Experts call for rapid action to save Great Barrier Reef
Although they looks like plants or rocks, corals are actually animals. Coral colonies are made up of tiny animals called polyops. Coral is vital to the planet and the structures provide structures a home to around 25% of all marine species.The Great Barrier Reef is a 2,300km (1,429-mile) expanse of tropical corals that provides a home to a huge range of marine life. Bleaching happens when coral gets stressed and turns white because the water it lives in is too hot.Although coral can recover from bleaching events, if stressed coral continues to experiences high temperatures it can die.
AIMS looked at the health of 124 coral reefs between August 2024 and May 2025. It has been performing surveys since 1986.The Great Barrier Reef experienced the worst coral bleaching events ever in 2024 and in the first few months of 2025. It was the sixth event in nine years. As well as climate change, natural weather patterns have played a role in mass bleaching events, as have outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish that feast on coral.In the latest AIMS survey results, the most affected coral species were the Acropora, which are susceptible to heat stress and a favoured food of the crown-of-thorns starfish.
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Sky News
a day ago
- Sky News
Chris Hemsworth describes 'gear shift' after learning he's 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer's
Chris Hemsworth has told Sky News that finding out he had a greater chance of developing Alzheimer's disease was a "gear shift" in his life motivations. During a genetic test in season one of Limitless: Live Better Now, the Australian actor discovered that he is, biologically, eight to 10 times more likely than others to have the brain disorder during his lifetime as he carries two copies of the APOE4 gene. He had first taken part in the National Geographic show to be its "guinea pig" and face new experiences that challenge the body and mind. But after having the test, the 41-year-old Thor, Furiosa and Transformers star was faced with an unexpected truth. One in every 50 people inherit two copies of the APOE4 gene and research has found that nearly all double carriers showed key early signs of the disease which causes dementia by the age of 55. Everyone's risk is different, and evidence suggests there are things you can do to reduce your risk whether you're a carrier of the gene or not, including not smoking, reducing alcohol intake, daily exercise, monitoring cholesterol and blood pressure and eating a balanced diet. Speaking of when he found out he was a double carrier, Hemsworth told Sky News: "It was just kind of this point in my life where up until your 40s, you're kind of gathering data and information and it's all reactionary and then you get to a point where you think, oh some of this sort of identity that I've sort of built doesn't hold true anymore. "There's some inner sort of protest or inner voice that has a deeper need to understand and there's deeper questions and what is the purpose and the why behind what I'm doing ... and what am I seeking, what am I contributing, as opposed to just what I am collecting." Reacting on screen, he said it made him shift his focus to living better and increase the chances of him spending as much time as possible with his family and friends. What's changed in the second series? The change in mindset is evident in season two. "This time around, I was very involved in the orchestration and the sort of production and bringing together spaces that I was interested in or there was a deep curiosity or were deeply personal to me. And it was more sort of experiential journalism as opposed to a contestant in a challenging kind of fun, reality show. He adds: "I was much more committed or invested in the experience. "And I was a bit more educated on the topics too. I had to research, I had a deeper point of view, I suppose, personally, but also sort of the education I was given prior and I enjoyed that more, to be honest, I didn't like that I felt very uncomfortable in the first season because I was standing around all these experts and I knew nothing about these topics, yet I was kind of asked to speak on them and so I felt like an imposter the entire time." Limitless: Live Better Now looks at the ways in which you can improve your brain and body's health through endurance challenges and learning a new instrument. Teaming up with Sheeran Hemsworth chose the drums and, taking it to the extreme, was set the task of joining his friend Ed Sheeran on stage to play Thinking Out Loud. "That fear and that anxiety was incredibly overwhelming," Hemsworth says, detailing how he felt "underwater" in the weeks leading up to the event. "It's weird the way intense situations actually cause a hyper focus; it's a survival mechanism of the brain. "Some of the other challenges where if I did the training it was beneficial, but I could kind of muscle my way through it. You can't do that with a musical instrument and then the realisation that the entire band is relying on you to keep time. And then 70,000 people are sitting there going, 'please don't wreck our favourite song'." Reflecting on the moment, he says it's one of the most magical feelings he's ever had. "The joy was unlike anything I've ever experienced. You know, if you could bottle that and have it in a healthy way and not have all the negatives that someone may have for it, it was amazing. It was a true kind of one of my first probably proper out of body experiences, I suppose. "It was like, I kind of remember being in the out, looking down at myself almost, kind of going, wow, I'm kind of floating along with this thing that's so much bigger than me and I'm in true sort of flow state with it."
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘Alien is a warning, isn't it?': Essie Davis on Alien: Earth and Tasmania's ecological crisis
Essie Davis didn't watch much horror growing up in Tasmania; the 55-year-old actor can still bitterly recall the moment when, aged four, she was left at home while her older siblings went to see Jaws at the local cinema in Hobart. 'I stood by the back door going, 'I will remember this day for the rest of my life!'' Davis recalls, speaking from her current family home, also in Tasmania. She finally saw the film on VHS years later, while dating a production designer she had met while performing at Belvoir St theatre. That designer was Justin Kurzel, now one of Australia's most celebrated directors – and also her husband. Back in the mid-90s, Kurzel's courtship rituals included a crash course in horror classics – Jaws was high on the list, followed closely by Ridley Scott's 1979 space slasher Alien. 'I love that first Alien film so much, I wish I'd seen it in a cinema,' Davis says. 'They're definitely a huge part of my film psyche.' It would take another few decades before Davis entered the Alien universe herself, in a new prequel series set shortly before the original film. Alien: Earth focuses on Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a 'forever girl' whose consciousness is transferred from her terminally ill human body to a synthetic one, making her a world-first 'hybrid'. Davis plays Dame Sylvia, one of the scientists responsible for Wendy's second life. In one of many allusions to Peter Pan, Hawley named the character after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the real-life mother of the boys who inspired JM Barrie to write his Neverland saga. The show's themes – and Sylvia's attempts to balance Wendy's humanity with her new, artificial immortality – felt particularly timely to Davis. 'AI was a thing that was coming, but it wasn't suddenly upon us,' she says. 'And then we had the writers' strike and the actors' strike, and then ChatGPT suddenly was in the schools in Tasmania, and I was just going, 'hang on a minute'. 'There's a tightrope of ethics and morality, and everyone has a different version of it. I really hope that people will enjoy this and get hooked into that quandary of genetic engineering and ethics and that strange quest to own everything and beat everyone and be younger than anyone.' Davis is a horror icon herself, thanks to a breakout role in Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook. The low-budget Australian production became a global hit, with fans including The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who placed the film alongside Alien as one of the scariest films he had ever seen. It remains a modern cult classic 10 years later. 'I remember watching a screening way before it was released, and just went, 'Oh, this is great, but it's not scary',' she says. 'And then we went to the Sundance film festival, and I sat up the back as people swore and leapt out of their seats.' Davis credits the film's enduring appeal – its top-hatted spook has even been embraced as an unlikely Queer icon – to something deeper than jump scares. 'It's not just a horror film,' she says. 'It's in fact a kind of psychological thriller about mental health and grief and parenting and love.' It remains a defining role for Davis, alongside her star turn in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries – the 1920s detective franchise that ran for three series and a film, based on the novels of Kerry Greenwood, who died in April. 'A terrible loss, but she's forever in us now,' says Davis. 'I was crying, working out whether I should do it or not,' she adds, of donning Phryne Fisher's signature black bob. 'I'm really glad I did, because that character was such a positive force, and it's just so fun to play someone so clever and positive and naughty and irreverent – and someone who really cares about social justice, and is not going to bow for anyone, and stands up for the underdog.' Along with roles in Game of Thrones, Baby Teeth and Netflix's One Day, Davis has also collaborated with her film-maker husband, responsible for films including Snowtown, Nitram, and television adaptations of Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang and most recently Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Davis appeared in the latter three. Their kids were old enough to be watching Alien for a high school English class when the script for Alien: Earth hit Davis's inbox; the series is led by Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the award-winning small-screen adaptation of Fargo. She was intrigued; the show's depiction of a future Earth carved up and controlled by mega-corporations – Dame Sylvia is employed by Prodigy, a rival to the franchise's longstanding faceless villains, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation – particularly resonated with her. 'It's terribly prescient – the richest of corporations and the richest people taking over the world, essentially running the world,' she says. For Davis, the perils of corporate profits have been plain to see from her home in Tasmania, where she and Kurzel returned to raise their family. 'It is terrifying what is happening to our beautiful place here in Tassie, and the total corporate capture of our government by big industry,' she says of the controversy around the state's fish farming industry, of which she has become one of many high-profile critics, alongside Richard Flanagan and former ABC journalist turned political candidate Peter George. These days, Davis doesn't have to go to the cinema to witness coastal dread. 'When you look out over the water from Bruny Island, everywhere you look you see rows and rows of fish pens, and huge, industrial factory ships,' she says. 'We had mass fish mortalities, rotting salmon washing up on our beaches. And 53 cormorants got shot because they were fishing out of the pens.' Davis says the public opposition to such practices 'began as lots of individuals around Tasmania making constructive criticism, and asking for a bit of negotiation on pollution'. It was being ignored by salmon companies and successive governments, she says, that connected and galvanised the far-flung island community. What began as a movement, Davis says, has now become an 'insurrection', evident in the rise of Peter George, who was elected to Tasmania's state parliament as an independent days after our interview. 'But we're not going to stop,' she says. 'We're just going to keep on until we have people representing the people of Tasmania and not just corporations and party politics. 'I guess Alien is a warning, isn't it?' she adds. 'A warning of what greed and money and this kind of pursuit of immortality can do to a planet.' Alien: Earth launches on Disney+ on 12 August in Australia and the US and on 13 August in the UK
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
James Lovell, who guided Apollo 13 safely back to Earth, dies aged 97
Astronaut Jim Lovell, who guided the Apollo 13 mission safely back to Earth in 1970, has died aged said he "turned a potential tragedy into a success" after an attempt to land on the Moon was aborted due to an explosion onboard the spacecraft while it was hundreds of thousands of miles from of millions watched on television as Lovell and two other astronauts splashed back down into the Pacific Ocean, a moment which has become one of the most iconic in the history of space who was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, was the first man to go to the Moon Nasa head Sean Duffy said he had helped the US space programme to "forge a historic path".In a statement, Lovell's family said: "We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor, and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible. He was truly one of a kind." Lovell's remarkable life One Saturday, a 16-year-old hauled a heavy, three-foot tube into the middle of a large field in had persuaded his science teacher to help him make a makeshift rocket. Somehow, he managed to get his hands on the ingredients for gunpowder - potassium nitrate, sulphur and pulled on a welder's helmet for protection. He packed it with powder, struck a match and ran like rocket rose 80 feet into the air and exploded. Had the chemicals been packed slightly differently, he would have been blown to Jim Lovell, this was more than a childish lark. In achieving his dream to be a rocket scientist, he would become an American hero. But it wasn't going to be easy. James Arthur Lovell Jr was born on 25 March 1928 - just a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic trip across the Atlantic."Boys like either dinosaurs or airplanes," he said. "I was very much an airplane boy."But when he was five years old, his father died in a car mother, Blanche, worked all hours - struggling to keep the family in clothes and food. University was well beyond their financial reach. Navy pilot The answer was the US Navy, which was hungry for new pilots after World War II. It wasn't building rockets but at least it involved signed up to a programme that sent him to college at the military's expense while training as a fighter years in, he gambled and switched to the Navy Academy at Annapolis, on Chesapeake Bay, in the hope of working with his beloved was a lucky decision. A few months later, the Korean War broke out and his former fellow apprentice pilots were sent to South East Asia. Many never got to finish their was banned at Annapolis and girlfriends discouraged. The navy did not want its midshipmen wasting their time on such Lovell had a sweetheart. Marilyn Gerlach was the high school girl he'd shyly asked to the were not allowed on campus and trips outside were limited to 45 minutes. Somehow the relationship hours after his graduation in 1952, the newly commissioned Ensign Lovell married her. They would be together for more than 70 years, until Marilyn's death in 2023. He did everything he could to advertise his love of rocketry. His thesis at the Navy Academy was in the unheard of topic of liquid-fuel engines. After graduation, he hoped to specialise in this pioneering new the navy had other ideas. Lovell was assigned to an aircraft carrier group flying Banshee jets off ships at night. It was a white-knuckle, high-wire business fit only for daredevils. But for Lovell, it wasn't enough. Space In 1958, he applied to Nasa. Project Mercury was America's attempt to place a man in orbit around the Earth. Jim Lovell was one of the 110 test pilots considered for selection but a temporary liver condition put paid to his chances. Four years later, he tried June 1962, after gruelling medical tests, Nasa announced its "New Nine". These would be the men to deliver on President Kennedy's pledge to put American boots on the Moon. It was the most elite group of flying men ever assembled. They included Neil Armstrong, John Young and, fulfilling his childhood dream, Jim Lovell. Three years later he was ready. His first trip into space was aboard the two-man Gemini 7. Lovell and fellow astronaut Frank Borman ate a steak-and-eggs breakfast and blasted off. Their mission: to find out if men could survive two weeks in space. If not, the Moon was out of endurance record complete, Lovell's next flight was in command of Gemini 12 alongside space rookie, Buzz Aldrin. This time they proved that man could work outside a spacecraft. Aldrin clambered awkwardly into the void, spending five hours photographing star for the Moon itself. The crew of Apollo 8 would be the first to travel beyond low Earth orbit and enter the gravitational pull of another celestial body. It was Nasa's most dangerous mission yet. Earthrise The Saturn V rocket that shot Lovell, Borman and William Anders out of our atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour was huge - three times larger than anything seen on the Gemini navigator, Lovell took with him a sextant to take star readings - in case the computers failed and they had to find their own way hours after take-off, they made it. The engines fired and Apollo 8 slid silently behind the Moon. The men heard a cackle in their headsets as the radio signal to Mission Control faltered and then spellbound astronauts pinned themselves to the windows, the first humans to see the far side of our nearest celestial neighbour. And then, from over the advancing horizon, an incredible sight."Earthrise," gasped Borman."Get the camera, quick," said Lovell. It was Christmas Eve 1968. America was mired in Vietnam abroad and civil unrest at home. But at that moment, it seemed that humanity was united. The people of the world saw their planet as the astronauts saw it - fragile and beautiful - shining in the desolation of read from the Book of Genesis, the basis of many of the world's great religions, to the people of the Earth. "And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."For him, it was an image that changed our world forever. He put his thumb against the window and the whole world disappeared behind it. It was the most moving experience of his the spacecraft re-emerged from the darkness, Lovell was first to announce the good news. "Please be advised," he said as the radio crackled back into life, "there is a Santa Claus."At that very moment, 239,000 miles away, a man in a blue Rolls-Royce pulled up outside Lovell's house in Houston. He walked past the dozens of reporters camped outside and handed a box to opened the star-patterned tissue paper and pulled out a mink jacket. "Happy Christmas," said the card that came with it, "and love from the Man in the Moon." They went up as astronauts and came down celebrities. The people of the Earth had followed their every move on were ticker tape parades, congressional honours and a place on the cover of Time Magazine. And they hadn't even set foot on the honour went, of course, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. A year later, Kennedy's dream was posthumously seen to fruition. A small step was taken and mankind took its giant leap. The New Nine had done their job. 'Houston, we've had a problem' In April 1970, it was Jim Lovell's turn. Fortunately, the crew of Apollo 13 did not believe in unlucky Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were men of science - highly trained and determined to follow Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface. But things went badly were 200,000 miles above the Earth and closing in on their target when they spotted low pressure in a hydrogen tank. It needed a stir to stop the super cold gas settling into flicked the switch. It should have been a routine procedure but the command module, Odyssey, shuddered. Oxygen pressure fell and power shut down."I believe we've had a problem here," said Swigert. Lovell had to repeat the message to a stunned Mission Control: "Houston, we've had a problem."It was one of the greatest understatements of all time. The crew were in big trouble - a dramatic explosion had disabled their craft. Haise and Lovell worked frantically to boot up the lunar module, Aquarius. It was not supposed to be used until they got to the Moon. It had no heat shield, so could not be used to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. But it could keep them alive until they got world stopped breathing and watched. For a second time, Jim Lovell had brought the world together as one. The first time it had been for Earthrise, the second would be to witness his fight to survive.'For four days," said Marilyn, "I didn't know if I was a wife or a widow."Temperatures fell to freezing, food and water were rationed. It was days before they limped back to the fringes of Earth's atmosphere. They climbed back aboard the Odyssey and prayed the heat shield had not been radio silence that accompanies re-entry went on far longer than normal. Millions watched on TV, many convinced that all was lost. After six agonising minutes, Jack Swigert's voice cut through the team on the ground held its breath until the parachutes deployed and the crew was safely down. The mission was Nasa's greatest failure and, without question, its finest hour. Lovell retired from the navy in 1973 and opted for a the quiet life, working for the Bay-Houston Towing Company, giving speeches and serving as president of the National Eagle Scout book, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, became the famous 1995 movie, starring Tom Hanks as Jim the film, the director asked him to dress up as an admiral. It was for a cameo scene, shaking hands with Hanks when the crew were rescued from the sea. But the old American hero wasn't having Lovell had been to the Moon twice, witnessed Earthrise and narrowly avoided a cold death in space - and saw no reason to falsely burnish his résumé.He took out his old navy uniform, dusted it down and put it on for the cameo appearance. "I retired as a captain," he insisted, "and a captain I will be."
