Month: April 2023

Looking back at 2022’s weather with months of analysis, the World Meteorological Organization said last year really was as bad as it seemed when people were muddling through it.

And about as bad as it gets — until more warming kicks in.

Killer floods, droughts and heat waves hit around the world, costing many billions of dollars. Global ocean heat and acidity levels hit record highs and Antarctic sea ice and European Alps glaciers reached record low amounts, according to the United Nations’ climate agency’s State of Global Climate 2022 report released Friday.

While levels have been higher before human civilization, global sea height and the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane in the air reached highest modern recorded amounts. The key glaciers that scientists use as a health check for the world shrank by more than 1.3 meters (51 inches) in just one year and for the first time in history no snow survived the summer melt season on Switzerland’s glaciers, the report said.

Sea level is now rising at about double the rate it did in the 1990s, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a news conference. Oceans can rise another half a meter to a meter (20 to 39 inches) by the end of century as more ice melts from ice sheets and glaciers and warmer water expands, he said.

“Unfortunately these negative trends in weather patterns and all of these parameters may continue until the 2060s” despite efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases because of the pollution already spewed, Taalas said. “We have already lost this melting of this glaciers game and sea level rise game. So that’s bad news.”

Last year was close to but not quite the hottest year on record, ranking fifth or sixth hottest depending on measuring techniques. But the past eight years are the hottest eight years on record globally. The world kept that warm despite the rare third year of a La Nina, a natural temporary cooling of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide.

The United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand had their hottest years on record.

Global heat and other weather records go back to 1850.

“In 2022, continuous drought in East Africa, record breaking rainfall in Pakistan and record-breaking heat waves in China and Europe affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage,” Taalas said.

China’s heat wave was its longest and most extensive in that country’s record with its summer not just hottest on record but smashing the old record by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the 55-page report said.

Africa’s drought displaced more than 1.7 million people in Somalia and Ethiopia, while Pakistan’s devastating flooding — which put one-third of the nation under water at one point — displaced about 8 million people, the report said.
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Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated, a move that comes after the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee.

Among those no longer labeled was National Public Radio in the U.S., which announced last week that it would stop using Twitter after its main account was designated state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.

Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — said it was still misleading.

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Swedish public radio made similar decisions to quit tweeting. CBC’s government-funded label vanished Friday, along with the state-affiliated tags on media accounts including Sputnik and RT in Russia and Xinhua in China.

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users on Thursday lost the blue checks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors.

Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks used to mean the account was verified by Twitter to be who it says it is.

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, all three had blue checks indicating that the account paid for verification.

King, for one, said he hadn’t paid.

“My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you know.”

In a reply to King’s tweet, Musk said “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet he said he’s “paying for a few personally.” He later tweeted he was just paying for King, Shatner and James.

Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the site’s verification system “is an absolute mess.”

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now,” Warwick said. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could (and will) be going toward my extra hot lattes.”

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check (which is actually a white check mark in a blue background).

For users who still had a blue check Thursday, a popup message indicated that the account “is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number and they verified that they have access to it — it does not confirm the person’s identity.

It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks Thursday. Many government agencies, nonprofits and public-service accounts around the world found themselves no longer verified, raising concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.

While Twitter offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it’s not clear how the platform doles these out.

The official Twitter account of the New York City government, which earlier had a blue check, tweeted on Thursday that “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the New York City Government This is the only account for @NYCGov run by New York City government” in an attempt to clear up confusion.

A newly created spoof account with 36 followers (also without a blue check), disagreed: “No, you’re not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.”

Soon, another spoof account — purporting to be Pope Francis — weighed in too: “By the authority vested in me, Pope Francis, I declare @NYC_GOVERNMENT the official New York City Government. Peace be with you.”

Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue as of Thursday, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.

Musk’s move has riled up some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the marks were unfair. But it is not an obvious money-maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.

Digital intelligence platform Similarweb analyzed how many people signed up for Twitter Blue on their desktop computers and only detected 116,000 confirmed sign-ups last month, which at $8 or $11 per month does not represent a major revenue stream. The analysis did not count accounts bought via mobile apps.

After buying San Francisco-based Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.

Twitter began tagging profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago. Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names.

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.
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The Supreme Court is facing a self-imposed Friday night deadline to decide whether women’s access to a widely used abortion pill will stay unchanged or be restricted while a legal challenge to its Food and Drug Administration approval goes on.

The justices are weighing arguments that allowing restrictions contained in lower-court rulings to take effect would severely disrupt the availability of the drug, mifepristone, which is used in the most common abortion method in the United States.

It has repeatedly been found to be safe and effective, and has been used by more than 5 million women in the U.S. since the FDA approved it in 2000.

The Supreme Court had initially said it would decide by Wednesday whether the restrictions could take effect while the case continues. A one-sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday gave the justices two additional days, without explanation.

The justices are scheduled to meet for a private conference Friday, where they could talk about the issue. The additional time could be part of an effort to craft an order that has broad support among the justices. Or one or more justices might be writing a separate opinion, and asked for a couple of extra days.

The challenge to mifepristone, brought by abortion foes, is the first abortion controversy to reach the nation’s highest court since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade 10 months ago and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

In his majority opinion, Alito said one reason for overturning Roe was to remove federal courts from the abortion fight. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he wrote.

But even with their court victory, abortion opponents returned to federal court with a new target: medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions in the United States.

Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol. The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access.

The abortion opponents filed suit in Texas in November, asserting that FDA’s original approval of mifepristone 23 years ago and subsequent changes were flawed.

They won a ruling on April 7 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, revoking FDA approval of mifepristone. The judge gave the Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, mifepristone’s maker, a week to appeal and seek to keep his ruling on hold.

Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Englehardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.

Their ruling would effectively nullify changes made by the FDA starting in 2016, including extending from seven to 10 weeks of pregnancy when mifepristone can be safely used. The court also said that the drug can’t be mailed or dispensed as a generic and that patients who seek it need to make three in-person visits with a doctor. Women also might be required to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.

The administration and Danco have said that chaos will result if those restrictions take effect while the case proceeds. Potentially adding to the confusion, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone under the current rules in 17 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed a separate lawsuit.

The Biden administration has said the rulings conflict and create an untenable situation for the FDA.

And a new legal wrinkle threatens even more complications. GenBioPro, which makes the generic version of mifepristone, filed a lawsuit Wednesday to preemptively block the FDA from removing its drug from the market, in the event that the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene.

For now, the Supreme Court is only being asked to block the lower-court rulings through the end of the legal case. But the administration and Danco have a fallback argument if the court doesn’t agree. They are asking the court to take up the challenge to mifepristone, hear arguments and decide the case by early summer.

The court only rarely takes such a step before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.

The New Orleans-based 5th circuit already has ordered an accelerated schedule for hearing the case, with arguments set for May 17.
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The CEO of TikTok tried to calm critics’ fears about the security of his company’s app during an appearance Thursday.

Shou Chew was asked at a TED2023 Possibility conference if he could guarantee Beijing would not use the TikTok app, owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, to interfere in future U.S. elections.

“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew said. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can, how we can reduce this risk to as low as zero as possible.”

Chew made the comments in Vancouver at the TED organization’s annual convention, where artificial intelligence and safeguards were discussed.

U.S. lawmakers and officials are ratcheting up threats to ban TikTok, saying the Chinese-owned video-sharing app used by millions of Americans poses a threat to privacy and U.S. national security.

U.S. lawmakers have grilled Chew over concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted in March, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”

U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more blunt in February, telling the committee, “Make no mistake, TikTok is a national security threat. … It’s a spy balloon in your phone.”

He was referencing a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the United States in early February before being shot down off the southeastern U.S. coast.

Several governments, including Canada and the U.S., have banned the TikTok app from government-issued smartphones, citing concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

Chew says TikTok has never stored data from Americans on servers in China.

“All new U.S. data is already stored in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So it’s in this protected U.S. environment that we talked about in the United States,” he said. “We still have some legacy data to delete in our own servers in Virginia and in Singapore. Our data has never been stored in China.”

“It’s going to take us a while to delete them, but I expect it to be done this year,” he said.

Chew also emphasized TikTok’s efforts to moderate content. When asked how many people are reviewing content posted to the platform, Chew said the numbers and cost are huge.

“The group is based in Ireland and it’s a lot of people. It’s tens of thousands of people,” Chew said. “It’s one of the most important cost items. And I think it’s completely worth it.”

Speaking to a TED conference dominated by discussions of artificial intelligence, Chew said a lot of moderation on TikTok is done by machines.

“The machines are good, they’re quite good, but they’re not as good as you know, they’re not perfect at this point. So you have to complement it with a lot of human beings today,” he said.

VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report. 
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While artificial intelligence, or AI, is not new, the speed at which the technology is developing and its implications for societies are, for many, a cause for wonder and alarm.

ChatGPT recently garnered headlines for doing things like writing term papers for university students.

Tom Graham and his company, Metaphysic.ai, have received attention for creating fake videos of actor Tom Cruise and re-creating Elvis Presley singing on an American talent show. Metaphysic was started to utilize artificial intelligence and create high-quality avatars of stars like Cruise or people from one’s own family or social circle.

Graham, who appeared at this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver, which began Monday and runs through Friday, said talking with an artificially created younger self or departed loved one can have tremendous benefits for therapy.

He added that the technology would allow actors to appear in movies without having to show up on set, or in ads with AI-generated sports stars.

“So, the idea of them being able to create ads without having to turn up is – it’s a match made in heaven,” Graham said. “The advertisers get more content. The sports people never have to turn up because they don’t want to turn up. And everyone just gets paid the same.”

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free teaching materials, sees AI as beneficial to education and a kind of one-on-one instruction: student and AI.

His organization is using artificial intelligence to supplement traditional instruction and make it more interactive.

“But now, they can talk to literary characters,” he said. “They can talk to fictional cats. They can talk to historic characters, potentially even talk to inanimate objects, like, we were talking about the Mississippi River. Or talk to the Empire State Building. Or talk to … you know, talk to Mount Everest. This is all possible.”

For Chris Anderson, who is in charge of TED – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread ideas, usually in the form of short speeches – conversations about artificial intelligence are the most important ones we can have at the moment. He said the organization’s role this year is to bring different parts of this rapidly emerging technology together.

“And the conversation can’t just be had by technologists,” he said. “And it can’t just be heard by politicians. And it can’t just be held by creatives. Everyone’s future is being affected. And so, we need to bring people together.”

For all of AI’s promise, there are growing calls for safeguards against misuse of the technology.

Computer scientist Yejin Choi at the University of Washington said policies and regulations are lagging because AI is moving so fast.

“And then there’s this question of whose guardrails are you going to install into AI,” she said. “So there’s a lot of these open questions right now. And ideally, we should be able to customize the guardrails for different cultures or different use cases.”

Another TED speaker this year, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has been studying AI for 20 years and is currently a senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California. He has a more pessimistic view of artificial intelligence and any type of safeguards.

“This eventually gets to the point where there is stuff smarter than us,” he said. “I think we are presently not on track to be able to handle that remotely gracefully. I think we all end up dead.”

Ready or not, societies are confronting the need to adapt to AI’s emergence.
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President Joe Biden announced plans Thursday to increase U.S. funding to help developing countries fight climate change and curb deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.

During a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, Biden urged his counterparts to be ambitious in setting goals to reduce emissions and meet a target of limiting overall global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“We’re at a moment of great peril but also great possibilities, serious possibilities. With the right commitment and follow-through from every nation … on this call, the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees can stay within reach,” Biden said.

The countries that take part in the forum account for about 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and global gross domestic product, according to the White House. Thursday’s meeting was the group’s fourth under Biden’s presidency.

Biden announced a U.S. contribution of $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which finances projects on clean energy and climate change resilience in developing countries, doubling the overall U.S. contribution.

“The impacts of climate change will be felt the most by those who have contributed the least to the problem, including developing nations,” Biden said. “As large economies and large emitters, we must step up and support these economies.”

Biden also announced plans to request $500 million over five years to contribute to the Amazon Fund, which works to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, and related activities. A senior administration official said Biden’s team would have to work with Congress to secure that funding.

“Together, we have to make it clear that forests are more valuable conserved than cleared,” Biden said.

Brazil welcomed the pledge.

“It is obviously a great achievement, both for what it means to have the United States contributing to a fund like the Amazon Fund and for the volume of resources to be contributed,” Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva said at a news conference.

Biden’s announcement comes during a week of tension between the U.S. and Brazil after the latter’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for Western powers to stop supplying arms to Ukraine and said Washington was encouraging the fighting between Ukraine and Russia. He later toned down his comments and condemned Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Biden, who has made fighting climate change one of his top policy priorities, has set a goal of reducing U.S. emissions 50%-52% by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed sweeping emission cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032 in an effort to boost electric vehicles. Biden encouraged leaders from the group to join a collective effort to spur zero-emission vehicles and to reduce emissions from the shipping and power industries.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a new European Union-led initiative to develop new global targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy alongside the International Energy Agency, in time for a global summit on climate change in November.

“These targets would complement other goals, such as the phaseout of unabated fossil fuels and the ambitious goals for zero-emission vehicles and ships,” she said at the meeting.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on rich countries to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, a decade before the goal set in the Paris climate agreement, and developing countries to hit that milestone by 2050.

He also called for OECD countries to phase out coal by 2030 and 2040 in all other countries and end all licensing or funding — public and private — of new fossil fuel projects.

Developing countries have resisted setting specific timelines for these reductions.

The countries and entities that make up the Major Economies Forum: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and Vietnam.
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This time it’s for real. 

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identities and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. 

After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t each pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system—many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific time. 

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure the users are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration. 

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to “Star Trek’s” William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’ blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk took his blue check away. 

‘Anyone could be me’

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could [and will] be going toward my extra hot lattes.” 

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check. 

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become undeserved or “corrupt” status symbols for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership. 

Twitter began tagging profiles with blue check marks about 14 years ago. One main reason for doing so was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names. 

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting a blue check to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to suspend the service days after its launch. 

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently. 
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SpaceX’s giant week meets a fiery end. But company officials still say the launch of Starship was a success. Plus, the European Space Agency sets sail for Jupiter’s icy moons. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The U.S. government and state legislators are ramping up efforts to limit the use of toxic chemicals known as PFAS (pronounced pee-fas) in everyday products and to regulate levels in drinking water. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias found out, scientists are going a step further by exploring ways to fully eliminate the so-called “forever chemicals.”
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SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.

The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.

Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”

The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys.

It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.

At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.

The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
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NY-AALESUND, NORWAY — At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing – and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future.

But around the tiny town of Ny-Aalesund, high above the Arctic circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientific data is getting harder to access. And sometimes it’s vanishing before scientists can collect it.

Scientists hoping to harvest ice cores are finding glaciers inundated by water. Research sites are getting harder to reach, as earlier springtime melt leaves the ground too barren for snowmobile travel.

Researchers have been studying the polar region for decades — with Ny-Aalesund’s weather records going back more than 40 years. But their work has become vitally important as climate change ramps up. That’s because what happens in the Arctic can impact global sea levels, storms in North America and Europe, and other factors far beyond the frozen region.

While the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, in Svalbard temperatures are climbing even faster — up to seven times the global average.

Last summer was the hottest on record. August temperatures in Ny-Aalesund were on average 5.1C degrees, about 0.5C warmer than normal for the month.

Polar bear sightings in Kongsfjord over the past four years have been higher than ever before, as the animals are left hungrier due partly to the loss of their sea ice hunting grounds and are more often prowling nearby islands in search of food as eight watchmen take turns patrolling the perimeter of Ny-Aalesund for polar bears.

Resting harbor seals alongside nesting seabird colonies are drawing the hungry carnivores closer, said Joanna Sulich, a biologist with the Norwegian Polar Institute and Polar Bears International.

“For many researchers who are studying those birds, it’s something of concern,” Sulich said.

Within the last decade, four buildings have been damaged by thawing permafrost, and last year Kings Bay SA, the state-owned company that manages the town, had to close down a laboratory where scientists processed samples from fish snow and ice due to thaw cracking its foundation.  

Bracing against wind gusts up to 15 meters per second (34 miles per hour), a team of scientists pitched camp this month on the Holtedahlfonna icefield, a 3-hour snowmobile drive from Ny-Aalesund riven with dangerous crevasses.

The team hoped to drill 125 meters into Dovrebreen glacier, hoping to collect two ice cores for studying 300 years of climate records – part of an effort by the non-profit Ice Memory Foundation to collect and preserve ice cores from melting glaciers around the world. 

The team was shocked when the drill, at only 25 meters deep, suddenly sloshed into a massive pool of water.

“We did not expect such a huge water flux coming out from the glacier, and this is a clear sign of what is happening in this region,” said expedition leader Andrea Spolaor. “The glacier is suffering.”  

On a snowfield a kilometer south of Ny-Aalesund, the chemist Francois Burgay filled plastic test tubes with snow, looking for chemical signals from marine algae blooms which travel from the ocean to the atmosphere and are deposited with the snow.

Once these signals are identified, he hopes scientists will be able to use them to understand how Arctic waters have changed in the past, and project how they might change in the future.
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Astronomers from around the world gathered in a small town in Western Australia for one of the wonders of the universe – a total eclipse of the sun.  First landfall occurred over the northwestern tip of Australia at Exmouth, along the Ningaloo Coast before moving on to parts of East Timor and Indonesia. 

Thousands of people gathered at the remote corner of the Western Australian coast to marvel at this rare cosmic symmetry when the sun, the moon and the Earth aligned.  

The total solar eclipse was part of a hybrid eclipse, which happens only a handful of times each century.  In Western Australia, it stretched across three hours.

The most dramatic part, when the sun was completely blocked out, lasted for barely a minute.  

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization radio astronomer Vanessa Moss told VOA total solar eclipses have intrigued and scared people through the ages.

“It reminds us about our place in the solar system,” she said. “These eclipses used to be mysterious things that people could not understand.  They used to be bad omens or scary things.  But now, thanks to science, thanks to technology that has advanced we can predict them but also just, you know, appreciate more of the wonders of it as opposed to be scared about it.  It is actually just a really cool phenomenon to experience.”

For those who were there it was an experience they will likely never forget.  

The last hybrid solar eclipse was in 2013.  NASA expects the next in 2031.

Scientists used the eclipse to study the Sun’s atmosphere and learn more about distant galaxies.
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By day, Jessica Wade spends her time in a laboratory at Imperial College London surrounded by spectrometers, oscilloscopes — and men.

At night, she writes biographies on Wikipedia about women researchers like her who don’t have an online presence.

“We can’t just do the shouting about how we need more women in science. We have to do the point of honoring and celebrating the women scientists that we have,” she told AFP.

“And I think writing their stories, making sure the world recognizes what they’ve done is a really important way to do that.”

Wade, 34, has worked at Imperial’s imposing campus in west London since 2016.

As a physicist, she is involved in developing new generations of carbon-based semi-conductors to make optical and electronic devices such as televisions and solar panels more energy efficient.

She leads a team of five people in a wider team of about 15. Of them, only one other scientist is a woman.

Science “is very male dominated,” Wade said, lamenting the lack of interest in it among girls whose parents are not scientists.

“As soon as I walked into a physics department that had a majority of men and a majority of people from white privileged backgrounds, I suddenly realized that not everyone’s getting the opportunity to study physics, not everyone’s getting excited about it,” she added.

“That lack of diversity impacts the science we do, the questions we ask, the directions we go in, the way we translate our innovations into society, where those kinds of devices are actually used in the world and who they benefit.”

Visibility

Wade now seeks to “take science to more people” but came across “knowledge gaps” in the internet’s free, multilingual, collaborative encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia is an amazing platform because it’s used by everyone in society,” she said.

“It’s used by 15 billion access points a month. Parents, teachers, policymakers, journalists, scientists, Amazon, Alexa, Google Home, they all use Wikipedia when they’re looking for information.”

But there is one big problem, she added: “About 90% of Wikipedia contributors and editors are men, and about 19% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women.”

Wade set out to redress the imbalance in 2018 and has since written almost 2,000 pages by herself at the rate of one a night, at home, after dinner.

“They take more than one hour each, so that’s already too many hours of my life,” she laughed.

But she is undeterred by the daunting task.

“I don’t see it stopping anytime soon,” she said.

In fact, the research itself creates more work, as she often discovers more women scientists when writing another biography.

Wades’ first Wikipedia biography entry was the American climatologist Kim Cobb.

She saw her at a conference but after looking her up on Wikipedia found there was nothing on her oceanographic research.

Acknowledgement

Wade, who is now part of a network of women editors and leads workshops on how to write for Wikipedia, says a person’s presence and their work on the internet means they are discoverable.

“Little girls who are googling something, let’s say about sea urchins, will click through and then land on a Wikipedia page about an awesome woman scientist who had contributed to that,” she said.

“If you’re trying to nominate someone for an award or to become a fellow or to invite someone to give a lecture, you always google them and if they’ve got a biography nicely summarized on somewhere like Wikipedia, it’s so much easier to write someone’s citation or reference.”

That happened for Gladys West, a 92-year-old black American mathematician, whose profile was one of Wade’s first.

Starting in 1956, when racial segregation was still imposed in the United States, she worked for 42 years on navy navigation systems. Her calculations eventually led to the development of GPS.

“I researched Gladys to write her page and there was so little about her online, she was almost 90 and no one had celebrated her,” she said.

“I put her Wikipedia page online in February 2018 and in May 2018 she was in the BBC top 100 women in the world.

“And then she was inducted to the US Air Force Hall of Fame, and she won the Royal Academy of Engineering Prince Philip medal, which had never before gone to a woman.”
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At least 67 million children partially or fully missed routine vaccines globally between 2019 and 2021 because of lockdowns and health care disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations said Wednesday.

“More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have been eroded,” read a new report from the U.N.’s children’s agency, UNICEF, adding that getting back on track “will be challenging.”

Of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million missed routine vaccines entirely, UNICEF said, flagging concerns about potential polio and measles outbreaks.

Vaccine coverage among children declined in 112 countries and the percent of children vaccinated worldwide slipped 5 percentage points to 81%, a low not seen since 2008. Africa and South Asia were particularly hard-hit.

“Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated,” the report said.

Vaccines save 4.4 million lives each year, a number the United Nations says could jump to 5.8 million by 2030 if its ambitious targets to leave “no one behind” are met.

“Vaccines have played a really important role in allowing more children to live healthy, long lives,” Brian Keeley, the report’s editor in chief, told AFP. “Any decline at all in vaccination rates is worrying.”

Before the introduction of a vaccine in 1963, measles killed about 2.6 million people each year, mostly children. By 2021, that number had fallen to 128,000.

But between 2019 and 2021, the percentage of children vaccinated against measles fell from 86% to 81%, and the number of cases in 2022 doubled compared with 2021.

The slide in vaccination rates could be compounded by other crises, Keeley warned, from climate change to food insecurity.

“You’ve got [an] increasing number of conflicts, economic stagnation in a lot of countries, climate emergencies, and so on,” he said. “This all sort of makes it harder and harder for health systems and countries to meet vaccination needs.”

UNICEF called on governments “to double-down on their commitment to increase financing for immunization” with special attention on accelerating “catch-up” vaccination efforts for those who missed their shots.

The report also raised concerns about a drop in people’s confidence in vaccines, seen in 52 out of 55 countries surveyed.

“We cannot allow confidence in routine immunizations to become another victim of the pandemic,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be of more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable diseases.”

Vaccine confidence can be “volatile and time specific,” the report said, noting that “further analysis will be required to determine if the findings are indicative of a longer-term trend” beyond the pandemic.

Overall, it said that support for vaccines “remains relatively strong.”

In about half of the 55 countries surveyed, more than 80% of respondents “perceived vaccines as important for children.”

“There is reason to be somewhat hopeful that services are recovering in quite a few countries,” said Keeley, who added that preliminary vaccination data from 2022 showed encouraging signs.

But even getting numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels will take years, he said, not including reaching “the children who were missing before the pandemic.”

“And they are not an insubstantial number.”

 
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Older Americans and people with weak immune systems can get an extra COVID-19 booster dose this spring.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday signed off on a more flexible booster schedule for people who remain at the highest risk from COVID-19 — giving them the choice of a second “bivalent” Pfizer or Moderna booster, the most up-to-date formula.

“Many in the population are experiencing vaccine fatigue but there is a subset who are eager to receive additional doses,” CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver told an agency advisory panel that expressed support for the change.

The move came a day after the Food and Drug Administration took steps to make coronavirus vaccinations simpler for everyone. From now on, anyone getting a Pfizer or Moderna dose — whether it’s a booster or their first-ever vaccination — will get an updated version rather than the outdated original shots.

Here are some things to know:

Who needs a booster?

Anyone who’s gotten their original vaccinations but hasn’t had an updated booster yet can still get one. Only 42% of Americans 65 and older — and just 20% of all adults — have gotten one of those updated boosters since September.

Who can get a second updated booster?

People 65 or older who already had one Pfizer or Moderna updated booster can roll up their sleeves again, as long as it’s been at least four months since that last shot.

The schedule is a little different for people with weak immune systems. Most can choose a second Pfizer or Moderna updated booster at least two months after their first. Under the latest FDA and CDC guidelines, they also could get additional doses if and when their physician decides they need one.

Why the extra leeway?

Older adults continue to have the highest rates of hospitalization from COVID-19, even as cases have declined. But a frail 85-year-old may want another booster right away, while a robust 65-year-old may not see the need — or might instead time another shot for peak protection ahead of a summer vacation or other special event.

CDC officials stressed there’s even more variety among immune-compromised patients, from people with only mild impairment to those trying to replenish immunity that grueling cancer treatment knocked out.

The changes put the U.S. in line with Britain and Canada, which also are offering certain vulnerable populations a spring shot. It’s a reasonable choice, Dr. Matthew Laurens, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said before the announcement.

“We do have vaccines that are available to protect against these severe consequences, so why not use them?” he said. “They don’t do any good just sitting on a shelf.”

Will younger, healthier people get a fall dose?

Stay tuned. The FDA will hold a public meeting in June to consider if the vaccine recipe needs more adjusting to better match the latest coronavirus strains — just like it adjusts flu vaccines every year. And part of that discussion will be whether younger, healthier people also need a booster.

The updated Pfizer and Moderna shots being used now target the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron versions, which have been replaced by an ever-changing list of omicron descendants. Still, while protection against mild infections is short-lived, those updated doses continue to do a good job fighting severe disease and death even against the newest variants.

Tots are least likely to be vaccinated yet

CDC’s advisers were dismayed at how few of the youngest children are vaccinated. Just 6% of 2- to 4-year-olds have gotten their initial COVID-19 shots and 4.5% of those younger than 2. Far fewer got an updated booster.

The FDA’s new rules mean tots under 5 who’ve never been vaccinated can get the most up-to-date formula — two Moderna shots or three of the Pfizer-BioNTech version. Unvaccinated 5-year-olds can get two Moderna doses or a single Pfizer shot. And tots already fully or partially vaccinated may get a bivalent shot or two depending on their vaccination history.

What about the Novavax vaccine?

Novavax makes a more traditional type of COVID-19 vaccine, and its original formula remains available for people who don’t want the Pfizer or Moderna option. Novavax also is getting ready in case FDA urges a fall update, by manufacturing several additional formulas.
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The Supreme Court is deciding whether women will face restrictions in getting a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, while a lawsuit continues.

The justices are expected to issue an order on Wednesday in a fast-moving case from Texas in which abortion opponents are seeking to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone.

The drug first won FDA approval in 2000, and conditions on its use have been loosened in recent years, including making it available by mail in states that allow access.

The Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the maker of the drug, want the nation’s highest court to reject limits on mifepristone’s use imposed by lower courts, at least as long as the legal case makes it way through the courts. They say women who want the drug and providers who dispense it will face chaos if limits on the drug take effect. Depending on what the justices decide, that could include requiring women to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.

Alliance Defending Freedom, representing anti-abortion doctors and medical groups in a challenge to the drug, is defending the rulings in calling on the Supreme Court to let the restrictions take effect now.

The legal fight over abortion comes less than a year after conservative justices reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

Even as the abortion landscape changed dramatically in several states, abortion opponents set their sights on medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions in the United States.

The abortion opponents filed suit in November in Amarillo, Texas. The legal challenge quickly reached the Supreme Court after a federal judge issued a ruling on April 7 that would revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions.

Less than a week later, a federal appeals court modified the ruling so that mifepristone would remain available while the case continues, but with limits. The appeals court said that the drug can’t be mailed or dispensed as a generic and that patients who seek it need to make three in-person visits with a doctor, among other things.

The generic version of mifepristone makes up two-thirds of the supply in the United States, its manufacturer, Las Vegas-based GenBioPro Inc., wrote in a court filing that underscored the perils of allowing the restrictions to be put into effect.

The court also said the drug should only be approved through seven weeks of pregnancy for now, even though the FDA since 2016 has endorsed its use through 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Complicating the situation, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone under the current rules in 17 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed a separate lawsuit.

The Biden administration has said the rulings conflict and create an untenable situation for the FDA.

In an order issued last Friday by Justice Samuel Alito, the court put the restrictions on hold through Wednesday to give the court time to consider the emergency appeal.

If the justices aren’t inclined to block the ruling from taking effect for now, the Democratic administration and Danco have a fallback argument, asking the court to take up the challenge to mifepristone, hear arguments and decide the case by early summer.

The court only rarely takes such a step before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans already has ordered an accelerated schedule for hearing the case, with arguments set for May 17.

Mifepristone has been available for use in medication abortions in the United States since the FDA granted approval in 2000. Since then, more than 5 million women have used it, along with another drug, misoprostol, to induce abortions.
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