The IAEA has continued to monitor activities around North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre, but cannot confirm the nature and purpose of the activities because it does not have access on the ground, Director General Yukiya Amano told the IAEA’s Board of Governors today.

A new trade route under development by the Chinese government might facilitate invasions by alien species, transporting diverse animal, plant, fungal, and microbial stowaways that could threaten natural resources and global biodiversity, new evidence suggests. 

With Pope Francis and the presidents of Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Portugal in attendance, the World Youth Day for Catholic youth, held at the end of January in Panama City, was a major event featuring five days of concerts, vigils, prayers, masses and more.

The rich levels of biodiversity on land seen across the globe today are not a recent phenomenon: diversity on land has been similar for at least the last 60 million years, since soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A cutting edge medical imaging technique that provides for ‘in-room images’ during a patient’s cancer treatment process and which contributes to more accurate targeted radiotherapy treatment, helping to minimising radiation exposure to healthy tissues, is the focus of an IAEA publication issued last week.

Malnutrition is not always visible to the naked eye. A child could look healthy but still suffer from massive nutrient deficiencies. It is called hidden hunger — a chronic deficiency in micronutrients — and affects a large part of Sierra Leone’s population.

Yuuki Watanabe has always been fascinated by speed and power. As a child, he recalls being transfixed by the raw strength of great white sharks (Carcharadon carcharias). ‘They look cool’ says Watanabe, from the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan. However, he now has another reason for being in awe of these charismatic predatory sharks: ‘they are an endothermic fish’, he says. In other words, they maintain a warmer body temperature than the surrounding water—in contrast to most fish, which simply go with the thermal flow. This relatively warm-bodied lifestyle should allow them to swim at much higher speeds than their cold-blooded contemporaries. Yet, no one had successfully recorded the great white’s behaviour to find out how their relatively warm lifestyle influences their activity. Would their warm muscles allow them to live up to their high-speed reputation? It turns out that although the fish could swim fast, they opt for lower speeds when hunting for fat seal snacks and the team publish this discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology.