By SETH BORENSTEIN

AP – An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth.

As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night.

People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don’t usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food.

When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.

“It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet,” says conservation scientist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. “This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be.”

Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, assembled scientists to assess the ecological changes happening with so much of humanity housebound. Scientists, stuck at home like the rest of us, say they are eager to explore unexpected changes in weeds, insects, weather patterns, noise and light pollution. Italy’s government is working on an ocean expedition to explore sea changes from the lack of people.

“In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth’s response is,” Field says.

Researchers are tracking dramatic drops in traditional air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, smog and tiny particles. These types of pollution kill up to 7 million people a year worldwide, according to Health Effects Institute president Dan Greenbaum.

The air from Boston to Washington is its cleanest since a NASA satellite started measuring nitrogen dioxide,in 2005, says NASA atmospheric scientist Barry Lefer. Largely caused by burning of fossil fuels, this pollution is short-lived, so the air gets cleaner quickly.

Compared to the previous five years, March air pollution is down 46% in Paris, 35% in Bengaluru, India, 38% in Sydney, 29% in Los Angeles, 26% in Rio de Janeiro and 9% in Durban, South Africa, NASA measurements show.

“We’re getting a glimpse of what might happen if we start switching to non-polluting cars,” Lefer says.

Cleaner air has been most noticeable in India and China. On April 3, residents of Jalandhar, a city in north India’s Punjab, woke up to a view not seen for decades: snow-capped Himalayan peaks more than 100 miles away.

Cleaner air means stronger lungs for asthmatics, especially children, says Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. And she notes early studies also link coronavirus severity to people with bad lungs and those in more polluted areas, though it’s too early to tell which factor is stronger.

The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.

Aerosol pollution, which doesn’t stay airborne long, is also dropping. But aerosols cool the planet so NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is investigating whether their falling levels may be warming local temperatures for now.

Stanford’s Field says he’s most intrigued by increased urban sightings of coyotes, pumas and other wildlife that are becoming video social media staples. Boar-like javelinas congregated outside of a Arizona shopping center. Even New York City birds seem hungrier and bolder.

In Adelaide, Australia, police shared a video of a kangaroo hopping around a mostly empty downtown, and a pack of jackals occupied an urban park in Tel Aviv, Israel.

We’re not being invaded. The wildlife has always been there, but many animals are shy, Duke’s Pimm says. They come out when humans stay home.

For sea turtles across the globe, humans have made it difficult to nest on sandy beaches. The turtles need to be undisturbed and emerging hatchlings get confused by beachfront lights, says David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy.

But with lights and people away, this year’s sea turtle nesting so far seems much better from India to Costa Rica to Florida, Godfrey says.

“There’s some silver lining for wildlife in what otherwise is a fairly catastrophic time for humans,” he says.

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Associated Press writer Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi contributed to this report.

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MATTHEW PERRONE

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. health regulators on Tuesday OK’d the first coronavirus test that allows people to collect their own sample at home, a new approach that could help expand testing options in most states.

The test from LabCorp will initially only be available to health care workers and first responders under a doctor’s orders. The sample will still have to be shipped for processing back to LabCorp, which operates diagnostic labs throughout the U.S.

Allowing people to self-swab at home would help reduce infection risks for front-line health care workers and help conserve protective gear.

For the home test, people are initially screened with an online questionnaire. If authorized by a physician, LabCorp will ship a testing kit to their home. The kit includes cotton swabs, a collection tube, an insulated pouch and box to ship the specimen back to LabCorp. To take a sample, a cotton swab is swirled in each nostril. The test results are posted online to a secure company website.

The company said it will make the test available in the coming weeks. Each kit will cost $119. The kits will not be available in Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. Those states have laws prohibiting testing with at-home kits.

Initially, the Food and Drug Administration required health care workers wearing masks, gloves and other protective gear to collect all samples from potential coronavirus patients, usually by sticking a long swab down the nose or throat.

More recently, the FDA has endorsed the self-swab method. LabCorp’s test is the first that allows it to be done at home without supervision.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement the agency authorized the self-swab test based on data showing it is “as safe and accurate as sample collection at a doctor’s office, hospital or other testing site.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MARTHA IRVINE and CHRISTINA LARSON

AP – Jamie Margolin had not expected to be sitting in her bedroom right now.

The high school senior had prom and graduation coming up, but so much more: A multi-state bus campaign with fellow climate activists. A tour for her new book. Attendance at one of the massive marches that had been planned this week for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Then the pandemic arrived in Seattle, her hometown, and her plans went out the window.

“But still so much to do,” Margolin said, perched in front of her computer for a video interview from that bedroom.

Like many other young activists who’ve helped galvanize what’s become a global climate movement, Margolin is not letting a spreading virus stop her. They are organizing in place, from the United States to Ecuador, Uganda, India and beyond.

And while some fear they’ve lost some momentum in the pandemic, they are determined to keep pushing — and for now, to use technology to their advantage.

Unable to gather en masse as they’d planned this Earth Day, these activists are planning livestreams and webinars to keep the issue of climate front and center on the world stage and in the U.S. presidential race.

One event, Earth Day Live, is being organized by a coalition of youth-led climate groups, including Zero Hour, of which Margolin is a leader (her Twitter profile includes the tag #futurepotus). As is the case with many other young climate activists, she got involved in the movement taking aim at the fossil fuel industry well before Sweden’s Greta Thunberg became a global household name.

Online organizing is not as easy in some countries. In Uganda, activist Mulindwa Moses says only about a third of the population has Wi-Fi. Also under lockdown, the 23-year-old graduate student is waiting for his chance to return to planting trees and speaking to his nation’s youth in person.

Like the original founders of Earth Day, he is among those who were first inspired by local issues — which they came to connect with global climate change.

While traveling in eastern Uganda, Moses met with families who had lost their homes in mudslides caused by torrential rainfall.

“I remember a girl I had a conversation with — she lost her parents and had to take care of her siblings. She was suffering so much,” he said.

So, last year, he began a campaign to encourage citizens to plant “two trees a week” and regrow their forests to combat deforestation and mudslides exacerbated by changing weather patterns.

In Ecuador, 18-year-old Helena Gualinga also has had to pause her world travels.

Born in Ecuador’s indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community — home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon — she says she learned from the example of her parents and her elders how to speak up for the rights of her people. Their fight has been against a government that they believe has given their land too freely to mining and oil companies.

“The energy I remember from my elders growing up” — at community meetings she attended with her parents when she was small — “was that my community was always very worried,” she said.

Now, she added, “I know I have a voice.”

Moses plans to run for his country’s parliament next year. “I want to fight to change the system from the inside,” he said.

So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin. While fighting the coronavirus has used up much of local government’s bandwidth, he still plans this fall to push the platform on which he ran – for his city to become fully sustainable by 2030. It is a lofty and some would say unattainable goal, but he is looking for “the impossible yes.”

“Obviously, I wanted the alarm sounded decades ago before I was even born,” the 18-year-old said. “But it’s too late for incremental change.”

Tia Nelson, daughter of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, said her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success.

Though the senator went to Washington in 1963, and won support from President Kennedy, his daughter said it took several years to find backing for many of his environmental causes. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, first envisioned as a nationwide “teach-in,” after reading a magazine article about college students’ impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Later that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.

“The climate youth movement today is having a significant and important impact in doing exactly what my father had hoped on the first Earth Day — that he would get a public demonstration sufficiently robust to shake the political establishment out of their lethargy,” Tia Nelson said. “The youth movement 50 years ago did that. The youth movement today around climate change is doing the same thing.”

Nelson, who is climate director at the Wisconsin-based Outrider Foundation, said she’s particularly excited at polls showing that many young Republicans care just as much about climate change as Democrats.

Peter Nicholson, who helps lead Foresight Prep, a summer environmental justice program at Chicago’s Loyola University, said the coronavirus crisis only highlights the message that “we are all connected.”

“Climate change is no less real,” he said. “The feedback loop is just much longer.”

So for now, Margolin and her peers will use their devices to help foster those connections — something their predecessors could not do remotely.

“Everyone is online anyway,” she said. “Maybe they start on Earth Day. But then with online resources, you click one link that leads you to another, leads to another that leads you to contact info.”

“And then you just start getting involved.”

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Other online Earth Day resources:

Smithsonian Earth Summit: https://earthoptimism.si.edu/2020-summit/

Earth Day 50: http://www.earthdayinitiative.org/

Earth Day for Earthrise: https://earthrise2020.org/

Citizens Climate Lobby virtual Earth Day: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/uniting-from-home-registration-101119077884

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Martha Irvine is an AP national writer and visual journalist. Christina Larson is an AP global science and environment writer.