cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8953267

Banner image: Lilac-breasted roller in Etosha National Park, Namibia. Image courtesy of Giles Laurent via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

How Namibia's bird conservation projects build community resilience (commentary)

• Droughts and land degradation often erode communities’ social bonds, but in the Karas region of Namibia, bird conservation initiatives have become a rallying point.
• Women and youth are at the forefront of these initiatives, which has inspired confidence among peers and shown that conservation is not the domain of scientists alone, but also a practice of everyday community resilience.
• “It is time for policymakers, NGOs, and donors to support these initiatives not just as biodiversity projects, but as investments in community well-being,” a new op-ed argues.
• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.

In Namibia’s Karas Region, birds are more than symbols of freedom or beauty — they are teachers of resilience. Their survival in arid landscapes mirrors the endurance of the communities who live alongside them. Grassroots bird conservation projects here have revealed something profound: protecting birds can also strengthen families, nurture hope, and build social cohesion.

Across villages in Karas, parents and children tend habitats together, restoring nesting sites and planting native vegetation. These acts of care are not only ecological interventions; they are lessons in patience and problem solving. When a child sees a weaverbird return to a reed bed that the community has protected, it is a moment of triumph that teaches perseverance in the face of environmental challenges.

Women and youth are at the forefront of these initiatives. In one community, a group of young women organized bird walks for schoolchildren, teaching them to identify species like the sociable weaver and the pale chanting goshawk. Their leadership has inspired confidence among peers and shown that conservation is not the domain of scientists alone — it is a practice of everyday resilience.

Sociable weavers nesting in acacia trees, Karas Region, Namibia. Image courtesy of Martha Karas.

These projects also counter the isolation that environmental stress can bring. Droughts and land degradation often erode social bonds, but bird conservation has become a rallying point. Families gather to monitor nesting sites, share stories, and celebrate small victories. In doing so, they weave resilience into the social fabric. Conservation here is not only about biodiversity; it is about belonging.

The ecological benefits are clear. Protecting bird habitats safeguards pollination, seed dispersal, and pest control — services that sustain agriculture and livelihoods. But equally important is the emotional strength these projects cultivate. In Karas, conservation has become a human resilience strategy: a way to confront uncertainty with collective action and hope.

This perspective challenges the conventional view of conservation as a technical exercise. Too often, policies focus narrowly on species counts or protected areas. While these metrics matter, they overlook the lived experience of communities who find strength in caring for nature. By recognizing conservation as both ecological and social, we broaden its value and deepen its impact.

Lappet-faced vultures like this are native to the arid plains of the Karas Region, and organizations like Vultures Namibia ensure there’s awareness of them. Image courtesy of Martha Karas.

The lesson from Karas is urgent. As climate change intensifies, resilience will be as critical as resources. Grassroots bird projects show that resilience can be cultivated through simple, shared acts of care. They remind us that conservation is not only about saving species, but about sustaining the human spirit.

It is time for policymakers, NGOs, and donors to support these initiatives not just as biodiversity projects, but as investments in community well-being. Funding should prioritize programs that empower women and youth, foster intergenerational learning, and strengthen social bonds through conservation.

Birds in Namibia’s Karas Region are survivors of harsh landscapes. But they are also mentors of resilience, teaching us how to endure, adapt, and thrive together. By listening to the voices of those who lead grassroots efforts, we can reimagine conservation as a strategy for human strength as much as ecological survival.

Supporting these projects is not charity — it is foresight. In every nest protected, in every child inspired, we see the seeds of resilience that will carry communities through the challenges ahead.

Conservation, at its best, is a story of hope. And in Karas, that story is being written by birds and the people who care for them.

Martha Karas is a Namibian writer based in the Karas region.

@angryseagullnoises

So i'm doing a bit of reading about the basics of nuclear fission these days, just to understand what's actually happening there.

Here are some interesting things that i think that i learned so far:³

• nuclear engineering is all about the neutron economy. If you had an easily-available cheap source of neutrons, we wouldn't need big nuclear power plants because energy could be easily generated by hitting Hydrogen-1 (protium) with neutrons to make H-2 (deuterium) out of it. According to this diagram, this releases around 2 MeV of energy per collision (resulting nucleus has 2 nucleons), which is a lot of energy.

• the problem is that we don't have a cheap source of neutrons, and that's about where the whole trouble with nuclear energy begins. we're smashing U-235 specifically because it's fissile and can sustain a chain reaction: It emits more neutrons per collision than it absorbs, so we get a net gain of neutrons out of it.

• the sun sources its neutrons from weak interaction between protons and electrons¹. Basically this fuses a proton and an electron together to make a neutron. This is the rate-limiting factor in the sun's fusion and determines the sun's lifetime before it burns through its fuel. The average time for a particle to undergo weak interaction is about 10¹⁰ years in the sun's interior which is about the sun's lifetime. If the sun had more neutrons, it would burn faster.²

[1]: well, sorta. this is kinda simplified and more precisely described in the proton-proton chain which is the same thing but with extra frills.

[2]: Also note that while the weak interaction is the rate-limiting factor of the fusion process, it barely releases any energy. Almost all of the energy is released due to the strong interaction which glues protons and neutrons together really tightly and that way releases a lot of energy.

[3]: if you know better, please do correct me.

I'm not talking about the "typical" junk food (like KFC or McDonalds), instead it's more on certain aspects of Japanese cuisine being carb heavy or features fried items such as: ramen, agepan, karage, tempura, gyudon, tonkatsu, yakitori, etc. I mean, can ramen or gyudon bowls still be deemed "fast food" even though they appear 'healthier' than American fast food.

[2026-07-12] TASS

NATO's Boeing E-3A Sentry early warning and control aircraft is circling off the Black Sea coast in Romania’s airspace, a source in the European Union’s air traffic control services has told TASS.

"A NATO plane, registered in Luxembourg, is now flying in circles in the Black Sea area, in Romania’s airspace," the source said.

In his words, the plane took off from Lithuania’s Siauliai and flew over central Romania, accompanied by Boeing KC-135T Stratotanker aerial refueling aircraft. After making several circles in the area, the plane flew to Romania’s Black Sea coast, where it continues its flight at the altitude of almost 9,000 meters.

The source did not specify the goal of the flight, saying only that the plane’s onboard equipment allows to detect and identify aerial targets at the distance of up to 400 km. "The previous similar mission by Boeing E-3A Sentry took place in late June," the source added.

Over the past few months, another NATO aircraft - a US-made Bombardier Challenger 650 Artemis II intelligence and reconnaissance plane - has often been spotted over the Black Sea’s neutral waters.

Scott Metzger | Bluesky | Patreon

Farmers that combine grazing land with solar farms (badass name incoming: agrovolatics) are seeing 2-3x income to traditional farming.

Hello fellow ADHD people!

I had a weird idea today. I've noticed that sometimes I have a single specific task that I avoid incredibly painfully, to the point where, even on my best days, I basically do everything else. And it makes other things easier because the more I think about the task that I'm avoiding, the more my brain is running away to do other things.

It made me wonder, maybe I can make a dummy task that isn't really critical, but make myself think that it is, and avoid it, therefore increasing my motivation to do other tasks as a form of avoidance.

Any opinions or experiences about this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12140427

Banner image: The Maud Island frog of New Zealand is expected to face rising wildfire risk due to climate change. Image by Phil Bishop via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).

Scientists forecast wildfire risk for species survival under climate change

A new study warns climate change could increase the global area susceptible to wildfires in the future, putting many more species at risk than today.

Previous research has shown that climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires as precipitation patterns change and vegetation becomes drier in parts of the world. Researchers have now projected how the length of fire seasons and the extent of burned area might change in the future under four scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. Using these forecasts, they also assessed the future impact of wildfire for 9,592 species of animals, plants and fungi, currently reported on the IUCN Red List as threatened by wildfire.

Under the moderate-emissions scenario, where current greenhouse gas emission trends continue, the researchers found that by 2100, the extent of burned areas globally could increase by 9.3%, and that nearly 84% of fire-threatened species will be exposed to higher risk of wildfires.

Xiaoye Yang, study lead author from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, told Mongabay by email that “there are clear spatial disparities in future wildfire risk to biodiversity.”

Regions such as South America and Oceania are expected to face especially elevated risks of burning, Yang said. Fires in high-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere are also projected to increase rapidly in the future, although they’ve historically been rare in these regions, he added.

The study found that the top 1% of species most affected by wildfires (96 species) are found in South America, South Asia, southern Australia and New Zealand. These species, including the Maud Island frog (Leiopelma pakeka) and North Island saddleback (Philesturnus rufusater), a bird, both from New Zealand, share common traits, the authors write: they have very small geographic ranges and are already threatened with extinction.

Species in areas newly threatened by wildfires may lack adaptive experience with fire, making them particularly vulnerable to emerging wildfire regimes, Yang said.

At the same time, some regions like Central Africa could see a reduction in burned area in the future, the study found. About 1,000 species in Africa could also experience lower exposure to wildfire risk.

“Although the increase in wildfire risk will vary across regions — meaning that some countries contributing more to emissions may not experience proportional increases in wildfire impacts — collective action remains crucial,” Yang said.

Carla Staver, a professor at Princeton University in the U.S., who studies wildfires in savannas, told Mongabay that framing wildfires as a blanket biodiversity threat is a limited perspective, since certain ecosystems depend on fires. “For example, the 41.8% of African species that could experience a decrease in wildfire risk probably mostly occur in savannas, which are fire dependent, so reductions in fire activity in those systems aren’t good news either,” she said.

Plus, I doubt the person making the threat would wait for any actual preparations such as canceling various subscriptions. And I don't think they'd allow for the necessary witnesses required while I'm writing my will.

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With how many lawsuits they get and the total amounts they now have technically lost in court, how is it possible they still hide their hosting infrastructure? Anna's archive hosts a truly monumental amount of content and its not like its exactly easy to host petabytes(?) of content in secret easily. Hell the orders for hard drives should make it easy to find them. It's not like they can just tuck a raspberry pi with an Ethernet connection somewhere and throw up a proxy and call it a day. What kind of techniques are required to hide that amount of infrastructure? Especially under such scrutiny as the US government and many publishers coming for their throats I can't imagine it's a small feat.

https://heyokyay.com/hooray/

If you love classical music or would like to know more of what it's like, you can see these musicians perform at the semifinals in Sydney and Melbourne. It only costs $10 to experience the sounds these brilliant young people make. Details in the article.