new threats that are reshaping them.

As storm-chasing seabirds, Desertas petrels seek out hurricanes that draw deep-sea creatures to the surface. Only about 200 pairs remain, although the population is stable.

Determined to find a solution to the discarded plastic nets, Ian Falconer found a way to convert them into filament for 3D printing, for use in products from motorbikes to sunglasses

Ian Falconer kept thinking about the heaps of discarded plastic fishing nets he saw at Newlyn harbour near his home in Cornwall. “I thought ‘it’s such a waste’,” he says. “There has to be a better solution than it all going into landfill.”

Falconer, 52, who studied environmental and mining geology at university, came up with a plan: shredding and cleaning the worn out nets, melting the plastic down and converting it into filament to be used in 3D printing. He then built a “micro-factory” so that the filament could be made into useful stuff.

Allegations related to flood control projects have sparked widespread anger and protests in the Philippines

Philippine health worker Christina Padora waded through July’s waist-high flood water to check on vaccines and vital medications stored in the village clinic, something she had regularly done during previous typhoons.

But this time she didn’t make it. Taking hold of a metal pole that she failed to see was connected to a live wire, the 49-year-old was fatally electrocuted in the water.