(AP): The two biggest economies and largest carbon polluters in the world announced separate financial attacks on climate change Tuesday.



Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country will no longer fund coal-fired power plants abroad, surprising the world on climate for the second straight year at the U.N. General Assembly. That came hours after U.S. President Joe Biden announced a plan to double financial aid to poorer nations to $11.4 billion by 2024 so those countries could switch to cleaner energy and cope with global warming’s worsening impacts. That puts rich nations close to within reach of its long-promised but not realized goal of $100 billion a year in climate help for developing nations.



“This is an absolutely seminal moment,” said Xinyue Ma, an expert on energy development finance at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.



This could provide some momentum going into major climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in less than six weeks, experts said. Running up to the historic 2015 Paris climate deal, a joint U.S.-China agreement kickstarted successful negotiations. This time, with China-U.S. relations dicey, the two nations made their announcements separately, hours and thousands of miles apart.



“Today was a really good day for the world,” United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the upcoming climate negotiations, told Vice President Kamala Harris.



United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has made a frenetic push this week for bigger efforts to curb climate change called the two announcements welcome news, but said “we still have a long way to go” to make the Glasgow meeting successful.



Depending on when China’s new coal policy goes into effect, it could shutter 47 planned power plants in 20 developing countries that use the fuel that emits the most heat-trapping gases, about the same amount of coal power as from Germany, according to the European climate think-tank E3G.



“It’s a big deal. China was the only significant funder of overseas coal left. This announcement essentially ends all public support for coal globally,” said Joanna Lewis, an expert on China, energy, and climate at Georgetown University. “This is the announcement many have been waiting for.”



From 2013 to 2019, data showed that China was financing 13% of coal-fired power capacity built outside China – “far and away from the largest public financier,” said Kevin Gallagher, who directs the Boston University center. Japan and South Korea announced earlier this year that they were getting out of the coal-financing business.



With all three countries pulling out of financing coal abroad “that sends a signal to the global economy. This is a sector that’s fast becoming a stranded asset,” Gallagher said.



While this is a big step it is not quite a death knell for coal, said Byford Tsang, a policy analyst for E3G. That’s because China last year added as much new coal power domestically as was just potentially canceled abroad, he said.



Tsang cautioned that the one-sentence line in Xi’s speech that mentioned this new policy lacked details like effective dates and whether it applied to private funding as well as public funding.



What also matters is when China stops building new coal plants at home and shutters old ones, Tsang said. That will be part of a push in the G-20 meetings in Italy next month, he said. “The Chinese are going to respond to international pressure, rather than just American bilateral pressure right now,” said Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s politics and energy at Villanova University.



“A coal-free energy mix is still decades in the future” because coal power plants typically operate for 50 years or more, said Stanford University environment director Chris Field.



Many nations that are trying to build their economies — including top polluters China and India — have long argued they needed to industrialize with fossil fuels, like developed nations had already done. Starting in 2009 and then with “a grand bargain” in 2015 in Paris, richer nations promised $100 billion a year in financial help to poorer nations to make the switch from dirty to clean fuel, World Resources Institute climate finance expert Joe Thwaites said.



But as of 2019, the richer nations were only providing $80 billion a year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.



So when rich nations like the United States asked poorer ones to do more “it gives any other country a very easy retort,” Thwaites said: “‘You took out commitments and you haven’t delivered on those either.’”″



In April, Biden announced he would double the Obama-era financial aid pledge of $2.85 billion a year to $5.7 billion. On Tuesday he announced that he hopes to double that to $11.4 billion a year starting in 2024, but he does need passage from Congress.



The European Union has been doling out $24.5 billion a year with the European Commission recently upping that to more than $4.7 billion over seven years. “The Europeans are doing a lot more and the Americans are lagging behind,” Thwaites said.



He said several studies calculate that based on the U.S. economy, population and carbon pollution, it should be contributing 40% to 47% of the $100 billion funds to be doing its fair share.



But Congressional Republicans aren’t convinced. “We shouldn’t be contributing to a fund that picks winners and losers and further subsidizes China in the process,” said Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the House Climate Committee.



The time for global grandstanding is over, said Princeton University climate science and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer said. “It’s what’s happening on the ground that matters.”



“Accelerating the global phase-out of coal is the single most important step” to keeping the Paris agreement’s key warming limit within reach, said U.N. chief Guterres.



Note: Associated Press journalist Matthew Daly contributed from Washington.

China, US unveil separate big steps to fight climate change

AP: Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”



“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”



But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.



The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.



Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then.



Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5-degree-Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows.



“Our report shows that we need to be prepared for going into that level of warming in the coming decades. But we can avoid further levels of warming by acting on greenhouse gas emissions,” said report co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environment Sciences at the University of Paris-Saclay.



In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours unless there are deep emissions cuts, the report said.



“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” said IPCC Vice-Chair Ko Barrett, senior climate adviser for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.



With crucial international climate negotiations coming up in Scotland in November, world leaders said the report is causing them to try harder to cut carbon pollution. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called it “a stark reminder.”



The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea-level rise and worsening extremes such as heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.



For example, the kind of heatwave that used to happen only once every 50 years now happens once a decade, and if the world warms another degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), it will happen twice every seven years, the report said.



As the planet warms, places will get hit more not just by extreme weather but by multiple climate disasters at once, the report said. That’s like what’s now happening in the Western U.S., where heat waves, drought and wildfires compound the damage, Mearns said. Extreme heat is also driving massive fires in Greece and Turkey.



Some harm from climate change — dwindling ice sheets, rising sea levels, and changes in the oceans as they lose oxygen and become more acidic — is “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” the report said.



The world is “locked-in” to 15 to 30 centimeters (6 to 12 inches) of sea-level rise by mid-century, said report co-author Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.



Scientists have issued this message for more than three decades, but the world hasn’t listened, said United Nations Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen.



For the first time, the report offers an interactive atlas for people to see what has happened and may happen to where they live.



Nearly all of the warming that has happened on Earth can be blamed on emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. At most, natural forces or simple randomness can explain one- or two-tenths of a degree of warming, the report said.



The report described five different future scenarios based on how much the world reduces carbon emissions. They are a future with incredibly large and quick pollution cuts; another with intense pollution cuts but not quite as massive; a scenario with moderate emission cuts; a fourth scenario where current plans to make small pollution reductions continue; and a fifth possible future involving continued increases in carbon pollution.



In five previous reports, the world was on that final hottest path, often nicknamed “business as usual.” But this time, the world is somewhere between the moderate path and the small pollution reductions scenario because of progress to curb climate change, said report co-author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the U.S. Pacific Northwest National Lab.



While calling the report “a code red for humanity,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kept a sliver of hope that world leaders could still somehow prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, which he said is “perilously close.”



Alok Sharma, the president of the upcoming climate negotiations in Scotland, urged leaders to do more so they can “credibly say that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive.”



“Anything we can do to limit, to slow down, is going to pay off,” Tebaldi said. “And if we cannot get to 1.5, it’s probably going to be painful, but it’s better not to give up.”



In the report’s worst-case scenario, the world could be around 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than now by the end of the century. But that scenario looks increasingly unlikely, said report co-author and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, climate change director of the Breakthrough Institute.



“We are a lot less likely to get lucky and end up with less warming than we thought,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, the odds of ending up in a much worse place than we expected if we do reduce our emissions are notably lower.”



The report also said ultra-catastrophic disasters — commonly called “tipping points,” like ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents — are “low likelihood” but cannot be ruled out. The much-talked-about shutdown of Atlantic ocean currents, which would trigger massive weather shifts, is something that’s unlikely to happen in this century, Kopp said.



A “major advance” in the understanding of how fast the world warms with each ton of carbon dioxide emitted allowed scientists to be far more precise in the scenarios in this report, Mason-Delmotte said.



In a new move, scientists emphasized how cutting airborne levels of methane — a powerful but short-lived gas that has soared to record levels — could help curb short-term warming. Lots of methane in the atmosphere comes from leaks of natural gas, a major power source. Livestock also produces large amounts of the gas, a good chunk of it in cattle burps.



More than 100 countries have made informal pledges to achieve “net-zero” human-caused carbon dioxide emissions sometime around mid-century, which will be a key part of the negotiations in Scotland. The report said those commitments are essential.



“It is still possible to forestall many of the direst impacts,” Barrett said.

UN scientists warn of worsening global warming

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP): Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.



Branson’s company announced Thursday evening that its next test flight will be July 11 and that its founder will be among the six people on board. The winged rocket ship will soar from New Mexico — the first carrying a full crew of company employees. It will be only the fourth trip to space for Virgin Galactic.



The news came just hours after Bezos’ Blue Origin said Bezos would be accompanied into space on July 20 by a female aerospace pioneer who’s waited 60 years to rocket away.



Bezos chose July 20 as his West Texas launch date — the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He assigned himself to the flight just a month ago, the final stretch in a yearslong race to space between the two rich rocketeers.



Amazon’s founder will be on Blue Origin’s debut launch with people on board, accompanied by his brother, the winner of a $28 million charity auction and Wally Funk, one of the last surviving members of the Mercury 13 who was chosen as his “honored guest.” The 13 female pilots passed the same tests as NASA’s original Mercury 7 astronauts back in the early 1960s, but were barred from the corps — and spaceflight — because they were women.



As late as Wednesday, Branson declined to say when he would ride into space because of restrictions placed on him by his publicly traded company. But he stressed he was “fit and healthy” to fly as soon as his engineers give him the go.



“I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars. On July 11, it’s time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic,” he said via Twitter.



Virgin Galactic launches its rocket ship from an aircraft, reaching an altitude of roughly 55 miles (88 kilometers). Blue Origin launches its New Shepard rocket from the ground, with its capsule soaring to about 66 miles (106 kilometers). Both those heights are considered the edge of space. By comparison, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launches its capsules — both crew and cargo — into orbit around Earth.



All three private space companies plan to take paying customers into space. SpaceX will be the first with a private flight coming up in September.



Flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin last about 10 minutes, with three or so minutes of weightlessness. But the returns are quite different: Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane glides to a landing on a runway, like NASA’s old space shuttles did, with a pair of pilots in charge. Blue Origin’s automated capsules parachute to the desert floor, similar to how NASA’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules made ocean splashdowns. Their spaceports are just 200 miles (320 kilometers) apart.



Funk, at age 82, will become the oldest person to launch into space when Blue Origin takes its turn.



“I’ll love every second of it. Whoooo! Ha-ha. I can hardly wait,” Funk said in an Instagram video posted by Bezos.



“Nothing has ever gotten in my way,” she added. “They said, ‘Well, you’re a girl, you can’t do that.’ I said, ’Guess what, doesn’t matter what you are. You can still do it if you want to do it and I like to do things that nobody has ever done.”



She’ll beat the late John Glenn, who set a record at age 77 when flying aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Glenn pooh-poohed the idea of women flying in space, shortly after he became the first American to orbit the world in 1962.



“No one has waited longer,” Bezos said via Instagram. “It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally.”



Bezos is stepping down as Amazon’s CEO on Monday.



Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or when the public might strap into the spacious six-seat capsule. Its New Shepard rocket is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.



Virgin Galactic has more than 600 reservations in the pipeline. These original tickets went for $250,000. The company will start accepting more following the upcoming flight with Branson. Keen to get to space, Funk reserved a seat years ago.



Virgin Galactic plans three more test flights before taking up customers, Branson was initially supposed to be on the second demo coming up but moved it up in an apparent bid to outdo Bezos. He said Wednesday, after his other company Virgin Orbit launched a batch of satellites, that it’s important for his customers to see him ride his rocket ship first before they climb on board.

Richard Branson announces trip to space, ahead of Jeff Bezos

BBC: China's space agency has released video of its Zhurong rover trundling across the surface of Mars.



The pictures were acquired by a wireless camera that the robot had placed on the ground.



The new media release also includes sequences from Zhurong's landing in May, showing the deployment of its parachute system and the moment of touchdown.



The six-wheeled robot is investigating a region known as Utopia Planitia.



The China National Space Agency (CNSA) says Zhurong has driven 236m in 42 Mars sols (as of 27 June). A sol is a Martian day. It lasts slightly longer than an Earth day, at 24 hours and 39 minutes.



The latest movies were relayed back to Earth via the Tianwen-1 satellite which orbits the Red Planet.



"The orbiter and the Mars rover are in good working condition, reporting safely from Mars to the party and the motherland, and sending distant blessings on the century of the party's founding," a CNSA press statement said.



The first of July will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.



A video release was expected, especially of the landing, which occurred on 14 May. Some preview stills looking up at the parachute system from the rover's entry capsule were handed out last week.



In the movie version, however, we see the envelope inflate in the rarefied Martian atmosphere. We also see Zhurong and its landing platform drop away from the "backshell" of the capsule; and finally a look-down camera captures the moment of touchdown as the platform's braking rocket motor blasts the surface clear of dust.



There are three videos on the surface. The first, presumably taken shortly after Zhurong put the wireless camera on the ground, shows the robot backing away.



The second video shows Zhurong wiggling its wheels while sitting next to its landing platform. The CNSA had previously released a still from this scene.



And, finally, the third video details the rover's roll down the ramp that got it off the landing platform on to the surface. What's interesting about this movie is that we get sound as well. We can hear the robot's locomotion system in action.



The nature of Mars' atmosphere means noises don't sound quite the same as they do on Earth. They seem somewhat muffled.



Scientists are hoping to get at least 90 Martian days of service out of Zhurong.



The robot looks a lot like the American space agency's (Nasa) Spirit and Opportunity vehicles from the 2000s.



It weighs some 240kg. A tall mast carries cameras to take pictures and aid navigation; five additional instruments will investigate the mineralogy of local rocks and the general nature of the environment, including the weather.



Like the current American rovers (Curiosity and Perseverance), Zhurong has a laser tool to zap rocks to assess their chemistry. It also has a radar to look for sub-surface water-ice - a capability it shares with Perseverance.



Videos of the landing of Perseverance were released by Nasa shortly after its descent to the Martian surface on 18 February.

China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover

Kathmandu: Karkhana has launched the country's first science kit for school students.



With an aim of making science subject experimental the science kit has been introduced on a virtual event organized on Friday. Materials for science experiments are included in the science kit.



The kit will include several material bundles based on the science course book's syllabus. Each experimental package will include supplies for each of the science book's lessons. The kit also includes a guidebook that will instruct students on how to use the materials in their science experiments.



Karkhana also provides a digital handbook for students. For experiments, they will also guide students through Google Classroom. The science kit will initially be offered only to students in grades six, seven,and eight.



As the science curriculum and teaching techniques in Nepal give theoretical knowledge only, applied and practical science teaching and learning is severely lacking. "We believe that interactive learning is more enjoyable for students. Thus, we have prepared this science kit with our eight years-long experience in the teaching sector," said Pavitra Bahadur Gautam, co-founder of Karkhana.



Karkhana has introduced a science kit that can aid to construct a scientific lab at home in order to encourage children to study by doing and to make science subjects more attractive, Gautam added. He further informed that all the science kit materials have been locally manufactured by Karkhana. Most of the materials have been produced at their own factory using local resources.



"Our major target is to redefine the way we learn science subject,"he said, adding, "The kit will be available on Sasto Deal and UG Bajar. Aswell as interested one can purchase it through Karkhana's officialwebsite." Karkhana also plans to distributescience kits to school administrators in the near future.



Meanwhile, Karkhana is working with local governments and NGOs/INGOs to provide science kits to students living in distant locations.



The science kit will cost from Rs5,300 to Rs 5,500 per unit.

Karkhana introduces country's first science kit

AP: The coelacanth — a giant weird fish still around from dinosaur times — can live for 100 years, a new study found.



These slow-moving, people-sized fish of the deep, nicknamed a “living fossil,” are the opposite of the live fast, die young mantra. These nocturnal fish grow at an achingly slow pace.



Females don’t hit sexual maturity until their late 50s, the study said, while male coelacanths are sexually mature at 40 to 69 years. And maybe strangest of all, researchers figure pregnancy in the fish lasts about five years.



Coelacanths, which have been around for 400 million years, were thought extinct until they were found alive in 1938 off South Africa. Scientists long believed coelacanths live about 20 years. But by applying a standard technique for dating commercial fish, French scientists calculated they actually live close to a century, according to a study in Thursday’s Current Biology.



Coelacanths are so endangered that scientists can only study specimens already caught and dead.



In the past, scientists calculated fish ages by counting big lines on a specific coelacanth scale. But the French scientists found they were missing smaller lines that could only be seen using polarized light — the technique used to figure out the age of commercial fish.



Study co-author Bruno Ernande, a marine evolutionary ecologist at France’s marine research institute, said polarized light revealed five smaller lines for every big one. The researchers concluded the smaller lines better correlated to a year of coelacanth age — and that indicated their oldest specimen was 84 years old.



Using the technique, the scientists studied two embryos and calculated the largest was five years old and the youngest was nine years old. So, Ernande said, they figured pregnancy lasts at least five years in coelacanths, which have live births.



That five-year gestation is “very strange” for fish or any animal, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Harold Walker, who wasn’t part of the research.



Even though coelacanths are unrelated genetically and show wide evolutionary differences, they age slowly like other dwellers of the deep, sharks and rays, Ernande said. “They might have evolved similar life histories because they are sharing similar type habitats,” he said.

Weird ‘living fossil’ fish lives 100 years, pregnant for five

(BBC): As many said at the time, bird song did sound different during lockdown, according to a scientific study.



By analysing the calls of sparrows recorded over decades, scientists confirmed a change in the birds' vocal repertoire when the city fell quiet.



The birds upped the quality of their songs, as they called to defend their territory and entice a mate.



And while it might have seemed to human ears that bird song got louder, the sparrows actually sang more quietly.



These sweeter, softer songs carried further given the lack of background noise.



Dr Elizabeth Derryberry of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, US, has studied for years how noise pollution affects bird song.



"People were right that birds did sound different during the shutdown and they filled the soundscape that we basically abandoned," she told BBC News.



"As we moved out of the soundscape, the birds moved in and I think this tells us something about just how big an effect we have on birdsong and on communication, especially in cities."



What did the study show? Thanks to a long-running study of the songs of white-crowned sparrows living in and around the San Francisco Bay area, scientists were able to compare effects before and during lockdown.



What they found came as a bit of a surprise. Most of the time, it's male sparrows that sing, and during the silence the birds improved their vocal performance and sang lower-amplitude "sexier" songs to defend their territory and woo a female.



"When noise levels dropped during the shutdown, their songs actually sounded sexier to other birds in the population," said Dr Derryberry.



It shows how quickly nature can recover from the effects of human noise pollution, she added.



"This study shows that when you reduce noise pollution there's almost an immediate effect on wildlife behaviour and that's really exciting because so many things that we do to try to help the environment take a long time to improve."



A 'silent spring'? The lockdown was in effect a natural experiment in how wildlife responded to human-generated noise.



Traffic levels across the Golden Gate Bridge fell to levels similar to the 1950s and it was reported on social media that coyotes were seen wandering across.



Much has been written about the connection people felt with nature during the lockdown. And this study provides some evidence that both wildlife and human benefitted from the "silent spring".



"It improves your state of being and mental health to be able to hear more birds and I think the shutdown highlighted that, and this study provided some data to support that," said Dr Derryberry.



What do we know about the sparrow's songs? The white-crowned sparrow, which has distinctive white and black head stripes, is found across much of the US and Canada, where its songs have been widely studied.



Different sub-species across the country sing slightly different songs, known for the sweet, whistling introduction, a succession of jumbled whistles, and a trill near the end.



The sparrows of the San Francisco Bay area have been recorded since the 1970s, creating a rare historical record of song behaviour.



It's well known that birds living in cities have had to adjust their songs in recent decades, much like people having to talk louder at a crowded party. This is known scientifically as the Lombard, or cocktail party effect.



The study, published in Science, was carried out in collaboration with experts at Texas A&amp;M University-San Antonio, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and George Mason University, Fairfax.

How lockdown birds sang to a different tune

(BBC): China has released the first pictures taken by its Zhurong rover on Mars.



The forward view shows the landscape ahead of the robot as it sits on its landing platform; the rear-looking image reveals Zhurong's solar panels.



The rover touched down on the Red Planet early on Sunday, Beijing time.



In doing so, it made China only the second nation - after America - to successfully put a probe on the surface of Mars and operate it for a significant length of time.



Chinese scientists hope get at least 90 Martian days of service out of the six-wheeled robot at its location on Utopia Planitia, a vast terrain in the planet's northern hemisphere.



Zhurong looks a lot like the US space agency's (Nasa) Spirit and Opportunity vehicles from the 2000s.



It weighs some 240kg. A tall mast carries cameras to take pictures and aid navigation; five additional instruments will investigate the mineralogy of local rocks and the general nature of the environment, including the weather.



Like the current American rovers (Curiosity and Perseverance), Zhurong has a laser tool to zap rocks to assess their chemistry. It also has a radar to look for sub-surface water-ice - a capability its American cousins don't share.



Utopia Planitia is where Nasa landed its Viking-2 mission in 1976.



It's a colossal basin - more than 3,000km across - that was formed by an impact early in Mars' history.



There is some evidence pointing to it having held an ocean long ago.



Remote sensing by satellites indicates there are significant stores of ice at depth.



America put down the much larger (one tonne) Perseverance robot in February.



Europe, which has twice failed with landing attempts, will send a rover called Rosalind Franklin to Mars next year (in a joint project with the Russians).

China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures

NEW DELHI (AP): A potentially worrisome variant of the coronavirus detected in India may spread more easily. But the country is behind in doing the kind of testing needed to track it and understand it better.



On Monday, the World Health Organization designated the new version of the virus a “variant of concern” based on preliminary research, alongside those that were first detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil but have spread to other countries.



“We need much more information about this virus variant,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19. “We need more sequencing, targeted sequencing to be done and to be shared in India and elsewhere so that we know how much of this virus is circulating.”



Viruses mutate constantly, and the surge in infections here has resulted in more opportunities for new versions to emerge.



But India was slow to start the genetic monitoring needed to see if those changes were happening and if they were making the coronavirus more infectious or deadly.



Such variants also need to be monitored to see if mutations help the virus escape the immune system, potentially leading to reinfections or making vaccines less effective. For now, the WHO stressed that COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing disease and death in people infected with the variant.



Indian scientists say their work has been hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and the government’s reluctance to share vital data. India is sequencing around 1% of its total cases, and not all of the results are uploaded to the global database of coronavirus genomes.



When there isn’t enough sequencing, there will be blind spots and more worrisome mutations could go undetected until they’re widespread, said Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who is tracking global sequencing efforts.



Ravindra Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, said: “It has all the hallmarks of the virus that we should be worried about.”



First detected in the coastal Maharashtra state last year, the new variant has now been found in samples in 19 of the 27 states surveyed. Meanwhile a variant first detected in Britain has declined in India in the past 45 days.



Indian health officials have cautioned that it is too soon to attribute the nation’s surge solely to such variants. Experts point out that the spread was catalyzed by government decisions to not pause religious gatherings and crowded election rallies.



Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies microorganisms at Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India, said researchers need to figure out if the variant is capable of infecting those who previously had COVID-19 and, if so, whether it could result in severe disease.



“I don’t get why people don’t see this as important,” she said.



Sequencing efforts in India have been haphazard. The country uploads 0.49 sequences per 1,000 cases to GISAID, a global data sharing effort, Chan said. The U.S., which had its own troubles with genetic monitoring, uploads about 10 in 1,000, while the U.K. does so for about 82 per 1,000 cases.



Late last year, Indian government institutions were ordered to buy domestic raw materials wherever possible, in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of turning India “self-reliant.” This proved impossible, since all materials for sequencing were imported, resulting in more paperwork, said Anurag Agarwal, the director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. The obstacles were most pronounced between September and December, he said, but his lab was able to find workarounds and continued sequencing.



Other labs didn’t, and scientists said that should have been when India ramped up its sequencing, because cases were declining at the time.



Even after a federal effort started in Jan. 18, bringing together 10 labs that can sequence 7,500 samples weekly, the actual work didn’t start until mid-February due to other logistical issues, said Dr. Shahid Jameel, a virologist who chairs the scientific advisory group advising the consortium.



By then, India’s cases had begun spiking.



Jameel said India has sequenced around 20,000 samples, but only 15,000 were publicly reported because some were missing vital data. Until late last month, a third of the samples sent by states were unusable, he said.



And now, the raging virus has infected many of the staff in the labs doing the work.



“Many of our labs are facing this problem,” he said.

Scientists race to study variants in India as cases explode

(BBC): Debris from a Chinese rocket that had been hurtling back towards Earth has disintegrated over the Indian Ocean, China says.



The bulk of the rocket was destroyed during the re-entry, but parts landed at a location 72.47° East and 2.65° North, Chinese state-run media reported.



The point lies west of the Maldives.



US and European tracking sites had been monitoring the uncontrolled fall of the Long March-5b vehicle.



Chinese state media said parts of the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 Beijing time (02:24 GMT) on Sunday.



US Space Command said in a statement that it could "confirm the Chinese Long March-5b re-entered over the Arabian Peninsula". It was "unknown if the debris impacted land or water," the agency said.



Ahead of the rocket's re-entry there were fears that debris could come down in an inhabited area. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said China had been negligent in letting the rocket fall out of orbit.



However, space experts had predicted that the chances of anyone actually being hit by a piece of space junk were very small, not least because so much of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, and huge land areas are uninhabited.



The main segment from the Long March-5b vehicle was used to launch the first module of China's new space station last month.



At 18 tonnes it is one of the largest items in decades to have an undirected dive into the atmosphere.



The US said last week it was watching the path of the object - but had no plans to shoot it down.



Various space debris modelling experts had pointed to late Saturday or early Sunday (GMT) as the likely moment of re-entry.



The experts predicted that most of the vehicle would burn up during its final plunge through the atmosphere, although there was always the possibility that metals with high melting points, and other resistant materials, could survive to the Earth's surface.



When a similar core stage returned to Earth a year ago, piping assumed to be from the rocket was identified on the ground in Ivory Coast, Africa.



China has bridled at the suggestion that it has been negligent in allowing the uncontrolled return of so large an object.



Commentary in the country's media had described Western reports about the potential hazards involved as "hype" and predicted the debris would fall somewhere in international waters.

China rocket debris 'disintegrates over Indian Ocean' - Chinese media

BBC: Debris from a Chinese rocket is expected to fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry this weekend.



The main segment from the Long March-5b vehicle was used to launch the first module of China's new space station last month.



At 18 tonnes it is one of the largest items in decades to have an undirected dive into the atmosphere.



The US on Thursday said it was watching the path of the object but currently had no plans to shoot it down.



"We're hopeful that it will land in a place where it won't harm anyone," US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. "Hopefully in the ocean, or someplace like that."



Various space debris modelling experts are pointing to late Saturday or early Sunday (GMT) as the likely moment of re-entry. However, such projections are always highly uncertain.



Originally injected into an elliptical orbit approximately 160km by 375km above Earth's surface on 29 April, the Long March-5b core stage has been losing height ever since.



Just how quickly the core's orbit will continue to decay will depend on the density of air it encounters at altitude and the amount of drag this produces. These details are poorly known.



China has bridled at the suggestion that it has been negligent in allowing the uncontrolled return of so large an object. Commentary in the country's media has described Western reports about the potential hazards involved as "hype" and predicted the debris will likely fall somewhere in international waters.



The Global Times quoted aerospace expert Song Zhongping who added that China's space monitoring network would keep a close watch and take necessary measures should damage occur.



But the respected cataloguer of space activity, Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US, said the situation did reflect poorly on China.



"It is indeed seen as negligence," he told BBC News.



"This is the second launch of this rocket; the debris in Ivory Coast last year was from the previous launch, i.e. a basically identical rocket.



"These two incidents [the one now and the Ivory Coast one] are the two largest objects deliberately left to re-enter uncontrolled since Skylab in 1979."



Fragments of the US space station Skylab scattered across Western Australia in 1979, attracting worldwide attention.



Hugh Lewis, who models space debris at Southampton University, UK, noted that more than 60 years of spaceflight had left a large legacy of junk in orbit. The responsibility for this litter rests on several countries, but principally Russia and the US.



"It's worth remembering that there are approximately 900 orbital rocket stages in low-Earth orbit, left behind by nearly every launch-capable nation and with a combined mass orders or magnitude greater than the one expected to re-enter the atmosphere this [weekend]," Dr Lewis posted on Twitter.



Modern practice now calls for rocket stages to be de-orbited as soon as possible after their mission. In the case of large core segments, these would normally come straight back, within one orbit, falling into the ocean or on land (the US company SpaceX now propulsively lands its core stages so they can be used again).



For upper-stages that go into an orbit and may travel around the globe several times as they precisely position a payload, the preference is to include a re-ignitable engine that can steer the stage into a return at the earliest opportunity.



Usually, this would be over an ocean - potentially in the furthest place from land in the South Pacific, between Australia, New Zealand and South America.



Over an area of approximately 1,500 sq km (580 sq miles), this region is a popular graveyard of rocket elements and defunct satellites, where the remains of around 260 missions are thought to be scattered on the ocean floor.

Big Chinese rocket segment set to fall to Earth

(BBC): China has launched a key module of a new permanent space station, the latest in Beijing's increasingly ambitious space programme.



The Tianhe module - which contains living quarters for crew members - was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on a Long March-5B rocket.



China hopes to have the new station operational by 2022.



The only space station currently in orbit is the International Space Station, from which China is excluded.



China has been a late starter when it comes to space exploration. It was only in 2003 that it sent its first astronaut into orbit, making it the third country to do so, after the Soviet Union and the US.



So far, China has sent two previous space stations into orbit. The Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 were trial stations though, simple modules that allowed only relatively short stays by astronauts.



The new, 66-tonne, multi-module Tiangong station is set to be operational for at least 10 years.



Tianhe is the core component of it. It is 16.6m long and 4.2m wide. It will provide power and propulsion and contains the life support technologies and living quarters required by visiting astronauts.



Beijing plans to have at least 10 more similar launches, carrying all the additional equipment into orbit, before the completion of the station next year. It will orbit Earth at an altitude of 340 to 450km (210-280 miles).



The only current space station in orbit is the ISS which is a collaboration between Russia, the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. China has been blocked from participating in it.



The ISS is due to be retired after 2024, which could potentially leave Tiangong as the only space station in Earth's orbit.



China's space programme has become a regular feature in the country's propaganda videos and, in a way, why wouldn't it?



After a high-speed catch up with other nations, it now has bold ambitions beyond Earth.



Having been frozen out of the International Space Station programme by the US, Beijing just decided to build its own.



When the Tiangong station is up and running - possibly as early as next year - though it will be only a quarter of the size of the international facility, no other country will have its own orbiting space lab.



There is talk here of missions to Mars and a lunar station with Russia.



The comparison with the Cold War space race is clearly there to be made: legitimate scientific ambitions mixed up with international mistrust, the potential militarisation of space and key projects being hailed as new benchmarks to justify the enormous amounts of money being spent.

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