As the pre-monsoon summer heat takes hold in New Delhi, two things are as inevitable as 40-degree-Celsius days: power cuts and air pollution from the diesel generators that then kick in.

But a team of Indian engineers has figured out away to bring some good from choking generator exhaust: They are capturing it and turning it into ink.

“The alarming thing about diesel generators is they are located in the heart of densely populated areas. It’s spitting smoke right there,” said Kushagra Srivastava, one of the three engineers who developed the technology, now installed in Gurgaon, a satellite city of New Delhi, and in the southern city of Chennai.

The idea, Srivastava said, came about when he and his co-founders stopped at a sugarcane juice stall on a hot day.

They noticed a wall that had turned black behind the stand’s diesel generator, where exhaust emerged from a pipe.

They wondered if diesel exhaust might be used to produce paint — and set out to try.

The device they came up with, which attaches to generators, captures 90 percent of the soot particles from cooled diesel exhaust. The material can then be sold to ink manufacturers.

Their company, Chakr Innovation, has so far installed 50 of the devices for government firms such as Indian Oil, real estate developers and other state government offices, earning more than 11 million rupees ($200,000) in revenue in the first year, Srivastava said.

The company has plans to install another 50 devices over the coming year, he said. It has so far sold 500 kg of collected soot, which has been used to create 20,000 liters of ink, he added.

Chakr Innovations is not the first start-up to see cash in diesel exhaust. A competitor called Graviky Labs, based in Bangalore, is using similar technology to turn diesel exhaust from vehicles into ink.

Choking Air

Srivastava and his co-inventors Arpit Dhupar and Prateek Sachan see themselves as part of a movement towards cleaner air and energy in a country where major cities struggle with choking air.

About 1.1 million people a year die from the impacts of air pollution in India, according to a 2015 survey by the U.S.-based Health Effects Institute. That is about a quarter of the total number of air pollution deaths worldwide, it said.

In New Delhi, levels of the most dangerous particles in the air are sometimes 10 times higher than the safe limit, the survey noted.

Srivastava and Dhupar both grew up in New Delhi, which the World Health Organization in 2014 declared the most polluted city in the world. Sachan comes from Allahabad, the third most polluted city in WHO’s 2016 rankings.

“Earlier I remember there were a lot less cars on the road, there was a lot less congestion, and a lot more greenery,” said Dhupar, Chakr’s chief technology officer.

But as trees were felled and roads widened to accommodate more cars, Dhupar — then in high school — developed chronic respiratory problems. Doctors put him on medication and warned him to stop playing sports.

“My problem is, whenever I start to run out of air, the anxiety levels shoot up,” he said.

Dhupar said many of his family and friends have also developed long-term respiratory issues.

Diesel exhaust contributed to just 2 percent of all air pollution deaths in India in 2015, according to the Health Effects Institute.

But in “confined spaces” in urban areas, where many generators are used, it represents a larger risk, said Pankaj Sadavarte, one of the report’s researchers.

Action in New Delhi

India has in place policies to monitor and restrict air pollution, but they can be difficult to enforce, experts say.

Worries about air pollution are growing, however. Last November, the capital launched its first air quality emergency action plan during a particularly hazardous week when pollution spiked.

The government halted construction within the city, raised parking fees to discourage driving and shut schools to keep children indoors.

The national Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is drafting a national policy to clean India’s air, though its release has been delayed, said Sunil Dahiya, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace India.

“The air pollution debate and health debate is picking up in India,” Dahiya said in a telephone interview. “That momentum is forcing the policymakers to make our cities more livable.”
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Polar bears and other iconic animals could be extinct by the end of the century if ocean temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, marine biologists warned Monday.

Warming temperatures caused by climate-changing emissions may result in a catastrophic loss of marine wildlife and drastic changes to ocean food webs by 2100, scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina said in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Ocean temperatures on rise

Much current marine life will be unable to tolerate ocean temperatures that are projected to increase by 2.8 degrees Celsius on average, according to the study.

“With warming of this magnitude, we expect to lose many, if not most, animal species from marine protected areas by the turn of the century,” said the study’s lead author, John Bruno, a biologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Marine protected areas, established as sanctuaries for polar bears, coral reefs and other wildlife threatened by human activities such as fishing and oil extraction, have failed to protect species from the impacts of global warming, the scientists said.

In Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, a large number of corals already have been destroyed by bleaching and diseases related to higher temperatures, the study noted.

Poles are most at risk

The protections in place will be ineffective by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current rate, researchers said.

Reduced oxygen concentrations in the ocean — one consequence of global warming — will make marine protected areas uninhabitable to most species, they argued.

Richard Aronson, a co-author of the study and head of the department of ocean engineering and marine sciences at Florida Tech, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that wildlife in the Arctic and Antarctic is particularly at risk.

“Oceanic warming is happening most rapidly at the poles. Warming will threaten polar ecosystems generally, including iconic wildlife like polar bears and penguins,” he said in an email.

Oceans absorb gases

Around 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed by oceans, Aronson said.

“We have to take bold steps individually and as a society to control emissions. Shifting away from our dependence on fossil fuels would be a major step in the right direction,” he said.

“Stabilizing emissions over the next few decades could cut the rate of warming in half,” he added.
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Hawaii’s Kilauea is not your typical blow-the-top-off kind of volcano.

It’s been simmering and bubbling for about 35 years, sending superhot lava spewing up through cracks in the ground. This month’s eruptions are more of the same, except the lava is destroying houses miles from the summit.

Scientists on Monday said there’s been a slight decrease in the pressure that forces lava to the surface, but it’s likely a temporary lull. Dennison University volcanologist Erik Klemetti said similar eruptions at Kilauea have simmered for years.

“It’s going to take some time before you can say for sure whether things are winding down,” he said.

Nonstop eruptions

Kilauea is the youngest and most active of the five volcanoes on the Big Island. It’s been erupting continuously since 1983, but not the way most people think, not like Mount St. Helens in 1980, spewing straight up and everywhere.

A couple of miles below Kilauea is a constantly fed “hot spot” of superhot molten rock from deep inside Earth. It needs to find a way out.

And rather than exploding, at Kilauea “you get an oozing of lava at the surface,” explained U.S. Geological Survey volcano hazards coordinator Charles Mandeville.

The molten rock is called magma when it is underground; when it reaches the surface, it is called lava. The lava flows out through cracks in the ground, usually within the confines at the national park that surrounds Kilauea. But this time the eruptions are destroying homes.

“This kind of eruption that is occurring now is very normal for this volcano,” said volcanologist Janine Krippner of Concord University in West Virginia. “It’s really that it’s just impacting people.”

What happened this time

The past week or so has seen “a major readjustment with the volcano’s plumbing system,” Mandeville said.

On April 30, scientists got their first sign something was up. The floor of the summit’s lava pool had a “catastrophic failure,” forcing the magma east, looking for ways out, Mandeville said. That created a series of small earthquakes.

The magma escaped in “fire fountains” of lava shooting as high as 230 feet (70 meters) out of cracks, Mandeville said. The first one of those happened last Thursday, followed by at least nine more since then.

“You don’t know where the next fissure is going to open up,” he said.

What’s next

While there’s been a slight decrease in pressure, scientists won’t know for certain if Kilauea has calmed down for at least two months, according to Mandeville. He said it could be much longer before conditions are safe for people to be in the area east of the volcano’s summit. Officials have told some 1,700 residents to leave their homes.

The lava is 2,200 degrees (1,200 degrees Celsius), Mandeville said.

“It literally incinerates anything it touches,” he said.

It’s not just the molten rock, but the spewed gases can be dangerous too, Klemetti said. That includes sulfur dioxide, which reacts with water in your lungs and can form acid, he said.

Mandeville said scientists want at least two months of calm before declaring the situation better.

In the meantime, “there’s not much we can do other than get people out of the way,” he said.

Volcanoes make Hawaii

The Hawaiian Islands only exists because of volcanoes. These volcanoes were created from “hot spots” of underground magma, which are mostly but not always underwater. The molten rock erupts on the sea floor, cools and forms a volcano. With each eruption, the volcano grows until it is big enough to push out of the water and form islands.

There are about 13 hot spots like this around the globe, with the islands of Hawaii one of the most active of the bunch.

Nine-tenths of Kilauea’s surface is less than 1,000 years old, which is quite young in geology, Krippner said.

Mandeville said there are 169 active volcanoes in the United States — including underneath Yellowstone — and 1,550 in the world that are above sea level, he said.

We wouldn’t exist without volcanoes, scientists said. Volcanic eruptions provide nutrients, like nitrogen, for soil and their gases, especially water vapor, helped form the atmosphere we now have.

“It provides so much good,” Krippner said, “we just have to get out of their way while they do their thing.”
…

Jeremy Wilson knew it was risky renting a home in an area with the highest hazard level for lava flows in Hawaii, but it was all he could afford for his family of six.

Now, with magma spewing from cracks in the earth above and below his 3-bedroom home, he fears it could join the 26 other houses destroyed since the eruption of the nearby Kilauea volcano on Thursday, according to Hawaii County Civil Defense.

“I’m a renter but everything we own is in that house,” said Wilson, a 36-year-old social worker, who moved to the Leilani Estates subdivision four years ago and is among 1,700 residents who have evacuated since the eruption.

The semi-rural wooded area, with dirt roads and many homemade “off the grid” houses, is a landing pad for newcomers to Hawaii’s Big Island who cannot afford real-estate prices elsewhere.

“If you want to live in Hawaii, it’s really your only option,” said Wilson, who has been staying with friends along with his two children, wife, mother-in-law and uncle since they were forced to flee.

Keeping prices low in Leilani Estates is the “Zone 1” (out of nine) hazard rating for lava-flows the U.S. Geological Survey gives the area due to “vents that have been repeatedly active in historical time.”

Reminder of 1955 event

Geologists say this week’s activity is beginning to look like an event in 1955 in which eruptions continued for 88 days in the area and covered around 4,000 acres with lava, though few people lived there back then. More recently in 2014, lava threatened the nearby Puna district and the town of Pahoa.

Jessica Gauthier, 47, a realtor in Leilani Estates, said the eruption of Kilauea, about 12 miles (19 km) distant, was a reality check for new residents.

“People move here thinking it’s paradise, and what they learn is that it’s something different,” said Gauthier. Eruptions of lava and toxic sulfur dioxide gas continued within the subdivision, and larger aftershocks from Friday’s 6.9 magnitude earthquake were expected, the observatory said.

A lava flow advanced about a mile from one of ten vents that have opened. As the lava finds a preferred route, some vents are expected to close, putting pressure on others and shooting magma up to 1,000 feet (305 m) into the air. On Saturday it reached heights of 230 feet.

Some residents saw eruptions as inevitable and said if Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, wanted the land back, then she would take it.

‘No stranger to disasters’

Wilson, who grew up in Springfield, Missouri, was less philosophical. He has been trying to rescue his possessions before they are torched.

He was forced back on Sunday when he saw smoke coming from cracks in the road on the approach to his house.

“I’m from Tornado Alley. So I’m no stranger to disasters, but this is something else,” said Wilson. “This is crazy.”
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Dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs and explosives, so Mark Ruefenacht wondered if their exquisite sense of smell could be used to detect changes in a diabetic’s blood sugar level.

A near fatal episode prompted the forensic scientist, who’s had diabetes for most of his adult life, to ask that question. In 1999, while he was training a puppy to be a guide dog for the blind, his blood sugar suddenly dropped to a dangerously low level.

“More than likely, I had a seizure, from the low blood sugar,” Ruefenacht recalled, as he explained how the puppy kept trying to rouse him. “And he stuck with me and I was able to get my blood sugar up.”

That incident made him wonder if dogs could be trained to detect the inherent chemical changes that accompany a drop in blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, then alert their owners.    

Dogs4Diabetics

Ruefenacht worked with scientists and funded research which determined that the “smell” of hypoglycemia shows up in both breath and sweat. He also worked with and studied professionals who train dogs to sniff out everything from explosives to cancer. And most important of all, Ruefenacht started training a fun-loving yellow Labrador retriever named Armstrong to alert him when he was having a dangerously low blood sugar. The training proved so successful, Armstrong is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first diabetes-detection dog.

Sitting under a poster of Armstrong, who died in 2012, Ruefenacht recalls that those early successes led some organizations to offer him large sums of money for the rights to his discoveries.  Ruefenacht says he turned those opportunities down. Instead, in 2004, he founded Dogs4Diabetics. 

He says properly training a diabetes detection dog and its owner can cost $50,000.  The organization raises money to cover these expenses, then provides the dogs at no cost to people who qualify.

The smell of hypoglycemia

The dogs are trained to identify the scent of hypoglycemia on a reliable and consistent basis. Ruefenacht uses jars containing swabs of sweat from a diabetic who had low blood sugar, randomly mixed with jars of other distracting smells, such as peanut butter, dog food and eucalyputus.  The dogs are rewarded when they select the correct jar. This “sweat jar” method for training diabetes alert dogs has been validated scientifically.

The next step is to teach them to alert their owner. The dogs are trained to use subtle signals, but if those go unnoticed, to put their paws on his lap, or balance on their back legs and put their front paws on his shoulders. They learn to snuffle at his nose and mouth, lick his face and bark.  And if all else fails, they’re trained to get someone else to come and help.

Ruefenacht says the dogs are often aware of blood sugar drops long before electronic monitoring systems send a warning alarm.

Dogs4Diabetics has placed more than 100 dogs with diabetics.  They hope to expand the program – training humanity’s most loyal companion to save lives and help diabetics around the world.  
…

Diabetics who use insulin to control their blood sugars can sometimes end up with very low readings that, if left untreated, can lead to death. While modern blood sugar monitoring systems can warn patients when their blood sugar levels are dangerously low, there is another, more “user-friendly” way to do the same thing. Shelley Schlender reports.
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The first vaccine campaign against cholera in Yemen has started, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, a year and a half after an epidemic was triggered by war and a health and sanitation crisis.

There have since been more than one million suspected cases of cholera in Yemen, and 2,275 recorded deaths, the WHO says.

The disease is spread by feces in sewage contaminating water or food, and it can kill because patients quickly lose fluids through vomiting and diarrhea. Caught early it can be treated with oral rehydration salts.

The oral vaccination campaign, which began in four districts in Aden on Sunday targeting 350,000 people, coincides with the rainy season, which health workers fear could spread the disease further.

“The first four districts are being targeted… and then the campaign will move towards all the areas at risk in the country, covering at least four million people,” Lorenzo Pizzoli, WHO cholera expert, said in a tweet posted on Sunday.

Yemen’s war, a proxy conflict between Iran-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led alliance, has killed more than 10,000 people since 2015.

It has also displaced more than 2 million and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including the health system whose workers have not been paid.

Nevio Zagaria, the WHO representative in Yemen, told Reuters in April that some 1.4 million vaccine doses had been shipped via Nairobi, out of 4.4 million planned.

“The rainy season is starting, so we need to use the window of opportunity to start a vaccination campaign,” he said at the time.

In July 2017, the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision – which manages a global stockpile — earmarked one million cholera vaccines for Yemen. But the WHO and local authorities together to scrap a vaccination plan on logistical and technical grounds.

Some senior Houthi health officials have been known to object to vaccinations, delaying the campaign, aid workers say.
…

Globally, more cases of cancer are reported in men than in women. A recent study in India reveals that the reverse is true there. Published in the medical journal Lancet, the study reports that Indian women not only have a higher rate of cancer, they are also afflicted by it at a younger age compared with their counterparts in developed Western countries. Ritul Joshi reports from New Delhi.
…

An innovative consumer awareness campaign will be launched this summer in several cities in the United States. The campaign is aimed at preventing the waste of food that costs the world billions of dollars and has severe consequences on global food security and the environment. Verónica Balderas Iglesias spoke with experts.
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A powerful Atlas 5 rocket was poised for liftoff early Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying to Mars the first robotic NASA lander designed entirely for exploring the deep interior of the red planet.

The Mars InSight probe was scheduled to blast off from the central California coast at 4:05 a.m. PDT (1105 GMT), creating a luminous predawn spectacle of the first U.S. interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific.

The lander will be carried aloft for NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atop a two-stage, 19-story Atlas 5 rocket from the fleet of United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

The payload will be released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301-million-mile (484 million km) flight to Mars. It is scheduled to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet’s equator called the Elysium Planitia.

InSight’s mission

That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing site of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity. The new 800-pound (360-kg) spacecraft marks the 21st U.S.-launched Martian exploration, dating to the Mariner fly-by missions of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been launched by other nations.

Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years, about one Martian year, plumbing the depths of the planet’s interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.

Measuring marsquakes

InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to detect the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it and the outermost layer, the crust.

The Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.

Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the lunar surface as well, detecting thousands of moonquakes and meteorite impacts. But InSight is expected to yield the first meaningful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth.

Insight also will be fitted with a German-made drill to burrow as much as 16 feet (5 meters) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet. 

Meanwhile, a special transmitter on the lander will send radio signals back to Earth, tracking Mars’ subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet’s core and possibly whether it remains molten.

Hitching a ride aboard the same rocket that launches InSight will be a pair of miniature satellites called CubeSats, which will fly to Mars on their own paths behind the lander in a first deep-space test of that technology.
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Peanuts are the most common cause of fatal food-induced anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction. But British scientists have found a better way to monitor a significant food hazard by developing a more accurate blood test, and it’s five times cheaper than the existing one. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and heavy rains can cause large amounts of rock and soil to collapse under their own weight and tumble down a slope. These landslides can crush everything in their path. Aided by sophisticated satellites, scientists are creating a comprehensive catalogue of landslide-prone areas, hoping it will help affected communities predict when and where they might happen. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium about the size of a U.S. quarter is missing from an Idaho university that was using it for research, leading federal officials on Friday to propose an $8,500 fine.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Idaho State University can’t account for about a 30th of an ounce (1 gram) of the material that’s used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.

The amount is too small to make a nuclear bomb, agency spokesman Victor Dricks said, but could be used to make a dirty bomb to spread radioactive contamination.

“The NRC has very rigorous controls for the use and storage of radioactive materials as evidenced by this enforcement action,” he said of the proposed fine for failing to keep track of the material. 

Dr. Cornelis Van der Schyf, vice president for research at the university, blamed partially completed paperwork from 15 years ago as the school tried to dispose of the plutonium.

“Unfortunately, because there was a lack of sufficient historical records to demonstrate the disposal pathway employed in 2003, the source in question had to be listed as missing,” he said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The radioactive source in question poses no direct health issue or risk to public safety.”

Idaho State University has a nuclear engineering program and works with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation’s primary nuclear research lab and located about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of the school.

The plutonium was being used to develop ways to ensure nuclear waste containers weren’t leaking and to find ways to detect radioactive material being illegally brought into the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the school said in an email to the AP.

The university, which has 30 days to dispute the proposed fine, reported the plutonium missing on Oct. 13, according to documents released by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said a school employee doing a routine inventory discovered the university could only account for 13 of its 14 plutonium sources, each weighing about the same small amount.

The school searched documents and found records from 2003 and 2004 saying the material was on campus and awaiting disposal. However, there were no documents saying the plutonium had been properly disposed.

The last document mentioning the plutonium is dated Nov. 23, 2003. It said the Idaho National Laboratory didn’t want the plutonium and the school’s technical safety office had it “pending disposal of the next waste shipment.”

The school also reviewed documents on waste barrels there and others transferred off campus since 2003, and opened and examined some of them. Finally, officials searched the campus but didn’t find the plutonium. 

The nuclear commission said senior university officials planned to return the school’s remaining plutonium to the Energy Department. It’s not clear if that has happened. 

Energy Department officials didn’t return calls seeking comment Friday. 

Dricks, the commission spokesman, said returning the plutonium was part of the school’s plan to reduce its inventory of radioactive material.

He said overall it has “a good record with the NRC.”
…

The Kilauea volcano sent more lava into Hawaii communities Friday, a day after forcing more than 1,500 people to flee from their mountainside homes, and authorities detected high levels of sulfur gas that could threaten the elderly and people with breathing problems.

After a week of earthquakes and warnings, the eruption that began Thursday threw lava into the sky from a crack in a road and sent another line of molten rock snaking through a forest. On Friday, the activity continued, with reports of lava spurting from volcanic vents on two streets. Areas downhill from the vents were at risk of being covered up.

The community of Leilani Estates near the town of Pahoa on the Big Island appeared to be in the greatest danger. Authorities also ordered an evacuation of Lanipuna Gardens, a smaller, more rural subdivision directly to the east. But scientists said new vents could form, and it was impossible to know where.

Civil defense officials cautioned the public about high levels of sulfur dioxide near the volcano and urged vulnerable people to leave immediately. Exposure to the gas can cause irritation or burns, sore throats, runny noses, burning eyes and coughing.

Maija Stenback began to get nervous when she noticed cracks in the streets near her home. On Thursday, she shot video of the lava as it bubbled and splattered across a street about six blocks from her house.

“You can feel it all the way into the core of your being,” she said. “It’s just that roaring and unbelievable power of the lava bubbling up and spitting up into the air.”

Stenback, her daughter and grandchildren packed as much as they could into their car. The two kids were each allowed to select three toys to take before the family left for a friend’s home about a 30-minute drive away.

“I have lived through a lot of lava flows here, but never this close before,” Stenback said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries, but at least 100 people were staying in shelters Friday, with many more evacuees believed to be with relatives and friends.

The Hawaii governor activated the National Guard to help with evacuations and provide security to about 770 structures in Leilani Estates and 130 lots in Lanipuna Gardens left empty when residents sought shelter.

Kilauea has erupted periodically for decades, and scientists said they have no way of predicting how long the eruption will continue.

A key factor will be whether a magma reservoir at the summit starts to drain in response to the eruption, which has not happened yet, said Asta Miklius, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

“There is quite a bit of magma in the system.  It won’t be just an hours-long eruption probably, but how long it will last will depend on whether the summit magma reservoir gets involved. And so we are watching that very, very closely,” Miklius said.

County, state and federal officials had been warning residents all week that they should be prepared to evacuate because an eruption would give little warning.

The geological survey on Thursday raised the volcano’s alert level to warning status, the highest possible, meaning a hazardous eruption was imminent, underway or expected.

Henry Calio said the first sign that something might be wrong happened when cracks emerged in the driveway of his home in Leilani Estates. His wife, Stella, then received a call from an official who told them to get out immediately.

The two feared they might lose their house.

“This is our retirement dream,” Henry Calio said.

Kilauea’s Puu Oo crater floor began to collapse Monday, triggering the earthquakes and pushing the lava into new underground chambers. The collapse caused magma to push more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) downslope toward the populated southeast coastline of the island.

The magma later crossed under Highway 130, which leads to a popular volcano access point. Civil defense authorities closed the area to visitors and ordered private tour companies to stop taking people into the region.

Over the decades, most of Kilauea’s activity has been nonexplosive, but a 1924 eruption spewed ash and 10-ton (9-metric ton) rocks into the sky and killed one person.

A 1983 eruption resulted in lava fountains soaring over 1,500 feet (457 meters) into the sky. Since then, the lava flow has buried dozens of square miles of land and destroyed many homes.
…

Adults and children should consume a maximum of 10 percent of their daily calories in the form of saturated fat such as meat and butter and one percent from trans fats to reduce the risk of heart disease, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The draft recommendations, the first since 2002, are aimed at reducing non-communicable diseases, led by cardiovascular diseases, blamed for 72 percent of the 54.7 million estimated deaths worldwide every year, many before the age of 70.

“Dietary saturated fatty acids and trans-fatty acids are of particular concern because high levels of intake are correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases,” Dr. Francesco Branca, Director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, told reporters.

The dietary recommendations are based on scientific evidence developed in the last 15 years, he added.

The United Nations agency has invited public comments until June 1 on the recommendations, which it expects to finalize by year-end.

Saturated fat is found in foods from animal sources such as butter, cow’s milk, meat, salmon and egg yolks, and in some plant-derived products such as chocolate, cocoa butter, coconut, palm and palm kernel oils.

An active adult needs about 2,500 calories per day, Branca said.

“So we are talking about 250 calories coming from saturated fat and that is approximately a bit less than 30 grams of saturated fat,” he said.

That amount of fat could be found in 50 grams (1.76 oz) of butter, 130-150 grams of cheese with 30 percent fat, a liter of full fat milk, or 50 grams of palm oil, he said.

Trans fats

Trans fats occur naturally in meat and dairy products. But the predominant source is industrially-produced and contained in baked and fried foods such as fries and doughnuts, snacks, and partially hydrogenated cooking oils and fats often used by restaurants and street vendors.

In explicit new advice, WHO said that excessive amounts of saturated fat and trans fat should be replaced by polyunsaturated fats, such as fish, canola and olive oils.

“Reduced intake of saturated fatty acids have been associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary heart disease when replaced with polyunsaturated fatty acids or carbohydrates from whole grains,” it said.

Total fat consumption should not exceed 30 percent of total energy intake to avoid unhealthy weight gain, it added.

The recommendations complement other WHO guidelines including limiting intake of free sugars and sodium.
…

NASA’s next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the red planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.

Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander.

Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites with pop out from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff and hightail it to Mars, right behind InSight.

It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they’re known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6 1/2 months and 300 million miles (485 million kilometers).

A brief look at the $18.5 million experiment tagging along with InSight:

Mini sats

Miniature satellites, or CubeSats, have been piggybacking on big-ticket space missions for well over a decade, providing relatively cheap and fast access to orbit for students and other out-of-the-mainstream experimenters. Until now, the hundreds of CubeSats have been confined to Earth orbit. That’s about to change with NASA’s Mars Cube One project, or MarCO.

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has its CubeSat sights on the moon. A recent competition yielded two winning proposals: a CubeSat to explore the moon’s far side from lunar orbit, another to probe a permanently shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole, also from lunar orbit. NASA is also looking to send CubeSats to the moon, as well as an asteroid.

Movie connection

It turns out that these twin cubes are equipped with the same type of cold gas propulsion system used in fire extinguishers to spray foam. The movie WALL-E uses a fire extinguisher to propel through space. Team members couldn’t resist the connection, thus the names WALL-E and EVE for the two mini spacecraft. Engineers want to test this compact propulsion system for guiding the 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) cubes to Mars.

Getting to Mars

Once free from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff, WALL-E and EVE will trail a few thousand miles (kilometers) behind InSight en route to Mars. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles (kilometers) apart from one another. That’s to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it’s actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

While InSight will be stopping at Mars on November 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) out. Don’t expect any Thunderbird pilot-theatrics as the cubes fly by, like a tilting of the solar wings in salute. “That would make a great movie, but that’s definitely not the way we’re going to do it,” Clement said.

Extra ears

Besides testing the cubes’ maneuvering system, NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. If the experiment succeeds, it should take just several minutes for flight controllers to hear from the cubes. No worries if they’re silent. NASA will rely on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already circling the planet as the main communication link with InSight during descent and touchdown. It will take a lot longer, though, to get confirmation. The beauty of a CubeSat relay system is that it could provide descent information at planets and other cosmic stop-offs lacking established communications.

Post-Mars

Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won’t work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won’t be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Each morning, in a small Bangladeshi kitchen on the edge of the world’s largest refugee camp, a group of cooks stir rice, lentils, spices, and vitamin powder in steaming cauldrons to serve to thousands of hungry Rohingya refugees.

More than 700,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims arrived in Bangladesh last year from neighboring Myanmar, escaping what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s army, an allegation Myanmar denies.

Upon arrival in Bangladesh, many of the refugees were destitute, starving after fleeing army attacks on their villages.

But nearly nine months later, hunger persists for the Rohingya in Bangladesh, even though aid groups hold regular food distributions.

As a result, many families depend on the hot meals handed out at this kitchen by the Action Against Hunger aid group in the town of Ukhiya. The group also provides biscuits to children to take home after their meal to further supplement their diets.

One regular visitor to the kitchen is Abdu Sobee, who says he comes almost every day with his brother’s children.

“I need money to buy fish, vegetables, and chili to cook,” he explains, while his two nieces scoop handfuls of yellow rice into their mouths. “I don’t have this. Where will I get it? So I brought my children here because they give food for free.”

Despite the free lunches, not everyone is able to stay healthy.

In the camps, one-fifth of Rohingya children younger than 5 are malnourished, with 12 percent suffering from severe stunting as a result of their hunger, according to Action Against Hunger.

Next to the busy kitchen, the aid group operates a clinic to treat stricken children.

Currently, there are 120 children enrolled at the clinic with severe acute malnutrition, the affliction’s worst form, said Dr. Jashim Uddin Akon, who runs the Ukhiya clinic. A total of 5,000 Rohingya children are receiving treatment for severe malnutrition at 15 clinics across the camps.

During VOA’s visit, a refugee named Roshida brought her 6-month-old daughter to the doctors. The skin on the child’s arms was loose; her head lolling on a thin neck.

“She was breastfeeding for two months, and now I cannot produce enough milk, so she became malnourished,” Roshida told VOA.

A clinician measured the baby’s upper arm and determined she was a severe case. They immediately started treatment, spoon-feeding the child a high energy peanut paste mixed with water.

The baby may recover after a few weeks of this daily treatment, but the deeper problem is that Roshida herself is not fully healthy.

“I cannot produce milk because I cannot eat well,” Roshida said. “I only depend on handouts of rice. If I only eat the handouts, how will I produce milk?”

Roshida says the major issue is that she has no money to buy extra food to supplement the basic diet provided by aid groups. Her husband has a job in the refugee camp, but isn’t paid for his work. Bangladesh’s government prohibits Rohingya refugees from paid employment.

“My husband is an Islamic teacher. He’s taught for free for three months,” she said. “That’s no money.”

Recently, the World Food Program launched an initiative to close this gap. WFP’s basic food distributions include only rice, lentils and oil — hardly a balanced diet.

To fix this, WFP now gives vouchers to refugee families, which they can redeem in local markets for up to 19 different food items, including fresh vegetables, chilies, eggs, and fish, in addition to the staple rice and lentils.

Still, many refugees haven’t received the vouchers yet. With no work, another option would be to return to Myanmar, where Rohingya once had enough food. But Roshida says this is impossible.

“I’m not going back, because if we return, they will give us trouble again. We need to get our rights first. We are here in Bangladesh for justice. If we don’t get it, why will we go back?”

The past violence in Myanmar affects the nutrition of babies in another way: Mothers who suffer mental trauma from last year’s attacks struggle to properly care for their children, Akon said.

“They are not psychologically well. They have trauma. They lost their house. They lost their country. They lost their relatives,” he said. “When a mother is psychologically affected, the mothers don’t give proper caring to the babies.”

For Rohingya mothers, keeping their children well fed requires more than food handouts.
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Dr. Paul Offit is an infectious disease specialist and an expert in vaccines. He’s been at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia since 1992. Since then he says not a year has gone by when he has not seen a child die from a vaccine-preventable disease. It’s largely, he says, because the parents chose not to vaccinate their child.

Far from Philadelphia, along the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, health workers are desperately trying to vaccinate every child against polio so no child will ever again suffer the crippling effects of this disease. If they can complete this task, polio will be a disease of the past.

Offit says the difference between parents in this mountainous border region of southcentral Asia and those in the U.S. is that in Pakistan and Afghanistan, people know the devastating consequences of polio. He says previous generations in the U.S. did, too.

WAYCH: Some Parents More Wary of Vaccines Than the Diseases Vaccines Prevent

“For my parents, who were children of the 1920s and 1930s, they saw diphtheria as a routine killer of teenagers. They saw polio as a common crippler of children and young adults, so you didn’t have to convince them to vaccinate me, my brother and sister.”

Offit says parents in his generation were also quick to vaccinate their children.

“I had measles. I had mumps. I had German measles (rubella). I had the chickenpox so I know what those diseases felt like, and it was miserable,” he said.

23 viruses, two cancers

Vaccines can prevent 23 viruses and two types of cancer, and more vaccines are in the works, including one for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Offit is the co-inventor of a life-saving rotavirus vaccine.

But some parents are not getting their children vaccinated. Last year there were more than 14,000 cases of measles in Europe, mostly in Romania. Nearly 40 children died. It exasperates health officials like Miljana Grbic, head of the World Health Assembly in Romania. 

“We cannot fight this disease if we do not increase vaccination coverage,” she said. “… But we also have to understand why vaccination coverage is going down.”

For some parents, it’s the inconvenience of the trip to the doctor’s office. Others think good hygiene and nutrition are all children need to stay healthy. Still others believe vaccines can give their children autism, diabetes and other diseases.

Offit says persuading these parents to vaccinate their children is hard. 

“It’s hard to compel people to vaccinate against something that they don’t fear,” he said. “And when they don’t fear that, what they’ll do is, they’ll fear the vaccines, and I think that’s where we’re at.”

Vaccine refusal spreads

A study published in BMJ suggests that in the U.S., vaccine refusal is contagious. It spreads from communities with a high number of parents who oppose vaccines to other communities nearby when parents who oppose vaccines talk to their friends and parents of their children’s schoolmates.

“Collectively, this factor is driving vaccine refusal and delay,” said Professor Tony Yang, one of the principal authors of the study.

Yang, from George Mason University, and his co-authors looked at the number of non-medical exemptions for vaccines from 2000 to 2013. They found these exemptions increased in geographical clusters.

Some governments are now making it harder for parents not to immunize their children. After a measles outbreak, California passed more restrictive laws. Yang says parents trust their pediatricians, so health care providers need to be more pro-active in getting children vaccinated.

Australia HPV work

Despite hesitancy in some parts of the world, some countries are leading the way in promoting vaccines. Australia has provided the HPV vaccine to school-aged girls since 2007.

The Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer, the second most common type of cancer in women worldwide. It also causes head and neck cancers and genital warts.

By 2013, a study showed a significant reduction in the number of young women with abnormal cells of the cervix and a 90 percent decline in genital warts in young women.

Cervical cancer takes 20 to 30 years to develop. By 2035, Australia expects to see up to a 45 percent decline in deaths from cervical cancer all because of a vaccine and the government’s policy.
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Six critically endangered black rhinos are being transported from South Africa to Chad, restoring the species to the country in north-central Africa nearly half a century after it was wiped out there.

African Parks, a Johannesburg-based conservation group, said Thursday that the rhinos will travel by air to Zakouma National Park, a reserve in Chad that it manages with the government.

The group says the goal is to help the long-term survival of black rhinos and to restore biodiversity in Chad. It says there are fewer than 25,000 rhinos in the African wild, of which about 20 percent are black rhinos and the rest white rhinos.

Most of the rhinos are in South Africa, though the population has been hit hard by poachers supplying horns to an illegal Asian market.
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The European Space Agency has released an updated catalogue of more than 1.7 billion stars in our galaxy, as well as other celestial bodies, such as exoplanets, asteroids and quasars. The new data gives astronomers an unprecedented three-dimensional map for studying the origin of the universe and searching for habitable planets. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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President Trump plans to meet next week with leaders from U.S. and foreign carmakers on trade and changes to emission standards.

“When the White House wants to meet with us about our sector and policy, we welcome the opportunity,” Alliance of American Automobile Manufacturers spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist said Wednesday.

The time and agenda of the talks are still to be announced. But the car builders want to make their concerns about possible changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement known to the president.

They are also expected to talk about Trump administration plans to revise strict Obama-era emission standards for U.S. cars and light trucks.

Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., are suing the administration over the plans, accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of breaking the law.

“This is about health. This is about life and death,” California Governor Jerry Brown said Tuesday. “Pollutants coming out of tailpipes does permanent damage to children. The only way we’re going to overcome this is by reducing emissions.”

Brown accused Trump of wanting people to buy more gasoline and create more pollution.

The lawsuit argues the EPA acted arbitrarily and violated the Clean Air Act when it decided emission standards were too high.

In 2012, former president Barack Obama ordered emission standards to be raised to about 21 kilometers per liter of gasoline by 2025. The goal was to cut pollution and make cars and small trucks more energy efficient.

The EPA is seeking to freeze fuel efficiency requirements at 2020 levels until 2026.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt said last month that Obama’s decision was politically based and the emission standards Obama set were too high and did not “comport with reality.”

Pruitt said his EPA will set fresh standards so new cars that use less gas and are safer than older models will be affordable.

But environmental groups said the American public overwhelmingly supports the stricter standards.
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Weeks after his death, physicist Stephen Hawking has delivered his last thoughts about the nature of the cosmos, and he says it may be simpler than often believed.

Well, simpler if you understand theoretical physics, anyway. It remains incomprehensible for the rest of us.

A paper that outlines his view, written with Thomas Hertog of the University of Leuven in Belgium before Hawking’s death in March, has been published by the Journal of High Energy Physics. Hertog had announced the new theory last year at a conference celebrating Hawking’s 75th birthday.

The University of Cambridge, where Hawking worked, announced the publication on Wednesday.

Here’s a very simplified version of what it says. First, some background.

Scientists believe our universe sprang into existence with the Big Bang, followed by an unimaginably rapid expansion known as inflation. Within our observable universe, inflation ended long ago.

But some ideas of inflation say it never stops, persisting in other regions of the cosmos forever. This eternal inflation produces a “multiverse,” a collection of pocket universes of which our own universe is just one.

There may be an infinite number of these pocket universes. If they’re all very different, then how typical is the universe we live in, where scientists make their observations?

That’s a key question for understanding the fundamental laws of nature, and finding a way to estimate what types of universes are probable is a big challenge, said physics professor David Kaiser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many people have tried to tackle that question, but Hawking approached it from a point of view shaped by his long study of the intersection of quantum theory and gravity, he said.

Hawking’s paper suggests that there may be a much smaller range of possibilities for universe types than previous estimates had suggested. So “the behavior of our own, observable universe might not be a rare outlier, but perhaps [be] relatively typical,” Kaiser said in an email.

“Naturally,” Kaiser said, “this is all rather speculative.”

Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics called it “a stimulating, but not revolutionary paper.”
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As teacher Tanya Mathiason flicked through a slideshow to display diagrams of male and female genitalia to primary school children in northwest London, no one flinched or giggled.

Instead, the students eagerly discussed the meaning of the words: female, genital and mutilation.

“Break those words down: What does female mean? What does genital mean? What does mutilation mean?” said Mathiason, the head of pastoral care at Norbury School in the culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhood of Harrow.

“It means when someone cuts off stuff?” replied one student.

“Harm?” said another.

By the time they leave Norbury School, all 640 students — both boys and girls — will have learned about female genital mutilation (FGM), a ritual that usually involves the partial or total removal of the external genitalia including the clitoris.

An estimated 137,000 women and girls in England and Wales have undergone FGM, according to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

FGM can cause chronic pain, menstrual problems, recurrent urinary tract infections, cysts and infertility. Some girls hemorrhage to death or die from infections. It can also cause fatal childbirth complications in later life.

Young age

As FGM is mostly carried out between infancy and age 15, school principal Louise Browning said she wanted the students to start learning about it in the third year, at about seven years old.

“I became more aware that FGM was happening to girls at a much younger age than I thought,” Browning told Reuters.

“Who’s to say that we don’t have survivors in our school? I felt I was letting down my girls by not raising this. Our end goal is for this practice to stop.”

Browning and her team worked with the National FGM Centre, run by children’s charity Barnado’s and the Local Government Association, to devise age-appropriate lessons, which they began teaching in Norbury School in 2015.

It is one of only a handful of primary schools in the country that teaches students about FGM, but raising awareness among parents and children was necessary, she said.

FGM mostly affects immigrant communities from various countries including Somalia, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Sudan, Nigeria and Egypt — a demographic that is well-represented in the Harrow school.

“Many of our families, our children, come from FGM-practicing communities so it is really important that they have this knowledge, that they leave here at 11 [years old] knowing what this practice is about,” said pastoral manager Mathiason.

Shocking

FGM is performed by Muslims and Christians and by followers of some indigenous religions. People often believe FGM is required by religion, but it is not mentioned in the Koran or the Bible.

“Most people who do it think it’s in their religion … but no religion actually tells you to do that,” said 11-year-old Khadija, who has learned about FGM since she was seven.

“It’s just shocking because it’s most likely to be parents who would do it. They’re the ones who love you and care about you, but instead they want to harm you,” she added.

In March, a London solicitor accused of forcing his daughter to be circumcised was acquitted, increasing pressure on police and prosecutors who have yet to secure a conviction for FGM more than 30 years after it was outlawed.

The prosecution was only the second to be brought under FGM legislation introduced in 1985.

FGM is underpinned by the desire to control female sexuality, but beliefs around the practice vary enormously. Many believe it purifies the girl, brings her status in the community and prevents promiscuity. Uncut girls risk being ostracized.

Sonita Pobi, head of training at the National FGM Center, said the lessons helped children make sense of the practice and know who to turn to for help, regardless of their cultural background or religion.

“It’s about giving children the vocabulary to speak up when something is wrong. It’s about making children aware about the hidden form of abuse that may happen to them,” Pobi said.

After learning about FGM at Norbury School, 11-year-old Oliver said he felt empowered to help classmates and friends.

“When I first learnt about it, I was quite scared because it was happening. But once I knew quite a bit about it, I knew that I couldn’t really sort out the situation, but I would know who to speak to,” he said.

His classmate Naylen, also 11, agreed.

“I think the FGM lessons are good for children to learn because … we could make a change to all of these harmful activities,” he said.
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A U.S. federal court has given tobacco companies until June 18 to post a corrective statement on their websites about the dangers of their products and their efforts to mislead the public about those risks.

The companies were also ordered to include the statement on cigarette packages by November, according to the order issued Tuesday. It will also apply to any social media campaigns aimed at promoting cigarettes.

The corrective statements will state, among other things, that cigarette smoking causes on average 1,200 American deaths per day; that cigarettes are designed to create and sustain nicotine addiction; that low-tar, light, and natural cigarettes are no less harmful that regular ones; and that secondhand smoke causes disease and death in non-smokers.   

The statements are part of a 2006 injunction against major U.S. cigarette makers to “prevent and restrain” further deception of the American people regarding tobacco use, a Justice Department statement said.

Three major U.S. tobacco companies, R.J. Reynolds, Phillip Morris and ITG Brands, have been fighting to weaken and delay the statements since 2006.
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