Five hours south of Lima, a lagoon ringed by palms and sand dunes is a regional conservation area with a new five year plan, a citizens' committee and a monthly top up from a well, while a woman nearby has planted tens of thousands of the desert's own trees.
The Talbragar fish bed case at Crystal Kingdom, Coonabarabran. Photograph: Oliver Strewe. Good morning. This week begins out past the Warrumbungles, at
Out past the Warrumbungles, a museum built from one district's rocks holds Jurassic fish, the leaves of a tree that grew before the Wollemi pine, and the most colourful crystals the volcanoes ever made.
On the last day of July a female Amur tiger called Umit walked out of her enclosure into 450,000 hectares of river forest and reed bed in south east Kazakhstan, the first tiger to live wild there since 1948.
That smell when rain lands on warm ground has a name, an Australian one, and behind it is a partnership between soil bacteria and tiny creatures that is 400 million years old.
In the strait that runs through the middle of Istanbul, researchers are photographing dorsal fins the way police photograph fingerprints, and the fins keep coming back with calves beside them.
Everything you think you know about hippos is a little bit wrong, in the best way, and the scientists who spend their nights on African riverbanks have the evidence.
An amateur astronomer scrolling satellite maps for a camping spot in Quebec saw a circle that should not have been there. Two years later, geologists flew in and confirmed a crater that had been hiding in plain sight for 390 million years.
Two sets of ancient teeth from Sulawesi carry the same deep grooves and the same chemical trace, and Australian and Indonesian scientists say they tell of people chewing betel nut for comfort 25,000 years ago.
Once a year the Great Barrier Reef spawns in a pink snowstorm, and most of that new life drifts away. A small clear box built by CSIRO and Southern Cross University holds it where it is needed, and the corals are settling in numbers nobody has managed before.
A weekend under the sky moves your body clock most of the way back to sunrise, and a review of 108 brain studies shows the stress circuits settling within minutes. Here is a place an hour and a half from Sydney to try it.
On 5 October the Wombat, Pyrenees and Mount Buangor forests become Victoria's first new national parks in more than a decade, after decades of local people looking after them. Greater gliders, platypus and powerful owls live there, and they are a couple of hours from Melbourne.
