YCLOAK

A total lunar eclipse will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual thrills for stargazers across North and South America. 

The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about one-and-a-half hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade. It will be the first so-called blood moon in a year. 

Observers in the eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America will have prime seats for the whole show, weather permitting. Partial stages of the eclipse will be visible across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Left out: Alaska, Asia and Australia.  

“This is really an eclipse for the Americas,” said NASA’s Noah Petro, a planetary geologist who specializes in the moon. “It’s going to be a treat.” 

All you need, he noted, are “patience and eyeballs.” 

A total eclipse occurs when Earth passes directly between the moon and the sun and casts a shadow on our constant, cosmic companion. The moon will be 362,000 kilometers (225,000 miles) away at the peak of the eclipse — around midnight on the U.S. East Coast. 

“This is this gradual, slow, wonderful event that as long as it’s clear where you are, you get to see it,” Petro said. 

If not, NASA will provide a livestream of the eclipse from various locations; so will the Slooh network of observatories. 

There’ll be another lengthy total lunar eclipse in November, with Africa and Europe lucking out again, but not the Americas. Then the next one isn’t until 2025. 

Launched last fall, NASA’s asteroid-seeking Lucy spacecraft will photograph this weekend’s event from 103 million kilometers (64 million miles) away, as ground controllers continue their effort to fix a loose solar panel. 

NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, a geologist, plans to set her alarm clock early aboard the International Space Station. 

“Hopefully, we can be up in time and be at the right place at the right time to catch a good glimpse,” she told The Associated Press earlier this week. 

 
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Plans are underway in Malawi to start administering the cholera vaccine in some southern districts, as the number of cholera cases has been rising since an outbreak began in January.

According to a daily update released Thursday by the Ministry of Health, Malawi has registered more than 200 cases, with seven deaths and 26 hospital admissions. 

The update says the outbreak that started in Nsanje district in January has spread to four other areas in southern Malawi: Neno, Chikwawa, Machinga and Blantyre. 

Records show that as of Thursday, Nsanje had 97 registered cases, Blantyre had 53, Neno had 38, Chikwawa had 12 and Machinga had two. 

Wongani Mbale, deputy spokesperson for the district health office in Blantyre, blames the outbreak on poor sanitation. 

“According to what we have gathered, it seems that a lot of people are using unprotected wells, which are a source of infections,” Mbale said. “The water is contaminated. So as a district, we think that the cause is the use of contaminated water.” 

Cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingesting food or water contaminated with bacteria. The disease affects both children and adults and, if untreated, can kill within hours. 

To contain the outbreak, Malawi’s government has announced plans to start administering the cholera vaccine this month in all affected districts. 

Health Ministry spokesperson Adrian Chikumbe told a local newspaper that the government has 2.9 million doses of vaccine to be administered orally starting May 23. 

Mbale of the Blantyre health office said his office has started taking measures to combat the vaccine hesitancy that hindered the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. 

“Starting from next Monday, we are having some briefings to health workers to train HSAs (Health Surveillance Assistants) on how they can implement this activity,” he said. “After that, we will have orientation and sensitization meetings with the community so that they can receive the vaccine without any doubt, as you know that the majority are fearing the vaccine, saying that maybe it’s for COVID.” 

George Jobe, executive director for Malawi Health Equity Network, a health rights organization, said cholera aside, there is a need for the government to address sanitation problems in many rural areas in Malawi.   

“In Neno, for example, water has been a challenge. There was a time when [people in] Neno suffered typhoid because of water. And we also understand that the places that have been affected are relying on the Lisungwi River. In this case, there is a need for clean water to be made available even in hard-to-reach rural areas,” Jobe said. 

The government said it is distributing chlorine in affected areas for water treatment, as well as sending out cholera control information to people through various channels of communication. 

 
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Over the past three decades Ara Mirzaian has fitted braces for everyone from Paralympians to children with scoliosis. But Msituni was a patient like none other — a newborn giraffe.

The calf was born Feb. 1 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, north of San Diego, with a front leg bending the wrong way. Safari park staff feared she could die if they didn’t immediately correct the condition, which could prevent her from nursing and walking around the habitat.

But they had no experience with fitting a baby giraffe in a brace. That proved especially challenging given she was a 178-centimeter-tall newborn and growing taller every day. So, they reached out to experts in orthotics at the Hanger Clinic, where Mirzaian landed his very first animal patient.

“It was pretty surreal when I first heard about it,” Mirzaian told The Associated Press this week during a tour to meet Msituni, who was strutting alongside the other giraffes with no troubles. “Of course, all I did was go online and study giraffes for like 24/7 until we got out here.”

Zoos increasingly are turning to medical professionals who treat people to find solutions for ailing animals. The collaboration has been especially helpful in the field of prosthetics and orthotics. Earlier this year, ZooTampa in Florida teamed up with similar experts to successfully replace the beak of a cancer-stricken great hornbill bird with a 3D-printed prosthetic.

The Hanger team in California had fit orthotics for a cyclist and kayaker who both went on to win medals at the 2016 Paralympics in Brazil and customized a brace for a marathoner with multiple sclerosis who raced in seven continents.

And in 2006, a Hanger team in Florida created a prosthetic for a bottlenose dolphin that had lost its tail after becoming tangled in ropes from a crab trap. Their story inspired the 2011 movie Dolphin Tale.

But this was a definite learning curve for all, including Matt Kinney, a senior veterinarian for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance in charge of Msituni’s case.

“We commonly put on casts and bandages and stuff. But something that extensive, like this brace that she was provided, that’s something we really had to turn to our human (medicine) colleagues for,” Kinney said.

Msituni suffered from hyperextended carpi — wrist joint bones in giraffes’ front limbs, which are more like arms. As she overcompensated, the second front limb started to hyperextend as well. Her back leg joints also were weak but were able to be corrected with specialized hoof extenders.

And given that she weighed more than 55 kilograms at birth, the abnormality was already taking its toll on her joints and bones.

While the custom braces were being built, Kinney first bought post-surgery knee braces at Target that he cut up and re-sewed, but they kept slipping off. Then Msituni wore medical grade braces for humans that were modified for her long legs. But eventually Msituni broke one.

For the custom braces to work, they would need to have a range of motion but be durable, so Hanger worked with a company that makes horse braces.

Using cast moldings of the giraffe’s legs, it took eight days to make the carbon graphite braces that featured the animal’s distinct pattern of crooked spots to match her hide.

“We put on the giraffe pattern just to make it fun,” Mirzaian said. “We do this with kids all the time. They get to pick superheroes, or their favorite team and we imprint it on their bracing. So why not do it with a giraffe?”

In the end, Msituni only needed one brace. The other leg corrected itself with the medical grade brace.

When they put her under to fit the custom brace, Mirzaian was so moved by the animal’s beauty, he gave her a hug.

“It was just amazing seeing such a big, beautiful creature just lying there in front of me,” he said.

After 10 days in the custom brace, the problem was corrected.

All told, she was in braces for 39 days from the day she was born. She stayed in the animal hospital the entire time. After that, she was slowly introduced to her mom and others in the herd. Her mom never took her back, but another female giraffe has adopted her, so to speak, and she now runs along like the other giraffes.

Mirzaian hopes to hang up a picture of the baby giraffe in her patterned brace so the kids he treats will be inspired to wear theirs.

“It was the coolest thing to see an animal like that walk in a brace,” he said. “It feels good to know we saved a giraffe’s life.”
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Top U.S. meatpacking companies drafted the executive order issued by President Donald Trump in 2020 to keep meat plants running and convinced his administration to encourage workers to stay on the job at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released Thursday by a U.S. House panel.

The report by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis details the meat industry’s influence on Trump’s White House as it tried to keep production rolling even as employees fell ill.

More than 59,000 meatpacking workers at plants owned by the nation’s top five meatpackers contracted COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic and at least 269 died, according to the first report by the panel, released in October.

“The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated,” committee chair Representative James Clyburn said.

The North American Meat Institute, the leading meat industry trade group, said the report “distorts the truth” and “uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.”

The report, based on thousands of documents and interviews with workers, union officials and experts, found that in April 2020, meatpacking companies led by Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods drafted an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) to keep meat plants open.

The DPA, which was enacted in 1950, gives the president emergency powers to control the domestic economy.

The companies sent the draft to Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials and corresponded extensively with the White House, USDA, and other administration officials before the order was finalized and signed on April 28, the report found.

Industry executives argued at the time that domestic meat supply was threatened by worker absenteeism.

Those concerns were “baseless,” the House report said. USDA data showed meatpackers had 622 million pounds of frozen pork in March 2020 and that top meatpackers’ pork exports grew as much as 370% in the first year of the pandemic.

Jim Monroe, Smithfield vice president of corporate affairs, said the company is proud of its pandemic response.

“Did we make every effort to share with government officials our perspective on the pandemic and how it was impacting the food production system? Absolutely,” he said.

Gary Mickelson, a Tyson spokesperson, said the company’s top priority is worker health and safety and that it has collaborated with federal, state and local officials in its pandemic response in the interest of protecting workers.

In April 2020, meat industry executives also lobbied the USDA to encourage workers to report to plants as absenteeism rose, resulting in a public statement to that effect from former Vice President Mike Pence, the report found.

The industry worked closely with political appointee Mindy Brashears, the USDA undersecretary of food safety, and corresponded with her via her personal email and cell phone, a potential violation of the Federal Records Act, the report found.

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, also told the House committee that he added softening language, like “if feasible,” to CDC guidance for managing COVID-19 spread in meat plants because he was “persuaded by industry concerns” about the potential impact of the guidance.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered a nationwide lockdown Thursday to try to contain a highly transmissible variant of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which was confirmed in the country this week for the first time.

The official Korean Central News Agency said genetic sequencing analysis of samples collected from a group of people on Sunday in Pyongyang had identified the BA.2 strain, also known as the “stealth omicron” for its relative difficulty of detection.

At least one person confirmed to have COVID-19 has died, KCNA said Friday, and around 350,000 people have shown signs of a fever that has “explosively spread nationwide” since late April. About 162,200 of them have been treated so far, but it did not specify how many had tested positive for COVID-19.

North Korea has maintained a strict border closure since February 2020 and instituted its own quarantine measures amid the pandemic, which have now officially been breached.

BA.2 became the world’s dominant strain in March, the World Health Organization said. It was also responsible for driving up infections in South Korea to highs unseen before. In late April, North Korea closed its rail line into China’s border city of Dandong after it registered a spike in COVID-19 cases.

The detection of omicron and Pyongyang’s public admission of it came as North Korea remains one of the last remaining countries yet to run a vaccination program for its 26 million people.

And given that its medical system still significantly lags behind those of its Asian neighbors, observers say it appeared unlikely that Pyongyang would shift from its yearslong stance of rejecting vaccine help and stick to its only allowable option of a border closure.

‘A most serious emergency’

Kim was seen wearing a mask for the first time at Thursday’s early morning politburo meeting, which he took off only when addressing his masked aides.

He ordered a “thorough lockdown” in all cities and counties, KCNA said. He directed businesses and construction projects to continue to operate but in isolation to “perfectly block” the spread of the virus.

“They only have one option: simply lock down their country and try to prevent the spread of the omicron virus,” Park Won-gon, professor of North Korea studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told VOA. “Because North Korea doesn’t have simple medicines, much less a medical system comparable to other countries, even if they had the vaccines, they would not be able to stop omicron.”

Park doesn’t think North Korea will be looking to solicit vaccines from outside parties; what it really wants is a simple cure, which the world has yet to develop more than two years into the pandemic.

North Korea will institute draconian measures to those of its biggest ally, China, if not even more severe, Park predicted.

Based on several studies conducted on the contingency of North Korea, Park said, there was a single scenario that would incite a people’s uprising, and possibly the regime’s collapse: a pandemic paired with extreme economic difficulty. “That is why, for more than two years, North Korea has been very sensitive and serious about this pandemic, even at the deep economic cost of closing its border with China.”

Extended impact

North Korea is already dealing with a difficult rice planting season, an important time on the socialist state’s calendar, challenged by droughtlike conditions and a shortage of necessities such as fertilizer. Even prior to the pandemic’s official entrance to the country, the state had relocated office workers and laborers to its agricultural regions to assist in building trenches for water transport, according to the official newspaper Rodong Sinmun.

The movement restrictions set to be enacted could complicate the effort, Park said, in a country that has chronically experienced the shortage of food. “It will definitely have a huge negative impact on their food supply in the near future.”

Still, Kim, in Thursday’s politburo meeting, said more dangerous than the virus were “unscientific fear, lack of faith and weak will” as he expressed confidence in the people’s ability to organize and get behind a cause.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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An image once thought impossible becomes reality. Plus, the International Space Station has four fewer passengers. And you might have heard of the company that was trying to catch a rocket from the sky. It did it. Sort of. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Rare and threatened species were among the plants and animals tracked by citizen scientists from around the world in this year’s City Nature Challenge in Los Angeles.  The findings from 47 countries were unveiled this week, including a new orchid species in Bolivia and the endangered Przewalski’s Horse in war-torn Ukraine. VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan has details.
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The world got a look Thursday at the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.

The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Previous efforts had found the black hole in the center of our galaxy too jumpy to get a good picture.

The University of Arizona’s Feryal Ozel called the black hole “the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy” while announcing the new image.

The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A(asterisk), near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun.

This is not the first black hole image. The same group released the first one in 2019 and it was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away. The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles).

The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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The Supreme Court’s nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The meeting in the justices’ private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes.

Thursday’s conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court’s marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court’s final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices’ initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

That’s true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

“I think it’s tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation,” said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. “But at the same time, there’s nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers.”

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

“I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely,” said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. “I’ll be surprised if it changes very much,” Gergis said.

At least five votes in December

It’s not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alito’s writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trump’s three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the court’s legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, he’d need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.

Majority opinions often change in response to friendly suggestions and barbed criticisms. The justices consider the internal back-and-forth a crucial part of their work.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that pointed criticism from her friend and ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, made her opinions better. Scalia died in 2016; Ginsburg, four years later.

The lack of any other opinions surprised some former law clerks to the justices, though Wold said it’s also true that bigger, harder cases traditionally take more time.

Spring usually ‘tense’  

Several former clerks also said they expect the leak to be discussed at the weekly meeting on Thursday, at which the justices typically finalize opinions in cases they’ve heard and choose cases to hear in the coming months. The spring normally is a tense time at the court, with major decisions looming that often reveal stark divisions and sometimes produce sharp words.

“I would be shocked if it doesn’t come up,” Wold said, adding that, given what has happened, the court would probably take additional precautions with drafts circulating in the future, including limiting who has access to them.

Kent Greenfield, a Boston University law professor who spent a year as a clerk to Souter, also speculated that the leak would be on the table Thursday. “Roberts is in a complete bind. He has to address it, but it doesn’t strike me that he has many options,” Greenfield said.
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North Korea officially confirmed its first COVID-19 outbreak Thursday, with state media reporting a sub-variant of the highly transmissible omicron virus, known as BA.2, had been detected in Pyongyang.

“There has been the biggest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, that has been kept safely over the past two years and three months since February 2020,” the state media said.

The report said people in Pyongyang contracted the omicron variant, without providing details on case numbers or possible sources of infection.

The report was published as the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un chaired a Workers’ Party meeting to discuss responses to the first outbreak of the coronavirus. 
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Democratic party lawmakers in the U.S. failed Wednesday to pass a measure essentially codifying the right to an abortion. The vote comes after revelations the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the landmark ruling that legalized abortion. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports.
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The U.S. set another record for drug overdose deaths last year with more than 107,000 fatalities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Wednesday. 

The provisional 2021 total represents a 15% jump from the previous record in 2020, and means there is roughly one overdose death in the country every 5 minutes.

While drugs like opioid painkillers, other opioids and heroin cause many deaths, fentanyl is the leading killer, causing 71,000 deaths last year, which was a 23% jump from the year before.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the latest numbers “truly staggering.”

Drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have been rising for more than two decades.

“It is unacceptable that we are losing a life to overdose every five minutes around the clock,” said Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. 

“That is why [U.S.] President [Joe] Biden’s new National Drug Control Strategy signals a new era of drug policy centered on individuals and communities, focusing specifically on the actions we must take right now to reduce overdoses and save lives,” he said. “Those actions include expanding access to high impact harm reduction tools like naloxone, quickly connecting more people to treatment, disrupting and dismantling drug trafficking operations, and improving data to systems that drive the Nation’s drug policy.”

One reason fentanyl is responsible for so many deaths is that it is cheap and often mixed into other drugs without the buyer’s knowledge.

“The net effect is that we have many more people, including those who use drugs occasionally and even adolescents, exposed to these potent substances that can cause someone to overdose even with a relatively small exposure,” Volkow said in a statement.

Methamphetamine caused 32,856 overdose deaths, cocaine in 24,538 deaths, and prescription pain medications in 13,503 deaths in 2021.

COVID-19 lockdowns had an impact on overdose deaths as they made getting treatment more difficult for drug users.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.
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Researchers say DNA can replace hard drives to help store the world’s ever-increasing digital output. Matt Dibble has the story
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For the fourth time in seven years, the authority that administers one of Australia’s greatest natural treasures has reported widespread bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.

This occurs when the sea is too warm for too long. It forces the coral to expel microscopic symbiotic algae that gives it most of its energy and color.

Reefs can recover from bleaching, but it can take years. If water temperatures don’t return to normal, the coral can die. Large parts of the reef were killed off by mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017.

Officials say it’s happening again. They are hoping it won’t be as destructive as previous years, but serious threats remain.

David Wachenfeld, who is the chief scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, said reefs all over the world are under pressure.

“Often the Great Barrier Reef is used as a poster child for the impacts of climate change on coral reefs,” he said. “And I completely understand that, but climate change is a global problem. It needs a global solution, and it is all of the world’s coral reefs that are under threat.”

The United Nations is assessing the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as localized threats, including pollution and over-fishing.

In Canberra, the government has insisted it’s the “best-managed reef in the world” and that multi-million-dollar programs are boosting its resilience.

Conservationists argue, however, that Australia needs far more ambitious plans to curb its carbon emissions.

The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) said Wednesday that during a La Nina event, which is a naturally occurring weather cycle, eastern Australia receives more cloud cover and rain that should have “been a welcome reprieve for our Reef” from warmer ocean temperatures.

However, an AMCS spokesperson warned that bleaching was “becoming more and more frequent” and that this was “not normal.”

The Great Barrier Reef runs 2,300 kilometers down Australia’s northeastern coast and spans an area about the size of Japan.
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A new study led by the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. and the University of Southampton, along with experts in Australia and New Zealand, found that industrialized shipping could be killing large numbers of whale sharks.

Marine biologists have said that whale shark numbers have been falling in recent years, but it has not been clear why.

But a new international study suggests that collisions with shipping traffic could be a major factor.

Researchers examined satellite data to track about 350 whale sharks. They found that the world’s largest fish spend most of their time in waters used by freighters and other larger vessels.

The study showed that transmissions from the tags that monitor their movements often ended in busy shipping lanes. The international team, including experts from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, believe many sharks are probably being hit and killed by boats before sinking to the ocean floor.

Mark Erdmann is from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a scientist at Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization.

He co-authored the study, and believes shipping is a major threat to whale shark populations, which are a protected species.

“If we are protecting them from fisheries, why are their populations still declining? And one thought is the fact that these are big oceanic plankti vores that move relatively slowly, feeding on the surface, spend 50% of their time in, kind of, top 10-20 meters of the water. So, it is possible that they are actually running into a lot of the global shipping. Now, what the study found is that, indeed, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between where whale sharks are moving and global shipping traffic. So, those are real collision-risk areas,” he said.

Most lethal strikes are likely to go undetected or unreported. At present, there are no regulations to protect endangered whale sharks against these types of collisions.

Whale sharks play an important role in the marine food web and healthy ocean ecosystems.

They can grow up to 20 meters long.

The study is published in the PNAS — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — journal.
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The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with a nearly 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted. 

With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday. 

The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40%, and a decade ago it was only 10%. 

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for the hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going. 

“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report. 

These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long-term averages and state of the art computer simulations. They are different from increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or wet a certain day will be in specific places. 

But even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s — that’s not quite the same as the global threshold first set by international negotiators in the 2015 Paris agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. 

The global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being that warm not for one year, but over a 20- or 30-year time period, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only tell if Earth hits that average mark years, maybe a decade or two, after it is actually reached because it is a long-term average, Hermanson said. 

“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. 

The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected because of human-caused climate change in the next five years, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Niño — the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that alter world weather — which could toss another couple of tenths of a degree on top temporarily, and the world gets to 1.5 degrees. 

The world is in the second straight year of a La Niña, the opposite of El Niño, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. The five-year forecast says that La Niña is likely to end late this year or in 2023. 

The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Niño, La Niña and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said. 

On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at a rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeastern Brazil and Australia, the report predicted. 

The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, with greater than 90% accuracy, Hermanson said. 

NASA top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the figures in this report are “a little warmer” than what NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration use. He also had doubts about skill level on long-term regional predictions. 

“Regardless of what is predicted here, we are very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade or so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term — or that working to reduce further change is not worthwhile,” Schmidt said in an email. 
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