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WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Herbivores face a higher risk of extinction than predators, whether they are mammals, birds or reptiles, according to an extensive study of 24,500 species both living and extinct that was published Wednesday. The paper, which appeared in Science Advances, suggests herbivores have suffered a higher extinction rate over the past 50,000 years compared to other parts of the food web and the trend continues to this day. This contradicts the […]
HOUSTON, United States (AFP) — SpaceX on Tuesday successfully completed a flight of less than a minute of the largest prototype ever tested of the future rocket Starship, which the company hopes to use one day to colonize Mars. “Mars is looking real,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in response to a fan. The current Starship prototype is fairly crude: it’s a large metallic cylinder, built in a few weeks by SpaceX teams on the […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — The question of whether ancient life could have existed on Mars centres on the water that once flowed there, but new research published Monday suggests that many of the Red Planet’s valleys were gouged by icy glaciers not rivers. The study in Nature Geoscience, which comes amid a flurry of new Mars missions trying to discover if the now-barren planet ever hosted life, casts doubt on a dominant theory that the planet […]
by Miwa Suzuki with Dana Moukhallati in Dubai TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — The first Arab space mission to Mars, an unmanned probe dubbed “Hope”, blasted off from Japan on Monday on a mission to reveal more about the atmosphere of the Red Planet. The Japanese rocket carrying the probe developed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan right on schedule at 6:58 am local time (2158 […]
by Patrick GALEY PARIS, France (AFP) — Scientists said Thursday they had obtained the closest ever images taken of the Sun as part of a pan-European mission to study solar winds and flares that could have far-reaching impacts back on Earth. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in February and completed its first fly by of our star last month, sending back unprecedented images of phenomena close to its […]
by Alexandra Vardi TEL AVIV, Israel (AFP) — Israeli scientists have come up with a “simple” and low-cost method to turn waste into ethanol for use as sanitisers in the battle against the novel coronavirus. Professor Hadas Mamane of Tel Aviv University (TAU) and her team have been working for the past five years on recycling waste and transforming it into alcohol. Now, in response to the global demand for hand sanitisers, they have focused […]
by Louis GENOT RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AFP) — Brazil may be struggling in its battle against the coronavirus, but it is on the cutting edge of vaccine development with large-scale trials and the production of millions of doses on the horizon. COVID-19 is spreading rapidly across the Latin American nation — a situation underlined when President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive on Tuesday — creating the necessary conditions for testing a vaccine’s efficiency. Brazil, which […]
by Pierrick YVON Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — When human contact needs to be kept to a minimum, robots can save lives and factories. But when the coronavirus crisis is over, will they amplify job losses? It may be a mechanised arm pulling beers in a Seville bar, a dog-like dispenser of hand sanitiser in a Bangkok mall, a cooler on wheels that delivers groceries in Washington, or a vaguely humanoid greeter at a […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Limpets — those coin-sized, suction-cup critters with conical caps — have had the experts fooled all along. For more than a century, scientists have assumed that their out-sized ability to clamp onto tide-pool rocks in defiance of bare-handed attempts to pry them off was due mostly to muscle power. Some South African limpets, one study showed, could withstand up to 100 kilos (220 pounds) of force. […]
by Fran BLANDY and AFP Africa bureaus PICTURES BY SIMON MAINA AND NIPAH DENNIS Agence France-Presse NAIROBI, Kenya (AFP)— Watching from afar as much of the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus, African scientists, engineers and innovators have turned to homegrown solutions to prepare for the worst case scenario. By the time the virus hit Africa, where cases have risen relatively slowly, images of overwhelmed hospitals and stories of health workers strapped for […]
by Olga SHYLENKO Agence France-Presse KIEV, Ukraine (AFP) — Yuriy Otruba was preparing for his sixth scientific expedition to Antarctica when the coronavirus pandemic hit, shutting borders, grounding flights and locking down countries he needed to travel through. After repeated trips since 2009, the 34-year-old Ukrainian scientist feared this year’s journey would be impossible due to strict lockdown measures imposed throughout the world to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The journey from Kiev to the Akademik Vernadsky […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Robots are expected to demonstrate their value for “dirty and dangerous” medical tasks in the fight to quell the coronavirus pandemic, researchers said Wednesday. An editorial in Science Robotics noted that robots can help with telemedicine, decontamination, handling of hazardous waste and monitoring compliance with voluntary quarantines. “Historically, robots have been developed to take on dull, dirty and dangerous jobs,” the researchers wrote. “As epidemics escalate, the potential roles of […]
