Year: 2023

Growing up in Lahore — Pakistan’s cultural capital — fall used to be the perfect time for Mariam to enjoy outdoor activities after months of scorching summer heat. Now, she cannot imagine the same for her young daughters as Lahore’s air, ranked the most polluted globally, becomes unusually toxic in cooler months. “You can just smell, sometimes you can taste it, and feel it as well,” said the mother of two describing what it is like to breathe the polluted air. With an AQI reading of 345 early in the day, Lahore ranked second worst city in the world for air pollution on Tuesday, according to the Air Quality Index or AQI run by IQAir, a Swiss air purifier manufacturer. An AQI above 151 is unhealthy, while above 301 the air is hazardous for breathing. IQAir’s index ranked Lahore the most polluted city of 2022. Smog emergency The city, along with several other in Pakistan’s biggest province Punjab,is under a month-long smog emergency since early November. Smog – a combination of smoke and fog – is a specific phenomenon that occurs when certain pollution particles mix with cold, moist air and hang close to the ground, reducing visibility. In a bid to reduce traffic congestion and exposure to toxic air, the top court in Punjab on Monday ordered the closure of government-run educational institutions on Saturdays until the end of January 2024. The court also asked the provincial government to come up with a work-from-home plan for the private sector. …

Innovations in food production could alleviate hunger for millions of people, according to Britain, which hosted a global summit on food insecurity Monday, but critics say the focus on technology ignores the growing inequality of wealth. The summit was a joint initiative between Britain, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at boosting food security through science and innovation. Innovation hub British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said a renewed focus was needed to alleviate hunger. “It can’t be right that today in 2023, almost 1 billion people across the world regularly do not have enough to eat, that millions face hunger and starvation, and over 45 million children under five are suffering acute malnutrition. In a world of abundance, no one should die from lack of food and no parent should ever have to watch their child starve,” Sunak told delegates in London. He outlined Britain’s plans to host a “virtual hub” for innovation in food production, known as CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), aimed at making global food systems more resilient to future shocks in a changing climate. “We’ve already helped develop crops that are drought-resistant and even richer in vitamins, now feeding 100 million people across Africa. And we’re going further, launching a new U.K. CGIAR science center to drive cutting-edge research on flood-tolerant rice, disease-resistant wheat and much more. These innovations will reach millions across the poorest countries, as well as improving U.K. crop …

A federal judge in Nevada has dealt another legal setback to Native American tribes trying to halt construction of one of the biggest lithium mines in the world. U.S. District Judge Miranda Du granted the government’s motion to dismiss their claims the mine is being built illegally near the sacred site of an 1865 massacre along the Nevada-Oregon line. But she said in last week’s order the three tribes suing the Bureau of Land Management deserve another chance to amend their complaint to try to prove the agency failed to adequately consult with them as required by the National Historic Preservation Act. “Given that the court has now twice agreed with federal defendants (and) plaintiffs did not vary their argument … the court is skeptical that plaintiffs could successfully amend it. But skeptical does not mean futile,” Du wrote Nov. 9. She also noted part of their case is still pending on appeal at the 9th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, which indicated last month it likely will hear oral arguments in February as construction continues at Lithium Nevada’s mine at Thacker Pass about 370 kilometers northeast of Reno. Du said in an earlier ruling the tribes had failed to prove the project site is where more than two dozen of their ancestors were killed by the U.S. Cavalry Sept. 12, 1865. Her new ruling is the latest in a series that have turned back legal challenges to the mine on a variety of fronts, including environmentalists’ claims it would …

Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children. “The inability for people to live their day-to-day life without encountering open-air drug use is so pressing on urban folks’ minds,” said John Horvick, vice president of polling firm DHM Research. “That has very much changed people’s perspective about what they think Measure 110 is.” When the law was approved by 58% of Oregon voters three years ago, supporters championed Measure 110 as a revolutionary approach that would transform addiction by minimizing penalties for drug use and investing instead in recovery. But even top Democratic lawmakers who backed the law, which will likely dominate the upcoming legislative session, say they’re now open to revisiting it after the biggest increase in synthetic opioid deaths among states that have reported their numbers. The cycle of addiction and homelessness spurred by fentanyl is most visible in Portland, where it’s not unusual to see people using it in broad daylight on busy city streets. “Everything’s on the table,” said Democratic state Sen. Kate Lieber, co-chair of a new joint legislative committee created to tackle addiction. “We have got to do something to make sure that we have safer streets and that we’re saving lives.” Measure 110 directed …

SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was presumed to have failed in space minutes after lifting off on Saturday in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion. The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, soaring roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) above ground on a planned 90-minute flight into space. But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it appeared to achieve a crucial maneuver to separate with its core stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching. Meanwhile, the core Starship booster carried further toward space, but roughly 10 minutes into the flight a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle. “We have lost the data from the second stage. … We think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX’s livestream host John Insprucker said. The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, following an April attempt that ended in failure about four minutes after liftoff. A live SpaceX webcast of Saturday’s launch showed the rocket ship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life. The test flight’s principal objective was to get Starship off the ground and into space just shy of Earth’s orbit. Doing so would have marked a key step …

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed earlier this week that Beijing will crack down on companies in China that produce precursor chemicals for fentanyl, an agreement that Biden said would “save lives.” In exchange, the Biden administration agreed to lift sanctions on China’s Physical Evidence Identification Center of the Ministry of Public Security and the National Drug Laboratory. In May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce sanctioned the lab for allegedly participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. China, which is the source of most fentanyl precursors used in the U.S., argued that U.S. export controls have “severely affected” China’s inspection and testing of fentanyl-related substances and impaired its “goodwill to help the U.S. in drug control,” according to the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the United States. Although a cooperative effort to curb the supply of fentanyl brought some results over the years, enthusiasm dampened as tensions grew between China and the U.S. On Aug. 5, 2022 — after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, a self-governing island Beijing considers its own — China officially announced the suspension of anti-drug cooperation with the U.S. Here is some background to the Biden-Xi deal. What is fentanyl? According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It is a prescription drug in the United States used for treating severe pain. Illegally manufactured fentanyl “is …

Britain’s medicines regulator has authorized the world’s first gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease, in a move that could offer relief to thousands of people with the crippling disease in the U.K. In a statement Thursday, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency said it approved Casgevy, the first medicine licensed using the gene editing tool CRISPR, which won its makers a Nobel prize in 2020. The agency approved the treatment for patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia who are 12 years old and older. Casgevy is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Europe) Ltd. and CRISPR Therapeutics. To date, bone marrow transplants, extremely arduous procedures that come with very unpleasant side effects, have been the only long-lasting treatment. “The future of life-changing cures resides in CRISPR based (gene-editing) technology,” said Dr. Helen O’Neill of University College London. “The use of the word ‘cure’ in relation to sickle cell disease or thalassemia has, up until now, been incompatible,” she said in a statement, calling the MHRA’s approval of gene therapy “a positive moment in history.” Both sickle cell disease and thalassemia are caused by mistakes in the genes that carry hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carry oxygen.  In people with sickle cell — which is particularly common in people with African or Caribbean backgrounds — a genetic mutation causes the cells to become crescent-shaped, which can block blood flow and cause excruciating pain, organ damage, stroke and other problems. In people with thalassemia, the genetic mutation can cause …

The U.S. flu season is under way, with at least seven states reporting high levels of illnesses and cases rising in other parts of the country, health officials say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted new flu data Friday, showing very high activity last week in Louisiana, and high activity in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico and South Carolina. It was also high in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory where health officials declared an influenza epidemic earlier this month. “We’re off to the races,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert. Traditionally, the winter flu season ramps up in December or January. But it took off in October last year, and is making a November entrance this year. Flu activity was moderate but rising in New York City, Arkansas, California, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. And while flu activity has been high in Alaska for weeks, the state did not report data last week, so it wasn’t part of the latest count. Tracking during flu season relies in part on reports of people with flu-like symptoms who go to doctor’s offices or hospitals; many people with the flu are not tested, so their infections aren’t lab-confirmed. COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses can sometimes muddy the picture. Alicia Budd, who leads the CDC’s flu surveillance team, said several indicators are showing “continued increases” in flu. There are different kinds of flu viruses, and the version that’s been …

In the Arctic, the impact of climate change is happening at an accelerated pace, with temperatures rising two to four times faster than the global average. “It’s called the polar amplification,” explains Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “Snow and ice reflect lots of energy back to space when ice and snow are melting, and the surface turns much darker. So this amount of energy will be absorbed by the surface, and it will make the surface warmer – at the same time making the atmosphere warmer as well.” Communities in circumpolar regions of Alaska are dealing with a triple challenge of climate change: coastal erosion, thawing of permafrost on which buildings and infrastructure stand, and, for some communities, the challenge of managing encounters with apex predators — polar bears pushed onshore. “An optimal habitat for polar bears now is basically absent, it’s disappeared,” says Todd Atwood, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey. He has been studying polar bears for the past 12 years and says melting sea ice makes it harder for bears to hunt seals. “That tends to be the trigger for bears to either stay with the sea ice as it retreats further over those deeper waters, or, for a growing proportion of the population to make the swim to shore.” In addition to the high risk of succumbing to sea conditions on a long swim, bears trying to adapt to life on land face an additional risk as …

After a barrage of earthquakes that herald an impending volcanic eruption, some evacuated residents of the Icelandic town of Grindavik wonder if they will ever return. “There are going to be a lot of people who don’t want to go there. My mother said, ‘I never want to go there again,’” Eythor Reynisson, who was born and raised in Grindavik, told AFP. The fishing port of 4,000 people on Iceland’s south coast was evacuated on November 11 after magma shifting under the Earth’s crust caused hundreds of earthquakes — a warning of a likely volcanic eruption. Thousands of smaller tremors have shaken the region since. With massive crevices ripping roads apart and buildings’ concrete foundations shattered, the once picturesque Grindavik now resembles a war zone. The damage to the town hall will take months to repair. Long-term threat Even if the magma flow stops and no eruption occurs, “there is the issue of whether one should live in a town like this,” Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told AFP. The Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced an eruption for eight centuries until 2021. Since then, three eruptions have struck — all in remote uninhabited areas — and volcanologists believe this may be the start of a new era of activity in the region. Sigmundsson warned that “a difficult period of uncertainty” lies ahead, as eruptions could happen in the coming years. That has left residents wondering whether it is worth rebuilding their homes. Sigmundsson said that for …

Zimbabwe has recorded more than 7,000 suspected cholera cases and almost 150 deaths …

The moon glowed in the predawn Mongolia sky as Agvaantogtokh and his family prepared for another big move. On horseback, he rode to a well with nearly a thousand sheep and goats. Occasionally, he and his wife, Nurmaa, stopped to help struggling young ones, weak after a harsh winter. Thousands of miles away in Senegal, Amadou Altine Ndiaye’s family led livestock through a sparse African savannah. Horses and donkeys pulled a four-cart caravan along dirt paths in sweltering heat. Cattle followed. The family believed the next village would be richer with vegetation. “I was born into pastoralism, and since then I’ve known only that,” said Ndiaye, 48, a member of the Muslim Fulani ethnic group who learned the ways of herding alongside his elders. “It’s a source of pride.” More than 50 million people in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere practice this way of life. As nomadic pastoralists, they keep domestic animals and move with them to seek fresh pastures — often selling some livestock for meat. Although pastoralism has sustained these populations for millennia, it faces mounting pressures from deteriorating environments, shrinking rangelands, and new generations who seek a less grueling life. At the same time, pastoralism is modernizing, with groups leveraging technology. The practice has survived for so long because it is designed to adapt to a changing environment — pastoralists move with animals to find fresh pasture and water, leaving behind fallow land to regrow. Experts say it’s a lesson that could help those who …

Hundreds of previously unreported workplace injuries surface at a space industry titan. Plus, the European Space Agency chief’s warning on climate change, and we say goodbye to a space travel pioneer. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. A caution to our viewers – this report contains graphic images some may find disturbing. …

Advances in childhood cancer are a success story in modern medicine. But in the past decade, those strides have stalled for Black and Hispanic youth, opening a gap in death rates, according to a new report published Thursday. Childhood cancers are rare and treatments have improved drastically in recent decades, saving lives. Death rates were about the same for Black, Hispanic and white children in 2001, and all went lower during the next decade. But over the next 10 years, only the rate for white children dipped a little lower. “You can have the most sophisticated scientific advances, but if we can’t deliver them into every community in the same way, then we have not met our goal as a nation,” said Dr. Sharon Castellino, a pediatric cancer specialist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, who had no role in the new report. She said the complexity of new cancers treatments such as gene therapy, which can cure some children with leukemia, can burden families and be an impediment to getting care. “You need at least one parent to quit their job and be there 24/7, and then figure out the situation for the rest of their children,” Castellino said. “It’s not that families don’t want to do that. It’s difficult.” More social workers are needed to help families file paperwork to get job-protected leave and make sure the child’s health insurance is current and doesn’t lapse. The overall cancer death rate for children and teenagers in the …

How was the air breathed by Caesar, the Prophet Mohammed or Christopher Columbus? A giant freezer in Copenhagen holds the answers, storing blocks of ice with atmospheric tales thousands of years old. The Ice Core Archive, housing 25 kilometres (15 miles) of ice collected primarily from Greenland, is helping scientists understand changes in the climate. “What we have in this archive is prehistoric climate change, a record of man’s activities in the last 10,000 years,” glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen of the University of Copenhagen told AFP. Blocks of ice have been his passion for 43 years — and it was while drilling into Greenland’s ice sheet that he met his wife Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, also a top expert in the field of paleoclimatology. Steffensen has since 1991 managed the repository, one of the biggest in the world, with 40,000 blocks of ice stacked on long rows of shelves in large boxes. The frozen samples are unique, made up of compressed snow and not frozen water. “All the airspace between the snowflakes is trapped as bubbles inside (and) the air inside these bubbles is the same age as the ice,” Steffensen explained. The repository’s antechamber is similar to a library’s reading room: this is where scientists can examine the ice they have withdrawn from the main “library”, or storage room. But they must be quick: the temperature in the antechamber is kept at -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4F) — decidedly balmy compared to the -30C (-22F) in the storage room. Here, Steffensen …