by tyler | Apr 28, 2023 | CNN, world
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a flood of refugees. Many of them were pet owners who had to leave their dogs and cats behind, hoping it would only be a matter of days before they were able to return to them.
It wasn’t long before Ukrainian veterinarians Valentina and Leonid Stoyanov learned that many pets were locked in nearby homes.
“After one, two weeks … neighbors just start hear (sic) how a lot of different animals around them screaming,” Valentina told CNN.
At the time, the couple specialized in exotic animal and wildlife rescue. With the invasion came a new mission: caring for these beloved but abandoned pets.
The Stoyanovs began working with local police to access homes to rescue dogs and cats. Within a week of the invasion, Leonid said they were caring for some 400 animals in their Odesa clinic.
“Each animal for us, it’s like members of our family,” Valentina said.
For the last decade, the couple has worked together treating more unusual animals and wildlife. Before the war, their videos of the monkeys, snakes, owls, and other creatures they rescued and cared for found a growing audience on their “Vet Crew” TikTok and Instagram feeds.
Valentina said their “simple life” has changed drastically.
“All our family – mother, father – have to leave Ukraine,” Leonid said. “But we decided we stay here and help animals – a lot of animals.”
Their clinic is partially underground and surrounded by taller buildings offering some protection from Russian attacks. But the lack of electricity is one of their most serious challenges. The couple needed to find a generator to keep the lights on and their reptiles warm.
The Stoyanovs purchased tons of dog and cat food that they distribute to area shelters. They have also often driven to the front lines to help animals in need. Leonid recalls wearing body armor on his many trips vaccinating and feeding dogs there.
“Russian army a lot of times shooting our car and they bombed it. And one time they missed (by) maybe ten meters. And we have a lot of holes in our car,” he said.
During the last year, Leonid’s health also took a turn for the worse. He suffered a heart attack and said he was clinically dead for several minutes before doctors were able to revive him.
“They say, “You have a lot of animals. You need to (be) here,” he said.
He has since had two surgeries, including one to implant a pacemaker. And despite some discomfort, he says he feels “physically normal” now.
The Stoyanovs usually try to find new homes for the animals they rescue, or they release wild animals back into their natural habitat. But it was a different story for a blind husky named Casper, now a permanent member of the Stoyanov family. He belonged to a Ukrainian soldier named Sergei who had no family and asked the couple to care for his dog while he was away fighting.
“It was very touching moment when Casper and … Sergei say goodbye (to) each other. Because Sergei crying and Casper also crying,” Valentina said.
Sergei would call every week, but after about two months, Casper began acting strangely and cried. The Stoyanovs later learned that this was around the time when Sergei was killed, Leonid said.
“It’s very, very depressive situation (here),” Leonid said. “We cannot sleep because we are nervous. … We have a lot of work, a lot of animals, a lot of people dying, a lot of our friends dying.”
Despite all of the challenges, the couple say they have no plans to stop.
“We just hold on and continue to do what we do because we see how it is important for animals, for all these lives around us,” Valentina said.
The Stoyanovs are grateful for the support they receive online from their social media community, whom they call their Vet Crew Family. They said it’s their encouragement that keeps them going.
“Without these people, what we do here right now in Ukraine will not be possible. And this is why all these people (become) family for us,” Valentina said. “And I think most important message for all of them, it is … thank you.”
by tyler | Apr 27, 2023 | CNN, world
Researchers have embarked on an ambitious global initiative to discover and record marine life hidden in the world’s oceans.
Ocean Census aims to identify 100,000 unknown species in the next 10 years, allowing scientists to better understand and protect the deep-sea ecosystem.
There are huge gaps in our knowledge of the ocean depths. Of the 2.2 million species believed to exist in the Earth’s oceans, only 240,000 have been described by scientists, according to the census.
The initiative builds on past projects such as the Census of Marine Life, which concluded in 2010 and identified 6,000 potential new ocean species.
New advances in technology include high-resolution underwater imaging, machine learning and sequencing of DNA contained in seawater. The innovations will help accelerate the speed and scale of discovery of new life-forms, said marine biologist Alex Rogers, the project’s science director. He is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“I would hope by the end of 10 years we would have made some incredible scientific discoveries, maybe completely new ecosystems,” Rogers said at the launch event in London on Thursday.
It typically takes scientists at least a year to definitively describe a species post-discovery, but new types of technology are making it much easier for sea creatures to be studied in their natural habitat. These include tools like underwater laser scanning that can scan gelatinous creatures such as jelly fish that are hard to study on land.
“You can now look at (the creature) in the water column and see what the morphology is and study them in situ,” said Jyotika Virmani, the executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, California, which will participate in the project.
“What we’re moving towards is a place where we can actually perhaps even do taxonomic identification in the water column instead of bringing everything back to land. And that’s really exciting and will make things move a lot faster.”
All living organisms, including humans, disperse genetic material into the environment, and the project will also make use of new and accessible techniques to sample waterborne DNA to detect and track species.
While many of the species discovered are likely to be on the smaller end of the scale, Virmani noted that the world’s longest sea creature was only discovered in 2020 off the coast of Western Australia — a 150-foot stringlike animal known as a siphonophore.
Ocean Census will also help to identify how marine ecosystems are responding to the climate crisis, and assess how marine life could adapt to a warmer climate.
The project is being led by Nekton, a UK-based marine science and conservation institute, and funded by The Nippon Foundation, a nonprofit foundation based in Japan.
Over the next decade, dozens of expeditions to the ocean’s biodiversity hotspots will search for new species involving divers, submarines and deep-sea robots. The project also hopes to involve private vessels and individuals. The data and information gathered will by openly accessible for scientists, policymakers and the public for noncommercial use.
by tyler | Apr 26, 2023 | CNN, world
Astronomers have captured for the first time the shadow of a black hole and the powerful jet of material emerging from it in a newly released image.
The supermassive black hole is at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, or M87. The observations were initially made in 2018 by combining the capabilities of multiple telescopes.
The groundbreaking image can help astronomers gain more insight into how black holes behave and what enables them to launch energetic jets of material across the universe.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, the Greenland Telescope and the Global Millimetre VLBI Array of telescopes across Europe and North America worked together to create a virtual Earth-size telescope and peer into the heart of M87, located 55 million light-years away.
The black hole at M87’s galactic center is 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun.
A large galaxy usually contains a supermassive black hole at its center, where the celestial object gobbles up gas, dust and stars that pass too closely. But a black hole can also send powerful jets of material blasting across space and beyond its home galaxy.
The new image and an accompanying research paper were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes, but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole,” said lead study author Ru-Sen Lu, astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, in a statement.
In the new image, the connection between the base of the jet and the matter swirling around the supermassive black hole can be seen. Previous observations have shown the jet and black hole separately, including the first direct image of a black hole, released in 2019.
“This new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” said study coauthor Jae-Young Kim, assistant professor at Kyungpook National University in South Korea, in a statement.
As matter orbits around the black hole, it heats up and releases radiation in wavelengths of light. The light creates the ring structure seen glowing around the black hole’s shadow, or the darkness at the center. The new image captured radio light emitted at a longer wavelength than the 2019 image.
“At this wavelength, we can see how the jet emerges from the ring of emission around the central supermassive black hole,” said study coauthor Thomas Krichbaum, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a statement.
The size of the ring in the new image is about 50% larger when compared with the 2019 image taken by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, another global network of telescopes used in photographing the M87 black hole. Astronomers believe that more material is falling toward the black hole in the new image, which is why the ring looks bigger.
The researchers used interferometry, a technique that synchronizes the signals captured by each telescope, to create the image.
Recently, astronomers also used machine learning to release a cleaner, sharper version of the original M87 black hole image from 2019.
The central region is darker and larger, surrounded by a bright ring as hot gas falls into the black hole.
Black holes are made up of huge amounts of matter squeezed into a small area, according to NASA, creating a massive gravitational field that draws in everything around it, including light. These powerful celestial phenomena also have a way of superheating the material around them and warping space-time.
Material accumulates around black holes, is heated to billions of degrees and reaches nearly the speed of light. Light bends around the gravity of the black hole, which creates the photon ring seen in the image. The black hole’s shadow is represented by the dark central region.
The visual confirmation of black holes also acts as confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In the theory, Einstein predicted that dense, compact regions of space would have such intense gravity that nothing could escape them. But if heated materials in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the event horizon could be visible.
More observations from global telescope networks could help unravel other secrets about black holes.
“We plan to observe the region around the black hole at the centre of M87 at different radio wavelengths to further study the emission of the jet,” said study coauthor Eduardo Ros, scientific coordinator of the department for very long baseline interferometry at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in a statement. “The coming years will be exciting, as we will be able to learn more about what happens near one of the most mysterious regions in the Universe.”
by tyler | Apr 26, 2023 | CNN, world
Haiti’s crime rate has more than doubled since last year, as the Caribbean island nation faces widespread insecurity and gang violence, new data has revealed.
More than 1,600 incidents including homicide, rape, kidnapping, and lynchings were reported in the first quarter of 2023, up from 692 during the same period last year, according to data collected by the Haitian National Police and the UN.
Last month was the highest incidence rate since 2005.
The UN’s Special Representative for Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, warned of increasingly violent armed gangs vying for control of neighborhoods in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and added that many residents have taken matters into their own hands.
More than a dozen people were lynched by a crowd in Haitian capital Port-au-Prince on Monday, on suspicion of being gang members, according to authorities.
Video from Reuters and AFP showed burning and charred bodies with tires around them, and crowds forming near the area. Residents who spoke to Reuters and AFP on camera said they believed the victims were gang members.
Before the killing, Haitian National Police had stopped and searched the victims in a minibus in the neighborhood of Canape-Vert, seizing weapons and other equipment, according to a statement from the Haitian National Police.
“More than a dozen individuals riding on board this vehicle were unfortunately lynched by members of the population,” the statement said.
Gangs control wide swathes of Port-Au-Prince, plaguing residents with extreme violence as Haitians also grapple with extreme poverty and a humanitarian crisis.
The Caribbean nation has been thrown into chaos over the past year by relentless anti-government protests, rampant kidnappings and a recent resurgence of deadly cholera.
Salvador warned that children are suffering the consequences of the country’s instability, adding that over the last three months, school children have been hit by bullets while sitting in their classrooms and kidnapped while being dropped off at school.
Last October, Haiti’s government and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the international community to consider deploying forces to Haiti to address growing humanitarian and security crises in the country.
On Wednesday, Salvador emphasized the urgent need for international specialized forces to deploy, warning that instability in Haiti could spill over to other countries in the region.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2023 | CNN, world
Black holes have a reputation for snacking on stars, but some of these celestial garbage disposals may be messier than others, according to new research.
Astrophysicists used 3D computer models to show that intermediate-mass black holes take a few bites out of wayward stars before tossing away the stellar crumbs and leaving a cosmic trail.
Researchers made the discovery while running simulations on black holes of various masses and sending sun-size stars past them. The clues uncovered in the experiment might help astronomers find intermediate-mass black holes by searching for evidence of their behaviors.
During the simulations, the intermediate-mass black hole snagged the star in its orbit, and each time the star made another lap, the black hole took another bite out of it. When only the dense, misshapen core of the star was left, the black hole discarded it and sent it flying across the galaxy.
A study describing the modeling analysis has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and the findings will be presented Tuesday at the American Physical Society’s April meeting.
“We obviously cannot observe black holes directly because they don’t emit light,” said lead study author Fulya Kıroğlu, a doctoral student of astrophysics at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences in Evanston, Illinois, in a statement. She is also a member of the university’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.
“So, instead, we have to look at the interactions between black holes and their environments. We found that stars undergo multiple passages before being ejected. After each passage, they lose more mass, causing a flair of light as (it’s) ripped apart. Each flare is brighter than the last, creating a signature that might help astronomers find them.”
Astrophysicists are still trying to prove if intermediate-mass black holes exist in the first place. The elusive celestial objects, estimated to be between three and 10 times the mass of our sun, are created when exploding stars collapse.
The mass of a medium-mass black hole is thought to be between that of a supermassive black hole and a much lower-mass black hole. A supermassive black hole is found at the center of most large galaxies and can be millions to billions of times the mass of our sun.
“Their presence is still debated,” said Kıroğlu. “Astrophysicists have uncovered evidence that they exist, but that evidence can often be explained by other mechanisms. For example, what appears to be an intermediate-mass black hole might actually be the accumulation of stellar-mass black holes.”
During the 3D modeling experiment, stars were able to complete as many as five orbits around an intermediate-mass black hole before being kicked away. With each pass, the star lost more mass while being slowly ripped apart. The remnants were ejected at blinding speed back into the galaxy — enough to create a bright light pattern that astronomers could watch for in their quest to prove the existence of the invisible medium-mass black holes.
“It’s amazing that the star isn’t fully ripped apart,” Kıroğlu said. “Some stars might get lucky and survive the event. The ejection speed is so high that these stars could be identified as hyper-velocity stars, which have been observed at the centers of galaxies.”
by tyler | Apr 25, 2023 | CNN, world
China’s Zhurong rover on Mars has been in hibernation since last May due to an “unpredictable accumulation” of dust, mission designer Zhang Rongqiao said, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported on Tuesday.
Powered by solar energy, Zhurong landed in a large plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere called Utopia Planitia on May 15, 2021, and went into hibernation last May during winter.
“According to our analysis, the biggest possibility is that because of unpredictable accumulation of Martian dust, its power generation capacity was reduced and it was too low to wake itself up,” Rongqiao said, explaining why the rover has since been dormant.
He said the rover is expected to automatically wake up when the light and weather conditions improve with temperatures inside the cabin surpassing -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) and when there is enough sunlight to charge the battery to at least 140 watts.
While he acknowledged there is a possibility the rover may never exit hibernation if dust accumulation exceeds 40%, he stressed the rover’s dormancy is “within our expectation.”
The rover’s primary mission, which lasted for three months, was to search for signs of ancient life. It investigated the minerals, environment and distribution of water and ice in the plain, which is all part of the largest impact basin in the Martian northern lowlands.
The data collected by the rover has found evidence suggesting water persisted on Mars for much longer than expected, findings that were published last year in a study in the journal Science Advances.
Rongqiao said the rover was designed to have a working duration of 90 days on Mars, but has so far worked 358 days and traveled 1,921 meters (6,302 feet) on Mars.
Martian winters can be tough on any spacecraft exploring the red planet, when more dust becomes lofted in the air, which obscures sunlight from reaching solar panels, and the planet’s already frigid temperatures drop even lower. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter experienced issues during the same Martian winter that caused Zhurong to go into hibernation, although the chopper weathered the season and just completed its 50th flight on Mars.
Rovers and landers are no strangers to the risks that the Martian environment poses. The NASA InSight lander’s mission came to an end in December after spending nearly 1,500 days on Mars. Mission managers declared the program’s end after the lander failed to respond to two messages from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The mission ended more than four years after it first landed on November 26, 2018, revealing new information about the interior of Mars. Designed to last for only two years, InSight’s mission was extended twice. But a heavy accumulation of dust on its solar panels caused a steady drop in the lander’s power source.
