The mobile phone industry is among the most dynamic in the world with brand-new products featuring technological improvements, large and small, hitting the market with predictable frequency throughout each year. Having a mobile phone these days is a must for most Malaysians. The country boasts a mobile penetration of 140%…

Proceeds from the sale of trees felled in the forests of Borneo may have been used to build shiny new homes within gated communities for Americans in the desert of Arizona, in the United States, charges Sarawak Report. “[W]e have discovered that it is here,” writes the investigative news website…

Step aside, Petronas Twin Towers. Here comes Malaysia’s soon-to-be tallest skyscraper. And it will be wholly green, to boot, if its developers keep their word. Merdeka PNB118 (so named because it will be in Merdeka, owned by Permodalan Nasional Berhad, and feature 118 floors) is set to be completed by 2020 and…

Saving endangered species like the iconic Malayan tiger is a national priority. The trouble is, most Malaysians don’t care. Or at least not enough to lend a hand. This is according to the Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers (MYCAT), whose members bemoan the fact that their intensive nationwide campaigns to…

Score another victory up for sun bear conservationism. After a months-long campaign, animal rights activists in Sabah have finally managed to rescue two captive bears from their bare confines at a  mini zoo inside a hot spring near the town of Tawau in Borneo. The animals, malnourished and visibly distressed,…

Penang’s Transport Master Plan is aimed at alleviating the perennial traffic congestions around the island. It envisions a complex integrated network with a light-rail transit system, a monorail, a cable car and an undersea tunnel to link George Town on the island to Butterworth on the mainland. The trouble is…

Safer pakamatic lorries will be transporting bauxite on newly designed routes to new safer storage sites for stockpiles. The routes will avoid heavily populated residential areas and lorry drivers will be required to abide by load limits to avoid spillage en route. The authorities in Pahang have been talking up…

Take a glimpse at a picture of Earth from outer space, and you will see what looks like a multicolored marble with lots and lots of blue on it. That’s no surprise: the planet’s surface (all 70% of it) is covered in water. Now, what if we could use some…

Malayan tapirs need all the help they can get. They are getting some of that help from schoolchildren across Malaysia who have created thousands of miniature clay figurines in the image of the endangered animals. The children did so as part of the Malayan Tapir Awareness Campaign in order to…

Orangutan skulls. Langur skulls. Macaque skulls. Monkey skull necklaces. Hornbill beaks. Sun bear claws. Bear teeth. Wild boar tusks…. These were among the gruesome “decorative” items that two Malaysian men who ran an online business called Borneo Artifact kept mailing from the island into the United States for a decade….

Slash-and-burn forest clearing can deal incalculable damage to local ecosystems, yet forest fires, large and small, continue to be set around much of Malaysia largely in order to clear woods for agricultural plots and palm oil plantations. To date the government has largely been fighting a rearguard action against the practice…

The health effects of air pollution have been well documented. Depending on its intensity and the length of your exposure to it, air pollution can trigger or exacerbate cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, metabolic malfunctions and a variety of other ailments. All this we’ve long known. Here’s something you may not…

All those massive amounts of carbon dioxide we have been belching into the atmosphere have been creating a greenhouse effect, turning up the thermostat worldwide. But here is something else they have been doing: turning plants greener. Does that sound counterintuitive? Perhaps it should not. Plants thrive on carbon dioxide…

You may think of peat swamps as but inviting stretches of foul-smelling territory. That they may well be, yes, but they are far more than that. Peat swamps are home to a great deal of biodiversity with a fascinating kaleidoscope of species. Better yet: peat bogs are excellent absorbers of…

Here we go again. Despite stepped-up efforts to clamp down on the practice and harsh penalties for it, the sale of protected species continues unabated in Sarawak. Acting on a tip-off on April 23, the Sarawak Forest Department seized six Borneo short-tailed pythons (Python breitensteini), three tortoises, two tree shrews…

The states of Johor and Perak are set to ban the use of plastic and polystyrene. Good news? Certainly. Not everyone is happy, though. Cue cries of outrage from plastic manufacturers. The problem isn’t the ubiquity and ready availability of cheap and disposable plastic products that people use once or…