AFP UK

A mother plays with her baby at their home in Caracas, Venezuela

Science has perfected the answer to calming a crying baby: Hold and walk with them for five minutes.

The evidence-based soothing strategy was derived from experiments carried out in Japan and Italy, which were analyzed and published in the journal Current Biology on Tuesday.

The paper’s authors said they hoped the finding could benefit stressed parents, particularly the inexperienced.

“I have raised four children,” senior author Kumi Kuroda of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan said in a video statement.

“But even I couldn’t foresee the key results of this study until the statistical data came up,” she added. 

The team had previously studied the “transport response” in mammals that give birth to young that are unable to care for themselves, such as mice, dogs, monkeys and humans.

When these animals pick up their babies and start walking, the young become quiet and docile, and their heart rates slow.

Kuroda and colleagues wanted to explore this further in humans, and to compare the effect against other comforting behaviors such as rocking in one spot.

They recruited 21 mother-baby pairs aged 0-7 months, and tested them under four conditions: carrying while moving, held still by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot. 

Crying decreased and heart rates slowed within 30 seconds when infants were transported. There was a similar effect when they were rocked, but not when held motionless.

This suggested that, contrary to assumptions, maternal holding was insufficient to calm a child, and the transport response was an important factor. 

Next, they looked at the impact of carrying infants for five minutes, finding that the activity put 46 percent of them to sleep, and an additional 18 percent fell asleep in the minute after.

This showed that not only did carrying stop crying, it also promoted sleep.

But there was a wrinkle: when infants were put to bed, more than one-third became alert within 20 seconds.

Electrocardiogram readings showed the babies’ heart rates rose the second they were detached from their mother’s bodies.

However, when the babies were asleep for a longer period of time before being put down, they were less likely to awaken.

Kuroda said she found this surprising, as she had assumed other factors like the way they were placed in bed or their posture would play a role, but this was not the case.

“Our intuition is very limited, that is why we need science,” she said.

Based on the totality of their findings, they recommended a protocol for soothing and promoting sleep: hold and walk the baby five minutes, then sit and hold them for another five to eight minutes, before putting them to sleep.

This provides immediate comfort as opposed to other methods like letting a baby cry themselves to sleep, but more work will be needed to understand if it can train infant sleep in the long term.

The UN warned last month that the drought gripping the Horn of Africa was now likely to extend into a fifth year

Humanity is “going in the wrong direction” on climate change due to its addiction to fossil fuels, the UN said Tuesday in an assessment showing that planet-warming emissions are higher than before the pandemic.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization and its Environment Programme warned catastrophes will become commonplace should the world economy fail to decarbonise in line with what science says is needed to prevent the worst impacts of global heating.

They pointed to Pakistan’s monumental floods and China’s crop-withering heatwave this year as examples of what to expect.

“Floods, droughts, heatwaves, extreme storms and wildfires are going from bad to worse, breaking records with alarming frequency,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. 

The UN warned last month that the drought gripping the Horn of Africa and threatening millions with acute food shortages was now likely to extend into a fifth year.

“There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction,” said Guterres.

The UN’s United in Science report underscores how, nearly three years since Covid-19 handed governments a unique opportunity to reassess how to power their economies, countries are ploughing ahead with pollution as normal. 

It found that after an unprecedented 5.4 percent fall in emissions in 2020 due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, preliminary data from January-May this year shows global CO2 emissions are 1.2 percent higher than before Covid-19.

This is largely down to large year-on-year increases in the United States, India, and most European countries, the assessment found. 

“The science is unequivocal: we are going in the wrong direction,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“Greenhouse gas concentrations are continuing to rise, reaching new record highs. Fossil fuel emission rates are now above pre-pandemic levels. The past seven years were the warmest on record.”

– ‘Uncharted territory’ –

Last week the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitor said that summer 2022 was the hottest in Europe and one of the hottest globally since records began in the 1970s. 

Tuesday’s report said there was a 93 percent chance that the record for the hottest year globally — currently, 2016 — will be broken within five years.

It warned the continued use of fossil fuels meant the chance of the annual mean global temperature temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in one of the next five years was roughly even (48 percent). 

Keeping longer term temperatures below 1.5C is the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

Despite more than three decades of UN-lead negotiations, rich polluters show little sign of being willing to make the kind of swingeing emissions cuts that would keep the 1.5C goal in play. 

The UN’s Environment Programme, in an update to its annual “emissions gap” assessment following new pledges made at last November’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, said Tuesday that even these promises were far from adequate.

In fact, it said the ambition even in countries’ most recent pledges would need to be four times greater to limit warming to 2C, and seven times higher to make 1.5C.

All told, current worldwide climate policies put Earth on course to warm 2.8C by 2100, UNEP said. 

Guterres said that Tuesday’s assessment showed “climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction”. 

“Yet each year we double-down on this fossil fuel addiction, even as the symptoms get rapidly worse,” he said in a video message.

Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network, said that the forthcoming COP27 climate conference in Egypt needed leaders to agree to new funding to help communities in at-risk nations rebuild after extreme events.

“The terrifying picture painted by the United in Science report is already a lived reality for millions of people facing recurring climate disasters,” she said.

The 2000 adventure drama, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, drew criticism for the impact of the shoot on the pristine sands of Maya Bay

More than two decades after Hollywood film “The Beach” was shot at Thailand’s glittering Maya Bay, the kingdom’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered officials to press ahead with environmental rehabilitation work.

The 2000 adventure drama, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, drew criticism for the impact of the shoot on the pristine sands of the bay, located on the island of Ko Phi Phi Ley in southern Thailand.

Film-makers planted dozens of coconut trees to give a more “tropical” feel to the glimmering Maya Bay and were also accused of ripping up vegetation growing on sand dunes.

However, US production studio 20th Century Fox insisted it left the beach exactly how it had found it and had removed tonnes of rubbish.

Local authorities filed a civil lawsuit in late 1999 against Thai government agencies, US filmmaker 20th Century Fox and a Thai film coordinator, seeking 100 million baht in compensation for environmental damage.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court in Bangkok upheld a previous ruling by a Civil Court that the Royal Forest Department was liable for rehabilitating Maya Bay.

In a final ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the department to set up a committee to formulate a rehabilitation plan within 30 days.

Environmental campaigners launched two unsuccessful legal challenges to stop filming of the movie based on Alex Garland’s cult novel, over concerns about ecological damage.

The film put Maya Bay on the map and it became a victim of mass tourism.

It was closed in October 2018 to allow it to recover from the impact of a daily influx of some 6,000 visitors.

The entire Phi Phi archipelago was forced into a convalescence when the global pandemic hit and visitor numbers dwindled to virtually nil as Thailand imposed tough travel rules.

Maya Bay reopened to tourists at the start of 2022 but visitor numbers are capped to try to limit the ecological damage.

Paris city monuments will soon go dark in the evening as part of efforts to reduce energy consumption

Paris will start switching off the ornamental lights that grace city monuments hours earlier than usual, plunging the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks in the dark to cope with surging electricity costs, officials said Tuesday.

Most monuments operated by the city will now go unlit from 10:00 pm, (2000 GMT), a potential disappointment for the tens of millions of tourists to the romantic City of Lights.

The Eiffel Tower, usually bathed in a warm glow until 1:00 am, and which comes ablaze with dazzling white lights every hour, will now go dark after the last visitor leaves, at 11:45 pm.

But streets lights will remain on for security, as will the illuminations of the city’s ornate bridges over the Seine river, Mayor Anne Hidalgo said at a press conference.

The “energy sobriety” plan aims to cut energy use by 10 percent, said Hidalgo, which could help soften the blow of rising costs by some 10 million euros ($10.2 million).

Hidalgo, a Socialist who played up her efforts to green Paris during a failed presidential run earlier this year, said she would also push the government to do the same for national monuments in the city, such as the Pantheon or the Arc de Triomphe.

In August, President Emmanuel Macron warned that high energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine could signal “the end of abundance,” widely interpreted as preparing public opinion for a difficult winter ahead.

There are fewer than 7,000 cheetahs left in the world

Eight cheetahs will be sent to India where they will be personally welcomed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his birthday, officials said Tuesday, in an ambitious project to reintroduce the speedy big cats to the country.

India in the past was home to Asiatic cheetahs but the species was declared extinct domestically by 1952. A prince is believed to have killed the last three specimens.

However, New Delhi has since 2020 been working to reintroduce the animals after the Supreme Court announced that African cheetahs, a different subspecies, could be settled in a “carefully chosen location” on an experimental basis.

The five males and three females will arrive from Namibia on Saturday and will initially be kept in a quarantine enclosure at the Kuno National Park in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

India is also planning to ship in more cheetahs from South Africa at a later date.

“The prime minister himself will be releasing the animals into the quarantine enclosures,” an environment ministry official told AFP.

The cats will then be moved to larger spaces and once they acclimatise will be released into open forest in the park.

Local media reports said the cheetahs will touch down in the western city of Jaipur after a 10-hour journey and will then travel by helicopter to the Kuno park.

Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said the project was part of global efforts to conserve the animal.

Modi’s presence for the launch “will give enthusiasm and energy to all of us”, he added. 

– Leopard conflict –

The Kuno park was selected as a home because of its abundant prey and grasslands.

But critics have warned that the cheetahs may struggle to adapt to the habitat and may clash with the significant number of leopards already present.

Adrian Tordiffe, a veterinary wildlife professor at the University of Pretoria who is involved in the project, said South Africa had pressed India to use additional parks to help separate the two species.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem for the adults… they are very familiar with coexisting with other predators,” Tordiffe told AFP.

“But we might have a situation where we have a problem with cubs’ survival.”

Cheetahs became extinct in India primarily because of habitat loss and hunting for their distinctive spotted pelts. 

An Indian prince, the Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo, is widely believed to have killed the last three recorded cheetahs in India in the late 1940s.

The incoming animals have been prepped for the journey with health check-ups, vaccinations and radio collaring, the Indian Express newspaper reported.

Considered vulnerable under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, there are fewer than 7,000 cheetahs left around the world — primarily in the African savannas.

After Queen Elizabeth II's death, Singapore's Botanic Gardens loaned a sprig of Dendrobium Elizabeth to the British high commissioner's residence

Elizabeth is majestic, hardy and “very fashionable”, said a top Singapore flower curator — referring not to the late monarch, but to an orchid named after the queen when she visited the former British colony.

After Queen Elizabeth II’s death last week, the city-state’s Botanic Gardens loaned a towering sprig of Dendrobium Elizabeth to the British high commissioner’s residence, to be displayed alongside pictures of the monarch.

The orchid hybrid, with twisted Dresden-yellow petals and a uranium-green lip, was named in honour of the queen when she visited Singapore in 1972, said Whang Lay Keng, curator at Singapore’s National Orchid Garden.

“Dendrobium Elizabeth is a majestic, robust and resilient plant,” she told AFP.

“It’s kind of like how Queen Elizabeth carried herself.”

Flowering just twice a year, the Dendrobium Elizabeth was bred from orchids originating from Singapore and Papua New Guinea, and carries just about 40 blooms per plant. 

Orchid-mad Singapore boasts the delicate, colourful blooms as their national flower, and the city-state often christens new hybrids after visiting dignitaries as part of its diplomatic charm offensive. 

The tradition took root in 1957 during British colonial rule — which spanned more than 140 years — when an orchid variety was named after the wife of London’s high commissioner to Singapore at the time. 

Queen Elizabeth first made a state visit to Singapore in 1972, followed by two more trips in 1989 and 2006.

“During the 1970s, the colour yellow-green was very popular, so naturally we wanted to select something that was fashionable and very interesting,” Whang said, adding that “yellow is a colour of royalty”.

But the tropical lowland orchid also has very distinct Southeast Asian traits.

It is a “sun-loving plant that thrives in a moist and humid climate, where sunlight and warmth are important for its growth”, the orchid curator said. 

Among the more than 200 orchid hybrids named after visiting leaders and celebrities — displayed in the VIP section of the city’s sprawling Botanic Gardens — there is also the Dendrobium Memoria Princess Diana. The pastel-white bloom was so dubbed after the death of the princess of Wales.

Pedestrians cross a road past apartment blocks in Hong Kong's To Kwa Wan area during intense heat

Hong Kong has broken two heat records for September in a little over a week, the city’s weather observatory said Tuesday, as the crowded financial hub swelters through one of its hottest summers.

The Hong Kong Observatory said a temperature of 35.4 degrees Celsius (95.7 Fahrenheit) was recorded on Tuesday afternoon, “once again breaking the record for highest temperature in September” since the city started keeping records in 1884.

The previous high of 35.3C was set just last Monday, toppling a record that had stood since 1963.

“Due to dry air from mainland (China), we expect the weather to be sunny and hot from this week to early next week,” the observatory added.

Southern China last month recorded its longest continuous period of high temperatures since records began more than 60 years ago, sparking power cuts and droughts that have hit the agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

Experts have said the intensity, scope and duration of the heatwave could make it one of the most severe recorded in global history, with temperatures routinely hitting up to 40C in many provinces last month.

Those temperatures in mainland China have since come down.

Intensely humid Hong Kong has experienced less searing heat than the mainland but has still sizzled through an intense summer.

July was the city’s hottest month on record while the average temperature from June to August was 29.2C, making it the fourth hottest summer so far.

The high temperatures have been especially punishing for the 220,000 poorest residents who live in cramped rooftop huts or tiny subdivided apartments and “cage homes” that often have limited or no air conditioning.

There's money in trash: Scrap metal at Romco's recycling plant in Lagos

Mounds of waste scattered along roads and vast landfills are a Nigerian eyesore.

In Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country, collecting, sorting and recycling trash is despairingly rare.

But there is also good news. Some entrepreneurs are working hard to tackle the rubbish mountain, despite the many challenges.

Romco Metals started recycling aluminium at its factory outside Lagos in 2015, drawn by global demand for the light, strong, flexible metal.

Buoyed by good results, it built a second facility outside Ghana’s capital Accra and now plans to open at least three new plants across Africa and triple production by 2025.

Aluminium is the world’s second most-used metal after steel and used widely in construction, medicine and car-making.

“Electric vehicles require more durable lighter material such as aluminium, and that’s where our materials end up,” said the company’s youthful founder, 32-year-old Raymond Onovwigun.

– Job creation –

A British-registered company, Romco melts down and recycles around 1,500 tonnes of discarded aluminium per month, out of a capacity of 3,000 tonnes.

It says it has created 450 direct jobs — 5,000 in total, in this labour-intensive sector — and plans to double that number within a year.

“Before… there was no work,” community leader Bankole Gbenga known as Chief Abore told AFP during a recent visit to the Lagos facility. 

Chief Abore says more than a hundred young people from his community alone now work for Romco in some capacity.

“Some are doing carpentry, some are welders… some of the youth are doing security,” said the 40-year-old.

Among those who have most benefited from Romco’s business are material suppliers like Mohammed Ashiru Madugu, who delivers several truckloads of metal scrap each week.

Madugu has a warehouse in northwestern Katsina, where suppliers from across the state and even neighbouring states bring him discarded metal.

He loads the goods onto trucks and sends them -– with escorts because of frequent ambushes by criminal gangs on the road –- all the way to Lagos, more than a thousand kilometres (600 miles) away.

For one truck, he can get paid up to 26 million naira (about $60,000 dollars) although the price fluctuates.

– Vast problem –

Only a tiny fraction of waste is recycled in Nigeria, a country of some 210 million consumers.

Plastic, metal and glass that in advanced economies are routinely picked up and processed are mostly tossed out.

Each year, Nigeria disgorges 200,000 tonnes of plastic into the Atlantic, the UN Industrial Development Organisation reported last year.

In Lagos alone, a city of more than 20 million people, less than 10 percent total recyclables are currently collected, Ibrahim Adejuwon Odumboni, managing director of the Lagos State Management Agency told AFP.

By comparison, in the UK, more than 41 percent of waste picked up by local authorities was recycled last year, according to British statistics.

For Odumboni, recycling initiatives are to be commended but more should be done by the companies making aluminium beverage cans and other products.

“We need the manufacturers to invest in the collection system. In many parts of the world, a portion of what producers sell is going into the recovery of products. We currently don’t have that in Nigeria,” he said.

If companies selling aluminium products “are not held responsible (for collecting waste) then it doesn’t make any sense — we’re just going round and round in circle.”

He blames poor legislation but says an improved law on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is currently being discussed in the state house of assembly.

EPR is an environmental policy in place in many countries that gives producers incentives to take responsibility for their products after they are used.

Another challenge for recyclers is carbon emissions from the energy they use to crush, shred or melt old materials.

Romco, for instance, uses compressed natural gas to turn the aluminium into ingots.

“(It) is still a fossil fuel but the best, most efficient fossil fuel. It doesn’t contain lead or sulphur,” said Onovwigun.

The company says, however, that it wants to be independent of fossil fuels and is “exploring the potential of using solar, green hydrogen, and biofuels.”

An international research team has revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, leaving astronomers "blown away" 

The wall of dense gas and dust resembles a massive winged creature, its glowing maw lit by a bright star as it soars through cosmic filaments.

An international research team on Monday revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, leaving astronomers “blown away.”

The stellar nursery is situated in the constellation Orion, 1,350 light-years away from Earth, in a similar setting in which our own solar system was birthed more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Astronomers are interested in the region to better understand what happened during the first million years of our planetary evolution.

The images were obtained as part of the Early Release Science program and involved more than 100 scientists in 18 countries, with institutions including the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Western University in Canada, and the University of Michigan.

“We are blown away by the breathtaking images of the Orion Nebula,” Western University astrophysicist Els Peeters said in a statement.

“These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the gas and dust cloud in which they are born,” she added.

Nebulas are obscured by large amounts of dust that made it impossible to observe with visible light telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor. 

Webb however operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, penetrating the dust.

This revealed numerous spectacular structures, down to the scale of 40 astronomical units, or the size of our solar system.

These include dense filaments of matter, which could birth new generations of stars, as well as forming stellar systems that consist of a central proto-star surrounded by a disc of dust and gas, in which planets form.

“We hope to gain understanding about the entire cycle of star birth,” said Edwin Bergin, University of Michigan chair of astronomy and a member of the international research team. 

“In this image we are looking at this cycle where the first generation of stars is essentially irradiating the material for the next generation. The incredible structures we observe will detail how the feedback cycle of stellar birth occurs in our galaxy and beyond.”

Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, boasting a primary mirror measuring 6.5 meters (more than 21 feet) that is made up of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated segments, as well as a five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court.

The Artemis 1 (rocket pictured September 2, 2022) space mission hopes to test the SLS as well as the unmanned Orion capsule that sits atop it, in preparation for future Moon-bound journeys with humans aboard

NASA is now targeting September 27 as the earliest possible launch date for its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, the agency said in a blog post Monday.

The date would depend on engineering teams successfully carrying out a test to fuel up the Space Launch System rocket, and receive a waiver to avoid retesting batteries on an emergency flight system that is used to destroy the rocket if it strays from its designated range.

If it does not receive the waiver, the rocket will have to be wheeled back to its assembly building, pushing the timeline back several weeks.

For the September 27 date, a “70-minute launch window opens at 11:37 am EDT,” while the mission would end with an ocean splashdown of the Orion capsule on November 5.

A potential next date comes on October 2.

The Artemis 1 space mission hopes to test the SLS as well as the unmanned Orion capsule that sits atop it, in preparation for future Moon-bound journeys with humans aboard.

Once launched, it will take several days for the spacecraft to reach the Moon, flying around 60 miles (100 kilometers) at its closest approach.

One of the trip’s main objectives is to test the capsule’s heat shield — which at 16 feet (five meters) in diameter is the largest ever built — when the ship re-enters the atmosphere.

The next mission, Artemis 2, will take astronauts to the Moon without landing on its surface, while the third — set for the mid-2020s — would see the first woman and person of color on lunar soil.

NASA wants to build a lunar space station called Gateway and keep a sustained presence on the Moon to gain insight into how to survive very long space missions, ahead of a mission to Mars in the 2030s.