Cyclist issued fine for striking four-year-old girl crossing the street
A cyclist turned herself in and received a fine after striking a four-year-old girl who was crossing the street to catch a school bus.
Without Russian help, climate scientists worry how they'll keep up their important work of documenting warming in the Arctic.
Europe's space agency is wrestling with how its planned Mars rover might survive freezing nights on the Red Planet without its Russian heating unit.
And what of the world's quest for carbon-free energy if 35 nations cooperating on an experimental fusion-power reactor in France can't ship vital components from Russia?
In scientific fields with profound implications for mankind's future and knowledge, Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is causing a swift and broad decaying of relationships and projects that bound together Moscow and the West. Post-Cold War bridge-building through science is unraveling as Western nations seek to punish and isolate the Kremlin by drying up support for scientific programs involving Russia.
The costs of this decoupling, scientists say, could be high on both sides. Tackling climate change and other problems will be tougher without collaboration and time will be lost. Russian and Western scientists have become dependent on each other's expertise as they have worked together on conundrums from unlocking the power of atoms to firing probes into space. Picking apart the dense web of relationships will be complicated.
The European Space Agency's planned Mars rover with Russia is an example. Arrays of Russian sensors to sniff, scour and study the planet's environment may have to be unbolted and replaced and a non-Russian launcher rocket found if the suspension of their collaboration becomes a lasting rupture. In that case, the launch, already scrubbed for this year, couldn't happen before 2026.
"We need to untangle all this cooperation which we had, and this is a very complex process, a painful one I can also tell you," the ESA director, Josef Aschbacher, said in an Associated Press interview. "Dependency on each other, of course, creates also stability and, to a certain extent, trust. And this is something that we will lose, and we have lost now, through the invasion of Russia in Ukraine."
International indignation and sanctions on Russia are making formal collaborations difficult or impossible. Scientists who became friends are staying in touch informally but plugs are being pulled on their projects big and small. The European Union is freezing Russian entities out of its main 95 billion euro (US$105 billion) fund for research, suspending payments and saying they'll get no new contracts. In Germany, Britain and elsewhere, funding and support is also being withdrawn for projects involving Russia.
In the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology severed ties with a research university it helped establish in Moscow. The oldest and largest university in Estonia won't accept new students from Russia and ally Belarus. The president of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tarmo Soomere, says the breaking of scientific connections is necessary but also will hurt.
"We are in danger of losing much of the momentum that drives our world towards better solutions, (a) better future," he told the AP. "Globally, we are in danger of losing the core point of science -- which is obtaining new and essential information and communicating it to others."
Russian scientists are bracing for painful isolation. An online petition by Russian scientists and scientific workers opposed to the war says it now has more than 8,000 signatories. They warn that by invading Ukraine, Russia has turned itself into a pariah state, which "means that we can't normally do our work as scientists, because conducting research is impossible without full-fledged cooperation with foreign colleagues."
The growing estrangement is being pushed by Russian authorities, too. An order from the Science Ministry suggested that scientists no longer need bother getting research published in scientific journals, saying they'll no longer be used as benchmarks for the quality for their work.
Lev Zelenyi, a leading physicist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow who was involved in the now-suspended collaboration on the ExoMars rover, described the situation as "tragic" and said by email to the AP that he and other Russian scientists must now "learn how to live and work in this new non-enabling environment."
On some major collaborations, the future isn't clear. Work continues on the 35-nation ITER fusion-energy project in southern France, with Russia still among seven founders sharing costs and results from the experiment.
ITER spokesman Laban Coblentz said the project remains "a deliberate attempt by countries with different ideologies to physically build something together." Among the essential components being supplied by Russia is a massive superconducting magnet awaiting testing in St. Petersburg before shipment -- due in several years.
Researchers hunting for elusive dark matter hope they'll not lose the more than 1,000 Russian scientists contributing to experiments at the European nuclear research organization CERN. Joachim Mnich, the director for research and computing, said punishment should be reserved for the Russian government, not Russian colleagues. CERN has already suspended Russia's observer status at the organization, but "we are not sending anyone home," Mnich told the AP.
In other fields as well, scientists say Russian expertise will be missed. Adrian Muxworthy, a professor at London's Imperial College, says that in his research of the Earth's magnetic field, Russian-made instruments "can do types of measurements that other commercial instruments made in the West can't do." Muxworthy is no longer expecting delivery from Russia of 250 million-year-old Siberian rocks that he had planned to study.
In Germany, atmospheric scientist Markus Rex said the year-long international mission he led into the Arctic in 2019-2020 would have been impossible without powerful Russian ships that bust through the ice to keep their research vessel supplied with food, fuel and other essentials. The Ukraine invasion is stopping this "very close collaboration," as well as future joint efforts to study the impact of climate change, he told the AP.
"It will hurt science. We are going to lose things," Rex said. "Just lay out a map and look at the Arctic. It is extremely difficult to do meaningful research in the Arctic if you ignore that big thing there that is Russia."
"It really is a nightmare because the Arctic is changing rapidly," he added. "It won't wait for us to solve all of our political conflicts or ambitions to just conquer other countries."
------
Frank Jordans in Berlin, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and other AP journalists contributed to this report.
A cyclist turned herself in and received a fine after striking a four-year-old girl who was crossing the street to catch a school bus.
Where you live plays a big factor in what you pay at the grocery store. And while it's no secret the same item may have a different price depending on the store, city or province, we wanted to see just how big the differences are, and why.
The Netherlands' contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest was dramatically expelled from competition hours before Saturday's final of the pan-continental pop competition, which has been rattled by protests over the participation of Israel.
Irresponsibly using a credit card can land you in financial trouble, but personal finance columnist Christopher Liew says when used properly, it can be a powerful wealth-building tool that can help grow your credit profile and create new opportunities.
A man who was accused of sexually and physically assaulting a woman had his charges dropped in April, just weeks before he was set to stand trial in Toronto, due to a lack of judges in the region.
For decades, North Bay, Ontario's water supply has harboured chemicals associated with liver and developmental issues, cancer and complications with pregnancy. It's far from the only city with that problem.
A protest encampment set up on the University of Alberta campus was cleared early Saturday morning by Edmonton police.
An evacuation alert was issued for two Wood Buffalo communities Friday night, as crews battled an out-of-control wildfire near Fort McMurray.
A man has been transported to hospital after police say he was stabbed in a random attack carried out by a group of teens in Toronto on Friday night.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.