Brazil will ban fires in the Amazon forest for 120 days, heeding the demands of global investors upset over environmental destruction, the government said Thursday. A formal decree banning fires will come next week. Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourao made the announcement during a virtual investment conference Thursday with several European firms. He cited a letter signed by 29 firms — some of whom are threatening to cut all investment in Brazil unless the environmental degradation stops. “It’s a positive first step, and we need to continue the dialogue, and hopefully we’ll all see some results on the ground,” said Jeanett Bergan, head of responsible investments for KLP, Norway’s largest pension fund. The investors told Brazilian authorities they monitor deforestation rates, prevention of forest fires, and enforcement of Brazil’s forest code when assessing their investment strategy in Brazil. FILE – Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro leaves his official residence of Alvorada palace in Brasilia, May 25, …

NASA embarks on an epic summer road trip tens of millions of miles away. An astronaut who both walked on the moon and reached the deepest point on Earth shares her journey. And a “natural firework” of a comet streaks the French skies. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

A new study using rats suggests that how a person decides whether to step in and help another person who is in distress may be more a factor of biology than psychology and may show why some people show empathy and others do not.A long-held social-psychological concept holds that people in a group are less likely to help someone in need than if those individuals were alone. The idea, known as “the bystander effect,” is often explained by suggesting a larger group “diffuses responsibility.” In other words, an individual might feel less personally responsible for helping.But the study, conducted at the University of Chicago and published Wednesday in the Journal of Science Advances, shows rats, making decisions based purely on biological instincts and not any concept of right or wrong, reacted in a similar way while part of a group.Led by neurobiologist Peggy Mason, the researchers used a small device …

A new study suggests earlier Arctic springs driven by climate change are providing wolf spiders in the region the opportunity to have more babies. The study, published in the June 24 edition of the biological sciences journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that Arctic wolf spiders are taking advantage of the early spring season by producing more batches of offspring — called clutches — because warmer temperatures extend the season when the spiders are active. Authors of the study, from the Arctic Research Center at Denmark’s Aarhus University, dissected individual egg sacs from the spiders and counted the number of eggs and partially developed juvenile spiders. They compared those egg contents with the size of the mothers and determined that the spiders were producing two separate clutches, something previously only observed in spiders living in lower latitudes. The spiders hatched during the second clutch appeared significantly later in the season. In …

In the wake of America’s official departure from the World Health Organization, a former senior director at the U.N. health agency predicted that other countries, particularly Germany, would likely step in to fill any void left by the single-biggest financial contributor.   At a briefing on Wednesday morning, Dr. David Heymann, a former assistant WHO director-general and an American, said he was “very disappointed” at the U.S. decision to exit the agency.   He says the U.S. has been behind incredibly important activities at WHO, noting it was the U.S. and its Cold War enemy Russia that spearheaded the global initiative to eradicate smallpox.   Heymann said, however, that WHO would likely just get on with its work.   He says Germany has become an important partner in global health recently and other countries are stepping up as well.   He says: “As much as it would be terrible if the U.S. leaves WHO and leaves [with] that expertise it has …

Temperatures soared 10 degrees Celsius above average across much of permafrost-laden Siberia last month, which was tied for the warmest June on record globally, the European Union’s climate monitoring network said Tuesday. The 12-month period to June 2020 was also tied for the warmest to date across the planet, on a par with the ones ending in May 2020 and September 2016, an exceptional El Nino year, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported.That means Earth’s average surface temperature for July 2019-June 2020 was 1.3C above pre-industrial levels, the standard benchmark for global warming. The 2015 Paris climate treaty calls for capping the rise in temperature to “well below” 2C.  In 2018, however, the UN’s climate science panel (IPCC) concluded in a landmark report that 1.5C — only two-tenths of a degree above the new 12-month high — is a far safer guardrail. In the Arctic, meanwhile, an hourly temperature record for June …

Experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) Tuesday acknowledged there is growing evidence the coronavirus can spread through the air and said they are preparing a brief on the subject.At the U.N. agency’s regular briefing in Geneva, WHO technical committee head Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said the WHO was contacted in April by a group of than 200 scientists who have called for the world body and others to acknowledge that the coronavirus can spread in the air.Kerkhove said her committee is working with the group and are producing a scientific brief to summarize what they know about the nature of air-borne transmission of virus.WHO Under Fire Over COVID-19 Transmission Route Critics say agency moves too slowly to acknowledge airborne transmission, but science not settledThe WHO coordinator of infection prevention and control, Professor Benedetta Allegranzi, noted that while there is emerging evidence about the airborne nature of the virus, it …

Doctors in Brazil say an experimental treatment given to a man known as the Sao Paulo Patient may have cured him of HIV.     The man, who was subjected to intensive anti-retroviral drug therapy with the purpose of removing all traces of the AIDS virus from his body, shows no signs of the virus after more than a year since he stopped receiving the treatment.   In an interview with The Associated Press, the patient said he was “very moved, because it’s something that millions of people want. It’s a gift of life, a second chance to live.”   The only other two known cases of HIV cures have been through bone marrow transplants, which gave patients new immune systems that were better equipped to respond to the virus.     Bone marrow transplants are prohibitively expensive, though, and they come with life-threatening side effects, leading experts to disregard …

A Russian court on Tuesday fined a coronavirus-denying monk who has challenged Kremlin lockdown orders for spreading false information about the pandemic.The court in the Ural Mountains region ordered Father Sergiy to pay 90,000 rubles ($1,250). The 65-year-old monk, who has attracted nationwide attention by urging followers to disobey church leadership and ignore church closures during the pandemic, didn’t attend the court hearing.On Friday, a Russian Orthodox Church panel in Yekaterinburg ruled to defrock Father Sergiy for breaking monastic rules. He didn’t show up at the session and dismissed the verdict, urging his backers to come to defend the Sredneuralsk women’s monastery where he has holed up since last month.In Friday’s video posted by his supporters, Father Sergiy denounced President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the Motherland” serving a Satanic “world government” and dismissed Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill and other top clerics as “heretics” who must be “thrown …

Meet Kongonaphon kely, a pocket-sized dinosaur forerunner that was smaller than your cellphone.  The creature, which predated dinosaurs and flying pterosaurs, was just shy of 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Some of these things would have been quite cute animals,” said study lead author Christian Kammerer, a paleontology researcher at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Looking like a small dinosaur that could fit in your hand, Kammerer mused that it “would probably make a great pet.”  Of course, no humans were around when Kongonaphon was roaming the wild, jumping around with its strong hind legs and feeding on bugs with its peg-like teeth, Kammerer said. The name means tiny bug slayer. The fossils, dug up in Madagascar, date from 237 million years ago. Scientists figure the little guy was an adult because of growth rings in its bones, Kammerer said.  …

The United Nations says global HIV/AIDS targets for 2020 will not be met, and that some progress could be lost, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has seriously impacted the HIV/AIDS response.“Our report shows that COVID is threatening to throw us even more off course,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS said Monday at the report’s launch in Geneva. “COVID is a disease that is claiming resources — the labs, the scientists, the health workers — away from HIV work. We want governments to use creative ways to keep the fight going on both. One disease cannot be used to fight another.”COVID-19 is the disease caused by the new coronavirus.UNAIDS says despite expanding HIV treatment coverage — some 25 million of the 38 million people living with HIV now have access to antiretroviral therapy — progress is stalling. Over the last two years, new infections have plateaued at …

A Latino cook whose co-worker got COVID-19 waited in his truck for a free swab at a rare testing event in a low-income neighborhood in Phoenix. A Hispanic tile installer queued up after two weeks of self-isolation while his father battled the coronavirus in intensive care. He didn’t know his dad would die days later. As the pandemic explodes in diverse states like Arizona and Florida, people in communities of color who have been exposed to the virus are struggling to get tested. While people nationwide complain about appointments being overbooked or waiting hours to be seen, getting a test can be even harder in America’s poorer, Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, far from middle-class areas where most chain pharmacies and urgent care clinics offering tests are found.   “There really isn’t any testing around here,” said Juan Espinosa, who went with his brother Enrique to the recent drive-up testing event …

Tomas Kapler knew nothing about ventilators — he’s an online business consultant, not an engineer or a medical technician. But when he saw that shortages of the vital machines had imperiled critically ill COVID-19 patients in northern Italy, he was moved to action.”It was a disturbing feeling for me that because of a lack of equipment the doctors had to decide whether a person gets a chance to live,” Kapler said. “That seemed so horrific to me that it was an impulse to do something.”And so he did. “I just said to myself: ‘Can we simply make the ventilators?’” he said.  Working around the clock, he brought together a team of 30 Czechs to develop a fully functional ventilator — Corovent. And they did it in a matter of days.Kapler is a member of an informal group of volunteers formed by IT companies and experts who offered to help the …

The practice of mining precious metals and stones from the Earth dates as far back as recorded human history. The prized possessions of previous eras give clues to a culture’s technological advancement. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports on a mineral-mining operation recently discovered in underwater caves in Mexico. …