'Our homeland is burning': Volunteers join Siberia wildfire fight

The father and son stood in the forest burning around them, the elder with a shovel in hand, the younger with a plastic bottle filled with gasoline.

World races to contain Delta variant, US steps up anti-virus plan

Governments around the world on Thursday raced to head off a surge in coronavirus cases driven by the Delta variant, with US President Joe Biden offering new incentives to vaccine holdouts and Israel authorizing booster shots.

World's first re-progammable commercial satellite set to launch

The European Space Agency will on Friday launch the world's first commercial fully re-programmable satellite, paving the way for a new era of more flexible communications.

China virus success under threat as Delta variant spreads

A coronavirus cluster that emerged in the Chinese city of Nanjing has now reached five provinces and Beijing, forcing lockdowns on hundreds of thousands of people as authorities scramble to stamp out the worst outbreak in months.

In Spain, dozens of villages struggle for drinking water

Less than two hours from Madrid, 76-year-old Francisca Benitez has to brush her teeth every night with bottled water because her village has no supply of drinking water.

Japan to widen virus emergency after record spike amid Games

Japan is set to expand the coronavirus state of emergency in Tokyo to neighboring areas and the western city of Osaka on Friday in the wake of a record-breaking surge in infections while the capital hosts the Olympics.

States race to use COVID-19 vaccines before they expire

Hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses have been saved from the trash after U.S. regulators extended their expiration date for a second time, part of a nationwide effort to salvage expiring shots to battle the nation's summer surge in infections.

Florida virus cases soar, hospitals near last summer's peak

Hospital admissions of coronavirus patients continue to soar in Florida with at least two areas in the state surpassing the previous peaks of last summer's surge, prompting calls by local officials for the governor to declare an emergency.

Research looks for possible COVID tie to later Alzheimer's

Researchers are trying to unravel why some COVID-19 survivors suffer "brain fog" and other problems that can last for months, and new findings suggest some worrisome overlaps with Alzheimer's disease.

Washington, DC, is back to requiring masks be worn indoors

In the face of rising regional COVID-19 infection numbers, the nation's capital is returning to mandatory indoor mask requirements, regardless of vaccination status.

Thailand builds another field hospital for virus-hit Bangkok

Health authorities in Thailand raced to set up a large field hospital in a cargo building at one of Bangkok's airports on Thursday as the country reported record numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths.

'Dangerous' heatwave hits Athens again

In Athens' parliament square, the Evzones parade under their red berets and stifling heat.

In effort to curb COVID, Tokyo Olympics collect lots of spit

They spit. They wait. They hope.

Largest US quake in half-century causes Alaska little damage

The largest earthquake in the United States in the last half century produced a lot of shaking but spared Alaska any major damage in a sparsely populated region, officials said Thursday.

New Russian lab briefly knocks space station out of position

A newly arrived Russian science lab briefly knocked the International Space Station out of position Thursday when it accidentally fired its thrusters.

Buffer zones, better regulation needed to prevent agricultural pollution in rivers, streams

Greater buffer zones around bodies of water and more consistent enforcement of water protection regulations are needed to reduce agriculture-based pollution in the Western U.S., a recent review from Oregon State University found.

Differentiating strong antibiotic producers from weaker ones

An untapped trove of desirable drug-like molecules is hidden in the genomes of Streptomyces bacteria—the same bacteria responsible for the first bacterial antibiotics to treat tuberculosis back in the 1940s.

Researchers film human viruses in liquid droplets at near-atomic detail

A pond in summer can reveal more about a fish than a pond in winter. The fish living in icy conditions might remain still enough to study its scales, but to understand how the fish swims and behaves, it needs to freely move in three dimensions. The same holds true for analyzing how biological items, such as viruses, move in the human body, according to a research team led by Deb Kelly, Huck Chair in Molecular Biophysics and professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State, who has used advanced electron microscopy (EM) technology to see how human viruses move in high resolution in a near-native environment. The visualization technique could lead to improved understanding of how vaccine candidates and treatments behave and function as they interact with target cells, Kelly said.

'Digging' into early medieval Europe with big data

During the middle of the sixth century CE a dramatic transformation began in how the people of western Europe buried their dead. The transition from 'furnished' inhumation (those with grave goods to include jewellery, dress accessories, tools and personal items etc) to 'unfurnished' (those without grave goods) was widespread and by the early eighth century an unfurnished inhumation was by far the favoured method of burial.

Why uncertainty makes us change our behavior—even when we shouldn't

People around the world dramatically changed their shopping behaviors at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vitamin D supplements ineffective treatment for painful IBS symptoms

Vitamin D supplements are not an effective treatment for easing painful symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), a new study from the University of Sheffield reveals.

Pretreatment fatigue can mean worse survival outcomes for patients with cancer

Patients with cancer who reported clinically significant fatigue at the start of their treatment had shorter overall survival times and more side effects than patients without fatigue. Those are the findings of a new analysis of patients who took part in four clinical trials testing treatments for lung cancer or prostate cancer conducted by the SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Black and Latinx conservatives 'upshift' competence to white audiences: study

When communicating in mostly white settings, politically conservative Black and Latinx Americans use words associated with competence more often than their liberal counterparts, distancing themselves from negative racial stereotypes, according to a new study by Yale social psychologist Cydney Dupree.