Year: 2023

The World Health Organization and U.S. health authorities said Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown. The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries," it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday. So far, the variant has been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control confirmed it is also closely monitoring the variant, in a message on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter. There are four known sequences of the variant, the WHO has said. "The potential impact of the BA.2.86 mutations are presently unknown and undergoing careful assessment," the WHO…

With warming ocean waters threatening much of the world’s coral reefs, some ecologists are using simple technology to help restore them. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. ...

Comic books can be a great way to help people work through emotional trauma. For VOA, Genia Dulot reports on comics that encourage children and adults to share their feelings and address issues of mental health ...

The evacuation center at the South Maui Community Park & Gymnasium is now Anne Landon's safe space. She has a cot and access to food, water, showers, books and even puzzles that bring people together to pass the evening hours.  But all it took was a strong wind gust for her to be immediately transported back to the terrifying moment a deadly fire overtook her senior apartment complex in Lahaina last week.  "It's a trigger," she said. "The wind was so horrible during that fire."  Helping survivors cope Mental health experts are working in Maui to help people who survived the deadliest fire in the United States in more than a century make sense of what they endured. While many are still in a state of shock, others are starting…

Pollution from discarded plastic, metals and other items is a persistent problem in Nigeria. Some young people are doing what they can to clean up the trash and make strides toward sustainable development. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria, narrated by Salem Solomon. ...

Russia's lunar spacecraft entered the moon's orbit on Wednesday, a major step toward the country's ambition of being the first to land on the moon's south pole in the search for frozen water.  The Luna-25 entered the moon's orbit at 11:57 a.m. local time (0857 GMT), Russia's space corporate Roskosmos said.  Luna-25 will circle the moon, the Earth's only natural satellite, for about five days, then change course for a soft landing on the lunar south pole planned for August 21.  India's Chandrayaan-3 entered the moon's orbit earlier this month ahead of a planned touchdown on the south pole of the moon later this month.  The Luna-25, which is roughly the size of a small car, will aim to operate for a year on the south pole, where scientists at…

New restrictions on access to a drug used in the most common form of abortion would be imposed under a federal appeals court ruling issued Wednesday, but the Supreme Court will have the final say. The ruling by three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans overturned part of a lower court ruling that revoked the Food and Drug Administration's approval — more than two decades ago — of mifepristone. But it left intact part of the ruling that would end the availability of the drug by mail and require that the drug be administered in the presence of a physician. Those restrictions won't take effect, at least right away, because the Supreme Court previously intervened to keep the drug available during the legal fight.…

Surgeons transplanted a pig's kidney into a brain-dead man and for over a month it's worked normally — a critical step toward an operation the New York team hopes to eventually try in living patients. Scientists around the country are racing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research offer a remarkable rehearsal. The latest experiment announced Wednesday by NYU Langone Health marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a person, albeit a deceased one — and it's not over. Researchers are set to track the kidney's performance for a second month. "Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it's looking like it is," Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone's transplant institute, told…

Germany's Cabinet on Wednesday approved a plan to liberalize rules on cannabis, setting the scene for the European Union's most populous member to decriminalize possession of limited amounts and allow members of "cannabis clubs" to buy the substance for recreational purposes. The legislation is billed as the first step in a two-part plan and still needs approval by parliament. But the government's approval is a stride forward for a prominent reform project of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's socially liberal coalition, although significantly short of its original ambitions. The bill, which the government hopes will take effect at the end of this year, foresees legalizing possession of up to 25 grams (nearly 1 ounce) of cannabis for recreational purposes and allowing individuals to grow up to three plants on their own. German…

Vice President Kamala Harris marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act by touting the Biden administration’s commitment to mitigating the climate crisis. Natasha Mozgovaya reports from Seattle. ...

Researchers in heavily drilled Pennsylvania were preparing Tuesday to release findings from taxpayer-financed studies on possible links between the natural gas industry and pediatric cancer, asthma and poor birth outcomes. The four-year, $2.5 million project is wrapping up after the state's former governor, Democrat Tom Wolf, in 2019 agreed to commission it under pressure from the families of pediatric cancer patients who live amid the nation's most prolific natural gas reservoir in western Pennsylvania. A number of states have strengthened their laws around fracking and waste disposal over the past decade. However, researchers have repeatedly said that regulatory shortcomings leave an incomplete picture of the amount of toxic substances the industry emits into the air, injects into the ground or produces as waste. The Pennsylvania-funded study involves University of Pittsburgh…

A clinical trial in Australia is developing a treatment for sleep disturbances caused by wildfires. The study, which is supported by Natural Hazards Research Australia, a research organization, and Federation University Australia, is now seeking participants in Australia, the United States and Canada. The trial is aimed at people who have disturbed sleep, including nightmares, insomnia or symptoms of trauma after surviving a wildfire. Participants will be asked about their experiences with wildfires and asked to rate the severity of their sleep and trauma symptoms. Those who take part complete short assessments and provide feedback through online activities. The testing is at home using sleep-specific technology and apps that track sleep. Clinical psychologist Fadia Isaac is conducting the trial with other researchers at Federation University Australia, with funding from Natural…

New Zealand on Monday removed the last of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions, marking the end of a government response to the pandemic that was watched closely around the world.  Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the requirement to wear masks in hospitals and other health care facilities would end at midnight, as would a requirement for people who caught the virus to isolate themselves for seven days.  New Zealand was initially praised internationally for eliminating the virus entirely after imposing nationwide lockdowns and strict border controls.  But as the pandemic wore on and more infectious variants took hold, the nation's zero-tolerance approach became untenable. It eventually abandoned its elimination strategy.  Reflecting on the government's response to the virus over more than three years, Hipkins said that during the height of the…

For the team aboard the Okeanos Explorer off the coast of Alaska, exploring the mounds and craters of the sea floor along the Aleutian Islands is a chance to surface new knowledge about life in some of the world's deepest and most remote waters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel is on a five-month mission aboard a reconfigured former Navy vessel run by civilians and members of the NOAA Corps. The ship, with a 48-member crew, is outfitted with technology and tools to peer deep into the ocean to gather data to share with onshore researchers in real time. The hope is that this data will then be used to drive future research. "It's so exciting to go down there and see that it's actually teeming with life,"…

A Montana judge on Monday sided with young environmental activists who said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by permitting fossil fuel development without considering its effect on the climate. The ruling in the first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found the policy the state uses in evaluating requests for fossil fuel permits — which does not allow agencies to evaluate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions — is unconstitutional. Judge Seeley wrote in the ruling that "Montana's emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana's…

Patients who take blockbuster drugs like Wegovy or Ozempic for weight loss may face life-threatening complications if they need surgery or other procedures that require empty stomachs for anesthesia. This summer's guidance to halt the medication for up to a week may not go far enough, either.  Some anesthesiologists in the U.S. and Canada say they’ve seen growing numbers of patients on the weight-loss drugs who inhaled food and liquid into their lungs while sedated because their stomachs were still full — even after following standard instructions to stop eating for six to eight hours in advance.  The drugs can slow digestion so much that it puts patients at increased risk for the problem, called pulmonary aspiration, which can cause dangerous lung damage, infections and even death, said Dr. Ion…

For a vast number of book writers, artificial intelligence is a threat to their livelihood and the very idea of creativity. More than 10,000 of them endorsed an open letter from the Authors Guild this summer, urging AI companies not to use copyrighted work without permission or compensation. At the same time, AI is a story to tell, and no longer just science fiction. As present in the imagination as politics, the pandemic, or climate change, AI has become part of the narrative for a growing number of novelists and short story writers who only need to follow the news to imagine a world upended. “I'm frightened by artificial intelligence, but also fascinated by it. There's a hope for divine understanding, for the accumulation of all knowledge, but at the…

Postal worker Eugene Gates Jr. was delivering mail in the suffocating Dallas heat this summer when he collapsed in a homeowner's yard and was taken to a hospital, where he died. Carla Gates said she's sure heat was a factor in her 66-year-old husband's death, even though she's still waiting for the autopsy report. When Eugene Gates died on June 20, the temperature was 36.6 Celsius and the heat index, which also considers humidity, had soared over 43.3 Celsius. "I will believe this until the day I die, that it was heat-related," Carla Gates said. Even when it seems obvious that extreme heat was a factor, death certificates don't always reflect the role it played. Experts say a mishmash of ways more than 3,000 counties calculate heat deaths means we…

With field temperatures soaring above 150 degrees at times, 10-year-old baseball player Emmitt Anderson and his teammates from Alabama thought better of kneeling when they gathered near the mound for pregame prayers at a recent regional youth baseball tournament here. “It was too hot on our knees," Anderson said of the artificial surface. "We just stood up.” High heat proved considerably harder to handle than fastballs up in the strike zone at the DYB World Series this week. Temperatures reached 105 degrees, with the heat index peaking at 117. Some spectators and umpires required treatment for heat-related symptoms. A few passed out and were briefly hospitalized. “The heat was so extreme, I just knew it was a matter of time before something happened,” said Dr. Kelsey Steensland, an anesthesiologist from…

Scientists are wondering if global warming and El Nino have an accomplice in fueling this summer’s record-shattering heat. The European climate agency Copernicus reported that July was one-third of a degree Celsius (six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) hotter than the old record. That’s a bump in heat that is so recent and so big, especially in the oceans and even more so in the North Atlantic, that scientists are split on whether something else could be at work. Scientists agree that by far the biggest cause of the recent extreme warming is climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas that has triggered a long upward trend in temperatures. A natural El Nino, a temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, adds a…

The U.S. government said Friday it will spend up to $1.2 billion for two pioneering facilities to vacuum carbon out of the air, a historic gamble on a still developing technology to combat global warming that is criticized by some experts. The two projects — in Texas and Louisiana — each aim to eliminate 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, equivalent in total to the annual emissions of 445,000 gas-powered cars. It is "the world's largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history," the Energy Department said in a statement. "Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won't reverse the growing impacts of climate change," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in the statement. "We also need to remove the CO2 that we've already put in the atmosphere." Direct…

Monsoon season can exacerbate the outbreak as infected people overwhelm hospitals ...

About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. "There's something wrong. The number should not be going up," said Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman whose son shot himself to death last year. "My son should not have died," she said. "I know it's complicated, I really do. But we have to be able to do something. Something that we're not doing. Because whatever we're doing right now is not helping." Experts…