Category: News

The world's worst air this week is not in pollution hot spots like India or China. It's in the western United States, where record-breaking wildfires are blanketing the region with smoke.Portland, Oregon, has topped the air pollution charts for major cities this week at monitoring…

Pregnant women living in bushfire-prone areas in Australia are being urged to protect themselves and their unborn babies from smoke as the fire season returns. Doctors in the worst-affected regions say they are horrified by the effects of the smoke from last summer's catastrophic conditions.Doctors…

Nearly half of Americans, or 49%, said they definitely or probably would not get an inoculation if a coronavirus were available today, while 51% said they would, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this month.The 49% who lean toward rejecting the inoculation…

Researchers on a quest to find life in the universe got promising news this week.  Space agencies are joining forces to defend the planet from an aggressive asteroid, and a look at one of the best places on Earth to view the stars.  VOA’s Arash…

The British auction house Christie's announced this week that it would sell the largest and most complete known skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in early October.The auction house said the dinosaur skeleton is nearly 12 meters long and just under 5 meters tall. It has…

Experts from the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say the sun is in the first year of a new cycle of activity, and they are watching it closely in an effort to guard against solar storms that could cause problems on Earth.Officials…

As if the COVID-19 pandemic isn't bad enough, flu season is about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere, adding millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths to the already-strained American health care system."We really, really want to emphasize…

Scientists say they have found what may be the oldest specimen of fossilized sperm ever discovered, inside a tiny crustacean trapped in a piece of amber 100 million years ago.The researchers say the discovery in amber from Myanmar's Kachin province, described in a paper published…

The U.N. Secretary-General warned Wednesday the coronavirus pandemic is “out of control,” and he called for global solidarity in making a future vaccine affordable and available to all. “The virus is the No. 1 global security threat in our world today,” Antonio Guterres told reporters.…

Fires burning in California are the largest on record. In Washington state, a larger area burned in five days than have burned in any previous year on record save one. And in Oregon, one-tenth of the state's population was under fire evacuation warnings or orders…

Heavy rain and pounding surf driven by Hurricane Sally hit the Florida and Alabama coasts Tuesday as forecasters expected the slow-moving storm to dump continuous deluges before and after landfall, possibly triggering dangerous, historic flooding along the northern Gulf Coast. "It's going to be a huge…

Scientists at a Russian university have announced the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved ice age cave bear, with much of its soft tissue including its nose, flesh and teeth intact.In a statement, scientists from North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk say reindeer herders on Great Lyakhovsky…

The U.S. National Hurricane Center says slow-moving Hurricane Sally, the latest storm to threaten the U.S. Gulf Coast, remains offshore but is already bringing high winds, rain and surf to the coastline.    In the latest report, forecasters say Sally was about 110 kilometers east…

Marine experts are planning to rescue humpback whales that have been recorded for the first time in crocodile-infested waters in the Kakadu national park in tropical northern Australia. It is thought the giant sea mammals took a wrong turn during one of nature’s most epic…

Hurricane Sally, one of five storms lined up as if on a conveyor belt across the Atlantic, churned toward the Louisiana-Mississippi coast Monday with rapidly strengthening winds of at least 145 kph (90 mph) and the potential for as much as 60 centimeters (23.5 inches)…

At opposite ends of the country, President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden presented vastly different views Monday about the cause of the historic, destructive wildfires in the Western United States, which have killed at least 35 people.In California, the president — brushing aside concerns about…

An international team of astronomers Monday announced the discovery of a rare gas molecule — phosphine — in the clouds of Venus, which may be the first solid evidence of extraterrestrial life in the solar system.  The researchers say on Earth, phosphine is only made…