The World Health Organization rescinded Sunday its appointment of Zimbabwe’s longtime President Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador.

“I have listened carefully to all who have expressed their concerns, and heard the different issues that they have raised. I have also consulted with the Government of Zimbabwe and we have concluded that this decision is in the best interests of the World Health Organization,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

Tedros, who became head of the WHO in July, had announced his appointment of Mugabe two days earlier during a conference in Uruguay, saying that Zimbabwe could “influence his peers in his region” and praising the country’s commitment to providing health care for all.

But over two dozen organizations quickly released a statement slamming the decision, saying health officials were “shocked and deeply concerned” — citing Mugabe’s record of human rights abuses and claiming that the country’s healthcare system has collapsed under his nearly 30-year rule.

The United States called the appointment of Mugabe by WHO’s first African leader “disappointing.”

The United States has maintained sanctions on Zimbabwe since 2003, citing the leader’s use use of millions of dollars to travel abroad, human rights abuses, and accusations of electoral fraud.
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Despite laws banning child marriage, rights groups in Pakistan say the problem continues, partly because of a desire to follow tradition, and partly because of poverty. No matter the reason, development experts say early marriage hurts the education and health prospects for girls. Sahar Majid brings us this report by Saman Khan from VOA’s Urdu service in Lahore.
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Autistic children often have social difficulties. They tend to linger on the edges of social groups at school and have fewer friendships than those without the condition. But that can change, if their classmates understand them and give them a chance. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, an Australian mother wrote and illustrated a children’s book to help kids do that. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Georgia Rep. Betty Price says her comments on people with HIV that ignited a national firestorm were “taken completely out of context.”

Price, the wife of former U.S. Health Secretary Tom Price, was in a legislative committee meeting Tuesday when she asked a state health official whether people with HIV could legally be quarantined.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Price said Saturday that she was just being “provocative.”

She said a health official had presented that Georgia is second only to Louisiana in the rate of new infections. Part of the reason is that more than a third of Georgians with HIV are not receiving care for it. She said that’s what sparked her “rhetorical” comments.

“I do not support a quarantine in this public health challenge and dilemma of undertreated HIV patients,” Price said in a statement. “I do, however, wish to light a fire under all of us with responsibility in the public health arena _ a fire that will result in resolve and commitment to ensure that all of our fellow citizens with HIV will receive, and adhere to, a treatment regimen that will enhance their quality of life and protect the health of the public. I look forward to continuing to work with all to accomplish this goal.”

Price, a Republican whose district includes parts of Atlanta’s northern suburbs, asked the head of the Georgia Department of Public Health’s HIV Epidemiology Section about stopping the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“What are we legally able to do? I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” Price can be seen asking the official, Dr. Pascale Wortley, in a video of the study committee meeting on barriers to adequate health care.

“Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition, so we have a public interest in curtailing the spread,” she continued. “Are there any methods, legally, that we could do that would curtail the spread?”

Like her husband, who resigned last month as Health and Human Services secretary after an outcry over his use of costly private planes for official travel, Betty Price is a doctor. Her legislative biography says she worked as an anesthesiologist for more than two decades, served on the boards of the Medical Association of Atlanta and the Medical Association of Georgia and is a past president of the American Medical Women’s Association in Atlanta.

In 2015, Georgia ranked fifth highest in the country for the number of adults and adolescents living with HIV, according to a fact sheet on the state’s Department of Public Health website. The total number of people living with HIV infection in Georgia on Dec. 31 of that year was 54,574 and nearly two-thirds of them lived in the Atlanta metro area.

Project Q Atlanta, a website serving the city’s gay community, was the first to report Price’s comments.
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President Salva Kiir opened South Sudan’s first-ever kidney hospital Thursday in Juba, calling it a breakthrough for the country’s medical care.

The facility — a welcome positive sign in conflict-torn South Sudan — is to provide free services to all kidney patients in the country, including foreigners who have been residing there for at least six months.

However, the government has not explained how it will pay for the services. Oil production is the country’s main revenue-producer, and output remains far below normal as the country endures its fourth year of a civil war.

The Al Cardinal group of companies, headed by investor Asraf Seed Ahmed, built the hospital, which boasts 10 dialysis machines and the capacity to treat at least 50 patients a day, although no transplants will be performed for the time being.

As Asraf turned over management of the hospital to the government Thursday, he called on Kiir to ensure that the hospital remains well-staffed and continues to provide free care to all patients.

“Mr. President, I want this center to be taken care of. If this center is managed well, it means citizens will get good services. I call upon all the organizations and foreign embassies here to work and provide for the other needs of South Sudanese citizens,” Asraf said.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, guests clapped and women ululated as Kiir said citizens can now receive “first-class treatment right here at home.”

“They will no longer have to travel abroad for diagnosis and long-term care,” he said.

Dr. Maker Isaac, director of Juba Teaching Hospital, said the new facility will receive 20 patients each month, but the overwhelming majority of kidney patients will be referred to other countries for treatment.

Isaac said a large number of South Sudanese patients suffered from suspected kidney diseases, many of whom died because there were no facilities available to treat or diagnose the disease.

“People die in front of us and we believe this death can be prevented simply by cleaning the blood of the patient, but we were unable to do anything. We just watch them die,” he told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.

“Now, kidney patients can receive treatment, free of charge. This will make a very huge impact in the care of the patients in South Sudan,” Isaac said.
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A malaria outbreak has killed at least four people at a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, according to local residents and health officials.

Hundreds of people have come down with the infectious disease at the Kalobeyei refugee complex in Kenya’s Turkana County.

“Already four to six people have died due to malaria,” Galama Guyo, a health care professional at Kalobeyei, told VOA’s Horn of Africa service. “Weekly, we report more than 200 malaria cases, especially people with low body resistance [immunity].”

Health care providers do not have enough drugs to treat patients, and there is no major hospital in the area, so some patients have to travel to up to 30 kilometers for treatment, he said.

The type of malaria hitting the camps is plasmodium falciparum, one of four types common in the Horn of Africa, said Guyo.

The U.N. refugee agency is tracking the situation at Kalobeyei and the nearby town of Kakuma, says the agency’s communication director in Nairobi, Yvonne Ndege.

“Our health partners have mobilized some resources to ensure they procure enough drugs and diagnostic kits to treat the increased cases of malaria that we have seen in Kakuma and Kalobeyei,” she said. “UNHCR is also planning to provide additional drugs to help address the situation.”

Located in a very arid region, Kalobeyei hosts thousands of African immigrants, mostly from Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.
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The World Health Organization reports pneumonic plague is continuing to spread at an alarming rate in urban areas of Madagascar and greater effort is needed to bring this deadly disease under control. Latest figures put the number of suspected cases at 1,153, including 94 deaths.

Health agencies are worried at how quickly this disease is spreading so early in Madagascar’s plague season, which runs from September to April.  The disease usually infects some 400 people a year. But this year, with six more months to go, the number of suspected cases is nearly three times higher than normal.  WHO Regional Emergency Director for Africa, Ibrahima Soce Fall, says the spread of the disease is faster because pneumonic plague, which is transmitted from person to person, has moved from the remote rural areas to congested urban areas. It is mainly found in the capital Antananarivo and the port city of Toamasina.

Nevertheless, Fall tells VOA he is confident WHO in coordination with the Ministry of Health and other agencies will be able to contain the disease in short order. He says WHO has provided enough antibiotics to treat 5,000 patients and to protect up to 100,000 people who may have been in contact with an infected person.

“This can be controlled relatively quickly if we manage to improve the contact tracing as we are doing right now,” said Fall. “So, with the teams who are already used to contact tracing and putting all contacts under antibiotic prophylaxis, we can prevent the disease. I am confident that with the strong team we have on the ground, in common with some partners coming and more health workers, we will be able to revert very quickly the trend.”

Fall cautions, though, it will be important to remain vigilant after transmission is over. He notes stopping the transmission of the plague does not mean the risk is gone. He says the virus is still in the country, and while people continue living in poor, unsanitary conditions, the disease is likely to recur.

 
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Astronauts went spacewalking Friday to provide some necessary focus to the International Space Station’s robot arm.

The main job for commander Randy Bresnik and teacher-turned-astronaut Joe Acaba was to replace a blurry camera on the new robotic hand that was installed during a spacewalk two weeks ago. The two men were supposed to go spacewalking earlier this week, but NASA needed extra time to rustle up the repair plan.

Sharp focus is essential in order for the space station’s robot hand to capture an arriving supply ship. The next delivery is a few weeks away, prompting the quick camera swap-out.

Orbital ATK, one of NASA’s commercial shippers, plans to launch a cargo ship from Virginia on November 11.

Acaba was barely outside an hour when he had to replace one of his safety tethers, which keep him secured to the orbiting outpost and prevent him from floating away.

Mission Control noticed his red tether seemed frayed and worn and ordered Acaba to “remain put” with his good waist tether locked to the structure as Bresnik went to get him a spare.

Spacewalking astronauts always have more than one of these crucial lifelines in case one breaks. They also wear a jetpack in case all tethers fail and they need to fly back to the space station.

This was the third spacewalk in two weeks for the space station’s U.S. residents. Bresnik performed the first two with Mark Vande Hei.

As they ventured out, Bresnik noted they were flying over Puerto Rico.

“Get out of here,” replied Acaba, the first astronaut of Puerto Rican heritage.

Acaba’s parents were born there, and he still has family on the hurricane-ravaged island.

“There’s a whole line of people looking up and smiling today as you get ready to head out the door,” Bresnik said.

Friday’s spacewalk should be the last one for the year. Early next year, astronauts will replace the hand on the opposite side of the 58-foot robot arm, Canada’s main contribution to the space station. The original latching mechanisms are showing wear and tear since the arm’s launch in 2001.

 The 250-mile-high complex is currently home to three Americans, two Russians and one Italian.
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The parliament of Australia’s second largest state passed legislation Friday to allow terminally ill patients to seek medical help to end their lives, a bill that is expected to act as a catalyst for the rest of the country to adopt similar laws.

Any resident of Victoria state older than 18, with a terminal illness and with less than 12 months to live can request a lethal dose of medication, the bill permits. Anyone that is too ill to administer the dosage can ask for a doctor to help.

Many countries have legalized euthanasia or physician-assisted deaths, including Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and some states in the United States.

Federal government opposed

But Australia’s federal government has opposed legalizing euthanasia even though the remote Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction in the world to do so in 1995.

The federal government enacted its own legislation to override the Northern Territory law in 1997 under rules allowed by the constitution. State law cannot be overridden.

The passage of the bill in Victoria is expected to herald assisted death legislation in other Australian states.

“It is a landmark moment. Other states are likely to follow. We have seen this in other jurisdictions and I expect once politicians see how the system works, they will adopt similar models,” said Ben White, director of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at Queensland University of Technology.

Divisive issue

The issue has divided lawmakers and medicinal professionals.

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews introduced the bill after his father’s death from cancer in 2016.

An opponent of the legalization, Michael Gannon, president of the Australian Medical Association, which represents medical practitioners, said state law should not change because of the death of Andrews’ father. He later apologized for the comment.

Members of the state assembly debated the bill through the night in a 26-hour session that ended with approval by 47 votes to 37.

The legislation needs the approval of Victoria’s senate, though analysts expect it to pass into law.

The legislation will not come into effect for 18 months to allow time to properly implement the assisted dying process.
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The idea of gravitational waves has been around for over 100 years since Albert Einstein posited their existence. But in 2016 scientists proved they were out there using giant L-shaped detectors called gravitational wave observatories. But this week more news was made when scientists were able to watch the creation of gravitational waves. VOA’s Kevin Enochs report
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Back in the old days, movies were edited by simply cutting out a piece of film you didn’t want and replacing it with a new shot. That’s almost exactly how the CRISPR gene editing technology works, but on a cellular level. Researchers now say they are close to being able to use this technology to fix some genetic diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Divers are removing hundreds of old tires, plastic jugs and other junk that was dumped off the Southern California coast nearly 30 years ago by a man who thought he was helping the ocean environment.

The cleanup began last week off of Newport Beach, the California Coastal Commission announced Wednesday.

“It’s about time this was cleaned up. Dumping plastic and other trash into our oceans is not the way to restore the marine ecosystem,” commission Chair Dayna Bochco said in a statement. “There is an estimated 18 billion pounds of plastic that enters the world’s oceans every year and we must do what we can to clean this up.”

In 1988, Rodolphe Streichenberger created what he described as an experimental, artificial reef.

The reef covered several acres of ocean floor and consisted of 1,500 used automobile tires, 2,000 one-gallon plastic jugs covered with plastic mesh, 100 sections of PVC pipe and other items, including fishing net, Styrofoam and iron roads, the commission said.

Streichenberger believed the reef would spur the growth of kelp forests, provide a place to grow mussels for commercial harvest and rebuild ocean habitat damaged by pollution and development.

The materials are “absolutely harmless,” Streichenberger told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “You have seen no impact. Only fish. It’s very good for the fish.”

But his research was “deeply flawed,” according to the Coastal Commission.

“State scientists said the tires contained harmful toxins, the material was not dense enough to anchor to the ocean floor and warned the discarded netting and ropes could trap fish and marine mammals,” the commission said in its statement.

“It’s hard to believe there was a time when someone thought this was a good idea,” commission Executive Director Jack Ainsworth said. “We now know that plastic is poison in the ocean, polluting every level of the food chain.”

Streichenberger also had failed to obtain permission from the commission for the project. He was refused a retroactive permit in 1997 and the commission eventually issued a cease-and-desist order.

Streichenberger and his now-defunct Marine Forests Society sued, challenging the commission’s authority. In 2005, the California Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling and sided with the commission.

 Streichenberger died the next year at 77.

Over the years, the Coastal Commission and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife kept tabs on the reef.

Instead of a thriving and diverse ecosystem, divers found that the junk had been spread around the sea floor by currents and held only “the type of marine life commonly found on pier pilings and boat bottoms,” the commission statement said.

 “There’s no native kelp, just a few fish swimming around,” said Kirsten Gilardi, assistant director at the Wildlife Health Center School at the University of California, Davis, which is involved in the cleanup. “It’s nothing like the diversity and density you’d see on a natural rocky reef off the Southern California coast.”

 Earlier this year, the Coastal Commission finally found a way to fund a cleanup through permit fees for a different underwater project at Hermosa Beach. 

 Since then, divers have been pulling tires from the water at the rate of about 100 a day, according to the commission. 
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Some flowers have found a nifty way to get the blues.

They create a blue halo, apparently to attract the bees they need for pollination, scientists reported Wednesday. Bees are drawn to the color blue, but it’s hard for flowers to make that color in their petals.

Instead, some flowers use a trick of physics. They produce a blue halo when sunlight strikes a series of tiny ridges in their thin waxy surfaces. The ridges alter how the light bounces back, which affects the color that one sees.

 

The halos appear over pigmented areas of a flower, and people can see them over darkly colored areas if they look from certain angles.

The halo trick is uncommon among flowers. But many tulip species, along with some kinds of daisy and peony, are among those that can do it, said Edwige Moyroud of Cambridge University in England.  

 

In a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature, Moyroud and others analyze the flower surfaces and used artificial flowers to show that bumblebees can see the halos.

 

An accompanying commentary said the paper shows how flowers that aren’t blue can still use that color to attract bees. Further work should see whether the halo also attracts other insects, wrote Dimitri Deheyn of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

 
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The statistics in the United States are disturbing enough: every year two million people contract bacterial infections that are difficult or impossible to treat with antibiotics; 23,000 of those people die. Doctors gathered in Berlin are warning it’s going to get worse. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Planting forests and other activities that harness the power of nature could play a major role in limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris agreement, an international study showed Monday.

Natural climate solutions, also including protection of carbon-storing peat lands and better management of soils and grasslands, could account for 37 percent of all actions needed by 2030 under the 195-nation Paris plan, it said.

Combined, the suggested “regreening of the planet” would be equivalent to halting all burning of oil worldwide, it said.

“Better stewardship of the land could have a bigger role in fighting climate change than previously thought,” the international team of scientists said of findings published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The estimates for nature’s potential, led by planting forests, were up to 30 percent higher than those envisaged by a U.N. panel of climate scientists in a 2014 report, it said.

Trees soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow and release it when they burn or rot. That makes forests, from the Amazon to Siberia, vast natural stores of greenhouse gases.

Overall, better management of nature could avert 11.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year by 2030, the study said, equivalent to China’s current carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.

The Paris climate agreement, weakened by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision in June to pull out, seeks to limit a rise in global temperature to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Current government pledges to cut emissions are too weak to achieve the 2C goal, meant to avert more droughts, more powerful storms, downpours and heat waves.

“Fortunately, this research shows we have a huge opportunity to reshape our food and land use systems,” Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, said in a statement of Monday’s findings.

Climate change could jeopardize production of crops such as corn, wheat, rice and soy even as a rising global population will raise demand, he said.

The study said that some of the measures would cost $10 a ton or less to avert a ton of carbon dioxide, with others up to $100 a ton to qualify as “cost-effective” by 2030.

“If we are serious about climate change, then we are going to have to get serious about investing in nature,” said Mark Tercek, chief executive officer of The Nature Conservancy, which led the study.
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It covers almost three-fourths of the planet, but it’s probably not a good idea to fill your cup from a river. Drinkable water flows to most of our taps only after it gets a good scrubbing. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports from a drinking water treatment plant in the Washington metropolitan area.
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New York City is known for its tall buildings, financial markets and centers for the arts, but America’s most populated city is becoming known for something you might not expect — farms.

New York City’s government announced last month that it is providing $500,000 to create two urban farms. Both will use space in New York public housing developments. The new farms will join four other farms already operating with city government help.

The idea is to get more fresh fruits and vegetables to communities in the city. City officials see it as a public health issue.

“These new urban farms will not only provide access to healthy produce, but also provide jobs to young residents,” said New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres.

The new farms will be in the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and the Bronx.

These farms are supported by the local government but there are also privately run farms in the city.

In the New City neighborhood of Tribeca, Robert Laing has opened up a privately-run indoor farm called Farm.One, where he grows many kinds of herbs. His customers include well-known restaurants in New York City.

The restaurants can pick up fresh herbs hours for that night’s dinner because his Laing’s indoor farm can be reached by bicycle from much of the city. Laing’s website tells customers that they can buy fresh herbs, even in a snowstorm.

Farm.One is very different than farms in less populated communities. The major difference is size. It is only 112-meters. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the average farm in America is 176 Hectares.

Farm.One’s crops are grown on vertical shelves so more can be grown in less space.

“The nice thing about farming vertically indoors is that you don’t need a lot of space,” Laing said. “I can see some bodega [a small grocery story] setting one up on the roof.”

Urban farms are growing in other cities besides New York City.

The website Inhabitat.com recently released a list of the top four U.S. cities for urban farms. They are Austin, Texas; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan.

The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future released a report on urban farms in 2016. It said there are important benefits to turning unused land into sources of healthy food.

But it said that urban farming still has a long way to go to produce the environmental and health benefits claimed by supporters.

“In some cases, the enthusiasm is ahead of the evidence,” the Johns Hopkins research said.

For example, the report said that supporters of growing food close to the people who eat it claim that it reduces pollution compared to transporting food long distances.

But the researchers found that smaller farms do not do as a good a job as larger farms in reducing use of water and other natural resources.

The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research based in Washington D.C. wants more urban farms. It said the benefits are almost unlimited.

The group announced last month that it will give $2 million to help pay for a new farm in Newark, New Jersey, just outside of New York City.

Aero Farms will work with scientists from Cornell University in New York State and Rutgers University in New Jersey. The goal is to grow salad greens with improved taste and color.

The funding announcement said that because the farm is indoors the farmers can control the environment, including temperature, to improve their crops.

Sally Rockey, executive director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, said that more than half the world’s population lives in cities and that it is important to provide healthy food to this population. Whenever possible, Rockey said, food should be “grown locally.”

Brian Massey writes and farms. He recently wrote about managing an urban farm in a Washington D.C. neighborhood near Howard University.

He said that a lot of people liked the fresh fruit and vegetables his farm produced. But he said others worried the farm was there to help the newly arrived, wealthier residents, not the poor.

There was a concern that the farm would add to Washington’s continuing shortage of low-income housing, Massey wrote.
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It was a faint signal, but it told of one of the most violent acts in the universe, and it would soon reveal secrets of the cosmos, including how gold was created.

Astronomers around the world reacted to the signal quickly, focusing telescopes located on every continent and even in orbit to a distant spot in the sky.

 

What they witnessed in mid-August and revealed Monday was the long-ago collision of two neutron stars – a phenomenon California Institute of Technology’s David H. Reitze called “the most spectacular fireworks in the universe.”

 

“When these things collide, all hell breaks loose,” he said.

 

Measurements of the light and other energy emanating from the crash have helped scientists explain how planet-killing gamma ray bursts are born, how fast the universe is expanding, and where heavy elements like platinum and gold come from.

 

“This is getting everything you wish for,” said Syracuse University physics professor Duncan Brown, one of more than 4,000 scientists involved in the blitz of science that the crash kicked off. “This is our fantasy observation.”

 

It started in a galaxy called NGC 4993, seen from Earth in the Hydra constellation. Two neutron stars, collapsed cores of stars so dense that a teaspoon of their matter would weigh 1 billion tons, danced ever faster and closer together until they collided, said Carnegie Institution astronomer Maria Drout.

 

The crash, called a kilonova, generated a fierce burst of gamma rays and a gravitational wave, a faint ripple in the fabric of space and time, first theorized by Albert Einstein.

 

The signal arrived on Earth on Aug. 17 after traveling 130 million light-years. A light-year is 5.88 trillion miles.

 

NASA’s Fermi telescope, which detects gamma rays, sent out the first alarm. Then, 1.7 seconds later, gravity wave detectors in Louisiana and Washington state that are a part of the LIGO Laboratory , whose founders won a Nobel Prize earlier this month, detected the crash. It issued a worldwide alert to focus telescopes on what became the most well-observed astronomical event in history.

 

Before August, the only other gravity waves detected by LIGO were generated by colliding black holes. But black holes let no light escape, so astronomers could see nothing.

 

This time there was plenty to see, measure and analyze: matter, light, and other radiation. The Hubble Space Telescope even got a snapshot of the afterglow.

 

“The completeness of this picture from the beginning to the end is unprecedented,” said Columbia University physics professor Szabolcs Marka. “There are many, many extraordinary discoveries within the discovery.”

 

The colliding stars spewed bright blue, super-hot debris that was dense and unstable. Some of it coalesced into heavy elements, like gold, platinum and uranium. Scientists had suspected neutron star collisions had enough power to create heavier elements, but weren’t certain until they witnessed it.

 

“We see the gold being formed,” said Syracuse’s Brown.

 

Calculations from a telescope measuring ultraviolet light showed that the combined mass of the heavy elements from this explosion is 1,300 times the mass of Earth. And all that stuff – including lighter elements – was thrown out in all different directions and is now speeding across the universe.

 

Perhaps one day the material will clump together into planets the way ours was formed, Reitze said – maybe ones with rich veins of precious metals.

 

“We already knew that iron came from a stellar explosion, the calcium in your bones came from stars and now we know the gold in your wedding ring came from merging neutron stars,” said University of California Santa Cruz’s Ryan Foley.

 

The crash also helped explain the origins of one of the most dangerous forces of the cosmos – short gamma ray bursts, focused beams of radiation that could erase life on any planet that happened to get in the way. These bursts shoot out in two different directions perpendicular to where the two neutron stars first crash, Reitze said.

 

Luckily for us, the beams of gamma rays were not focused on Earth and were generated too far away to be a threat, he said.

 

Scientists knew that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang. By using LIGO to measure gravitational waves while watching this event unfold, researchers came up with a new estimate for how fast that is happening, the so-called Hubble Constant. Before this, scientists came up with two slightly different answers using different techniques. The rough figure that came out of this event is between the original two, Reitze said.

 

The first optical images showed a bright blue dot that was very hot, which was likely the start of the heavy element creation process amid the neutron star debris, Drout said. After a day or two that blue faded, becoming much fainter and redder. And after three weeks it was completely gone, she said.

 

Scientists involved with the search for gravitational waves said this was the event they had prepared for over more than 20 years.

 

The findings are “of spectacular importance,” said Penn State physicist Abhay Ashtekar, who wasn’t part of the research. “This is really brand new.”

 

 

 

 
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A new breeding and research center in New Orleans, Louisiana, is now home to African antelopes that usually live in the rain forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The new habitat offers the endangered animals a large space to roam freely and a quiet safe environment in which to breed. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Kevin Enochs narrates.
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Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in over 40 years.

 

Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.

“Not only did the chick starve but the partner [who stayed behind] also had to endure a long fast,” said Yan Ropert-Coudert, a marine ecologist with the French science agency CNRS.

 

Ropert-Coudert, who leads the study of seabirds at the Dumont D’Urville Antarctic research station, said the Adelie colony there numbers about 18,000 pairs who have been monitored since the 1960s. A similar breeding loss was observed for the first time in the 2013/2014.

 

“It is unusual because of the size of the population concerned,” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “Zero breeding success years have been noted before elsewhere, but never for colonies of this size.”

 

Sea ice extent in the polar regions varies each year, but climate change has made the fluctuation more extreme.

 

The environmental group WWF, which supported the research, urged governments meeting in Hobart, Australia, this week to approve a new marine protection area off East Antarctica. Rod Downie, head of polar programs for the group’s British branch, said the impact of losing thousands of chicks was dramatic for an otherwise hardy species such as Adelie penguins.

 

“It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet,’ with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adelie Land,” he said.

 

Ropert-Coudert said creating a protection zone in the D’Urville Sea-Mertz region, where the colony is located, wouldn’t prevent larger-than-usual sea ice, but it might ease the pressure on penguins from tourism and over-fishing.
…

After 50 years of sitting in the National Geographic archives, 100 hours of footage on Jane Goodall and her groundbreaking observations of chimpanzees in the African forest of Tanzania have been compiled into a documentary film.

The documentary titled “Jane” starts in 1960 when Jane Goodall was 26 years old.

WATCH: Video Report by Elizabeth Lee

Through interviews with Goodall and National Geographic footage, the film documents Goodall’s early years, as a woman with no university degree, working in a remote part of Tanzania. The film portrays her work and personal life. Her unconventional ways of observing chimps challenged the scientific community’s belief on what it means to be human.

“More than any other documentary that has been made, it does take me back to the actual feeling I had when I was out there in the forest and so it’s very moving,” Goodall said at a screening of the film in Los Angeles.

The music in the documentary was composed by Philip Glass. When Goodall saw the film with the music, she described it as “magical.”

The moment in the documentary that especially moved Glass was when Goodall was sitting with chimpanzees who had accepted her.

“The very intimacy when she is sitting with them [chimps] and they’re like children to her. She’s combing their hair and she talks with them and they’ve accepted her totally,” Glass said.

Goodall remembered her unique relationship with the chimps.

“It’s not quite family but, it’s not quite like friends, but I’m part of their lives. They accept me. I can watch what they do. In the time of the movie, we had a really close touching relationship, which we don’t have anymore,” Goodall said.

With that close relationship, Goodall made headlines by discovering that chimpanzees are intelligent, social animals who used tools to gather food, something the scientific community at the time, believed only humans could do.

When asked whether she would have done anything differently in her research, Goodall said, “Everything worked out perfectly. Were mistakes made? Of course, but one learns from mistakes, and so I wouldn’t have changed anything really.”

Jane features the footage of National Geographic filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, Goodall’s first husband.

“Going through 100 hours of Hugo Van Lawick‘s footage is a dream. You know, Hugo’s one of the greatest wildlife cinematographers in the history of filmmaking,” director Brett Morgen said.

 At the Los Angeles screening, Hollywood actor Jamie Lee Curtis described why she is in awe of Goodall.

“She has just, by doing what she loves, has brought us all along on the journey and that’s a message if anything. Be uncompromising in your vision, uncompromising in your attack and attitude of what it is that you do,” Curtis said.

Even in present day, Goodall continues to travel and speak about protecting chimpanzees and being good stewards of the natural world.
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President Donald Trump’s decision to end a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was benefiting roughly 6 million Americans helps fulfill a campaign promise, but it also risks harming some of the very people who helped him win the presidency.

Nearly 70 percent of those benefiting from the so-called cost-sharing subsidies live in states Trump won last November, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. The number underscores the political risk for Trump and his party, which could end up owning the blame for increased costs and chaos in the insurance marketplace.

The subsidies are paid to insurers by the federal government to help lower consumers’ deductibles and co-pays. People who benefit will continue receiving the discounts because insurers are obligated by law to provide them. But to make up for the lost federal funding, health insurers will have to raise premiums substantially, potentially putting coverage out of reach for many consumers.

Some insurers may decide to bail out of markets altogether.

“I woke up, really, in horror,” said Alice Thompson, 62, an environmental consultant from the Milwaukee area who purchases insurance on Wisconsin’s federally run health insurance exchange.

Thompson, who spoke with reporters on a call organized by a health care advocacy group, said she expects to pay 30 percent to 50 percent more per year for her monthly premium, potentially more than her mortgage payment. Officials in Wisconsin, a state that went for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in decades last fall, assumed the federal subsidy would end when they approved premium rate increases averaging 36 percent for the coming year.

An estimated 4 million people were benefiting from the cost-sharing payments in the 30 states Trump carried, according to an analysis of 2017 enrollment data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of consumers benefiting from cost-sharing, all but one — Massachusetts — went for Trump.

Kentucky, for example

Kentucky embraced former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act under its last governor, a Democrat, and posted some of the largest gains in getting its residents insured. Its new governor, a Republican, favors the GOP stance to replace it with something else.

Roughly half of the estimated 71,000 Kentuckians buying health insurance on the federal exchange were benefiting from the cost-sharing subsidies Trump just ended. Despite the gains from Obama’s law, the state went for Trump last fall even as he vowed to repeal it.

Consumers such as Marsha Clark fear what will happen in the years ahead, as insurers raise premiums on everyone to make up for the end of the federal money that helped lower deductibles and co-pays.

“I’m stressed out about the insurance, stressed out about the overall economy, and I’m very stressed out about our president,” said Clark, a 61-year-old real estate broker who lives in a small town about an hour’s drive south of Louisville. She pays $1,108 a month for health insurance purchased on the exchange.

While she earns too much to benefit from the cost-sharing subsidy, she is worried that monthly premiums will rise so high in the future that it will make insurance unaffordable.

Most beneficiaries in Florida

Sherry Riggs has a similar fear. The Fort Pierce, Florida, barber benefits from the deductible and co-pay discounts, as do more than 1 million other Floridians, the highest number of cost-sharing beneficiaries of any state.

She had bypass surgery following a heart attack last year and pays $10 a visit to see her cardiologist and only a few dollars for the medications she takes twice a day.

Her monthly premium is heavily subsidized by the federal government, but she worries about the cost soaring in the future. Florida, another state that swung for Trump, has approved rate increases averaging 45 percent.

“Probably for some people it would be a death sentence,” she said. “I think it’s kind of a tragic decision on the president’s part. It scares me because I don’t think I’ll be able to afford it next year.”

Double-digit premium increases

Rates were rising in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s decision. Insurance regulators in Arkansas, another state that went for Trump, approved premium increases Friday ranging from 14 percent to nearly 25 percent for plans offered through the insurance marketplace. Had federal cost-sharing been retained, the premiums would have risen by no more than 10 percent.

In Mississippi, another state Trump won, an estimated 80 percent of consumers who buy coverage on the insurance exchange benefit from the deductible and co-pay discounts, the highest percentage of any state. Premiums there will increase by 47 percent next year, after regulators assumed Trump would end the cost-sharing payments.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has estimated the loss of the subsidies would result in a 12 percent to 15 percent increase in premiums, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has put the figure at 20 percent. Experts say the political instability over Trump’s effort to undermine Obama’s health care law could prompt more insurers to leave markets, reducing competition and driving up prices.

Trump’s move concerned some Republicans, worried the party will be blamed for the effects on consumers and insurance markets.

“I think the president is ill-advised to take this course of action, because we, at the end of the day, will own this,” Republican Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said Friday on CNN. “We, the Republican Party, will own this.”

Dent is not running for re-election.

GOP support

In announcing his decision, Trump argued the subsidies were payouts to insurance companies, and the government could not legally continue to make them. The subsidies have been the subject of an ongoing legal battle because the health care law failed to include a congressional appropriation, which is required before federal money can be spent.

The subsidies will cost about $7 billion this year.

Many Republicans praised Trump’s action, saying Obama’s law has led to a spike in insurance costs for those who have to buy policies on the individual market.

Among them is Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a state Trump won. An estimated 78,000 Arizonans were benefiting from the federal subsidies for deductibles and co-pays.

“While his actions do not take the place of real legislative repeal and revitalization of free-market health care, he is doing everything possible to save Americans from crippling health care costs and decreasing quality of care,” Biggs said.
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Students are not supposed to “zone out” in class, but that’s a required part of the curriculum in the Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies course at the University of Vermont. Faith Lapidus tells us about the unusual program.
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A groundbreaking treatment for a rare form of hereditary blindness has moved closer to U.S. approval. This week advisers to the Food and Drug Administration recommended the experimental gene therapy, which replaces a defective gene. If the FDA agrees by mid-January, this would become the first gene therapy in the U.S. for an inherited disease. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us how a breakthrough treatment helped restore vision to a teenager who has his sights on a singing career.
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