Year: 2023

Thousands of people marched the streets of Ghana’s capital last week to raise awareness of breast cancer. Event organizers aimed to dispel myths about breast cancer in Africa and encourage early detection for a cure. Senanu Tord reports from Accra. (Camera: Senanu Tord and Samuel Mintah) …

Packaging producers in Kenya have begun a campaign to collect each day 1,500 tonnes of empty beverage cartons and turn them into new products. Officials say the cartons account for 30 percent of the liquid packaging board produced in Kenya. Victoria Amunga reports from Thika, Kenya. Camera and edit: Jimmy Makhulo …

NASA on Wednesday showed off its first asteroid samples delivered last month by a spacecraft — the most ever returned to Earth. Scientists and space agency leaders took part in the reveal at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The ancient black dust and chunks are from the carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu, almost 60 million miles away. NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft collected the samples three years ago and then dropped them off sealed in a capsule during a flyby of Earth last month. Scientists anticipated at least a cupful of rocks, far more than what Japan brought back from a pair of missions years ago. They’re still not sure about the exact quantity. That’s because the main sample chamber has yet to be opened, officials said. “It’s been going slow and meticulous,” said the mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona. Black dust and particles were scattered around the outside edge of the chamber, according to Lauretta. “Already this is scientific treasure,” he said. Besides carbon, the asteroid rubble holds water in the form of water-bearing clay minerals, said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. …

In developing countries such as Nigeria, caregivers and parents of children with cerebral palsy struggle to support the children and deal with the stigma of the disorder. Gibson Emeka visits a mother in Abuja who has left everything to care for her son. Narrated by Salem Solomon. …

Tens of millions in the Americas will have front-row seats for Saturday’s rare “ring of fire” eclipse of the sun.  What’s called an annular solar eclipse — better known as a ring of fire — will briefly dim the skies over parts of the western U.S. and Central and South America.  As the moon lines up precisely between Earth and the sun, it will blot out all but the sun’s outer rim. A bright, blazing border will appear around the moon for as much as five minutes, wowing sky gazers along a narrow path stretching from Oregon to Brazil.  The celestial showstopper will yield a partial eclipse across the rest of the Western Hemisphere.  It’s a prelude to the total solar eclipse that will sweep across Mexico, the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada in six months. Unlike Saturday, when the moon is too far from Earth to completely cover the sun from our perspective, the moon will be at the perfect distance on April 8, 2024.  Here’s what you need to know about the ring of fire eclipse, where you can see it and how to protect your eyes:  What’s the path of the ‘ring of fire’ eclipse?  The eclipse will carve out a swath about 210 kilometers wide, starting in the North Pacific and entering the U.S. over Oregon around 8 a.m. PDT Saturday. It will culminate in the ring of fire a little over an hour later. From Oregon, the eclipse will head downward across Nevada, …

October 14 is World Migratory Bird Day in the Southern Hemisphere. To better forecast bird migration, scientists are using machine learning and next-generation radar. The resulting “BirdCasts” offer new ways to help birds at risk. Shelley Schlender reports from the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado. …

Utah on Tuesday became the latest U.S. state to sue TikTok, alleging the company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits. TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit. “We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City. Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits, while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the U.S. Constitution. Public health concerns are cited in the Utah lawsuit. Research has shown that children who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of poor mental health, including anxiety and depression, the lawsuit alleges. “TikTok designed and employs algorithm features that spoon-feed kids endless, highly curated content from which our children struggle to disengage. TikTok designed these features to mimic a cruel slot machine that hooks kids’ attention and does not let them go,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said at the news conference. The lawsuit seeks to force TikTok to change its “destructive behavior” while imposing fines and penalties to fund education …

In many African societies, elders are highly regarded as powerful figures who keep the culture alive and guide the young. But sometimes that power doesn’t help when it comes to obtaining health care. Juma Majanga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. (Camera and produced by: Jimmy Makhulo) …

Vodafone underlined its commitment to Open RAN networks on Monday by confirming it would create purpose-built chipset architecture for the nascent technology with Intel INTC.O. The European operator also said it had made its first 4G calls using Open RAN over network sites shared with Orange ORAN.PA in Romania, and it was partnering with Nokia NOKIA.HE to pilot the technology in Italy. Open RAN allows mobile operators to mix and match equipment from various suppliers, potentially increasing flexibility. Progress has been slow, however, and the market remains dominated by proprietary solutions from Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei, although the latter has been hit by government restrictions in countries including Britain. Vodafone agreed in 2022 to work with U.S. chipmaker Intel on the potential to design its own chip architecture. The company’s director of network architecture Santiago Tenorio confirmed the partners would jointly create chipsets at its campus in Malaga, Spain. The chipsets will be available to smaller third-party vendors to test their own algorithms without a large financial outlay in silicon, Tenorio said at the FYUZ industry event in Madrid. He said the ability to produce silicon designs in testing sample quantities would significantly speed up the time to deliver innovation. “Combining Vodafone’s networking expertise with Intel’s strength in silicon architecture design will enable rapid prototyping, verification and testing, eventually leading to a faster mass production of the chips the industry needs to accelerate,” he said. Vodafone and Orange said on Monday they had successfully made 4G calls over a cluster …

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will give $40 million, including to a Belgian biotech company and two leading African vaccine manufacturers, in a bid to boost access to mRNA vaccines for protection against various diseases in Africa.    Nivelles-based Quantoom Biosciences will get $20 million to advance work on its mRNA manufacturing platform, while the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal and Biovac in South Africa will get $5 million each to buy the technology. A further $10 million is available for other vaccine manufacturers who want to use the platform.    Vaccines made using mRNA revolutionized the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but access was drastically inequitable. A number of initiatives have since been set up to tackle this and try to use the new technology for existing threats that disproportionately affect lower-income countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis.    The World Health Organization launched its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town in April this year. One member, Afrigen Biologics, has already made Africa’s first-ever mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in the lab.    But mRNA vaccines remain expensive to produce, particularly at the scale needed to test and roll out safe and effective vaccines.    Quantoom’s platform, called Ntensify, allows batches of mRNA to be produced more cheaply and efficiently at scale, a Gates Foundation spokeswoman told Reuters ahead of an announcement at its 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar on Monday.    “[This] is an important and necessary step towards vaccine self-reliance in the region,” said Dr Amadou Sall, chief …

Athletes from 20 countries took the field in Malaysia for the fourth World Deaf Football Championships. Ukraine is the men’s champion, and the United States won the women’s crown. As Dave Grunebaum reports, the athletes are succeeding on and off the field. …

In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors. That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media. “My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas. Many LGBTQ+ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere. As lawmakers in some states limit what can be taught about sex and gender, it will be that much more difficult for those students to come by inclusive material in classrooms. New laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ+ content from classrooms. Sex education curriculum varies widely. Some groups including Planned Parenthood have called for sex education to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ students, but some states outright forbid such an approach. The penal code in Texas, for one, still says curriculum developed by the Department of State Health Services must say homosexuality is not acceptable and is a criminal …

A dose of patience may come in handy at the pharmacy counter this fall. Drug and staffing shortages haven’t gone away. Stores are starting their busiest time of year as customers look for help with colds and the flu. And this fall, pharmacists are dealing with a new vaccine and the start of insurance coverage for COVID-19 shots. Some drugstores have addressed their challenges by adding employees at busy hours. But experts say many pharmacies, particularly the big chains, still don’t have enough workers behind the counter. Chris Adkins said he left his job as a pharmacist with a major drugstore chain a couple years ago because of the stress. Aside from filling and checking prescriptions, Adkins routinely answered the phone, ran the register and stocked pharmacy shelves. “I just didn’t have time for the patients,” he said. “I am OK working hard and working long hours, but I just felt like I was not doing a good job as a pharmacist.” In recent years, drugstores have struggled to fill open pharmacist and pharmacy technician positions, even as many have raised pay and dangled signing bonuses. Larger drugstore chains often operate stores with only one pharmacist on duty per shift, said Richard Dang, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California. That kind of thin staffing can make it hard to recruit employees. “I think that many pharmacists in the profession are hesitant to work for a company where they don’t feel supported,” said Dang, a …

A massive number of migrating birds collided with McCormick Place — a Chicago convention center — this week, resulting in an unprecedented number of bird deaths. Dave Willard has collected dead and injured birds from around the center during the migration season for about 40 years. In an interview with the Audubon website, Willard said that he and his colleagues collected 964 dead birds and approximately 80 “stunned live ones.” “It was truly unprecedented,” he said of Thursday’s event. Hundreds more dead and injured birds were subsequently found around the city. Before this week’s catastrophe, the largest number of dead birds he had collected was 200. “Unfortunate weather” combined with “disorienting brightly lit buildings” confused the birds, resulting in the high death and injury numbers. “You pick up a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and realize, if it hadn’t been for a building in Chicago, it would be spending its winter in the foothills of the Andes,” Willard said. “It’s just a shame that a city can’t be less of an obstacle.” …

Spanish company PLD Space launched its reusable Miura-1 rocket early on Saturday from a site in southwestern Spain, carrying out Europe’s first fully private rocket launch and offering hope for the continent’s stalled space ambitions. The startup’s test nighttime launch from Huelva came after two previous attempts were scrubbed. The Miura-1 rocket, named after a breed of fighting bulls, is as tall as a three-story building and has a 100-kilogram cargo capacity. The launch carries a payload for test purposes, but this will not be released, the company said. Mission control video showed engineers cheering as the rocket gained altitude against the dark nighttime sky, shouting for joy and congratulating one another. A first attempt to launch the Miura-1 rocket in May was abandoned due to strong high-altitude winds. A second attempt in June failed when umbilical cables in the avionics bay did not all release in time, halting the lift off as smoke and flames spewed out from the rocket. Airspace, areas of the sea and roads were closed around the high-security launch site ahead of the launch. Europe’s efforts to develop capabilities to send small satellites into space are in focus after a failed orbital rocket launch by Virgin Orbit from Britain in January. That system involved releasing the launcher from a converted Boeing 747. Competitors lining up to join the race to launch small payloads include companies in Scotland, Sweden and Germany. Saturday’s mission on the Miura-1 demonstrator was the first of two scheduled suborbital missions. However, …

Indian rescuers are searching for over 100 people missing in a flash flood caused by a glacial lake bursting its banks, a risk scientists warn is increasing with climate change. Agence France-Presse explains what glacial lake outburst floods are and the risks they pose, particularly in parts of Asia. What is a glacial lake outburst flood? A glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, is the sudden release of water that has collected in former glacier beds. These lakes are formed by the retreat of glaciers, a naturally occurring phenomenon that has been turbocharged by the warmer temperatures of human-caused climate change. Glacier melt is often channeled into rivers, but ice or the build-up of debris can form what is effectively a natural dam, behind which a glacial lake builds. If these natural dams are breached, large quantities of water can be released suddenly from the lakes, causing devastating flooding. What causes these breaches? The natural dams holding back glacial lakes can be breached for a variety of reasons, explained Lauren Vargo, a glacier expert and scientist at the Antarctic Research Centre in New Zealand. Causes include “an avalanche of snow, or a landslide causing a wave in the lake, or overfilling of the lake … from rain or the glacier melting,” she told AFP. Sometimes the dam has been gradually degraded over time or is ruptured by an event such as an earthquake. The breaches are highly unpredictable, “because they can be caused by so many different factors,” she said. …

At a rally Friday in the southern city of Blantyre, unemployed nurses called for more jobs and gave Malawi’s president 14 days to help them find new opportunities for work. Frank Kamwendo, the chairperson of concerned nurses, said the demonstrations were a last resort after several meetings with Malawi government officials. “We have been trying our level best to discuss with the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of local government to recruit more than 2,260 nursing officers,” said Kamwendo. “Unfortunately, these ministries have been telling us that there are no funds for recruitment.” Kamwendo said the nurses have also tried in vain to get the government to help them work in other countries. Thousands without jobs Government statistics show that Malawi has about 3,000 unemployed nurses and 160 vacant positions for nurses in public medical facilities. Last year, Malawi’s government stopped a plan by the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives that could have helped some 2,000 unemployed nurses find work in the United States and Saudi Arabia. Ministry of Labor authorities said the organization has no legal mandate to export labor. Shouts Simez, the president of the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives in Malawi, told VOA that there are now positive signs that the situation will soon be better for unemployed nurses. “I am happy to share that the approach has changed now because now it’s from the Ministry of Labor to the Ministry of Trade and Industry,” said Simeza. “So, the Ministry of …

A study published Friday indicates 1 in 10 babies around the world are born prematurely — before 37 weeks — leading to deaths, disability and chronic illnesses. The study was conducted by the World Health Organization, the U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The study monitored global births between 2010 and 2020 and documented global, regional and country estimates and trends. It found 13.4 million babies — 1 in 10 of all live births — were born prematurely in 2020, with large disparities between regions and nations. It showed about 65% of 2020 preterm births worldwide occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, where more than 13% of all births were preterm. The rates in the most affected countries — Bangladesh, 16.2%; Malawi 14.5%; and Pakistan, 14.3% — were three or four times higher than those in the world’s least affected countries — Serbia, 3.8%; Moldova, 4%; and Kazakhstan, 4.7%. The study indicates premature birth is not limited to low- and middle-income countries, with data showing preterm rates of 10% or higher in wealthier nations such as Greece, with 11.6%, and the United States, at 10%. No region saw a significant reduction in premature births during the 10-year period. The WHO said that premature birth is a leading cause of death among young children, and that those who survive are more susceptible to disabilities, developmental issues and chronic illness as adults. The U.N. agency called for greater global investment in prevention and ensuring …