Scientists studying dementia are learning more about what the various forms of this cognitive decline does to our brains. But there are precious few treatments that cure, reverse or delay this decline. However, a new study suggests a healthy diet can help. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

Scientists studying dementia are learning more about what the various forms of this cognitive decline does to our brains. But there are precious few treatments that cure, reverse or delay this decline. However, a new study suggests a healthy diet can help. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

To understand the significance of the so-called Monkey Trial, one must try to imagine the America of 1925; specifically, the southern state of Tennessee. 

Under pressure by a coalition of strict Christians, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to pass a law — the Butler Act — that deemed it illegal to “teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.”

The act alarmed many in the legal community, including the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which persuaded John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher and football coach from Illinois, to test the constitutionality of the law in what became known as “The Monkey Trial.” 

The trial also attracted intense media attention, including live radio broadcasts of the trial for the first time in history, according to an award-winning documentary by PBS’s American Experience on the trial.

Attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes; William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic conservative, represented both Tennessee and the fundamentalists who were deeply opposed to Charles Darwin’s theory.

“I knew, sooner or later, that someone would have to stand up to the stifling of freedom that the anti-evolution act represented,” Scopes wrote in his 1967 book Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes.

The trial ended on July 21 with a guilty verdict and $100 fine.

A year later, the ACLU issued its appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law, but overturned the conviction of Scopes on a legal technicality.

Decades later in 1967, Tennessee repealed the act and teachers were free to teach the theories of Darwin without breaking the law.
…

The U.N. says women’s and children’s health is improving faster than at any point in history. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on a massive program has saved countless lives and is gaining momentum.
…

They dove in, splashed around and blissfully floated in the murky river water.

 

Intrepid swimmers got a once-a-year chance to beat the summer heat with a dip in the once-notorious dirty water of Boston’s Charles River on Tuesday.

 

The annual “City Splash” is one of the few days a year the state permits public swimming on the city’s stretch of the 80-mile river, which gained notoriety in the Standells’ 1960s hit “Dirty Water.”

 

The event, now in its fifth year, spotlights the nonprofit Charles River Conservancy’s efforts to build a “swim park” — floating docks where swimmers can safely jump into the river without touching the hazardous bottom and where water quality would be regularly tested.

 

Nearly 300 people signed up to take the plunge.

 

“It felt refreshing and wonderful,” said Ira Hart, a Newton, Massachusetts, resident as he hopped out of the river, goggles in hand. “They used to talk about how it was toxic sludge and you’d glow if you came out of the Charles. Well I’m not glowing, at least not yet.”

Boston is among the cities hoping to follow the model of Copenhagen, Denmark, which opened the first of its floating harbor baths in the early 2000s. Paris opened public swimming areas in a once-polluted canal this week, and similar efforts are in the planning stages in New York, London, Berlin, Melbourne and elsewhere.

 

In Boston, the Charles River Conservancy still needs to raise several million dollars and garner approvals from state, federal and city agencies.

 

But S.J. Port, the group’s spokeswoman, said the biggest hurdle already has been overcome: The Charles is now among the cleanest urban rivers in the country.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this month the river earned a “B” grade for water quality last year, meaning it met the standards for boating 86 percent of the time and 55 percent of the time for swimming. That’s a marked improvement from the “D” the Charles was given in 1995, when cleanup started in earnest, but down from 2015’s “B+” grade.

 

Here’s a sampling of where other efforts to reclaim urban rivers for swimming stand:

 

Portland, Oregon

 

The city partnered with a local civic group to entice residents to take a dip in the Willamette River this summer.

 

They opened the first official public beach with lifeguards on the river earlier this month. They’ve also launched a public awareness campaign and scheduled a range of water-centered events.

 

Among them was last weekend’s Big Float inner tube river parade that drew about 2,500 revelers.

 

London

 

A group of architects, designers and engineers have proposed a series of pools in the middle of the iconic River Thames, where river water would be constantly filtered.

 

Chris Romer-Lee, a lead organizer of the Thames Baths project, said the group aims to submit plans to local authorities by early 2018.

 

The group launched an online crowd-funding campaign last year that raised about $182,000 to refine their design but are working to secure almost $19.6 million in outside investment for the project itself.

 

New York

 

Four local artists and architects launched the idea for +Pool , a floating, filtered pool in the shape of a plus sign in 2010.

 

Since then, they’ve successfully tested a filtration system that removes bacteria without using chemicals, said Kara Meyer, deputy director for the nonprofit effort.

 

She said organizers also have raised nearly $2 million to continue developing the project, are exploring potential sites on the East and Hudson rivers and are preparing to seek necessary city approvals.

 

Melbourne, Australia

 

The nonprofit Yarra Swim Co. unveiled its concept for a floating pool on the city’s Yarra River at Australia’s Venice Biennale Exhibition last year.

 

Michael O’Neill, the effort’s co-founder, said the company will be reaching out to community groups and government agencies starting next month to get their feedback on what the Yarra Pools project should offer and to promote its broader vision for use of the river.

 

Berlin

 

The long-gestating Flussbad project calls for cleaning up a canal off the German capital’s Spree River for public bathing.

 

Barbara Schindler, a spokeswoman for the effort, said the idea has been around since the 1990s, but has reached notable milestones in recent years.

 

She said the organization completed a water quality study in 2015 and has received $4.6 million in government funding to hopefully turn the concept into reality.
…

A pilot program that paid landowners in Uganda to not cut down trees was successful, according to researchers looking for ways to try to reduce carbon emissions.

The researchers used interviews, periodic inspections and satellite images to monitor forests around 121 villages over two years. In 60 villages, they offered landowners $28 every year for each hectare of forest they preserved.

Deforestation is responsible for about one-tenth of global carbon emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and leaving trees in place is one of the most cost-efficient options for capturing carbon. But it is hard to show it is effective.

“If you put up solar panels, you can say, ‘Ha! I put in those solar panels. Please give me my credits towards my target.’ If you slow deforestation … it’s harder to really know what impact you had,” co-author Seema Jayachandran, an economist at Northwestern University, told VOA.

Uganda deforestation

The study was conducted by researchers at Northwestern and a Dutch organization named Porticus. Uganda was an ideal location to attempt the program because between 2005-2010, the country had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with a 2.7 percent loss each year.

Researchers wanted to address concerns that payments wouldn’t actually reduce deforestation, either because participants in the program wouldn’t have harvested trees anyway, they would just harvest more from other unprotected forest or they would quickly harvest immediately after the end of the program.

The study, published in the journal Science, found that there was less than half as much deforestation around villages in the program than around the control villages. Researchers found that villages in the payment program had preserved 5.5 more hectares of forestland than other villages.

And after the program ended, there was not a rush to cut down trees, so the benefits of the program lasted.

However, because the study was small, relative to the size of the national timber and charcoal markets, researchers were not able to see its effect on those markets. Without that information, they were not able to demonstrate that reduced deforestation in the study region didn’t lead to increased deforestation elsewhere.

Reasons for deforestation

Jayachandran said a program like this would do best if it was paired with efforts to address the reasons for deforestation. These could be helping people in cities get stoves, so they aren’t cooking with charcoal, or teaching farmers how to grow more food in less space, so they don’t need to clear as much forest for crop land.

The researchers hope that governments trying to meet their carbon emission targets under the 2015 Paris Agreement will consider paying poorer countries to reduce deforestation. The Paris accord on climate change aims to keep average world temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

Program was popular

Jayachandran told VOA that humanity can’t afford to ignore any opportunity to reduce carbon emissions.

The program was administered by the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust. The Chimpanzee trust talked to participants about other ways to make a livelihood from the forest such as bee keeping or growing mushrooms, and about the benefits of preserving forest land.

Lilly Ajarova, executive director of the trust, said the program was very popular with participants.

“The challenge we have at this point is that there has been no continuity,” Ajarova said. The program will need to be more long term in order for it to have “real economic benefits, not just for the people involved but for the whole nation.”
…

European explorers had long speculated about the existence of an Arctic route that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and would avoid the long journey around South America’s Cape Horn.

For centuries, able seafarers failed to find the Northwest Passage, among them John Cabot, Henry Hudson, Francis Drake and James Cook.

Harsh weather, thick ice and treacherous shallows forced many expeditions to turn back. Those that didn’t ended in disaster, such as the expedition led by British naval officer John Franklin in 1845.

Franklin’s men perished from scurvy, starvation and apparent lead poisoning from food tins, with some resorting to cannibalism toward the end. The wrecks of their formidable ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were found in 2014 and 2016.

Rescue parties sent to find Franklin’s expedition made key discoveries about the passage’s maritime geography, eventually paving the way for the first successful transit.

In 1903, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and six other men set out in a tiny ship, the Gjoa. Sailing from east to west, they drew on the expertise of indigenous Inuit people to brave the dangerous conditions and reached Alaska in 1906.

The next recorded transit of the Northwest Passage, this time from west to east, was completed by the Canadian RCMP vessel St. Roch in 1942.

Over the years, there have been 410 recorded transits, mostly by Canadian icebreakers and small adventure yachts. The first cargo ship to achieve a transit was the SS Manhattan, a reinforced tanker accompanied by several icebreakers in 1969.

In 1984, the Lindblad Explorer became the first cruise ship to complete the passage, carrying 104 passengers on a trip from New York to the Japanese port of Yokohama. Thirty-two years later, the Crystal Serenity set a new record, carrying 1,100 cruise passengers through the passage at once.
…

Ancient civilizations plowed themselves into oblivion, and modern agriculture risks doing it again, geologist David Montgomery says.

In his new book, Montgomery says a growing number of farmers are using techniques that can save their farms from slow death by erosion.

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, Montgomery meets farmers who are building healthy soil and buffering themselves against climate change — and saving money while doing it — by practicing what is called conservation agriculture.

Experts worldwide are working to persuade farmers to reject thousands of years of agricultural tradition in order to save their soil.

Erosion of civilizations

Montgomery told VOA, while finishing his previous book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “It was very difficult to write the final chapter and not have it sound really depressing.”

Dirt describes how tillage, one of the oldest practices in agriculture, degraded farms and civilizations from Mesopotamia to 1930’s Dust Bowl America.

Farmers till the soil to control weeds and make planting easier, but exposed soil washes away in the rain and blows away in the wind, carrying with it the nutrients plants need to thrive.

And yet, most farmers worldwide still plow their soil and leave it bare in the off-season. Many plant the same crops over and over again. All three practices wear out the soil.

Growing a Revolution picks up where Dirt ends, with the promise of a relatively new kind of farming.

“Conservation agriculture flip[s] all three of those ideas on their head,” he said. “It’s a completely different philosophy to not till, to always have the ground covered with either a commercial crop or a cover crop, and to grow a much more diverse rotation.”

Trouble in tidy fields

Trey Hill of Maryland has not tilled his soybean field in years. The young crop peeks out from below waist-high brown stalks of what remains of last year’s cover crop, a mix of grains, legumes, radishes and more.

“If you don’t like your fields to look like a mess,” Hill said with a laugh, “it has to kind of grow on you.  Yet, I have a lot of other owners and peers that are, like, ‘Wow, what you’re doing is really exciting.'”

A short drive away, in a neighbor’s conventionally tilled field, soybeans grow in neat and tidy lines on a clean slate of bare earth.

University of Maryland soil scientist Ray Weil sees signs of trouble. The lower leaves of the soybean plants are splashed with mud from a rainstorm two nights earlier.

“When it rained, that soil went flying,” Weil said. “When the soil goes flying, it goes running down the slope. That’s the first step in soil erosion.”

Just a few millimeters below the surface, he finds soybean roots growing sideways, unable to penetrate a layer of hard earth packed down by the effects of tillage. If it turns dry later in the summer, he said, “they’re going to be crying uncle for water.”

‘Farming ugly’

“When no-till started, they called it ‘farming ugly,'” Weil said.

Hill’s “ugly” field is pretty on the inside. The roots of the cover crop he planted last year held onto the soil and its precious nutrients through the winter. Legumes added nitrogen, a key fertilizer. Earthworms feasting on the decomposing plants dig tunnels in the earth. Those pores soak up rainfall like a sponge, and they provide paths for the roots of Hill’s soybeans to grow through.

Cushioning against droughts and downpours, these soils help Hill through the weather extremes that are becoming more frequent with climate change.

And Hill is saving money. Less tilling means paying for less tractor fuel. He buys less fertilizer because his cover crops feed the soil.

“It all means more income to the farmer,” Hill said.

Profits for big and small farms

Conservation agriculture is also working on small farms in the developing world.

“What surprised me was how profitable these techniques can be in both settings,” Montgomery said.

Montgomery visited Ghana, where traditional slash-and-burn farming is degrading the soil, but conservation agriculture is turning fields into food forests. Farmers raised multiple crops on the same field, keeping the ground covered year ’round.

“You would have, say, an overstory of plantains and an understory of peppers and cassava,” he said.  “If I’d squinted and didn’t know better, I might have sworn I was in a jungle, but everything around me was food.”

The spread of conservation agriculture has been slow. The transition can take several years. Weeds can cut yields in that time. Equipment designed to work on bare earth may not operate on cover-cropped fields.

Developing world farmers, in particular, often remove the residues of one crop before planting the next, to feed livestock, thatch roofs, or use as cooking fuel.

“There’s lots of uses,” Weil said. “But the residues need to be left in the field, at least most of them, to feed the soil.”

“Lots of barriers to giving it a try,” he added. “But once you get going, it’s cheaper.”

Cheaper, soil-saving and climate-friendly, experts worldwide are helping farmers switch to conservation agriculture and consign the plow to the history books.
…

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports a survey of 11 countries finds evidence that HIV drug resistance is growing, posing a potential threat to the prevention and treatment of AIDS.

According to the WHO, 36.7 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. More than half that number are on life-saving antiretroviral therapy.

In what it calls a wake-up call, the WHO says more than 10 percent of people starting antiretroviral therapy in six of the 11 countries surveyed in Africa, Asia and Latin America were resistant to the drugs. It warns this potentially could undermine progress in controlling and reducing the spread of this disease.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of HIV cases and accounts for nearly two-thirds of the global total of new HIV infections; but, the WHO coordinator for HIV treatment and care, Meg Doherty, told VOA other parts of the world, especially eastern Europe and central Asia, have some of the highest incidences of drug resistance.

She added some of the higher incidences are in places with the lowest amount of antiretroviral coverage.

“So, we know in most of Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, that there is very good and the highest coverage of treatment. So, it is a good news story. But, once we have more people on therapy and more people who are potentially taking drugs that could alter the virus, the risk of this resistance can go up,” Doherty said.

The World Health Organization is issuing new guidelines to help countries address HIV drug resistance. It recommends countries monitor the quality of their treatment programs and as soon as resistance is detected, people should be switched to a different drug treatment regimen.

The U.N. agency warns increasing HIV drug resistance could lead to an additional 135,000 deaths and 105,000 new infections in the next five years if no action is taken.  It projects the cost of HIV treatment could increase by $650 million during this time.
…

Many people enjoy a cup of coffee, especially in the morning. Turns out, that is giving them a good start – not just to their day – but to their lives. A new study indicates that people who drink at least three cups of coffee each day appear to live longer than those who don’t. In the largest study on coffee drinking so far, scientists examined data from 500,000 healthy people over the age of 35 in 10 European countries. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
…

The achievement gap is defined as the persistently low scores disadvantaged children get on tests when compared to their middle and upper class peers. It has economic and racial components, and educators have been battling to solve the problem for decades. Some research done with low-income kids in India is providing some clues that may help close the gap. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

Australia is contributing funds to help Sri Lanka combat its worst outbreak of dengue fever, which has claimed 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people so far this year in the Indian Ocean island nation.

Visiting Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Wednesday night that Australia is giving $475,000 Australian (US $377,000) to the World Health Organization to implement immediate dengue prevention, management and eradication programs in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka’s hospitals are overcrowded with patients, and the government has deployed soldiers, police and health officials to inspect houses and clear rotting garbage, stagnant water pools and other potential mosquito-breeding grounds across the country. Health officials blamed the public for their failure to clear puddles and piles of trash after last month’s heavy monsoon rains.

The number of infections nationwide is 38 percent higher than last year, when 55,150 people were diagnosed with dengue and 97 died, according to the Health Ministry. Cases were concentrated around the main city of Colombo, though they were occurring across the tropical island nation.

Bishop is on a two-day visit and will meet Thursday with government leaders.

She said Australia is offering an additional $1 million (US $795,000) for a research partnership between Australia’s Monash University and Sri Lanka’s Health Ministry to test the introduction of naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to eradicate dengue fever from Sri Lanka.

She said the bacteria “prevent transmission of dengue virus between humans’’ and that it has shown success during the last six years in countries such as Brazil, Columbia, Australia, India, Vietnam and Indonesia where it was piloted.

The bacteria have the ability to block other mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and Chikungunya, the Australian embassy said in a statement.
…