Prince William arrived Sunday in Singapore for the annual Earthshot Prize awards, the first to be held in Asia, to support environmental innovators with solutions to battle climate change and save the planet. 

Upon his arrival, dozens of people waving British flags welcomed him with loud cheers. William, 41, shook hands, signed autographs and sportingly took selfies with many of them during a walkabout. 

“It’s fantastic to be back in Singapore for this year’s Earthshot Prize ceremony, after 11 years,” he said in a statement upon landing. “Singapore’s bold vision to be a leader for environmental innovation sets the standard for others to follow.” 

“He has this charm,” said Johanes Mario, a Singaporean welcoming William at the airport. “He really fights for … the climate. I believe this is really a good cause for the future of our generation.”

At Singapore’s Changi Airport and before greeting the crowd, William stood on an upper floor for a stunning view of the 40-meter (131-foot) Rain Vortex, the world’s largest indoor waterfall, which was illuminated green to mark his arrival. He was also shown a tree planted in his honor in the indoor garden at the foot of the waterfall. 

The heir to the British throne last visited Singapore with his wife, Princess Catherine, in 2012. Traveling solo this time, William’s focus is on the Earthshot Prize that he and his Royal Foundation charity launched in 2020 to promote innovative solutions and technologies to combat global warming and mitigate its impact on the environment. 

15 finalists

Five winners will be named at an award ceremony Tuesday. Each will get a million pounds ($1.2 million) to help them scale up their projects for a wider global reach. Fifteen finalists representing six continents were selected from 1,300 nominees this year. The winners are from five categories: nature protection, clean air, ocean revival, waste elimination and climate change. 

William will address the star-studded ceremony, to be hosted by English actress Hannah Waddingham. Renowned wildlife conservationist Robert Irwing and celebrities including Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and actresses Lana Condor and Nomzamo Mbatha are expected to attend the event. 

The inaugural ceremony was held in London in 2021, followed by Boston last year. The prize’s name refers to the late President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “moonshot” speech, which challenged Americans to reach the moon by the end of that decade. That inspired the prince and his partners to set a similar goal for finding solutions to pressing environmental problems by 2030. 

Singapore’s Foreign Ministry said William will call on Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and meet Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loon at The Istana palace — one of Singapore’s oldest heritage sites — during his four-day trip. 

William, a keen sportsman, will also try his hand at dragon boating, a popular sport in Singapore and many parts of the world. He will also meet Singaporeans to see how local organizations are working to protect and restore the planet. 

William’s office at Kensington Palace has said that Singapore was chosen to host this year’s awards ceremony because of its role as a “hub for innovation” in Southeast Asia. 

William will also attend the United for Wildlife global summit, featuring representatives of law enforcement agencies, conservation groups and corporations working to combat trade in illegal wildlife products, estimated at $20 billion annually. 
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Building a robot that’s both humanlike and useful is a decadesold engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction. 

While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked another wave of investments in the quest to build a humanoid, most of the current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from keeping at it. 

“The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,'” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.” 

Do we even need humanoids? Hurst makes a point of describing Agility’s warehouse robot Digit as human-centric, not humanoid, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does over what it’s trying to be. 

What it does, for now, is pick up tote bins and move them. Amazon announced in October it would begin testing Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened an Oregon factory in September to mass-produce them. 

Digit has a head containing cameras, other sensors and animated eyes, and a torso that essentially works as its engine. It has two arms and two legs, but its legs are more birdlike than human, with an inverted knees appearance that resembles so-called digitigrade animals such as birds, cats and dogs that walk on their toes rather than on flat feet. 

Rival robot-makers, like Figure AI, are taking a more purist approach on the idea that only true humanoids can effectively navigate workplaces, homes and a society built for humans. Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be “iterated on like an iPhone” to perform multiple tasks to take up the work of humans as birth rates decline around the world. 

“There’s not enough people doing these jobs, so the market’s massive,” said Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock. “If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there’s a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe.” 

At the moment, however, Adcock’s firm doesn’t have a prototype that’s ready for market. Founded just over a year ago and after having raised tens of millions of dollars, it recently revealed a 38-second video of Figure walking through its test facility in Sunnyvale, California. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also trying to build a humanoid, called Optimus, through the car company’s robotics division, but a hyped-up live demonstration last year of the robot’s awkwardly halting steps didn’t impress experts in the robotics field. Seemingly farther along is Tesla’s Austin, Texas-based neighbor Apptronik, which unveiled its Apollo humanoid in an August video demonstration. 

All the attention — and money — poured into making ungainly humanoid machines might make the whole enterprise seem like a futile hobby for wealthy technologists, but for some pioneers of legged robots, it’s all about what you learn along the way. 

“Not only about their design and operation, but also about how people respond to them, and about the critical underlying technologies for mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence,” said Marc Raibert, the co-founder of Boston Dynamics, best known for its dog-like robots named Spot. 

Raibert said sometimes the path of development is not along a straight line. Boston Dynamics, now a subsidiary of carmaker Hyundai, experimented with building a humanoid that could handle boxes. 

“That led to development of a new robot that was not really a humanoid, but had several characteristics of a humanoid,” he said via email. “But the changes resulted in a new robot that could handle boxes faster, could work longer hours and could operate in tight spaces, such as a truck. So humanoid research led to a useful nonhumanoid robot.” 

Some startups aiming for humanlike machines focused on improving the dexterity of robotic fingers before trying to get their robots to walk. 

Walking is “not the hardest problem to solve in humanoid robotics,” said Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of British Columbia, Canada-based startup Sanctuary AI. “The hardest problem is the problem of understanding the world and being able to manipulate it with your hands.” 

Sanctuary’s newest and first bipedal robot, Phoenix, can stock shelves, unload delivery vehicles and operate a checkout, early steps toward what Rose sees as a much longer-term goal of getting robots to perceive the physical world to be able to reason about it in a way that resembles intelligence. Like other humanoids, it’s meant to look endearing, because how it interacts with real people is a big part of its function. 

“We want to be able to provide labor to the world, not just for one thing, but for everybody who needs it,” Rose said. “The systems have to be able to think like people. So we could call that artificial general intelligence if you’d like. But what I mean more specifically is the systems have to be able to understand speech and they need to be able to convert the understanding of speech into action, which will satisfy job roles across the entire economy.” 
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Using sidewalks as exam rooms and heavy red duffle bags as medical supply closets, volunteer medics spend their Saturdays caring for the growing number of migrants arriving in Chicago without a place to live.

Mostly students in training, they go to police stations where migrants are first housed, prescribing antibiotics, distributing prenatal vitamins and assessing for serious health issues. These student doctors, nurses and physician assistants are the front line of health care for asylum-seekers in the nation’s third-largest city, filling a gap in Chicago’s haphazard response.

“My team is a team that shouldn’t have to exist, but it does out of necessity,” said Sara Izquierdo, a University of Illinois Chicago medical student who helped found the group. “Because if we’re not doing this, I’m not sure anyone will.”

More than 19,600 migrants have come to Chicago over the last year since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending buses to so-called sanctuary cities. The migrants wait at police stations and airports, sometimes for months, until there’s space at a longer-term shelter, like park district buildings.

Once in shelter, they can access a county clinic exclusively for migrants. But the currently 3,300 people in limbo at police stations and airports must rely on a mishmash of volunteers and social service groups that provide food, clothes and medicine.

Izquierdo noted the medical care gap months ago, consulted experienced doctors and designed a street-medicine model tailored to migrants’ medical needs. Her group makes weekly visits to police stations, operating on a shoestring budget of $30,000, mostly used for medication.

On a recent Saturday, she was among dozens of medics at a South Side station where migrants sleep in the lobby, on sidewalks and an outdoor basketball court. Officers didn’t allow the volunteers in the station so when one patient requested privacy, their doctor used his car.

Abrahan Belizario saw a doctor for the first time in five months.

The 28-year-old had a headache, toothache and chest pain. He recently arrived from Peru, where he worked as a driver and at a laundromat but couldn’t survive. He wasn’t used to the brisk Chicago weather and believed sleeping outdoors exacerbated his symptoms.

“It is very cold,” he said. “We’re almost freezing.”

The volunteers booked him a dental appointment and gave him a bus pass.

Many migrants who land in Chicago and other U.S. cities come from Venezuela where a social, political and economic crisis has pushed millions into poverty. More than 7 million have left, often risking a dangerous route by foot to the U.S. border.

The migrants’ health problems tend to be related to their journey or living in crowded conditions. Back and leg injuries from walking are common. Infections spread easily. Hygiene is an issue. There are few indoor bathrooms and outdoor portable toilets lack handwashing stations. Not many people carry their medical records.

Most also have trauma, either from their homeland or from the journey itself.

“You can understand the language, but it doesn’t mean you understand the situation,” said Miriam Guzman, one of organizers and a fourth-year medical student at UIC.

The doctors refer patients to organizations that help with mental health but there are limitations. The fluid nature of the shelter system makes it difficult to follow-up; people are often moved without warning.

Chicago’s goal is to provide permanent homes, which could help alleviate health issues. But the city has struggled to manage the growing population as buses and planes arrive daily at all hours. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who took office in May, calls it an inherited issue and proposed winterized tents.

His administration has acknowledged the heavy reliance on volunteers.

“We weren’t ready for this,” said Rey Wences Najera, first deputy of immigrant, migrant and refugee rights. “We are building this plane as we are flying it and the plane is on fire.”

The volunteer doctors also are limited in what they can do: Their duffle bags have medications for children, bandages and even ear plugs after some migrants wanted to block out sirens. But they cannot offer X-rays or address chronic issues.

“You’re not going to tell a person who has gone through this journey to stop smoking,” said Ruben Santos, a Rush University medical student. “You change your way of trying to connect to that person to make sure that you can help them with their most pressing needs while not doing some of the traditional things that you would do in the office or a big academic hospital.”

The volunteers explain to each patient that the service is free but that they’re students. Experienced doctors, who are part of the effort, approve treatment plans and prescribe medications.

Getting people those medications is another challenge. One station visit prompted 15 prescriptions. Working from laptops on the floor — near dozens of sleeping families — the doctors mapped out which medics would pick up medications the following day and how they’d find the recipients.

Sometimes the volunteers must call for emergency help.

Thirty-year-old Moises Hidalgo said he had trouble breathing. Doctors heard a concerning “crackling” sound, suspected pneumonia and called an ambulance.

Hidalgo, who came from Peru after having left his native Venezuela more than a decade ago, once worked as a chef. He’s been walking around Chicago looking for jobs, but has been turned away without a work permit.

“I’ve been trying to find work, at least so that I can pay to sleep somewhere, because if this isn’t solved, I can’t keep waiting,” he said.

To stay warm while sleeping outside, he wore four layers of clothing; his loose pants cinched with a shoelace.

The medics hope Chicago can formalize their approach. And they say they’ll continue to keep at it — for some, it’s personal.

Dr. Muftawu-Deen Iddrisu, who works Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, said he wanted to give back. Originally from Ghana, he attended medical school in Cuba.

“I come from a very humble background,” he said. “I know how it feels. I know once sometime back someone did the same for me.” 
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One of modern climate science’s pioneers is warning that the world isn’t just steadily warming but is dangerously accelerating, according to a study that some other scientists call a bit overheated.

The work from former NASA top scientist James Hansen, who since leaving the space agency has become a prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, which cause climate change, illustrates a recently surfaced division among scientists about whether global warming has kicked into a new and even more dangerous gear.

Hansen, who alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988, said Thursday that since 2010, the rate of warming has jumped by 50%. Hansen argues that since 2010 there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those particles means there’s less of the cooling effect that they can have.

Hansen said a key calculation used in figuring out how much the world will warm in response to carbon pollution shows much faster warming than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. He called the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times “deader than a doornail” and said a less stringent goal of 2 degrees Celsius is on its deathbed. That matters because increases in average global temperatures lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather events.

“The next few years will show that we indeed do have an acceleration in the global warming rate,” Hansen said in a press briefing. “And it’s based on simple good physics.”

“The planet is now out of (energy) balance by an incredible amount, more than it ever has been,” said Hansen, who has been nicknamed the Godfather of Global Warming.

Several climate scientists contacted by The Associated Press expressed skepticism about Hansen’s study, tinged with respect for his long-term work.

Hansen’s study in Thursday’s journal Oxford Open Climate Change is broad-ranging “but has little by way of analytical depth or consistency checks when making claims quite far outside the norm,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. “It seems primarily aimed at convincing policymakers rather than scientists.”

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who insisted that warming is steadily increasing but not accelerated, posted a rebuttal to Hansen’s claims and said climate change right now is bad enough and there’s no need to overstate the case. Mann said “it has always been risky to ignore (Hansen’s) warnings and admonitions” but when claims are made so out of the mainstream the standard for evidence is high, and he said Hansen hasn’t met them.

Yet a check of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data lends support to Hansen’s modeling.

Hansen’s study said from 1970 to 2010, the world warmed at a rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, but projected that would increase to a rate of at least 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade after 2010. NOAA data shows that 0.27 degrees is the rate since September 2010.

That starting date is key because that’s when scientists could start to see the effect of clean air regulations that reduced aerosol pollution and the amount of sulfur in fuel used by ocean shipping, Hansen said. That type of more traditional sooty air pollution has a cooling effect that masks a fraction of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Hansen and many other scientists said.

When scientists try to figure out future and past warming one of the crucial variables is climate sensitivity, which is how much the world warms when carbon dioxide levels in the air double. These calculations have had a wide range and scientists have yet to settle on it, but the latest U.N. climate panel said it is within a range of 2 degrees Celsius to 5 degrees Celsius, with the likely range between 2.5 and 4 degrees and 3 degrees being a good midpoint.

Hansen’s study has it at 4.8 degrees Celsius. That’s within the widest range, but barely.

It’s that high because past research was based on wrong calculations of how fast the world warmed between glacial periods, Hansen said.

Past calculations were based on plant and animal fossil data, figuring microbiotic organisms wouldn’t adapt to warming, but would move to their preferred temperature range. Hansen said recent research shows that the organisms adapt and stay put, and when his team calculated past temperature changes based on chemical, not biological markers, it showed much faster warming for when carbon dioxide doubled in Earth’s ancient history.

Studies on climate sensitivity vary widely and are inconsistent, with another recent study showing 2.8 degrees not 4.8, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and the tech company Stripe. He said Hansen’s calculations are “not implausible but not particularly well supported by the literature.”

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, however, said “I tend to trust Hansen, despite his advocacy. I think his contention that the IPCC has underestimated climate sensitivity will prove out.”

Hansen said a more recent climate model — downplayed by the U.N. climate panel for running too hot – is actually more accurate than the ones mainstream climate scientists prefer based on cloud conditions in the southern ocean.

With a strong natural El Nino, which tends to temporarily warm the globe, and record heat in the air and in the deep oceans, scientists in the past month have split about what’s happening to the globe.

Mann said the warming the world is seeing is what has long been predicted and is not the indication of something unusual or acceleration. The increases reported, he said, are statistically insignificant.

Hausfather said the world is warming faster, but he calculated the rate at 0.24 degrees Celsius per decade instead of Hansen’s 0.27 degrees.
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The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later.

The Danish wind energy developer Ørsted said this week it’s scrapping its Ocean Wind I and II projects off southern New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted.

Together, the projects were supposed to deliver over 2.2 gigawatts of power.

The news comes after developers in New England canceled power contracts for three projects that would have provided another 3.2 gigawatts of wind power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. They said their projects were no longer financially feasible.

In total, the cancellations equate to nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.

Despite the setbacks, offshore wind continues to move forward, the White House said, citing recent investments by New York state and approval by the Interior Department of the nation’s largest planned offshore wind farm in Virginia. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also announced new offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

“While macroeconomic headwinds are creating challenges for some projects, momentum remains on the side of an expanding U.S. offshore wind industry — creating good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction,” while strengthening the power grid and providing new clean energy resources for American families and businesses, the White House said in a statement Thursday.

Industry experts now say that while the U.S. likely won’t hit 30 gigawatts by 2030, a significant amount of offshore wind power is still attainable by then, roughly 20 to 22 gigawatts or more. That’s far more than the nation has today, with just two small demonstration projects that provide a small fraction of a single gigawatt of power.

Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of government plans to shift to renewable energy, particularly in populous East Coast states with limited land for wind turbines or solar arrays. Eight East Coast states have offshore wind mandates set by legislation or executive actions that commit them to adding a combined capacity of more than 45 gigawatts, according to ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm.

“I think very few people would argue that the U.S. will have the gigawatts the Biden administration wants” by 2030, said Timothy Fox, a ClearView vice president. “But I do think eventually we will have it and will likely exceed it.”

Offshore wind developers have publicly lamented the global economic gales they’re facing. Molly Morris, president of U.S. offshore wind for the Norwegian company Equinor, said the industry is facing a “perfect storm.”

High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened. Ørsted is writing off $4 billion, due largely to cancellation of the two New Jersey projects.

David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted, said it’s crucial to lower the levelized cost of offshore wind in the United States so Americans aren’t debating between affordability and clean energy. Hardy spoke at the American Clean Power industry group’s offshore wind conference in Boston last month on a panel with Morris.

“We’re probably a little bit too ambitious,” he said. “We came in hot; we came in fast, we thought we could build projects that were inexpensive, large projects right out of the gate. And it turns out that we probably still need to go through the same learning curve that Europe did, with higher prices in the beginning and a little slower pace.”

In May, there were 27 U.S. offshore wind projects that had negotiated agreements with states to provide power before the brunt of the cost increases hit, according to Walt Musial, offshore wind chief engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the Energy Department. The delay between signing purchase agreements and getting final approval to build allowed unexpected cost increases to render many projects economically unfeasible, he said.

Musial called Ørsted’s announcement a setback for the industry but “not a fatal blow by any means.”

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced approval of the nation’s largest offshore wind project. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will be a 2.6 gigawatt wind farm off Virginia Beach to power 900,000 homes. And even as Ørsted announced the New Jersey cancellations, it said it was investing with utility Eversource to move forward with construction of Revolution Wind, Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm, a 704-megawatt project.

The current outlook from S&P Global Commodity Insights is 22 gigawatts by 2030, though that will be revised due to the recent industry announcements.

New York state, meanwhile, recently announced the award of 4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity as it seeks to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. That announcement came shortly after New York regulators rejected a request for bigger payments for four offshore wind projects worth a combined 4.2 gigawatts of power.

Any delay in offshore wind means continued reliance on fossil fuel-burning power plants, according to environmental advocates. “The quicker they come online, the quicker our air quality improves,” said Conor Bambrick, director of policy for Environmental Advocates NY.

New Jersey, under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, has established increasingly stringent clean energy goals, moving from 100% clean energy by 2050 to 100% by 2035. Murphy cast Ørsted’s decision as “outrageous” and an abandonment of its commitments, but the two-term Democrat said New Jersey plans to move forward with offshore wind.

The first U.S. commercial-scale offshore wind farms are currently under construction: Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts and South Fork Wind off Rhode Island and New York. 
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Countries moved a step closer Saturday to getting a fund off the ground to help poor states damaged by climate disasters, despite reservations from developing nations and the United States.  

The deal to create a “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for developing country negotiators at United Nations climate talks in Egypt last year, overcoming years of resistance from wealthy nations.  

But in the past 11 months, governments have struggled to reach consensus on the details of the fund, such as who will pay and where the fund will be located.  

A special U.N. committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week — following a deadlock in Egypt last month — to finalize recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024.  

The committee, representing a geographically diverse group of countries, resolved to recommend the World Bank serve as trustee and host of the fund — a tension point that has fueled divisions between developed and developing nations. 

Housing a fund at the World Bank, whose presidents are appointed by the U.S., would give donor countries outsized influence over the fund and result in high fees for recipient countries, developing countries have argued. 

To get all countries on board, it was agreed the World Bank would serve as interim trustee and host of the fund for a four-year period. 

Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special climate envoy, said in a post on X that Berlin “stands ready to fulfill its responsibility — we’re actively working towards contributing to the new fund and assessing options for more structural sources of financing.” 

Others were less optimistic. 

“It is a somber day for climate justice, as rich countries turn their backs on vulnerable communities,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at nonprofit Climate Action Network International.  

“Rich countries … have not only coerced developing nations into accepting the World Bank as the host of the Loss and Damage Fund but have also evaded their duty to lead in providing financial assistance to those communities and countries.” 

The committee also recommended that developed countries be urged to continue to provide support to the fund, but failed to resolve whether wealthy nations would be under strict financial obligation to chip in. 

“We regret that the text does not reflect consensus concerning the need for clarity on the voluntary nature of contributions,” a U.S. State Department official told Reuters. 

The U.S. attempted to include a footnote clarifying that any contributions to the fund would be voluntary, but the committee chair did not allow it. The U.S. objected to that denial. 

Sultan al-Jaber, who will preside over the COP28 talks, said he welcomed the committee’s recommendations and that they would pave the way for an agreement at COP28.  
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Called cover crops, they top the list of tasks U.S. farmers are told will build healthy soil, help the environment and fight climate change.

Yet after years of incentives and encouragement, Midwest farmers planted cover crops on only about 7% of their land in 2021.

That percentage has increased over the years but remains small in part because even as farmers receive extra payments and can see numerous benefits from cover crops, they remain wary. Many worry the practice will hurt their bottom line — and a study last year indicates they could be right.

Researchers who used satellite data to examine over 90,000 fields in six Corn Belt states found cover crops can reduce yields of cash crops — the bushels per acre. The smaller the yield, the less money farmers make.

“I don’t want to abandon it, but as far as just going whole-hog with planting cover crops, that’s a tough thing for me to do,” said Illinois farmer Doug Downs, who plants cover crops only on a sliver of his land in a relatively flat region of east-central Illinois.

Cover crops are plants grown on farmland that otherwise would be bare. While crops like corn and soybeans are growing or soon after harvest, farmers can sow species such as rye or red clover that will grow through winter and into spring. They stabilize soil, reduce fertilizer runoff, store carbon in plant roots and potentially add nutrients to the dirt.

The practice is key to government efforts to sequester carbon in farmland to help reduce climate change, since there’s general agreement planting the right off-season crops can pull carbon from the air and keep it underground in plant roots.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture promotes cover crops through several programs, starting with $44 million in payments during the 2023 fiscal year from the agency’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for over 4,700 contracts to plant them on more than 344,000 hectares. Additional funding was available for conservation practices, including cover crops, through the Inflation Reduction Act. Another program provided $100 million in extra benefits through federal crop insurance coverage to farmers who plant cover crops.

There’s heightened interest in cover crops for carbon storage, though the effectiveness depends on the soil, plant variety, temperature and other factors.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has put so much stock in cover crops that it recently launched a social media campaign with Nick Offerman, featuring the Parks and Recreation TV show actor buried in dirt while promoting the practice. The environmental group has encouraged Congress to give farmers more lucrative financial incentives to plant the crops.

The NRDC points to studies that have found cover crops don’t necessarily reduce cash crop yields and can boost growth. And Lara Bryant, the group’s deputy director of water and agriculture, notes that while the overall percentage of farmers planting cover crops is small, acreage increased by 50% to about 5% of U.S. cropland from 2012 to 2017, the most recent year USDA data is available.

“We have a long way to go but we’ve come a long way in a short amount of time,” Bryant said.

However, the 2022 satellite study found yields declined by an average of 5.5% on corn fields where cover crops were used for three or more years. For soybean fields, the decline was 3.5%. The declines varied depending on factors such as cover crop type, soil moisture and soil quality.

“I was surprised it was so negative,” said David Lobell, a Stanford University agricultural ecologist who worked on the study published in the journal Global Change Biology with researchers from Illinois and North Carolina. “We rechecked everything and were a little bit surprised.”

The study found that rye, the most frequently used cover crop, is especially prone to reducing yields, Lobell said. Rye is less expensive than many cover crops and grows well in many kinds of soil.

The study examined farm fields in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, using satellite images. Lobell said details from an individual field are less precise than on-the-ground study, but by examining thousands of fields, researchers can reach accurate conclusions.

The researchers said farmers need more technical help choosing and maintaining cover crops as well as more government or food industry payments to offset potential yield losses. The federal government and at least 22 states provide financial incentives to farmers — and food companies such as General Mills and PepsiCo pay more to farmers who plant cover crops.

Terry Cosby, chief of the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, acknowledged establishing effective cover crops can take time and some experimenting but said farmers who stick with them should see significant benefits. He noted the Biden administration’s allocation of $19.5 billion for climate smart programs over five years and that federal, state and university outreach services can provide technical advice.

“It’s going to take some trials and errors,” Cosby said. “It might fail but over the long term … it has been proven that you can be very successful with some type of cover crop.”

Downs, the Illinois farmer, has tried to incorporate cover crops into some of his operations, especially to control weeds. But he says it hasn’t been easy.

In 2019, Downs planted rye in one field but didn’t plant it on an identical field across a road. The spring was wet and the rye field was so soggy, he couldn’t get in for weeks to kill the cover crop and plant his soybeans, resulting in a smaller crop.

“Growing a cover crop cost me $250 an acre, and I spent $50 an acre doing it,” Downs said.

Farmers don’t typically harvest and sell cover crops; they frequently use herbicides to kill them before planting their principle crop. 

Less than 32 kilometers away, fourth-generation farmer Curt Elmore has been “dabbling” in cover crops for a decade, planting varieties like oats and rye on parts of the 809 hectares he farms.

Elmore seeds cover crops by plane before harvesting his cash crop, but cover crop growth has been spotty, not worth the cost.

Elmore said he’ll keep trying, but it seems that in his area of Illinois, it will take more payments from governments or companies to convince many additional farmers to take up the practice.

“If this is an imperative, then somebody is going to have to pay for it,” he said.

Joe McClure, Iowa Soybean Association research director, said the Stanford study largely confirms his organization’s research, though he thought the university researchers should do field study to verify their satellite-based analysis.

McClure said more more financial support would help farmers avoid having to choose between planting cover crops and losing money.

J. Arbuckle, a professor in Iowa State University’s sustainable agriculture program, said it’s important to be open with farmers about possible yield reductions and how they can be mitigated over longer periods, such as six or seven years.

Even then, Arbuckle said, it can be hard to convince farmers to give cover crops a try because, despite the significant environmental benefits, a small drop in cash crop yield can mean a big cost.

“Even a one bushel hit, if you’re talking about a bushel an acre over a thousand acres, that’s a lot of money,” he said.
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A thick layer of toxic haze choked Indian capital New Delhi on Friday, and some schools were ordered closed as the air quality index plummeted to the “severe” category.

New Delhi again topped a real-time list of the world’s most polluted cities compiled by Swiss group IQAir, which put the Indian capital’s air quality index, or AQI, at 640, which is in the “hazardous” category, followed by 335 in the Pakistani city of Lahore.

Regional officials said a seasonal combination of lower temperatures, a lack of wind and crop stubble burning in neighboring farm states caused a spike in air pollutants.

Many of New Delhi’s 20 million residents complained of irritation in the eyes and itchy throats with the air turning a dense gray.

An AQI of 0-50 is considered good while anything between 400-500 affects healthy people and is a danger to those with existing diseases.

“In my last 24 hours duty, I saw babies coughing, children coming with distress and rapid breathing,” Aheed Khan, a Delhi-based doctor, said on social media platform X.

Fewer people came to the city’s parks, such as Lodhi Garden and India Gate, popular with joggers.

Residents snapped up air purifiers. One service center for the appliances said there was a shortage of new filters and fresh stocks were expected Monday.

Officials said they did not expect an immediate improvement in the air quality.

“This pollution level is here to stay for the next two to three weeks, aggravated by incidents of stubble burning, slow wind speed and cooling temperatures,” said Ashwani Kumar, chairman of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee.

Farmers in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh typically burn crop waste after harvesting in October to clear their fields before sowing winter crops a few weeks later.

This year, attention on the worsening air quality has cast a shadow over the cricket World Cup hosted by India, with financial capital Mumbai also suffering from a spike in pollution levels.

Delhi hosts a World Cup match Monday between Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

A concentration of toxic PM2.5 particles, which are less than 2.5 microns in diameter and can cause deadly illness, was 53.4 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline value in New Delhi on Friday, according to IQAir.

While junior schools in the capital were ordered shut for Friday and Saturday, they were open in the suburbs and children boarding school buses were forced to wear masks that had been put away since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Poor air quality also caused respiratory problems, irritation in the eyes and restlessness in pets.

“Breathing trouble can develop into pneumonia or other ailments in younger animals. If possible, avoid taking pets out on morning walks for a few days till the air improves,” said Prabhat Gangwar, a veterinarian at animal welfare NGO Friendicoes.
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Fewer high school students are vaping this year, the government reported Thursday.

In a survey, 10% of high school students said they had used electronic cigarettes in the previous month, down from 14% last year.

Use of any tobacco product — including cigarettes and cigars — also fell among high schoolers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

“A lot of good news, I’d say,” said Kenneth Michael Cummings, a University of South Carolina researcher who was not involved in the CDC study.

Among middle school student, about 5% said they used e-cigarettes. That did not significantly change from last year’s survey.

This year’s survey involved more than 22,000 students who filled out an online questionnaire last spring. The agency considers the annual survey to be its best measure of youth smoking trends.

Why the drop among high schoolers? Health officials believe a number of factors could be helping, including efforts to raise prices and limit sales to kids by raising the legal age to 21.

“It’s encouraging to see this substantial decrease in e-cigarette use among high schoolers within the past year, which is a win for public health,” said Brian King, the Food and Drug Administrations tobacco center director.

The FDA has authorized a few tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes intended to help adult smokers cut back but has struggled to stop sales of illegal products.

Other key findings in the report:

Among students who currently use e-cigarettes, about a quarter said they use them every day.
About 1 in 10 middle and high school students said they recently had used a tobacco product. That translates to 2.8 million U.S. kids.
E-cigarettes were the most commonly used kind of tobacco product, and disposable ones were the most popular with teens.
Nearly 90% of the students who vape used flavored products, with fruit and candy flavors topping the list. 

 

In 2020, FDA regulators banned those teen-preferred flavors from reusable e-cigarettes like Juul and Vuse, which are now only sold in menthol and tobacco. But the flavor restriction didn’t apply to disposable products, and companies like Elf Bar and Esco Bar quickly stepped in to fill the gap.

The growing variety in flavors like gummy bear and watermelon has been almost entirely driven by cheap, disposable devices imported from China, which the FDA considers illegal. Those products now account for more than half of U.S. vaping sales, according to government figures.

In the latest survey, about 56% of teens who vape said they used Elf Bar, trailed by Esco Bar and Vuse, which is a reusable e-cigarette made by R.J. Reynolds. Juul, the brand widely blamed for sparking the recent spike in teen vaping, was the fourth most popular brand, used by 16% of teens.

The FDA tried to block imports of both Elf Bar and Esco Bar in May, but the products remain widely available. Elf Bar has thwarted customs officials by changing its brand name, among other steps designed to avoid detection.

On Thursday, the FDA announced another round of fines against 20 stores selling Elf Bar products. The agency has sent more than 500 warning letters to retailers and manufacturers of unauthorized e-cigarettes over the past year, but those citations are not legally binding and are sometimes ignored.

In the latest report, the CDC highlighted one worrisome but puzzling finding. There was a slight increase in middle schools students who said they had used at least one tobacco product in the past month, while that rate fell among high school students. Usually those move in tandem, said Kurt Ribisl, a University of North Carolina researcher. He and Cummings cautioned against making too much of the finding, saying it might be a one-year blip.
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Colombia will try to control its population of more than 100 hippopotamuses, descendants of animals illegally brought to the country by late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 1980s, through surgical sterilization, the transfer of hippos to other countries and possibly euthanasia, the government said Thursday.

The hippos, which spread from Escobar’s estate into nearby rivers where they flourished, have no natural predators in Colombia and have been declared an invasive species that could upset the ecosystem.

Authorities estimate there are 169 hippos in Colombia, especially in the Magdalena River basin, and that if no measures are taken, there could be 1,000 by 2035.

Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said the first stage of the plan will be the surgical sterilization of 40 hippos per year and this will begin next week.

The procedure is expensive — each sterilization costs about $9,800 — and entails risks for the hippopotamus, including allergic reactions to anesthesia or death, as well as risks to the animal health personnel, according to the ministry. The hippos are dispersed over a large area and are territorial and often aggressive.

Experts say sterilization alone is not enough to control the growth of the invasive species, which is why the government is arranging for the possible transfer of hippos to other countries, a plan that was announced in March.

Muhamad said Colombian officials have contacted authorities in Mexico, India and the Philippines, and are evaluating sending 60 hippos to India.

“We are working on the protocol for the export of the animals,” she said. “We are not going to export a single animal if there is no authorization from the environmental authority of the other country.”

As a last resort to control the population, the ministry is creating a protocol for euthanasia.

A group of hippos was brought in the 1980s to Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar’s private zoo that became a tourist attraction after his death in 1993. Most of the animals live freely in rivers and reproduce without control.

Residents of nearby Puerto Triunfo have become used to hippos sometimes roaming freely about the town.

Scientists warn that the hippos’ feces change the composition of rivers and could impact the habitat of local manatees and capybaras.
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Climate change threatens to reverse decades of progress toward better health and well-being, particularly in the most vulnerable communities, according to a new report by the U.N. weather agency.

In its annual State of Climate Services report, the World Meteorological Organization on Thursday warned that the climate crisis was generating a global health crisis and said that many ill effects of climate change could be tempered by adaptation and prevention measures.

WMO said climate change was causing the world to warm at a faster rate than at any other point in recorded history.

“There is no more return back to the good old milder climate of the last century.  Actually, we are heading towards a warmer climate for the coming decades, anyhow,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary-general.

“Unless we are successful in phasing out this negative trend” by limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, “we will see this situation getting worse,” he said.

The report finds countries in Africa and southern Asia are most at risk from climate change, which it says is fueling vector-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria, even in places where they were not seen before.

“And we are creating conditions for more noncommunicable diseases like lung cancer and chronic respiratory infections also, because of the bad quality of the air that we breathe,” said Maria Neira, director of the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health at the World Health Organization. “The extreme weather events obviously will have dramatic consequences for the health of the people.”

Taalas noted that food insecurity also was growing, and that increasingly more frequent heat waves were worsening the impacts of extreme weather events.

“For example, in the Horn of Africa, during the past three years, we have had very severe food insecurity situations, which was related to both heat and drought,” he said. “And quite often in these episodes when we have heat waves, we have also very poor air quality.”

WMO said extreme heat causes more deaths than any other extreme weather event. It estimated that excessive heat killed approximately 489,000 people a year from 2000 to 2019, with 45% of these deaths in Asia and 36% in Europe.

It noted that heat waves also worsen air pollution, “which is already responsible for an estimated 7 million premature deaths every year and is the fourth-biggest killer by health risk factor.”

“There is a significant challenge by the health community to address climate change,” said Joy Shumake-Guillemot, who leads the WHO/WMO Joint Office on Climate and Health.

“We see major gaps, particularly in early-warning systems for climate-related impacts, such as extreme heat,” where only half of countries are now getting the message “about how dangerous heat conditions might be affecting them.”

She said the report focused on the power and opportunity of using climate science and services to better inform national policies.

However, while 74% of national meteorological services are providing data to the health systems in countries around the world, “only about 23% of ministries of health are really using this information in systematic ways in health surveillance systems to track the diseases that we know are influenced by climate,” she said, adding that climate services had to be further developed to address these gaps.

WMO chief Taalas agreed with this assessment, noting that climate information and services can play an important role in helping states manage extreme weather events, predict health risks and save lives.

For example, he said early-warning systems for extreme heat and for pollen to help allergy sufferers were very important. Unfortunately, he said, well-functioning early-warning services in African countries and other states were very limited.

“One of the sectors where African countries do not have services are these health services, and many African countries are not able to provide heat warnings for their populations, and their authorities have limitations in coping with such warnings,” he said.

To rectify this lapse, Taalas said WMO has established a major early-warning services program to help countries in Africa and elsewhere improve their management of environmental health and climate services.

“From our perspective,” he said, “it is very smart to prevent pandemics, and we can do so by improving the early warning services.

“This would prevent … the human casualties and we could minimize the economic losses by having proper early-warning services in place … and that is what we are very much promoting.”
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect people from the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, as she leads the Biden administration’s push for a global AI roadmap.

Analysts, in commending the effort, say human oversight is crucial to preventing the weaponization or misuse of this technology, which has applications in everything from military intelligence to medical diagnosis to making art.

“To provide order and stability in the midst of global technological change, I firmly believe that we must be guided by a common set of understandings among nations,” Harris said. “And that is why the United States will continue to work with our allies and partners to apply existing international rules and norms to AI, and work to create new rules and norms.”

Harris also announced the founding of the government’s AI Safety Institute and released draft policy guidance on the government’s use of AI and a declaration of its responsible military applications.

Just days earlier, President Joe Biden – who described AI as “the most consequential technology of our time” – signed an executive order establishing new standards, including requiring that major AI developers report their safety test results and other critical information to the U.S. government.

AI is increasingly used for a wide range of applications. For example: on Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency announced that its AI-enabled military intelligence database will soon achieve “initial operational capability.”

And perhaps on the opposite end of the spectrum, some programmer decided to “train an AI model on over 1,000 human farts so it would learn to create realistic fart sounds.”

Like any other tool, AI is subject to its users’ intentions and can be used to deceive, misinform or hurt people – something that billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk stressed on the sidelines of the London summit, where he said he sees AI as “one of the biggest threats” to society. He called for a “third-party referee.”

Earlier this year, Musk was among the more than 33,000 people to sign an open letter calling on AI labs “to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

“Here we are, for the first time, really in human history, with something that’s going to be far more intelligent than us,” said Musk, who is looking at creating his own generative AI program. “So it’s not clear to me we can actually control such a thing. But I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that’s beneficial to humanity. But I do think it’s one of the existential risks that we face and it’s potentially the most pressing one.”

This is also something industry leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have told U.S. lawmakers in testimony before congressional committees earlier this year.

“My worst fears are that we cause significant – we, the field, the technology, the industry – cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways,” he told lawmakers at a Senate Judiciary Committee on May 16.

That’s because, said Jessica Brandt, policy director for the AI and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, while “AI has been used to do pretty remarkable things” – especially in the field of scientific research – it is limited by its creators.

“It’s not necessarily doing something that humans don’t know how to do, but it’s making discoveries that humans would be unlikely to be able to make in any meaningful timeframe, because they can just perform so many calculations so quickly,” she told VOA on Zoom.

And, she said, “AI is not objective, or all-knowing. There’s been plenty of studies showing that AI is really only as good as the data that the model is trained on and that the data can have or reflect human bias. This is one of the major concerns.”

Or, as AI Now Executive Director Amba Kak said earlier this year in a magazine interview about AI systems: “The issue is not that they’re omnipotent. It is that they’re janky now. They’re being gamed. They’re being misused. They’re inaccurate. They’re spreading disinformation.”

Analysts say these government and tech officials don’t need a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather an alignment of values – and critically, human oversight and moral use.

“It’s OK to have multiple different approaches, and then also, where possible, coordinate to ensure that democratic values take root in the systems that govern technology globally,” Brandt said.

Industry leaders tend to agree, with Mira Murati, Open AI’s chief technology officer, saying: “AI systems are becoming a part of everyday life. The key is to ensure that these machines are aligned with human intentions and values.”

Analysts watching regulation say the U.S. is unlikely to come up with one, coherent solution for the problems posed by AI.

“The most likely outcome for the United States is a bottom-up patchwork quilt of executive branch actions,” said Bill Whyman, a senior adviser in the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Unlike Europe, the United States is not likely to pass a broad national AI law over the next few years. Successful legislation is likely focused on less controversial and targeted measures like funding AI research and AI child safety.” 
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The World Health Organization warns that disease outbreaks, malnutrition and non-communicable diseases are rising in war-torn Sudan, with devastating consequences for millions of people forced to flee their homes in the face of escalating violence. 

Since conflict erupted April 15, more than 4.6 million people have become newly displaced inside Sudan. The number, added to the more than three million who already were displaced within the country before the current conflict, makes Sudan home to the world’s largest internally displaced crisis. 

“The health system in Sudan is stretched to breaking point as capacities decline in the face of mounting needs,” said Ni’ma Saeed Abid, WHO representative in Sudan, speaking Tuesday in Port Sudan.

“Access to health care continues to be limited due to insecurity, displacement, and shortages of medicines and medical supplies, placing millions of Sudanese at risk of severe illness or death from preventable and treatable causes,” he said. 

The WHO says that 70 to 80 percent of health facilities are “non-functional in conflict hotspots.” It has verified 60 attacks against health care and personnel, leading to 34 deaths and 38 injuries. 

“Conflict and the consequent massive displacement have driven the population further into a state of widespread malnutrition, with the lives of children hanging in the balance,” said Abid.

“Cholera, measles, dengue and malaria are circulating in several states. And a combination of any of these diseases with malnutrition can be lethal,” he warned. 

According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimates, 20.3 million people, or 40 percent of Sudan’s population, are facing hunger. Estimates show 4.6 million children, pregnant and nursing mothers are malnourished; 3.4 million children under five are acutely malnourished; and 700,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, which can lead to death. 

“I have seen two or three children put on the same bed for treatment for acute severe malnutrition because of the high number of cases,” Abid said. “And all these children because of malnutrition are susceptible for infection.” 

Since September 26, Sudan has declared outbreaks of cholera in Gedaref, Khartoum and South Kordofan states, with suspected cases reported from Al Jazirah and Kassal states. 

“And there is a possibility of further expansion because of the quality of water supply, because of the sanitation and because of displacement,” Abid said. “We are expecting that we may see more states affected, more people affected.” 

As of last week, the WHO reports 1,962 suspected cholera cases with 30 lab-confirmed cases and 72 associated deaths. It estimates more than 3.1 million people are at risk of cholera until the end of December.

The World Health Organization has stockpiled drugs and essential supplies for the treatment of cholera patients. It has deployed 14 rapid response teams into the affected areas, strengthened the country’s surveillance and early warning systems, and is getting ready to receive oral cholera vaccines for a campaign in Gedaref state.

More than six months have passed since the start of the crisis in Sudan. While efforts to contain some of the worst impacts of the disaster are critical, they are not enough. 

Martin Griffiths, under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, says only peace will stem the humanitarian tragedy that continues to unfold unabated in the country. 

In a statement over the weekend, he welcomed the resumption of peace talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, saying they couldn’t have started soon enough. 

“Thousands of people have been killed or injured. … Aid workers are hamstrung by fighting, insecurity, and red tape, making the operating environment in Sudan extremely challenging,” he said.

“We need the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to break the bureaucratic logjam. We need them to fully adhere to international humanitarian law and to secure safe, sustained and unhindered access to people in need,” he said. 
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