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Australian Sauna Helps Save Frogs from Flesh-Eating Fungus 

This picture taken on August 13, 2024 shows a green and golden frog, an endangered specie, hiding between bricks inside a sauna at the research center of Macquarie University in Sydney. (AFP)
This picture taken on August 13, 2024 shows a green and golden frog, an endangered specie, hiding between bricks inside a sauna at the research center of Macquarie University in Sydney. (AFP)
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Australian Sauna Helps Save Frogs from Flesh-Eating Fungus 

This picture taken on August 13, 2024 shows a green and golden frog, an endangered specie, hiding between bricks inside a sauna at the research center of Macquarie University in Sydney. (AFP)
This picture taken on August 13, 2024 shows a green and golden frog, an endangered specie, hiding between bricks inside a sauna at the research center of Macquarie University in Sydney. (AFP)

Hundreds of endangered Australian Green and Golden Bell frogs huddle inside a sauna, shielded from Sydney's winter chill.

The sauna -- a small greenhouse containing black-painted bricks warmed by the sun -- may be pleasant, but it also protects the frogs from a deadly chytrid fungus that would otherwise drive them to extinction.

Macquarie University biologist Anthony Waddle holds one frog -- no bigger than a credit card -- in his hand as its green and gold colors become more vibrant in the heat.

"Chytrid is the worst pathogen ever", he told AFP.

It is a water-borne disease that burrows into the frogs' skin, attacking their bodies and eventually killing them.

Waddle said that globally, the disease has caused the decline of 500 amphibian species and driven 90 to extinction -- six in Australia.

"Nothing has ever caused this much devastation," he told AFP. "In Australia, we have frogs that only live in glass boxes now. This is a huge, ongoing problem."

But Waddle's dollhouse-sized saunas could change that.

In their warm interiors, the deadly chytrid fungus cannot grow on the frogs, allowing them to fight off the infection and survive.

-'No one solution' -

Frogs play a vital role in the environment and are known as bioindicators, which are used to assess the health of ecosystems.

Without the amphibians, entire ecosystems can collapse.

Globally, 41 percent of frog species are threatened with extinction, making them one of the most vulnerable invertebrate groups, a recent study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found.

Some of the biggest drivers include loss of habitat, climate change and the chytrid disease.

These drivers are difficult to tackle, but in the absence of a cure, Waddle hopes his frog saunas can help limit the losses.

"This might be the first evidence that we could cheaply and feasibly reduce that nasty yearly die-off of frogs," Waddle said.

"For Green and Golden Bell frogs, that could mean the difference between a population going or persisting."

He said the saunas show that creative solutions ranging from the complex -- such as identifying genes that could make individuals resistant to chytrid -- to more simple are needed if frog populations are to survive.

"Not one solution is going to work for everything. Frogs are so different," Waddle added.

But the beauty of Waddle's saunas is that they cost AUD$70 ($US50) to assemble, and he has helped dozens of citizen scientists build their own backyard versions.

This has not only provided valuable data about endangered frog species but also saved some from the deadly fungus.

Jodi Rowley, an amphibian biologist from the Australian Museum, said the saunas showed how creative solutions could have real-world benefits.

"It's easy to feel helpless in the face of biodiversity declines, but this study gives us a tangible way we may be able to help frogs battling a devastating fungal disease," she told AFP.

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Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
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Wave of Low Temperature Brings Rare Snowfall to Shanghai

A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)
A woman holding an umbrella rides a bicycle amid snowfall in Shanghai, China January 20, 2026. (Reuters)

A wave of low temperature sweeping southern China brought rare snowfall to ​Shanghai on Tuesday, delighting residents of the financial hub as authorities warned that the frigid weather could last for at least three days.

The city, on China's east coast, last ‌experienced a heavy snowfall ‌in January ‌2018. ⁠And ​just ‌last week, Shanghai basked in unusually high temperatures of 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), which local media said had caused some osmanthus trees to bloom.

"The weather seems rather ⁠strange this year," said 30-year-old resident Yu Xin.

"In ‌general, the temperature ‍fluctuations have ‍been quite significant, so some people ‍might feel a bit uncomfortable," she said.

Chinese state media said other areas experienced sharp temperature drops, including Jiangxi and ​Guizhou provinces, which sit south of China's Yangtze and Huai ⁠rivers. Guizhou province is expected to experience temperature drops of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius, the Zhejiang News reported.

Across China, authorities have also shut 241 sections of major roads in 12 provinces including Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang due to snowfall and icy ‌roads, state broadcaster CCTV said.

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Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
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Researchers Find Antarctic Penguin Breeding Is Heating up Sooner, and That’s a Problem

View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)
View of gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) penguins at the Paradise Bay in the Gerlache Strait -which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, on January 20, 2024. (AFP)

Warming temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier and that's a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study said.

With temperatures in the breeding ground increasing 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) from 2012 to 2022, three different penguin species are beginning their reproductive process about two weeks earlier than the decade before, according to a study in Tuesday's Journal of Animal Ecology. And that sets up potential food problems for young chicks.

“Penguins are changing the time at which they’re breeding at a record speed, faster than any other vertebrate,” said lead author Ignacio Juarez Martinez, a biologist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. "And this is important because the time at which you breed needs to coincide with the time with most resources in the environment and this is mostly food for your chicks so they have enough to grow.''

For some perspective, scientists have studied changes in the life cycle of great tits, a European bird. They found a similar two-week change, but that took 75 years as opposed to just 10 years for these three penguin species, said study co-author Fiona Suttle, another Oxford biologist.

Researchers used remote control cameras to photograph penguins breeding in dozens of colonies from 2011 to 2021. They say it was the fastest shift in timing of life cycles for any backboned animals that they have seen. The three species are all brush-tailed, so named because their tails drag on the ice: the cartoon-eye Adelie, the black-striped chinstrap and the fast-swimming gentoo.

Suttle said climate change is creating winners and losers among these three penguin species and it happens at a time in the penguin life cycle where food and the competition for it are critical in survival.

The Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists, eating mainly krill. The gentoo have a more varied diet. They used to breed at different times, so there were no overlaps and no competition. But the gentoos' breeding has moved earlier faster than the other two species and now there's overlap. That's a problem because gentoos, which don't migrate as far as the other two species, are more aggressive in finding food and establishing nesting areas, Martinez and Suttle said.

Suttle said she has gone back in October and November to the same colony areas where she used to see Adelies in previous years only to find their nests replaced by gentoos. And the data backs up the changes her eyes saw, she said.

“Chinstraps are declining globally,” Martinez said. “Models show that they might get extinct before the end of the century at this rate. Adelies are doing very poorly in the Antarctic Peninsula and it’s very likely that they go extinct from the Antarctic Peninsula before the end of the century.”

Martinez theorized that the warming western Antarctic — the second-fasting heating place on Earth behind only the Arctic North Atlantic — means less sea ice. Less sea ice means more spores coming out earlier in the Antarctic spring and then “you have this incredible bloom of phytoplankton,” which is the basis of the food chain that eventually leads to penguins, he said. And it's happening earlier each year.

Not only do the chinstraps and Adelies have more competition for food from gentoos because of the warming and changes in plankton and krill, but the changes have brought more commercial fishing that comes earlier and that further shortens the supply for the penguins, Suttle said.

This shift in breeding timing “is an interesting signal of change and now it’s important to continuing observing these penguin populations to see if these changes have negative impacts on their populations,” said Michelle LaRue, a professor of Antarctic marine science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was not part of the Oxford study.

With millions of photos — taken every hour by 77 cameras for 10 years — scientists enlisted everyday people to help tag breeding activity using the Penguin Watch website.

“We’ve had over 9 million of our images annotated via Penguin Watch,” Suttle said. “A lot of that does come down to the fact that people just love penguins so much. They’re very cute. They’re on all the Christmas cards. People say, ‘Oh, they look like little waiters in tuxedos.’”

“The Adelies, I think their personality goes along with it as well,” Suttle said, saying there's “perhaps a kind of cheekiness about them — and this very cartoon-like eye that does look like it’s just been drawn on.”

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100 Vehicles Pile Up in Michigan Crash Amid Snowstorm

This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
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100 Vehicles Pile Up in Michigan Crash Amid Snowstorm

This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)
This image taken from video provided by WZZM shows part of a severe multi-car pileup leading Michigan State Police to shut down an interstate south of Grand Rapids Monday, Jan. 19, 2026, in Ottawa County, Mich. (WZZM via AP)

More than 100 vehicles smashed into each other or slid off an interstate in Michigan on Monday as snow fueled by the Great Lakes blanketed the state.

The massive pileup prompted the Michigan State Police to close both directions of Interstate 196 Monday morning just southwest of Grand Rapids while officials worked to remove all the vehicles, including more than 30 semitrailer trucks. The State Police said there were numerous injuries, but no deaths had been reported.

Pedro Mata Jr. said he could barely see the cars in front of him as the snow blew across the road while driving 20-25 mph (32-40 kph) before the crash. He was able to stop his pickup safely, but then decided to pull his truck off the road into the median to avoid being hit from behind.

“It was a little scary just listening to everything, the bangs and booms behind you. I saw what was in front of me. I couldn’t see what was behind me exactly,” The Associated Press quoted Mata as saying.

The crash is just the latest impact of the major winter storm moving across the country. The National Weather Service issued warnings about either extremely cold temperatures or the potential for winter storms across several states starting in northern Minnesota and stretching south and east into Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

A day earlier, snow fell as far south as the Florida Panhandle and made it harder for football players to hang onto the ball during playoff games in Massachusetts and Chicago. Forecasters warned Monday that freezing temperatures are possible overnight into Tuesday across much of north-central Florida and southeast Georgia.

The Ottawa County Sheriff's office in Michigan said multiple crashes and jack-knifed semis were reported along with numerous cars that slid off the road. Stranded motorists were being bused to Hudsonville High School, where they could call for help or arrange a ride.

Officials expected the road to be closed for several hours during the cleanup.
One of the companies helping remove the stranded cars, Grand Valley Towing, sent more than a dozen of its trucks to the scene of the chain-reaction crash. Several towing companies responded in the brutally cold weather.

“We’re trying to get as many vehicles out of there as quickly as possible, so we can get the road opened back up,” manager Jeff Westveld said.