Kathmandu (Rastriya Samachar Samiti): The number of waterfowl in Nepal is declining. According to the preliminary data of the waterfowl census, the number of waterfowl has decreased this year.



The number of water birds has decreased in Koshi river, Jagdishpur Ramsar area, Chitwan, Karnali river and Badaiya lake area. Conservationists say declining wetland areas, increasing use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, poaching of birds, and climate change have added to the challenges to waterfowl conservation.



Experts have also suggested that conservation measures should be taken in time, citing the declining species and numbers of waterfowl, which are seen as indicators of wetland areas.



According to the 2021 census, 19,544 waterfowl of 62 species have been recorded in the Koshi River. According to Koshi Bird Society president Sanjeev Acharya, 21,744 waterfowl of 58 species were recorded in Koshi in 2019 and 16,012 waterfowl of 61 species in 2020.



Similarly, 15,496 water birds were recorded in the Jagdishpur Ramsar area last year and only 12,476 have been counted this year, said Deubahadur Rana, a biologist at the Nepal Bird Conservation Association.



Chairman of the Bird Education Society Ramesh Chaudhary said that the number of water bird species has decreased in Chitwan this year as well. Chairman of the Bardiya Nature Club Ram Shahi said that the number of birds in the Karnali River and Badaiya Lake areas is less than in the past.



The waterfowl were counted to find out the details and status of the native and migratory birds in the wetland area and to update the numbers during this time when the birds are migrating as the winter cold increases. Counted on more than five dozen wetland areas, lakes and rivers across the country, the national coordinator of the census, Dr. Hemsagar Baral informed.



There are more than 886 species of birds in Nepal. Of these, more than 150 birds visit Nepal in winter and more than 60 in summer.

Experts suggest timely conservation measures to save Waterfowl

(BBC): The four main engines of Nasa's new "megarocket" are to be fired in unison for the first time, demonstrating the launcher's raw, explosive power.



The Space Launch System (SLS) is part of the agency's Artemis programme, which aims to put Americans back on the lunar surface in a few years.



The engine "hotfire" is the last in a series of tests known as the Green Run.



It will help Nasa certify the rocket for its maiden flight, scheduled to take place later this year.



When it completes that flight, the SLS will become the most powerful rocket ever to have flown to space.



This uncrewed mission, called Artemis-1, will launch Nasa's next generation spacecraft, Orion, on a loop around the Moon.



Saturday's eight-minute ground test - due to take place within a two-hour window from 22:00-00:00 GMT (17:00-19:00 EST) - is designed to simulate the rocket's climb to orbit.



The core stage will be anchored to a steel structure called the B-2 test stand on the grounds of Nasa's Stennis Space Center near Bay St Louis, Mississippi.



Once ignited, the four RS-25 engines at the base of the core will generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust - the force that propels a rocket through the air.



"It's a full-duration burn - that's what we're targeting," Ryan McKibben, Green Run test conductor at Nasa Stennis, told BBC News.



"Doing a whole stage test versus a single engine test is definitely exciting," he said, adding: "It's a unique opportunity to test drive the core stage for the first time."



The hotfire is the eighth and final test in the Green Run, a programme of evaluation carried out by engineers from Nasa and Boeing - the rocket's prime contractor.



"It's been a very cautious iteration of procedures that has got us to this stage," said John Shannon, vice president and SLS program manager at Boeing.



"It's not a developmental or test article, it's the flight article that will power Artemis-1 around the Moon, so we're being very careful with it as we go."



He praised teams for keeping the Green Run on track despite the pandemic and disruption from tropical weather.



The core stage engines, manufactured by propulsion specialist Aerojet Rocketdyne, have already made history. They're the same type that used to power the space shuttle orbiter, and Nasa will re-use flown hardware for the first four SLS launches.



The SLS consists of the huge core stage with two smaller solid rocket boosters (SRBs) attached to the sides. Engineers have begun stacking the individual SRB segments at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ahead of the launcher's first flight at the end of 2021.



"This powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency and the country in deep space missions to the Moon and beyond," John Honeycutt, SLS programme manager at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said during a media briefing on Tuesday.



Before the hotfire, engineers will fill the core stage with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million litres) of propellant.



That propellant consists of liquid hydrogen, which is the rocket's fuel, and liquid oxygen, which helps the fuel burn. They react explosively inside the engines, generating super-heated water vapour from the exhaust.



Hydrogen and oxygen are gaseous at room temperature, but gases take up lots of space. Turning them into liquids allows an equivalent amount to be stored in a smaller tank, but also requires them to be chilled to super-cold temperatures.



When they're fed to the engines, the propellants are at several hundred degrees below zero (F), but the exhaust that emerges at is 6,000F (3,316C) - hot enough to boil iron.



"We fire down into a bucket that has a lot of water going into it. The water keeps it from burning straight through the test stand," Ryan McKibben told BBC News.



Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are directed into the flame bucket to cool the exhaust. In addition, tens of thousands of gallons will be used to create a water "curtain" around the engines to suppress the noise generated when they fire for eight minutes.



This is done to protect the core stage from vibrations while it is anchored to the stand.



Over 1,400 sensors will measure how the rocket's systems are performing during the test.



"With this hotfire, there's a lot of data - including how the avionics (flight electronics) and software command-and-control will perform with the integrated core stage and engine propulsion system - which will fire all four engines," said Julie Bassler, SLS stages manager at Marshall Space Flight Center.



Nasa wants to iron out any problems before this year's Artemis-1 mission. If all goes well, the SLS will also launch astronauts to the Moon for the first human landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.



Although the target is to fire the engines for eight minutes - around the time it takes for the SLS to get to orbit - Nasa and Boeing get all the engineering data they need in order to certify the rocket for flight within the first four minutes of the test.



A full duration burn, however, will allow experts to observe the engine cut-off, which occurs after almost all the propellant has drained from the run lines.



Once the hotfire test is complete, technicians will refurbish the core stage, remove it from the test stand and prepare it for transport to Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.



Officials want to ship the rocket segment in February to Kennedy Space Center, where it will be prepared for launch.



The engines being tested on Saturday contributed to 21 successful shuttle flights over the vehicle's 30-year operational history.



Two were used on the last space shuttle mission, STS-135 in 2011. One flew on the 1998 mission that launched the oldest person ever to go to space - US senator and Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who was 77 at the time. The other was used on one of the flights to service the Hubble Space Telescope.



The engines were refurbished following shuttle missions, but they will be discarded after Artemis-1.



"Since they're one-way now, they're letting us push the engines to a little higher power level because we can wear the engines a little bit more," said Ryan McKibben.



Aerojet Rocketdyne is developing new versions of the RS-25, built with innovative manufacturing techniques, that will be used on future flights of the SLS.

SLS: Nasa's 'megarocket' set to fire up engines in crucial test

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP): Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company launched a new capsule into space Thursday to test all the astronaut perks before people strap in.



Thursday’s flight with a dummy named Mannequin Skywalker lasted 10 minutes and reached 66 miles (106 kilometers) above West Texas. Both the New Shepard rocket and the capsule landed successfully.



It was the 14th flight to the fringes of space for a New Shepard rocket. The first was in 2015.



“The success of this flight puts us one really big step closer to flying astronauts,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said from company headquarters in Kent, Washington. “There’s going to be a lot of fun ahead in 2021.”



Blue Origin plans to launch paying passengers — tourists, scientists and professional astronauts — on brief hops over West Texas’ remote desert. It’s also working on a bigger rocket, New Glenn, that would blast off from Cape Canaveral as well as a lunar lander for astronauts under NASA’s Artemis moon program.



The capsule soaring Thursday featured the latest crew upgrades: microphones and push-to-talk buttons for the six seats, wall panels to muffle engine noise, a safety-alert system, and temperature and humidity controls to keep passengers comfortable and the big windows free of fog.



The launch and landing team was scaled back because of the pandemic.



New Shepard is named for the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn honors John Glenn, the first American in orbit.

Blue Origin launches capsule to space with astronaut perks

WASHINGTON (AP): If you’re an identical twin who’s always resisted being called a clone of your sibling, scientists say you have a point.



Identical twins are not exactly genetically the same, new research shows.



Scientists in Iceland sequenced DNA from 387 pairs of identical twins — those derived from a single fertilized egg — as well as from their parents, children and spouses. That allowed them to find “early mutations that separate identical twins,” said Kari Stefansson, a geneticist at the University of Iceland and the company deCODE genetics, and co-author of the paper published Thursday in the journal Nature Genetics.



A mutation means an alteration in a sequence of DNA — a tiny change that is not inherently good or bad, but can influence physical features or susceptibility to certain diseases. They can occur when a cell divides and makes a slight error in replicating DNA.



On average, identical twins have 5.2 of these early genetic differences, the researchers found. But about 15% of identical twin pairs have more genetic differences, some of them up to 100, said Stefansson.



These differences represent a tiny portion of each twin’s genetic code, but they could influence why one twin is taller or why one twin is at greater risk for certain cancers.



Previously, many researchers believed that physical differences between identical twins were related mostly to environmental factors, such as nutrition or lifestyle.



Jan Dumanski, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden, who was not involved in the new paper, praised it as “a clear and important contribution” to medical research.



“The implication is that we have to be very careful when we are using twins as a model” for teasing apart the influences of nature and nurture, he said.



Previous studies, including a 2008 paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, have identified some genetic differences between identical twins.



The new study goes beyond earlier work by including DNA of parents, children and spouses of identical twins. That allowed the researchers to pinpoint when genetic mutations occurred in two different kinds of cells — those present in just one individual and those inherited by that person’s children. They also found mutations that occurred before the developing embryo split into two, setting the stage for twins.



Stefansson said that his team had found pairs of twins where a mutation is present in all cells of the body of one twin, but not found in the other twin at all. However, “sometimes the second twin may show the mutation in some cells, but not all cells,” he said.



Nancy Segal, a psychologist who studies twins at California State University, Fullerton and was not involved in the paper, called the research “heroic and really significant.”



“This will force scientists to refine our thinking about the influences of genetics and environment,” she said. “Twins are very alike, but it is not a perfect similarity.”

Identical twins aren’t perfect clones, research shows

(BBC): Countries only have only a limited time in which to act if the world is to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Here are five reasons why 2021 could be a crucial year in the fight against global warming.



Covid-19 was the big issue of 2020, there is no question about that.



But I'm hoping that, by the end of 2021, the vaccines will have kicked in and we'll be talking more about climate than the coronavirus.



2021 will certainly be a crunch year for tackling climate change.



Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, told me he thinks it is a "make or break" moment for the issue.



So, in the spirit of New Year's optimism, here's why I believe 2021 could confound the doomsters and see a breakthrough in global ambition on climate.



<ol><li>The crucial climate conference In November 2021, world leaders will be gathering in Glasgow for the successor to the landmark Paris meeting of 2015.</li></ol>



Paris was important because it was the first time virtually all the nations of the world came together to agree they all needed to help tackle the issue.



The problem was the commitments countries made to cutting carbon emissions back then fell way short of the targets set by the conference.



In Paris, the world agreed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by trying to limit global temperature increases to 2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The aim was to keep the rise to 1.5C if at all possible.



We are way off track. On current plans the world is expected to breach the 1.5C ceiling within 12 years or less and to hit 3C of warming by the end of the century.



Under the terms of the Paris deal, countries promised to come back every five years and raise their carbon-cutting ambitions. That was due to happen in Glasgow in November 2020.



The pandemic put paid to that and the conference was bumped forward to this year.



So, Glasgow 2021 gives us a forum at which those carbon cuts can be ratcheted up.



<ol start="2"><li>Countries are already signing up to deep carbon cuts And there has already been progress.</li></ol>



The most important announcement on climate change last year came completely out of the blue.



At the UN General Assembly in September, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that China aimed to go carbon neutral by 2060.



Environmentalists were stunned. Cutting carbon has always been seen as an expensive chore yet here was the most polluting nation on earth - responsible for some 28% of world emissions - making an unconditional commitment to do just that regardless of whether other countries followed its lead.



That was a complete turnaround from past negotiations, when everyone's fear was that they might end up incurring the cost of decarbonising their own economy, while others did nothing but still enjoyed the climate change fruits of their labour.



And China is not alone.



The UK was the first major economy in the world to make a legally binding net zero commitment in June 2019. The European Union followed suit in March 2020.



Since then, Japan and South Korea have joined what the UN estimates is now a total of over 110 countries that have set net zero target for mid-century. Together, they represent more than 65% of global emissions and more than 70% of the world economy, the UN says.



With the election of Joe Biden in the United States, the biggest economy in the world has now re-joined the carbon cutting chorus.



These countries now need to detail how they plan to achieve their lofty new aspirations - that will be a key part of the agenda for Glasgow - but the fact that they are already saying they want to get there is a very significant change.



<ol start="3"><li>Renewables are now the cheapest energy ever There is a good reason why so many countries are now saying they plan to go net zero: the collapsing cost of renewables is completely changing the calculus of decarbonisation.</li></ol>



In October 2020, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation, concluded that the best solar power schemes now offer "the cheapest source of electricity in history".



Renewables are already often cheaper than fossil fuel power in much of the world when it comes to building new power stations.



And, if the nations of the world ramp up their investments in wind, solar and batteries in the next few years, prices are likely to fall even further to a point where they are so cheap it will begin to make commercial sense to shut down and replace existing coal and gas power stations.



That is because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing - the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. It's like pushing on an open door - the more you build the cheaper it gets and the cheaper it gets the more you build.



Think what this means: investors won't need to be bullied by green activists into doing the right thing, they will just follow the money. And governments know that by scaling up renewables in their own economies, they help to accelerate the energy transition globally, by making renewables even cheaper and more competitive everywhere.



<ol start="4"><li>Covid changes everything The coronavirus pandemic has shaken our sense of invulnerability and reminded us that it is possible for our world to be upended in ways we cannot control.</li></ol>



It has also delivered the most significant economic shock since the Great Depression.



In response, governments are stepping forward with stimulus packages designed to reboot their economies.



And the good news is it has rarely - if ever - been cheaper for governments to make these kind of investments. Around the world, interest rates are hovering around zero, or even negative.



This creates an unprecedented opportunity to - in the now familiar phrase - "build back better".



The European Union and Joe Biden's new administration in the US have promised trillions of dollars of green investments to get their economies going and kick-start the process of decarbonisation.



Both are saying they hope other countries will join them - helping drive down the cost of renewables globally. But they are also warning that alongside this carrot, they plan to wield a stick - a tax on imports of countries that emit too much carbon.



The idea is this may help induce carbon-cutting laggards - like Brazil, Russia, Australia and Saudi Arabia - to come onside too.



The bad news is that, according to the UN, developed nations are spending 50% more on sectors linked to fossil fuels than on low-carbon energy.



<ol start="5"><li>Business is going green too The falling cost of renewable and the growing public pressure for action on climate is also transforming attitudes in business.</li></ol>



There are sound financial reasons for this. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?



Indeed, why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?



The logic is already playing out in the markets. This year alone, Tesla's rocketing share price has made it the world's most valuable car company.



Meanwhile, the share price of Exxon - once the world's most valuable company of any kind - fell so far that it got booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of major US corporations.



At the same time there is growing momentum behind the movement to get businesses to embed climate risk into their financial decision making.



The aim is to make it mandatory for businesses and investors to show that their activities and investments are making the necessary steps to transition to a net zero world.



Seventy central banks are already working to make this happen, and building these requirements into the world's financial architecture will be a key focus for the Glasgow conference.



It is still all to play for.



So, there is good reason for hope but it is far from a done deal.



To stand a reasonable chance of hitting the 1.5C target we need to halve total emissions by the end of 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed body that collates the science needed to inform policy.



What that means is making the sort of emissions reductions achieved in 2020 thanks to the massive international lockdowns every year to the end of the decade. Yet emissions are already edging back to the levels they were in 2019.



The truth is lots of countries have expressed lofty ambitions for cutting carbon but few have yet got strategies in place to meet those goals.



The challenge for Glasgow will be getting the nations of the world to sign up to policies that will start reducing emissions now. The UN says it wants to see coal phased out completely, an end to all fossil fuel subsidies and a global coalition to reach net zero by 2050.



That remains a very tall order, even if global sentiments on tackling global warming are beginning to change.



— The article was prepared by Justin Rowlatt

Why 2021 could be turning point for tackling climate change

(BBC): Almost five years of studying the deep Atlantic in unprecedented detail has revealed 12 species new to science.



The sea mosses, molluscs and corals had eluded discovery because the sea floor is so unexplored, scientists say.



Researchers warn that the newly discovered animals could already be under threat from climate change.



Carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean is making it more acidic, causing coral skeletons in particular to corrode.



The scientists involved stressed it was "not too late to protect these special species" and the important habitats they occupied.



Some key Atlantic discoveries from the mission: New species: "At least" 12 new deep-sea species. The team also found approximately 35 new records of species in areas where they were previously unknown Climate change: Ocean warming, acidification, and decreasing food availability will combine to significantly shift and reduce the availability of suitable habitats for deep-sea species by 2100 Hydrothermal vents: Scientists discovered a field of these sea-floor hot springs in the Azores. Hydrothermal fields are important areas of relatively high biological productivity that host complex communities in the midst of the vast deep ocean 



Cities of the deep As Prof George Wolff, an ocean chemist from the University of Liverpool who was involved in the project pointed out: "We can still say we have better maps of the surface of the Moon and Mars than of the sea floor.""So whenever you go to the deep ocean, you find something new - not just individual species but entire ecosystems."



Prof Murray Roberts from the University of Edinburgh led the Atlas project, as it is called. He told BBC News that nearly five years of exploration and investigation had revealed some "special places" in the ocean and worked out "how they tick""We found whole communities formed by sponges or deep ocean corals that form the cities of the deep sea," he explained. "They support life. So really important fish use these places as spawning grounds.



"If those cities are damaged by destructive human uses, those fish have nowhere to spawn and the function of those whole ecosystems is lost for future generations.



"It's like understanding that the rainforest is an important place for biodiversity on the land; the same is true of the deep sea - there are important places that need to be protected and, crucially , they are all connected."



Slowing ocean currents The project involved researchers from 13 countries around the Atlantic - combining ocean chemistry and physics, as well as biological discovery, to work out how the ocean environment is changing as the world warms and as humans exploit more of the deep sea for fishing and mineral extraction.



Studying ocean currents and depositions of fossils on the seabed revealed that the major currents in the North Atlantic have slowed dramatically in response to climate change.



"The implications of that are complicated, but potentially the connections between ecosystems are being reduced," Prof Roberts explained, because ocean currents are the highways that link different habitats together in the vastness of the deep ocean.



Out of sight "The value of all this knowledge is that it enables us to understand what we might risk losing," said Prof Claire Armstrong, a natural resource economist from the University of Tromsø.



"The deep ocean can be so out of sight and out of mind that we're not really aware of what we're doing to its environments and the consequences of what we do."



With a growing global population, increasing pollution and emerging areas of commercial activity in the deep sea, including prospecting for medically and industrially useful products, marine scientists say it is vital to fill the gaps in our ocean knowledge.



The ocean is not an endless resource, Prof Armstrong added. "Conserving and knowing what we might need in the future is really, really difficult."

Atlantic discovery: 12 new species 'hiding in the deep'

(BBC): Scientists have been greeted by the sight of jet black chunks of rock and soil from an asteroid after opening a capsule that returned from deep space a week ago.



It's the first significant sample of material to be delivered to Earth from a space rock and was grabbed last year by Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft.



Researchers began opening the capsule on Monday (GMT) in Sagamihara, Japan.



The material was retrieved from an asteroid called Ryugu.



Hayabusa-2 reached the object in June 2018; it is believed to be one of the building blocks left over from the formation of the Solar System.



Scientists at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) curation facility at Sagamihara have now opened one of three sample chambers inside the capsule.This was hoped to contain particles of rock and soil from Hayabusa-2's first touchdown on the asteroid in 2019. The spacecraft grabbed the material by firing a tantalum metal bullet into the surface and letting debris float up a collection tube under the low gravity.



Scientists had already been excited when they saw black grains from the asteroid caught at the entrance to the sample catcher (where the material is stored) on Monday. And they were not disappointed when they opened it: Inside was material ranging in size from pebbles to tiny particles of dust.



'Pristine material' However, this is just one of three chambers inside the capsule. Sample chamber B should be empty, but chamber C is thought to hold material collected from beneath Ryugu's surface.



Scientists wanted to collect pristine material from Ryugu that had not been altered by exposure to the environment of space - including its radiation - for aeons. In order to do this, they had to use an explosive charge to propel a copper projectile into the surface of the asteroid.



This blasted a 20m-wide crater in Ryugu, allowing Hayabusa-2 to descend into the crater and grab the pristine particles, depositing them in chamber C.



Scientists should open this chamber in due course.



Jaxa has also announced that gas collected from the capsule is from the asteroid.



It was likely to have been liberated by the soil collected from Ryugu and is the world's first sample of gas returned from deep space.



Asteroids are leftover building materials from the formation of the Solar System. They're made of the same stuff that went into making rocky worlds like the Earth, but they continued to roam free, rather than being incorporated into planets.



Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive class of space rock known as a C-type (or carbonaceous) asteroid.



In the early Solar System, such objects could have delivered much of the Earth's water along with the ingredients necessary for life to get started.



When the spacecraft arrived at its target in 2018, scientists were surprised by just how dark Ryugu was. Its unexpected hue even forced controllers to adjust the laser altitude sensor used when the spacecraft approached the asteroid's surface.



The Hayabusa-2 sample capsule returned to Earth on Saturday 5 December, parachuting down safely in the Australian desert near Woomera.

Hayabusa-2: Pieces of an asteroid found inside space capsule

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP): Night began to fall in Rio de Janeiro’s Pedra Branca state park as four Brazilian scientists switched on their flashlights to traipse along a narrow trail of mud through dense rainforest. The researchers were on a mission: capture bats and help prevent the next global pandemic.



A few meters ahead, nearly invisible in the darkness, a bat made high-pitched squeaks as it strained its wings against the thin nylon net that had ensnared it. One of the researchers removed the bat, which used its pointed teeth to bite her gloved fingers.



The November nighttime outing was part of a project at Brazil’s state-run Fiocruz Institute to collect and study viruses present in wild animals — including bats, which many scientists believe were linked to the outbreak of COVID-19.



The goal now is to identify other viruses that may be highly contagious and lethal in humans, and to use that information to devise plans to stop them from ever infecting people — to forestall the next potential global disease outbreak before it gets started.



In a highly connected world, an outbreak in one place endangers the entire globe, just as the coronavirus did. And the Brazilian team is just one among many worldwide racing to minimize the risk of a second pandemic this century.



To some, it might seem too soon to contemplate the next global outbreak, with the world still grappling with the devastating fallout of the ongoing one. But scientists say it’s highly like that, without savvy intervention, another novel virus will jump from animal to human host and find the conditions to spread like wildfire.



As this pandemic has shown, modern transport can disperse the pathogen to all corners of the globe in a matter of hours and spread easily in densely populated cities.



It’s not a question of if, but of when, according to Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India.



She pointed to previous research that found India was among the most likely places in the world for such a “spillover” event to occur, due to population density and increasing human and livestock incursion into its dense tropical forests teeming with wildlife.



It’s no coincidence that many scientists are focusing attention on the world’s only flying mammals — bats.



Bats are thought to be the original or intermediary hosts for multiple viruses that have spawned recent epidemics, including COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and Marburg virus. A 2019 study found that of viruses originating from the five most common mammalian sources — primates, rodents, carnivores, ungulates and bats — those from bats are the most virulent in humans.



Bats are a diverse group, with more than 1,400 species flitting across every continent except Antarctica. But what many have in common are adaptations that allow them to carry viruses that are deadly in humans and livestock while exhibiting minimal symptoms themselves — meaning they are able travel and shed those viruses, instead of being quickly hobbled.



“The secret is that bats have unusual immune systems, and that’s related to their ability to fly,” said Raina Plowright, an epidemiologist who studies bats at Montana State University.



To get off the ground and sustain flight requires an incredible amount of energy, with bats’ metabolic rate increasing sixteen-fold, Plowright said. “You’d expect them to get cell damage from all that metabolic exertion,” she said.



But that doesn’t happen. Instead, bats are remarkably resilient, with many species living more than 30 years — highly unusual for such small mammals.



Plowright and other bat scientists believe evolutionary tweaks that help bats recover from the stress of flying also give them extra protection against pathogens.



“Bats seem to have evolved a collateral benefit of flight — resistance to deal with some of the nastiest viruses known to science,” said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at McMaster University in Canada.



While scientists are still untangling the mystery, two leading theories are that bats may have evolved what Banerjee called “an efficient DNA repair mechanism” or that their bodies may tightly regulate inflammation triggers and not overreact to viral infections.



Probing the secrets of bat immune systems may help scientists understand more about when bats do shed viruses, as well as providing hints for possible future medical treatment strategies, he said.



Bats and other animals that carry pathogens don’t innately pose a risk to humans — unless conditions are right for a spillover event. “The virus has to come out of the host for us to get infected,” said Cara Brook, a disease ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.



That’s why the Brazilian researchers chose Pedra Branca park. As one of the world’s largest forests within an urban area, it offers a constant interaction of wild animals with the thousands of humans and domestic animals in surrounding communities. The scientists are studying not just bats, but also small primates, wild cats and domestic cats in homes with confirmed COVID-19 cases.



Scientists and governments would stand a better chance at containing future outbreaks if they had faster notice of when and where they begin, said Ian Mackay, a virologist at Australia’s University of Queensland.



“Ongoing, constant, nonstop surveillance,” along the lines of the flu labs set up by the World Health Organization across the globe, could help researchers be better prepared, he said. He also suggested that labs for virus discovery could regularly sample waste water or materials from hospitals.



In India, a National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-Being has been pending since 2018 and will likely be launched next year. Abi Tamim Vanak, a conservation scientist at Ashok Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment in Bengaluru, said that a core part of the plan is to set up 25 sentinel surveillance sites across the country in both rural and urban areas.



“They will be the first line of defense,” he said.



A varied patchwork of virus surveillance programs exists in several countries, but funding tends to wax and wane with the political climate and sense of urgency.



Among the most ambitious endeavors is the Global Virome Project, which aims to discover 500,000 new viruses over 10 years.



The U.S. Agency for International Development recently announced the launch of the $100 million STOP Spillover project, an effort led by scientists at Tufts University and including global partners to study zoonotic diseases in Africa and Asia.



One approach that won’t help, scientists say, is treating bats as the enemy – vilifying them, throwing stones or trying to burn them out of caves.



This spring, villagers in the Indian state of Rajasthan identified bat colonies in abandoned forts and palaces and killed hundreds with bats and sticks. They also sealed some crevices where the bats lived, effectively trapping them. In the Indian state of Karnataka, villagers cut down old trees where bats tend to roost.



Scientists say those those tactics are likely to backfire.



An investigation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Ugandan health authorities found that, after a mining operation attempted to exterminate bats from a cave in Uganda, the remaining bats exhibited higher infection levels of Marburg virus. This led to Uganda’s most severe outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, caused by the virus, in 2012.



“Stress is a huge factor in upsetting the natural balance that bats have with their viruses — the more you stress bats, the more they shed viruses,” said Vikram Misra, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.



Although orders issued by Indian forest officials reiterating the complete ban on killing of wildlife and information campaigns to dispel myths were largely successful, convincing people not to attack bats means dispelling long-running cultural assumptions.



“People have a lot of misconceptions about bats. They’re nocturnal and look a little weird flying, and there’s a lot of literature and culture built around bats being scary,” said Hannah Kim Frank, a biologist at Tulane University. “But bats aren’t aggressive — and attacking bats doesn’t help control diseases.”



“We actually need bats in the wild to consume insects that otherwise destroy cotton, corn and pecan harvests,” said Kristen Lear, an ecologist at Bat Conservational International.



A better approach to minimize disease risk, Frank said, is simply to minimize contact between wild bats and people and livestock.



She suggested that research on when bats migrate, and when new pups are born, could inform decisions about when people should avoid certain areas or keep their livestock penned up.



In North America, some scientists advocate restricting public access to caves where bats roost.



“Cave gating — bat-friendly gates, built with iron crossbars — can keep humans out and allow bats to move freely,” said Kate Langwig, an infectious disease ecologist at Virginia Tech. “If we leave the bats alone, and don’t try to hurt or exterminate them, they are going to be healthier.”



Perhaps the most significant factor bringing bats into more frequent contact with people and domestic animals is the destruction of habitat, which forces bats to seek out new foraging and roosting grounds.



In Australia, widespread destruction of winter flowering eucalyptus trees that provide nectar for fruit bats — known locally as “flying foxes” — prompted the bats to move into areas closer to human settlements looking for alternate meals, including to a suburb of Brisbane called Hendra.



There, the bats transmitted a virus to horses, which in turn infected people. First identified in 1994 and named Hendra virus, it is highly lethal, killing 60% of people and 75% of horses infected.



A similar chain of events took place in Bangladesh, when habitat destruction drove fruit bats into cities, where they spread Nipah virus, which causes severe encephalitis in humans, by licking date palm sap from collection barrels.



To potentially reverse the movement of bats, Montana State University’s Plowright and colleagues based in Australia are studying restoring the bats’ original habitat.



“Every city in Australia is full of fruit bats that lost their winter habitats,” she said. “The idea is to plant new forests and make sure they are away from places with domestic animals and people.”



Whether the goal is to curb the spread of known zoonotic diseases or to reduce the risk of new ones emerging as pandemics, the strategy is the same: Reduce contact between humans and wild animals.



“In the history of COVID-19, bats have been more victim than victimizer,” said Ricardo Moratelli, coordinator of the Fiocruz project in Brazil. “Bats host a large number of parasites, and they deal with these parasites well. The problem is when human beings enter into contact with them.”

Scientists focus on bats for clues to prevent next pandemic

(AP): Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the World War II fighter pilot ace and quintessential test pilot who showed he had the “right stuff” when in 1947 he became the first person to fly faster than sound, has died. He was 97.



Yeager died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on his Twitter account. “It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, &amp; a legacy of strength, adventure, &amp; patriotism will be remembered forever.”



Yeager’s death is “a tremendous loss to our nation,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.



“Gen. Yeager’s pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America’s abilities in the sky and set our nation’s dreams soaring into the jet age and the space age. He said, ‘You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done,’” Bridenstine said.



“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in August 2006 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yeager.



He was “the most righteous of all those with the right stuff,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Bedke, commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards.



Yeager, from a small town in the hills of West Virginia, flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an X-15 to near 1,000 mph (1,609 kph) at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79.



“Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining,” he said in “Yeager: An Autobiography.”



“I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” he wrote. “If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”



On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed an orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting aviation milestone.



“Sure, I was apprehensive,” he said in 1968. “When you’re fooling around with something you don’t know much about, there has to be apprehension. But you don’t let that affect your job.”



The modest Yeager said in 1947 he could have gone even faster had the plane carried more fuel. He said the ride “was nice, just like riding fast in a car.”



Yeager nicknamed the rocket plane, and all his other aircraft, “Glamorous Glennis” for his wife, who died in 1990.



Yeager’s feat was kept top secret for about a year when the world thought the British had broken the sound barrier first.



“It wasn’t a matter of not having airplanes that would fly at speeds like this. It was a matter of keeping them from falling apart,” Yeager said.



Sixty-five years later to the minute, on Oct. 14, 2012, Yeager commemorated the feat, flying in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier at more than 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) above California’s Mojave Desert.



His exploits were told in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff,” and the 1983 film it inspired.



Yeager was born Feb. 23, 1923, in Myra, a tiny community on the Mud River deep in an Appalachian hollow about 40 miles southwest of Charleston. The family later moved to Hamlin, the county seat. His father was an oil and gas driller and a farmer.



“What really strikes me looking over all those years is how lucky I was, how lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963 so that I came of age just as aviation itself was entering the modern era,” Yeager said in a December 1985 speech at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.



“I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride,” he said.



Yeager enlisted in the Army Air Corps after graduating from high school in 1941. He later regretted that his lack of a college education prevented him from becoming an astronaut.



He started off as an aircraft mechanic and, despite becoming severely airsick during his first airplane ride, signed up for a program that allowed enlisted men to become pilots.



Yeager shot down 13 German planes on 64 missions during World War II, including five on a single mission. He was once shot down over German-held France but escaped with the help of French partisans.



After World War II, he became a test pilot beginning at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.



Among the flights he made after breaking the sound barrier was one on Dec. 12. 1953, when he flew an X-1A to a record of more than 1,600 mph. He said he had gotten up at dawn that day and went hunting, bagging a goose before his flight. That night, he said, his family ate the goose for dinner.



He returned to combat during the Vietnam War, flying several missions a month in twin-engine B-57 Canberras making bombing and strafing runs over South Vietnam.



Yeager also commanded Air Force fighter squadrons and wings, and the Aerospace Research Pilot School for military astronauts.



“I’ve flown 341 types of military planes in every country in the world and logged about 18,000 hours,” he said in an interview in the January 2009 issue of Men’s Journal. “It might sound funny, but I’ve never owned an airplane in my life. If you’re willing to bleed, Uncle Sam will give you all the planes you want.”



When Yeager left Hamlin, he was already known as a daredevil. On later visits, he often buzzed the town.



“I live just down the street from his mother,” said Gene Brewer, retired publisher of the weekly Lincoln Journal. “One day I climbed up on my roof with my 8 mm camera when he flew overhead. I thought he was going to take me off the roof. You can see the treetops in the bottom of the pictures.”



Yeager flew an F-80 under a Charleston bridge at 450 mph on Oct. 10, 1948, according to newspaper accounts. When he was asked to repeat the feat for photographers, Yeager replied: “You should never strafe the same place twice ’cause the gunners will be waiting for you.”



Yeager never forgot his roots and West Virginia named bridges, schools and Charleston’s airport after him.



“My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day,” Yeager wrote. “My accomplishments as a test pilot tell more about luck, happenstance and a person’s destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon or shot the head off a squirrel before going to school.”



Yeager was awarded the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Collier air trophy in December 1948 for his breaking the sound barrier. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.



Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch in Cedar Ridge in Northern California where he continued working as a consultant to the Air Force and Northrop Corp. and became well known to younger generations as a television pitchman for automotive parts and heat pumps.



He married Glennis Dickhouse of Oroville, California, on Feb. 26, 1945. She died of ovarian cancer in December 1990. They had four children: Donald, Michael, Sharon and Susan.



Yeager married 45-year-old Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.

Chuck Yeager, 1st to break sound barrier, dies at 97

NEW YORK (AP): Brain scans offer a tantalizing glimpse into the mind’s mysteries, promising an almost X-ray-like vision into how we feel pain, interpret faces and wiggle fingers.



Studies of brain images have suggested that Republicans and Democrats have visibly different thinking, that overweight adults have stronger responses to pictures of food and that it’s possible to predict a sober person’s likelihood of relapse.



But such buzzy findings are coming under growing scrutiny as scientists grapple with the fact that some brain scan research doesn’t seem to hold up.



Such studies have been criticized for relying on too few subjects and for incorrectly analyzing or interpreting data. Researchers have also realized a person’s brain scan results can differ from day to day — even under identical conditions — casting a doubt on how to document consistent patterns.With so many questions being raised, some researchers are acknowledging the scans’ limitations and working to overcome them or simply turning to other tests.



Earlier this year, Duke University researcher Annchen Knodt’s lab published the latest paper challenging the reliability of common brain scan projects, based on about 60 studies of the past decade including her own.



“We found this poor result across the board,” Knodt said. “We’re basically discrediting much of the work we’ve done.”



WATCHING BRAINS ‘LIGHT UP’



The research being re-examined relies on a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.



Using large magnets, the scans detect where oxygenated blood rushes to when someone does an activity — such as memorizing a list of words or touching fingertips together — allowing scientists to indirectly measure brain activity.



When the technology debuted in the early 1990s, it opened a seemingly revolutionary window into the human brain.



Other previous imaging techniques tracked brain activity through electrodes placed on the skull or radioactive tracers injected into the bloodstream. In comparison, fMRI seemed like a fast, high-resolution and non-invasive alternative.



A flurry of papers and press coverage followed the technique’s invention, pointing to parts of the brain that “light up” when we fall in love, feel pain, gamble or make difficult decisions. But as years passed, troubling evidence began to surface that challenged some of those findings.



“It’s a very powerful thing to show a picture of the brain. It lends itself to abuse, in some ways,” said Damian Stanley, a brain scientist at Adelphi University. “People eat them up, things get overblown. Somewhere in there, we lost the nuance.”



QUESTIONS EMERGE



In 2009, a group of scientists investigated papers that had linked individual differences in brain activity to various personality types. They found many used a type of analysis that reported only the strongest correlations, leading to potentially coincidental conclusions. A “disturbingly large” amount of fMRI research on emotion and personality relied on these “seriously defective research methods,” the group wrote.



Later that year, another pair of researchers demonstrated that the raw results of imaging scans — without the proper statistical corrections — could detect brain activity in a dead Atlantic salmon. Four years ago, another group of scientists claimed a different common statistical error had led thousands of fMRI projects astray.



This year, Stanford University researchers described what happened when they gave the same fMRI data to 70 groups of independent neuroscientists. No two teams used the same analysis methods and, overall, the researchers did not always come to the same conclusions about what the data demonstrated about brain activity.



“In the end, we probably jumped on the fMRI bandwagon a little too fast. It’s reached the threshold of concern for a lot of us,” said Duke neuroscientist Anita Disney.



THE NEXT BIG THING



With doubts growing, many labs have become more cautious about what imaging techniques to use in efforts to unravel the average brain’s 110,000 miles (177,000 kilometers) of nerve fibers.



Yale University researcher Joy Hirsch, for example, wants to understand “the social brain” — what happens when people talk, touch or make eye contact. She’s opted out of fMRI, since it can only be used on a single person who must remain perfectly still for imagining inside a large scanner.



Instead, Hirsch uses an alternative technology that bounces laser lights off of a fiber optic cable-laced skullcap into the brain to detect blood flow. The technique, functional near infrared spectroscopy, allows her subjects to move freely during scanning and permits her to study live social interactions between several people.



Disney also shies away from fMRI, which she says is too crude of an instrument for her forays into the molecular relationship between brain chemistry, behavior and states like arousal and attentiveness.



That doesn’t mean everyone is walking away from fMRI.



Some surgeons depend on the technique to map a patient’s brain before surgeries, and the technology has proven itself useful for broadly mapping the neural mechanisms of diseases such as schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s.



Today, optogenetics — an emerging technique that uses light to activate neurons — is poised to be brain science’s next siren technology.



Some say it’s too early to know whether they’ll adopt it as a tool.



“In that early hyper-sexy phase of a new technique, it is actually really difficult to get people to do the basic work of understanding its limitations,” Disney said.



The evolving understanding of fMRI and its limits shows science at work and should ultimately make people more confident in the results, not less, said Stanford brain scientist Russ Poldrack.



“We want to show people you have to pay attention to this stuff,” Poldrack said. “Otherwise people are going to lose faith in our ability to answer questions.”

Why are some scientists turning away from brain scans?

BEIJING (Reuters): China’s Chang’e-5 lunar vehicle has finished collecting samples of lunar rocks and soil more than a day ahead of schedule in the first lunar sample retrieval mission since the 1970s, the country’s space agency said on Thursday.



The robotic vehicle has stored the samples and will now dock with the orbiting Chang’e-5 for the return journey to Earth.



China launched a robotic spacecraft on Nov. 24 to bring back rocks from the moon in the first bid by any country to retrieve samples since 1976.



Late on Tuesday, the Chang’e-5 spacecraft successfully deployed a pair of landing and ascending vehicles onto the moon’s surface. The plan was to collect 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of samples.



The sample collection was completed after 19 hours, the space agency said in its statement, without disclosing the total weight of the samples collected.



China had planned to collect the samples over a period of about two days, with the entire mission taking around 23 days.



The ascending vehicle would lift off from the lunar surface with the samples, and dock with a module currently orbiting around the moon.The samples would then be transferred to a return capsule onboard the orbiting module for delivery back to Earth.



If successful, the mission will make China only the third country to have retrieved lunar samples after the United States and the Soviet Union.



China made its first lunar landing in 2013.



In January 2019, the Change-4 probe landed on the far side of the moon, the first space probe from any nation to do so.

China completes lunar sample collection ahead of schedule

(AP): As an extreme year for hurricanes, wildfires and heatwaves come to an end, the head of the United Nations challenged world leaders to make 2021 the year that humanity ends its “war on nature” and commits to a future free of planet-warming carbon pollution.



With new reports highlighting 2020’s record-breaking weather and growing fossil fuels extraction that triggers global warming, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivered yet another urgent appeal to curb climate change. It was tinged with optimism but delivered dire warnings, as the UN gears up for a Dec. 12 virtual climate summit in France on the 5th anniversary of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement.



“The state of the planet is broken,” Guterres said in a speech at Columbia University. “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal.”



“Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes are increasingly the new normal,” he said.



In a report, the World Meteorological Organization said this year is set to end about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the last half of the 1800s, which scientists use as a baseline for warming caused by heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Most trapped heat goes into the world’s seas, and ocean temperatures now are at record levels. It also means 2020 will go down as one of the three hottest years on record.



“There is at least a one-in-five chance of it temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2024,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said. The Paris climate accord set a goal of not exceeding 1.5-degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times.



A new analysis by Climate Action Tracker scientists who monitor carbon pollution and pledges to cut them said public commitments to emission cuts, if kept, would limit warming to about 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and possibly as low as 2.1 degrees Celsius.



Guterres saw hope in promises by more than 100 countries that by mid-century they will not be adding more heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere than trees and technology can remove, along with shorter term pollution cuts. China and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden have pledged net zero carbon emissions.



“I firmly believe that 2021 can be a new kind of leap year — the year of a quantum leap towards carbon neutrality,” Guterres said.



But he said the two U.N. reports Wednesday “spell out how close we are to climate catastrophe.”



When countries spend trillions of dollars to recover from the pandemic-triggered economic slowdown, Guterres said they must to do so in a way that emphasizes clean energy.



Nations should stop funding and subsidizing fossil fuels, he said. And countries need to fulfill their Paris promise to spend $100 billion annually to help poorer countries develop cleaner energy.



Guterres said there’s no way the world can curb the climate change “without U.S. leadership” and urged students and other Americans to do “everything you can” to get their governments to curb emissions more quickly.



One of the new reports found countries would need to cut production of oil, coal and natural gas by 6 percent each year by 2030 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Instead, a review of eight major fossil-fuel producing nations showed they plan to increase production by 2 percent annually. That means twice the amount of carbon-based fuel would come onto the market than feasible to keep the Paris goal within reach.



Governments in the Group of 20 major and emerging economies have so far committed more money to prop up fossil fuel sectors than to boost the rollout of renewable energy, the report found.



Co-author Ivetta Gerasimchuk of the International Institute for Sustainable Development said investing in oil, coal and gas no longer makes economic sense because renewable energy is becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. But, she said, “We see that instead of governments letting these fossil fuel projects die they resurrect them from the dead.”



The WMO’s report found global warming is worsening in all seven key climate indicators, but the problem is increasing human suffering in an already bad year.



“In 2020, over 50 million people have been doubly hit: by climate-related disasters (floods, droughts and storms) and the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report said. ”Countries in Central America are suffering from the triple-impact of hurricanes Eta and Iota, COVID-19 and pre-existing humanitarian crises.”



Among the dozens of extremes the report highlighted:



-- A record 30 Atlantic named tropical storms and hurricanes.



--Death Valley, California, hit 129.9 degrees (54.4 degrees Celsius), the hottest the world has seen in 80 years.



--Record wildfires struck California and Colorado in the western United States, following a major fire season and record heat in Australia.



--The Arctic had record wildfires and a prolonged heat wave culminating in a 100-degree mark (38 degrees Celsius) in Siberia in June.



--Record low Arctic sea ice was reported for April and August and the yearly minimum, in September, was the second lowest on record.



--More than 2,000 people died in record summer rains and flooding in Pakistan and surrounding nations.



While these events can’t solely be blamed on climate change, “these are the types of events scientists fear will increase due to climate change,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the report.



“Human activities are at the root of our descent towards chaos,” Guterres said. “But that means human action can solve it.”

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