Month: October 2023

Japan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a law requiring transgender people to undergo sterilization surgery in order to officially change their gender is unconstitutional. The decision by the top court’s 15-judge Grand Bench was its first on the constitutionality of Japan’s 2003 law requiring the removal of sex organs for a state-recognized gender change, a practice long criticized by international rights and medical groups. The decision, which requires the government to reconsider the law, is a first step toward allowing transgender people to change their identity in official documents without getting sterilized. But it was not a full victory because the Supreme Court sent the case back to the high court to further examine the requirement for gender-affirmation surgery. The case was filed in 2020 by a claimant whose request for a gender change in her family registry — to female from assigned male at birth — was turned down by lower courts. The decision comes at a time of heightened awareness of issues surrounding LGBTQ+ people in Japan and is a partial victory for that community. The judges unanimously ruled that the part of the law requiring sterilization for a gender change is unconstitutional, according to the court document and the claimant’s lawyers. But the top court ordered the case to be sent back to the high court for further review of the requirement for gender-affirmation surgery — a decision the claimant’s lawyers said was regrettable because it delays the settlement of the issue. Under the law, transgender …

The UK Space Agency and a U.S. spaceflight services company have signed an initial agreement as they bid to send British astronauts into orbit for two weeks, the agency said Wednesday. The memorandum of understanding with Houston-based Axiom Space sets out plans for a flight that would see British astronauts conduct a two-week mission in space. “On this future flight, the UK astronauts would launch to space, spending up to two weeks on orbit to carry out scientific research, demonstrate new technologies, and participate in education and outreach activities,” the agency said. Axiom was founded by its chief executive Michael Suffredini, who served as NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) program manager from 2005 to 2015. It has sent two crewed missions into orbit with SpaceX rockets in April 2022 and in May this year. The first mission carried an astronaut and three “investors” with the crew spending 17 days in orbit. The second mission carried a crew of four and lasted 10 days. Axiom says it is working on what will become the first-ever commercial space station. The mission with the UK would be commercially sponsored and supported by the European Space Agency. It would build on the UK government’s space strategy which identifies five technologies as critical: artificial intelligence, engineering biology, telecommunications, semiconductors and quantum technologies. “With this agreement as the initial foundation, we will build a comprehensive mission plan in support of the UK’s national and agency objectives to advance its capabilities in space exploration and discovery,” Suffredini …

Bird flu has been detected in the Antarctica region for the first time, according to British experts, raising concerns the deadly virus could pose a threat to penguins and other local species. Scientists had been fearing that the worst outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in history would reach Antarctica, a key breeding ground for many birds. The British Antarctic Survey said its staff took samples from brown skua seabirds after they died on Bird Island in South Georgia, a British overseas territory east of South America’s tip and north of Antarctica’s main landmass. The tests were sent to Britain and came back positive, the U.K.’s polar research institute said in a statement on Monday. The virus was most likely brought by birds returning from their migration to South America, where there has been a huge number of bird flu cases, it added. Visitors to South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are under enhanced biosecurity measures, and scientific field work involving birds there has been stopped, the statement said. There have been regular bird flu outbreaks since the virus first emerged in 1996. Since mid-2021, much larger outbreaks started to spread southward to previously untouched areas including South America, leading to mass deaths among wild birds and tens of millions of poultry being culled. ‘Devastating news’ Michelle Wille, a bird flu expert at the University of Melbourne, said the spread of bird flu to the Antarctica region was “devastating news.” “The situation could change rapidly,” she wrote on …

Artificial intelligence companies and governments should allocate at least one third of their AI research and development funding to ensuring the safety and ethical use of the systems, top AI researchers said in a paper on Tuesday.  The paper, issued a week before the international AI Safety Summit in London, lists measures that governments and companies should take to address AI risks.  “Governments should also mandate that companies are legally liable for harms from their frontier AI systems that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented,” according to the paper written by three Turing Award winners, a Nobel laureate, and more than a dozen top AI academics.  Currently there are no broad-based regulations focusing on AI safety, and the first set of legislation by the European Union is yet to become law as lawmakers are yet to agree on several issues. “Recent state of the art AI models are too powerful, and too significant, to let them develop without democratic oversight,” said Yoshua Bengio, one of the three people known as the godfather of AI. “It [investments in AI safety] needs to happen fast, because AI is progressing much faster than the precautions taken,” he said. Authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Daniel Kahneman, Dawn Song and Yuval Noah Harari. Since the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI models, top academics and prominent CEOs such as Elon Musk have warned about the risks on AI, including calling for a six-month pause in developing powerful AI systems. Some companies have countered this, saying …

The World Health Organization reported Monday that progress was being made in efforts to prevent and respond to cases of sexual misconduct but acknowledged that abuse by WHO staff remained problematic.       “For the past two years, WHO has intensified our work to prevent and respond to any form of sexual misconduct, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, said Gaya Gamhewage, director of prevention and response to sexual misconduct at WHO. “However, the numbers are still going up for the simple reason, I believe, that all the cases have not surfaced yet. So, the numbers will keep going up for some time. But this does not mean that what we are doing is not having any effect. In fact, what we are doing is surfacing this issue, as well,” she said. The numbers would seem to bear this out. Over the past 12 months, the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services, or IOS, reports it has investigated 287 allegations of sexual misconduct in all WHO regions. Gamhewage said, “WHO is working on preventing and responding to sexual misconduct related to its own workforce—our staff, our contractors, our implementing partners.  This does not include numbers for peacekeepers.” Approximately 83 of these cases are related to the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 25% of that number pertaining to alleged abuse by WHO personnel.   According to a WHO press release, the remaining allegations were related to other agencies operating during the outbreak. The WHO received investigation …

The world is moving too slowly to meet pledges to end deforestation by 2030, with the destruction worsening in 2022, according to a report by a coalition of environmental organizations released on Monday. More than 140 countries – representing the vast majority of the world’s woodlands – pledged at the 2021 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by the end of the decade. Yet deforestation increased by 4% worldwide in 2022 compared with 2021, as some 66,000 square kilometers (25,000 square miles) were destroyed, the annual Forest Declaration Assessment report said. That means the world is 21% off track to end deforestation by 2030. “The world’s forests are in crisis. The opportunity to make progress is passing us by,” said Erin Matson, a senior consultant at environmental group Climate Focus. The report was conducted by a coalition of civil society and research organizations who assess progress toward pledges to eliminate deforestation by 2030. That includes the Glasgow pledge and the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, which saw a shorter list of countries as well as dozens of the world’s biggest companies make a similar commitment. Efforts to preserve old-growth tropical forests — prized for their dense carbon content and rich biodiversity — are 33% off track, with 4.1 million hectares lost in 2022, according to the study. In a news briefing, the researchers involved in the report stressed that the annual $2.2 billion in public funds channeled to projects to protect …

Nigeria is ramping up its environmental education efforts as floods and soil erosion increase due to climate change. The latest education initiative is a card game called Play, Learn and Act Now, or PLAN. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria. …

The coming election to choose the World Health Organization’s next chief of the South-East Asia Regional Office, or SEARO, has become contentious as the person who takes up that post could influence the health of billions of people.  The daughter of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is one of two candidates for the SEARO position. Saima Wazed’s nomination has sparked controversy with many health experts calling it “nepotism,” and expressing concern over the election process to fill senior roles at the U.N. health body.  A candidate for the SEARO post should have a “strong technical and public health background and extensive experience in global health”, according to the WHO website. The candidate should also have “competency in organizational management” and “proven historical evidence for public health leadership”, the website says. The next SEARO chief will be elected through a secret ballot by the region’s 11 member countries, which include Bangladesh, Nepal and India. The vote is scheduled to take place in New Delhi during a WHO regional committee meeting Oct. 30-Nov. 2.  Countries in the region nominate candidates to head the WHO regional office. Wazed was nominated by the government of Bangladesh.  In addition to Wazed, who is a mental health advocate, only one other candidate has been put forward: Shambhu Acharya, a public health expert and senior WHO official who was nominated by Nepal.  Questions have been raised about the disparity between the candidates’ qualifications.   Wazed has a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Barry University, a school …

Countries are deadlocked over how to design a fund to help countries recover and rebuild from climate change-driven damage, with just over 30 days left before crucial United Nations climate negotiations kick off in Dubai.   Two dozen countries involved in a committee tasked with designing a “loss and damage” fund wrapped up the last meeting in the early hours of Saturday in Aswan, Egypt, with developing and developed countries at odds over central questions: which entity should oversee the fund, who should pay and which countries would be eligible to receive funding.   The committee was expected to draft a list of recommendations for implementing the fund, which was agreed in a breakthrough last year at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and would be the first U.N. fund dedicated to addressing irreparable climate-driven damage from drought, floods and rising sea levels.   Instead, the group agreed to meet one more time in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 3 before the COP28 U.N. summit begins in Dubai on Nov. 30 to try to bridge divisions, which could set the tone for the two-week climate negotiations.   “The entire COP28 negotiations could get derailed if developing countries’ priorities on funding for loss and damage are not adequately addressed,” said Preety Bhandari, a senior adviser on finance at the World Resources Institute.   Among the most contentious issues last week was whether the World Bank should host the fund – a position pushed by the U.S. and developed countries – or whether the …

Three nurses care for a 10-year-old girl at a clinic treating dozens of patients in Kano, northern Nigeria, amid the country’s worst diphtheria outbreak which has killed hundreds of people since the start of the year. The girl lays inside a glass cubicle with a severe case of the contagious disease. “We have to admit her to the intensive care unit,” Usman Hassan, a medic in charge of the clinic at Kano’s largest hospital told AFP, his face covered by a mask. Nigeria is battling to contain the outbreak, which has killed around 800 people and infected 14,000. It has spread to almost half of the country’s 36 states, with Kano accounting for the bulk of cases and deaths. The clinic at Murtala Muhammad Specialist Hospital is one of two health facilities run by the French medical charity MSF in Kano, the epicentre of the epidemic. “As of Thursday, Kano has reported 10,700 diphtheria cases with more than 500 fatalities,” Hashim Juma Omar, a doctor overseeing MSF diphtheria intervention in Kano, told AFP. Entry to the 90-bed clinic is strictly controlled to prevent the spread of the infection. “We are currently seeing more than 700 people with suspected diphtheria and admitting more than 280 patients on a weekly basis in the two diphtheria treatment centres,” said Omar. Nigeria’s Center for Disease Control declared an outbreak of diphtheria in January after cases began to surface in May last year. It “has already surpassed the worst outbreak which had 5,039 cases in …

A California research team is conducting a five-year ecological study of six songbird species in northwestern New Mexico oil fields to see how sensory intrusions affect the birds’ survival, reproduction and general health. The Santa Fe New Mexican says the study by avian researchers from California Polytechnic State University will zero in on the specific impacts of noise and light pollution. As the human population swells and generates more light and sound, researchers are curious about how those multiplying stressors might compound the challenges of climate change in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the newspaper reported. Clint Francis, an ecology professor at California Polytechnic, said early studies that examined whether excessive noise and light decreased bird populations were done in more urban settings, where the birds were threatened by prowling cats, toxic chemicals and speeding cars. The next step is to isolate either noise or light in a rural area to see how one or the other affects the songbirds, Francis said. He did such research in this same northwestern New Mexico region in 2005. This time the aim is to observe how the two together affect the birds in a locale where the conditions can be clearly measured in tandem. “We try to hold everything constant but vary noise and light pollution to try to understand whether there is, perhaps, surprising cumulative effects when you have both of those stimuli together,” Francis told the New Mexican. The research will focus on six types of songbirds: ash-throated flycatchers, gray flycatchers, …

Researchers in the United States have shown for the first time they can safely and effectively infect human volunteers with Zika virus, a step toward learning more about the disease and developing vaccines and treatments.   The study – known as a “controlled human infection model” – has previously been controversial for Zika because of the risks to participants and lack of treatments.  But U.S. regulators and the World Health Organization ruled the new model, developed by a team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was safe and scientifically important.   Zika is a viral infection spread by mosquitoes, which is usually mild or asymptomatic.  But a major outbreak in the Americas in 2015 and 2016 showed it can be dangerous for pregnant women and fetuses, causing devastating birth defects such as microcephaly, a disorder in which a child is born with an abnormally small head and brain.   There are no vaccines or treatments, and the outbreak in the Americas ended before new ones could be fully tested. Infections have dwindled worldwide since, with about 40,000 reported last year from that region.  But the WHO has warned that surveillance can be patchy, and transmission patterns for Zika are not well understood. Climate change is also likely to boost the spread, which is already established in 91 countries.  Anna Durbin, the Johns Hopkins professor who led the study, said developing countermeasures was essential because infections could re-surge.  Also significant, she added, was the mental health burden on …

The World Health Organization warns that tens of thousands of survivors of a series of powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquakes that struck western Afghanistan’s Herat province between October 7 and 15 are in desperate need of humanitarian aid and essential health services. “I have personally seen how these multiple earthquakes flattened villages, displaced thousands of people and left many families in urgent need of humanitarian and health assistance,” said Alaa AbouZeid, health emergencies team lead for WHO Afghanistan. Speaking in Kabul on Friday, AbouZeid said, “Over 114,000 people are in urgent need of lifesaving health assistance. … The health consequences are staggering.” Those most seriously affected by the disaster, he said, are women, girls, boys and the elderly, “who account for over 90% of the deaths and injuries. Many children are left orphaned.” The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reports that the earthquakes directly affected more than 66,000 people — about 1,500 killed, some 2,000 injured, at least 3,700 homes destroyed and another 21,300 buildings damaged. “I have talked to people affected by earthquakes, and the sense of loss is heartbreaking,” said Luo Dapeng, WHO representative in Afghanistan. “Many people spent days digging under the rubble to search for members who either died or got injured.” According to an initial assessment by the WHO, at least 40 health facilities across nine districts were damaged, resulting in severe disruptions of health services for an estimated 580,000 people. AbouZeid said health providers were afraid to go into those buildings, …

India successfully carried out Saturday the first of a series of key test flights after overcoming a technical glitch ahead of its planned mission to take astronauts into space by 2025, the space agency said. The test involved launching a module to outer space and bringing it back to earth to test the spacecraft’s crew escape system, said the Indian Space Research Organization chief S. Somanath, and was being recovered after its touchdown in the Bay of Bengal. The launch was delayed by 45 minutes in the morning because of weather conditions. The attempt was again deferred by more than an hour because of an issue with the engine, and the ground computer put the module’s liftoff on hold, said Somanath. The glitch caused by a monitoring anomaly in the system was rectified and the test was carried out successfully 75 minutes later from the Sriharikota satellite launching station in southern India, Somanath told reporters. It would pave the way for other unmanned missions, including sending a robot into space next year. In September, India successfully launched its first space mission to study the sun, less than two weeks after a successful uncrewed landing near the south pole region of the moon. After a failed attempt to land on the moon in 2019, India in September joined the United States, the Soviet Union and China as only the fourth country to achieve the milestone. The successful mission showcased India’s rising standing as a technology and space powerhouse and dovetails with …

Astronomers have detected an intense flash of radio waves coming from what looks like a merger of galaxies dating to about 8 billion years ago — the oldest-known instance of a phenomenon called a fast radio burst that continues to defy explanation.  This burst in less than a millisecond unleashed the amount of energy our sun emits in three decades, researchers said. It was detected using the Australian SKA Pathfinder, a radio telescope in the state of Western Australia. Its location was pinpointed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, one of the most powerful optical telescopes.  A fast radio burst, or FRB, is a pulse of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation. It lasts a small fraction of a second but outshines most other sources of radio waves in the universe. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.  “The radio waves in FRBs are similar to those used in microwave ovens. The amount of energy in this FRB is the equivalent to microwaving a bowl of popcorn twice the size of the sun,” said astronomer Ryan Shannon of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, co-leader of the study published this week in the journal Science.  Until now, the oldest known such burst dated to 5 billion years ago, making this one 3 billion years older. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. For comparison, Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In seeing objects and events from long ago, astronomers peer across vast cosmic distances, …

It’s been a month since a Maryland man became the second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig — and hospital video released Friday shows he’s working hard to recover. Lawrence Faucette was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine offered the highly experimental surgery. In the first glimpse of Faucette provided since the September 20 transplant, hospital video shows physical therapist Chris Wells urging him to smile while pushing through a pedaling exercise to regain his strength.  “That’s going to be tough, but I’ll work it out,” Faucette, 58, replied, breathing heavily but giving a smile.  The Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another dying man. David Bennett survived just two months before that heart failed, for reasons that aren’t completely clear, although signs of a pig virus later were found inside the organ. Lessons from that first experiment led to changes before this second try, including better virus testing.  Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants — called xenotransplants — have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.  In Friday’s hospital video, Faucette’s doctors said the pig heart has shown no sign of rejection.  “His heart is doing everything on its own,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, the …

With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic, a study said Thursday. Last month Hurricane Lee went from barely a hurricane at 129 kph to the most powerful Category 5 hurricane with 249 kph winds in 24 hours. In 2017, before it devastated Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria went from a Category 1 storm with 145 kph to a top-of-the-chart whopper with 257 kph winds in just 15 hours. The study looked at 830 Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1971. It found that in the last 20 years, 8.1% of the time storms powered from a Category 1 minor storm to a major hurricane in just 24 hours. That happened only 3.2% of the time from 1971-90, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. Category 1 hurricanes top out at 153 kph and a hurricane has to have at least 178 kph winds to become major. Those are the most extreme cases, but the fact that the rate of such turbocharging has more than doubled is disturbing, said study author Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in New Jersey. When storms rapidly intensify, especially as they near land, it makes it difficult for people in the storm’s path to decide on what they should do — evacuate or hunker down. It also makes it harder for meteorologists to predict how bad it will be and for emergency managers …

Burkina Faso’s health ministry has declared a dengue fever epidemic amid the deadliest outbreak in years. More than 200 people have died, and new cases are rising sharply. There have been 50,478 suspected cases and 214 deaths of the mosquito-borne illness this year, the ministry said in a statement released on Wednesday, mostly in the urban centers of the capital, Ouagadougou, and Bobo Dioulasso. It said about 20% of the cases and deaths were recorded last week alone. Dengue kills an estimated 20,000 people worldwide each year. Rates of the disease have risen eightfold since 2000, driven largely by climate change, the increased movement of people and urbanization. The World Health Organization this month warned that the disease would become a major threat in new parts of Africa as warmer temperatures create conditions for the mosquitoes carrying the infection to spread. Dengue is spread by infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, muscle pain, nausea and rashes. Lack of treatment or misdiagnosis, common in poverty-stricken countries such as Burkina Faso where health care is spotty, increase the chance of death. Burkina Faso’s outbreak dwarfs other African outbreaks in recent years. According to figures from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dengue killed 18 people in Burkina Faso in 2017 and 15 in 2016. The health ministry said that it was providing free rapid diagnostic tests and had organized spraying of insecticide in public places to counter the spread. …