The United States is on track to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw from the accord, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday.

Guterres said emissions-cutting plans put in motion by American businesses, regional governments and cities meant that the goals set by the former U.S. administration, which signed the deal in 2016 were within reach.

“We have seen in the cities, and we have seen in many states, a very strong commitment to the Paris agreement, to the extent that some indicators are moving even better than in the recent past,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.

“There are expectations that, independently of the position of the administration, the U.S. might be able to meet the commitments made in Paris as a country.”

Greenhouse gas emissions

Under the deal, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Nearly 200 countries and parties have signed the landmark agreement after intense negotiations in Paris, where all nations made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges running to 2030.

The agreement is aimed at limiting global warming to within two degrees Celsius, but Guterres warned that more action was needed by 2020 to reach that goal.

Withdrawal notice due in 2019

Trump faced condemnation when he announced in June 2017 that the United States was pulling out, painting the accord as a “bad deal” for the U.S. economy.

Under the agreement, the United States can formally give notice that it plans to withdraw in 2019, three years after the accord came into force, and the withdrawal would become effective in 2020.

Describing climate change as “the most systemic threat to humankind,” Guterres said recent data on extreme weather events showed that “2017 was filled with climate chaos.”

“2018 has already brought more of the same,” he said. “Food security, health, stability itself all hang in the balance.”

Guterres is planning to host a major summit next year to take stock of progress in implementing the climate deal, but it remains unlikely that Trump would attend.

Plan to loosen emissions, fuel standards

Though Guterres said the U.S. is on track to meet Paris climate agreement targets, the Trump administration still has the ability to change current regulations.

The New York Times reported Thursday, citing an Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman, that the White House was expected to push a plan to loosen standards on emissions and vehicle fuel economy standards, undercutting the previous administration’s bid to fight climate change.

Such a move would represent a win for automakers, potentially paving the way to lower the bar for standards globally.
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A Los Angeles judge Thursday ordered coffee companies to abide by California state law and put cancer warning labels on their products.

A nonprofit group called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics is suing such popular coffee roasters and retailers as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s. They say the companies fail to warn consumers that roasting coffee naturally produces a carcinogen called acrylamide.

In the first part of the three-phase trial, Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled the coffee companies failed to prove their assertion that there is no significant risk from acrylamide.

In Thursday’s ruling after the second phase, Berle said the companies failed to adequately show coffee is a healthy drink.

“Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving by a preponderance of evidence that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health,” he wrote.

An upcoming third phase would decide what civil penalties the coffee companies would have to pay.

Company officials have not yet responded to the judge’s ruling.

Acrylamide forms naturally when such foods as coffee, hot wheat cereals and potatoes are cooked or deep fried.

Most medical studies show no increased risk of cancer from eating such foods.

Some recent studies have shown possible benefits from drinking coffee, including protection against liver disease, some diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
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The search for worlds circling star  far beyond our solar system will intensify in the coming weeks with NASA’s launch of a spacecraft scientists hope will enlarge the known catalog of so-called exoplanets believed capable of supporting life.

NASA plans to send the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set for blast-off on April 16 on a two-year, $337-million mission.

The latest NASA astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years, revolutionizing one of the newest fields in space science.

NASA expects TESS to detect thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized — no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

One of a kind orbit

Such worlds are believed to stand the greatest chance of having rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the most promising candidates for the evolution of life, as opposed to gas giants similar to Jupiter or Neptune.

Astronomers said they hope to end up with about 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study.

The new probe will take about 60 days to attain its highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit that will loop TESS between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks.

Kepler’s positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, and though scientists found a way to keep it operational it has nearly run out of fuel.

“So it’s perfect timing that we’ll be launching TESS to continue the great activity of looking for planets around stars other than our sun and thinking about what it might mean for life in the universe,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington on Wednesday.

Size of refrigerator

TESS, roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings, is equipped with four special cameras to survey 200,000 stars that are relatively near the sun and thus among the brightest in the sky, seeking out those with planets of their own.

Like Kepler, TESS will use a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic, repetitive dips in the visible light from stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them.

But unlike Kepler, which fixed its glare on stars within a tiny fraction of the sky, TESS will scan the majority of the heavens for shorter periods and focus much of its attention on stars called red dwarfs, which are smaller, cooler and longer-lived than our sun.

One reason is red dwarfs have a high propensity for Earth-sized, presumably rocky planets, making them potentially fertile ground for closer examination, said David Latham, TESS science director for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Also because red dwarfs are so small, and their planets orbit more closely than the Earth does to the sun, the dip in light from a planetary transit of a red dwarf is more pronounced compared with a larger star, Latham said.

“It’s easier to find interesting planets around smaller stars,” he said.

Measuring dips in starlight can determine the exoplanet’s size and orbital path. Further observations from ground telescopes can supply its mass and ultimately the planet’s density and composition — whether largely solid, liquid or gas.

Earth-sized planets found

Martin Still, the TESS program scientist for NASA, said more than 50 rocky, Earth- or super-Earth-sized planets have previously been identified, and NASA expects to increase that number through the new mission.

The most favorable discoveries will undergo closer scrutiny by a new generation of larger, more powerful telescopes now under development that will search for telltale signs of water and “the kinds of gases in their atmospheres that on Earth are an indication of life,” Hertz said.

“TESS itself will not be able to find life beyond Earth, but TESS will help us figure out where to point our larger telescopes,” he said.
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A 48-foot section of an old sailing ship has washed ashore on a Florida beach, thrilling researchers who are rushing to study it before it’s reclaimed by the sea.

The Florida Times-Union reports the well-preserved section of a wooden ship’s hull washed ashore overnight Tuesday on Florida’s northeastern coast.

Researchers with the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum have been documenting the artifact and say it could date back as far as the 1700s.

Museum historian Brendan Burke told the newspaper that evidence suggests the vessel was once sheeted in copper, and that crews found Roman numerals carved on its wooden ribs.

Researchers rushed to photograph and measure the wreckage. The photos will be used to create a 3-D model.
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On a freezing January night, Bailey Henke, 18, of Grand Forks, N.D. died in yet another tragic case of opioid overdose in America. Authorities later traced the pill he swallowed to a fentanyl factory in China – one the world’s top sources of the illegal drug. VOA traveled to America’s Heartland to see how Henke’s family, friends and the community are grappling with the deadly fallout from the Chinese drug supply chain.
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The pursuit of happiness is among the unalienable rights listed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and so it is no wonder that the study of that elusive treasure makes for one of the most popular classes in the country. A record 1,200 students are attending a class that teaches students how to be happier at prestigious Yale University in the U.S. state of Connecticut. As VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, many more are enrolled in the Yale happiness course online.
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It’s a double cosmic conundrum: Lots of stuff that was already invisible has gone missing.

Astronomers have found a distant galaxy where there is no dark matter.

Dark matter is called “dark” because it can’t be seen. It is the mysterious and invisible skeleton of the universe that scientists figure makes up about 27 percent of the cosmos. Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars.

It’s supposed to be everywhere.

What you see is what you get

But Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues spied a vast, old galaxy with relatively few stars where what you see truly is what you get. The galaxy’s stars are speeding around with no apparent influence from dark matter, according to a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

Instead of shaking the very foundations of physics, scientists say this absence of dark matter may help prove the existence of, wait for it, dark matter.

“Not sure what to make of it, but it is definitely intriguing,” wrote Case Western Reserve astronomer Stacy McGaugh, who was not part of the study, in an email. “This is a weird galaxy.”

Van Dokkum studies diffuse galaxies, ones that cover enormous areas but have relatively few stars. To look for them he and colleagues built their own makeshift telescope out of 48 telephoto lenses that he first tested by using a toy flashlight to shine a light on a paper clip. The bug-eyed telescope, called Dragonfly, peers into the sky from New Mexico.

Using Dragonfly, van Dokkum and colleagues found a large, sparse galaxy called NGC1052-DF2 in the northern constellation Cetus, also known as the whale. It’s as big as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of its stars. Then they used larger telescopes on Hawaii and eventually the Hubble Space Telescope to study the galaxy.

Slow-moving stars

Even though the galaxy is mostly empty, they found clusters of densely grouped stars. With measurements from the telescopes, van Dokkum and colleagues calculated how fast those clusters moved. If there were a normal amount of dark matter those clusters would be speeding around at 67,000 mph (108,000 kilometers per hour). Instead, the clusters were moving at 18,000 mph (28,000 kilometers per hour). That’s about how fast they would move if there were no dark matter at all, van Dokkum said.

The team also calculated the total mass of the galaxy and found the stars account for everything, with little or no room left for dark matter.

“I find this unlikely in all possible contexts,” said McGaugh, who is a proponent of a “modified gravity” theory that excludes the existence of dark matter altogether. “That doesn’t make it wrong, just really weird.”

How could this absence of dark matter help prove that it exists? By potentially disproving modified gravity theories that suggest gravity acts in a way that the cosmos makes sense without dark matter. But those alternative theories require stars in this galaxy to zip at least twice as fast as they were seen moving in this study.

More dark matter, not none

Other outside scientists said the initial look at the calculations appear to be correct, though the results are confounding. A galaxy with so few stars should have more dark matter than others, not none.

“These are very strong scientists and so I take the results very seriously,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University.

One outsider suggested that perhaps the “galaxy” van Dokkum studied is so diffuse that it may not really be a galaxy. Another suggested that the dark matter might just be outside of the area that van Dokkum measured.

A true surprise

Van Dokkum dismissed both possibilities. 

“It’s sort of non-negotiable. There’s nothing else, just the stars,” he said. The only way this can be explained is if dark matter exists in the universe, just not in that galaxy, he said.

There’s no good explanation for why and how this galaxy has no dark matter, van Dokkum said. He proposed four different possibilities, all unproven. His favorite: That the galaxy formed in the very early universe in a way astronomers have never seen or understood.

“It’s not so often you get a true surprise,” van Dokkum said.
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Italian surgeon Marco Dolfin suffered a major setback in 2011 – one that completely changed his life. That was the year he was involved in a serious motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. But Dr. Dolfin never gave up. And he never lost hope that one day he would practice medicine again. As Iacopo Luzi reports, new technology has made his dream possible.
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The search for life’s sweetest but most elusive treasure — happiness — brings nearly 1,200 Yale University undergraduates twice a week into an

enormous hall on the Connecticut school’s campus for its most popular class ever.

“Psychology and the Good Life” is such a hit that one in four undergraduate students at the Ivy League university is enrolled in the spring semester course, said Laurie Santos, the psychology professor who teaches the class. It is the largest class enrollment size in the history of Yale, founded in 1701.

 What is the draw? Santos says it is the hope that science can help students find blissful relief from the misery that has reached at all-time high at colleges.

“Students report being more depressed than they have ever been in history at college, more anxious,” she said.

Social science has generated many new insights into what makes people happy and how they can achieve that, Santos said. “They really want to learn those insights in an empirical, science-driven way,” she said, referring to students enrolled in the course.

The third-oldest university in the United States, Yale boasts many famous alumni, including presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and actors Paul Newman and Meryl Streep.

Socialization, exercise, sleep

Santos said feelings of happiness are fostered through socialization, exercise, meditation and plenty of sleep. Money and possessions are often seen as goals in the game of life, but the route to happiness heads in a different direction, she said.

“Very happy people spend time with others, they prioritize time with their friends, time with their family, they even take time to talk to the barista,” Santos said.

She points to the psychological phenomenon of “mis-wanting,” which leads people to pursue the wrong goals in life.

“We work really hard to get a great salary or to buy this huge house,” she said. “Those things are not going to make us as happy as we think.”

Homework assignments for the class, also known as Psyc 157, include showing more gratitude, performing acts of kindness and bumping up social connections.

Because of overwhelming demand, the course is now being offered free to the public, through Coursera.org.

On campus, the class is already paying off for Yale senior Rebekah Siliezar, who described her previous mindset.

“What’s most pressing on our minds is grades, it’s the next job, it’s a potential salary after graduation,” said Siliezar, whose family lives in suburban Chicago. Now, she said, “I really try to focus on the present moment and the people around me.”
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Paro the furry seal cries softly while an elderly woman pets it. Pepper, a humanoid, waves while leading a group of senior citizens in exercises. The upright Tree guides a disabled man taking shaky steps, saying in a gentle feminine voice, “right, left, well done!”

Robots have the run of Tokyo’s Shin-tomi nursing home, which uses 20 different models to care for its residents. The Japanese government hopes it will be a model for harnessing the country’s robotics expertise to help cope with a swelling elderly population and dwindling workforce.

Allowing robots to help care for the elderly — a job typically seen as requiring a human touch — may be a jarring idea in the West. But many Japanese see them positively, largely because they are depicted in popular media as friendly and

helpful.

“These robots are wonderful,” said 84-year-old Kazuko Yamada after the exercise session with SoftBank Robotics Corp.’s Pepper, which can carry on scripted dialogues. “More people live alone these days, and a robot can be a conversation partner for them. It will make life more fun.”

Plenty of obstacles may hinder a rapid proliferation of elder care robots: high costs, safety issues and doubts about how useful — and user-friendly — they will be.

The Japanese government has been funding development of elder care robots to help fill a projected shortfall of 380,000 specialised workers by 2025.

Despite steps by Japan to allow foreign workers in for elder care, obstacles to employment in the sector, including exams in Japanese, remain. As of the end of 2017, only 18 foreigners held nursing care visas, a new category created in 2016.

But authorities and companies here are also eyeing a larger prize: a potentially lucrative export industry supplying robots to places such as Germany, China and Italy, which face similar demographic challenges now or in the near future.

“It’s an opportunity for us,” said Atsushi Yasuda, director of the robotic policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or METI. “Other countries will follow the same trend.”

More than 100 foreign groups have visited Shin-tomi the past year from countries including China, South Korea and the Netherlands.

A few products are trickling out as exports: Panasonic Corp has started shipping its robotic bed, which transforms into a wheelchair, to Taiwan. Paro is used as a “therapy animal” in about 400 Danish senior homes.

Still tiny

The global market for nursing care and disabled aid robots, made up of mostly Japanese manufacturers, is still tiny: just $19.2 million in 2016, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

But METI estimates the domestic industry alone will grow to 400 billion yen ($3.8 billion) by 2035, when a third of Japan’s population will be 65 or older.

“It’s potentially a huge market,” said George Leeson, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. “Everyone is waking up to their ageing populations. Clearly robotics is part of that package to address those needs.”

To nurture the industry, the government is using a two-pronged approach. METI is promoting development, providing 4.7 billion yen ($45 million) in subsidies since 2015.

The Labor Ministry is spearheading the spread of robots, and spent 5.2 billion yen ($50 million) to introduce them into 5,000 facilities nationwide in the year that ended last March.

There is no government data about how many care facilities use robots.

Government officials stress that robots will not replace human caregivers.

“They can assist with power, mobility and monitoring. They can’t replace humans, but they can save time and labor,” said METI’s Yasuda. “If workers have more time, they can do other tasks.”

That’s a robot?

Most of the devices look nothing like the popular image of a robot. By the government’s definition, each has three components — sensors, a processor and a motor or apparatus.

Panasonic used government aid to develop Resyone, a bed that splits in two, with one half transforming into a wheelchair.

Cyberdyne Inc’s HAL — short for Hybrid Assistive Limb — lumbar type is a powered back support that helps caregivers lift people.

Those needing walking rehabilitation can grab hold of Tree, made by unlisted Reif Co, which crawls along the ground, showing where to place the next step and offering balance support.

SoftBank’s Pepper is used in about 500 Japanese elder care homes for games, exercise routines and rudimentary conversations.

But some workers find Pepper difficult to set up, said Shohei Fujiwara, a manager at SoftBank Robotics, a unit of Internet conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. They’d like Pepper to respond to voice commands and move around independently – functions that SoftBank hopes to introduce this year, he said.

A costly solution

Cute, furry and responsive, Paro reacts to touch, speech and light by moving its head, blinking its eyes and playing recordings of Canadian harp seal cries.

“When I first petted it, it moved in such a cute way. It really seemed like it was alive,” giggled 79-year-old Saki Sakamoto, a Shin-tomi resident. “Once I touched it, I couldn’t let go.”

Paro took more than 10 years to develop and received about $20 million in government support, said its inventor, Takanori Shibata, chief research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. About 5,000 are in use globally, including 3,000 in Japan.

But Paro, like most robots, is expensive: 400,000 yen ($3,800) in Japan and about 5,000 euros in Europe. Panasonic’s Resyone bed costs 900,000 yen ($8,600) and Cyberdyne’s HAL lumbar exoskeleton costs 100,000 yen ($950) a month to rent.

Most facilities using them, including Shin-tomi, have relied on local and central government subsidies to help cover the costs. Individuals can also use nursing care insurance to help cover approved products, but those numbers are tiny.

And so far, the robots have not reduced Shin-tomi’s personnel costs or working hours.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” said Kimiya Ishikawa, president and CEO of Silverwing Social Welfare Corp, which runs Shin-tomi. “We brought them in mostly to improve the working environment, keep staffers from getting back injuries and make things safer.”

What they have done, he said, is boost the morale of both staff and residents.

“That’s brought a peace of mind among the staff and the residents feel supported,” he said.
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A nearly decade-long makeover of King Tut’s tomb aimed at preserving one of Egypt’s most important archaeological sites and also one of its most popular tourist attractions is close to complete, the Getty Conservation Institute of Los Angeles said Tuesday.

The project has added a filtration system to keep out dust, humidity and carbon dioxide and a barrier to keep visitors from continuing to damage the tomb’s elaborate wall paintings. Other amenities include walkways and a viewing platform. 

New lights are also scheduled to be installed in the fall in the tomb of Tutankhamun, the legendary boy king who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. His mummified body remains on display in an oxygen-free case.

The project was launched in 2009 by the Los Angeles institute, known worldwide for its conservation work, in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.

“This project greatly expanded our understanding of one of the best known and significant sites from antiquity, and the methodology used can serve as a model for similar sites,” Tim Whalen, the John E. and Louise Bryson director of the institute, said in a statement. 

Tutankhamun, just a child when he assumed the throne, was about 19 when he died. 

His tomb, discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, was hidden for millennia by flood debris that preserved it intact and protected it from tomb raiders. 

Over the years humidity and dust carried in by visitors have caused damage, as have some visitors who scratched the wall paintings.

“Humidity promotes microbiological growth and may also physically stress the wall paintings, while carbon dioxide creates an uncomfortable atmosphere for visitors themselves,” said Neville Agnew, the institute’s senior principal project specialist. 

He added: “But perhaps even more harmful has been the physical damage to the wall paintings. Careful examination showed an accumulation of scratches and abrasion in areas close to where visitors and film crews have access within the tomb’s tight space.”

Conservationists also studied mysterious brown spots on some of the paintings that have baffled experts for years. They concluded they were caused by microorganisms that have since died and are causing no further damage. 

They decided to leave the spots there because they have penetrated into the paint layers and removing them would cause more damage. 
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Scientists now have the dirt on the rubber ducky: Those cute yellow bath-time toys are — as some parents have long suspected — a haven for nasty bugs.

Swiss and American researchers counted the microbes swimming inside the toys and say the murky liquid released when ducks were squeezed contained “potentially pathogenic bacteria” in four out of the five toys studied.

The bacteria found included Legionella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that is “often implicated in hospital-acquired infections,” the authors said in a statement.

The study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, ETH Zurich and the University of Illinois was published Tuesday in the journal Biofilms and Microbiomes. It’s billed as one of the first in-depth scientific examinations of its kind.

They turned up a strikingly high volume — up to 75 million cells per square centimeter (0.15 square inch) — and variety of bacteria and fungus in the ducks.

Tap water doesn’t usually foster the growth of bacteria, the scientists said, but low-quality polymers in the plastic materials give them the nutrients they need. Bodily fluids — like urine and sweat — as well as contaminants and even soap in bathwater add microbes and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus and create balmy brine for bacteria.

“We’ve found very big differences between different bath animals,” said microbiologist and lead study author Lisa Neu, alluding to other types of bath toys — like rubber crocodiles — that also were examined. “One of the reasons was the material, because it releases carbon that can serve as food for the bacteria.”

While certain amounts of bacteria can help strengthen children’s immune systems, they can also lead to eye, ear and intestinal infections, the researchers said. Among the vulnerable users: Children “who may enjoy squirting water from bath toys into their faces,” a statement from the institute said.

The scientists, who received funding from the Swiss government as part of broader research into household objects, say using higher-quality polymers to make the ducks could prevent bacterial and fungal growth. The Swiss government isn’t making any recommendations at this stage.

Known for their squeaks and eulogized in a Sesame Street song on TV, rubber duckies have been a childhood bath-time staple for years. Online vendor Amazon.com lists one such offering — advertised as water-tight to prevent mildew — among the top 10 sellers in its Baby Bath Toys category.
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