Month: February 2022

A billionaire who led an all-private space crew into orbit last year has announced plans for up to three new missions in conjunction with SpaceX, including one with a spacewalk. Jared Isaacman, who founded payment processing company Shift4, will lead the first of the new flights with a launch potentially coming by the end of this year.  In addition to a mission featuring the first spacewalk attempted by non-professional astronauts, the planned flight also includes achieving a record altitude in Earth orbit. As part of the partnership with SpaceX, the flights are set to utilize SpaceX spacecrafts. Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.  …

As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study. Researchers used analysis of DNA from seized elephant tusks and evidence such as phone records, license plates, financial records and shipping documents to map trafficking operations across the continent and better understand who was behind the crimes. The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. “When you have the genetic analysis and other data, you can finally begin to understand the illicit supply chain — that’s absolutely key to countering these networks,” said Louise Shelley, who researches illegal trade at George Mason University and was not involved in the research. Conservation biologist Samuel Wasser, a study co-author, hopes the findings will help law enforcement officials target the leaders of these networks instead of low-level poachers who are easily replaced by criminal organizations. “If you can stop the trade where the ivory is being consolidated and exported out of the country, those are really the key players,” said Wasser, who co-directs the Center for Environmental Forensic Science at the University of Washington. Africa’s elephant population is fast dwindling. From around 5 million elephants a century ago to 1.3 million in 1979, the total number of elephants in Africa is now estimated to be around 415,000. A 1989 ban on international commercial ivory trade hasn’t stopped the decline. Each year, an estimated 1.1 million pounds (500 metric tons) of poached elephant tusks are …

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has begun a two-week meeting to consider a report that assesses the impact of the world’s changing climate and how humans might adapt. Hundreds of scientists meeting virtually will lay out the latest evidence on how past and future changes to the Earth’s climate system are affecting the planet. The report under review is the second of three installments that will comprise the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, which will be released later this year. In August, the scientific body approved the first contribution of Working Group I, which dealt with the physical science basis of climate change. The second part, currently under review, highlights the role of social justice and diverse forms of knowledge, such as indigenous and local knowledge, might play to strengthen climate change action and reduce the risks. The chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee, said the report focuses on solutions and productive areas for action. “It will be more strongly integrated, the natural, social and economic sciences. And it will provide policymakers with sound data and knowledge to help them shape policies and make decisions. The need for the Working Group II report has never been greater because the stakes have never been higher,” he said. The United Nations-backed IPCC was established in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments regarding climate change. The panel previously issued five assessment reports that spotlighted climate change as an issue of growing global importance. The Paris Agreement on climate …

A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday began its review of Japan’s plan to begin releasing more than a million tons of treated radioactive water into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant — a review that Japan hopes will instill confidence in the plan. The 15-member team is to visit the Fukushima plant on Tuesday and meet with government and utility officials during its five-day mission. The government and Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings announced plans last year to begin gradually releasing the still-contaminated water in spring 2023 after its further treatment and dilution. The water is being stored in about 1,000 tanks at the damaged plant which officials say need to be removed so the reactors can be decommissioned. The tanks are expected to reach their capacity of 1.37 million tons later this year. The release of the water into the sea has been fiercely opposed by fishermen, local residents and Japan’s neighbors, including China and South Korea. Fukushima residents worry the reputation of their agricultural and fishing products will be further damaged. Japan sought IAEA’s assistance to ensure the release meets international safety standards. Gustavo Caruso, director of the IAEA’s Office of Safety and Security Coordination, said on Monday that the mission “in an objective, credible and science-based manner will help send messages of transparency and confidence for the people in Japan and beyond.” The team will review details of the water, safety of the discharge, sampling methods and the environmental impact, he said. …

A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world’s crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organization that made a withdrawal from the facility. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks’ exposure to the outside world. On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples. ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 2017 and 2019 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco. “The fact that the seed collection destroyed in Syria during the civil war has been systematically rebuilt shows that the vault functions as an insurance for current and future food supply and for local food security,” said Norwegian International Development Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim. The vault, which holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally, also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties. The world used to cultivate more than …

The World Health Organization warns a sharp rise in measles cases in Afghanistan is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of malnourished children.  More than 35,300 suspected cases of measles and 156 deaths have been reported in Afghanistan from January 2021 through January of this year.  What is setting off alarm bells ringing is the sharp, rapid rise in cases last month. The World Health Organization reports a 40% increase in the number of measles cases in the last week of January.  Although the number of deaths is relatively low, the WHO warns many children are likely to die from the disease in the coming weeks. WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier says measles-related deaths are not always reported in Afghanistan, so the toll is likely to be much higher than the figures suggest. “The rise in measles cases is especially concerning because of the extremely high levels of malnutrition in Afghanistan,” Lindmeier said. “Malnutrition weakens immunity, making people more vulnerable to illness and death from diseases like measles—especially children.  In addition, measles infections can cause immune system suppression and immunologic amnesia, which increases susceptibility to all pathogens.”    The World Food Program says Afghanistan is facing the worst food crisis on record.  It says 1 in 3 people are going hungry and some 2 million children are malnourished.  The WFP warns 14 million children are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of hunger, noting that malnutrition rates already are soaring. Measles is an extremely contagious viral disease. Lindmeier says unvaccinated …

At the Tokyo Olympics, mental health was the breakout star. Amplified by some of the world’s top athletes, it shook up those Games and made everyone take notice. Six months later, in Beijing, the conversation has evolved: The subject pops up regularly, but no one is shocked when it does. Many athletes have spoken about their struggles, but often in a no-biggie, nothing-to-see-here way. A difficulty is mentioned, then the conversation moves on. After star gymnast Simone Biles pulled out of competition in Tokyo because she wasn’t in the right headspace, retired Olympic swimming phenom Michael Phelps memorably said that “It’s OK to not be OK.” And now, thanks in part to people like Biles, it seems it’s OK to talk about it, too. “I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned after the last Olympics is being as open as possible,” snowboarding sensation Chloe Kim told reporters after she took the gold medal Thursday in the halfpipe competition. It was Kim’s second Olympic gold. She initially threw that first one, earned in Pyeongchang four years ago, in the trash — a story that epitomizes the dissonance between the cheery face many champions show the world and the torments they face behind the scenes. “After my last Olympics, I put that pressure on myself to be perfect at all times, and that would cause a lot of issues at home. I would be really sad and depressed all the time when I was home,” Kim told reporters after easily securing the …

NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and taken a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.   All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly 1½ months into the mission, officials said Friday.   The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.   “That was just a real wow moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.   Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — each the size of a coffee table — will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.  The $10 billion infrared observatory — considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope — will seek light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. It will also examine the atmospheres of alien worlds for any possible signs of life.  NASA did not detect the crippling flaw in Hubble’s mirror until after its 1990 launch; more than three years passed before spacewalking astronauts were able to correct the telescope’s blurry vision.   While everything is looking good so far with Webb, engineers should be able to rule out any major mirror flaws by next month, said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager.   Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter), gold-plated mirror is the largest ever launched into space. An infrared camera on the telescope snapped …

The COVID-19 infection rate for Africa may be as much as seven times higher than reported, while death counts could be two to three times higher, according to the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa. “We’re very much aware that our surveillance systems problems that we had on the continent, with access to testing supplies, for example,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said Thursday, “have led to an underestimation of the cases.” Public health officials have warned for some time that Africa’s COVID infection and death tolls were likely undercounted. India’s health ministry reported 58,077 new COVID cases on Friday. Like Africa, public health officials have also cautioned that India’s COVID figures are probably under-calculated, as well. As many as 3,000 New York City municipal workers are facing termination Friday if they do not adhere to the city’s mandate requiring city workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Workers have staged protests, but Mayor Eric Adams has remained firm in upholding the policy imposed by his predecessor Bill de Blasio. “We are not firing them. People are quitting,” Adams said recently. Firefighters and police could be among those terminated. Meanwhile, officials in Paris and Brussels have warned that they will not allow convoys, to enter the cities to stage anti-vaccine protests, similar to the one in Ottawa, Canada. Part of the French convoy is already en route to the capital for the weekend rally.  The Belgian protest is planned for Feb. 14. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday it has …

Trucker-led protests against coronavirus restrictions in Canada shut down another U.S. border crossing Thursday, as copycat movements gathered steam overseas and Washington called on its northern neighbor to use federal powers to end the blockades. The border obstructions have already impacted business, with the key Ambassador Bridge linking Ontario and Detroit out of service for several days — and major automakers forced to cut back production at several plants as a result. A second crossing in the western province of Alberta has been blocked for days, and on Thursday protesters closed down a third — in central Manitoba. Citing supply shortages, Ford said it was forced to slow down production at factories in Canada, while some Stellantis factories in the United States and Canada halted work Wednesday evening, General Motors canceled several shifts, and Toyota said its plants were also hit. In the Canadian capital, police said Thursday they were bringing in reinforcements, issuing more arrests and tickets, and stepping up truck towing operations in a bid to break the impasse that has paralyzed the city. But protesters were hunkering down and taking pride in how their two-week protest has mushroomed into an international movement. “You know it’s really bad if Canadians are coming out full force,” said protester Naomi Gilman, noting how her fellow citizens had largely remained quiet “for two long years” of COVID-19 restrictions. “So I think that resonates around the world for sure,” she told AFP. France, New Zealand, US Addressing reporters outside the House of …

Facing growing pressure from impatient state governors, the Biden administration acknowledged for the first time that it is developing plans to guide the country away from the pandemic’s emergency phase toward a more relaxed national response, including ending the federal recommendation for wearing masks in most indoor settings. “We are internally discussing, of course, what it looks like to be in the phase of the fight against the COVID pandemic where it is not disrupting everyone’s daily lives,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday. “We recognize people are tired of the pandemic. They’re tired of wearing masks.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends “universal indoor masking,” including in businesses and schools, “regardless of vaccination status and regardless of what states require.” While some states follow the CDC guidance, pandemic health protocols have always varied by state with different requirements for masks, vaccines and testing. Now more states are relaxing coronavirus health protocols, including New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Rhode Island and Washington. The rule changes, implemented by both Republican and Democratic governors, include lifting indoor mask requirements in certain settings, such as schools and businesses, as well as rescinding vaccine mandates. Psaki insisted that while administration officials understand the need to be flexible, they are following the advice of medical experts who rely on scientific evidence. “That doesn’t move at the speed of politics; it moves at the speed of data,” she said. The CDC said it is working on …

French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said.  Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area’s city hall said. No other details were released.  Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi. The French minister for higher education and research, Frédérique Vidal, praised Montagnier’s work on HIV in a written statement Thursday and expressed her condolences to his family. Inspired by discoveries Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France. According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology. He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972. “My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new, mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography. In 1983, a working group led by him and Barré-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Thursday issued a draft of revised guidelines for prescribing opioid painkillers, urging doctors to be flexible and individualize their use of the drugs to the needs of the patient.   The CDC’s current guidelines were issued in 2016, largely in response to the over-prescribing of opioids in the United States from 2007 to 2012. The agency reports in 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for the highly addictive painkillers, enough for every person in the country to have their own bottle. The result was one of the worst drug-abuse epidemics in the U.S., with addiction and deaths related to the drugs skyrocketing. The CDC reports that from 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 people in the United States died from overdoses related to opioid pain medication.   But CDC officials said that while 2016 guidelines helped end the over-prescribing of the drugs, they also may have pushed doctors too far in the other direction.   Co-author of the new guidelines, acting director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Christopher Jones, said some doctors were too quick to cut off patients taking prescription painkillers and too strict in keeping the drugs from patients who might benefit. The 229-page draft of the updated guidelines removes some of the suggested limits the original guidelines placed on administering opioids and proposes individualized patient care. It also offers more options for treating the kind of short-term, acute pain that follows surgeries or injuries. …

NASA captures a first-ever photo op from our solar system. Starlink suffers a storm-caused setback, and a dusty piece of space history gets the spa treatment. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

France will build at least six new nuclear reactors in the decades to come, President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday, placing nuclear power at the heart of his country’s drive for carbon neutrality by 2050. Macron said the new plants would be built and operated by state-controlled energy provider EDF and that tens of billions of euros in public financing would be mobilized to finance the projects and safeguard EDF’s finances. “What our country needs, and the conditions are there, is the rebirth of France’s nuclear industry,” Macron said, unveiling his new nuclear strategy in the eastern industrial town of Belfort. Promising to accelerate the development of solar and offshore wind power in France, Macron also announced he wanted to extend the lifespan of older nuclear plants to 50 years or more from 40 years currently, provided it was safe. The announcement comes at a difficult time for debt-laden EDF, which is facing delays and budget over-runs on new nuclear plants in France and Britain, and corrosion problems in some of its aging reactors. The nuclear blueprint cements France’s commitment to nuclear power, a mainstay of the country’s postwar industrial prowess but whose future was uncertain after Macron and his predecessor had promised to reduce its weight in the country’s energy mix. Macron’s thinking has been reshaped by the European Union’s ambitious goals for carbon neutrality within three decades, which put renewed focus on energy forms that emit fewer, or zero, greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, including nuclear. Surging energy …

A new study says 1 in 10 Australian health care workers has had thoughts of suicide or self-harm during the pandemic. The authors of the Australian Frontline Health Workers survey believe it is the world’s largest study of suicidal thoughts among health care workers. It canvassed the opinions of 8,000 staff, in a range of positions and professions, including support staff, cleaners, doctors and nurses. The survey finds 10% of respondents have had thoughts of self-harm or suicide during the pandemic, but fewer than half had sought help from a mental health professional. Even before the emergence of COVID-19, Australian health workers had higher rates of suicide than those in other occupations. The study’s authors said that emotional exhaustion and burnout were common among many respondents. What is unclear is the impact stress, which could cause more medical errors, has had on the quality of patient care. Georgina Lonergan, a nuclear medicine technologist in Victoria state, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that her job was extremely stressful. “There is an undercurrent of anxiety, I think, for everyone working in health care,” she said. “I have definitely had an undercurrent of anxiety increasing over the last couple of years. Some days you just really do not want to come. There has been a couple of days where I have been close to tears on the way in just from anxiety and just being tired of it all.” The survey was published Wednesday in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. …

The COVID pandemic exposed stark vaccine inequities between high- and low-income nations and underscored Africa’s dependence on outside countries for jabs. However, a new initiative in Senegal hopes to reduce that inequity Annika Hammerschlag reports from Dakar, Senegal. Camera: Annika Hammerschlag …