Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by its Congress this week that marks a first step in regulating the country’s voluntary carbon market. Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions’ appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream. “This is an economic activity that will boost others that can be done in forestry concessions,” said Jacqueline Ferreira, a portfolio manager at Instituto Escolhas, an environmental nonprofit involved in consultations on the bill. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who now must sign or veto parts or all of the bill within 15 days, has made reining in deforestation a priority as he seeks to reverse the policies of his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Forest leased to private firms in Brazil can …

For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet — not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp. Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star. The sun-like star had been puffing up with old age for eons and finally got so big that it engulfed the close-orbiting planet. It’s a gloomy preview of what will happen to Earth when our sun morphs into a red giant and gobbles the four inner planets. “If it’s any consolation, this will happen in about 5 billion years,” said co-author Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This galactic feast happened between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago near the Aquila constellation when the star was around 10 billion years old. As the planet went down …

Some 258 million people needed emergency food aid last year because of conflict, economic shocks and climate disasters, a U.N. report said Wednesday, a sharp rise from 193 million the previous year.    “More than a quarter of a billion people are now facing acute levels of hunger, and some are on the brink of starvation. That’s unconscionable,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.    It was “a stinging indictment of humanity’s failure to make progress… to end hunger, and achieve food security and improved nutrition for all,” he said.    More than 40% of those in serious need of food lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Yemen, the U.N. report said.    “Conflicts and mass displacement continue to drive global hunger,” Guterres said.    “Rising poverty, deepening inequalities, rampant underdevelopment, the climate crisis and natural disasters also contribute to food insecurity.”    In 2022, 258 million people faced high levels …

In a massive global crackdown on fentanyl trafficking on the darknet, U.S. and international law enforcement agencies have arrested nearly 300 suspects and seized a large cache of drugs, cash, virtual currency and weapons, officials announced on Tuesday. The law enforcement action dubbed Operation SpecTor spanned three continents and involved the collaboration of eight countries. It was part of a Justice Department initiative led by the FBI known as JCODE, which aims to dismantle online drug markets. The operation netted 281 arrests, 850 kilograms of drugs, including 64 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics, $53.4 million in cash and virtual currencies and 117 firearms. The total number of arrests was the most ever for any JCODE operation and more than double that of the previous operation, officials said. The Justice Department described the takedown as “the largest international law enforcement operation targeting fentanyl and opioid traffickers on the darknet.” “Our …

Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking a dozen cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said Tuesday in declaring the latest public health epidemic. About half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in a report from his office. “We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told The Associated Press in an interview. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right. That’s why I issued this advisory to pull back the curtain on a struggle that too many people are experiencing.” The declaration is intended to raise awareness around loneliness but won’t unlock federal funding or programming devoted to combatting …

Scientists said Monday they have found a way to use brain scans and artificial intelligence modeling to transcribe “the gist” of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading. While the main goal of the language decoder is to help people who have lost the ability to communicate, the U.S. scientists acknowledged that the technology raised questions about “mental privacy.” Aiming to assuage such fears, they ran tests showing that their decoder could not be used on anyone who had not allowed it to be trained on their brain activity over long hours inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Previous research has shown that a brain implant can enable people who can no longer speak or type to spell out words or even sentences. These “brain-computer interfaces” focus on the part of the brain that controls the mouth when it tries to …

Almost a third of the nurses in the United States are considering leaving their profession after the COVID-19 pandemic left them overwhelmed and fatigued, according to a survey. The survey of over 18,000 nurses, conducted in January by AMN Healthcare Services Inc., showed on Monday that 30% of the participants are looking to quit their career, up 7 percentage points over 2021, when the pandemic-triggered wave of resignations began. The survey also showed that 36% of the nurses plan to continue working in the sector but may change workplaces. “This really underscores the continued mental health and well-being challenges the nursing workforce experiences post pandemic,” AMN Healthcare CEO Cary Grace told Reuters in an interview. The survey showed there are various changes needed, with 69% of nurses seeking increased salaries and 63% of them seeking a safer working environment to reduce their stress. This comes at a time that hospital …

Babies born to opioid users had shorter hospital stays and needed less medication when their care emphasized parent involvement, skin-to-skin contact and a quiet environment, researchers reported Sunday. Newborns were ready to go home about a week earlier compared to those getting standard care. Fewer received opioid medications to reduce withdrawal symptoms such as tremors and hard-to-soothe crying, about 20% compared to 52% of the standard-care babies. Babies born to opioid users, including mothers in treatment with medications such as methadone, can develop withdrawal symptoms after exposure in the womb. Typically, hospitals use a scoring system to decide which babies need medicine to ease withdrawal, which means treatment in newborn intensive care units. “The mom is sitting there anxiously waiting for the score,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Leslie Young of the University of Vermont’s children’s hospital. “This would be really stressful for families.” In the new approach — …