A rare glimpse inside the everyday lives of polar bears may give scientists clues about their decline. With bear-cams and activity trackers around the necks of nine polar bears, researchers monitored more than a week of their daily activity during peak hunting season in the Beaufort Sea above Alaska. Five …

​ …

Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry says archaeologists are starting radar scans of the tomb of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun in the southern city of Luxor.   The ministry said Thursday the scans will be carried out over a week to check for the existence of any hidden chambers behind the tomb.   Egypt …

NASA has transformed selfies taken by its Mars rover Curiosity into a stunning self-portrait. Released this week, the photo shows Curiosity in the middle of the dusty, red Martian terrain, with Mount Sharp in the background. The rim of Gale Crater is also visible. A small, self-focusing camera on the …

Save your life but harm your heart? Health experts are sounding a warning as potential side effects of a growing number of breast cancer treatments come to light. In its first statement on the topic, the American Heart Association on Thursday said women should consider carefully the risks and benefits …

American-style football’s championship game, the Super Bowl, is being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sunday. It’s the biggest football event of the year. Millions of people will watch it on TV, but up to a million more across the nation are expected to attend Super Bowl-related events in person. With widespread …

Carnival begins next week in Rio de Janeiro and two million people are expected to pack the streets each day. But the nation is currently in the midst of a yellow fever outbreak and that has health officials worried. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

The Environmental Protection Agency is putting a two-year hold on an Obama-era clean-water rule to give the Trump administration more time to come up with a replacement. The EPA decision, announced Wednesday, came a week after the Supreme Court said the rule, which had been blocked since 2015, could be …

Vaccines. Popular sports drinks. Computers. They share one quality: They were invented by researchers working at a college or university. Victoria McGovern says research leads to greater discovery and better education. McGovern is a senior program officer with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an organization that supports medical research in the …

Virtual reality, neural feedback and digital therapy were among five ideas to help solve the U.S. opioid crisis that won a global technology challenge on Tuesday. Winners were selected from hundreds of ideas submitted by researchers, caregivers, service providers and individuals from Ohio, other states and nine countries. The winning …

Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, enjoyed little more than one month of clean air last year as pollution levels rose to match those of China’s smog-prone capital, Beijing, preliminary findings of a new report showed. Annual average air pollution in Hanoi in 2017 was also four times higher than the level deemed …

Miami and other U.S. cities most at risk from disasters exacerbated by global warming are also among those whose high energy consumption is fueling temperature rise, data from clean-energy company Arcadia Power showed Tuesday. Miami, battered last year by Hurricane Irma, was the least energy-efficient in a sample of 15 …

Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has been rocked by explosions for years set off by Al-Shabab militants battling to overthrow the weak U.N.-backed government. The frequent bombings have killed or injured thousands of civilians. Now, first responders are offering first aid classes to help Somalis learn how to help their neighbors before …

A recent estimate by researchers at the University of Miami suggests that 100 million sharks are killed every year. That overfishing is putting many species at risk of extinction. But it is also having some unintended consequences for other fish that sharks prey on. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

China’s crackdown on imports of plastic trash should be a signal for rich nations to increase recycling and cut down on non-essential products such as plastic drinking straws, the head of the U.N. Environment Program said on Monday. Erik Solheim, a former Norwegian environment minister, urged developed nations to re-think …

U.S. Democratic senators have blocked a bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks, ensuring that the procedure stays legal through the later terms of a woman’s pregnancy. Republican leaders in the Senate knew the bill had little chance to pass, but wanted to pressure Democrats to take a …

Scientists have assembled the most complete human genome to be mapped with a single technology using a new pocket-size portable DNA sequencer, which they say could one day make genome mapping quick and simple enough to do at home. Using a device about the size of a mobile phone and …

Scientists have unearthed in a Sahara Desert oasis in Egypt fossils of a long-necked, four-legged, school bus-sized dinosaur that lived roughly 80 million years ago, a discovery that sheds light on a mysterious time period in the history of dinosaurs in Africa. Researchers said on Monday the plant-eating Cretaceous Period …

A group of young Colombians, one as young as seven, filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government on Monday demanding it protect their right to a healthy environment in what campaigners said was the first such action in Latin America. The lawsuit, filed at a Bogota court, alleges the government’s …

Women who are deficient in iodine and trying to get pregnant may have half the chance of conceiving compared to women with healthy iodine levels, according to a recent U.S. study. Researchers followed more than 500 women trying to conceive over about five years and found that, overall, those with …

After three decades and 15 billion dollars, just three countries still harbor polio. Those three countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, all suffer from violent insurgencies. A new study is one of the first to document how a lack of security sets back efforts to eradicate the paralyzing disease. VOA’s Steve …

Polio cases in Pakistan rose by 73 percent during the most intense periods of civil conflict there in recent years, according to a new study. The report, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  is one of the first to provide concrete evidence of the impacts insecurity has on …

The moon is providing a rare triple treat this week.   On Wednesday, much of the world will get to see not only a blue moon and a supermoon, but also a total lunar eclipse, all rolled into one. There hasn’t been a triple lineup like this since 1982 and …

New data from 22 high- and low-income countries show antibiotic resistance to a number of serious bacterial infections is growing at an alarming rate. The World Health Organization surveyed one-half million people with suspected bacterial infections between March 2016 and July 2017. The survey, the first of its kind, is …

North and South Korea are reporting outbreaks of different strains of influenza, less than two weeks before thousands of visitors from around the world arrive for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics in the South. North Korea’s Ministry of Public Health reported over 80,000 confirmed cases of the influenza strain H1N1 …