Not counting certain types of skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women in the U.S. and worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Now researchers in Europe have come up with a robotic device that may speed detection of cancer tumors, potentially saving thousands of lives. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Astronomers and local residents gathered to gaze in awe at the longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century: 1 hour, 43 minutes. During eclipses, the moon turns a red or brownish color because the light that reaches it passes through the earth’s atmosphere. In Cairo, astronomers with their telescopes volunteered to wow stargazers
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How late is too late to become a mother? Actress Brigitte Nielsen has had her fifth child at 54, reopening debate on the growing number of women using IVF to have babies later in life.

Fertility experts say the average age of mothers is steadily rising across the world, with women increasingly turning to fertility treatments to extend their childbearing years.

Some have renewed calls for women to prioritize having children in their younger and more fertile years, but others said health providers needed to take into account the pressures that led women to put off starting a family.

“We should trust women to make this decision for themselves,” Katherine O’Brien, head of policy research at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), a charity.

“What we need is a health care service that supports their decisions rather than trying to cajole women into children at a time that’s not right for them,” she told Reuters.

Nielsen said she conceived using eggs she had frozen in her 40s, an increasingly popular choice among women seeking to extend their fertile years.

Given that the quantity and quality of eggs declines with age, most women trying to conceive in their mid-40s or above would be advised to consider using donor eggs taken from a younger woman.

A recent analysis of fertility treatments in 1,279 institutions across Europe found almost a third of births through egg donation in 2014 were to women aged 40 or older.

One Indian woman thought to be in her 70s gave birth last year using a donor egg, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, a case that promoted debate over the ethics of older women using treatment to conceive.

“There is a global trend for women choosing to have their children later in life,” said Richard Kennedy, the president of the International Federation of Fertility Societies.

“Certainly, in the UK and western Europe it’s personal choices: It’s lifestyle, it’s women pursuing their professions and [they] are making lifestyle choices to delay having families to until their late 30s or early 40s,” he said.

Kennedy said pregnancies of women in their 50s or older “is not something that should necessarily be encouraged,” citing the heightened risks of cardiac and other health problems during pregnancy.

“I think that women should be conscious of their fertility,” he added. “A woman should be encouraged to consider that when she is making decisions around her career and personal life.”

O’Brien, however, said much of the debate around fertility “just ignores the reality of women’s lives.”

She pointed to research by BPAS that found women were aware that fertility declined with age, but were often waiting to have children for practical reasons — such as concern over their financial stability or the impact on their careers.

“The fact that women are able to have children at that stage of their life should be celebrated,” she said. “All this finger-wagging is directed solely at women and that ignores that this is largely a decision taken by two people.”
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Skywatchers around much of the world are looking forward to a complete lunar eclipse that will be the longest this century.

The so-called “blood moon” Friday, when it turns a deep red, will be visible at different times in Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe and South America when the sun, Earth and moon line up perfectly, casting Earth’s shadow on the moon.

The total eclipse will last 1 hour and 43 minutes, with the entire event lasting closer to four hours.

In a special treat, Mars is in opposition on Friday — meaning the planet and the sun will be on exact opposite sides of the Earth and will shine its best. Mars is also at its closest approach to Earth this week since 2003, making it appear bigger and brighter.
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A Lebanese lawmaker has introduced a draft bill in parliament that would legalize the use of cannabis for medical purposes.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Antoine Habchi said he is proposing using the plant as alternative medicine to fight addiction and at the same time as a way to help Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley restore its economy and generate much needed income.

Habchi said that under the bill, cultivation would be tightly controlled.

However, it will likely take months of discussions before the draft bill would come to a vote.

Lebanon is the third largest cannabis producer in the world, after Morocco and Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.

Centered on the Bekaa Valley, known for narcotics production, Lebanon produces some of the finest quality cannabis, mostly processed into hashish.
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In Malawi, pregnant women and new mothers who live in remote villages are getting medical help thanks to a toll-free hotline and text messaging service known as “Chipatala cha pa Foni” or Heath Center by Phone. Run by the nonprofit VillageReach, the program connects expecting mothers in rural areas with health workers. More pregnant women are receiving prenatal care and birth planning thanks to the medical hotline, as Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Lilongwe.
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Rock Steady Boxing NOVA gym opened in McLean, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., last December. That was the good news for 75-year-old Neil Eisner, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years ago and finds boxing an effective way to fight back against the disease.

Rock Steady Boxing (RSB) was designed especially for people with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to tremors and balance problems. Each exercise in the program focuses on a specific skill — one is combining punches on a bag to work on strength, another is crawling across the floor. Eisner says the exercises help him perform everyday tasks like moving around and getting in and out of bed.

Some strengthening exercises target vocal cords. “One of the things that’s interesting enough is [Parkinson’s patients] tend to have a [softer] voice. When you have that lower voice, and people can’t hear you, you don’t realize. So, he asks us to bring our voice clearly and more loudly,” Eisner said.

​Becoming an RSB trainer

For personal trainer Alec Langstein, working with an older population is familiar. He understands their health issues and the need for them to stay active.

“My aunt has a gym in Westchester, New York, and she does a Rock Steady Boxing program there,” he said. “She invited me up to her gym to check out the program. She thought it would be a perfect fit for what I do. I helped out with a few classes, and it was just, I thought, an amazing program.”

The Rock Steady Boxing nonprofit was founded in 2006 by attorney Scott C. Newman, who was looking for ways to stay active after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 40. Since then, more than 500 boxing programs have been introduced in the U.S. and around the world.

Langstein went to the organization’s headquarters to become an RSB-licensed trainer, and a few months later, he opened his Rock Steady Boxing NOVA gym.

“It’s a typical boxing program,” he explained. “They focus on balance, hand-eye coordination, reaction, footwork. There is some cognitive stuff because in boxing, certain numbers equal certain punches. So, when I yell certain numbers, you have to move and react at the same time. So, the brain and the body are working together. It’s also taking out the aggression some people may have out of having the disease.”

​Improving quality of life

To understand how RSB can help Parkinson’s patients, physical therapist Danielle Sequira says it’s important to know what triggers the symptoms.

“Parkinson’s mainly affects the dopamine-producing cells in the brain. That leads to a lack or a loss of dopamine, which contributes to the movement difficulties,” she said.

While boxing and other exercises don’t cure the disease or stop the dopamine decline, they can improve the patient’s quality of life. Exercises can be modified for people with Parkinson’s, including those in wheelchairs.

“The research shows that exercise helps the brain use dopamine more efficiently,” Sequira said. “My goal usually, after I work with some of my patients with Parkinson’s, is to refer them out to get involved in an exercise program out in the community.”

​The social effect

RSB seems to have helped Victoria Hebert reduce the symptoms of her Parkinson’s. She has a tremor in her left hand, and says certain situations trigger it.

“Being cold, being hot, or sitting with a crowd I’m not very comfortable with, I can’t help starting to shake. I end up having to sit on my hand just to keep it still,” she said.

But with this crowd, Hebert doesn’t feel the need to hide the disease. “These people have become very close in the four or five months we’ve been together.”

“That’s the big part of it, sharing experiences with others,” she added. “I have to say, it’s very embarrassing, but over eight years of time I’ve never met another person with Parkinson’s. Then, I came here, and it was like a whole class of 20, 25 people with it. It was kind of surprising to me, kind of surprising that I, myself, didn’t reach out to anybody before that.”
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Rock Steady Boxing (RSB) is a fitness program designed for people with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to tremors and balance problems. The Rock Steady Boxing nonprofit was founded in 2006. Since then, more than 500 boxing programs have been introduced in the U.S. and around the world. Faiza Elmasry visited an RSB gym in McLean, Virginia. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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A consortium of astronomers said Thursday they had for the first time confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing the gravitational effects of a supermassive black hole on a star zipping by it.

The German-born theoretical physicist had posited that large gravitational forces could stretch light, much like the compression and stretching of sound waves we perceive with the change of pitch of a passing train.

Researchers from the GRAVITY consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics realized that they had a “perfect laboratory” to test Einstein’s theory with the Sagittarius A* black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

Black holes are so dense that their gravitational pull can trap even light, and the supermassive Sagittarius A* has mass four million times that of our sun, making it the biggest in our galaxy.

Astronomers followed the S2 star as it passed close to the black hole on May 19 at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) per hour.

They then calculated its velocity and position using a number of instruments and compared it with predictions made by Einstein that the light would be stretched by the gravity in an effect called gravitational redshift. Newtonian physics doesn’t allow for a redshift.

“The results are perfectly in line with the theory of general relativity” and are “a major breakthrough towards better understanding the effects of intense gravitational fields,” said the research team, whose findings are published in Friday’s issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This is the first time observers have been able to measure such an effect.

The European Southern Observatory, whose Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to make the observations, had watched S2 pass by Sagittarius A* in 2016 but the instruments it was using then were not sensitive enough to detect the gravitational redshift.

“More than 100 years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more — in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined,” said the ESO in a statement.

Astronomers already use another effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — that a black hole can bend passing light. Called gravitational lensing, researchers have used it to peer behind black holes.

Astronomers hope they can make practical use of the latest confirmation of Einstein’s theory to track shifts in S2’s trajectory due to gravity, which could yield information on mass distribution around the black hole.

“I am always blown away by Einstein’s predictions, by the power of his reasoning which yielded this theory and which has never been faulted,” French astrophysicist Guy Perrin, a member of the GRAVITY consortium, told AFP.

Partnering with the Max Planck Institute in the consortium were French research institute CNRS, the Paris Observatory and several French universities along with Portugal’s CENTRA astrophysics center.
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Pet owners are always happy to share a memory about the time their dog responded to their distress by coming to them or trying to get their attention. But those seemed to just be stories, until new research in the journal Learning & Behavior found that dogs really do feel empathy toward their owners.

According to Ripon College psychology professor Julia Meyers-Manor, the research was inspired by her earlier work on empathy in rats.

“One of the challenges we face when we’re trying to study empathy is that the idea behind empathy is you are recognizing the emotional states of another individual and responding to it,” she told VOA.

The problem is you can’t tell why a rat would help another rodent. For example, it might help to free a trapped friend because the other rat is stressed, or the first rat might be just lonely or bored.

“I can’t make rats have an emotional state” for an experiment, said Meyers-Manor, “but I can ask humans to adopt an emotional state.”

Human actors

To help researchers find out if dogs recognize and react to others’ feelings, they asked humans to mimic behaviors that reflect different feelings.

Her lead study author, Emily Sanford of Johns Hopkins University, added, “People tend to think that dogs really care about their emotions, but we were interested in seeing if there was any scientific evidence to back that up.”

The researchers tested dogs’ prosocial reaction, or their willingness to help another, in a simple door-opening task. The owner sat in a small room with a clear door that the pups could easily push open. The owner was instructed to either pretend to cry or hum a tune. The dog was released into the adjacent room and videotaped to see whether it would push open the door to check on its owner.

When the researchers looked at which condition led dogs to open the door, Meyers-Manor said, “we found it was about equal between the dogs in the distressed, the crying condition, and in the dogs in the humming condition.” In other words, most of the dogs often opened the door regardless of what their owner was doing.

The real difference between the crying and humming conditions was seen in the amount of time it took for the dogs to act. The dogs whose owners appeared to be crying were much faster to check on them than those whose owners were humming. The speed of the dogs’ response was also predicted based on their bond with their owners.

‘Impossible task’

“There’s some research that says that when dogs are faced with a task they can’t solve, that they will direct their attention more to an owner whom they have a close bond with,” said Meyers-Manor. So they gave the dogs what’s called “the impossible task,” which places them in a room with both their owner and a stranger. They are shown an inaccessible treat and the researchers then time how long the dogs looked at their owner for help compared with the time it took to turn to the stranger.

Sanford said this was where individual differences appeared among dogs in the crying condition. “We actually found that dogs that gazed at their owners longer during the impossible task were faster to open the door during the prosocial helping task.”

A second way to predict how quickly a dog would open the door, if at all, was based on stress levels. The researchers collected physiological data and watched the dogs for signs of stress during the main task. Dogs who showed lots of stress behaviors like whining or excessive panting were less likely to push open the door.

“The dogs who opened [the door] were actually the dogs who are the most calm and collected,” said Meyers-Manor. “The dogs who were more distressed shut down. They showed lots of distress behaviors, but they couldn’t seem to get past that distress to open the door.”

Therapy dogs

About half of the dogs in this experiment were nationally certified therapy dogs. Although there was some sense that these trained pooches might respond more quickly than their untrained counterparts, this wasn’t borne out in the data.

“So certainly if you ask the therapy dog owners, I’m sure they would say, yes, their dogs are more empathetic than the average. But that’s not what our research says,” Meyers-Manor said.

James Serpell, director of the Center for Interaction of Animals and Society, agreed that therapy dogs aren’t necessarily more empathetic. “They don’t necessarily need to be any more friendly or empathic than any pet dog,” he told VOA. “They just need to not be aggressive or react violently when someone drops a crutch or something next to them.”

Whether they’re certified or not, this research demonstrates that our dogs do recognize our emotional states and respond to them.

As Sanford put it, “Your pet dogs are part of your family and they do feel feelings towards you. And if you are talking to them, they might not necessarily understand all the words that you’re saying, but they certainly understand the emotions behind them.”
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Brazilian researchers are developing an innovative process using pineapples to speed the healing process for skin wounds. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Since 2011, a year when Kentucky was flooded with 371 million doses of opioid painkillers, state officials have cracked down on pain clinics, sued pharmaceutical companies and limited how many pills doctors can prescribe.

The result is nearly 100 million fewer opioid prescriptions in 2017 — and an 11.5 percent increase in drug overdose deaths.

That’s the sobering findings of a new report from the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy in a state on the front lines of the nation’s opioid epidemic. The report says 1,565 people died from drug overdoses in 2017, a 40 percent increase in the past five years.

Deaths attributed to prescription painkillers and heroin are declining. But other drugs have taken their place. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, accounted for more than half of all the deaths. And methamphetamine has made a comeback, accounting for 360 deaths. That’s a 57 percent increase in just one year.

“We are in a crisis state,” Republican Gov. Matt Bevin said. “While we are putting money at it and while we are drawing attention to it, until we start to truly address this and look at underlying causes of these things and what is leading to this it is not going to be addressed.”

​42,000 deaths in US in 2016 

Nationally, opioids accounted for more than 42,000 deaths in 2016. States with the highest rates of drug overdose deaths that year were West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Every year, Kentucky lawmakers have been passing more laws designed to address the opioid problem. They have increased penalties for heroin dealers. They have diverted more money to drug treatment programs. And they limited patients to a three-day supply of prescription painkillers unless a doctor gives them written permission for a larger amount.

State officials spent $500,000 to create 1-833-8KY-HELP, a hotline to connect people with treatment options. And they have spent thousands of dollars giving first responders naloxone, medicine that can reverse an opioid overdose.

Medicaid expansion helped

Anti-drug advocates celebrate those changes, but their celebration is tempered once a year when the new numbers come out detailing how many more people have died.

“Most of the things we do we realize are not going to take that immediate effect,” said Van Ingram, executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. “It just never gets any easier.”

Many anti-drug advocates have credited the Affordable Care Act with helping people get treatment. The law, known as Obamacare, expanded the Medicaid program to give more than 400,000 Kentuckians health coverage. Many used that coverage to get drug treatment.

Bevin wants to require people in Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid population to get a job, go to school or do volunteer work to keep their coverage. He also wants to charge them small monthly premiums to model private insurance plans.

Critics have said the result will be fewer people on Medicaid with fewer treatment options. But Bevin’s plan would exempt people with substance abuse disorder from complying with the new rules. Those rules were supposed to go into effect July 1, but were blocked by a federal judge.
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