Pregnant women living in bushfire-prone areas in Australia are being urged to protect themselves and their unborn babies from smoke as the fire season returns. Doctors in the worst-affected regions say they are horrified by the effects of the smoke from last summer’s catastrophic conditions.Doctors have said particles from bushfire smoke in Australia have left placentas that nourish an unborn child resembling those in women who are heavy smokers. Instead of being a healthy shade of pink, distressed organs are left grey and grainy.The result can be premature and underweight babies. One specialist said some were “unexpectedly and unpredictably small.”There’s a warning that newborns could suffer the consequences throughout their entire lives.General practitioner Rebecca McGowan said she believes global warming is exacerbating Australia’s bushfire danger and that babies are at risk of harm.“This is the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “We are starting to see literally the effects. …

Nearly half of Americans, or 49%, said they definitely or probably would not get an inoculation if a coronavirus were available today, while 51% said they would, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this month.The 49% who lean toward rejecting the inoculation cited concerns about side effects from the vaccine.The public’s trust in a safe COVID-19 vaccine coming to market has taken a tumble. In May, a Pew survey revealed 72% of Americans said they would be inoculated if the vaccine were available.Only 21% in this month’s poll said they would definitely get the vaccine.The recent Pew survey found that 77% of Americans believe the vaccines in development in the United States would likely be approved before their safety and effectiveness are completely understood.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can A young woman wearing a face mask walks across the medieval …

The world’s worst air this week is not in pollution hot spots like India or China. It’s in the western United States, where record-breaking wildfires are blanketing the region with smoke.Portland, Oregon, has topped the air pollution charts for major cities this week at monitoring company FILE – Flames and smoke from the Bobcat Fire are pictured after an evacuation was ordered for the residents of Arcadia, Calif., Sept. 13, 2020.What’s increasingly concerning is that these huge wildfires are no longer isolated incidents.”We are continuing to see the increase in the duration of these events, the severity of these events and the frequency,” said Keith Bein of the Air Quality Research Center at the University of California-Davis.”The bigger question becomes: [What are the impacts of] being exposed to this every summer for longer and longer periods and higher and higher concentrations?” he said. Those exposures likely add up.Gases and particlesSmoke …

Researchers on a quest to find life in the universe got promising news this week.  Space agencies are joining forces to defend the planet from an aggressive asteroid, and a look at one of the best places on Earth to view the stars.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us “The Week in Space.”Producer: Arash Arabasadi. …

The British auction house Christie’s announced this week that it would sell the largest and most complete known skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in early October.The auction house said the dinosaur skeleton is nearly 12 meters long and just under 5 meters tall. It has been known as Stan, named after amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison, who discovered it in the upper Midwestern U.S. state of South Dakota in 1987.Christie’s science and natural history specialist James Hyslop said scientists that looked at the bones initially misidentified them as belonging to a triceratops, a more common dinosaur discovery.It was not until Sacrison took the remains to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in 1992 that anyone realized what he had found.A detail of the teeth of Stan, one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossils discovered, is pictured Sept. 15, 2020, at Christie’s in New York.Hyslop said the paleontologists …

Experts from the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say the sun is in the first year of a new cycle of activity, and they are watching it closely in an effort to guard against solar storms that could cause problems on Earth.Officials at NOAA explain that the sun, just like Earth, goes through “seasonal” cycles, which astronomers have been recording since 1755. The Solar Prediction Panel, chaired by experts from NOAA and the NASA space agency, monitors these cycles that last about 11 years. They report a solar minimum between Solar Cycle 24 and 25 — the period when the sun is least active — happened in December 2019, putting Earth eight months into the first year of Solar Cycle 25. The panel expects sunspot or solar flare activity to peak over the next five years.  Elsayed Talaat, NOAA’s director of planning and analysis, said if solar flares — …

As if the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t bad enough, flu season is about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere, adding millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths to the already-strained American health care system.”We really, really want to emphasize the potential for disaster, actually,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America board of directors, at a recent briefing for reporters.Experts are urging everyone to get flu shots in order to take some of the load off of health workers and hospitals.FILE – A general view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Sept. 30, 2014.Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, up to 61,000 people A women reacts to getting an influenza vaccine shot at …

Scientists say they have found what may be the oldest specimen of fossilized sperm ever discovered, inside a tiny crustacean trapped in a piece of amber 100 million years ago.The researchers say the discovery in amber from Myanmar’s Kachin province, described in a paper published Wednesday in the science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, provides an extremely rare opportunity to study the evolution of the reproductive process.The scientists suspect the crustacean in which the sperm was found, a newly discovered species of ostracod about 1 millimeter long, was likely covered in amber shortly after mating.They say the sperm cell found in the animal was significant, not only because of the age of the specimen but also because of its size — about one-fifth the size of the entire animal that produced it.The researchers say that while most animals produce huge numbers of tiny sperm, there are …

The U.N. Secretary-General warned Wednesday the coronavirus pandemic is “out of control,” and he called for global solidarity in making a future vaccine affordable and available to all. “The virus is the No. 1 global security threat in our world today,” Antonio Guterres told reporters. There have been nearly 30 million confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and more than 936,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, which tracks global data on the virus.People wearing face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus walk in downtown Madrid, Spain, Sept. 16, 2020.Guterres spoke ahead of Tuesday’s start of the U.N. General Assembly annual debate, which typically draws more than a hundred presidents, prime ministers and other senior officials to New York each year. But due to the pandemic, leaders will send pre-recorded video messages, and side meetings will be held virtually. The U.N. chief said he …

Fires burning in California are the largest on record. In Washington state, a larger area burned in five days than have burned in any previous year on record save one. And in Oregon, one-tenth of the state’s population was under fire evacuation warnings or orders last week. Scientists say climate change is making fires worse in the American West. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more. …

Heavy rain and pounding surf driven by Hurricane Sally hit the Florida and Alabama coasts Tuesday as forecasters expected the slow-moving storm to dump continuous deluges before and after landfall, possibly triggering dangerous, historic flooding along the northern Gulf Coast. “It’s going to be a huge rainmaker,” said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist and meteorologist at Colorado State University. “It’s not going to be pretty.” The National Hurricane Center expected Sally to remain a Category 1 hurricane, with top sustained winds of 130 kilometers per hour at landfall late Tuesday or early Wednesday. The storm’s sluggish pace made it harder to predict exactly where its center will strike. The hurricane’s slow movement exacerbated the threat of heavy rain and storm surge. Sally remained dangerous even after losing power, its fiercest winds having dropped considerably from a peak of 161 kph on Monday. Waves crash near a pier at Gulf State Park, in Gulf Shores, …

Scientists at a Russian university have announced the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved ice age cave bear, with much of its soft tissue including its nose, flesh and teeth intact.In a statement, scientists from North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk say reindeer herders on Great Lyakhovsky island in the New Siberian Islands archipelago discovered the carcass in the melting permafrost. NEFU is considered the premier center for research into woolly mammoths and other prehistoric, ice age species.Scientists at the research center have hailed the find as ground-breaking. Previously, scientists had only the bone of cave bears to study. The species, or subspecies, lived in Eurasia in the Middle and Late Pleistocene period and became extinct about 15,000 years ago.Preliminary analysis suggests this specimen to be between 22,000 and 39,500 years old, but it will be carbon dated to confirm that.Recent years have seen major discoveries of mammoths, woolly rhinos, ice age …

The U.S. National Hurricane Center says slow-moving Hurricane Sally, the latest storm to threaten the U.S. Gulf Coast, remains offshore but is already bringing high winds, rain and surf to the coastline.    In the latest report, forecasters say Sally was about 110 kilometers east to southeast of east of the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. It currently has maximum sustained winds of 140 kilometers per hour, and hurricane warnings early Tuesday extended from the Louisiana-Mississippi border east to Florida.    Forecasters say Sally should reach land near the Alabama-Mississippi state line by late Tuesday or early Wednesday, although they stress “significant” uncertainty as to where the storm’s eye would make landfall. But they say Sally is moving more eastward than originally anticipated, sparing the city of New Orleans.     The slow-moving system is expected to produce 25-50 centimeters of rain, but isolated areas could see as much 76 …

Hurricane Sally drew closer to  the U.S. Gulf Coast on Tuesday morning, bringing heavy rains and  surging water ahead of its expected landfall as a Category 2 hurricane, with the chance of further strengthening possible. The second strong storm in less than a month to threaten the region, Sally’s winds increased to 100 miles per hour (155 kph), and late Monday was 90 miles (145 km) east of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said. It could wallop the Mississippi and Alabama coasts on Tuesday with devastating winds of up to 110 mph, on the cusp of becoming a Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of intensity, the NHC said. Hurricanes are considered to have the potential for devastating damage when they have sustained winds past 111 mph (179 kph). Mississippi and Louisiana called for evacuations of low-lying areas and President Donald Trump …

Marine experts are planning to rescue humpback whales that have been recorded for the first time in crocodile-infested waters in the Kakadu national park in tropical northern Australia. It is thought the giant sea mammals took a wrong turn during one of nature’s most epic migrations. The humpbacks should be starting their long journey to Antarctica from breeding grounds off Western Australia’s remote north coast. Instead, a small group – thought to be two adults and a large juvenile – were spotted in the East Alligator river in the Kakadu national park, east of Darwin on September 2.  It is famous for its world heritage Aboriginal rock art and for its crocodiles. Never have migrating whales been recorded in the area.  Experts believe one of the humpbacks has returned to the sea, and plans are being made to coax the others to follow. This could involve using the noise from boat engines to gently move them down …

At opposite ends of the country, President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden presented vastly different views Monday about the cause of the historic, destructive wildfires in the Western United States, which have killed at least 35 people.In California, the president — brushing aside concerns about climate change as a catalyst for the increasing number and intensity of such fires — reiterated his call for Western states to practice better forest management.“When trees fall down after a short period of time, they become very dry — really like a matchstick,” said Trump on arrival in California. “And they can explode. Also leaves. When you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.” Trump’s “climate denial” did not cause the fires, Biden said in his home state of Delaware. But if the president gets a second term, “These hellish events will continue to become more common, more devastating and …