Nature Hub

By Paul Njie & Natasha Booty BBC News, Yaoundé & London Edited by Amal Udawatta IMAGE SOURCE, AFP Image caption, Eight-month-old Daniella, right, is the first Cameroonian child to get the jab The world's first routine vaccine programme against malaria has started in Cameroon, in a move projected to save thousands of children's lives across Africa. The symbolic first jab was given to a baby girl named Daniella  at a health facility near Yaoundé on Monday. Every year 600,000 people die of malaria in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Children under five make up at least 80% of those deaths. Cameroon is offering the RTS,S vaccine free of charge to all infants up to the age of six months old. Patients require a total of four doses. Health officials say these will be given at the same time as other routine childhood vaccines to make it easier for parents. It comes after successful pilot campaigns in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi - where  the vaccine caused a

 From -  MONGABAY By   Malaka  Rodrigo   Edited by  - Amal Udawatta Recent research on Sri Lanka’s mushrooms has resulted in the discovery of two species previously unknown to science — Termitomyces srilankensis and Candolleomyces ruhunensis — and the discovery of Crepidotus striatus, a mushroom previously thought endemic to China. A tropical island in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka is known for its rich diversity of fungi and mushrooms, but there was little research until now, making the group one of the least-studied organisms in the country. As deforestation, habitat degradation and climate change threaten mushroom species, researchers urge the establishment of a national fungarium to preserve fungi specimens. Edible wild mushrooms have been a part of Sri Lankans’ diets for centuries, but present generations have lost traditional knowledge about identifying non-poisonous mushrooms and instead rely on commercially cultivated mushrooms. COLOMBO — In Lewis Carroll’s popular children’s boo

             From- Sky & Telescope    By - Govert Schilling,   Edited by - Amal Udawatta The CHARA array took two false-color images of RW Cephei, one in December 2022 (left), when the star had dimmed, and one in July 2023 (right), when the star had recovered its usual brightness. The patchy appearance results from dust created by a huge ejection from the star. The star is huge but it is so far away that it appears about one million times smaller than the full Moon in the sky, resolvable only by an interfereometer. CHARA / Georgia State University Betelgeuse isn’t the only giant star to undergo a “Great Dimming.” Remember the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse? In late 2019, this red supergiant in Orion became 1.2 magnitudes fainter than normal. Detailed observations of the star with the European Very Large Telescope in Chile, enabled by Betelgeuse’s relatively short distance of 640 light-years, revealed that the southern hemisphere of the star’s disk had darkened. The light was temporari