by Mussa Hattar Agence France Presse Petra, Jordan (AFP) — Tending to his camels in Petra, Jordan’s spectacular archaeological marvel hidden deep in a desert canyon, Hussein Bdoul is all smiles: the tourists are back. After years in which the Covid pandemic turned the storied “Rose City” into a ghost town, the father of seven is back at work, offering visitors rides on his decorated animals. “Tourism has returned and the numbers are even greater,” […]
Life
Scientists use laser to guide lightning bolt for first time
by Pierre Celerier Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — Scientists said Monday they have used a laser beam to guide lightning for the first time, hoping the technique will help protect against deadly bolts — and one day maybe even trigger them. Lightning strikes between 40-120 times a second worldwide, killing more than 4,000 people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage every year. Yet the main protection against these bolts from above […]
Runaway W. Antarctic ice sheet collapse not ‘inevitable’: study
by Kelly MACNAMARA Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — The runaway collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — which would trigger catastrophic sea level rise — is not “inevitable”, scientists said Monday following research that tracked the region’s recent response to climate change. As global temperatures rise, there is mounting concern that warming could trigger so-called tipping points that set off irreversible melting of the world’s massive ice sheets and ultimately lift oceans […]
AI, do my homework! How ChatGPT pitted teachers against tech
by Jules BONNARD Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — Know-it-all chatbots landed with a bang last year, convincing one engineer that machines had become sentient, spreading panic that industries could be wiped out, and creating fear of a cheating epidemic in schools and universities. Alarm among educators has reached fever pitch in recent weeks over ChatGPT, an easy-to-use artificial intelligence tool trained on billions of words and a ton of data from the web. […]
UN confirms 2022 among eight hottest years on record
Geneva, Switzerland (AFP) by Nina LARSON The past eight years were the hottest since records began, the United Nations confirmed Thursday, despite the cooling influence of a drawn-out La Nina weather pattern. Last year, as the world faced a cascade of unprecedented natural disasters made more likely and deadly by climate change, the average global temperature was about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the World Meteorological Organization said. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric […]
Nuclear reactor experiment rules out one dark matter hope
by Pierre Celerier and Daniel Lawler Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — It was an anomaly detected in the storm of a nuclear reactor so puzzling that physicists hoped it would shine a light on dark matter, one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. However new research has definitively ruled out that this strange measurement signalled the existence of a “sterile neutrino”, a hypothetical particle that has long eluded scientists. Neutrinos are sometimes called “ghost […]
Japan to start releasing treated water from Fukushima this year
TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Japan plans to start releasing more than a million tons of treated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean this year, a top government spokesman said Friday. The plan has been endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but the government will wait for “a comprehensive report” by the UN watchdog before the release, chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters. Cooling systems at the plant […]
Asthma study sparks debate about safety of cooking with gas
by Daniel Lawler Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — New research that links cooking with natural gas to around 12 percent of childhood asthma cases has sparked debate about the health risks of kitchen stoves, as well as calls in the United States for stepped-up regulation. The authors of the study said their findings suggested that around 650,000 US children would not have developed asthma if their homes had electric or induction stovetops, comparing the […]
Space junk, not meteorites, remains biggest threat to spacecraft
by Daniel Lawler Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — Dodging the kind of meteorite strike that forced Russia to plan a space station rescue mission is nearly impossible, yet the greater threat to spacecraft is actually the man-made debris in orbit, experts say. Russian announced on Wednesday a February mission to the International Space Station to pick up crew members left stranded after a strike damaged the capsule that was to take them home. […]
Russia to send rocket to rescue crew from ISS
Moscow, Russia (AFP) Russia said Wednesday it would send a rescue capsule next month for three crew members of the International Space Station, after a meteorite damaged the spacecraft that was due to return them to Earth. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, made the announcement after examining the flight worthiness of the Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule docked with the ISS that sprang a leak in December. On Wednesday, Roscosmos said the spacecraft that was originally set […]
Ecuador reports human infected with bird flu
QUITO, Ecuador (AFP) – Ecuador reported on Tuesday its first case of a human being infected with bird flu, weeks after the globally-spreading disease was detected on poultry farms in the South American country. “The first case of influenza A-H5 (bird flu) was confirmed in a nine-year-old girl in the province of Bolivar,” in the heart of the Andes, the health ministry said in a statement. “We presume that the infection was transmitted by direct contact […]
Super-resistant mosquitoes in Asia pose growing threat: study
TOKYO, Japan (AFP) – Mosquitoes that transmit dengue and other viruses have evolved growing resistance to insecticides in parts of Asia, and novel ways to control them are desperately needed, new research warns. Health authorities commonly fog mosquito-infested areas with clouds of insecticide, and resistance has long been a concern, but the scale of the problem was not well understood. Japanese scientist Shinji Kasai and his team examined mosquitos from several countries in Asia as well […]
