International scientists who examined previously unavailable genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of COVID-19 were detected in China said they found suggestions the pandemic originated from animals, not a lab. Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which also has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. How the coronavirus first started sickening people remains uncertain. “These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Friday press briefing. He also criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, adding that “this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.” The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan after the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019. Tedros said the genetic sequences were uploaded to the world's biggest public virus database in late January by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; the data have since been removed from the database. A French biologist spotted the information by chance while scouring the database and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China and looking into the origins of the coronavirus. Genetic sequencing data showed that some of the samples, which were known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic. “There’s a good chance that the animals that deposited that DNA also deposited the virus," said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in analyzing the data. “If you were to go and do environmental sampling in the aftermath of a zoonotic spillover event … this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.” Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control ffice in China, said that even though the new findings weren’t definitive, they were significant. “The market environmental sampling data published by China CDC is by far the strongest evidence to support animal origins,” Yip told the AP in an email. He was not connected to the new analysis. Scientists have been looking for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic since the virus first emerged, but that search has been complicated by factors including the massive surge of human infections in the pandemic's first two years and an increasingly bitter political dispute. It took virus experts more than a dozen years to pinpoint the animal origin of SARS, a related virus. The researchers say their analysis is the first solid indication that there may have been wildlife infected with the coronavirus at the market. Some of the samples with raccoon dog DNA were collected from a stall that tested positive for COVID-19 and was known to be involved in the wildlife trade, Goldstein said. But it is also possible that humans might have first brought the virus to the market and infected the raccoon dogs, or that infected humans happened to leave traces of the virus near the animals. After scientists in the group contacted the China CDC, they say, the sequences were pulled from the global virus database. Researchers are puzzled as to why data on the samples collected over three years ago wasn’t made public sooner. Earlier this week, some of the scientists presented their findings to an advisory group the World Health Organization has tasked with investigating COVID's origins, Goldstein confirmed. Mark Woolhouse, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh, said it will be crucial to see how the genetic sequences from the raccoon dogs match up to what's known about the historic evolution of the COVID-19 virus. He said that if the analysis shows the animal viruses have earlier origins than the ones that infected people, “that’s probably as good evidence as we can expect to get that this was a spillover event in the market.” After a weeks-long visit to China to study the pandemic's origins, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID most probably jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility of a lab origin as “extremely unlikely.” But the U.N. health agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing. In recent months, WHO director Tedros has said all hypotheses remained on the table, while he and senior officials pleaded with China to share more data about their COVID-19 research. The China CDC scientists who previously analyzed the samples published a paper as a preprint in February. Their analysis suggested that humans brought the virus to the market, not animals, implying that the virus originated elsewhere. The paper did not mention that animal genetic material was found in samples that tested positive for COVID-19, and the authors didn’t upload the raw data until March. Gao Fu, the former head of the China CDC and lead author of the paper, didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting comment. Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected, is home to several labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling theories that the virus may have leaked from one. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy had assessed “with low confidence” that the virus had leaked from a lab. But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree, believing it more likely it first came from animals. Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.

The Webb Space Telescope has captured the rare and fleeting phase of a star on the cusp of death. NASA released the picture Tuesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The observation was among the first made by Webb following its launch in late 2021. Its infrared eyes observed all the gas and dust flung into space by a huge, hot star 15,000 light-years away. A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles. Shimmering in purple like a cherry blossom, the cast-off material once comprised the star's outer layer. The Hubble Space Telescope snapped a shot of the same transitioning star a few decades ago, but it appeared more like a fireball without the delicate details. Also Read: Nasa issues second image of ‘Pillars of Creation’ taken by James Webb telescope Such a transformation occurs only with some stars and normally is the last step before they explode, going supernova, according to scientists. “We’ve never seen it like that before. It’s really exciting,” said Macarena Garcia Marin, a European Space Agency scientist who is part of the project. This star in the constellation Sagittarius, officially known as WR 124, is 30 times as massive as our sun and already has shed enough material to account for 10 suns, according to NASA.  

Archaeologists in Kenya have dug up some of the oldest stone tools ever found, but who used them is a mystery. In the past, scientists assumed that our direct ancestors were the only toolmakers. But two big fossil teeth found along with the tools at the Kenyan site belong to an extinct human cousin known as Paranthropus, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. This adds to the evidence that our direct relatives in the Homo lineage may not have been the only tech-savvy creatures during the Stone Age, said study author Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “Those teeth open up an amazing whodunit — a real question of, well, who were these earliest toolmakers?” Potts said. The tools date back to around 2.9 million years ago, when early humans used them to butcher hippos for their meat, the researchers report. Older stone tools have been found in Kenya, dating back to around 3.3 million years ago, long before our own Homo ancestors appeared. Those tools were a bit simpler and so far have only been found in one spot, said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not involved with the study. The latest discovery matches up with a much bigger tradition known as the Oldowan toolkit. These same kinds of tools show up across Africa and beyond during more than a million years of prehistory, Potts said, showing they really caught on among early humans. They held a rock in one hand and hit it with another stone, chipping off thin, razor-sharp flakes, explained anthropologist Kathy Schick of the Stone Age Institute in Indiana, who wasn't involved in the research. With the rocks and flakes, early humans could slice and crush a wide range of materials, said lead author Thomas Plummer, an anthropologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. And the tools from the Kenya site — likely the most ancient Oldowan tools found to date — suggest this gave them an advantage in a key area: eating. The site, known as Nyayanga, is a lush, hilly landscape on the shores of Lake Victoria. Since starting excavations there in 2015, researchers have found a trove of artifacts and animal bones, along with the two Paranthropus teeth. Slice marks on several hippo bones show they were cut up for their meat, which would have been eaten raw as a hippo steak tartare, Plummer said. The early humans also likely used their tools to break open antelope bones for their fatty marrow inside, and to peel the outer rinds of tough plant roots, the authors concluded. “Stone tools are allowing them, even at this really early date, to extract a lot of resources from the environment,” Plummer said. “If you can butcher a hippo, you can butcher pretty much anything.” In the past, it was easy to assume that our direct ancestors were the ones using these tools, Plummer said. But the teeth make it hard to rule out that other early humans were picking up tools of their own, researchers said — even extinct cousins like Paranthropus, with their big teeth and small brains. The mystery will be a tough one to solve. After all, we can’t say for sure whether Paranthropus was using these tools, or just happened to die in the same place, Schick said: “When we find hominin fossils with stone tools, you always have to ask, is this the dinner or the diner?” ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.    

A comet is streaking back our way after 50,000 years. The dirty snowball last visited during Neanderthal times, according to NASA. It will come within 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) of Earth Wednesday before speeding away again, unlikely to return for millions of years. So do look up, contrary to the title of the killer-comet movie “Don’t Look Up.” Discovered less than a year ago, this harmless green comet already is visible in the northern night sky with binoculars and small telescopes, and possibly the naked eye in the darkest corners of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s expected to brighten as it draws closer and rises higher over the horizon through the end of January, best seen in the predawn hours. By Feb. 10, it will be near Mars, a good landmark. Skygazers in the Southern Hemisphere will have to wait until next month for a glimpse. While plenty of comets have graced the sky over the past year, “this one seems probably a little bit bigger and therefore a little bit brighter and it’s coming a little bit closer to the Earth’s orbit,” said NASA’s comet and asteroid-tracking guru, Paul Chodas. Green from all the carbon in the gas cloud, or coma, surrounding the nucleus, this long-period comet was discovered last March by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a wide field camera at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. That explains its official, cumbersome name: comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). On Wednesday, it will hurtle between the orbits of Earth and Mars at a relative speed of 128,500 mph (207,000 kilometers). Its nucleus is thought to be about a mile (1.6 kilometers) across, with its tails extending millions of miles (kilometers). The comet isn’t expected to be nearly as bright as Neowise in 2020, or Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s. But “it will be bright by virtue of its close Earth passage ... which allows scientists to do more experiments and the public to be able to see a beautiful comet,” University of Hawaii astronomer Karen Meech said in an email. Scientists are confident in their orbital calculations putting the comet’s last swing through the solar system’s planetary neighborhood at 50,000 years ago. But they don’t know how close it came to Earth or whether it was even visible to the Neanderthals, said Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. When it returns, though, is tougher to judge. Every time the comet skirts the sun and planets, their gravitational tugs alter the iceball’s path ever so slightly, leading to major course changes over time. Another wild card: jets of dust and gas streaming off the comet as it heats up near the sun. “We don’t really know exactly how much they are pushing this comet around,” Chodas said. The comet — a time capsule from the emerging solar system 4.5 billion years ago — came from what’s known as the Oort Cloud well beyond Pluto. This deep-freeze haven for comets is believed to stretch more than one-quarter of the way to the next star. While comet ZTF originated in our solar system, we can’t be sure it will stay there, Chodas said. If it gets booted out of the solar system, it will never return, he added. Don’t fret if you miss it. “In the comet business, you just wait for the next one because there are dozens of these,” Chodas said. “And the next one might be bigger, might be brighter, might be closer.”  

An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will whip past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded. NASA insists it will be a near miss with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth. NASA said Wednesday that this newly discovered asteroid will zoom 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) above the southern tip of South America. That’s 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling overhead. The closest approach will occur at 7:27 p.m. EST (9:27 p.m. local.) Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites. Read more: NASA spacecraft rams into asteroid in defence test NASA’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “But despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.” Discovered Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is believed to be between 11 feet (3.5 meters) and 28 feet (8.5 meters) feet across. It was first spotted by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered an interstellar comet in 2019. Within a few days, dozens of observations were made by astronomers around the world, allowing them to refine the asteroid’s orbit. The asteroid’s path drastically will be altered by Earth’s gravity once it zips by. Instead of circling the sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit lasting 425 days, according to NASA.

When Rylae-Ann Poulin was a year old, she didn’t crawl or babble like other kids her age. A rare genetic disorder kept her from even lifting her head. Her parents took turns holding her upright at night just so she could breathe comfortably and sleep. Then, months later. doctors delivered gene therapy directly to her brain. Now the 4-year-old is walking, running, swimming, reading and riding horses — “just doing so many amazing things that doctors once said were impossible,” said her mother, Judy Wei. Rylae-Ann, who lives with her family in Bangkok, was among the first to benefit from a new way of delivering gene therapy — attacking diseases inside the brain — that experts believe holds great promise for treating a host of brain disorders. Her treatment recently became the first brain-delivered gene therapy after its approval in Europe and the United Kingdom for AADC deficiency, a disorder that interferes with the way cells in the nervous system communicate. New Jersey drugmaker PTC Therapeutics plans to seek U.S. approval this year. Meanwhile, about 30 U.S. studies testing gene therapy to the brain for various disorders are ongoing, according to the National Institutes of Health. One, led by Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz at Ohio State University, also targets AADC deficiency. Others test treatments for disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. Challenges remain, especially with diseases caused by more than a single gene. But scientists say the evidence supporting this approach is mounting — opening a new frontier in the fight against disorders afflicting our most complex and mysterious organ. “There’s a lot of exciting times ahead of us,” said Bankiewicz, a neurosurgeon. “We’re seeing some breakthroughs.” ___ The most dramatic of those breakthroughs involve Rylae-Ann’s disease, which is caused by mutations in a gene needed for an enzyme that helps make neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, the body’s chemical messengers. The one-time treatment delivers a working version of the gene. At around 3 months old, Rylae-Ann began having spells her parents thought were seizures — her eyes would roll back and her muscles would tense. Fluid sometimes got into her lungs after feedings, sending her to the emergency room. Doctors thought she might have epilepsy or cerebral palsy. Around that time, Wei's brother sent her a Facebook post about a child in Taiwan with AADC deficiency. The extremely rare disorder afflicts about 135 children worldwide, many in that country. Wei, who was born in Taiwan, and her husband, Richard Poulin III, sought out a doctor there who correctly diagnosed Rylae-Ann. They learned she could qualify for a gene therapy clinical trial in Taiwan. Though they were nervous about the prospect of brain surgery, they realized she likely wouldn’t live past 4 years old without it. Rylae-Ann had the treatment at 18 months old on November 13, 2019 — which her parents have dubbed her “reborn day.” Doctors delivered it during minimally invasive surgery, with a thin tube through a hole in the skull. A harmless virus carried in a functioning version of the gene. “It gets put into the brain cells and then the brain cells make the (neurotransmitter) dopamine,” said Stuart Peltz, CEO of PTC Therapeutics. Company officials said all patients in their clinical trials showed motor and cognitive improvements. Some of them, Peltz said, could eventually stand and walk, and continue getting better over time. Bankiewicz said all 40 or so patients in his team’s NIH-funded study also saw significant improvements. His surgical approach is more involved and delivers the treatment to a different part of the brain. It targets relevant circuits in the brain, Bankiewicz said, like planting seeds that cause ivy to sprout and spread. “It’s really amazing work,” said Jill Morris, a program director with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which helped pay for the research. “And he has seen a lot of consistency between patients.” One is 8-year-old Rian Rodriguez-Pena, who lives with her family near Toronto. Rian got gene therapy in 2019, shortly before her 5th birthday. Two months later, she held her head up for the first time. She soon started using her hands and reaching for hugs. Seven months after surgery, she sat up on her own. “When the world was crumbling around us with COVID, we were at our house celebrating like it was the biggest party of our lives because Rian was just crushing so many milestones that were impossible for so long,” said her mom, Shillann Rodriguez-Pena. “It’s a completely different life now.” ___ Scientists say there are challenges to overcome before this approach becomes widespread for more common brain diseases. For example, the timing of treatment is an issue. Generally, earlier in life is better because diseases can cause a cascade of problems over the years. Also, disorders with more complex causes — like Alzheimer's — are tougher to treat with gene therapy. “When you’re correcting one gene, you know exactly where the target is,” said Morris. Ryan Gilbert, a biomedical engineer at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said there can also be issues with the gene-carrying virus, which can potentially insert genetic information in an indiscriminate way. Gilbert and other researchers are working on other delivery methods, such as messenger RNA – the technology used in many COVID-19 vaccines – to deliver a genetic payload to the nucleus of cells. Scientists are also exploring ways to deliver gene therapy to the brain without the dangers of brain surgery. But that requires getting around the blood-brain barrier, an inherent roadblock designed to keep viruses and other germs that may be circulating in the bloodstream out of the brain. A more practical hurdle is cost. The price of gene therapies, borne mostly by insurers and governments, can run into the millions. The one-time PTC therapy, called Upstaza, costs more than $3 million in Europe, for example. But drugmakers say they are committed to ensuring people get the treatments they need. And researchers are confident they can overcome the remaining scientific obstacles to this approach. “So I would say gene therapy can be leveraged for many sorts of brain diseases and disorders,” Gilbert said. "In the future, you’re going to see more technology doing these kinds of things.” The families of Rylae-Ann and Rian said they hope other families dealing with devastating genetic diseases will someday get to see the transformations they’ve seen. Both girls are continuing to improve. Rian is playing, eating all sorts of foods, learning to walk and working on language. Rylae-Ann is in preschool, has started a ballet class, and is reading at a kindergarten level. When her dad picks her up, “she runs to me ... just gives me a hug and says, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ he said. “It’s like it’s a normal day, and that’s all we ever wanted as parents.” ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Russia will send up a new capsule next month to bring back three space station crew members whose original ride home was damaged, officials said Wednesday. The two Russians and one American will stay several extra months at the International Space Station as a result of the capsule switch, possibly pushing their mission to close to a year, NASA and Russian space officials told reporters. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and astronaut Frank Rubio were supposed to return in March in the same Soyuz capsule that took them up last September. But that capsule was hit by a tiny meteoroid on Dec. 14, creating a small hole in the exterior radiator and sending coolant spewing into space. Read more: NASA Orion capsule safely blazes back from moon, aces test Sergei Krikalev, head of human spaceflight for the Russian Space Agency, said barring an emergency at the space station, it would be too dangerous for the crew to use that capsule to return to Earth. Although Russian engineers believe the capsule could survive reentry and land safely, the cabin temperature could reach the low 40s Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) with high humidity because it couldn't shed heat generated by a computer and other electronics, noted Krikalev, a former cosmonaut. The new Soyuz capsule will be launched from Kazakhstan on Feb. 20, a month earlier than planned. No one will be on board; the capsule will fly in automatic mode, Russian Space Agency chief Yuri Borisov announced earlier in the day. The original plan was to launch this new Soyuz in March with two Russians and one American, replacements for the three already up there. This new crew will now have to wait until late summer or fall to fly when another capsule is ready for them. Russia will eventually bring back the damaged capsule with only science samples on board. NASA took part in all the discussions and agreed with the plan. “Right now, the crew is safe on board space station,” said NASA's space station program manager Joel Montalbano. “There’s no immediate need for the crew to come home today.” Backup plans are in the works, according to Montalbano and Krikalev, in case an emergency forces the seven space station residents to flee before the new Soyuz can be launched — like a fire or decompression. NASA is looking at the possibility of adding extra crew to the SpaceX capsule currently docked at the station. Read more: Boeing crew capsule launches to space station on test redo Neither Krikalev nor Montalbano could recall a similar case in which a substitute spacecraft needed to be quickly launched. Borisov said analysis confirmed the leak was caused by a micrometeoroid, not a piece of spacecraft debris or manufacturing defect. The resulting hole was about 1 millimeter in size or less than one-tenth of an inch. Montalbano said the three crew members took the news in stride. “I may have to find some more ice cream to reward them" on future cargo deliveries, he told reporters. Besides Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio, the space station is home to NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada; Russian Anna Kikina and Japan's Koichi Wakata. The four rode up on a SpaceX capsule last October.

(AP) — Lizards that once dwelled in forests but now slink around urban areas have genetically morphed to survive life in the city, researchers have found. The Puerto Rican crested anole, a brown lizard with a bright orange throat fan, has sprouted special scales to better cling to smooth surfaces like walls and windows and grown larger limbs to sprint across open areas, scientists say. “We are watching evolution as it’s unfolding,” said Kristin Winchell, a biology professor at NYU and main author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As urbanization intensifies around the world, it’s important to understand how organisms adapt and humans can design cities in ways that support all species, Winchell said. The study analyzed 96 Anolis cristatellus lizards, comparing the genetic makeup of forest-dwellers to those living in Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, as well as the northern city of Arecibo and western city of Mayaguez. Scientists found that 33 genes within the lizard genome were repeatedly associated with urbanization. “You can hardly get closer to a smoking gun!” said Wouter Halfwerk, an evolutionary ecologist and professor at Vrije University Amsterdam who was not involved in the study. He said he was impressed that the scientists were able to detect such a clear genomic signature of adaptation: “The ultimate goal within the field of urban adaptive evolution is to find evidence for heritable traits and their genomic architecture.” Winchell said the lizards’ physical differences appeared to be mirrored at the genomic level. “If urban populations are evolving with parallel physical and genomic changes, we may even be able to predict how populations will respond to urbanization just by looking at genetic markers,” she said. The changes in these lizards, whose lifespans are roughly 7 years, can occur very quickly, within 30 to 80 generations, enabling them to escape from predators and survive in urban areas, Winchell added. The larger limbs, for example, enable them to run more quickly across a hot parking lot, and the special scales to hold onto surfaces far more smooth than trees. “They can’t dig their claws into it. ... (Or) squirrel around to the backside,” she noted. The scientists chased after dozens of lizards for their study, catching them with their hands or using fishing poles with a tiny lasso to snag them. “It takes some practice,” Winchell said. On occasion, they had to ask permission to catch lizards off people’s homes. Among Winchell’s favorite findings was a rare albino lizard. She also found a nearly 8-inch (20-centimeter) one, rather large for the species, that she nicknamed “Godzilla.” The study focused on adult male lizards, so it’s unclear if females are changing in the same way or at the same rate as males, and at which point in a lizard’s life the changes are occurring. Halfwerk, whose own research showed how one frog species changed its mating call in urban areas, said scientists should look next for possible constraints on the evolutionary response and how morphology relates to mating behavior. “Ultimately, to cash in on adaptive traits for survival, they need to lead to higher reproduction,” he said.

New Zealand had its hottest year on record in 2022, beating a mark set just a year earlier thanks to a combination of natural weather cycles and manmade global warming, the agency that monitors temperatures said Wednesday. The nation’s top four hottest years have all been recorded since 2016, and scientists don’t see the trend reversing. Records are being broken around the globe, with Spain and Britain among other nations to also hit new highs in 2022. And as well as being warm, 2022 was also one of New Zealand’s wettest years. August storms flooded rivers, triggered landslides and forced hundreds of residents to evacuate. In October, two of the country’s largest ski areas were placed into a type of bankruptcy proceeding following a disastrous winter season with barely any snow. Also Read: UK saw hottest-ever year in 2022 as Europe's climate warms The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, which has been recording temperatures since 1909, said the average temperature across the country in 2022 was 13.8 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit). That was more than 1.2 degrees Celsius above the long-term average and beat the previous record by 0.2 degrees Celsius. Chris Brandolino, a principal scientist with the agency, said the high temperatures were driven by a combination of weather cycles including the La Niña system, which brings cooler-than-normal ocean temperatures to the tropical Pacific and warmer air to New Zealand. He said manmade factors also contributed. “Climate change continues to influence New Zealand’s long-term temperature trend,” Brandolino told reporters. He said the levels of carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere near Wellington keep rising. “Unfortunately you can see that trend, dating back to before 2014, continues to go upward and in the wrong direction,” he said. Brandolino said there was no discernable effect on last year’s weather from the massive eruption of a volcano in Tonga. He said he expects the first few months of 2023 to continue being warmer and wetter than normal, and for temperatures over time to keep rising. “It’s hard to see us breaking from the trend that we are on,” Brandolino said.

Stephen Hawking was a world-renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist known for his contributions to the study of black holes and the origin of the universe. Let's take a look at life, work, and surprising facts about Stephen Hawkings, one of the greatest scientists in the world. At a Glance: Life and Work of Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, to Frank and Isobel Eileen Hawking and showed an early aptitude for mathematics and science. Hawking attended University College, Oxford, and later received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, specializing in general relativity and cosmology. Despite being diagnosed with motor neuron disease (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) at the age of 21, Hawking remained active in his research and continued to make significant contributions to the field of physics. He developed a theory about the origin of the universe, known as the “Big Bang” theory, and made significant contributions to the black holes study and their properties. Read More: Top 11 Major Medical Science Innovations in 2022 Hawking was also known for his work on quantum-theory research into the origin of the universe. He also made significant contributions to the study of quantum mechanics and the unification of physical laws. In addition to his scientific work, Hawking was also a popular science communicator, writing numerous books on physics and cosmology that were aimed at a general audience. His book “A Brief History of Time” became a best-seller and helped to bring the concepts of physics to a wider audience. Hawking received numerous accolades for his work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2009. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and held professorships at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology. Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76. Despite his physical limitations, he remained active in his research and continued to make important contributions to the field of physics until the end of his life. Read More: Top 10 Most Exciting Innovations of 2022 in Technology.