Buddy is a Bengal slow loris, a type of endangered primate found in India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, China and Thailand. The largest type of loris, the Bengal is described by some as about the size of a bag of sugar. Only a few thousand are thought to remain in the wild.

All lorises are at great risk these days because unthinking people want them as pets.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/how-unprecedented-international-cooperation-saved-one-little-primates-life.html#ixzz3CpdzdSKn

The bigger picture in 2014 shows a lot of natural gas being added, which gets talked up time and time again in the mass media, but solar power and wind power together have added more capacity this year than natural gas (or fossil fuels on the whole).

There are some 2,000 species of fireflies, many of them native to the tropics in South America and the Pacific Ocean. They’re all members of the family Lampyridae, which loosely translated means “shining fire.”

Good news for chickens and meat eaters alike. Perdue Farms, one of the nation’s foremost poultry-producers, is drastically reducing the amount of antibiotics it uses to raise the chickens that wind up on your dinner plate.

That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Unfortunately, antibiotics have become a normal part of raising livestock in America. As Care2 has previously reported, 80% of our antibiotics get used on the animals we eat. Antibiotics are used for a variety of purposes like preventing animals from developing diseases while living in substandard conditions and helping the animals to put on additional weight.

It is not every day that a designer showcasing at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Johannesburg for the very first time gets a standing ovation. But that is exactly what happened to Laduma Ngxokolo, a young man from the Xhosa ethnic group, whose colourful range of knitwear had lit up the catwalk.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28742372

Dogs usually are the pets that make headlines for saving the lives of their owners, but in this case, the hero was an English black cat named Slinky Malinki.

For four years and five months, she clung to the rock and guarded her eggs. In a feat that surely made good use of all eight arms, an octopus revealed a new secret of deep sea life when ecologists observed her record-breaking behaviour from a robotic submarine. This doubles the longest brooding time ever seen in the animal kingdom, giving embryos time to develop in the cold.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28545964

Since it was chartered by Congress in 1934, the Export-Import Bank of the United States has partnered with the private sector to boost U.S. exports in key industries, including clean energy. … n fiscal 2011 and 2012, Ex-Im provided $1.3 billion in support for renewable energy projects, helping to complete new financing arrangements in emerging markets including Brazil, India and Mexico. Since 2010, Ex-Im has financed more than $760 million in renewable energy projects in India alone, among them the purchase of solar systems from AREVA Solar Inc. in California.

Conservationists have been pointing to a major obstacle for them, which is the Ventura (101) Freeway. … officials from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) announced that the agency will be seeking $2 million in grant funding to build a bridge over the freeway to help mountain lions cross safely and find new habitat. Supporters also hope that other species will also benefit from its construction, which will help maintain biodiversity in the area, in addition to the hope that it will roads safer for drivers.

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2004, now holds the off-Earth roving distance record after accruing 25 miles (40 kilometers) of driving, and is not far from completing the first extraterrestrial marathon. The previous record was held by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover. “Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world,” said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance.”

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/28jul_oppy/