Bird flu has been detected in the Antarctica region for the first time, according to British experts, raising concerns the deadly virus could pose a threat to penguins and other local species. Scientists had been fearing that the worst outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in history would reach Antarctica, a key breeding ground for many birds. The British Antarctic Survey said its staff took samples from brown skua seabirds after they died on Bird Island in South Georgia, a British overseas territory east of South America’s tip and north of Antarctica’s main landmass. The tests were sent to Britain and came back positive, the U.K.’s polar research institute said in a statement on Monday. The virus was most likely brought by birds returning from their migration to South America, where there has been a huge number of bird flu cases, it added. Visitors to South Georgia and the …

The World Health Organization reported Monday that progress was being made in efforts to prevent and respond to cases of sexual misconduct but acknowledged that abuse by WHO staff remained problematic.       “For the past two years, WHO has intensified our work to prevent and respond to any form of sexual misconduct, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, said Gaya Gamhewage, director of prevention and response to sexual misconduct at WHO. “However, the numbers are still going up for the simple reason, I believe, that all the cases have not surfaced yet. So, the numbers will keep going up for some time. But this does not mean that what we are doing is not having any effect. In fact, what we are doing is surfacing this issue, as well,” she said. The numbers would seem to bear this out. Over the past 12 months, the United Nations Office of Internal …

The world is moving too slowly to meet pledges to end deforestation by 2030, with the destruction worsening in 2022, according to a report by a coalition of environmental organizations released on Monday. More than 140 countries – representing the vast majority of the world’s woodlands – pledged at the 2021 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by the end of the decade. Yet deforestation increased by 4% worldwide in 2022 compared with 2021, as some 66,000 square kilometers (25,000 square miles) were destroyed, the annual Forest Declaration Assessment report said. That means the world is 21% off track to end deforestation by 2030. “The world’s forests are in crisis. The opportunity to make progress is passing us by,” said Erin Matson, a senior consultant at environmental group Climate Focus. The report was conducted by a coalition of civil society and research …

Nigeria is ramping up its environmental education efforts as floods and soil erosion increase due to climate change. The latest education initiative is a card game called Play, Learn and Act Now, or PLAN. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria. …

The coming election to choose the World Health Organization’s next chief of the South-East Asia Regional Office, or SEARO, has become contentious as the person who takes up that post could influence the health of billions of people.  The daughter of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is one of two candidates for the SEARO position. Saima Wazed’s nomination has sparked controversy with many health experts calling it “nepotism,” and expressing concern over the election process to fill senior roles at the U.N. health body.  A candidate for the SEARO post should have a “strong technical and public health background and extensive experience in global health”, according to the WHO website. The candidate should also have “competency in organizational management” and “proven historical evidence for public health leadership”, the website says. The next SEARO chief will be elected through a secret ballot by the region’s 11 member countries, which include Bangladesh, …

Countries are deadlocked over how to design a fund to help countries recover and rebuild from climate change-driven damage, with just over 30 days left before crucial United Nations climate negotiations kick off in Dubai.   Two dozen countries involved in a committee tasked with designing a “loss and damage” fund wrapped up the last meeting in the early hours of Saturday in Aswan, Egypt, with developing and developed countries at odds over central questions: which entity should oversee the fund, who should pay and which countries would be eligible to receive funding.   The committee was expected to draft a list of recommendations for implementing the fund, which was agreed in a breakthrough last year at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and would be the first U.N. fund dedicated to addressing irreparable climate-driven damage from drought, floods and rising sea levels.   Instead, the group agreed to meet one …

A California research team is conducting a five-year ecological study of six songbird species in northwestern New Mexico oil fields to see how sensory intrusions affect the birds’ survival, reproduction and general health. The Santa Fe New Mexican says the study by avian researchers from California Polytechnic State University will zero in on the specific impacts of noise and light pollution. As the human population swells and generates more light and sound, researchers are curious about how those multiplying stressors might compound the challenges of climate change in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, the newspaper reported. Clint Francis, an ecology professor at California Polytechnic, said early studies that examined whether excessive noise and light decreased bird populations were done in more urban settings, where the birds were threatened by prowling cats, toxic chemicals and speeding cars. The next step is to isolate either noise or light in a rural area …

Researchers in the United States have shown for the first time they can safely and effectively infect human volunteers with Zika virus, a step toward learning more about the disease and developing vaccines and treatments.   The study – known as a “controlled human infection model” – has previously been controversial for Zika because of the risks to participants and lack of treatments.  But U.S. regulators and the World Health Organization ruled the new model, developed by a team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was safe and scientifically important.   Zika is a viral infection spread by mosquitoes, which is usually mild or asymptomatic.  But a major outbreak in the Americas in 2015 and 2016 showed it can be dangerous for pregnant women and fetuses, causing devastating birth defects such as microcephaly, a disorder in which a child is born with an abnormally small head and …

The World Health Organization warns that tens of thousands of survivors of a series of powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquakes that struck western Afghanistan’s Herat province between October 7 and 15 are in desperate need of humanitarian aid and essential health services. “I have personally seen how these multiple earthquakes flattened villages, displaced thousands of people and left many families in urgent need of humanitarian and health assistance,” said Alaa AbouZeid, health emergencies team lead for WHO Afghanistan. Speaking in Kabul on Friday, AbouZeid said, “Over 114,000 people are in urgent need of lifesaving health assistance. … The health consequences are staggering.” Those most seriously affected by the disaster, he said, are women, girls, boys and the elderly, “who account for over 90% of the deaths and injuries. Many children are left orphaned.” The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reports that the earthquakes directly affected more than …

India successfully carried out Saturday the first of a series of key test flights after overcoming a technical glitch ahead of its planned mission to take astronauts into space by 2025, the space agency said. The test involved launching a module to outer space and bringing it back to earth to test the spacecraft’s crew escape system, said the Indian Space Research Organization chief S. Somanath, and was being recovered after its touchdown in the Bay of Bengal. The launch was delayed by 45 minutes in the morning because of weather conditions. The attempt was again deferred by more than an hour because of an issue with the engine, and the ground computer put the module’s liftoff on hold, said Somanath. The glitch caused by a monitoring anomaly in the system was rectified and the test was carried out successfully 75 minutes later from the Sriharikota satellite launching station in …

It’s been a month since a Maryland man became the second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig — and hospital video released Friday shows he’s working hard to recover. Lawrence Faucette was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine offered the highly experimental surgery. In the first glimpse of Faucette provided since the September 20 transplant, hospital video shows physical therapist Chris Wells urging him to smile while pushing through a pedaling exercise to regain his strength.  “That’s going to be tough, but I’ll work it out,” Faucette, 58, replied, breathing heavily but giving a smile.  The Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another dying man. David Bennett survived just two months before that heart failed, …

Astronomers have detected an intense flash of radio waves coming from what looks like a merger of galaxies dating to about 8 billion years ago — the oldest-known instance of a phenomenon called a fast radio burst that continues to defy explanation.  This burst in less than a millisecond unleashed the amount of energy our sun emits in three decades, researchers said. It was detected using the Australian SKA Pathfinder, a radio telescope in the state of Western Australia. Its location was pinpointed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, one of the most powerful optical telescopes.  A fast radio burst, or FRB, is a pulse of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation. It lasts a small fraction of a second but outshines most other sources of radio waves in the universe. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.  “The radio waves in FRBs are similar to …

With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic, a study said Thursday. Last month Hurricane Lee went from barely a hurricane at 129 kph to the most powerful Category 5 hurricane with 249 kph winds in 24 hours. In 2017, before it devastated Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria went from a Category 1 storm with 145 kph to a top-of-the-chart whopper with 257 kph winds in just 15 hours. The study looked at 830 Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1971. It found that in the last 20 years, 8.1% of the time storms powered from a Category 1 minor storm to a major hurricane in just 24 hours. That happened only 3.2% of the time from 1971-90, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. Category 1 hurricanes top out at …

Burkina Faso’s health ministry has declared a dengue fever epidemic amid the deadliest outbreak in years. More than 200 people have died, and new cases are rising sharply. There have been 50,478 suspected cases and 214 deaths of the mosquito-borne illness this year, the ministry said in a statement released on Wednesday, mostly in the urban centers of the capital, Ouagadougou, and Bobo Dioulasso. It said about 20% of the cases and deaths were recorded last week alone. Dengue kills an estimated 20,000 people worldwide each year. Rates of the disease have risen eightfold since 2000, driven largely by climate change, the increased movement of people and urbanization. The World Health Organization this month warned that the disease would become a major threat in new parts of Africa as warmer temperatures create conditions for the mosquitoes carrying the infection to spread. Dengue is spread by infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Symptoms …

Australian researchers say they have produced the most comprehensive view of the history of the universe to date. An Australian National University team says their study offers new ideas about how the universe might have started. The research team says the study’s aim was to understand the origins of all the objects in the universe. The U.S. space agency, NASA, says the universe “includes all of space, and all the matter and energy that space contains. It even includes time itself and, of course, it includes you.” NASA adds that “the Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe — all of them, including our own, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers.” The Australian team says it has created the most comprehensive chart ever created of the history of the universe. The lead author is honorary associate professor Charley Lineweaver. He …

U.N. inspectors took samples from a fish market near the Fukushima nuclear power plant on Thursday following the release of wastewater from the wrecked facility in August. China and Russia have banned Japanese seafood imports since the discharge began but Japan says it is safe, a view backed so far by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Some 540 Olympic swimming pools worth of water have been collected since a tsunami sent three reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi into meltdown in 2011 in one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters. Japan says that the water has been filtered by its special ALPS technology of radioactive substances — except tritium — and diluted with seawater. Japan says tests have shown that tritium levels are within safe limits. The IAEA team comprising scientists from China, South Korea and Canada were collecting fish, water and sediment samples this week to verify Japan’s findings. Paul McGinnity, …