Magazine

washington — NASA’s rover Perseverance on Mars has made what could be its most astonishing discovery to date: possible signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The six-wheeled robotic explorer came across an intriguing, arrow-shaped rock dubbed “Cheyava Falls” that may harbor fossilized microbes from billions of years ago, when Mars was a watery world.

Perseverance drilled into the enigmatic rock to collect a core sample on July 21, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley.

The samples carefully stowed beneath the rover’s belly are destined to eventually return to Earth, where they will undergo more comprehensive analysis.

“Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance,” project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech said Thursday.

Three compelling clues have scientists buzzing.

White calcium sulfate veins run the length of the rock, a telltale sign that water once flowed through it.

Between these veins is a reddish middle area, teeming with organic compounds, as detected by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument.

Finally, tiny off-white splotches ringed with black, reminiscent of leopard spots, contain chemicals that suggest energy sources for ancient microbes, according to scans by the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument.

“On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

The quest to confirm ancient Martian life is far from over, however.

The real test will come when Perseverance’s precious rock samples are returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return Program, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency slated for the 2030s.

While there are alternative explanations for these findings that do not involve microbes, there is a tantalizing chance that Perseverance’s core sample might contain actual fossilized microbes — potentially making history as the first proof of life beyond Earth.

“We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable,” said Farley.

“Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give. To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories,” he explained.
…

washington — Thousands of policymakers, health care professionals and advocates gathered this week in Munich, Germany, to take stock of the global fight against HIV as they try to meet the 2030 deadline set by world leaders for eliminating AIDS as a public health threat.

Advocates hailed sub-Saharan Africa’s progress in the global HIV response, with tens of millions of people now on lifesaving drugs.

A new UNAIDS survey released during the conference reported that “approximately 30.7 million of the estimated 39.9 million people living with HIV globally were receiving antiretroviral therapy in 2023.”

The report called that result a “landmark public health achievement,” and health officials at the conference said it would not be possible without the “immense political will” of regional leaders and NGOs.

Anne Githuku-Shongwe, the UNAIDS regional director for eastern and southern Africa, told VOA from Johannesburg that recently there has been a “huge focus” on ensuring that anyone living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa gets access to testing and treatment to ensure virus suppression, so the virus becomes untransmissible.

“The data is telling us that 84% of people living with HIV in our region have access to treatment. And 94% of those on treatment have been able to keep [the virus] suppressed so it is untransmissible,” she said.

However, Githuku-Shongwe pointed out that despite the progress that has been made, some countries in Africa are lagging behind in the battle against HIV/AIDS, partly because of civil wars, humanitarian setbacks and sheer negligence. She mentioned South Sudan, Angola, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and the Comoros as examples.

“[Countries] like Mauritius are barely at 50% of the treatment target,” she said, adding that another critical challenge being faced is the lack of attention to children living with the virus.

The report said children aged 0-14 years are still contracting HIV. An estimated 120,000 children got the virus in 2023, bringing the number of children living with HIV globally to 1.4 million, 86% of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UNAIDS report.

Worries about donor funding

Githuku-Shongwe said there have been major investments from partners – particularly from PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative to tackle the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She noted that in some countries, up to 99% of the HIV response is externally funded.

“But with time we are seeing that dwindling,” she said.

Nearly $19.8 billion was available in 2023 for HIV programs in low- and middle-income countries, almost $9.5 billion short of the amount needed by 2025, the report said.

Catherine Connor, vice president in charge of public policy and advocacy at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, a Washington nonprofit, told VOA from Munich that the data on infections in children were “troubling” and pointed to a lackadaisical approach toward pediatric HIV.

“The report clearly shows that children are one out of every 10 new infections, which is really high,” she said. “But there’s also an outsized mortality issue around children. Children make up 3% of the HIV-infected population, but they represent 12% of deaths.”

Connor said there’s inequity in treatment, particularly for children living with HIV.

“Children can’t take themselves to clinics. They often don’t even know they’ve been exposed to HIV,” she said. “So they really rely on caregivers, the community around them, to ensure not just that they can be identified as being HIV-exposed or potentially HIV-positive, but also get the needed support to maintain their health, even if they are on treatment.”

Connor concluded that world leaders and policymakers should be made aware how significant it is to act on HIV prevention, because if the world fails to take steps to curtail the virus, then “we will not end AIDS.”

“It’s almost like having a dam holding back a river of water,” she said.

“HIV is preventable and treatable, but it is not curable. And so, if we let cracks in that dam get so bad, it’s going to break, and we are going to see a reemergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in ways we have never seen,” Connor said.
…

…

washington — This week, as Taiwan was preparing for the start of its Han Kuang military exercises, its air defense system detected a Chinese drone circling the island. This was the sixth time that China had sent a drone to operate around Taiwan since 2023.

Drones like the one that flew around Taiwan, which are tasked with dual-pronged missions of reconnaissance and intimidation, are just a small part of a broader trend that is making headlines from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait and is changing the face of warfare. 

The increasing role that unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, play and rising concern about a Chinese invasion of democratically ruled Taiwan is pushing Washington, Beijing and Taipei to improve the sophistication, adaptability and cost of drone technology.

‘Hellscape’ strategy

Last August, the Pentagon launched a $1 billion Replicator Initiative to create air, sea and land drones in the “multiple thousands,” according to the Defense Department’s Innovation Unit. The Pentagon aims to build that force of drones by August 2025.

The initiative is part of what U.S. Admiral Samuel Paparo recently described to The Washington Post as a “hellscape” strategy, which aims to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan through the deployment of thousands of unmanned drones in the air and sea between the island and China.

“The benefits of unmanned systems are that you get cheap, disposable mass that’s low cost. If a drone gets shot down, the only people that are crying about it are the accountants,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University. “You can use them at large amounts of scale and overwhelm your opponents as well as degrade their defensive capabilities.”

The hellscape strategy, he added, aims to use lots of cheap drones to try to hold back China from attacking Taiwan.

Drone manufacturing supremacy

China has its own plans under way and is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones. In a news briefing after Paparo’s remarks to the Post, it warned Washington that it was playing with fire. 

“Those who clamor for turning others’ homeland into hell should get ready for burning in hell themselves,” said Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese defense ministry.

“The People’s Liberation Army is able to fight and win in thwarting external interference and safeguarding our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Threats and intimidation never work on us,” Wu said.

China’s effort to expand its use of drones has been bolstered, analysts say, by leader Xi Jinping’s emphasis on technology and modernization in the military, something he highlighted at a top-level party meeting last week.

“China’s military is developing more than 50 types of drones with varying capabilities, amassing a fleet of tens of thousands of drones, potentially 10 times larger than Taiwan and the U.S. combined,” Michael Raska, assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told VOA in an email. “This quantitative edge currently fuels China’s accelerating military modernization, with drones envisioned for everything from pre-conflict intel gathering to swarming attacks.”

Analysts add that China’s commercial drone manufacturing supremacy aids its military in the push for drone development. China’s DJI dominates in production and sale of household drones, accounting for 76% of the worldwide consumer market in 2021.

The scale of production and low price of DJI drones could put China in an advantageous position in a potential drone war, analysts say.

“In Russia and Ukraine, if you have a lot of drones – even if they’re like the commercial off-the-shelf things, DJI drones you can buy at Costco – and you throw hundreds of them at an air defense system, that’s going to create a large problem,” said Major Emilie Stewart, a research analyst at the China Aerospace Studies Institute.

China denies it is seeking to use commercial UAV technology for future conflicts.

“China has always been committed to maintaining global security and regional stability and has always opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA. “We are firmly opposed to the U.S.’s military ties with Taiwan and its effort of arming Taiwan.”

Drone force

With assistance from its American partners, pressure from China and lessons from Ukraine, Taiwan has been pushing to develop its own domestic drone warfare capabilities.

The United States has played a pivotal role in Taiwan’s drone development, and just last week it pledged to sell $360 million of attack drones to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, or TECRO, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington.

“Taiwan will continue to build a credible deterrence and work closely with like-minded partners, including the United States, to preserve peace and stability in the region,” TECRO told VOA when asked about the collaboration between Taipei and Washington. “We have no further information to share at this moment.”

The effort to incorporate drones into its defense is crucial for Taiwan, said Eric Chan, a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.

“The biggest immediate effects of the U.S. coming into this mass UAV game is to give Taiwan a bigger advantage to be able to, first, detect their enemy and, second, help them build a backstop to their own capabilities as well,” Chan said.

With the potential for China to consider using drones in an urban conflict environment, Taiwan is recognizing the importance of stepping up its counter-drone defense systems.

“After multiple intrusions of Chinese drones in outlying islands, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense now places great emphasis on anti-drone capabilities,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, chief executive of Tron Future, an anti-drone company working with the Taiwanese military.

The demand is one that Wang said his company is willing and ready to fill.
…

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. 

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement. 

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said. 

Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.” 

“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said. 

A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said. 

“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh. 

Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers. 

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. 

The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012. 

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union. 

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
…

United Nations — The U.N. Secretary-General warned Thursday that the Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, killing nearly a half-million people annually, and he blamed fossil fuels for driving global warming.

“Billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic — wilting under increasingly deadly heat waves, with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius around the world. That’s 122 degrees Fahrenheit. And halfway to boiling,” Antonio Guterres told reporters.

Sunday was the Earth’s hottest day on record, only to have the record broken the following day. Temperatures have been rising steadily, with scientists declaring the last 13 consecutive months all heat record-breakers. Urban areas are heating up at twice the global average.

Heat waves have killed scores of people this year in India and in Africa’s Sahel region. Last month, extreme heat killed 1,300 Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. This month, Europe, the United States and Asia have also seen exceptional heat.

He said that the World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization estimate that improvements to heat health warning systems in 57 countries could save nearly 100,000 lives a year.

Fossil fuels

Guterres has repeatedly called on greenhouse gas emitters to meet the 2015 Paris Climate Accord’s target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a goal that many worry is slipping away. He said that fossil fuel expansion and new coal plants are obstacles to meeting that target.

“I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” he said. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future.”

He urged leaders to quickly and fairly phase out fossil fuels and end new coal projects.

“The G20 must shift fossil fuel subsidies to renewables and support vulnerable countries and communities,” he said of the world’s largest economies.

And he urged more climate adaptation and mitigation financing from the richest countries — which are the biggest emitters — to help the poorest, most vulnerable nations that have contributed the least to global warming.

Guterres said he is launching a global call to action focused on caring for the most vulnerable, including protecting workers who are exposed to extreme heat.

“A new report from the International Labor Organization — being released today — warns that over 70% of the global workforce — 2.4 billion people — are now at high risk of extreme heat,” he said.

In addition to the rights and health of individual workers, there are economic impacts of extreme heat too.

“Heat stress at work is projected to cost the global economy $2.4 trillion by 2030. Up from $280 billion in the mid-1990s,” Guterres said, adding measures need to be taken to “heat proof” critical sectors of the global economy, like farming and construction work.

The U.N. chief warned that extreme heat widens social inequality, undermines development, furthers food insecurity, and pushes people deeper into poverty.

“Leaders across the board must wake up and step up,” he said.
…

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A super Jupiter has been spotted around a neighboring star by the Webb Space Telescope — and it has a super orbit. 

The planet is roughly the same diameter as Jupiter, but with six times the mass. Its atmosphere is also rich in hydrogen like Jupiter’s. 

One big difference: It takes this planet more than a century, possibly as long as 250 years, to go around its star. It’s 15 times the distance from its star than Earth is to the sun. 

Scientists had long suspected a big planet circled this star 12 light-years away, but not this massive or far from its star. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. These new observations show the planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A, part of a three-star system. 

An international team led by Max Planck Institute for Astronomy’s Elisabeth Matthews in Germany collected the images last year and published the findings Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

Astronomers directly observed the incredibly old and cold gas giant — a rare and tricky feat — by masking the star through use of a special shading device on Webb. By blocking the starlight, the planet stood out as a pinpoint of infrared light. 

The planet and star clock in at 3.5 billion years old, 1 billion years younger than our own solar system, but still considered old and brighter than expected, according to Matthews. 

The star is so close and bright to our own solar system that it’s visible with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Don’t bet on life, though. 

“This is a gas giant with no hard surface or liquid water oceans,” Matthews said in an email. 

It’s unlikely this solar system sports more gas giants, she said, but small rocky worlds could be lurking there. 

Worlds similar to Jupiter can help scientists understand “how these planets evolve over giga-year timescales,” she said. 

The first planets outside our solar system — dubbed exoplanets — were confirmed in the early 1990s. NASA’s tally now stands at 5,690 as of mid-July. The vast majority were detected via the transit method, in which a fleeting dip in starlight, repeated at regular intervals, indicates an orbiting planet. 

Telescopes in space and also on the ground are on the hunt for even more, especially planets that might be similar to Earth. 

Launched in 2021, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb telescope is the biggest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever placed in space.
…

A group of young African students is shooting for the stars thanks to a program called ‘Pathways to Space.’ Aerospace company Boeing and a South African science organization backed an education program that just celebrated its first batch of graduates. Vicky Stark reports from Cape Town.
…

…

…

…

…

Geneva — A senior World Health Organization official expressed alarm Tuesday at the high risk of polio spreading within the Gaza Strip because of dire sanitary conditions in the war-wracked enclave, and that the paralytic disease it causes could spill across borders without prompt action to stem the outbreak.

“I am, like, super worried,” Dr. Avadil Saparbekov, team lead for health emergencies at the WHO in the occupied Palestinian territory, told journalists from Jerusalem. “I am extremely worried about an outbreak happening in Gaza … and that it may spill over internationally at a very high point.” 

Saparbekov, who recently returned from a weeklong visit to Gaza, confirmed that “circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2” has been identified in samples of Gazan sewage assessed by researchers and that an epidemiological probe “to identify the potential source of this importation” is underway.

“Based on the results of the assessment, WHO and the GPEI (Global Polio Eradication Initiative) partners will consolidate a set of recommendations, including the need for a mass vaccination campaign,” he said.

On July 16, the Global Polio Laboratory Network isolated the virus in six environmental surveillance samples collected from sewage on June 23 in Khan Younis and Deir al Balah in Gaza.

The WHO reports that further genomic sequencing of the samples by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that they are related to environmental samples that were circulating in Egypt during the second half of last year.

“It is important to note that poliovirus has been isolated from environmental samples only at this time; no associated paralytic cases have been detected,” Saparbekov stressed.

Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus is transmitted from person to person mainly through the fecal-oral route. It can invade a person’s nervous system and cause paralysis and death.

“We have not yet collected the human samples to identify any viruses because of the lack of equipment to collect those and lack of capacity to test those samples,” Saparbekov said, noting that WHO and UNICEF teams entering Gaza on Thursday will bring up to 50 sample collection kits “so we will be able to collect human samples, stool samples from humans.”

The samples, he said, will be sent to a lab in Jordan to confirm any cases of infection.

“Until that is done, I cannot say that there are any humans that are affected with this circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus,” he said.

The WHO said that wild poliovirus was eliminated more than 25 years ago in the Palestinian territories. Before the start of the war in Gaza, following a vicious attack on Israel by Hamas militants on October 7, the U.N. health agency says 89% of the population was vaccinated against polio, primarily conducted through routine immunization.

Last Sunday, Israel’s military said it would offer polio vaccinations to soldiers serving in Gaza to protect against the paralytic disease.

Saparbekov said the WHO will be reaching out to COGAT, the Israeli authority responsible for the coordination of government activities in the Palestinian territories, “to see how they can facilitate” the response to the outbreak. One way to do that, he added, is to have vaccines available for Gazans in case “there is a decision to conduct a mass campaign.”

“We have so far received assurances that this will be done,” he said.

The WHO official expressed hope that the epidemiological investigation and risk assessment would be completed by the end of the week, such that his team “will have a joint recommendation from the GPEI network about what to do with this particular outbreak” by Sunday.

In the meantime, he said, aid workers are doing their best to inform the population as to health measures they must take to prevent a polio outbreak.

“Given the water and sanitation limitations in Gaza, it will be very difficult for the population to follow the advice to wash their hands, to drink safe water,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the majority that live in shelters with one toilet for 600 people and maybe 1.5 liters of water per person, will definitely not be able to follow the recommendations that we are providing,” he said.

While reiterating concerns about polio spreading in the Palestinian enclave, WHO health emergency chief Saparbekov said he also is very worried about the possible outbreak of other communicable diseases.

“We had Hepatitis A confirmed last year and now we may have a polio outbreak,” he said. “So, with the crippled health system, lack of water and sanitation, as well as lack of access of the population to health services, specifically primary health services, this is going to be a very bad situation that will happen in Gaza.

“We may have more people dying from communicable diseases than from injuries and related conditions,” he warned.
…

Some people who have lost the ability to speak can still move their vocal cords. California researchers are working to transform those muscle movements into audible speech. Genia Dulot reports from Los Angeles in this week’s edition of LogOn.
…

United Nations — Nearly 40 million people were living with the HIV virus that causes AIDS last year, over 9 million weren’t getting any treatment, and the result was that every minute someone died of AIDS-related causes, the U.N. said in a new report launched Monday.

While advances are being made to end the global AIDS pandemic, the report said progress has slowed, funding is shrinking, and new infections are rising in three regions: the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America.

In 2023, around 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses, a significant decline from the 2.1 million deaths in 2004. But the latest figure is more than double the target for 2025 of fewer than 250,000 deaths, according to the report by UNAIDS, the U.N. agency leading the global effort to end the pandemic.

Gender inequality is exacerbating the risks for girls and women, the report said, citing the extraordinarily high incidence of HIV among adolescents and young women in parts of Africa.

The proportion of new infections globally among marginalized communities that face stigma and discrimination – sex workers, men who have sex with men, and people who inject drugs also increased to 55% in 2023 from 45% in 2010, it said.

UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima said: “World leaders pledged to end the AIDS pandemic as a public health threat by 2030, and they can uphold their promise, but only if they ensure that the HIV response has the resources it needs, and that the human rights of everyone are protected.”

As part of that pledge, leaders vowed to reduce annual new HIV infections to below 370,000 by 2025, but the report said in 2023 new infections were more than three times higher at 1.3 million.

Last year, among the 39.9 million people globally living with HIV, 86% knew they were infected, 77% were accessing treatment, and for 72% the virus was suppressed, the report said

Cesar Nunez, director of the UNAIDS New York office, told a news conference there has been progress in HIV treatments — injections that can stay in the body for six months, but the two doses cost $40,000 yearly, out of reach for all but the richest people with the virus.

He said UNAIDS has been asking the manufacturer to make it available at lower cost to low and middle-income countries.

Nunez said there have also been seven cases where people with HIV who were treated for leukemia emerged with no sign of the HIV virus in their system.

He said injections and the seven cases will be discussed at the 25th International AIDS Conference which began Monday in Munich.

At present, he said, daily treatment with pills costs about $75 per person per year. It has allowed many countries to increase the number of people with HIV to receive treatment.

Nunez said UNAIDS will continue advocating for a vaccine to prevent AIDS.
…