Delhi Bans Old Cars from Refueling to Help Tackle Pollutionhttps://english.aawsat.com/varieties/5117457-delhi-bans-old-cars-refueling-help-tackle-pollution
Delhi Bans Old Cars from Refueling to Help Tackle Pollution
Traffic passes by flowers in bloom at a roundabout in New Delhi, India, 25 February 2025. EPA/HARISH TYAGI
Cars more than 15 years old will soon be barred from refueling in New Delhi, the city's government said Saturday, as part of measures to reduce the Indian capital's hazardous pollution levels.
New Delhi is regularly ranked as one of the most polluted cities in the world and is blanketed in acrid smog each year.
The pollution is primarily blamed on agricultural burning by nearby farmers to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes, AFP reported.
Cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds worsen the situation by trapping deadly pollutants each winter.
Diesel and petrol cars older than 10 and 15 years respectively are not allowed to ply on Delhi roads but many have been found flouting the rules.
Delhi's environment minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa told reporters Saturday that the decision to stop fuel for the old cars was made at a "marathon meeting" on air pollution to "find out the diseases and its remedies".
"We have decided to stop giving fuel to vehicles more than 15 years old after March 31, 2025," he said.
He said "gadgets" would be installed at petrol pumps to identify such vehicles.
Sirsa said other decisions taken include turning barren land into "new forests" and getting university students involved in planting.
He also said the government would make it mandatory for high rises, hotels and Delhi airport to install anti-smog guns and gadgets to control pollution.
The public health crisis has grown steadily worse over the years and weeks-long school closures across the capital, aimed at shielding vulnerable children from the harmful air, are now an annual occurrence.
At the peak of the smog, levels of PM2.5 pollutants -- dangerous cancer-causing microparticles small enough to enter the bloodstream through the lungs -- surged to more than 60 times the World Health Organization's recommended daily maximum.
Piecemeal government initiatives, such as partial restrictions on fossil fuel-powered transport and water trucks spraying mist to clear particulate matter from the air, have failed to make a noticeable impact.
An adult female Kemp's ridley sea turtle is seen swimming in a tank at Loggerhead Marinelife Center after a satellite tracking device was attached to its shell in Juno Beach, Fla. on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Cody Jackson)
3-limbed Sea Turtle Being Tracked at Sea by Satellite
An adult female Kemp's ridley sea turtle is seen swimming in a tank at Loggerhead Marinelife Center after a satellite tracking device was attached to its shell in Juno Beach, Fla. on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Cody Jackson)
The veterinary staff at a Florida sea turtle hospital is getting help from space to monitor the animals they have rehabilitated. They're particularly interested in amputees.
Using satellite tracking devices in a collaboration between the Loggerhead Marinelife Center and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, scientists are learning how well sea turtles can survive in the wild after losing a limb.
Amelie, a Kemp's ridley sea turtle who lost her right forelimb to a predator — most likely a shark, the center said — was taken to the beach on Wednesday for her highly anticipated release. The turtle paused for about 30 seconds, then slowly made her way into the Atlantic Ocean as onlookers cheered.
Amelie had been rescued and brought to the center by the Inwater Research Group in Port St. Lucie, Florida, seven weeks earlier after a traumatic amputation. She underwent surgery to clean and close the wound, and was treated for pneumonia while in a tank at the center.
When veterinarians deemed her healthy enough to return to the sea, they glued a tracking device to her shell.
A rehabilitated adult female Kemp's ridley sea turtle crawls toward the ocean during a release in Juno Beach, Fla. on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Cody Jackson)
An ultrasound confirmed that Amelie is developing eggs, giving researchers another reason to track her movements.
Kemp's ridley turtles, the rarest of sea turtle species, are more typically found on Florida's Gulf Coast, so treating Amelie was especially significant, said Andy Dehart, the center's president and CEO.
Amelie is actually the fourth amputee sea turtle being tracked by the enter, Loggerhead research director Sarah Hirsch said. They include a three-limbed turtle named Pyari who has traveled nearly 700 miles since her release in January, her tracker shows.
“We do know that they can be successful in the wild because we have seen them on our nesting beaches, but we really want to understand their dive behaviors, how they’re migrating once they’re back in the wild," The Associated Press quoted Hirsch as saying.
The satellite tags have a saltwater switch that detects when the turtle comes up to the surface to breathe, triggering the transmission of data to the satellites. Their location appears online after a 24-hour delay. To view Amelie and other turtles tracked for various research projects, visit the Loggerhead website.
“They’ve been through a lot," Hirsch said. "They’ve gotten a lot of medical care here, and to see them be able to go back out and contribute to the population is really rewarding.”
Genetic Study Identifies Earliest-known Dog, Dating to 15,800 Years Agohttps://english.aawsat.com/varieties/5255367-genetic-study-identifies-earliest-known-dog-dating-15800-years-ago
FILE PHOTO: A woman gives her dog a kiss as they watch the sunset at Anchor Bay outside Mellieha, Malta, January 26, 2018. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi/File Photo
Genetic Study Identifies Earliest-known Dog, Dating to 15,800 Years Ago
FILE PHOTO: A woman gives her dog a kiss as they watch the sunset at Anchor Bay outside Mellieha, Malta, January 26, 2018. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi/File Photo
Dogs have been loyal companions to people since we made them our first domesticated animals, descending long ago from gray wolves - though precisely when, where and why have remained unanswered. New genetic research now is offering valuable insight, including identifying the earliest-known dog, dating to 15,800 years ago, Reuters reported.
This dog, known from bones found at the Pinarbasi rock shelter site in Türkiye used by ancient human hunter-gatherers, is about 5,000 years older than the previous earliest-known, genetically confirmed canine, the researchers said.
The date of the Pinarbasi dog and several others almost as old identified at other sites in Europe shows that dogs already were widely distributed and an integral part of human culture millennia before the advent of agriculture, they said.
The new findings were presented in two scientific papers published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
William Marsh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London who was co-lead author of one of the studies, said the DNA evidence suggests dogs were present in various locales in western Eurasia by 18,000 years ago and already were quite different genetically from wolves.
"We putatively predict that dog and wolf populations diverged a lot earlier, likely before the last glacial maximum (of the Ice Age), so before 24,000 years ago. Although saying that, there is still a great degree of uncertainty," Marsh said.
The dog, descended from an ancient wolf population separate from modern wolves, was the first animal domesticated by people, with animals such as goats, sheep, cattle and cats coming later.
"Dogs have been by our side as humans underwent major lifestyle transitions and complex societies emerged," said geneticist Anders Bergström of the University of East Anglia in England, lead author of the other study.
"I think it's also interesting that, unlike most other domesticated animals, dogs do not always have very clearly defined roles or purposes for humans. Perhaps their primary role is often just to provide companionship," Bergström said.
The upper jaw of a domesticated dog from the Kesslerloch cave in Thayngen, Switzerland, dating to about 14,000 years ago, is seen in this photograph from July 2019. Cantonal Archaeological Service of Schaffhausen/Ivan Ivic/Handout via REUTERS
Bergström and his team performed a large-scale search for the early dogs of Europe, using a new method to differentiate genetically between wolves and dogs among 216 ancient remains ranging from 46,000 to 2,000 years old from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and Türkiye. This was the largest study of such remains to date.
The researchers managed to identify 46 dogs and 95 wolves. Because the skeletons of dogs and wolves were so similar in the early stages of canine domestication, genetic studies are needed to distinguish between them in ancient remains.
The oldest of the dogs identified by Bergström's team was one dating to 14,200 years ago from Switzerland's Kesslerloch Cave site. The oldest of the European dogs identified in this study were found to have shared an origin with dogs in Asia and the rest of the world, showing that these various canine populations did not arise from separate domestication events.
The Pinarbasi dog, identified in the study Marsh worked on, showed how much dogs were valued by the hunter-gatherers who kept them.
"At Pinarbasi, we have both human and dog burials, with dogs buried alongside humans," Marsh said.
There also was evidence that the people at Pinarbasi fed their dogs fish.
This study identified five dogs dating to between 15,800 and 14,300 years ago, including canine remains from Gough's Cave near Cheddar in England.
"At Gough's Cave, we have butchering and processing of humans after death that included cannibalism, as a funerary behavior akin to burial. Similar post-mortem modification, albeit not definitively for consumption, was found on the dog remains," Marsh said.
The Pinarbasi and Gough's Cave dogs were found to be more closely related to the ancestors of present-day European and Middle Eastern breeds such as boxers and salukis than to Arctic breeds like Siberian huskies.
Beyond companionship, the ancient dogs may have helped people hunt or perhaps served as watchdogs, sort of Ice Age alarm systems, according to the researchers. Unlike the many exotic dog breeds around today, these early dogs still likely closely resembled the wolves from which they descended, they said.
"The questions of when, where and why people domesticated dogs still remain largely unanswered," Bergström said. "We think it probably happened somewhere in Asia, but more precisely remains to be determined."
‘Hero’ Australian Dog Who Saved 100 Koalas Retireshttps://english.aawsat.com/varieties/5255043-%E2%80%98hero%E2%80%99-australian-dog-who-saved-100-koalas-retires
This handout picture taken on February 8, 2020 and released by the International Fund for Animal Welfare on March 25, 2026 shows Bear, an Australian Koolie, scanning the Two Thumbs Wildlife Trust Sanctuary for koalas in the Numeralla, Peak View and Nerriga areas of New South Wales. (Handout / International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) / AFP)
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‘Hero’ Australian Dog Who Saved 100 Koalas Retires
This handout picture taken on February 8, 2020 and released by the International Fund for Animal Welfare on March 25, 2026 shows Bear, an Australian Koolie, scanning the Two Thumbs Wildlife Trust Sanctuary for koalas in the Numeralla, Peak View and Nerriga areas of New South Wales. (Handout / International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) / AFP)
An Australian dog credited with saving over 100 koalas from bushfires is retiring after a decade of service.
Bear, an 11-year-old Australian Koolie, was one of the first dogs in the country to be trained on the scent of koala fur.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare called using dogs to detect koalas a "novel" approach.
"No one knew if it could be done," IFAW head of programs Josey Sharrad wrote in a statement about Bear on Monday.
As a pup, the four-legged hero's boundless energy made it tough to stay indoors, but he found his true potential in the bush.
"He literally went from chewing the walls of a Gold Coast apartment to roaming through the Aussie bush on a mission to save our most iconic species," Sharrad said.
Bear's skills saved over 100 koalas as the Black Summer bushfires raged across Australia's eastern seaboard from late 2019 to early 2020, razing millions of hectares, destroying thousands of homes and blanketing cities in noxious smoke.
The tail-wagging detective with a "joyful and goofy" personality retires with an extensive list of accolades, including an Animal of the Year award and Puppy Tales Photos Australian Dog of the Year award.
He also features in a "dogumentary" called "Bear: Koala Hero", and in a book, "Bear to the Rescue".
Bear will embark on a slower-paced chapter on the Sunshine Coast with one of his former handlers, getting belly rubs and playing his favorite game, fetch.
One of his former handlers, Romane Cristescu, said Bear had been a "tireless ambassador for koalas for a decade".
"He melted hearts all around the world, and opened many doors so we could have critical and difficult conversations about climate change and its impacts on the threatened koalas, as well as so many other species."
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