A vaccine with a 53 percent success rate doesn’t normally call for a celebration. But when that means protecting one in every two African children from a disease that kills a kid every 30 seconds, those odds start looking better. “The impact is tremendous,” says Joe Cohen, inventor of the first malaria vaccine. “We could save hundreds of thousands of kids every year.”
No more happy feet for emperor penguins. According to a new study, if Antarctic ice continues to shrink at its current pace, emperor penguins will face extinction within the next 100 years. Emperor penguins are one of only two open-sea Antarctic penguin species and depend on the sea ice for survival. After breeding, emperor penguins feed among the coastal pack ice where stretches of water are exposed. As a result of disappearing ice, the emperor penguins are being forced to retreat inward and could easily become displaced by other animals, losing out on nesting space.
As increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dissolve in the Earth's oceans, seawater is becoming warmer and more acidic. Now, a new study concludes that one result of more acidic seas is that sounds will travel farther underwater. A corresponding increase in background noise in the oceans could affect the behavior of marine mammals, a team of scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) says.
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