MUSIC: "Our World" theme
This week on Our World: Some positive news on the state of global fisheries ... an online report on the health of bird species ... and the challenges that remain in wiping out polio ...
BARRETT: "What goes on in small villages in a remote part of Nigeria will determine a return that we're going to get here in the United States as well as elsewhere."
Those stories, high tech tracking of migrating salmon, malaria's origins in an ancient chimp ancestor, and more.
I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
In March, NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft designed to look for planets similar enough to Earth that they might support some kind of life.
For the past four months, scientists have been testing Kepler's instruments, and on Thursday they called in reporters to announce the results.
BOSS: "The bottom line is, the real headline for this whole press conference is: Kepler Works."
That's Carnegie Institution astrophysicist Alan Boss, one of the scientists working on the project.
The Kepler team pointed the spacecraft at a distant star where a large planet, about the size of Jupiter, is known to exist.
Kepler's instruments detected the planet, seeing the star get slightly dimmer as the planet passed in front of it, blocking some of the light.
But it also detected something even harder to see. The planet observed by Kepler is so close to its sun that it glows red hot. Kepler's instruments detected the change in light as the planet orbited its star, rotating its bright, heated side away from Kepler, then back again in view. It's like our Moon gets darker or lighter depending on whether we're seeing the side illuminated by our Sun.
Alan Boss says these early results prove that Kepler is up to the task it was designed for - finding the smaller, hard-to-see planets that might support life.
BOSS: "Kepler is being launched, not just to find Jupiters - that's sort of a secondary product - but its prime mission is to count how many earths there are around sunlike stars in our region of the galaxy. We now know that Kepler can do it. But the question that remains is, how many earths are actually out there for Kepler to find."
Kepler will spend the next several years, keeping its electronic "eye" pointed at more than 100,000 stars, looking for signs that they may be home to earthlike planets.
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Fish are an important source of healthful food, and that's why experts have been sounding the alarm that we are taking too many fish out of the world's oceans and pushing some populations to the brink of extinction. But a new study finds signs of hope that depleted fisheries around the world can be restored. VOA food reporter Steve Baragona has details on a new study that suggests threatened fish stocks may not be quite so threatened after all.
BARAGONA: Three years ago, a study assessing the health of global fisheries caused a stir when it predicted that the populations of all commercially-fished ocean species would collapse by 2048.
The new study, published in the journal Science, confirms that an increasing number of fish populations are collapsing. But it finds that the steps taken around the world to reverse that trend are working. The rate at which fish are being taken out of the sea has dropped to a level that should allow fish populations to recover in five of the 10 regions studied.
WORM: "This means different regions are heading in different directions and some regions have indeed begun to eliminate overfishing."
BARAGONA: That's Boris Worm at Dalhousie University in Canada. He's the lead author of both the new study and the controversial 2006 study. Worm and a group of 20 collaborators from around the world looked at what strategies had helped successfully rebuild fish populations.
For example, in the northeastern United States, populations of haddock and other fish had been devastated by overfishing, beginning the 1960s. But in the 1990s, federal fishing authorities took aggressive action. They limited how many days fishers could spend at sea. Certain areas were closed to fishing entirely. Authorities required fishers to use gear that let smaller fish escape. And they set limits on the number and size of fish that could be caught. Study co-author Mike Fogarty of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says these measures worked.
FOGARTY: "Today we've witnessed a dramatic recovery of haddock to the highest levels we've seen since the 1930s, when actual population estimates were first available."