Month: January 2023

There was visible excitement among students when schools reopened Tuesday in Malawi's two biggest cities, Lilongwe and Blantyre, after a two-week suspension caused by a cholera outbreak.  The bacterial illness has killed close to 800 people, more than 100 of them children, and affected more than 25,000.  Malawi's government announced measures to prevent cholera from spreading in schools but warned it will shut down the schools again if needed.   To many students, especially those who are preparing to take national examinations this year, the closure doomed their hope of passing the exams. Ronnie Lutepo, a teenaged student at Michiru View secondary school in Blantyre, said returning to the school was the best thing he hoped for. “Yes, as I was at home my mum was telling me to study, but…

Nearly two thirds of the sharks and rays that live among the world's corals are threatened with extinction, according to new research published Tuesday, with a warning this could further imperil precious reefs. Coral reefs, which harbor at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants, are gravely menaced by an array of human threats, including overfishing, pollution and climate change. Shark and ray species -- from apex predators to filter feeders -- play an important role in these delicate ecosystems that "cannot be filled by other species", said Samantha Sherman, of Simon Fraser University in Canada and the wildlife group TRAFFIC International. But they are under grave threat globally, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications, which assessed extinction vulnerability data from the International Union for…

Jill Biden' s advocacy for curing cancer didn't start with her son's death in 2015 from brain cancer. It began decades earlier, long before she came into the national spotlight, and could now be further energized by her own brush with a common form of skin cancer. The first lady often says the worst three words anyone will ever hear are, "You have cancer." She heard a version of that phrase for herself this past week. A lesion that doctors had found above her right eye during a routine screening late last year was removed on Wednesday and confirmed to be basal cell carcinoma — a highly treatable form of skin cancer. While Biden was being prepped to remove the lesion, doctors found and removed another one from the left…

When Benjamin Franklin fashioned the first lightning rod in the 1750s following his famous experiment flying a kite with a key attached during a thunderstorm, the American inventor had no way of knowing this would remain the state of the art for centuries. Scientists now are moving to improve on that 18th-century innovation with 21st-century technology — a system employing a high-powered laser that may revolutionize lightning protection. Researchers said on Monday they succeeded in using a laser aimed at the sky from atop Mount Santis in northeastern Switzerland to divert lightning strikes. With further development, this Laser Lightning Rod could safeguard critical infrastructure including power stations, airports, wind farms and launchpads. Lightning inflicts billions of dollars in damage on buildings, communication systems, power lines and electrical equipment annually while…

Pakistan Monday launched its first nationwide anti-polio campaign of the year to immunize children under the age of five against the crippling disease. The move follows a surge in new infections in 2022. While no new case has been reported in Pakistan so far this year, the highly infectious wild poliovirus paralyzed 20 children last year. That compares to just one infection reported in 2021. National eradication program officials said that more than 360,000 health workers would deliver polio drops to at least 44.2 million children across 156 districts during the five-day campaign. They noted that children would also be administered an additional vitamin A supplement to boost their immunity against infectious diseases. The 20 polio cases in Pakistan in 2022 were reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mostly in its…

Pakistan launched its first anti-polio campaign of the year Sunday, targeting 44.2 million children under the age of five. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio continues to threaten the health and well-being of children. Polio affects the nervous system of children and ultimately leads to paralysis. Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif kicked off the nationwide drive by administering polio drops to children in the capital, Islamabad, saying Pakistan was unfortunately among the few countries that still suffered from the disease. Twenty cases were reported in the tribal North Waziristan area last year, though the disease was contained among other children through immunization, Sharif said. Around 44 million children in 156 districts will be immunized. This includes 22.54 million children in Punjab, 10.1 million in…

The U.S. has now collected 510 reports of unidentified flying objects, many of which are flying in sensitive military airspace. While there's no evidence of extraterrestrials, they still pose a threat, the government said in a declassified report summary released Thursday. Last year the Pentagon opened an office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, solely focused on receiving and analyzing all of those reports of unidentified phenomena, many of which have been reported by military pilots. It works with the intelligence agencies to further assess those incidents. The events "continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity," the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its 2022 report. The classified version of the report addresses how many of…

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way's outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy - almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy. The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way's halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles). These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and…

The World Health Organization has appealed to China to keep releasing information about its wave of COVID-19 infections after the government announced nearly 60,000 deaths since early December following weeks of complaints it was failing to tell the world what was happening. The announcement Saturday was the first official death toll since the ruling Communist Party abruptly dropped anti-virus restrictions in December despite a surge in infections that flooded hospitals. That left the WHO and other governments appealing for information, while the United States, South Korea and others imposed controls on visitors from China. The government said 5,503 people died of respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 and there were 54,435 fatalities from cancer, heart disease and other ailments combined with COVID-19 between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12. The announcement “allows…

A new report finds nearly a billion people in the world’s poorer countries are treated for often life-threatening conditions in health care facilities that lack a reliable electricity supply.  A joint report by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the International Renewable Energy Agency, “Energizing Health: Accelerating Electricity Access in Health-Care Facilities,” has just been issued.  Health officials say electricity access in health care facilities can make the difference between life and death.   Heather Adair-Rohani is Acting Unit Head, Air Quality, Energy and Health at the World Health Organization.  She says it is critical that health care facilities have a reliable, always functioning electricity supply available. “Imagine going to a health care facility with no lights, with no opportunity to have a baby warmer functioning," said Adair-Rohani. "To…

The U.S. Department of the Interior will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country's outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals, it said in a statement on Thursday. The proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1 billion over a 20-year period by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs, , the statement said. "Updating these regulations will facilitate the safe and efficient development of offshore wind energy resources, provide certainty to developers and help ensure a fair return to the U.S. taxpayers," U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in the release. The reforms come days after the department named Elizabeth Klein, a lawyer who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, to head its Bureau of Ocean…

England will ban a range of single-use plastic items such as cutlery, plates and bowls starting in October to limit soaring plastic pollution, Britain's environment department said Saturday.  The decision follows a public consultation by the government in which 95% of respondents were in favor of the bans, the department said in a statement.  "We all know the absolutely devastating impacts that plastic can have on our environment and wildlife," Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said. "These new single-use plastics bans will continue our vital work to protect the environment."  Most plastics can remain intact for centuries and damage oceans, rivers and land where millions of tons end up as waste each year. The United Nations says decades of overuse of single-use plastics has caused a "global environmental catastrophe."  The government…

A Swiss company says it has certifiably extracted CO2 from the air and permanently stored it in the ground — for the first time on behalf of paying customers, including Microsoft. Climeworks, a startup created in 2009 by two Swiss engineers, said its facility in Iceland had successfully removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and injected it into the ground, where it would very gradually be transformed into rock. The potential for scaling up remains to be proved. In its announcement on Thursday, Climeworks said its process had been certified in September by DNV, a Norwegian independent auditor, marking the first time carbon had been permanently captured on behalf of paying corporate clients. Climeworks counts companies including Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify among the clients who have bought into its future…

It was an anomaly detected in the storm of a nuclear reactor so puzzling that physicists hoped it would shine a light on dark matter, one of the universe's greatest mysteries.  However, new research has definitively ruled out that this strange measurement signaled the existence of a "sterile neutrino," a hypothetical particle that has long eluded scientists.   Neutrinos are sometimes called "ghost particles" because they barely interact with other matter — around 100 trillion are estimated to pass through our bodies every second.  Since neutrinos were first theorized in 1930, scientists have been trying to nail down the properties of these shapeshifters, which are one of the most common particles in the universe.  They appear "when the nature of the nucleus of an atom has been changed," physicist David Lhuillier…

The effects of the war in Ukraine are extending beyond Moscow and Kyiv, and may be impacting not only people but also wildlife. VOA's Bilal Hussain reports from Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir. VOA Mandarin Service contributed to this report. ...

The World Health Organization has issued an alert warning against the use of two Indian cough syrups blamed for the deaths of at least 20 children in Uzbekistan. WHO said the products, manufactured by India's Marion Biotech, were "substandard" and that the firm had failed to provide guarantees about their "safety and quality.” The alert, issued Wednesday, comes after Uzbekistan authorities said last month at least 20 children died after consuming a syrup made by the company under the brand name Doc-1 Max. India's health ministry subsequently suspended production at the company and Uzbekistan banned the import and sale of Doc-1 Max. The WHO alert said an analysis of the syrup samples by the quality control laboratories of Uzbekistan found "unacceptable amounts of diethylene glycol and /or ethylene glycol as…

After three years of isolation and financial struggles in Chinese soccer, the country is reopening its borders and economy to the outside world. With it, frustrated fans, financially challenged clubs and unpaid players in the Chinese Super League might receive some long-awaited good news. The 2022 season was unrecognizable from the 2019 edition, the last before COVID-19 hit. Then the league had an average attendance of over 24,000, the highest in Asia, and a number of big-name foreign imports. From 2020 onwards, Beijing's "zero-COVID" policy, designed to stamp out the virus, meant that teams mostly played in empty stadiums at centralized venues. Players were stuck in bio-secure bubbles for months on end and international stars, unable to enter the country, were released from contracts. It also meant little ticket, broadcast…

A Chinese company presented a cloned horse to the public Thursday that is the first of its kind born in the country and approved for equestrian sport. The cloning of competition and thoroughbred horses has been practiced in several countries since the early 2000s, particularly for genetic improvements. Born last June from a surrogate mother, Zhuang Zhuang was produced by the Beijing laboratory Sinogene and is a clone of a horse imported from Germany. The black animal is the first from the "warmblood" group of breeds to be born in China and to be officially approved by the China Horse Industry Association. Warmbloods are generally light horses with a lively temperament. Equestrian sports, especially show jumping, have been making strides in China in recent years. But a shortage of high-performance…

Last year was one of the the warmest on record, according to data released Thursday by two U.S. government agencies, and was marked by numerous instances of severe weather around the globe, many of which are exacerbated by global warming. The Earth’s average global surface temperature was 0.86 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average in 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This made it the sixth-warmest year on record by NOAA’s reckoning, and the fifth-warmest by NASA’s. (The discrepancy between the two is the result of a measurement difference of a tiny fraction of a degree.) The high temperatures in 2022 were particularly remarkable because of the presence of a major weather phenomenon over the Pacific Ocean…

Guan Yao, who lives in California, never thought that on his last video chat with his grandmother in Beijing he would watch her die. He had installed a tiny robot camera in his grandmother's home some time ago so they could be in constant contact after he moved to the U.S. in 2016. She took to the device, holding it almost as if it provided the comfort of his touch. Guan was video chatting with her throughout the last four hours of her life on December 22. The 85-year-old had tested positive for COVID-19 and had had a fever for days. Two days before dying, she finally got a bed in a hospital. Guan watched her blood oxygen saturation level suddenly turn from a low of 70 to a question…

German police Thursday continued efforts to clear hundreds of climate protesters occupying the western village of Luetzerath to prevent the demolition of the town for the expansion of a coal mine. Police began moving in Tuesday after a regional German court Monday rejected the last legal effort by the protesters to stop the demolition of the town located in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Utility company RWE wants to extract coal beneath Luetzerath, which it says is necessary to ensure energy security in Germany. The company reached a deal with the regional government last year that allows the village to be destroyed in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038. But the protesters — some of whom have occupied the town for as long as two…

For years, 51-year-old Rodney Stotts says he was living a dead-end life. Today, he is a different person, teaching young people about birds of prey and the importance of protecting the environment. Maxim Moskalkov has the story. Camera: Sergii Dogotar ...

The World Health Organization said Wednesday it is calling on China to provide more information about its surge in COVID-19 cases. “WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China, and this is in relation to the definitions that are used but also to the need for doctors and those reporting in the public health system to be encouraged to report these cases and not discouraged,” Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies director, told reporters. Ryan did praise China’s efforts to increase the number of designated beds in intensive care units and in using antivirals early in the course of treatment. A lack of extensive data from China has led a number of countries to require testing for Chinese travelers. “In the absence of data, countries have made a decision to…

The race is on to save the ecologically crucial wetlands surrounding the final 160 kilometers of the Mississippi River, America’s most iconic waterway. “We are losing our communities, our culture, our fisheries, and our first line of defense against the hurricanes that threaten us,” said Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Adjacent to New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish is disappearing at an alarming rate. In recent decades, nearly 700 square kilometers of land have been consumed by the Gulf of Mexico because of the devastating combination of sinking land and rising sea levels. The parish includes wetlands that are home to thousands of Louisianans and many species of wildlife deemed critical to the ecology — and economy — of the region. In December, the U.S. Army…