Month: April 2023

SpaceX’s giant week meets a fiery end. But company officials still say the launch of Starship was a success. Plus, the European Space Agency sets sail for Jupiter’s icy moons. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

The U.S. government and state legislators are ramping up efforts to limit the use of toxic chemicals known as PFAS (pronounced pee-fas) in everyday products and to regulate levels in drinking water. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias found out, scientists are going a step further by exploring ways to fully eliminate the so-called “forever chemicals.” …

SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites. The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii. Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!” The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys. It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve. At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape …

NY-AALESUND, NORWAY — At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing – and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future. But around the tiny town of Ny-Aalesund, high above the Arctic circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientific data is getting harder to access. And sometimes it’s vanishing before scientists can collect it. Scientists hoping to harvest ice cores are finding glaciers inundated by water. Research sites are getting harder to reach, as earlier springtime melt leaves the ground too barren for snowmobile travel. Researchers have been studying the polar region for decades — with Ny-Aalesund’s weather records going back more than 40 years. But their work has become vitally important as climate change ramps up. That’s because what happens in the Arctic can impact global sea levels, storms in North America and Europe, and other factors far beyond the frozen region. While the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, in Svalbard temperatures are climbing even faster — up to seven times the global average. Last summer was the hottest on record. August temperatures in Ny-Aalesund were on average 5.1C degrees, about 0.5C warmer than normal for the month. Polar bear sightings in Kongsfjord over the past four years have been higher than ever before, as the animals are left hungrier due partly to the loss of their sea ice hunting grounds and are more often prowling nearby islands in …

The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, warns many children are likely to die from vaccine preventable diseases because of a decline in routine immunization during the COVID-19 pandemic. New data in UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2023 report show a significant drop in confidence in the importance of vaccines for children in 52 out of 55 countries studied, noting that vaccination rates have declined by more than a third in South Korea, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, and Japan. Only in three countries — China, India, and Mexico — did the data show people remained positive about the health benefits of vaccination. In most countries, the study said, “people under 35 and women were more likely to report less confidence about vaccines for children after the start of the pandemic.” This is particularly worrisome as the report finds 67 million children, nearly half of them on the African continent, have missed out on one or more vaccinations due to disruptions in immunization services during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fear and disinformation Authors of the report warn the threat of vaccine hesitancy may be growing due to factors such as misleading information about vaccine safety, declining trust in expertise, and political polarization that are discouraging parents from vaccinating their children. “At the height of the pandemic, scientists rapidly developed vaccines that saved countless lives,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director. “But, despite this historic achievement, fear and disinformation about all types of vaccines circulated as widely as the …

By day, Jessica Wade spends her time in a laboratory at Imperial College London surrounded by spectrometers, oscilloscopes — and men. At night, she writes biographies on Wikipedia about women researchers like her who don’t have an online presence. “We can’t just do the shouting about how we need more women in science. We have to do the point of honoring and celebrating the women scientists that we have,” she told AFP. “And I think writing their stories, making sure the world recognizes what they’ve done is a really important way to do that.” Wade, 34, has worked at Imperial’s imposing campus in west London since 2016. As a physicist, she is involved in developing new generations of carbon-based semi-conductors to make optical and electronic devices such as televisions and solar panels more energy efficient. She leads a team of five people in a wider team of about 15. Of them, only one other scientist is a woman. Science “is very male dominated,” Wade said, lamenting the lack of interest in it among girls whose parents are not scientists. “As soon as I walked into a physics department that had a majority of men and a majority of people from white privileged backgrounds, I suddenly realized that not everyone’s getting the opportunity to study physics, not everyone’s getting excited about it,” she added. “That lack of diversity impacts the science we do, the questions we ask, the directions we go in, the way we translate our innovations into society, where …

At least 67 million children partially or fully missed routine vaccines globally between 2019 and 2021 because of lockdowns and health care disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations said Wednesday. “More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have been eroded,” read a new report from the U.N.’s children’s agency, UNICEF, adding that getting back on track “will be challenging.” Of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million missed routine vaccines entirely, UNICEF said, flagging concerns about potential polio and measles outbreaks. Vaccine coverage among children declined in 112 countries and the percent of children vaccinated worldwide slipped 5 percentage points to 81%, a low not seen since 2008. Africa and South Asia were particularly hard-hit. “Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated,” the report said. Vaccines save 4.4 million lives each year, a number the United Nations says could jump to 5.8 million by 2030 if its ambitious targets to leave “no one behind” are met. “Vaccines have played a really important role in allowing more children to live healthy, long lives,” Brian Keeley, the report’s editor in chief, told AFP. “Any decline at all in vaccination rates is worrying.” Before the introduction of a vaccine in 1963, measles killed about 2.6 million people each year, mostly children. By 2021, that number had fallen to 128,000. But between 2019 and 2021, the percentage …

Older Americans and people with weak immune systems can get an extra COVID-19 booster dose this spring. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday signed off on a more flexible booster schedule for people who remain at the highest risk from COVID-19 — giving them the choice of a second “bivalent” Pfizer or Moderna booster, the most up-to-date formula. “Many in the population are experiencing vaccine fatigue but there is a subset who are eager to receive additional doses,” CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver told an agency advisory panel that expressed support for the change. The move came a day after the Food and Drug Administration took steps to make coronavirus vaccinations simpler for everyone. From now on, anyone getting a Pfizer or Moderna dose — whether it’s a booster or their first-ever vaccination — will get an updated version rather than the outdated original shots. Here are some things to know: Who needs a booster? Anyone who’s gotten their original vaccinations but hasn’t had an updated booster yet can still get one. Only 42% of Americans 65 and older — and just 20% of all adults — have gotten one of those updated boosters since September. Who can get a second updated booster? People 65 or older who already had one Pfizer or Moderna updated booster can roll up their sleeves again, as long as it’s been at least four months since that last shot. The schedule is a little different for people with weak immune systems. Most …

The Supreme Court is deciding whether women will face restrictions in getting a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, while a lawsuit continues. The justices are expected to issue an order on Wednesday in a fast-moving case from Texas in which abortion opponents are seeking to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone. The drug first won FDA approval in 2000, and conditions on its use have been loosened in recent years, including making it available by mail in states that allow access. The Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the maker of the drug, want the nation’s highest court to reject limits on mifepristone’s use imposed by lower courts, at least as long as the legal case makes it way through the courts. They say women who want the drug and providers who dispense it will face chaos if limits on the drug take effect. Depending on what the justices decide, that could include requiring women to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary. Alliance Defending Freedom, representing anti-abortion doctors and medical groups in a challenge to the drug, is defending the rulings in calling on the Supreme Court to let the restrictions take effect now. The legal fight over abortion comes less than a year after conservative justices reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright. Even as the abortion landscape changed …

A group of American plastic surgeons has been working in  Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, helping  wounded soldiers and civilians recover from war injuries. Omelyan Oshchudlyak has the story. Camera: Yuriy Dankevych     …

Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, announced a provisional approval of the R21 vaccine during a media briefing on Monday. The regulatory agency’s consent came days after Ghana approved the vaccine. NAFDAC said the vaccine is 70 to 80 percent efficient in preventing the mosquito-borne disease and could protect millions of children. The agency’s director general, Mojisola Adeyeye, spoke to journalists in Abuja. “The vaccine is indicated for prevention of clinical malaria on children from five months to 36 months of age,” Adeyeye said. NAFDAC did not say when the vaccine will be rolled out, but Adeyeye said Nigeria will conduct in-country clinical trials and pharmacovigilance study. The WHO says some 600,000 people die of malaria every year, most of them in Africa, many of them young children. Nigeria accounts for the highest numbers of cases and deaths from malaria globally. Health experts say the vaccine could be a game changer. Kunle Olobayo is a lead researcher at the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development. “A proactive, preemptive intervention will definitely be most useful especially in countries like Nigeria,” said Olobayo. “Many interventions and steps that have been taken to reduce transmission have not been very successful because of our level of development, poverty. So, it will definitely change the dynamics. The WHO has yet to approve the vaccine. The WHO Nigeria malaria program head, Lynda Ozor, said authorities are still reviewing the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. “The WHO is reviewing the R21 data, and …

Virtual medicine, or medical extended reality, uses virtual reality headsets and imaging software to supplement conventional medical treatments. Practitioners from around the world shared best practices at a recent conference in Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports. …

Mozambique has asked the World Health Organization to supply an additional 2 million doses of a cholera vaccine as the country struggles to control a spreading outbreak.  The head of the Department of National Health Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Domingos Guihole, told VOA that the government awaits the WHO’s response to the cholera vaccine request, admitting difficulties due to the high global demand for vaccines. “At this moment in Mozambique, the cholera situation is not good,” Guihole said. “It is not good because we have 10 provinces affected by cholera. We have 53 districts in the whole country, 45 of which have active cholera disease.” The official said the intent is to vaccinate the population in high-risk areas, such as the northern province of Nampula and Zambezia in the central part of the country. Both provinces were hit hard by Cyclone Freddy, which tore across Mozambique twice inside two weeks last month. All five provinces impacted by Freddy on its first and second passes have witnessed cholera outbreaks. In addition to the risk of cholera, the government is concerned about a potential increase in cases of other waterborne diseases such as dysentery. Malaria is a concern, too; both are among the leading causes of mortality in Mozambique. “During almost seven months from October to April 16, we have notified 27,000 cases of cholera with 124 deaths, so the situation is not good,” said Guihole. “We have to say to all Mozambicans that we must follow the recommendations from the …

Nearly 300 Tyrannosaurus rex bones that were dug up from three sites in the United States and assembled into a single skeleton sold at Tuesday at a Switzerland auction for 4.8 million francs ($5.3 million), below the expected price. Crafted into an open-mouth pose, the T. rex skeleton measuring 11.6 meters long (38 feet long) and 3.9 meters high (12.8 feet) high came in under the anticipated range of 5 million to 8 million francs when it went under the hammer at the Koller auction house in Zurich. Koller had said Tuesday’s sale would be the first time such a T. rex skeleton would go up for auction in Europe. The composite skeleton was a showpiece of an auction that featured some 70 lots, and the skull was set up next to the auctioneer’s podium throughout. “It could be that it was a composite — that could be why the purists didn’t go for it,” Karl Green, the auction house’s marketing director, said by phone. “It’s a fair price for the dino. I hope it’s going to be shown somewhere in public.” Green did not immediately identify the buyer. Including the “buyer’s premium” and fees, the sale came to 5.5 million Swiss francs (about $6.1 million), Koller said. Promoters said the composite T. rex, dubbed “Trinity,” was built from specimens retrieved from three sites in the Hell Creek and Lance Creek formations of Montana and Wyoming between 2008 and 2013. Koller said “original bone material” comprised more than half of …

Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google. He criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.” He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously. “I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday. He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.” “It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said. Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm listed Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary. ‘Civilizational destruction’ The move came even after Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing …

Scientists found coastal species of shellfish and anemones living and breeding on floating islands of garbage in the Pacific thousands of miles from home, a study revealed Monday.  Environmentalists have for years been eyeing what they call the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” — masses of plastic rubbish combining bottles, fishing nets and much more. U.S. researchers who sampled rubbish from the northeastern Pacific between California and Hawaii said they found 37 kinds of invertebrates that originated from coastal areas, mostly from countries such as Japan on the other side of the ocean. “The high seas are colonized by a diverse array of coastal species, which survive and reproduce in the open ocean,” they wrote in the study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. “Coastal species persist now in the open ocean as a substantial component of a neopelagic [new, sea-dwelling] community sustained by the vast and expanding sea of plastic debris,” the study said. More than two-thirds of the items examined had coastal species on them, including crustaceans, sea anemones and moss-like creatures called bryozoans. Scientists had not often tracked creatures surviving dispersal across entire oceans. The researchers noted that in one rare event in 2012, debris from the previous year’s tsunami in Japan washed ashore in North America bearing living species. Creatures can spread quickly by feeding on the layers of slime formed on floating plastics by bacteria and algae, the study said. Scientists must now investigate how these coastal colonists will fit into the ocean food chain. “We …

Kenya is using the launch of its first operational observation satellite to promote space education and science through space clubs in schools. Kenya launched an operational 3U nanosatellite April 15 aboard the SpaceX Falcon Force base in the U.S. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo …

Two years ago, Paul’s teacher noticed that the 10-year-old boy could no longer see anything on the board at the front of the class. An ophthalmologist confirmed that Paul was one of the soaring number of children worldwide with myopia, also known as nearsightedness, an eye condition projected to affect half of the world’s population by 2050. But the ophthalmologist in the western French city of Nantes had some good news: specially designed glasses had just become available that could slow down the progression of Paul’s myopia. “After a year, the results were quite positive because his eyesight seemed to have stabilized,” Paul’s mother Caroline Boudet told AFP. Previous research has suggested that myopia progresses 60% slower in children wearing the “Miyosmart” glasses compared to normal prescription glasses. A six-year clinical study also found that the disorder did not start speeding up again if the children stopped using the glasses. Developed by Japan’s Hoya Corporation, the Miyosmart lenses, which also function as normal glasses to help the children see clearly, have been available in numerous European countries including France and the U.K. for around two years. Eyewear firm EssilorLuxottica claims its own Stellest lenses reduce myopia’s progression by 67% when worn at least 12 hours a day. The Italian French firm said the glasses could save more than one dioptre — the unit of measurement for optical power — over three years. Myopia occurs when there is too much distance between the cornea and retina, making far-off objects appear blurry. …

Nigeria has granted provisional approval to Oxford University’s R21 malaria vaccine, its medicines regulator said Monday, making it the second country to do so after Ghana last week.  The approvals are unusual as they have come before the publication of final-stage trial data for the vaccine.  “A provisional approval of the R21 Malaria Vaccine was recommended, and this shall be done in line with the WHO’s Malaria Vaccine Implementation Guideline,” Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said.  Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, kills more than 600,000 people each year, most of them African babies and children.  Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, is the world’s worst-affected country with 27% of global cases and 32% of global deaths, according to a 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) report.  It was unclear when the R21 vaccine may be rolled out in Nigeria or Ghana as other regulatory bodies, including the WHO, are still assessing its safety and effectiveness.  Childhood vaccines in the poorest parts of Africa are typically co-funded by international organizations such as Gavi, the vaccine alliance, only after getting WHO approval.  “While granting the approval, the Agency has also communicated the need for expansion of the clinical trial conducted to include a phase 4 clinical trial/Pharmacovigilance study to be carried out in Nigeria,” NAFDAC’s director-general, Mojisola Christianah Adeyeye, said in a statement.  Mid-stage data from the R21 trial involving more than 400 young children were published in September, showing vaccine efficacy of 70% to 80% at 12 …

Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Monday called off a highly anticipated launch of its powerful new Starship rocket, delaying the first uncrewed test flight of the vehicle into space. The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, originally was scheduled for blast-off from the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica, Texas, during a two-hour launch window that began at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). But the California-based space company announced in a live webcast during the final minutes of the countdown that it was scrubbing the flight attempt for at least 48 hours, citing a pressurization issue in the lower-stage rocket booster. Musk, the company’s billionaire founder and chief executive, told a private Twitter audience on Sunday night that the mission stood a better chance of being scrubbed than proceeding to launch on Monday. Getting the vehicle to space for the first time would represent a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars – at least initially as part of NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis. A successful debut flight would also instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth. Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster rocket and the upper-stage Starship cruise vessel it will carry to space are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to Earth for soft landings – a maneuver that has become routine for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket. But neither stage would …