Hungary's former leader Viktor Orban called European Union climate policy a "utopian fantasy" and effectively banned wind turbines. And yet the country has quietly become Europe's solar leader, with 25% of its electricity now being being generated from the renewable energy source, ahead of sunnier countries like Spain, and Greece.
The boom was driven not by climate concern but by self-sufficiency politics and cheap subsidies. Now a 450-megawatt park, just east of Budapest, is due online by September 2026. It's set to power around 106,000 households.
Marmot researchers find a new way to fund their science
When US federal funding dried up, researchers from UCLA and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory got creative. They launched OnlyMarms: a free platform posting videos of yellow-bellied marmots eating, digging and scampering in the wild, where fans can donate to support the science.
The team has tracked individually marked marmots in Colorado since 1962, building six decades of data on family lives, social behavior and responses to environmental change — and say studying marmot hibernation could even hold clues about human aging.
