Month: January 2019

A group of more than 1,400 iguanas have been reintroduced to an Ecuadoran island in the Galapagos archipelago around two centuries after they disappeared from there, authorities said on Monday. The Galapagos land iguanas from North Seymour Island were freed onto Santiago Island as part of an ecological restoration program, the National Galapagos Park authority said in a statement. The last recorded sighting of iguanas in Santiago Island had been made by British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1835. “Almost two centuries later, this ecosystem will once again count on this species through the restoration initiative,” said the park authority. Its director, Jorge Carrion, said the iguanas became extinct due to the introduction of predators such as the feral pig, which was eradicated in 2001. The program is also aimed at protecting the population of iguanas on North Seymour, said to number around 5,000, where food is limited. “The land iguana is a herbivore that helps ecosystems by dispersing seeds and maintaining open spaces devoid of vegetation,” said Danny Rueda, the park authority’s ecosystems director. The Galapagos archipelago, some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the Ecuador coast, contains unique wildlife and vegetation, and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. But it has one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world. …

A group representing Indian scientists say they will screen speakers at their yearly meeting more carefully after several made outlandish claims during their lectures. “We have decided that all the people, even the top scientists who want to interact with anybody at the Science Congress, would be asked to submit their abstracts, not to deviate … and we will place one of our members there as a moderator,” Indian Science Congress general secretary Premendu Mathur said Monday. One speaker at the just-completed congress doubted the findings and achievements of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. Another insisted the people of ancient India had airplanes and missile technology, carried out stem-cell research, and created test tube babies. Scientists in several Indian cities held silent demonstrations and carried signs to protest the speeches and the damage that such claims can do. “This is very harmful for the growth of scientific temper because these ideas are being propagated through the Science Congress which gives it reproducibility,” retired professor Dhruba Mukhopadhyay said. …

High up in the Bolivian cloud forest, a woman tends to her bees, smoker in hand, working from hive to hive under a canopy of leaves to delicately gather panels of honeycomb. It’s a bucolic scene that experts say won’t last, for the bees are dying. The culprit — as in so many other cases across the world — is pesticide. The difference in Bolivia is that pesticide use, along with the coca plantations it is being used to protect, is on the rise. Environmentalists and beekeepers like Rene Villca say the bee population is being decimated by massive and intensive use of chemical pesticides to protect the region’s biggest cash crop. Here in the idyllic Nor Yungas region north of the cloud-high capital La Paz, the pesticides are taking a toll on Villca’s hives. “Of the 20 hives I have, 10 are producing normally and 10 are not.” On another part of the mountain where Nancy Carlo Estrada tends to her bees, a canopy of protective netting around her head, Exalto Mamami wades through a waist-high coca plantation, pumping out liquid pesticide from a canister on his back, face covered with a long cloth against harmful blowback from the spray. He is all too aware of the pesticide’s toxicity, but has other priorities. “We use pesticides because the pests eat through the coca leaves and this affects our income. The plants can dry out and that way we as coca farmers lose out economically,” said Mamani. The sale of …

Heavy rains that brought additional pollution downstream last year contributed to the first decline in a decade to the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay, according to a report released Monday. The bay’s health grade sank from a C-minus in 2016 to a D-plus in the 2018 State of the Bay, a biennial report issued by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The bay scored a 33 out of a possible 100 after scientists measured 13 indicators in three categories, including pollution, habitat and fisheries. The report cited record rains last year that brought large amounts of pollutants downstream, mostly from Pennsylvania, but also from other regions. “Simply put, the bay suffered a massive assault in 2018,” said Will Baker, the group’s president. “The bay’s sustained improvement was reversed in 2018, exposing just how fragile the recovery is.” Beth McGee, a senior scientist at the foundation, which has released the report on the bay’s health since 1998, also highlighted the effect of the rains, which washed enormous amounts of debris from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania south into Maryland waters and into the nation’s largest estuary. “While some indicators improved or stayed the same, scores for the bay’s two systemic pollutants — nitrogen and phosphorous — decreased substantially, reflecting increased loads caused by the high rainfall in 2018 and above average loads in 2017,” McGee said. “The score for water clarity also dropped — another casualty of the record rain.” Still, Baker highlighted good news as well. Bay grasses remain intact, …

Here’s a simple statistic: by 2030, the number of knee replacement surgeries in the U.S. alone is expected to rise over 600 percent. But researchers at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center are now offering an alternative that can relieve the pain and slow the osteoarthritis that most often leads to the need for knee replacement. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

A leap in technology has allowed scientists to take their DNA labs out into the fields, so farmers can identify diseases quickly and tackle the problem before their crops die, or the virus spreads to neighboring farms. Faith Lapidus reports. …

A trash collection device deployed to corral plastic litter floating in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii has broken apart and will be hauled back to dry land for repairs. Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told NBC News last week that the 600-meter (2,000-foot) long floating boom will be towed 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) to Hawaii. If it can’t be repaired there, it will be loaded on a barge and returned to its home port of Alameda, California. The boom broke apart under constant wind and waves in the Pacific. Slat said he’s disappointed, but not discouraged and pledged that operations would resume as soon as possible. “This is an entirely new category of machine that is out there in extremely challenging conditions,” the 24-year-old Dutch inventor said. “We always took into account that we might have to take it back and forth a few times. So it’s really not a significant departure from the original plan.” Previously Slat said the boom was moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to float away. A ship towed the U-shaped barrier in September from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas. It had been in place since the end of October. The plastic barrier with a tapered 3-meter-deep (10-foot-deep) screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing …

In 2016, researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal University began sounding alarms that the nation is about a decade away from running out of groundwater. The situation is still dire, but some entrepreneurs are creating new ways to save every drop. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

Health care officials in Sweden say a patient who was admitted to a hospital with a suspected case of Ebola was found not to be suffering from the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease after all.  The male patient, whose identity has not been revealed, had recently returned to Sweden from a trip to Burundi and was exhibiting symptoms of hemorrhagic fever.  He was originally admitted to the emergency ward of a hospital in Enkoping, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Stockholm, but was later transferred to the larger Uppsala University Hospital.  Ebola, other diseases ruled out Health officials said Friday that the man’s condition had improved and that tests had ruled out Ebola as well as other diseases such as Marburg and dengue fever. They said they would continue to run further tests to figure out what the man was suffering from. Health officials said people in contact with the patient who had been kept in isolation were now free to go home.  There is currently no known Ebola outbreak in Burundi, but the country borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been battling an Ebola outbreak for almost six months. More than 350 people have died in that outbreak. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever that causes internal bleeding and potentially death. It is rapidly spread via contact with the bodily fluids of those infected. …

Ebola control operations have been restored in Democratic Republic of Congo’s conflict-ridden North Kivu province, following pre-election protests late last year, the World Health Organization reports. Anti-government demonstrations preceding presidential elections on December 26 disrupted key Ebola response activities in some affected areas of the province, notably in Beni and Butembo. Crowds of people, angry at the government’s decision to bar the region from voting in the election, vandalized an Ebola transit center and other health facilities. The damage prevented health workers from going to communities at risk and providing services needed to control the spread of the deadly disease. But WHO says full operations have been restored in all locations as of Jan. 1. While the situation is now calm, WHO spokesman Tarek Jasarevic tells VOA that any interruption could lead to increased transmission of the virus. “There is a risk that all this work that is being put in place, and WHO has more than 380 people on the ground, alongside hundreds of people deployed by the Ministry of Health and other partners, that this effort may be put in danger if we are not able to go and put response activities in the community,” Jasarevic said.  The number of reported Ebola cases stands at 608, including 369 deaths. WHO says no new cases have been reported among health care workers in 2019, leaving the number affected at 54, including 18 deaths.   Jasarevic says it is yet to be seen whether the temporary disruption of Ebola activities prior …

A suspected case of the deadly Ebola virus has been reported by a Swedish hospital, officials said Friday, adding that the patient has been isolated. Region Uppsala, which oversees several hospitals and medical clinics north of Stockholm, says a test had been carried out on the patient, who was not identified, adding a result would be available late Friday. In its statement, Region Uppsala said it was so far “only a matter of suspicion,” adding “other diseases are quite possible.” It did not say where the patient had traveled, but Sweden’s TT news agency said the patient had returned from a trip to Burundi three weeks ago and had not visited any region with the Ebola virus. The authorities said the hospital in Enkoping where the patient was first admitted had its emergency room shut down and the staff who treated the patient were “cared for.” The patient was eventually transferred to an infection clinic in Uppsala. “The patient came in Friday morning and reportedly was vomiting blood which may be a symptom of Ebola infection,” hospital spokesman Mikael Kohler told local newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning. He was not immediately available for further comment. Eastern Congo currently faces an Ebola outbreak. All major outbreaks have been in Africa, though isolated cases have been reported outside the continent. The hemorrhagic fever’s virus is spread via contact with the bodily fluids of those infected. …