When hungry elephants and people clash in a village - human overpopulation and overdevelopment = destruction and loss of habitat which drives species to extinction.

An elephant eyes the Elephant Response Team's vehicle as the team attempt to drive the animal away from the town of Livingstone in Zambia and back toward Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park.

The emergency call comes in just before midnight. In the driver's seat of a battered Toyota Hilux pickup truck, 29-year-old Chamunolwa Jimayi chats briefly with the caller. He hangs up the phone and shouts to his two colleagues in the back to hold on tight, then shoots off at high speed through the city center, careening around the traffic.

Some misguided people, today, who may call themselves "pronatalist", and who look at future predictions of negative population growth (meaning that population will decrease in the future, instead of continuing to increase), and see this as a problem, are wrong or are not thinking clearly. Some of them may believe that African and Arab and Asian populations are in the process of "replacing" or at least are overtaking the Caucasian, European-based ethnicities that have traditionally been the majority of the population in countries like the US, the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and they are right - this is indeed happening, as is the Hispanicization of the US population because of such massive immigration. And they are right to be concerned about this. In a century there may be no nations left on Earth where Caucasians of European ancestry are the majority of the population if immigration is not stopped. And this is a problem. There will be African majority countries, Asian majority countries, Arab majority countries, Hispanic majority countries, but there will not be any Caucasian of European ancestry majority countries left if we do not take action now.

These apes can tell when humans don’t know something, study finds

[Nyota, one of three bonobos involved in the experiment]

Trees might not be acting in the way we thought - this forest fitted with pipes can tell us why

By simulating the future atmosphere, scientists hope to understand whether trees will continue to act as the lungs of the planet.

"The oak is the queen of her domain," says Rob MacKenzie as he gestures towards a giant towering above us. This oak tree has stood in this very spot since long before he or I walked the Earth. 

Vampire hedgehogs, pirate spiders and fishy fungi - the strangest new species of 2024

Thousands of new species have been discovered by scientists this year – here are some of the weirdest.