Life

Massive Australia wildfires increased Antarctic ozone hole: study

by Kelly MACNAMARA Agence France Presse Paris, France (AFP) — Smoke from monster wildfires in Australia caused a chemical reaction that widened the ozone hole 10 percent, researchers said Wednesday, raising fears that increasing forest fires could delay the recovery of Earth’s atmospheric protection against deadly UV radiation. Severe summer heat and drought helped drive the deadly “Black Summer” fires from late 2019 to early 2020, which destroyed vast swathes of eucalyptus forest and enveloped […]

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White tiger cub found dumped on Greek street: animal park

Athens, Greece (AFP) — Greece’s leading animal park on Wednesday said it had recovered a rare white tiger cub found abandoned on a nearby street earlier this week. Attica Zoological Park outside Athens said the four-month-old female cub, which was found beneath a garbage bin near the premises, was paralysed from the waist down. “No one knows where it came from or how it got here,” park founder Jean Jacques Lesueur told Proto Thema daily, […]

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UK cyber security firm warns over ChatGPT

London, United Kingdom (AFP) — British cyber security firm Darktrace on Wednesday warned that artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT may have increased the sophistication of phishing scams. Content creation bot ChatGPT, Silicon Valley’s latest app sensation, was launched by Microsoft-backed start-up OpenAI in November. “Darktrace does not believe that ChatGPT has yet lowered barriers to entry for threat actors significantly,” the firm said in a results statement. “But it does believe that it may have helped […]

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Kenyan innovators turn e-waste to bio-robotic prosthetic

by Mary KULUNDU Agence France Presse Nairobi, Kenya (AFP) — Twoportraits of Albert Einstein hang on the walls of a makeshift laboratory on Nairobi’s outskirts, inspiring a pair of self-taught Kenyan innovators who have built a bio-robotic prosthetic arm out of electronic scrap. Cousins Moses Kiuna, 29, and David Gathu, 30, created their first prosthetic arm in 2012, after their neighbour lost a limb in an industrial accident. But their latest invention is a significant […]

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Queen’s corgis take centre stage at London exhibition

London, United Kingdom (AFP) — A new exhibition of photographs showing the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and her beloved corgis opens in London on Wednesday, celebrating her bond with the dogs. The exhibition, titled “The Queen and Her Corgis”, features images taken during the late sovereign’s life, showcasing her unique bond with her Pembroke Welsh Corgis. “We’ve got this very small but really exquisite exhibition that shows nine photographs taken of the queen and […]

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China’s students leap ‘Great Firewall’ to get homework help from ChatGPT

by Poornima WEERASEKARA Agence France-Presse BEIJING, China (AFP) — Chinese schoolchildren are turning to AI bot ChatGPT to slash their homework time — vaulting the country’s “Great Firewall” to write book reports and bone up on their language skills. With its ability to produce A-grade essays, poems and programming code within seconds, ChatGPT has sparked a global gold rush in artificial intelligence tech. But it has also prompted concern from teachers, worried over the possibilities […]

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NASA’s Artemis 2 mission around Moon set for November 2024

Washington, United States (AFP) — NASA is on track to launch a crewed mission around the Moon in November of next year after a successful unmanned test flight, the US space agency said Tuesday. NASA officials provided an update on the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the historic Apollo missions ended in 1972. The first Artemis mission wrapped up in December with an uncrewed Orion […]

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Rising seas eating away at Honduran fishing village

by Noe LEIVA Agence France-Presse CEDEÑO, Honduras (AFP) — The coastline of Cedeno, a fishing village in southern Honduras, looks like it was hit by an earthquake. Houses, businesses and clubs stand in ruins. Forsaken. But it was not a quake. Nor a tsunami. A much slower, but equally destructive force is at work in Cedeno and other villages on the Pacific Gulf of Fonseca: sea level rise. The creeping ocean has claimed ever more […]

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Wild education: the joy of Scandinavia’s forest preschools

by Viken KANTARCI in Solna and Camille BAS-WOHLERT in Ballerup Agence France-Presse SOLNA, Sweden (AFP) — Come rain, sleet or snow, young children nap outside even in mid-winter all across Scandinavia, where outdoor preschools teach children a love of nature. Sitting in the forest on a tarp laid out over the snow in Solna near Stockholm, Agnes and her friends — all around five — are lining up sticks. “We use pieces of wood to […]

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Pincered at sea, lobsters get new hope on land in UK

by Sylvain PEUCHMAURD Agence France-Presse WHITBY, United Kingdom (AFP) — The tiny lobsters are safe from predators — including each other — as they eddy in large white plastic tanks swirling with artificial currents. In a few weeks’ time, as part of a conservation project, they will leave their small shed in the northeastern English port of Whitby for the open sea. Whitby, whose dramatic abbey ruins were an inspiration for “Dracula” author Bram Stoker, […]

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Cow manure fuels French tractors

by Myriam LEMETAYER Agence France Presse Beaumontois-en-Périgord, France (AFP) — A French farmer steps away from his barn and fills up a tractor with fuel made from the manure of his cows, an attempt to put their climate-damaging methane to good use. Anchored by a stone farmhouse, much has changed on the Guerin family farm in the southern Dordogne region since its founding in 1926. The cow barn is largely automated, and features two huge, […]

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Colombia hopes to remove dead drug lord’s hippos

Bogotá, Colombia (AFP) — The governor of a region of Colombia where a herd of some 150 hippos — descendants of animals once owned by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar — are breeding out of control said Monday he hopes for the greenlight to send half of them to sanctuaries in India and Mexico. “We hope that the permits required by the national institutions can be approved in the first half of this year, so that […]

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