AFP UK

Peruvian workers laying gas pipes found the remains of eight people buried in a common tomb with food and musical instruments some 800 years ago, an archaeologist said Wednesday. 

The bodies of adults and children had been wrapped in plant material, with corn, dishes, and a variety of wind instruments, including flutes, placed around them, Cecilia Camargo, an archaeologist hired by the Calidda gas company whose workers made the discovery, told AFP. 

The eight had lived in the ancient town of Chilca some 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Lima. 

Some had been buried with shells on their heads, and had bags in which coca leaves, traditionally chewed as a stimulant, are kept. 

“It is an important find that gives us more information about the pre-Hispanic history of Chilca,” said the researcher.   

Workers of the same company found another 30 ancient bodies in Chilca in 2018.

The United States on Wednesday authorized the use of boosters of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for people aged over 65, or adults at high-risk of severe disease as well as those in high-exposure jobs.

The announcement means tens of millions of Americans are now eligible for a third shot once six months have passed since their second.

“Today’s action demonstrates that science and the currently available data continue to guide the FDA’s decision-making for COVID-19 vaccines during this pandemic,” said Janet Woodcock, acting head of the Food and Drug Administration.

The decision was expected and came after an independent expert panel convened by the regulatory agency last week voted in favor of recommending the move. 

The same group, however, declined an initial proposal, submitted by Pfizer and backed by President Joe Biden’s administration, to fully approve boosters to everyone aged 16 and over. 

The panel — which included vaccinologists, infectious disease researchers and epidemiologists — concluded that the benefit-risk balance differed for younger people, especially males at risk for myocarditis. 

Boosters for Pfizer are currently being debated by a separate body of experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which may recommend further specifics about recipients. 

For example, if obesity makes a person “at high risk of severe Covid,” that definition would cover more than 42 percent of the US population.

The CDC may also have to decide which workplaces and other settings might lead to “frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2.”

For its part, the FDA included “health care workers, teachers and day care staff, grocery workers and those in homeless shelters or prisons, among others.”

Recipients of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson will now await news for when they, too, might become eligible for another shot.

The United States on Wednesday welcomed China’s promise to end funding for coal projects overseas but voiced hope the world’s largest emitter would also do more at home on climate change.

President Xi Jinping told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that China will stop backing coal overseas, all but drying up the world’s foreign assistance to the dirty form of energy in developing countries after similar announcements by South Korea and Japan.

“We welcome this announcement but we also recognize that more needs to be done,” a US official told reporters at the United Nations, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with customs.

“We look forward to hearing more about the additional steps that they can take in this decisive decade to further reduce their national emissions,” the official said.

The official said that further Chinese action would “help put the world more closely on a trajectory that will hold temperatures from rising to well above 1.5 degrees,” as appears increasingly likely despite an aspiration set by the 2015 Paris accord.

UN scientists say that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels is a threshold at which the planet can avoid the worst ravages of climate change including increasingly severe weather, droughts and flooding.

Despite China’s pledge on overseas assistance, it has kept investing at home in coal — an issue raised on a visit earlier this month by US climate envoy John Kerry.

President Joe Biden has put a high priority on the environment after defeating the climate skeptic Donald Trump and in his own UN speech Tuesday vowed to double US aid for countries hardest hit by climate change, a key gap ahead of UN climate talks in Glasgow in November.

The United States on Wednesday welcomed China’s promise to end funding for coal projects overseas but voiced hope the world’s largest emitter would also do more at home on climate change.

President Xi Jinping told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that China will stop backing coal overseas, all but drying up the world’s foreign assistance to the dirty form of energy in developing countries after similar announcements by South Korea and Japan.

“We welcome this announcement but we also recognize that more needs to be done,” a US official told reporters at the United Nations, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with customs.

“We look forward to hearing more about the additional steps that they can take in this decisive decade to further reduce their national emissions,” the official said.

The official said that further Chinese action would “help put the world more closely on a trajectory that will hold temperatures from rising to well above 1.5 degrees,” as appears increasingly likely despite an aspiration set by the 2015 Paris accord.

UN scientists say that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels is a threshold at which the planet can avoid the worst ravages of climate change including increasingly severe weather, droughts and flooding.

Despite China’s pledge on overseas assistance, it has kept investing at home in coal — an issue raised on a visit earlier this month by US climate envoy John Kerry.

President Joe Biden has put a high priority on the environment after defeating the climate skeptic Donald Trump and in his own UN speech Tuesday vowed to double US aid for countries hardest hit by climate change, a key gap ahead of UN climate talks in Glasgow in November.

Peruvian workers laying gas pipes found the remains of eight people buried in a common tomb with food and musical instruments some 800 years ago, an archaeologist said Wednesday. 

The bodies of adults and children had been wrapped in plant material, with corn, dishes, and a variety of wind instruments, including flutes, placed around them, Cecilia Camargo, an archaeologist hired by the Calidda gas company whose workers made the discovery, told AFP. 

The eight had lived in the ancient town of Chilca some 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Lima. 

Some had been buried with shells on their heads, and had bags in which coca leaves, traditionally chewed as a stimulant, are kept. 

“It is an important find that gives us more information about the pre-Hispanic history of Chilca,” said the researcher.   

Workers of the same company found another 30 ancient bodies in Chilca in 2018.

A team of Omani cavers has made what is believed to be the first descent to the bottom of Yemen’s fabled Well of Barhout — a natural wonder shunned by many locals, who believe it is a prison for genies.

The forbidding ‘Well of Hell’, whose dark, round aperture creates a 30-metre (100 foot) wide hole in the desert floor of Yemen’s eastern province of Al-Mahra, plunges approximately 112 metres (367 feet) below the surface and, according to some accounts, gives off strange odours.

Inside, the Oman Cave Exploration Team (OCET) found snakes, dead animals and cave pearls — but no signs of the supernatural.

“There were snakes, but they won’t bother you unless you bother them,” Mohammed al-Kindi, a geology professor at the German University of Technology in Oman, told AFP.

Kindi was among eight experienced cavers who rappelled down last week, while two colleagues remained at the surface. 

Footage provided to AFP showed cave formations and grey and lime-green cave pearls, formed by dripping water.

“Passion drove us to do this, and we felt that this is something that will reveal a new wonder and part of Yemeni history,” said Kindi, who also owns a mining and petroleum consultancy firm.  

“We collected samples of water, rocks, soil and some dead animals but have yet to have them analysed,” he said, adding that a report will soon be made public.

“There were dead birds, which does create some bad odours, but there was no overwhelming bad smell.”

Yemeni officials told AFP in June that they did not know what lay in the depths of the pit, which they estimated to be “millions and millions” of years old, adding that they had never reached the bottom.

“We have gone to visit the area and entered the well, reaching more than 50-60 metres down,” Salah Babhair, director general of Mahra’s geological survey and mineral resources authority, said at the time. 

“We noticed strange things inside. We also smelled something strange… It’s a mysterious situation.”

Over the centuries, stories have circulated of malign figures known as jinns or genies living in the well, which some regard as the gate of hell.

Many residents of the area are uneasy about visiting the vast pit or even talking about it, for fear of ill fortune.

Yemenis have had enough bad luck as it is.

The country has been embroiled in a devastating civil war since 2014 that has triggered what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with two-thirds of its 30-million population dependent on some form of aid.

US actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio has taken an investment in two different lab-grown meat startups, the companies announced Wednesday.

DiCaprio has bought an unspecified stake in Aleph Farms and Mosa Meat, two companies developing protein products grown from cow cells — an emerging area in the growing alternative meat market.

The Academy Award-winning actor will also act as an advisor to the companies, said a joint press release from Israel-based Aleph Farms and Netherlands-based Mosa Meat.

“One of the most impactful ways to combat the climate crisis is to transform our food system,” DiCaprio said in the news release. “Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms offer new ways to satisfy the world’s demand for beef, while solving some of the most pressing issues of current industrial beef production.”

The announcement comes on the heels of earlier investments by the “Titanic” star in publicly traded Beyond Meat, which sells burgers and sausages made from plants. 

Aleph Farms “grows beef steaks, from non-genetically engineered cells isolated from a living cow, without harming animals and with a significantly reduced impact to the environment,” while Mosa Meat “introduced the world’s first cultivated beef hamburger in 2013, by growing it directly from cow cells,” according to the press release. 

Alternative meat advocates characterize such ventures as a critical component of addressing climate change.

Conventional livestock management is a source of greenhouse gases through the clearing of trees to make room for animal feed production and the raising of livestock, and emissions from the animals themselves.

But while plant-based meat has made its way to mainstream supermarkets, cultivated meat remains at a much earlier stage of commercialization. Costs remain high, and thus far only Singapore has approved the sale of such products.

The World Health Organization strengthened its air quality guidelines on Wednesday, saying air pollution was now one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, causing seven million premature deaths a year.

Urgent action is needed to reduce exposure to air pollution, said the UN body, ranking its burden of disease on a par with smoking and unhealthy eating.

“WHO has adjusted almost all the air quality guideline levels downwards, warning that exceeding the new… levels is associated with significant risks to health,” it said.

“Adhering to them could save millions of lives.”

The guidelines aim to protect people from the adverse effects of air pollution and are used by governments as a reference for legally binding standards.

The UN health agency last issued air quality guidelines, or AQGs, in 2005, which had a significant impact on pollution abatement policies worldwide.

In the 16 years since however, the WHO said more evidence had emerged showing that air pollution effected health at lower concentrations than previously understood.

“The accumulated evidence is sufficient to justify actions to reduce population exposure to key air pollutants, not only in particular countries or regions but on a global scale,” the organisation said.

– COP26 report –

The new guidelines come just in time for the COP26 global climate summit held in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12.

The WHO said that alongside climate change, air pollution was one of the biggest environmental threats to human health.

Its climate change chief Maria Neira said the WHO was preparing a major report to present in Glasgow to stress the “enormous health benefits” of reducing air pollution through mitigating climate change.

“You can imagine the incredible number of lives we will save,” she told journalists.

The new WHO guidelines recommend lower air quality levels for six pollutants, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and carbon monoxide.

The other two are PM10 and PM2.5 — particulate matter equal or smaller than 10 and 2.5 microns in diameter.

Both can penetrate deep into the lungs but researchers say PM2.5 can even enter the bloodstream, causing mainly cardiovascular and respiratory problems, but also affecting other organs, said the WHO.

In response, the PM2.5 guideline level has been halved.

In 2019, more than 90 percent of the world’s population lived in areas where concentrations exceeded the 2005 AQG for long-term PM2.5 exposure, with southeast Asia the worst-affected region.

– Premature deaths –

“Almost everyone around the world is exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“Inhaling dirty air increases the risk of respiratory diseases like pneumonia, asthma… and increases the risk of severe Covid-19.” 

Air quality markedly improved since the 1990s in high-income countries, the WHO noted. But the global toll in deaths and lost years of healthy life barely declined because air quality deteriorated in most other countries, in line with their economic development.

“Every year, exposure to air pollution is estimated to cause seven million premature deaths and result in the loss of millions more healthy years of life,” the WHO said.

In children, this could mean reduced lung growth and function, respiratory infections and aggravated asthma.

In adults, ischaemic heart disease — also called coronary heart disease — and strokes are the most common causes of premature death attributable to outdoor air pollution.

The evidence since 2005 showed how air pollution affected “all parts of the body, from the brain to a growing baby in a mother’s womb”, said Tedros.

Evidence is also emerging of other effects such as diabetes and neurodegenerative conditions, said the organisation.

Professor Alastair Lewis, of Britain’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science, said the guidelines “dramatically increase the scale of challenge to society” in cutting air pollution.

But he said the PM2.5 guidelines were “the most contentious” as they come from natural sources too — even from cooking — and can stay airborne for weeks.

“PM2.5 is, to an extent, also an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of living a 21st-century life,” said Lewis.

Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west — and so did the people who created them, a study said Wednesday. 

Research showed that over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and Raivavae — archipelagos that are thousands of miles apart but all home to similar ancient statues.

“These statues are only on those islands that are closely connected genetically,” the study’s lead author Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University told AFP.

Using cutting-edge analysis of modern DNA, Ioannidis and his team were able to map and date the first Polynesians’ path of settlement, which began in Samoa and fanned out across the Pacific between the years 830 and 1360.

“This had been an open problem since Captain Cook first noticed that the people on the Polynesian islands were all speaking the same language,” Ioannidis said.

The expansion happened rapidly — over about 17 generations — outpacing major changes in language or culture that could have served as markers, the findings show.

The researchers were able to piece together the puzzle of trans-Pacific migration by comparing the genetic material in 430 present-day inhabitants across 21 islands.

The outward expansion from Samoa unfolded westward to Fiji, Tonga in the south, and then to Raratonga in the east around the year 830. 

– ‘Small, ring-like islands’ –

A few hundred years later, descendents on Raratonga travelled to settle present-day Tahiti and the Tuamotu archipelago just beyond.

It is from the small, long-overlooked sand-bar islands of Tuamotu that the most ambitious forays set out, Ioannidis said.

Now sparsely-populated thanks in part to their role as nuclear test grounds, the Tuamotus span an area equal to the distance between England and Greece.

The study notes that the low-lying islands likely emerged from below sea level only a few hundred years before Polynesians spread there.

“They needed to have a maritime culture to get in between these small, ring-like islands,” Ioannidis said. 

“I think that explains in some part why it’s from there that we see the longest-distance voyages going out.”

This became ground zero for the megalith-building peoples who came to inhabit the Marquesas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Raivavae.

The timing of those expansions fits with earlier DNA-based findings by Ioannidis and his team showing that Native Americans — probably from the northwestern coast of South America — and Polynesians mingled around the year 1200. 

– Ancient clues in modern DNA – 

“The date we found for that contact is very close to the dates we find for these voyages out from the Tuamotus to settle these remote islands,” Ioannidis said.

Today’s Polynesian populations have mixed heritage, with traces of Europe, Africa and other places in their ancestry.

While genetic studies of ancient peoples have tended to focus on ancient DNA samples unearthed from archaeological sites, Ioannidis said his team had been able to home in on telltale sequences buried in modern DNA.

They used a software to analyse samples from 430 inhabitants across 21 different islands to identify recurring gene patterns specific to Polynesians, blocking out DNA sequences associated with European or other ancestry.

Otherwise, “you would just find that the islands with the ‘most Polynesian’ DNA were more related,” Ioannidis explained. 

“That’s not interesting from a historical perspective.”

His team used the genetic clues to draw a kind of family tree across the Pacific, east-to-west.

Since DNA strands shorten as they are re-combined over generations, the length of shared segments revealed how many generations passed between each settlement. 

A vast wall of molten lava creeping down the slopes of Spain’s La Palma island has now destroyed 320 buildings, as distraught residents watched the flow inching towards the sea on Wednesday. 

The Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted on Sunday in the south of La Palma, one of seven islands that make up the Canary Islands archipelago off the coast of Morocco.

The EU’s Copernicus observation programme said the lava now covered 154 hectares and had destroyed 320 buildings, double the figure it had given 24 hours earlier.

Experts are expecting the number to rise as the slow-moving mass slides towards the island’s western coast, when its interaction with the sea is likely to cause explosions and trigger toxic gas emissions.

So far, 6,100 people have been evacuated, among them 400 tourists who were taken to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, the Canaries regional government said.

Although there have been no casualties, the damage to land and property has been enormous, with the Canaries regional head Angel Victor Torres estimating the figures to be well over 400 million euros ($470 million).

In a desperate attempt to divert the flow, firefighters could be seen using heavy machinery to dig a channel towards a nearby ravine as the advancing lava glowed in the background.

“It’s not for a want of trying,” they tweeted alongside a video of the digger hard at work. 

– ‘Battle of titans’ –

Experts working on the Pevolca volcanic emergency plan say there are two lava flows: one to the north and one further south, which is barely moving.  

David Calvo, an expert with the Involcan volcanology institute, said the lava had “slowed down a lot because it is reaching a very flat area but it is gaining height. There are areas where it is already 15 metres thick”. 

If the lava — which has a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,012 degrees Fahrenheit) — continues to move at the same pace, it will reach the sea later on Wednesday or possibly Thursday. 

And when it gets there, there will be “a huge battle of the titans between the water and the lava,” he said. 

“With those contrasting temperatures, it causes massive explosions and a fragmentation of the lava which shoots out like missiles.”

– Exploding fragments –

Involcan experts witnessed the same phenomenon in 2018 at the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii where 16 people were hurt by the explosion of fragments and one person “almost lost a leg”, he said.

When the lava reaches the shore, it will also send clouds of acidic, toxic gas into the air, generated by the interaction with the  seawater, which can be dangerous to inhale, experts say. 

The volcano was also putting out some 10,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide emissions per day which showed “the pace, the intensity of the eruption is not going to decrease”, Calvo said. 

Involcan believes the eruption of La Cumbre Vieja could last “between 24 and 84 days”.

The eruption on this island of some 85,000 people, the first in 50 years, may have caused huge damages over a vast area, but so far nobody has been hurt. 

The local authorities also urged the population to avoid contact with volcanic ash, warning it could cause damage to the respiratory tract and eyes as well as skin irritation.

“Dealing with this crisis won’t end when the lava reaches the sea,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Tuesday. 

“It will end when we’ve managed to rebuild everything the volcano has destroyed and will destroy.”