Zika virus triggers pregnancy delay calls

Officials in four Latin American and Caribbean nations have warned women to avoid pregnancy amid concerns over an illness causing severe birth defects.

In El Salvador houses have been fumigated against mosquitoes

Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Jamaica recommended to delay pregnancies until more was known about the mosquito-borne Zika virus.This followed an outbreak in Brazil.Brazil said the number of babies born with suspected microcephaly - or abnormally small heads - had reached nearly 4,000 since October.

Meanwhile, US health authorities have warned pregnant women to avoid travelling to more than 20 countries in the Americas and beyond, where Zika cases have been registered.

The link between microcephaly and Zika has not been confirmed - but a small number of babies who died had the virus in their brain and no other explanation for the surge in microcephaly has been suggested.

The virus is not contagious and normally has flu-like symptoms.

In Colombia, Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria urged women to delay pregnancies for up to eight months.

"We are doing this because I believe it's a good way to communicate the risk, to tell people that there could be serious consequences," he was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Similar warnings were issued in Ecuador, El Salvador and Jamaica.

However, women's rights campaigners criticised the recommendations, saying women in the region often had little choice about becoming pregnant.

"It's incredibly naive for a government to ask women to postpone getting pregnant in a context such as Colombia, where more than 50% of pregnancies are unplanned and across the region where sexual violence is prevalent," said Monica Roa, a member of Women's Link Worldwide group.

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What is Zika virus?

Babies born with abnormally small heads may face lifelong difficulties

• It is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carries dengue fever and yellow fever
• It was first discovered in Africa in the 1940s but is now spreading in Latin America
• Scientists say there is growing evidence of a link to microcephaly, that leads to babies being born with small heads
• While Zika virus can lead to fever and a rash, most people show no symptoms, and there is no known cure
• The only way to fight Zika is to clear stagnant water where mosquitoes breed, and to protect against mosquito bites

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Forty-nine babies with suspected microcephaly have died, Brazil's health ministry says. In five of these cases an infection with Zika virus was found.

Brazil is experiencing the largest known outbreak of Zika, with most cases in the north-east. Others have been detected in the south-east, an area which includes Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of cases of Zika in several other Latin American countries.

In Colombia, more than 13,500 cases have been reported.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued initial travel warnings to pregnant women last week, adding eight more places to the list on Friday. The warnings now extend to:

• Central and South America: Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela
• Caribbean: Barbados, Saint Martin, Haiti, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe
• Oceania: Samoa
• Africa: Cape Verde

First flower blooms in space on International Space Station

Astronauts have grown the first flower in space on-board the International Space Station.

The zinnia flower is the first to grow in space

The orange zinnia flowers can be eaten and were grown in the 'Veggie' laboratory, which was installed on the space station in 2014.

Growing their own food in space is a big step for astronauts because it means they could go on longer missions in the future.

They've grown lettuce before but the zinnia is the first to bloom flowers.

It shows that it may be possible to grow other flowering crops like tomatoes.

Scott Kelly took this selfie with his crop of lettuce in the Veggie Laboratory

Growing plants in space might be trickier than you think - watering flowers is much more difficult in a place without gravity!

Another problem was that the high levels of moisture in the air inside the space station led to mould growing on some leaves.

The astronauts cleaned the plants, cut away the mouldy leaves, and set up a fan to try and dry out the crop. But the high speed fan did its job a bit too well, and the plants got too dry.

Astronaut Scott Kelly took charge of the flowers, and worked hard to revive them over Christmas, and on 12 January, a few petals started to peak out.

When the flowers finally bloomed, Scott shared the photo saying 'first ever flower grown in space makes its debut!'

From CBBC Newsround

Global fishing catch significantly under-reported, says study

The amount of fish taken from the world's oceans over the last 60 years has been underestimated by more than 50%, according to a new study.

Global fish take based on official figures underestimates the actual catch size according to this study

Researchers say that official estimates are missing crucial data on small scale fisheries, illegal fishing and discarded by-catch.

The authors argue that global fishing catches are now declining rapidly because stocks have been exhausted.

But other researchers have questioned the reliability of the new study.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is the body that collates global statistics on fishing from countries all over the world.

According to their official figures, the amount of fish caught has increased steadily since 1950 and peaked at 86 million tonnes in 1996 before declining slightly to around 77 million tonnes in 2010.

But researchers from the University of British Columbia argue that the official figures drastically under-report the true scale of fishing.

They argue that the figures submitted to the FAO are mainly from large scale "industrial" fishing activities and do not include small scale commercial fisheries, subsistence fisheries as well as the discarded by-catch and estimates for illegal fishing.

The scientists say their "catch reconstruction" method give a far more accurate picture of the scale of the impacts of fishing around the world.

They say that reconstructed catches, that include estimates and data on the under-reported activities, show that the world took 53% more fish from the seas than the official figures indicate.

They argue that around 32 million tonnes of fish go unreported every year - more than the weight of the entire US population.

"The catches are all underestimated," said lead author Prof Daniel Pauly.

"The FAO doesn't have a mandate to correct the data that they get - and the countries have the bad habit of reporting only what they see - if they don't have people who report on a given fishery then nothing is reported. The result of this is a systematic underestimation of the catch and this can be very high, 200-300% especially in small island states, in the developed world it can be 20-30%."

Prof Pauly gave the Bahamas as an example where there was no reporting of fish caught by small scale fishers. But when the researchers dug a little deeper and went to the big hotels and resorts, they found invoices from small scale fishermen who sold their catch directly.

Not only have more fish been taken from the seas than have been reported say the authors, but the decline in fish caught since the mid 1990s has been far greater than the official figures show.

A graph showing the differences between the official figures and the reconstructed catch

From BBC Science/Environment

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Carbon emissions 'postpone ice age'

The next ice age may have been delayed by over 50,000 years because of the greenhouse gases put in the atmosphere by humans, scientists in Germany say.

Earth has been through a cycle of ice ages and warm periods over the past 2.5 million years

They analysed the trigger conditions for a glaciation, like the one that gripped Earth over 12,000 years ago.

The shape of the planet's orbit around the Sun would be conducive now, they find, but the amount of carbon dioxide currently in the air is far too high.

Earth is set for a prolonged warm phase, they tell the journal Nature.

"In theory, the next ice age could be even further into the future, but there is no real practical importance in discussing whether it starts in 50,000 or 100,000 years from now," Andrey Ganopolski from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said.

"The important thing is that it is an illustration that we have a geological power now. We can change the natural sequence of events for tens of thousands of years," he told BBC News.

Earth has been through a cycle of ice ages and warm periods over the past 2.5 million years, referred to as the Quaternary Period.

This has seen ice sheets come and go. At its maximum extent, the last glaciation witnessed a big freeze spread over much of North America, northern Europe, Russia and Asia.

In the south, a vast expanse of what are now Chile and Argentina were also iced up.

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