The Trump administration is seeking a 17 percent cut to the budget of the government’s meteorological agency that monitors the climate and issues daily weather forecasts, the Washington Post reported Friday. Citing a four-page budget memo, the Post said the proposed reductions in the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would affect research and satellite programs and eliminate funding for some smaller programs. NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, whose overall budget “would be hit by an overall 18 percent reduction from its current funding level,” it said. The paper did not give a total figure for the proposed cuts, but said the White House Office of Management and Budget outline for the Commerce Department’s budget for fiscal year 2018 included sharp reductions for specific parts of NOAA. The agency’s satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the …

Science students from across Africa met in Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare to share their ideas and inventions at the inaugural Africa Science Buskers Festival. The event, which organizers say targets more than 20,000 students in Zimbabwe alone, aims to inspire and develop a love of science among primary and secondary schoolchildren. Among the participants in Harare is Jan-Williem Verhoef, 13, of the Hoerskool Garsfontein School in South Africa. The aspiring scientist exhibited what he says is his own discovery, inspired by his “habit of being lazy.” In 10 years, he predicts, Africa will have a self-washing car on the market. “I have a bad habit of being lazy, and every Sunday I am being pledged to wash my dad’s car and I strongly disagree with that,” he explained. “Basically, I looked into nature and found that the white flower has property of staying clean in very dirty, unclean conditions. This …

A genetic “mutational meltdown” helped push the woolly mammoth toward extinction, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say they compared genetic material from mammoths when they were plentiful and material from when the population was in decline. What they found was “genome deterioration” that reflected the smaller population size. The findings are a warning to conservationists that keeping a small pool of endangered animals could result in inbreeding and genomic meltdown. “There is a long history of theoretical work about how genomes might change in small populations. Here we got a rare chance to look at snapshots of genomes ‘before’ and ‘after’ a population decline in a single species,” said Rebekah Rogers, who led the work as a postdoctoral scholar at Berkeley and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “The results we found were consistent with this …

Friday is U.N. World Wildlife Day, which aims to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants. This year’s theme is “Listen to the Young Voices,” but many campaigners warn that future generations may never see many of the species around today because they are on the brink of extinction, mostly because of human activity. That includes the hidden wildlife beneath the oceans, at increasing risk from the huge amount of plastics filling our seas — from microbeads in cosmetics to industrial-scale waste. “Twelve million tons of plastic is entering the oceans every year, which is about a rubbish truck’s worth of plastic every single minute,” said Louisa Casson of Greenpeace’s London office. “Plastic is entering every single level of the ocean food chain, and marine creatures from zooplankton up to blue whales are choking on plastics. They are ingesting it, and they are getting tangled up …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, better known as drones, are increasingly being used in emergency situations. But safety concerns in a congested airspace prompted the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to limit their use. Researchers from the University of Maryland hope the regulations will be eased for drones making emergency medical deliveries. VOA’s George Putic reports. …