Year: 2022

Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Friday that April 2022 tied April 2010 as the fifth warmest April on record.  In a release, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said the average global temps in April were 0.85 of a degree Celsius above the 20th century average of 13.7 C.  NOAA said the global temperature for the year through April 2022 was 0.87 of a degree C above average, making it the fifth warmest such year through April on record.  They report Asia recorded its warmest April ever this year, with temperatures running 2.62 degrees above average. The agency says unusually high temperatures in India and Pakistan during the month contributed to the region’s record heat.  The agency’s Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook reports there is a virtual certainty — greater than 99% — that 2022 will rank among the 10 warmest years on record.  NOAA reports that the 10 warmest Aprils globally have all occurred since 2010, with 2014-2022 all ranking among the 10 warmest Aprils on record.    …

Plans are underway in Malawi to start administering the cholera vaccine in some southern districts, as the number of cholera cases has been rising since an outbreak began in January. According to a daily update released Thursday by the Ministry of Health, Malawi has registered more than 200 cases, with seven deaths and 26 hospital admissions.  The update says the outbreak that started in Nsanje district in January has spread to four other areas in southern Malawi: Neno, Chikwawa, Machinga and Blantyre.  Records show that as of Thursday, Nsanje had 97 registered cases, Blantyre had 53, Neno had 38, Chikwawa had 12 and Machinga had two.  Wongani Mbale, deputy spokesperson for the district health office in Blantyre, blames the outbreak on poor sanitation.  “According to what we have gathered, it seems that a lot of people are using unprotected wells, which are a source of infections,” Mbale said. “The water is contaminated. So as a district, we think that the cause is the use of contaminated water.”  Cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingesting food or water contaminated with bacteria. The disease affects both children and adults and, if untreated, can kill within hours.  To contain the outbreak, Malawi’s government has announced plans to start administering the cholera vaccine this month in all affected districts.  Health Ministry spokesperson Adrian Chikumbe told a local newspaper that the government has 2.9 million doses of vaccine to be administered orally starting May 23.  Mbale of the Blantyre health office said his …

Top U.S. meatpacking companies drafted the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2020 to keep meat plants running and convinced his administration to encourage workers to stay on the job at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released Thursday by a U.S. House panel. The report by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis details the meat industry’s influence on Trump’s White House as it tried to keep production rolling even as employees fell ill. More than 59,000 meatpacking workers at plants owned by the nation’s top five meatpackers contracted COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic and at least 269 died, according to the first report by the panel, released in October. “The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated,” committee chair Representative James Clyburn said. The North American Meat Institute, the leading meat industry trade group, said the report “distorts the truth” and “uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.” The report, based on thousands of documents and interviews with workers, union officials and experts, found that in April 2020, meatpacking companies led by Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods drafted an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to keep meat plants open. The DPA, which …

Over the past three decades Ara Mirzaian has fitted braces for everyone from Paralympians to children with scoliosis. But Msituni was a patient like none other — a newborn giraffe. The calf was born Feb. 1 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, north of San Diego, with a front leg bending the wrong way. Safari park staff feared she could die if they didn’t immediately correct the condition, which could prevent her from nursing and walking around the habitat. But they had no experience with fitting a baby giraffe in a brace. That proved especially challenging given she was a 178-centimeter-tall newborn and growing taller every day. So, they reached out to experts in orthotics at the Hanger Clinic, where Mirzaian landed his very first animal patient. “It was pretty surreal when I first heard about it,” Mirzaian told The Associated Press this week during a tour to meet Msituni, who was strutting alongside the other giraffes with no troubles. “Of course, all I did was go online and study giraffes for like 24/7 until we got out here.” Zoos increasingly are turning to medical professionals who treat people to find solutions for ailing animals. The collaboration has been especially helpful in the field of prosthetics and orthotics. Earlier this year, ZooTampa in Florida teamed up with similar experts to successfully replace the beak of a cancer-stricken great hornbill bird with a 3D-printed prosthetic. The Hanger team in California had fit orthotics for a cyclist and kayaker …

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered a nationwide lockdown Thursday to try to contain a highly transmissible variant of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which was confirmed in the country this week for the first time. The official Korean Central News Agency said genetic sequencing analysis of samples collected from a group of people on Sunday in Pyongyang had identified the BA.2 strain, also known as the “stealth omicron” for its relative difficulty of detection. At least one person confirmed to have COVID-19 has died, KCNA said Friday, and around 350,000 people have shown signs of a fever that has “explosively spread nationwide” since late April. About 162,200 of them have been treated so far, but it did not specify how many had tested positive for COVID-19. North Korea has maintained a strict border closure since February 2020 and instituted its own quarantine measures amid the pandemic, which have now officially been breached. BA.2 became the world’s dominant strain in March, the World Health Organization said. It was also responsible for driving up infections in South Korea to highs unseen before. In late April, North Korea closed its rail line into China’s border city of Dandong after it registered a spike in COVID-19 cases. The detection of omicron and Pyongyang’s public admission of it came as North Korea remains one of the last remaining countries yet to run a vaccination program for its 26 million people. And given that its medical system still significantly lags behind those of its Asian …

An image once thought impossible becomes reality. Plus, the International Space Station has four fewer passengers. And you might have heard of the company that was trying to catch a rocket from the sky. It did it. Sort of. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Rare and threatened species were among the plants and animals tracked by citizen scientists from around the world in this year’s City Nature Challenge in Los Angeles.  The findings from 47 countries were unveiled this week, including a new orchid species in Bolivia and the endangered Przewalski’s Horse in war-torn Ukraine. VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan has details. …

The world got a look Thursday at the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Previous efforts had found the black hole in the center of our galaxy too jumpy to get a good picture. The University of Arizona’s Feryal Ozel called the black hole “the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy” while announcing the new image. The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A(asterisk), near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun. This is not the first black hole image. The same group released the first one in 2019 and it was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away. The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles). The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation. …

The Supreme Court’s nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states. The meeting in the justices’ private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes. Thursday’s conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak. Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court’s marshal to undertake an investigation. Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court’s final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices’ initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions. That’s true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973. Kennedy met …

North Korea officially confirmed its first COVID-19 outbreak Thursday, with state media reporting a sub-variant of the highly transmissible omicron virus, known as BA.2, had been detected in Pyongyang. “There has been the biggest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, that has been kept safely over the past two years and three months since February 2020,” the state media said. The report said people in Pyongyang contracted the omicron variant, without providing details on case numbers or possible sources of infection. The report was published as the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un chaired a Workers’ Party meeting to discuss responses to the first outbreak of the coronavirus.  …

Democratic party lawmakers in the U.S. failed Wednesday to pass a measure essentially codifying the right to an abortion. The vote comes after revelations the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the landmark ruling that legalized abortion. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports. …

The U.S. set another record for drug overdose deaths last year with more than 107,000 fatalities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Wednesday.  The provisional 2021 total represents a 15% jump from the previous record in 2020, and means there is roughly one overdose death in the country every 5 minutes. While drugs like opioid painkillers, other opioids and heroin cause many deaths, fentanyl is the leading killer, causing 71,000 deaths last year, which was a 23% jump from the year before. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the latest numbers “truly staggering.” Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have been rising for more than two decades. “It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock,” said Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.  “That is why [U.S.] President [Joe] Biden’s new National Drug Control Strategy signals a new era of drug policy centered on individuals and communities, focusing specifically on the actions we must take right now to reduce overdoses and save lives,” he said. “Those actions include expanding access to high impact harm reduction tools like naloxone, quickly connecting more people to treatment, disrupting and dismantling drug trafficking operations, and improving data to systems that drive the Nation’s drug policy.” One reason fentanyl is responsible for so many deaths is that it is cheap and often mixed into other drugs without the buyer’s knowledge. “The …

Researchers say DNA can replace hard drives to help store the world’s ever-increasing digital output. Matt Dibble has the story …

For the fourth time in seven years, the authority that administers one of Australia’s greatest natural treasures has reported widespread bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. This occurs when the sea is too warm for too long. It forces the coral to expel microscopic symbiotic algae that gives it most of its energy and color. Reefs can recover from bleaching, but it can take years. If water temperatures don’t return to normal, the coral can die. Large parts of the reef were killed off by mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017. Officials say it’s happening again. They are hoping it won’t be as destructive as previous years, but serious threats remain. David Wachenfeld, who is the chief scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said reefs all over the world are under pressure. “Often the Great Barrier Reef is used as a poster child for the impacts of climate change on coral reefs,” he said. “And I completely understand that, but climate change is a global problem. It needs a global solution, and it is all of the world’s coral reefs that are under threat.” The United Nations is assessing the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as localized threats, including pollution and over-fishing. In Canberra, the government has insisted it’s the “best-managed reef in the world” and that multi-million-dollar programs are boosting its resilience. Conservationists argue, however, that Australia needs far more ambitious plans to curb its carbon emissions. The Australian Marine …

A new study led by the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. and the University of Southampton, along with experts in Australia and New Zealand, found that industrialized shipping could be killing large numbers of whale sharks. Marine biologists have said that whale shark numbers have been falling in recent years, but it has not been clear why. But a new international study suggests that collisions with shipping traffic could be a major factor. Researchers examined satellite data to track about 350 whale sharks. They found that the world’s largest fish spend most of their time in waters used by freighters and other larger vessels. The study showed that transmissions from the tags that monitor their movements often ended in busy shipping lanes. The international team, including experts from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, believe many sharks are probably being hit and killed by boats before sinking to the ocean floor. Mark Erdmann is from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a scientist at Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization. He co-authored the study, and believes shipping is a major threat to whale shark populations, which are a protected species. “If we are protecting them from fisheries, why are their populations still declining? And one thought is the fact that these are big oceanic plankti vores that move relatively slowly, feeding on the surface, spend 50% of their time in, kind of, top 10-20 meters of the water. So, it is possible that they are actually running into …

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with a nearly 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.  With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.  The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40%, and a decade ago it was only 10%.  The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for the hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going.  “We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.  These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long-term …

Democrats are moving forward this week on a Senate vote on a bill that would codify abortion rights into federal law, in the wake of a leaked draft from the Supreme Court that signals a possible end to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. As Arash Arabasadi reports, the legislation is expected to be blocked by Senate Republicans. …

The U.S. Supreme Court may overturn federal protections for abortions, according to a leaked draft of an opinion expected in the next few months. That would leave the legal status of abortions up to individual states. For VOA, Deana Mitchell reports from Texas, where women are not permitted to have abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy. …