A campus in Hawaii is joining a handful of U.S. colleges and universities aiming to use 100 percent renewable energy, it said Tuesday, part of a growing nationwide trend of schools going green.

The move by the University of Hawaii campus on Maui island is forward-looking and makes economic sense given the cost of fuel on the remote Pacific archipelago of islands and atolls, said Michael Unebasmi, a university spokesman.

With plans to replace oil-based electricity from a utility with solar panels, Maui College joins a handful of U.S. schools such as Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire’s main Durham campus.

The decision puts Maui College “at the leading edge,” Unebasmi told Reuters.

“We thought by doing this it would be a great example,” he said.

The network of solar panels will fuel the needs of the 78-acre (32 hectares) grounds by 2019, he said.

With a reliance on fossil fuels, Hawaii has particularly high energy prices of more than twice the national average, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

The push by U.S. schools moving away from polluting sources of electricity has picked up pace, said Bronte Payne at the Denver-based nonprofit Environment America.

Growing numbers

About half a dozen colleges and universities have announced commitments over the last two years to use renewable energy sources rather than planet-warming fossil fuel, she said.

Largest among them are Boston University, Colorado State University and Cornell University, she said.

More than 500 other colleges and universities are aiming for carbon neutrality, offsetting the use of fossil fuel with renewable energy or so-called carbon credits from low-level producers of greenhouse gases.

“They will set an example for communities across the country,” she said.

Cornell, in western New York state, aims to replace its on-campus natural gas power plant with a mix of solar and enhanced geothermal energy by 2035, said Sarah Zemanick, director of its campus sustainability office.

The main campus in Ithaca, with some 22,000 students, stretches across 745 acres (301 hectares).

“We’re at the scale of a small city, so it’s a good place for us not only to discover solutions that might work but also try them on our own campus,” Zemanick said.
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Water stress is increasingly driving migration around the world, but efforts to adapt to worsening shortages could help, a new U.N. study suggests.

Water stress — not just shortages, but water-quality issues — is expected to drive more people from their communities permanently and cause rapid growth of cities, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Two-thirds of the world’s people suffer some water scarcity for part of each year, with communities dependent on agriculture affected the most, said FAO director-general Jose Graziano da Silva in a video message for the 8th World Water Forum in Brazil.

Finding ways to adapt to that reality — rather than simply responding to disasters caused by water shortages — is the most effective way to deal with the problem, the FAO said.

Water use has increased six-fold worldwide over the past century, said the study, which drew on a survey of more than 180 research papers on water scarcity and migration issues.

As climate change brings increasingly irregular rainfall, worsening droughts and higher temperatures, water scarcity will likely increase, particularly as demand for agricultural water remains high, the study said.

Investment in preparing for water crises — such as adopting more water-smart agricultural practices — could cut the need for people to migrate, the study said, although drawing a clear link between water scarcity and migration remains complicated.

Experts believe drought played a role in the early stages of the Syrian conflict when 1.5 million farmers headed to cities as the country suffered its worst drought on record, said Charles Iceland of the World Resources Institute, a research body.

Drought was clearly not the major factor, he said, but instead exerted an additional pressure alongside political and social issues.

He said much of the world would face water scarcity by 2040 as populations and temperatures rise. Combating that would require changes including in agriculture, such as adopting water-saving drip irrigation, he said.

About 70 percent of freshwater used each year goes to agriculture, experts have estimated.
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Despite tensions, sanctions and recriminations between the United States and Russia, two American astronauts will join a Russian cosmonaut blasting off Wednesday from Kazakhstan for the International Space Station.

Even when things get nasty between the two countries, experts say the space program rarely suffers.

The United States has depended entirely on Russia to deliver astronauts to the ISS since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

After President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014 for annexing Crimea, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggested U.S. astronauts could get to the International Space Station by trampoline.

But the launches continued.

“The politicians can be very cute and make their statements. But that doesn’t seem to have had an impact on day-to-day work on the International Space Station,” said Cathleen Lewis, a curator in the Space History Department at the National Air and Space Museum.

Cold War collaborators

U.S.-Russia cooperation in space dates back to the mid-1970s, during the Cold War.

In the race to the moon, both sides suffered losses. Three U.S. astronauts died in the first Apollo mission in a fire on the launchpad in 1967; the Soviet Union lost a cosmonaut in a crash later that year.

The two sides agreed to cooperate on a space project. In 1975, an American Apollo spacecraft and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft met in orbit, where cosmonauts and astronauts shook hands.

In addition to the political achievement, it was a major engineering feat to make the two crafts compatible.

“That created a bond, but also the knowledge that we could do this, even in the height of the Cold War, and probably one of the worst periods of the Cold War,” Lewis said. “Both sides could get together and do this, unperturbed by the politics around them.”

Reaching beyond Earth

Today, the United States, Russia and 13 other countries collaborate on the International Space Station.

Lewis says that kind of cooperation will likely be essential as humans reach beyond Earth.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources to make either the moon or Mars habitable for humans,” she said.

For now, collaboration is the only option for ISS crews. However, SpaceX and Boeing expect to bring human launch capability back to U.S. soil in a year or so.
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Brazil’s health minister says the country is expanding its campaign to vaccinate people against yellow fever to cover the entire country.

Ricardo Barros says that by including the final four of Brazil’s 27 states, nearly 78 million people will have been vaccinated by 2019.

Barros told a news conference Tuesday that 920 cases of yellow fever have been reported nationwide since July 2017 and 300 people have died from the disease. During the same period last year, 610 cases and 196 deaths were reported.

U.S. health officials last week warned travelers to stay away from certain areas of Brazil if they haven’t been vaccinated against yellow fever.

The virus can be spread by the same mosquito that transmits other tropical diseases, including Zika and dengue.
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Children in South Asia and Africa continue to face the threat of infection from meningitis. Despite progress in vaccines, there are still poor health infrastructures in key areas and inadequate access to medical services.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says promoting vaccination programs faces challenges, with outbreaks of several forms of meningitis causing child mortality rates as high as 60 percent across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Meningitis still threatens children

Mathuram Santosham, a professor of pediatrics and pediatric medicine at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine, said while vaccinations programs have been very successful in the West and developed regions, children in developing countries remain at risk.

“The disease pretty much disappeared in the U.S., Europe and other countries. It’s now working well; but the places where children are dying are not Western countries and European countries, it’s India and Africa,” he said.

“When a child gets meningitis, even when the best care is available the mortality is between three and 10 percent. But in the poor countries where there isn’t good access to medical care, it can be as high as 60 percent,” Santosham told VOA.

The disease largely affects young children.

Meningitis has lasting effects

Even for those who survive, there is a 30 to 40 percent chance of serious neurological complications affecting the child’s long term health.

The major cause of bacterial meningitis – one of several forms of the disease – is the Haemophilus Influenza type b or Hib.

The disease causes an acute inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, known together as the meninges.

Vaccines have been very effective since 2000

In 2000, the WHO estimated Hib was responsible for 8.13 million cases of serious illness worldwide, leading to some 371,000 deaths a year. Reports say the annual death toll has now fallen to less than 200,000.

A 2015 paper in The Lancet magazine noted the success of the new vaccines, such as Hib, in reducing mortality rates and globally an almost two-thirds decline in global meningitis deaths by 2030.

Developing a vaccine for meningitis has been a long term challenge.

A professor at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Porter W. Anderson, began work on a Hib vaccine in 1968 with a vaccine effective for older children, but not in those under the age of two.

Help for children under age 2

A breakthrough in the research for younger children came in the collaborative work between U.S. scientists John B. Robbins and Rachel Schneerson, who succeeded in developing a vaccine for children under two years of age.

Robbins told VOA the breakthrough was significant. “The ability to prevent an infection that not only killed infants and children but maimed them after they were treated was wonderful. It kept on pushing us,” he said.

Up to the end of 2016, the WHO says the Hib vaccine has been introduced in 191 countries. Vaccine coverage varies from 90 percent in the Americas but falls to around 28 percent in the Western Pacific Region.

In Africa, the WHO recommends large scale vaccinations of “population groups that are at risk” amid the constant threat of outbreaks especially in Sub Saharan regions.

Schneerson said it is crucial the vaccine reaches globally.

“It’s for everybody and most of those infectious diseases are more prevalent in poor countries. We live in one world. We live in a boat which is becoming smaller and smaller. We all live together. We have to take care of each other,” Schneerson said.

In the U.S., the success of the vaccination program has led to a dramatic decline in cases.

Prior to the launch of the immunization program in the mid-1980’s, Hib-meningitis infected 20,000 U.S. children a year with five percent of those dying and one-third left with intellectual disabilities. Since then the the annual death toll has been less than 100.

Opposition to vaccines

But Santosham said there was resistance to the vaccination program’s implementation.

“There’s also a tremendous amount of anti-vaccine lobbies in countries like India and even the United States and in many parts of Europe also. They were putting out false information saying this vaccine is dangerous,” he said.

In India, a strong anti-vaccine lobby stalled a national vaccination program, leading medical authorities to directly appeal to the individual states and local politicians about the need for the program.

But Santosham said China and Thailand had not yet signed up for the program, but he expected China’s private medical sector to play a key role, while Thai health care workers are looking for government funding “in the next year or two”.

Projections of the success of the vaccinations led experts to predict more than seven million lives would have been saved due to the program by 2020. “So this is a tremendous success story,” Santosham said.

The four scientists, Rachel Schneerson, John B. Robbins, Porter W. Anderson and Mathuram Santosham, recently visited Thailand as recipients of the Prince Mahidol medical awards in Public Health.

 
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The world’s last male northern white rhino, Sudan, has died after “age-related complications,” researchers announced Tuesday, saying he “stole the heart of many with his dignity and strength.”

A statement from the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya said the 45-year-old rhino was euthanized on Monday after his condition “worsened significantly” and he was no longer able to stand. His muscles and bones had degenerated and his skin had extensive wounds, with a deep infection on his back right leg.

The rhino had been part of an ambitious effort to save the subspecies from extinction after decades of decimation by poachers, with the help of the two surviving females. One is his daughter, Najin, and the other is her daughter, Fatu.

“He was a great ambassador for his species and will be remembered for the work he did to raise awareness globally of the plight facing not only rhinos, but also the many thousands of other species facing extinction as a result of unsustainable human activity,” said the conservancy’s CEO, Richard Vigne.

​Sudan was something of a celebrity, attracting thousands of visitors. Last year he was listed as “The Most Eligible Bachelor in the World” on the Tinder dating app in a fundraising effort.

The last male northern white rhino had been born in Sudan, the last of his kind to be born in the wild. 

He was taken to a Czech zoo and then transferred to Kenya in 2009 with the three other remaining fertile northern white rhinos at the time. They were placed under 24-hour armed guard and fed a special diet. “However, despite the fact that they were seen mating, there were no successful pregnancies,” the conservancy said.

Rangers caring for Sudan described him as gentle and, as his condition worsened in recent weeks, expressed sadness over his imminent death.

The rhino “significantly contributed to survival of his species as he sired two females,” the conservancy said. “Additionally, his genetic material was collected yesterday and provides a hope for future attempts at reproduction of northern white rhinos through advanced cellular technologies.”

The only hope for preserving the subspecies “now lies in developing in vitro fertilization techniques using eggs from the two remaining females, stored northern white rhino semen from males and surrogate southern white rhino females,” the statement said.

Sudan’s death “is a cruel symbol of human disregard for nature and it saddened everyone who knew him. But we should not give up,” said Jan Stejskal, director of international projects at Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic. “It may sound unbelievable, but thanks to the newly developed techniques even Sudan could still have an offspring.”

Northern white rhinos once roamed parts of Chad, Sudan, Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic, and were particularly vulnerable because of the armed conflicts that have swept the region over decades.

Other rhinos, the southern white rhino and another species, the black rhino, are under heavy pressure from poachers who kill them for their horns to supply illegal markets in parts of Asia.

Roughly 20,000 southern white rhinos remain in Africa. Their numbers dipped below 100 around a century ago, but an intense effort initiated by South African conservationist Ian Player in the mid-20th century turned things around. 
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Some people have abnormally fast heartbeats, sometimes as fast as 400 beats per minute. A heartbeat this fast can be life-threatening. The solution is an implantable defibrillator. VOA’s Carol Pearson has the stories of two people whose lives have been saved by devices implanted directly into their heart.
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Venezuela’s health system is sinking into further disarray, a survey led by the opposition-dominated Congress showed on Monday, with most hospitals plagued by water outages, unable to feed patients and lacking even basic devices like catheters.

In the midst of a crushing economic crisis that has caused medicine shortages and emigration of doctors, President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government has stopped issuing weekly bulletins on health.

To fill the gap, Venezuela’s Congress and a health group have for five years asked doctors and hospital workers to report the situation in their institutions. Those in government-run hospitals have usually been ordered to keep quiet, and so communicate surreptitiously with the pollsters.

“The government has decided not to inform, to hide the truth. The truth is that every day Venezuelans are dying due to lack of supplies and medicines,” said opposition lawmaker and oncologist Jose Manuel Olivares as he presented the findings on Monday.

All indicators worsened in 2018 and the private sector is increasingly hit, the survey said. Some 94 percent of x-ray units are out of service or only partially functional. Around 79 percent of hospitals have poor or in existent water service. Only 7 percent of emergency services are fully operative.

“Behind each number you see here, there is a story. There is a father, a mother, a son … there is a Venezuelan suffering,” said Olivares.

“We hope the government reflects on this. Political differences can never supersede the problems of the people.”

The Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the survey. The poll was conducted between March 1 and March 10. Information was drawn from 137 hospitals in 55 cities.

A crumbling state-led economy and low global prices for oil, which is Venezuela’s main export, have led to a shortage of medicine and vaccines, sparking the return of diseases that were once controlled such as diphtheria and measles.

Venezuelans suffering from chronic illnesses like cancer or diabetes are often forced to forgo treatment. Transplant patients who had gotten a second shot at life are terrified as anti-rejection medicine runs short, heightening chances that their body will reject the foreign organ. Epileptic patients are struggling with seizures due to drug shortages.

Amid the dire panorama, patients and health groups have been lobbying for international aid. But Maduro’s government says there is no humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and has refused to accept aid.
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Our first known interstellar visitor likely came from a two-star system.

That’s the latest from astronomers who were amazed by the mysterious cigar-shaped object, detected as it passed through our inner solar system last fall.

The University of Toronto’s Alan Jackson reported Monday that the asteroid — the first confirmed object in our solar system originating elsewhere — is probably from a binary star system. That’s where two stars orbit a common center. According to Jackson and his team, the asteroid was likely ejected from its system as planets formed.

“It has been wandering interstellar space for a long time since,” the scientists wrote in the Royal Astronomical Society’s journal, Monthly Notices.

Discovered in October by a telescope in Hawaii millions of miles away, the asteroid is called Oumuamua, Hawaiian for messenger from afar arriving first, or scout. The red-tinged rock is estimated to be possibly 1,300 feet (400 meters) long and zooming away from the Earth and sun at more than 16 miles (26 kilometers) per second.

Last month, a science team led by Wesley Fraser of Queen’s University Belfast reported that Oumuamua is actually tumbling through space, likely the result of a collision with another asteroid or other object that kicked it out of its home solar system. He expects it to continue tumbling for billions of more years.

Scientists originally thought it might be an icy comet, but now agree it is an asteroid.

“The same way we use comets to better understand planet formation in our own solar system, maybe this curious object can tell us more about how planets form in other systems,” Jackson said in a statement.

Close binary star systems may be the source of the majority of interstellar objects out there, both icy comets and rocky asteroids, according to the researchers.
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India is the most vulnerable country to climate change, followed by Pakistan, the Philippines and Bangladesh, a ranking by HSBC showed on Monday.

The bank assessed 67 developed, emerging and frontier markets on vulnerability to the physical impacts of climate change, sensitivity to extreme weather events, exposure to energy transition risks and ability to respond to climate change.

The 67 nations represent almost a third of the world’s nation states, 80 percent of the global population and 94 percent of global gross domestic product.

HSBC averaged the scores in each area for the countries in order to reach the overall ranking. Some countries were highly vulnerable in some areas but less so in others.

Of the four nations assessed by HSBC to be most vulnerable, India has said climate change could cut agricultural incomes, particularly unirrigated areas that would be hit hardest by rising temperatures and declines in rainfall.

Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines are susceptible to extreme weather events, such as storms and flooding.

Pakistan was ranked by HSBC among nations least well-equipped to respond to climate risks.

South and southeast Asian countries accounted for half of the 10 most vulnerable countries. Oman, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa are also in this group.

The five countries least vulnerable to climate change risk are Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia and New Zealand.

In its last ranking in 2016, HSBC only assessed G20 countries for vulnerability to climate risk.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to unveil his long-awaited plan to combat the opioid addiction crisis on Monday. The plan will include a controversial measure that seeks death penalty for some high-volume traffickers.

Andrew Bremberg, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council told reporters on Sunday that the death penalty would be sought for trafficking in some opioids, including fentanyl, when appropriate under current law.

It remains unclear how prosecutors could seek the death penalty for traffickers without changing U.S. law. Some legal scholars have said the issue may need to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Besides bolstering law enforcement against smuggling and trafficking, the senior administration official said the plan also seeks to educate Americans about the dangers of opioid abuse through a sizable advertising campaign, and improving the ability to fund treatment through federal government.  

Bremberg said President Trump’s opioid initiative has three main elements. The first element aims to reduce drug demand through education, awareness and preventing over-prescription, including a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of opioid misuse, and a “safer prescribing initiative” to cut the filling of such prescriptions by one-third nationwide within three years.

The second element targets the flow of illicit drugs across U.S. borders and within American communities. Bremberg said the Trump administration will call on Congress to pass legislation that reduces the threshold number of drugs needed to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for traffickers who “knowingly distribute certain illicit opioids that are lethal in trace amounts, including fentanyl.”

The third element focuses on helping people in the throes of addiction by expanding evidence-based addiction treatment and recovery services.

In recent speeches, Trump has expressed his preference for the “ultimate penalty” for some traffickers, but this would be the first time the idea becomes part of an official plan.

“Some countries have a very, very tough penalty. The ultimate penalty. And by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do. So we’re going to have to be very strong on penalties,” he said earlier this month at a White House opioid summit.

This is Trump’s first visit to New Hampshire as president. The state has been hit hard by the opioid crisis.

The word “opioid” is derived from “opium.” Opioids includes illegal drugs such as heroin or fentanyl, as well as legal prescription painkillers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, and morphine.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose killed roughly 64,000 Americans in 2016 alone, more than the number of Americans killed during the entire Vietnam War. About two-thirds of these drug overdose deaths involve an opioid.  
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What if filling a prescription was as easy as withdrawing money from an ATM? A South African company has set out to make that a reality. Meet the Pharmacy Dispensing Unit.
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Population growth, changing consumption patterns and development are taking their toll on the world’s water supplies, and governments need to rely more on ‘green’ water management to ensure a healthy planet and meet the needs of the fast-growing global population. 

That’s one of the messages in a new study by the U.N.’s cultural and scientific organization, UNESCO, presented today at a world water conference in Brazil.

Water demand is increasing by about 1 percent a year, even as climate change, pollution and erosion threaten its quality and availability. But until now, most countries have relied on traditional, man-made water management systems such as reservoirs, irrigation canals and water treatment plants. The study considers the many benefits of natural water “infrastructure” — like wetlands, urban gardens and sustainable farming practices — and finds that very little investment has gone into these greener water management options. 

Stefan Uhlenbrook, coordinator of UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, which authored the study, notes, “Green solutions can meet several water management solutions at the same time — improving water management, while also reducing floods or droughts. Improving access to water.” He also points to multiple benefits outside the water sector, to “help store carbon, create jobs — particularly in rural environments. They can also help increase biodiversity, which is also very essential.”

Striking a balance

The goal, UNESCO says, is not to scrap traditional water management options like dikes, but instead to strike the right balance between man-made systems and those relying more on Mother Nature. 

Some places are starting to do that. New York City saves hundreds of millions of dollars yearly in water treatment and maintenance by protecting vast, natural watersheds. China plans to build pilot initiatives that recycle rainwater for urban consumption. 

Some communities are building artificial wetlands to fight flooding and pollution. Others, like the Indian state of Rajasthan, have adopted more sustainable soil and water management practices that boost harvests and fight drought — growing challenges in the future. 

Uhlenbrook says these are important steps. “We have to grow some 50 percent more food in the next 30-40 years. We have to think of how to do that without cutting more forests, cutting more trees and trying to develop more land — which is hardly possible in many places around the world.” 

Experts say greener water management can help to increase agricultural production by 20 percent — which may prove key in feeding a global population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050.
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Two vaccination workers were killed and two were seriously wounded, officials said 

Militants ambushed a polio vaccination team in a remote tribal region in Pakistan, killing two of the medical workers and seriously wounding another two, officials said Sunday.

The gunmen also attacked tribal police and the paramilitary Frontier Corps when they responded to the attack late Saturday, killing one paramilitary and wounding another.

Polio workers have come under attack on several occasions since it was revealed that the CIA used a polio vaccination campaign as a ruse to get information on Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. commandos in Pakistan in 2011.Those revelations fed into claims by Islamic extremists that the vaccinations are part of a Western plot against Muslims.

Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world where polio is still endemic, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria.

An official in Pakistan’s restive Mohmand Agency, Younus Khan, said two workers from the seven-member polio vaccination team went missing after the attack but later returned unharmed. He says security forces are still searching for the attackers.

Jamaatul Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed the attack.

Khan said the bodies of the polio workers were handed over to relatives and their funeral will take place later in the day.

Provincial Governor Iqbal Zafar Jhagra condemned the attack, calling the polio workers heroes.
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Visiting the doctor to get your blood pressure checked might be stressful and time consuming, but what if you could get a check-up at your regular barbershop instead? That’s the idea behind a recent study in Los Angeles, where pharmacists are working with 52 barbershops to try to help African-American men, who have higher rates of high blood pressure than other ethnic groups. Faiza Elmasry has the story, narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Taking a data-driven approach to disaster preparedness can help cities at risk bounce back after earthquakes. Faith Lapidus explains.
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Capturing snowflakes isn’t as easy as sticking out your tongue.

At least not when you’re trying to capture them for scientific study, which involves isolating the tiniest of crystals on a metal card printed with grid lines and quickly placing them under a microscope to be photographed.

“They are very tiny and they are close to the melting point,” Marco Tedesco of Columbia University said as he set up his microscope beside a snowy field. “So as soon as they fall, they will melt.”

Tedesco recently led a team of three researchers who trudged through the snowy hills of New York’s Catskill Mountains with cameras, brushes, shovels, a drone and a spectrometer to collect the most fine-grained details about freshly fallen snowflakes and how they evolve once they settle to the ground.

That data could be used to provide clues to the changing climate and validate the satellite models used for weather predictions. It also could provide additional information on the snow that falls into New York’s City’s upstate watershed, flows into reservoirs and fills the faucets of some 9 million people.

“We’re talking about sub-millimeter objects,” Tedesco said as he stood in shin-deep snow. “Once they get together, they have the power, really, to shape our planet.”

This is the pilot stage of the “X-Snow” project, which organizers hope will involve dozens of volunteers collecting snowflake samples next winter. The specimens Tedesco spied under his microscope on a recent snowy day displayed more rounded edges and irregularities than the classic crystalline forms. This is characteristic of flakes formed up high in warmer air.

Pictures and video from the drone will be used to create a three-dimensional model of the snow’s surface. Postdoctoral researcher Patrick Alexander trudged though the snow with a wand attached to a backpack spectrometer that measured how much sunlight the snow on the ground is reflecting — a factor determining how fast it will melt. Later, Alexander got down on his belly in the field to take infrared pictures of the snow’s layers and its grain size.

“There are a lot of things that happen that we can’t see with our eyes,” said Tedesco, a snow and ice scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “When snow melts and re-freezes, the grains get bigger. And as the grains get bigger the snow absorbs more solar radiation.”

Tedesco grew up in southern Italy near Naples and never even saw snow until he was 6 years old. But as a scientist, he has logged time studying ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and has studied snow hydrology in the Rockies and the Dolomites. He said snow in the Eastern U.S. has its own character. It tends to be moister than the powdery snow that falls in higher elevation in the West.

Tedesco hopes that a cadre of committed volunteers in the Catskills and the New York City area can take snowflake and snow depth samples next winter. Volunteers won’t need an expensive backpack spectrometer, but he recommends a $17 magnifying lens that clips onto their phone, a ruler, a GPS application and a print-out version of the postcard-sized metal card Tedesco uses to examine fresh snowflakes.

Enlisting volunteers to take snowflake photos is novel and potentially useful, said Noah Molotch, director of The Center for Water, Earth Science and Technology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Molotch, who is not involved in the project, said the pictures will give information about atmospheric conditions and could be useful in the study of climate change.

“Snowflakes are among the most beautiful things in nature,” he said. “And the more we can do to document that and get people interested and excited about that, I think is great.”
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Cigarette smoking kills nearly a half-million Americans every year and costs the U.S. economy $300 billion in health care and lost productivity, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To help smokers kick the deadly habit and stop kids from starting, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed rules Thursday to cut the nicotine in cigarettes to minimal or nonaddictive levels.

“This milestone places us squarely on the road toward achieving one of the biggest public health victories in modern history and saving millions of lives in the process,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Thursday.

He said the FDA has a “vision of a world where combustible cigarettes would no longer create or sustain addiction.”

Legal authority

The FDA has the legal authority to regulate nicotine levels in cigarettes, but has always been met by court challenges from tobacco companies.

Nicotine naturally occurs in tobacco. It is not deadly but is a highly addictive drug that helps make cigarettes so pleasurable to smokers.

It is the burning tobacco leaf and the numerous additives used in cigarettes that lead to lung cancer, emphysema, and other deadly diseases and cancers.

Secondhand smoke from cigarettes is also harmful to children and potentially lethal to adults.

Public comment

Gottlieb says the FDA is giving the public time to comment on the proposed mandated cuts in nicotine. He says it will help regulators answer such questions as what an acceptable level of nicotine is, whether the cuts should be introduced gradually or immediately, whether weaker cigarettes will bring on a black market for stronger smokes, and whether smokers will smoke more to compensate for the lower levels of the drug.

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that if the FDA cuts the nicotine to what it regards as a nonaddictive level, 5 million smokers would quit within one year. The Journal says by the turn of the century, the number of American adults who smoke cigarettes would plummet from the current 15 percent to a minuscule 1.4 percent, saving 8 million lives.
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With the number of endangered Puget Sound orcas at a 30-year low, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Wednesday signed an executive order directing state agencies to take immediate and longer-term steps to protect the struggling whales.

The fish-eating mammals, also known as killer whales, that spend time in Puget Sound have struggled for years because of lack of food, pollution, noise and disturbances from vessel traffic. There are now just 76, down from 98 in 1995. 

Inslee said the orcas are in trouble and called on everyone in the state to do their part. His directive aims to make more salmon available to the whales, give them more space and quieter waters, make sure they have clean water to swim in and protect them from potential oil spills.

“The destiny of salmon and orca and we humans are intertwined,” the governor said at a news conference at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Seattle. “As the orca go, so go we.” 

An orca task force forming now will meet for the first time next month and will come up with a final report with recommendations by November. 

“This is a wake-up call,” said Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, adding: “It’s going to take some pain. We’re going to have to make some sacrifices.”

Many people have been sounding the alarm about the plight of the closely tracked southern resident killer whales for years. The federal government listed the orcas as endangered in 2005, and more recently identified them as among the most at risk of extinction in the near future.

A baby orca has not been born in the past few years. Half of the calves born during a celebrated baby boom several years ago have died. Female orcas are also having pregnancy problems linked to nutritional stress brought on by a low supply of chinook salmon, the whales’ preferred food, a recent study found.

“We are not too late,” said Barry Thom, west coast regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries. “From a biology perspective, there are still enough breeding animals, but we need to act soon.”

Whale advocates welcomed the statewide initiative, saying it creates urgency and calls attention to the issue. But some also said it was long overdue.

“I think that everybody would have loved to have seen this five years ago,” said Joe Gaydos, science director for the SeaDoc Society. “It is a crisis. The fact that we’re responding is good.”

Under the order, state agencies will find ways to quiet state ferries around the whales, train more commercial whale-watching boats to help respond to oil spills and adjust fishing regulations to protect key areas and fish runs for orcas.

Orcas use clicks, calls and other sounds to navigate, communicate and forage mainly for salmon. Noise from vessels can interfere with that. 

The Legislature passed a supplemental budget Friday that includes $1.5 million for efforts such as increased marine patrols to see that boats keep their distance from the orcas and to boost hatchery production of salmon that the orcas prefer to eat by an additional five million.

Last year, the endangered orcas spent the fewest number of days in the central Salish Sea in four decades, mostly because there wasn’t enough salmon to eat, according to the Center for Whale Research, which keeps the whale census for the federal government.

“I applaud anything that helps (the orcas) through the short term, but the long term is what we really have to look at – and that’s the restoration of wild salmon stocks throughout Washington state,” Ken Balcomb, senior scientist with the Center for Whale Research, said Tuesday. 

Balcomb and others say aggressive measures are needed and they have called for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River to restore those salmon runs. 

J.T. Austin, the governor’s senior policy adviser on natural resources issues, said Inslee thus far does not support removing those dams. 

 
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A large-scale United Nations program to halt deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, is harming local communities and failing to protect forests, land rights researchers said on Wednesday.

The U.S.-based group Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) called on the World Bank to withhold funding from 20 current or pending projects in the province of Mai-Ndombe, which has been a test case for a U.N.-backed conservation scheme known as REDD+.

In an area rife with land conflict, an RRI report said the forest protection projects in this western province threatened the rights and incomes of rural women and indigenous groups, including about 73,000 pygmies.

“REDD+ was created to both halt deforestation and benefit local communities — yet the current projects in Mai-Ndombe fail to address both objectives,” said Marine Gauthier, the report’s author.

A spokesman for the U.N.’s REDD+ program did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the focal cases involves U.S. company Wildlife Works Carbon (WWC), which denied the accusations.

The company obtained a large land concession in order to protect a forest from loggers, and uses a share of the money earned from selling carbon credits to benefit people living there, said president Mike Korchinsky.

“Millions of dollars of benefits have gone to the communities,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He said WWC had built schools, invested in medical clinics, and provided years of agricultural support.

But Gauthier said local communities, which signed agreements with the company, were not properly consulted, and claimed the project had hindered their farming and other activities.

“These communities actually bear the burden of reducing deforestation,” she said.

The World Bank said the funding provided by REDD+ and its partners supported some of the poorest Congolese citizens, while contributing to meeting climate goals.

“We will review the report’s findings and have no plans to withhold funding at this time,” a World Bank spokesperson said in emailed comments.

“The work improves livelihoods, lessens pressure on native forests and reduces emissions of greenhouse gases from deforestation and forest degradation,” the World Bank said. RRI said women and minorities had been worst affected by the REDD+ projects that were up and running, because they often lack formal land rights and are not consulted about decisions.

REDD+, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, was one of the solutions to climate change laid out in the 2015 Paris accord. It offers monetary incentives to scale back deforestation.

Congo could become the first country to sign a REDD+ deal with the World Bank this year, setting an example for more than 50 developing countries that plan to follow suit, said RRI.

However, it warned that deal could exacerbate conflict and set a dangerous global precedent if changes were not made. RRI said it had shared the results and that discussions with donors were underway.
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Eastern China’s Jiangsu province will step up its war on pollution and focus on “high-quality development” following a spike in smog early this year, the China Daily reported, citing the provincial governor.

The province of Jiangsu is a major part of the Yangtze river delta manufacturing hub. Concentrations of breathable smog particles known as PM2.5 soared 20 percent in the region in January.

Jiangsu’s major heavy industrial center, Xuzhou, was also ranked China’s smoggiest city in December 2017, after a winter campaign to cut emissions in northern China led to a significant drop in PM2.5 concentrations in traditional smog zones.

Governor Wu Zhenglong promised “stricter strategies with higher standards” to control emissions, China Daily said.

Despite the January spike, average PM2.5 concentrations in the province still fell from 73 micrograms to 49 micrograms last year, the report added.

Late last month, an environment ministry official urged regions in the Yangtze delta and elsewhere to take responsibility for their air quality problems.

The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), said in a report this week that China was winning its war on pollution after cutting average PM2.5 concentrations by 32 percent in just four years.

“The available evidence from our monitoring data indicate that pollution has decreased nearly across the board,” said Michael Greenstone, director of EPIC. “We estimate that just 4 percent of the 900 million residents covered by the monitor network saw pollution rise in their prefecture between 2013 and 2017,” he added.
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Federal officials have killed 10 wolves in northern Idaho at the request of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to boost elk numbers, and state officials say more might be killed this winter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services said Wednesday that workers used a helicopter in the Clearwater National Forest in late February and early March to kill the wolves.

“At the request of Idaho, we did remove wolves in that region,” said agency spokeswoman Tanya Espinosa.

Idaho officials say the area’s elk population in what’s called the Lolo zone has plummeted in the last 25 years from about 16,000 to about 2,000, and that wolves are to blame along with black bears, mountain lions and a habitat transition to more forests.

Fish and Game has liberal harvest rules for bears and mountain lions, but wolves are more challenging to hunt. So in six of the last seven years, Fish and Game has sought to kill wolves to boost elk. Elk are a prominent big game species in Idaho and hunters have decried a scarcity of elk in the region. Elk are also a source of revenue through hunting license sales for Fish and Game.

“We’ve made an obligation to try to manage this elk herd at levels at maybe not peak levels, but at least bring it back to levels that we’ve seen in the past that were adequate for hunting,” said Jim Hayden, a biologist with Fish and Game.

Officials say Fish and Game license dollars paid for the federal agency to kill the wolves. State and federal officials didn’t have the cost immediately available.

Environmental groups blasted the killing of the wolves, focusing on the operation being made public only after it happened.

“Now more than ever, Wildlife Services and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game need to be up front with the public about their plans to kill wolves,” said Andrea Santarsiere, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Idaho stopped monitoring wolves last year and stopped releasing annual reports revealing how many wolves remain in Idaho. It’s troubling to see this ever-increasing veil of secrecy fall over the management of Idaho’s wolves.”

The last intensive wolf count in Idaho was in 2015 when officials said the state had an estimated 786 wolves at the end of the year. That’s also the last year Fish and Game was required to do that type of count after wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List.

But Fish and Game has continued to monitor wolf populations. Hayden said that based on DNA samples from more than 700 wolf droppings, nearly 150 remote cameras and other information, at least 11 packs are in the Lolo zone. Hayden said the agency manages populations and doesn’t count individuals. But he said an Idaho wolf pack typically has six to nine wolves. That means there are roughly 65 to 100 wolves in the Lolo zone. 

Fish and Game estimates that statewide there are more than 90 packs, Hayden said, far above the state’s minimum requirement of 15 packs. The federal government could take back management of Idaho wolves if the population gets too low.

Hayden said the state and federal agencies do not announce wolf-kill operations out of concern for the safety of the helicopter crew as well as the last-minute nature of the operations. He said a snowy day must be followed by clear flying weather, and there’s a chance that if those conditions occur again this winter federal workers will try to kill more wolves in the Lolo zone.

“After you go after the first one, the wolves are scattering, so it’s not common to take a whole pack,” he said.
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Physicist Stephen Hawking died March 14, 2018, at his home in Cambridge, England. He was one of the most respected and best-known scientists in modern history. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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It was an ordinary surgery to remove a tumor – until doctors turned off the lights and the patient’s chest started to glow. A spot over his heart shined purplish pink. Another shimmered in a lung. 

They were hidden cancers revealed by fluorescent dye, an advance that soon may transform how hundreds of thousands of operations are done each year. 

Surgery has long been the best way to cure cancer. If the disease recurs, it’s usually because stray tumor cells were left behind or others lurked undetected. Yet there’s no good way for surgeons to tell what is cancer and what is not. They look and feel for defects, but good and bad tissue often seem the same.

Now, dyes are being tested to make cancer cells light up so doctors can cut them out and give patients a better shot at survival.

With dyes, “it’s almost like we have bionic vision,” said Dr. Sunil Singhal at the University of Pennsylvania. “We can be sure we’re not taking too much or too little.” 

The dyes are experimental but advancing quickly. Two are in late-stage studies aimed at winning Food and Drug Administration approval. Johnson & Johnson just invested $40 million in one, and federal grants support some of the work. 

“We think this is so important. Patients’ lives will be improved by this,” said Paula Jacobs, an imaging expert at the National Cancer Institute. In five or so years, “there will be a palette of these,” she predicts.

Making cells glow

Singhal was inspired a decade ago, while pondering a student who died when her lung cancer recurred soon after he thought he had removed it all. He was lying next to his baby, gazing at fluorescent decals.

“I looked up and saw all these stars on the ceiling and I thought, how cool if we could make cells light up” so people wouldn’t die from unseen tumors, he said. 

A dye called ICG had long been used for various medical purposes. Singhal found that when big doses were given by IV a day before surgery, it collected in cancer cells and glowed when exposed to near infrared light. He dubbed it TumorGlow and has been testing it for lung, brain and other tumor types.

He used it on Ryan Ciccozzi, a 45-year-old highway worker and father of four from Deptford, New Jersey, and found hidden cancer near Ciccozzi’s heart and in a lung.

“The tumor was kind of growing into everything in there,” Ciccozzi said. “Without the dye, I don’t think they would have seen anything” besides the baseball-sized mass visible on CT scans ahead of time.

Singhal also is testing a dye for On Target Laboratories, based in the Purdue research park in Indiana, that binds to a protein more common in cancer cells. A late-stage study is underway for ovarian cancer and a mid-stage one for lung cancer.

In one study, the dye highlighted 56 of 59 lung cancers seen on scans before surgery, plus nine more that weren’t visible ahead of time. 

Each year, about 80,000 Americans have surgery for suspicious lung spots. If a dye can show that cancer is confined to a small node, surgeons can remove a wedge instead of a whole lobe and preserve more breathing capacity, said On Target chief Marty Low. No price has been set, but dyes are cheap to make and the cost should fit within rates hospitals negotiate with insurers for these operations, he said. 

Big promise for breast cancer

Dyes may hold the most promise for breast cancer, said the American Cancer Society’s Dr. Len Lichtenfeld. Up to one third of women who have a lump removed need a second operation because margins weren’t clear – an edge of the removed tissue later was found to harbor cancer. 

“If we drop that down into single digits, the impact is huge,” said Kelly Londy, who heads Lumicell, a suburban Boston company testing a dye paired with a device to scan the lump cavity for stray cancer cells.

A device called MarginProbe is sold now, but it uses different technology to examine the surface of tissue that’s been taken out, so it can’t pinpoint in the breast where residual disease lurks, said Dr. Barbara Smith, a breast surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

She leads a late-stage study of Lumicell’s system in 400 breast cancer patients. In an earlier study of 60 women, it revealed all of the cancers, verified by tissue tests later. 

But it also gave false alarms in more than a quarter of cases – “there were some areas where normal tissue lit up a little bit,” Smith said.

Still, she said, “you would rather take a little extra tissue with the first surgery rather than missing something and have to go back.”

Other cancers 

Blaze Bioscience is testing Tumor Paint, patented by company co-founder Dr. Jim Olson of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital. It’s a combo product – a molecule that binds to cancer and a dye to make it glow.

“You can see it down to a few dozen cells or a few hundred cells,” Olson said. “I’ve seen neurosurgeons come out of the operating room with a big smile on their face because they can see the cancer very clearly.”

Early-stage studies have been done for skin, brain and breast cancers in adults, and brain tumors in children. 

Avelas Biosciences of San Diego has a similar approach – a dye attached to a molecule to carry it into tumor cells. The company is finishing early studies in breast cancer and plans more for colon, head and neck, ovarian and other types.

Cancer drugs have had a lot of attention while ways to improve surgery have had far less, said company president Carmine Stengone.

“This was just an overlooked area, despite the high medical need.”
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