Identifying monkeypox strains by their place of origin in Africa is “discriminatory and stigmatizing,” says an international group of researchers who have urged an overhaul of how the fast-spreading virus is named. INFECTIOUS DISEASES Rename monkeypox strains? The new maps are based on imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites Google tailored artificial intelligence algorithms to estimate probable land-cover types, a method described last week in Nature Scientific Data. Some regional maps are revised monthly, but even that pace is too slow to capture rapid change from wildfire or flooding. By comparison, many countries have produced maps with no better than 30-meter resolution and only update them annually, reflecting the time it takes to identify land types. The World Resources Institute (WRI) and Google last week unveiled Dynamic World, a project that publishes global, digital land-use maps as frequently as every 2 days at resolutions as fine as 10 meters. Researchers studying the ecological and environmental changes wrought by humanity now will have access to sharper and more frequently updated maps of Earth’s surface, categorized by land-use types such as trees, built-up areas, and bare land. IMAGERY © 2022/CNES AIRBUS/LANDSAT COPERNICUS/MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES SAGO also proposes a more careful examination of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans at a Wuhan market that sold several mammalian species susceptible to the virus.Ī map of land types shows the Taal volcano in the Philippines before (left) and after it erupted in 2020. China has rejected the lab-leak theory, and panel members from China, Brazil, and Russia said they see no reason to study it further. Its successor, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), says the idea can’t be ruled out, although “the strongest evidence” supports the hypothesis that the virus jumped from animals to humans, SAGO’s chair, South African virologist Marietjie Venter, said at a 9 June press conference. An earlier WHO-organized commission drew controversy in 2021 by ranking the lab-leak notion “extremely unlikely” and not a priority for further study. In yet another attempt to determine the origin of the pandemic, a new group of experts convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) last week issued a preliminary report that calls for further study of several ideas, including the contentious one that SARS-CoV-2 might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Mapping that information shows the abundance of heavy elements is highest in the Galaxy’s central disk, where stars live fast and die young.ĬOVID-19 Don’t rule out lab leak, panel says Stars forge heavier elements and disperse them when they explode the elements are taken up by subsequent generations of stars. And, for the first time, the data also include spectra-breakdowns of starlight-that point to chemical compositions. The new data show thousands of stars are convulsed by giant, violent waves. Launched in 2013, Gaia has already uncovered new nearby satellite galaxies, fast-moving stars escaping the Milky Way, and evidence of past galaxies that merged with ours. Last week, operators released the third major trove of data, including lists of 800,000 binary stars, 10 million variable stars, and, within the Solar System, 156,000 asteroids and rocky bodies. The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has now mapped almost 2 billion of the Milky Way’s stars, logging their positions, speeds, temperatures, and other parameters-and allowing astronomers to chart the Galaxy’s structure and evolution. ASTRONOMY Star mapper provides Milky Way portrait
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