A group of Pakistani engineering students has developed a voice-operated wheelchair to help those disabled achieve more self-reliance. The chair is getting some traction, as we see in this report from Saman Khan in Lahore, narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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Doctors in central Somalia say a 10-year-old girl has died after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM).

Director of Hanano hospital in Dhusamareb, Dr. Abdirahman Omar Hassan, who was on the response team who tried to save the girl, told VOA Somali that the victim bled to death after undergoing FGM.

Hassan said the girl was brought to the hospital on July 17. Her parents told doctors the procedure was performed two days earlier in the village of Olol, 40 kilometer north of Dhusamareb town.

“She was brought in during the early evening, we all rushed to the emergency [room] when we learned her situation,” Hassan told VOA Somali. “She died because she was losing lots of blood.”

Hassan said examinations show the girl contracted tetanus because the items used by the person who performed the procedure were not sterilized.

FGM involves removing part or all of the clitoris and labia for non-medical reasons, usually as a rite of passage. The World Health Organization (WHO) says cutting — often performed on girls 15 and younger — can result in bleeding, infection, problems with urination and complications with childbearing.

“They cut the clitoris, one side of the vulva was cut, the other side was wounded in three areas,” Hassan said. “I never saw anyone who was mutilated like that in my life.”

The girl’s father Dahir Nur said he was distraught but accepts that his daughter died due to the procedure and believes she was “taken by Allah”.

Despite losing his daughter he defended the practice.

“The people in the area are content with it [FGM], her mother consented to it,” he said, adding, “We have seen the effects but it’s a culture in the country we live in.”

Nur says he holds no one responsible for the death of his daughter.

News of the fatal procedure emerged as Somali activists and international partners are meeting in Mogadishu to discuss increasing campaigns against FGM.

Somali anti-FGM activist Ifrah Ahmed appealed to religious leaders to do more to convince the community to end the practice.

“The religious leaders can inform the community about what the religion says about FGM — that this is not religious, it’s a culture,” she said.

Somalia is in the top three countries in the world for FGM violations, according to the WHO .
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A report by UNAIDS, “Miles to go—closing gaps, breaking barriers, righting injustices”, warns that the global response to HIV is at a critical point.  Eastern and southern Africa remain the regions most affected by the HIV epidemic, accounting for 45 percent of the world’s HIV infections and 53 percent of people with HIV globally.

An estimated 800,000 people in eastern and southern Africa acquired HIV in 2017, and an estimated 380,000 people died of AIDS-related illness, the report indicated.

Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania accounted for more than half of the new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS-related illness in the region last year.

The survey also indicated that there was discrimination against HIV positive persons in healthcare settings, especially towards key populations.

Key populations include men who have sex with men, drugs users, transgender persons and sex workers, considered to be most at  risk at contracting HIV.

There are nearly 1 million sex workers estimated to need services in the region.

“For us it is important in fact we do have within NASCOP, a key population program, mainly targeting the key populations, the female sex workers, men who have sex with men and injecting drug users,” said Dr. Kigen Barmasai, the director at Kenya’s National Aids and STI Control Program, NASCOP “One, we know that this contributes to 33 percent of new infections in Kenya, from this key populations, of course the prevalence varies, we have prevalence from 29 percent in female sex workers to 18 percent among the injected drug users. So as a program we are working on this and we are spearheading the HIV prevention, treatment and care efforts to reverse the epidemic. For the last ten years we have been working on that.”

More than half of the people surveyed who inject drugs said they avoided health-care services, citing discrimination or fear of law enforcement authorities.

In Kenya homosexuality is illegal and being found guilty can lead to a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.  Sex work is also illegal in Kenya.

“The criminal nature of Key populations, and the acts of Key populations that make people shy away from accessing health care and even organizing, coming together so that they can organize,” said Grace Kamau, chairperson of the Key population consortium in Kenya. “The main thing is the criminal nature. People fear to be arrested”

The report said about two-thirds of all people living with HIV in the region were accessing antiretroviral therapy in 2017.

Kamau attributes the successes in reaching large numbers of Key populations in Kenya to availability of HIV resources made possible by donor funding, but she says more people are yet to be reached.

“One of the things we have in Kenya is private clinics that are donor funded,” said Kamau. “That is where the sex workers feel comfortable and that is where they access their services. And that is what has made the number to go high.”

The report indicates that there were 19.6 million people living with HIV in eastern and southern Africa at the end of 2017.

Out of this number 81% were aware of their HIV status, an increase from 77% in 2016.

West and central Africa continues to lag behind as statistics indicated AIDS-related deaths have fallen by only 24% in western and central Africa, compared to a 42% decline in eastern and southern Africa.

Nigeria has more than half of the HIV burden in the region and there has been little progress in reducing new HIV infections there in recent years.

 
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A cholera outbreak in Cameroon has claimed at least a dozen lives. Hundreds of people have been rushed to several hospitals in the central African state. It is feared some of the cases were imported from Nigeria and may contaminate refugees fleeing the Boko Haram insurgency. 

Arabo Saidou, the highest government official in charge of health in Cameroon’s north region says the first cases of cholera were reported along Cameroon’s border with Nigeria two months ago.

He says the disease has continued to spread since four cases of cholera were recorded in the northern Cameroon town of Mayo Oulo that borders Nigeria on May 18. He says many people, especially children, have been dying both in and out of hospitals.

In May, the Word Health Organization reported that Nigeria’s Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states had been experiencing recurrent cholera outbreaks since February, with a total of 1,664 suspected cases and 31 deaths.

Many people from the three Nigerian states travel to Cameroon for business. At least a hundred thousand are in Cameroon as refugees fleeing the Boko Haram insurgency, with over 90,000 at the Minawao refugee camp.

Issac Bayoro, a Cameroonian epidemiologist working in the Mokolo administrative area where the Minawao refugee camp is located says they are educating refugees to respect hygiene norms and are also screening Nigerians coming to the camp in a bid to protect not only the refugees but their host communities.

He says many people continue to defecate in the open air or in streams and river beds where both humans and animals go to find water to drink thereby facilitating the spread of cholera. He says hygiene is not respected as many people do not wash their hands with soap as advised. He says people should stop trusting the belief that an African is naturally vaccinated and can not die of dirt.

Cameroon’s ministry of health indicated that the disease quickly spread to Yaounde and Douala, major cities in the central African state. The case reported in Yaounde was of a teenager who travelled to Yaounde from northern Cameroon with his mother. He latter died in a hospital according to the government.

Thomas Tawe, a university student and resident of Yaounde says he fears cholera may spread rapidly in the city because just 30 percent of the population has access to good drinking water.

“In the city of Yaounde only those who can pay can have water. When you go into the quarters (neighbourhoods) you see that people are carrying water from inhygienic sources,” said Tawe. “If the water is contaminated, automatically we will be contaminated.”
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A specially-outfitted bathroom in New York City has been converted into a safe haven for drug users. The goal: to curb an overdose crisis that’s sweeping the United States. New data shows drug overdoses killed 47,000 people nationwide in the 12 month period that ended in November 2017. Aside from preventing such deaths, studies show facilities like the one in New York can also reduce HIV infections and emergency calls about overdoses. But the program has its critics. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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U.S. regulators Friday approved a simpler, one-dose treatment to prevent relapses of malaria.

Standard treatment now takes two weeks and studies show many patients don’t finish taking every dose.

Malaria is caused by parasites that are spread to people through mosquito bites. Anti-malarial drugs can cure the initial infection, but parasites can get into the liver, hide in a dormant form and cause recurrences months or years later. A second drug is used to stop relapses.

The new drug, GlaxoSmithKline’s Krintafel, only targets the kind of malaria that mainly occurs in South America and Southeast Asia. Most malaria cases and deaths are in Africa, and they involve another species.

In testing, one dose of Krintafel worked about the same as two weeks of the standard treatment, preventing relapses in about three-quarters of patients in six months, the company said.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug for patients 16 and older, according to GlaxoSmithKline. The company said it’s the first new treatment in six decades for preventing relapses.

GlaxoSmithKline plans to apply soon for approval in Brazil, then other countries where the malaria type is common. It says it will sell the pills at low cost in poor countries.

Millions infected worldwide

Worldwide, malaria infects more than 200 million people a year and kills about half a million, most of them children in Africa. It causes fever, headache, chills and other flulike symptoms. The malaria type Krintafel targets causes about 8.5 million infections annually.

The British drugmaker, working with the World Health Organization, is also developing what could be the world’s first malaria vaccine, but early testing indicates it’s not very effective. Prevention now focuses on using insecticides and bed nets.
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A federal appeals court on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s renewed bid to dismiss a lawsuit by young activists who say it is ignoring the perils of climate change.

By a 3-0 vote, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the government fell short of the “high bar” needed to dismiss the Oregon case, originally brought in 2015 against the administration of President Barack Obama.

Twenty-one children and young adults accused federal officials and oil industry executives of violating their due process rights by knowing for decades that carbon pollution poisons the environment but doing nothing about it.

The government contended that letting the case proceed would be too burdensome, unconstitutionally pit the courts against the executive branch, and require improper “agency decision-making” by forcing officials to answer questions about climate change.

But the appeals court said the issues raised “are better addressed through the ordinary course of litigation.”

An earlier government bid to end the case failed in March.

The activists, whose ages range from preteen to the early 20s, are seeking various environmental remedies. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 29 in the federal court in Eugene, Oregon.

Representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for the activists did not immediately respond to similar requests.

The case is U.S. et al v U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, Eugene, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. No. 18-71928.
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Admirers of Neil Armstrong and space exploration have a chance to own artifacts and mementos that belonged to the modest man who became a global hero by becoming the first human to walk on the moon.

The personal collection of Armstrong, who died in his native Ohio in 2012, will be offered for sale in a series of auctions handled by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, beginning November 1-2 and continuing in May and November 2019.

The collection includes a variety of artifacts from Armstrong’s 1969 lunar landing and private mementos that include pieces of a wing and propeller from the 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer that the astronaut took with him to the moon.

Other items that went to the moon with Armstrong include a U.S. flag, the largest size typically flown during Apollo missions; a United Nations flag; various state flags; and some Robbins Medallions. The sterling silver medallions were paid for by the crews of Apollo missions and were available for purchase only by NASA astronauts. Armstrong’s collection also includes a rare gold medallion.

Among the more personal items to be auctioned are a Purdue University centennial flag from Armstrong’s alma mater that traveled on Apollo 11 and his Boy Scout cap.

Armstrong’s son, Mark Armstrong, said his father never talked to him about what he wanted done with the large amount of items he kept.

“I don’t think he spent much time thinking about it,” Armstrong said. “He did save all the items, so he obviously felt they were worth saving.”

Armstrong, who lives in suburban Cincinnati, said his father did keep all of his “flown” items together.

Faced with the responsibility of conserving, preserving and insuring irreplaceable items and honoring their father’s legacy, Armstrong and his brother, Rick, found that some things needed restoration, and that some required research to be properly identified.

“We felt like the number of people that could help us identify them and give us the historical context was diminishing and that the problem of understanding that context would only get worse over time,” he said.

The Armstrongs turned to Sarasota, Florida-based Collectibles Authentication Guaranty for help with preserving and authenticating the artifacts and memorabilia and chose Heritage Auctions for the sales.

Greg Rohan, president of Heritage Auctions, said it handles numerous categories of collectibles that appeal to various collectors, but items connected with space seem to have a universal appeal.

“Space is one of the very, very few categories that every single person seems to be interested in,” Rohan said. “You show somebody something from the space program, and they are fascinated by it.”

Bids can be taken online, by phone or in person.
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Doctors have been working for decades to find better ways to save people’s damaged or diseased arms and legs and avoid amputations.

Their work paid off for Jeff Bopp, a passenger in a sport utility vehicle near Columbia, Missouri. The Columbia Missourian, a community news organization, reported that the day had been going well for the 47-year-old Bopp.

“We were leading a group of about 10 ATVs [all terrain vehicles] down a wooded trail,” Bopp was quoted as saying, “When we got to the end, the person driving our vehicle turned the wheel very sharply, and I saw his foot mashed on the accelerator. I knew it wasn’t going to be good.”

“The driver thought he was going to whip the back end around, show off maybe a little bit or whatever, but it happened so fast,” Bopp said.

The vehicle flipped, and Bopp’s arm snapped — the muscle and skin torn away. He was flown to the University of Missouri Health Care’s Trauma Center.

“The way they described it in the medical reports, it was a near-field amputation,” Bopp said.

Dr. Jay Bridgeman, a limb reconstruction specialist, met Bopp in the emergency room.

“We were concerned we may not be able to save his arm,” Bridgeman said.

At a trauma center, there’s a team of specialists who could include plastic surgeons, micro surgeons, vascular specialists and more.

Bridgeman said the surgeons took a muscle from Bopp’s back and laid it over the areas that had lost tissue. “And, then, that required the skill of the micro surgeon to sew the blood vessels together and the nerves together.”

With a high-powered microscope, Bridgeman connected the blood vessels of the piece of back muscle with the remaining muscles in Bopp’s arm. The transplanted tissue is now part of his arm.

Bopp had more than a dozen surgeries to finish the job, but he has sensation, he can feel objects and use his hand.

Limb preservation teams are getting better at these procedures, according to Dr. Lee Kirksey,

At the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Lee Kirksey says at least 80 percent of patients who need this surgery have diabetes.

“About one third of diabetics at some point will develop an ulcer when they’re on their feet. And so where I see this area of limb salvage progressing is that we’ll become better and more skilled, and have more technology, for restoring blood flow for these patients.”

Kirksey is vascular surgeon and vice chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s department of vascular surgery.

When his team can’t save a limb, he says the focus shifts to amputating the limb so the patient can use a well-fitting prosthetic, “and then they’re wildly surprised about how they’re able to achieve a normal activity level in their life.”
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If there can be driverless cars on the road, why not driverless boats on the water? Faith Lapidus has details of a team building a robotic boat, and what they want it to do.
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For more than 30 years, doctors have worked to save people’s arms and legs. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, saving a limb after an accident or infection can take an entire team of specialists at a limb preservation center.
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Massive fruit trees in the Thailand evergreen forest need massive herbivores to help spread their seeds, according to a new study.

Based on the diets and habits of mammals, scientists found that elephants are the best allies for the Thai Annonaceae tree to spread its seeds.

In the diverse environment of Khao Yai National Park, there is a complex set of relationships between the plants and animals. Not every species of fruiting tree is an attractive meal to all herbivores. A team of researchers, led by Kim McConkey from the University of Nottingham, set out to study one particular tree, the Platymitra macrocarpa from the family of custard apple trees.

The p. macrocarpa produces 3-to-5-inch fruit that are ripe from May through August. McConkey tracked how often animals visited the trees and ate the fruit, including elephants, bears, monkeys, gibbons and Sambar deer. They measured the animals’ fruit consumption as well as the ensuing seed dispersal and seed viability.

Researchers found the seeds in the dung of some species while others like the Sambar deer regurgitated the large seeds. When asked about tracking animal poop, McConkey admitted, “I’ve got two boys so they just love what I do.”

As expected, the Asian elephants were the major seed dispersers for the p. macrocarpa. Elephants aren’t often seen in the area of the trees McConkey studied, but as she told VOA, “I thought if I’m going to see them feed on any fruit, it’s going to be this one.” Her hunch was borne out in the data, with elephants consuming only 3 percent of the fruit but producing 37 percent of the viable seedlings.

These findings regarding the Asian elephants point to the important role they play in the ecosystem. Jedediah Brodie, chair of conservation in the Wildlife Biology Program at the University of Montana, told VOA that “overhunting in the tropics often drives large animals locally extinct but leaves smaller species like rodents. And this study shows that those smaller animals just are not able to replicate the ecological role of the larger species.”

When looking at the performance of other species, the researchers were surprised by how effective Sambar deer were at dispersing seeds. “Sambar deer generally have quite a bad rap in these forests,” McConkey said. “People think they’re seed predators, but it turns out they actually do disperse a lot of seeds.” While the Sambar deer weren’t quite as effective seed dispersers as gibbons (21 percent), they still produced a respectable 17 percent.

Bruchid beetles were the primary challenge to producing viable seedlings. The beetles, which are known to infest all kinds of seeds and beans, spoiled most of the seeds left exposed on the forest floor. Unlike the regurgitated seeds of the sambar deer, the seeds went through the elephants’ digestive system and were covered by excrement. The seeds were protected from beetles and provided with an effective, natural fertilizer and were able to survive and grow into seedlings.

It is easy to think of animals adapting to their environment through evolution and behavioral change, but we rarely consider the same relationship in the opposite direction. The massive Platymitra macrocarpa has perhaps evolved to provide fruit that appeals to more than one frugivore.

As McConkey told VOA, “The husk of the fruit — it’s like the outer covering of the fruit — has become very thick, and it’s that outer covering that deer eat. But if you open up the fruit, each seed is covered by this juicy, soft pulp, and it’s that that the monkeys and gibbons like.” She thinks that this might be a case where the tree evolved to appeal to multiple animal species to increase the chance of spreading viable seeds.

Despite the variety of animals eating the seeds, elephants are still the tree’s best chance of producing viable seedlings. When asked what might happen if elephants were to disappear from the region, Brodie responded, “That’s the million-dollar question.”

This research is published in PLOS ONE.
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Japan on Wednesday approved its first national legislation banning smoking inside public facilities, but the watered-down measure excludes many restaurants and bars and is seen by critics as toothless.

The legislation aims to lower secondhand smoking risks ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics amid international calls for a smoke-free event. But ruling party lawmakers with strong ties to the tobacco and restaurant industries opted for a weakened version.

The upper house approved and enacted the bill into law Wednesday after it was approved earlier by the lower house.

Last month, Tokyo separately enacted a stricter ordinance banning smoking at all eateries that have employees, to protect them from secondhand smoke. The ordinance will cover about 84 percent of Tokyo restaurants and bars.

But the law still allows many exceptions and the Tokyo Games may not be fully smoke-free.

Japan often has been called a smokers’ paradise. Until now it has had no binding law controlling secondhand smoke and ranked among the least protected countries by the World Health Organization. That has brought pressure from international Olympic officials. 

The new national law bans indoor smoking at schools, hospitals and government offices. Smoking will be allowed at existing small eateries, including those with less than 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) of customer space, which includes more than half of Japanese establishments. Larger and new eateries must limit smoking to designated rooms.

Violators can face fines of up to 300,000 yen ($2,700) for smokers and up to 500,000 yen ($4,500) for facility managers.

The law will be implemented in phases through April 2020. 

​’Too lenient’

The law allowing smoking at more than half of Japan’s restaurants as exceptions is inadequate, said Hiroyasu Muramatsu, a doctor serving on Tokyo’s anti-smoking committee. “The law is too lenient compared to international standards,” he told Japan’s NHK public television. “We need a full smoking ban.”

The health ministry’s initial draft bill called for stricter measures but faced opposition from lawmakers sympathetic to the restaurant industry. The government also was viewed as opposed to harsher measures because the former monopoly Japan Tobacco is still partly state-owned.

In Japan, almost a fifth of adults still smoke. The rate for men in their 30s to 50s is nearly twice as high, according to a government survey last year.

Most office workers now light up only in smoking rooms or outdoors, and cities are gradually imposing limits on outdoor smoking in public areas. But most restaurants and bars in Japan allow smoking, making them the most common public source of secondhand smoke. 

“Secondhand smoking has been largely considered an issue of the manners, but it’s not,” Kazuo Hasegawa, 47, a nonsmoker who has developed lung cancer, told NHK. “It’s about health hazards. It harms people. And I don’t want younger generations to have to suffer like me.”

In Japan, about 15,000 people, mainly women and children, die annually as a result of secondhand smoke, according to government and WHO estimates. 

 
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The world is close to eliminating the threat from polio, but to eradicate the disease, it must be eliminated everywhere. Health officials say that’s the tricky part, because if the virus responsible for the crippling disease exists anywhere, it can still spread worldwide. Sadie Witkowski reports on the challenges that face polio eradication efforts.
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The move to end polio started in 1985 with Rotary International. At that time, polio paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children every year. There is still no cure, but two scientists developed vaccines against the virus in the 1950’s. 

Dr. Jonas Salk produced one with an inactivated virus that could protect against polio without spreading the disease. Later, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine with weakened strains of the virus. 

In 1988, public and private groups joined the effort in the Global Polio Eradication Program. Members included governments, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Since then, the number of polio cases has dropped by 99.9 percent. Last year, 22 children were crippled by this disease. The wild polio virus exists in only three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, but it’s still a global threat.

Dr. John Vertefeuille, from the CDC said, “This last mile is a complicated mile.” It’s not just because of conflict or terrorism. “It’s extreme remoteness. It’s very fragile health systems.” And in these remote conflict prone areas gaining access to children can be a major problem. 

If polio exists anywhere, it can once again spread everywhere. 

Vertefeuille and other experts discussed strategies to realize a polio-free world July 10 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

Widespread unrest in Afghanistan has kept thousands of children from receiving polio vaccines this year. Conflict in northern Nigeria does the same. 

What’s more, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan stretches for more than 2,000 kilometers. Thousands of people who cross this very porous border can easily transmit the virus in both countries.

While the funding and technical support has to come from large, private-public partnerships, immunization teams succeed best if they are local. Approaches have to take culture and customs into consideration. 

In many places the vaccinators are women because women can go into the homes, talk to other women and gain access to the children. 

Elsewhere, soldiers vaccinate children when they take over an area run by anti-government forces. Vaccination teams have to be prepared to move quickly when there is a lull in the fighting and to deliver multiple doses of vaccine in a short period of time.

Surveillance is just as critical. To end polio, you have to know where the outbreaks are. Community volunteers are a great resource. Some get cell phones so they can alert health officials if a child becomes paralyzed. 

Another challenge is getting children in migrant groups vaccinated. Vertefeuille says this is where technology helps. The CDC uses satellites to see where people have moved and what areas are abandoned. Clues are where structures have been repaired, where the grass grows on roads, indicating abandoned areas, and where it doesn’t, indicating where people are living. 

Dr. Andrew Etsana from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said these groups present a particular challenge because “you have people moving with a virus and it is difficult to track them and vaccinate the vulnerable children in this mobile population.”

Another issue is the nature of viruses themselves. Viruses mutate. So far, the polio vaccines have been effective, but if not enough children get vaccinated, the virus can change, and perhaps make the vaccine less effective. That’s why every child needs to be vaccinated. 

Outbreaks that can be avoided by vaccinating the whole population so that there are no gaps for the mutated virus to slip through. 

International experts are working with local leaders to close this gap. 

Another issue is complacency. Etsana said, “People are getting tired. The program has been going on. They thought it would have ended.” 

Rotary has pledged to continue its support, other groups as well. International support and funding is critical to ending polio, but after three decades, many people have never seen polio. Etsana says he sees complacency creeping into all areas of the program. “The funders of the program are also getting tired. The fund is drying up and if the fund dries up and the job is not done, we’re going to have a major problem. We may have reinfection.” 

But, if people recognize the program’s value – it has united communities, established vaccine centers, created partnerships never before imagined – the world can not only end polio, but tackle other diseases as well. The polio program is widely credited with stopping the spread of Ebola in Nigeria while the disease ravaged other west African countries.

 
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The fossilized skeleton of a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur will be on exhibit next year in the new fossil hall at the Museum of Natural History in Washington. Excavated in Montana, it is one of the largest and most complete T-rex skeletons ever discovered. The dinosaur, called the Nation’s T-rex, will become part of a larger showcase that explores billions of years of life on earth. VOAs Deborah Block takes us on a sneak peak.
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Astronomers are still finding moons at Jupiter, 400 years after Galileo used his spyglass to spot the first ones.

The latest discovery of a dozen small moons brings the total to 79, the most of any planet in our solar system.

Scientists were looking for objects on the fringes of the solar system last year when they pointed their telescopes close to Jupiter’s backyard, according to Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington. They saw a new group of objects moving around the giant gas planet but didn’t know whether they were moons or asteroids passing near Jupiter.

“There was no eureka moment,” said Sheppard, who led the team of astronomers. “It took a year to figure out what these objects were.”

They all turned out to be moons of Jupiter. The confirmation of 10 was announced Tuesday. Two were confirmed earlier.

The moons had not been spotted before because they are tiny. They are about one to two kilometers across, said astronomer Gareth Williams of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

And he thinks Jupiter might have even more moons just as small waiting to be found.

“We just haven’t observed them enough,” said Williams, who helped confirm the moons’ orbits.

The team is calling one of the new moons an “oddball” because of its unusual orbit. Sheppard’s girlfriend came up with a name for it: Valetudo, the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter.

Valetudo is in Jupiter’s distant, outer swarm of moons that circles in the opposite direction of the planet’s rotation. Yet it’s orbiting in the same direction as the planet, against the swarm’s traffic.

“This moon is going down the highway the wrong way,” Sheppard said.

 Scientists believe moons like Valetudo and its siblings appeared soon after Jupiter formed. The planet must have acted like a vacuum, sucking up all the material that was around it. Some of that debris was captured as moons.

“What astonishes me about these moons is that they’re the remnants of what the planet formed from,” he said.

Telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona were used for the latest discovery and confirmation.

Galileo detected Jupiter’s four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, in 1610. The latest count of 79 known moons includes eight that have not been seen for several years. Saturn is next with 61, followed by Uranus with 27 and Neptune with 14. Mars has two, Earth has one and Mercury and Venus have none. 
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Democratic lawmakers joined scores of scientists, health providers, environmental officials and activists Tuesday in denouncing an industry-backed proposal that could limit dramatically the scientific studies the Environmental Protection Agency considers in shaping protections for human health.

If adopted by the Trump administration, the rule would allow an EPA administrator to reject study results in making decisions about chemicals, pollutants and other health risks if underlying research data is not made public because of patient privacy concerns or other issues.

Opponents said the move would throw out the kind of public-health studies that underlie enforcement of the Clean Air Act and other landmark environmental controls, since the studies drew on confidential health data from thousands of individuals.

Democratic Rep. Paul Tonko of New York said the proposed rule was “a thinly veiled campaign to limit research … that supports critical regulatory action.”

The rule was proposed by then-Administrator Scott Pruitt before his resignation earlier this month amid mounting ethics scandals.

At the public hearing Tuesday, opponents outnumbered supporters.

It “enables the public to more meaningfully comment on the science” behind environmental regulation, said Joseph Stanko, a representative of industry trade groups and companies affected by what he said were increasingly stringent air-pollution regulations.

Backers have expressed their own worries about how the broadly written rule would apply to confidential trade secrets. Ted Steichen of the American Petroleum Institute said his group supports the initiative to “enhance transparency while ensuring privacy.”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., said the EPA proposal was the latest version of years of “transparency” legislation for EPA that Congress had rejected. She called it “an administrative attempt to circumvent the legislative process.”

New York state officials and representatives of public and private universities were among others speaking against the proposal.

Opponents also included community health practitioners who had taken time off their jobs to speak at the hearing.

Researcher Pam Miller, who works with Alaska Native communities affected by toxins, said she traveled from Anchorage to speak at the meeting. Hospital nurse Erica Bardwell came from nearby Arlington, Virginia.

Health workers “care about patients and won’t surrender their confidentiality. Which means studies won’t get done,” Bardwell said after her testimony.

“Which is the point” of the proposal, Bardwell added.

Critics said the policy shift is designed to restrict the agency from citing peer-reviewed public-health studies that use patient medical records that must be kept confidential under patient privacy laws.

Such studies include the Harvard School of Public Health’s landmark Six Cities study of 1993, which established links between death rates and dirty air in major U.S. cities. That study was used by EPA to justify tighter air-quality rules opposed by industrial polluters.

While Pruitt introduced the proposal, the EPA is continuing the steps toward its formal adoption under the new acting administrator, former Pruitt EPA deputy Andrew Wheeler.

In an email, EPA spokesman James Hewitt indicated Tuesday that Wheeler wanted to balance transparency and privacy concerns.

“Acting Administrator Wheeler believes the more information you put out to the public the better the regulatory outcome. He also believes the agency should prioritize ways to safeguard sensitive information,” Hewitt said.

The proposal is open for public comment through mid-August before any final EPA and White House review.
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An iceberg that has drifted perilously close to a remote Greenland village is so big it can be seen from space.

The European Space Agency released an image Tuesday showing the giant iceberg just off the coast of Innaarsuit in northwestern Greenland.

Dozens of residents were evacuated to higher ground last week due to concerns that the 11 million-ton iceberg could break apart, creating high waves that could wash away coastal buildings.

The image captured July 9 by ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites also shows several other large icebergs in the vicinity.

Separately, Greenland broadcaster KNR published a video taken by a resident showing a time lapse of the huge iceberg drifting past the village. KNR reported that strong winds and elevated tides moved the iceberg northward, away from the harbor, over the weekend.
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Billionaire Bill Gates and Estée Lauder Cos chairman emeritus Leonard Lauder on Tuesday said they will award $30 million over three years to encourage development of new tests for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.

For Microsoft co-founder Gates, launch of the Diagnostics Accelerator program follows an announcement in November of a personal investment of $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund aimed at bringing together industry and government to seek treatments for the brain-wasting disease.

The effort, Gates said, was fueled in part by his personal experience with family members struggling with Alzheimer’s.

The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s affects nearly 50 million people worldwide and is expected to rise to more than 131 million by 2050, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.

Gates and Lauder provided seed money for the diagnostics collaboration through the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), which was founded by Lauder. They will be joined by other philanthropists, including the Dolby family and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.

Funding provided through the initiative will be open to scientists and clinicians globally working in academic settings, charities and biotechnology companies.

As a philanthropy vehicle, the ADDF Diagnostics Accelerator venture will invest in riskier projects that may not have immediate commercial return, the group said in a statement.

Drugmakers have poured billions of dollars into scores of failed attempts to produce a treatment that can arrest the ravages of Alzheimer’s, a fatal disease that robs people of their memories and ability to care for themselves.

Many experts believe drug trials have failed in part because treatments were tested in people whose brains were already too damaged to benefit. They argue that drugs need to be tested early, before the disease has caused noticeable declines.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said that it would consider Alzheimer’s drug trials based on biological markers rather than clinical symptoms, paving the way for drugs to be tested far earlier in the disease process. Currently, a brain scan or spinal tap are the chief ways used to confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, although the most conclusive test remains an autopsy.

In a blog post announcing his investment, Gates painted a picture of a future where diagnosing Alzheimer’s would be “as simple as getting your blood tested during your annual physical.”

“Research suggests that future isn’t that far off,” Gates said.
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A Dutch company that presented the world’s first lab-grown beef burger five years ago said Tuesday it has received funding to pursue its plans to make and sell artificially grown meat to restaurants from 2021.

Mosa Meat said it raised 7.5 million euros ($8.8 million), mainly from M Ventures and Bell Food Group. M Ventures is an investment vehicle for German pharmaceuticals company Merck KGaA. Bell Food is a European meat processing company based in Switzerland.

Smaller investors include Glass Wall Syndicate, which supports several companies looking into cultured meat or meat substitute products aimed at consumers concerned about the environmental and ethical impact of raising and slaughtering animals.

Maastricht-based Mosa Meat, which has in the past also received 1 million euros from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, said it hopes to sell its first products – most likely ground beef for burgers – in 2021. The aim is to achieve industrial-scale production 2-3 years later, with a typical hamburger patty costing about $1.

Environmentalists have warned that the world’s growing appetite for meat, particularly in emerging economies such as China, isn’t sustainable because beef, pork and poultry require far greater resources than plant-based proteins. Cows in particular also produce large amounts of greenhouse gas that contribute to global warming.

The big challenge is making meat that looks, feels and tastes like the real thing. Mosa Meat uses a small sample of cells taken from a live animal. Those cells are fed with nutrients so that they grow into strands of muscle tissue. The company claims it could make up to 80,000 quarter pounders from a single sample.

With a number of startups and established players hoping to make cultured meat on a big scale in the coming years, a battle has broken out over the terms used to describe such products.

Some advocates have claimed the term – clean meat – while opponents in the traditional farm sector suggest – synthetic meat – is more appropriate.
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A mass radio campaign in Burkina Faso led to a significant rise in sick children getting medical attention and could prove one of the most cost-effective ways to save young lives in poor countries, researchers said Tuesday.

Publishing results of a trial involving a radio campaign in rural areas that promoted treatment-seeking for three of the biggest killers of children under five — malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea — researchers said around 3,000 lives were saved.

“What this study shows is that using mass media to drive people to health centers is actually more cost-effective than almost anything on earth in terms of saving children’s lives,” said Roy Head, who co-led the study.

“And that makes sense — it reaches millions of people at a time — but this is the first time it has been shown in a scientific trial.”

The radio campaign, which the researchers said used a “saturation” method of intensive radio transmissions over an extended period of time to promote behavior change in a population, was run in Burkina Faso between 2012 and 2015.

It was broadcast on seven radio stations at a radius of around 50 kilometers (30 miles), while seven other radio station areas did not broadcast the campaign and acted as controls for comparison.

Routine data from health facilities were then analyzed for evidence of changes in treatment-seeking, with data from over 1.1 million consultations and deliveries evaluated.

The results — published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Global Health on Tuesday — showed a significant increase in the adoption of life-saving behaviors for the specific diseases targeted.

Diagnosis rates for malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea rose significantly in all three years of the study, including a 107 percent rise in diarrhea diagnoses in year 3 and a 56 percent rise in malaria diagnoses in year 1. The researchers said there was no change in detection rates for illnesses not covered by the radio campaign, such as coughs and colds.

Using a mathematical modeling tool, the team estimated a mortality reduction of 9.7 percent in year 1, 5.7 percent in year 2 and 5.5 percent in year 3, translating into about 3,000 lives saved as a result of the campaign.

“Pneumonia, malaria, and diarrhea are three of the biggest killers of children in Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Simon Cousens, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who co-led the work. “This research provides evidence that mass media has an important role to play in persuading parents to seek life-saving treatment for children.”
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New data from 52 countries in hot climates reveals that over 1.1 billion people face “significant risks” — including death — from lack of access to cooling, a U.N. envoy said Monday.

Rachel Kyte told a press conference that “millions of people die every year from lack of cooling access, whether from food losses, damaged vaccines, or severe heat impact.”

The U.N. envoy, who is promoting the United Nations goal of providing sustainable energy for all people by 2030, said nine countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America with the biggest populations that face major risks are Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan.

Kyte stressed that “cooling for all” doesn’t mean “putting an air conditioner in every home.”

She said an urgent effort is needed to clarify cooling needs, engage governments and the private sector, and develop and test possible new solutions. 

Kyte spoke on the sidelines of this week’s high-level event assessing progress on six of the 17 U.N. goals adopted by world leaders in 2015 to combat poverty, promote development and preserve the environment by 2030. One of the goals is universal access to sustainable energy.

U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told the opening session that there has been progress on reducing maternal and child mortality, tackling childhood marriage, expanding access to electricity, addressing global unemployment, and cutting the rate of forest loss around the globe.

But Mohammed said in other areas “we are either moving too slowly, or losing momentum.”

“For the first time in a decade, the number of people who are undernourished has increased — from 777 million people in 2015 to 815 million in 2016 — fundamentally undermining our commitment to leaving no one behind,” she said.

Young people remain three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, most of the world’s extreme poor are projected to live in urban settings by 2035, and basic sanitation remains “off track,” she said. And “we are seeing alarming decline in biodiversity, rising sea levels, coastal erosion, extreme weather conditions and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases” that cause global warming.

As for access to energy including renewable energy, Mohammed said the rate of progress “is not fast enough to meet our target.”

“We need to also double our efforts on energy efficiency,” she said. “250 million more people in Africa have no access to clean fuels for cooking compared to 2015.”

Kyte, who is also CEO of the nonprofit organization Sustainable Energy for All, stressed that without ensuring access to cooling for all people, the U.N. goal of universal access to energy will not be achieved.

She stressed that “access to cooling is not a luxury” but “a fundamental issue of equity. And as temperatures hit record levels, this could mean the difference between life and death for some.”

While 1.1 billion people lack access to cooling, Kyte said another 2.3 billion people present “a different kind of cooling risk.”

They represent “a growing lower-middle class who can only afford to buy cheaper, less efficient air conditioners, which could spike global energy demand and have profound climate impacts,” she said.

As examples of other hurdles that must be overcome in the next 12 years, she said, 470 million people in poor rural areas don’t have access to safe food and medicines and 630 million people in hotter, poor urban slums “have little or no cooling to protect them against extreme heatwaves.”

In India, Kyte said, “nearly 20 percent of temperature-sensitive health care products arrive damaged or degraded because of broken or insufficient cold chains, including a quarter of vaccines.”
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Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture.

No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.

The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.

It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site.

“The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional,” said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey.

“We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture,” Arranz-Otaegui said. “It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food.”

University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. “Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fiber,” Richter said.

Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat- and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring about a yard (meter) in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.

Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it might have been an acquired taste.

“The taste of the tubers,” Arranz-Otaegui said, “is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well.”
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