A fourth-grade class at a suburban Kansas City school erupted in wonder when they tried on their solar eclipse glasses for the first time and turned toward the sun for an eclipse “practice.”

 

“The sun looks like the moon!” “It’s really dark!” “There’s just a little circle of light!” “It’s just a speck up there!”

 

The students at Clardy Elementary School in North Kansas City were practicing the proper use of the glasses Friday in anticipation of Monday’s solar eclipse. Their teacher, Christy Lister, had gone through slides detailing how and when to wear the glasses, how to care for them and proper behavior during the eclipse. It was only the third day of the school year, but the students had already talked about eyes, the solar system and other eclipse-related topics.

 

The district’s teachers and administrators began planning for the big event last May and worked through the summer on age-specific activities for the district’s 20,000 students. The activities will include kindergartners using beads that react to ultraviolet light from the sun, while others will conduct experiments measuring atmospheric changes during the eclipse or create solar viewers with 3-D printers.

U.S. schools along and near the coast-to-coast path where the sun will be totally blacked out by the moon during the eclipse are taking widely varying approaches. While some districts are seizing the opportunity for ready-made lessons, others are closing for the day or keeping kids inside because of safety concerns.

In Idaho, districts in and around Twin Falls are using the day for science education, while many districts in the eastern part of the state either canceled school or will start the school year a day later. In Wyoming, the Laramie School District moved the first day of school to Tuesday after the superintendent said he had “grossly underestimated” the event’s significance.

 

North Kansas City found the educational opportunity irresistible, said Jill Hackett, a deputy superintendent.

 

“Students will gain a lot more by watching, discussing what they see with their teachers and other students,” she said. “I think it will be extraordinary.”

Smaller towns expecting huge influxes of visitors have concerns about transportation. The primary worry for many districts is the risk of eye injuries for students who gaze at the sun without properly wearing the right glasses.

 

In St. Joseph, Missouri, district officials decided to close schools out of concern that the expected tens of thousands of out-of-towners could tie up traffic.

 

“We were concerned with the bus routes, there would be kids sitting and waiting for hours for their buses,” said district spokeswoman Bridget Blevins, who said city and county officials “strongly urged” the district to close.

 

Citing warnings of possible eye damage, Cumberland Valley School District in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, canceled recess Monday and Broward County public schools in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, canceled all outdoor activities during the eclipse. Schools in Crocker, Missouri, will be closed after the district’s insurance company required a liability waiver from parents and students concerning possible eye damage.

 

Other districts made changes to help students see the eclipse, even in areas where the moon won’t totally cover the sun. The New Albany Floyd County Schools in southern Indiana plans to extend the school day 15 minutes, timing it for the height of the eclipse. Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., will take students to its football field to see the event.

 

In North Kansas City, students can stay inside if they or their parents request it.

 

“We will be mindful of the exposure and making sure we’re safe,” Hackett said. “We plan field trips all the time, we teach students how to properly use tools, how to do experiments in labs. It just requires safety, very clear instructions and careful monitoring.”

 

For 9-year-olds Kyle Hurt, Jack Leech and Sierra Geary, the chance to see a solar eclipse brought nothing but excitement.

 

“It’s going to be a great event for us, for the school and for even the whole country,” Kyle said. “I can’t wait.”
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While Monday’s total solar eclipse in the U.S. will be a once-in-a-lifetime sky show for millions, there’s a small group of people who have experienced it all before and they can’t get enough of it.

 

Glenn Schneider has seen 33. Fred Espenak has watched 28. Donald Liebenberg has logged 26. For newbie Kate Russo, it’s 10 and counting.

 

These veteran eclipse chasers spend lots of money and craft intricate plans all to experience another mid-day darkening of the sky. Many work in science and related fields and they’ll travel around the world, even to Antarctica, to see one more.

“I do this not so much as an avocation, but as an addiction,” said Schneider, a University of Arizona astronomy professor.

Russo, a psychologist in Ireland who wrote a book about people’s eclipse experiences, said some people find the experience life-changing. That happened to her.

 

“Eclipse chasing isn’t just a hobby or interest,” Russo wrote in an email from Wyoming, where she traveled to see Monday’s eclipse. “Eclipse chasing is a way of life. It becomes who you are.”

Monday’s eclipse will cut a 70-mile-wide (112-kilometer) path of totality across the country, when the moon moves between Earth and the sun, blocking it for as much as 2 1/2 minutes. It’s the first coast-to-coast full eclipse since 1918. Many of the big eclipse chasers are planning to be in Oregon or Wyoming because there’s a better chance of clear weather there in August. They’ll be ready to drive hundreds of miles if need be to find good weather.

 

Total solar eclipses happen on average every 18 months or so, but they usually aren’t near easy-to-drive highways. Norma Liebenberg has been to a dozen, mostly joining her avid eclipse watcher husband, Donald, in remote places like Libya, Zambia and Western China.

 

“It’s sort of mind-boggling that there are 1,000 people out in these isolated places to see it,” she said. She even forgave her husband when he missed their first anniversary to go to a clouded-out eclipse in the South Pacific.

 

There’s a compulsiveness to eclipse chasers, especially photographers, said Dr. Gordon Telepun, an Alabama plastic surgeon who has seen only three.

 

“It’s very anxiety-producing, it’s very challenging,” said Telepun, who even developed a talking phone app that times an eclipse so photographers don’t miss anything. “It’s an adrenaline rush man, I’m telling you.”

Telepun said his hero is “Mr. Eclipse” Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, who explains why chasers are the way they are.

 

“It’s the closest any of us will come to being an astronaut and being in space,” Espenak said.

 

Eclipse chasers say their first always hooks them.

 

Schneider, who got a telescope at age 5, planned out his first eclipse precisely. He was 14 in 1970 and he traveled from New York City to East Carolina University’s stadium. He had choreographed how he was going to spend the 2 minutes 53 seconds of darkness. Then came the moment.

 

“I was frozen in place,” he recalled. “I had binoculars around my neck for two and a half minutes and I never picked them up.”

 

When it was over “I was shaking. I was crying. I was overwhelmed,” he said. “It was at that instant when I said ‘Yeah, this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life’.”

 

Now Schneider takes his grown daughter with him to eclipses. And he invented what he calls the “lug-o-scope,” a telescope that folds into its own luggage to make his eclipse chasing easier.

 

“Flexibility is probably No. 1,” Schneider said. “Keeping your options and open and be ready to take that option if that’s what’s needed.”

 

A veteran of 28 eclipses, Espenak often leads groups of 50 some people to view eclipses, lecturing both about the beauty and the science. Except when the hour grows close and the skies get dark, he goes silent.

 

“On eclipse day he’s all business. He does not want to be diverted from his checklist of everything he wants to do,” explains University of Tennessee’s Mark Littmann, co-author with Espenak of the book “Totality.” “It’s like you’re kind of trying to chat with a pilot coming in for an emergency landing. It isn’t that he’s just not friendly, it’s just not the right time anymore.”

 

Donald Liebenberg has seen and blogged about his 26 eclipses for Clemson University, where he does research. He holds the record for most time in totality because the retired federal scientist used to view them by airplane whenever possible. In 1973, he convinced the French to let him use the supersonic Concorde for eclipse viewing and he flew at twice the speed of sound. He got 74 minutes of eclipse time in that one flight.

 

After spending more than 60 years flying around the world, this time the Liebenbergs are only going as far as their driveway.

 

This eclipse is coming directly to them in South Carolina.
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A total solar eclipse will march across the United States on Monday, casting a shadow from Oregon’s Pacific Coast, across the U.S. heartland, all the way to South Carolina’s Atlantic Coast.

 

Why is this eclipse so anticipated?

 

This will be the first time in 38 years that the mainland United States will experience a total eclipse, and it will be the first time in 99 years that a total eclipse will pass from the U.S. Pacific Coast to the U.S. Atlantic Coast. The last time that happened was in 1918, traveling from Washington state to Florida.

Hawaii experienced a total solar eclipse in 1991.

 

Total eclipses happen every one to three years somewhere in the world, however, they are most likely to take place over the ocean since most of the Earth is covered by water.

 

What is an eclipse?

 

A total eclipse happens when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun and completely blots out the sun’s light, except for the corona of its outer atmosphere.

 

From Earth, the moon will appear to be the same size as the sun. This is possible because while the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun in diameter, it is also 400 times closer to Earth than the sun. When the two line up exactly, the skies go dark.

 

Where can I see the eclipse?

 

The path of totality, where the moon’s shadow will completely cover the sun, is a diagonal band that cuts across the country, about 100 kilometers wide. Those outside that narrow band can still see a partial eclipse, extending up to Canada and down to the top of South America.

 

Totality will begin near Lincoln City, Oregon, cross the states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and finally South Carolina.

 

The biggest cities in the path include Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Salem, Oregon.

 

How long will it last?

 

The total eclipse will last longest near Carbondale, Illinois: 2 minutes and 44 seconds.

 

The first city to enter the totality will be Lincoln Beach, Oregon, at 10:16 a.m. Pacific time and last to exit the totality is Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time.

 

How can I watch it?

About 12 million people are estimated to live in the path of totality while tens of thousands of others are planning to travel to witness the event, many to remote parks and rangelands across the U.S. heartland.

 

To avoid eye damage, experts say everyone should wear special solar glasses. Many cities have seen long lines of people waiting to pick up protective eye glasses and the price for such glasses have spiked online.

WATCH: Solar Eclipse Fuels Demand, Anxiety, for Viewing Lenses

What about the weather?

 

Heavy clouds will hide the most dramatic effects of the eclipse, causing travelers to carefully plan where to go to find the best visibility. The forecast looks best in the Western U.S., while South Carolina is the one place in the totality most likely to see clouds. Some travelers are preparing several options in the hopes of finding clear skies, although officials say there could also be gridlocked roads as the eclipse approaches and tourists chase blue skies.

 

When is the next one?

 

The next total solar eclipse to touch the U.S. won’t be for another seven years. In 2024, a line of totality will cross from Texas, up through the Midwest, and then over to New York, New England and New Brunswick, Canada.

 

Outside of the United States, the next eclipse will occur in 2019 and will be viewable from the South Pacific, Chile, and Argentina.
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Conservation efforts come in many forms – financial, political, personal… and even religious. A former Catholic seminary in Brazil has helped protect South America’s largest canid, the maned wolf. Faith Lapidus reports
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After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the era of nuclear nightmares — of the atomic arms race, of backyard bomb shelters, of schoolchildren diving under desks to practice their survival skills in the event of an attack — seemed to finally, thankfully, fade into history.

Until now.

For some baby boomers, North Korea’s nuclear advances and President Donald Trump’s bellicose response have prompted flashbacks to a time when they were young, and when they prayed each night that they might awaken the next morning. For their children, the North Korean crisis was a taste of what the Cold War was like. 

“I’m not concerned to where I can’t sleep at night. But it certainly raises alarms for Guam or even Hawaii, where it might be a real threat,” said 24-year-old banker Christian Zwicky of San Bernardino, California.

People of his parents’ generation were taught to duck and cover when the bombs came.

“Maybe those types of drills should come back,” Zwicky said.

He isn’t old enough to remember the popular 1950s public service announcement in which a cartoon character named Bert the Turtle teaches kids how to dive under their desks for safety. But Zwicky did see it often enough in high school history classes that he can hum the catchy tune that plays at the beginning. That’s when Bert avoids disaster by ducking into his shell, then goes on to explain to schoolchildren what they should do.

“I do remember that,” says 65-year-old retiree Scott Paul of Los Angeles. “And also the drop drills that we had in elementary school, which was a pretty regular thing then.”

Even as a 10-year-old, Paul said, he wondered how much good ducking under a desk could do if a bomb powerful enough to destroy a city fell nearby. No good at all, his teacher acknowledged.

Then there were backyard bomb shelters, which briefly became the rage during the missile crisis of 1962, when it was learned the Soviets had slipped nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba and pointed them at the United States.

After a tense, two-week standoff between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that some believe brought the world the closest it’s ever come to nuclear war, the missiles were removed and the shelters faded from public interest.

Now they, too, seem to be having a revival.

“When Trump took office it doubled our sales, and then when he started making crazy statements we got a lot more orders,” says Walton McCarthy of Norad Shelter Systems LLC of Garland, Texas. “Between now and a year ago, we’ve quadrupled our sales.”

His competitor, California-based Atlas Survival Shelters, says it sold 30 shelters in three days last week. During its first year in business in 2011 it sold only 10.

Bill Miller, a 74-year-old retired film director living in Sherborn, Massachusetts, thinks these days are more nerve-wracking than the standoff in October 1962.

“I think it’s much, much crazier, scarier times,” he said. “I think the people who were in charge in the Kennedy administration had much more of a handle on it.”

Nathan Guerrero, a 22-year-old political science major from Fullerton, California, agrees, saying he learned in history class that the “shining example” of a way to resolve such a conflict was how Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, brokered the tense negotiations.

“But knowing the way the current administration has sort of been carrying itself, it doesn’t look like they are keen to solving things diplomatically,” he said.

“As a young person, honestly, it’s pretty unsettling,” he continued.

Had he given any thought to building a backyard bomb shelter?

“I’d be lying if I said such crazy things haven’t crossed my mind,” he said, laughing nervously. “But in reality it doesn’t strike me as I’d be ready to go shopping for bunkers yet.” Instead, he studies for law school and tries “not to think too much about it.”

Other Americans are more sanguine about the possibility of nuclear war. Rob Stapleton has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, since 1975, and he is aware that Alaska has been considered a possible target because it is within reach of North Korean missiles.

“There’s been some discussion about it around the beer barrel and I’m sure the United States is taking it seriously, but we’re not too concerned around here,” he said.

Alaska is so vast and spread out, said Stapleton, that he and his friends can’t imagine why North Korea would waste its time attacking The Last Frontier.

“I mean sure you’d be making a statement, but you’d not really be doing any damage,” he said.
…

Forty years after blasting off, Earth’s most distant ambassadors — the twin Voyager spacecraft — are carrying sounds and music of our planet ever deeper into the cosmos.

Think of them as messages in bottles meant for anyone — or anything — out there.

Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of NASA’s launch of Voyager 2, now almost 11 billion miles distant. It departed from Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1977, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.

Voyager 1 followed a few weeks later and is ahead of Voyager 2. It’s humanity’s farthest spacecraft at 13 billion miles away and is the world’s only craft to reach interstellar space, the vast, mostly empty space between star systems. Voyager 2 is expected to cross that boundary during the next few years.

Each carries a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record (there were no CDs or MP3s in 1977) containing messages from Earth: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, chirping crickets, a baby’s cry, a kiss, wind and rain, a thunderous moon rocket launch, African pygmy songs, Solomon Island panpipes, a Peruvian wedding song and greetings in dozens of languages. There are also more than 100 electronic images on each record showing 20th-century life, traffic jams and all.

Tweets, photos

NASA is marking the anniversary of its back-to-back Voyager launches with tweets, reminiscences and still-captivating photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune taken by the Voyagers from 1979 through the 1980s.

Public television is also paying tribute with a documentary, The Farthest — Voyager in Space, airing Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. EDT.

The two-hour documentary describes the tense and dramatic behind-the-scenes effort that culminated in the wildly successful missions to our solar system’s outer planets and beyond. More than 20 team members are interviewed, many of them long retired. There’s original TV footage throughout, including a look back at the late astronomer Carl Sagan of the 1980 PBS series Cosmos. It also includes an interview with Sagan’s son, Nick, who at 6 years old provided the English message: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco — who joined Voyager’s imaging team in 1980 — puts the mission up there with man’s first moon landing.

‘Iconic’ achievement

“I consider Voyager to be the Apollo 11 of the planetary exploration program. It has that kind of iconic stature,” Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

It was Sagan who, in large part, got a record aboard each Voyager. NASA was reluctant and did not want the records eclipsing the scientific goals. Sagan finally prevailed, but he and his fellow record promoters had less than two months to rustle everything up.

The identical records were the audio version of engraved plaques designed by Sagan and others for Pioneers 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973.

The 55 greetings for the Voyager Golden Records were collected at Cornell University, where Sagan taught astronomy, and the United Nations in New York. The music production fell to science writer Timothy Ferris, a friend of Sagan living then in New York.

For the musical selections, Ferris and Sagan recruited friends along with a few professional musicians. They crammed in 90 minutes of music recorded at half-speed; otherwise, the discs would have held just 45 minutes’ worth of music.

How to choose from an infinite number of melodies and melodious sounds representing all of Earth?

Beethoven, Bach and Mozart were easy picks. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven represented jazz, Blind Willie Johnson gospel blues.

Chuck Berry

For the rock ‘n’ roll single, the group selected Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode.” Bob Dylan was a close runner-up, and the Beatles also rated high. Elvis Presley’s name came up (Presley died four days before Voyager 2’s launch). In the end, Ferris thought “Johnny B. Goode” best represented the origins and creativity of rock ‘n’ roll.

Ferris still believes it’s “a terrific record” and he has no “deep regrets” about the selections. Even the rejected tunes represented “beautiful materials.”

“It’s like handfuls of diamonds. If you’re concerned that you didn’t get the right handful or something, it’s probably a neurotic problem rather than anything to do with the diamonds,” Ferris told the AP this week.

But he noted: “If I were going to start into regrets, I suppose not having Italian opera would be on that list.”

The whole record project cost $30,000 or $35,000, to the best of Ferris’ recollection.

NASA estimated the records would last 1 billion to 3 billion years or more — potentially outliving human civilization.

For Ferris, it’s time more than distance that makes the whole idea of finders-keepers so incomprehensible.

A billion years from now, “Voyager could be captured by an advanced civilization of beings that don’t exist yet. … It’s literally imponderable what will happen to the Voyagers,” he said.
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On Monday, Aug. 21, for the first time in 99 years, a solar eclipse will march across the United States from west coast to east coast, and excitement is building across the nation. Experts advise that people wear specific, protective eyewear to view the eclipse, but as VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, finding the special lenses is becoming a difficult task.
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A prosthetic hand is a critical tool that allows amputees to find normalcy in their lives, but some elements, such as complete freedom of movement and sensations of touch, are not the same as a real hand.

“They’ve come a long way and they have a long way to go,” said amputee Charity McFarland, who lost her left hand in a car accident almost four years ago.

McFarland said of the accident, “All I saw were lights and I basically was trying to avoid getting hit, but then the accident happened, so it was like a rollover. They told me that I rolled over three times.”

An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S are missing a limb, according to research at Rice University in Houston.

While existing prosthetic limbs allow amputees to regain some of their abilities, there are very few devices that provide sensory feedback for the users.

Researchers from Rice University, the University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology are working to allow amputees to better perceive what their prosthesis is doing.

 

McFarland heard about the research and volunteered to help. The focus of the research is to create what are called haptic devices to better replicate a biological hand for amputees.

 

“Haptics is anything that has to do with the sense of touch. Any textures that you discern or even the ability to realize that you’re making contact with something. How much pressure you’re putting on it, if it’s slipping, all of those are haptic sensations,” said Rice University graduate student Janelle Clark, who was one of the researchers who measured how well test subjects could distinguish the sizes of objects grasped by a prosthesis with and without haptic feedback.

 

The tests include a rocker placed onto the subject’s remaining limb that moves back and forth and stretches the skin so the person can sense what the prosthesis is doing. The amount of stretch correlates to how opened or closed the prosthetic hand is on the user.

“The idea behind the research that we’re doing here is to create haptic devices that are simple, they’re intuitive, they’re not going to break and so that people can start to have an understanding of what’s going on with their prosthetic without looking at it all the time,” Clark said.

 

Researchers found blindfolded test subjects were able to more than double their ability to distinguish the size of objects grasped with a prosthetic hand when they received haptic feedback from a skin-stretch device.

McFarland, however, wasn’t one of them. “I still wasn’t able to sense what it was doing completely,” she said.

“This is going to be a long-term project… to create some sort of artificial hand that has the same capabilities, but maybe there are other changes in the short term that would also be appreciated,” Rice researcher Clark said.

 

For now, McFarland says she would appreciate a prosthesis that looks like a hand and allows the fingers to move and the wrist to bend and rotate just like a real hand.
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President Trump proposes to make big cuts in spending on global health research that could affect work to end malaria, AIDS and protect against other infectious diseases. Although the president’s proposal is essentially a wish list and Congress doesn’t have to go along with it, some see it as part of a disturbing trend. Carol Pearson reports.
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Scientists are drilling down through kilometers of Arctic ice to read the world’s climate history as a way to predict the planet’s future. VOA’s Steve Baragona visited Greenland to see what you can learn from a hole in the ice.
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NASA launched the last of its longtime tracking and communication satellites Friday, a vital link to astronauts in orbit as well as the Hubble Space Telescope.

The end of the era came with a morning liftoff of TDRS-M, the 13th satellite in the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network. It rode to orbit aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket. There were handshakes all around two hours later, when the satellite successfully separated from the rocket’s upper stage.

“We’re going to really celebrate this one,” said launch director Tim Dunn.

NASA has been launching TDRS satellites since 1983. The 22,300-mile-high constellation links ground controllers with the International Space Station and other low-orbiting craft including Hubble.

“It’s like our baby,” said NASA’s Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation.

“People have invested their soul and their sweat into making it happen” over the decades, Younes said on the eve of launch. “This spacecraft has served us so well.”

This latest flight from Cape Canaveral was delayed two weeks after a crane hit one of the satellite’s antennas last month. Satellite maker Boeing replaced the damaged antenna and took corrective action to prevent future accidents. Worker error was blamed.

The rocket and satellite cost $540 million.

Space shuttles hoisted the first-generation TDRS satellites. The second in the series was aboard Challenger’s doomed flight in 1986. It was the only loss in the entire TDRS series.

TDRS-M is third generation. NASA’s next-generation tracking network will rely on lasers. This more advanced and robust method of relaying data was demonstrated a few years ago during the moon-orbiting mission LADEE. NASA hopes to start launching these high-tech satellites by 2024. Until then, the space agency will rely on the current network.

NASA needs seven active TDRS satellites at any given time, six for real-time support and one as a spare. The newest one will remain in reserve, until needed to replace aging craft.

Besides serving other spacecraft, the satellites help provide communication to outposts at the South Pole. In 1998, the network provided critical medical help to a doctor diagnosed with breast cancer.
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Vietnam has been battling raging dengue fever outbreaks, with more than 10,000 new infections reported in the past week stretching its medical system.

The number of admitted patients represents a 42 percent increase over the same period last year along with seven more deaths, the Ministry of Health said Friday. A total of 90,626 people have been infected, of whom 76,848 are hospitalized and 24 have died.

The ministry attributed the rise of dengue outbreaks to higher temperatures, more rains and rapid urbanization that promote the breeding of virus-carrying mosquitoes.

Hospitals strained

Dr. Vu Minh Dien of the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, where the most severe cases were being treated, said that 800-1,000 people have been checking in daily complaining of fever. That compares to only several cases that reported to the hospital in June and July last year, he said.

Dien said about 300 dengue patients were being treated, stretching the hospital’s resources, including longer working hours without weekend leaves.

Tran Thi Xuyen, a fruit and vegetable seller in a small market in Son La province, said she did not know how she contracted dengue fever, which also infected her fellow saleswoman.

“I took antibiotics prescribed by the local district hospital for four days, but the fever did not go away and I admitted myself to this hospital where doctors said I had dengue fever,” she said from her hospital bed.

Mosquito-killing campaign

There is no cure for any of the four strains of the mosquito-borne virus that causes high fever, exhaustion and in some cases a vicious skin rash. Patients most at risk of dying are the elderly, children or those with other medical complications.

Hanoi and the southern commercial hub of Ho Chi Minh City are the hardest hit.

The government Thursday urged residents to actively engage in killing mosquitoes and mosquito larvae, particularly at construction sites and housing for workers.

“The joint efforts by the people as well as our political system in searching and eliminating mosquito larvae, emptying water containers, which are fertile for larvae to breed, and spraying chemicals to kill mosquitoes are key factors to curb dengue fever,” Dien said.
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In what is being called the first study of its kind, medical researchers have attempted to quantify the rise in opioid-related admissions and deaths at U.S. hospitals. The team studied hospital records over a seven-year period, between 2009 and 2015. The results put numbers to a drug epidemic that is growing rapidly. Kevin Enochs reports.
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The United Nations should name and shame countries that fail to protect health workers in war zones and audit what steps they take to keep medics safe, an aid expert said on Thursday.

International law bounds all warring parties to respect and protect medical personnel, but the provision is largely disregarded, with hospital and medics often deliberately targeted in conflict areas, aid agencies say.

Last year, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for an end to impunity for perpetrators, but little has been done to implement it, said Leonard Rubenstein, head of Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a network of aid groups.

“Since 2016, we have had complete international paralysis,” he told an event in London, blaming the stalemate on divisions between Russia and other members of the Security Council.

At least 80 people were killed in attacks on health facilities in 14 countries in the first three months of 2017, according to the World Health Organization.

More than half the attacks were in Syria.

Rubenstein said impartial investigations and reforming both military training and practice could improve safety for health workers — but nations had to be pushed into adopting them.

“The only way to get them to do it is to shame them,” he told a panel at the Overseas Development Institute via video link, ahead of World Humanitarian Day on Aug 19.

In order to do so, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights should issue annual reports highlighting what steps countries have taken to implement resolutions made the year before, Rubenstein said.

“It’s not the most powerful mechanism that we have — but it is the only one that we (have) really got at the moment, and I think that would go a long way to forcing the states to take the actions that they have committed to do,” he said.

 
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The August 21 solar eclipse, the first to travel coast to coast in the United States in nearly a century, has inspired dozens of citizen science projects involving solar physics, atmosphere and biology.

“Millions of people … can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world-class data,” said Matthew Penn, an astronomer with the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Penn is coordinating a citizen science effort to photograph the sun’s volatile outer atmosphere, known as the corona.

The corona’s pearly light is typically obscured by the bright glare of the sun, but during a total eclipse, scientists can get a clear view of the outer crown, a mysterious region that triggers solar flares and other storms that can disrupt satellites, power grids and other systems on Earth.

The view does not last long. Because the moon is moving at more than 2,000 mph (3,200 kph), it blocks the sun for only a couple of minutes, not long enough to detect key changes in the corona.

93-minute show

The eclipse will cast the moon’s 70-mile-wide shadow, called the “path of totality,” across the United States over 93 minutes, temporarily bringing darkness to daytime skies.

Penn’s project, called The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse Experiment, or Citizen CATE, involves a network of volunteers who will be stationed along the path of the eclipse with identical telescopes to take digital photos of the corona. The pictures will later be spliced together into a 93-minute movie.

Citizen CATE participants require special equipment and training, but dozens of other projects are open to anyone in the path of totality with a camera or cellphone.

Google and the University of California-Berkley are teaming up for Eclipse Megamovie 2017, a crowdsourced compilation of eclipse imagery.

For a project called Life Responds, the California Academy of Sciences wants field reports about how animals and plant life react during the eclipse. Using an app called iNaturalist, amateur scientists will log their observations and get help identifying flora and fauna.

“We want to collect exactly what all these animals are doing as it gets dark — what do we see, what do we hear,” said University of Missouri astronomer Angela Speck.

A number of zoos, wildlife preserves and 20 national parks are in the path of the eclipse.

EclipseMob

Another app-driven science project is called EclipseMob, organized by George Mason University in Virginia and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. It aims to collect information about radio waves passing through Earth’s ionosphere, the electrically charged outer layer of the atmosphere.

When sunlight is blocked during an eclipse, the ionosphere is suddenly transformed. Using home-built radio receivers and smartphones, participants will pick up radio waves transmitted by EclipseMob in Colorado and California and record how the signals change.

Other apps will record temperature changes and monitor clouds. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American Astronomical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have lists of citizen science projects on their websites.

“This is an opportunity to draw people from across the country into being fans of science,” said astronomer Speck, co-chair of the American Astronomical Society’s National Total Solar Eclipse Task Force.

“The change in light is so fast and what you get to see is so amazing that even people who chase eclipses and have seen dozens of them will still be wowed by this,” Speck said. “It’s not just visual, it’s an all-over experience.”
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Spacewalking cosmonauts on Thursday set free the world’s first satellite made almost entirely with a 3-D printer.

In all, Russians Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy ended up releasing five nanosatellites by hand. One by one, the tiny craft — no more than 1 to 2 feet in size — tumbled safely away from the International Space Station.

The exterior casing of the first one tossed overboard was made with a 3-D printer. So were the battery packs inside. Researchers want to see how 3-D-made parts weather the space environment.

The 3-D satellite contains regular electronics. It also holds greetings to planet Earth in a variety of languages, courtesy of students at Siberia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University, where the satellite was made.

The other satellites deployed Thursday have traditional spacecraft parts.

Each weighs just 10 to 24 pounds. They’re expected to orbit for five to six months.

One commemorates the 60th anniversary of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, launched October 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union. Another pays tribute to Russia’s father of rocketry, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He was born 160 years ago next month.

The remaining two small satellites involve navigation and other experiments.

Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy completed the satellite releases within an hour of venturing outside. Barely a minute passed between a few of the launches. The rest of their work took longer than expected, however, and Russia’s Mission Control outside Moscow sent the planned six-hour spacewalk into overtime. It ended up lasting 7½ hours, and the cosmonauts said their hands were tired. All but one task got done.

“We will have actually some grounds to get drunk today, I think,” one of the cosmonauts joked in Russian. A flight controller replied that he’d do it for them.

The cosmonauts collected science experiments from outside their 250-mile-high home, and wiped thruster residue from various surfaces for analysis. Three Americans and one Italian also live on the space station.
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Researchers say they have found a new clue into the mysterious exodus of ancient cliff-dwelling people from the Mesa Verde area of Colorado more than 700 years ago: DNA from the bones of domesticated turkeys.

The DNA shows the Mesa Verde people raised turkeys that had telltale similarities to turkeys kept by ancient people in the Rio Grande Valley of northern New Mexico — and that those birds became more common in New Mexico about the same time the Mesa Verde people were leaving their cliff dwellings, according to a paper published last month in the journal PLoS One.

That supports the hypothesis that when the cliff dwellers left the Mesa Verde region in the late 1200s, many migrated to northern New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) to the southeast, and that the Pueblo Indians who live there today are their descendants, the archaeologists wrote.

The cliff dwellers would have taken some turkeys with them, accounting for the increase in numbers in New Mexico, the authors said.

The debate continues

Researchers have long debated what became of the people sometimes called Ancestral Puebloans, who lived in the elaborate Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and other communities across the Four Corners region, where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.

Archaeologists believe the Ancestral Puebloans were a flourishing population of about 30,000 in 1200, but by 1280 they were gone, driven off by a devastating drought, social turbulence and warfare.

Because they left no written record, their paths are not known with certainty. Many archaeologists and present-day Pueblo Indians believe the Ancestral Puebloans moved to villages across New Mexico and Arizona, and that their descendants live there today.

Scott Ortman, a University of Colorado archaeologist and a co-author of the PLoS One paper, said the turkey DNA supports the explanation that many migrated to an area along the Rio Grande north of present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“The patterns that we found are consistent with several other studies and several other lines of evidence,” he said in an interview.

Evidence of migration

Jim Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University who was not involved in the paper, agreed the findings mesh with other evidence of a southeastward migration.

But a weakness of the study is the number of DNA samples used, he said. Researchers examined DNA from nearly 270 sets of turkey remains — some from before 1280 and some from after that date. But only 11 sets of remains came from the Rio Grande before 1280.

“It would have been really nice to have 10 times as many,” Allison said, but they were not available.

 

Ortman acknowledged that the turkey DNA alone is not conclusive evidence of migration to the Rio Grande Valley.

The New Mexico turkeys could have come from someplace other than the Mesa Verde region, or turkey-herding communities could already have sprung up in New Mexico before the Ancestral Puebloans left their Mesa Verde communities, he said.

Evidence is thin

Some archaeologists argue the evidence for a migration to the Rio Grande Valley is thin. Even supporters, such as Allison, acknowledge that some evidence does not fit, including differences in pottery and architectural styles.

Tim Hovezak, an archaeologist at Mesa Verde National Park, said he is not convinced the Ancestral Puebloans moved to the Rio Grande, but he tries to keep an open mind.

“I think it’s still a mystery, and it’s a very compelling one,” he said.

Ortman said other evidence besides the turkey DNA points to the migration.

The Tewa language spoken by some northern New Mexico Pueblo Indians today includes vocabulary “that seems to harken back to the material culture of the Mesa Verde area,” he said.

The Tewa term for the roof of a church translates roughly to “a basket made out of timbers,” Ortman said. That better describes the roofs used on kivas — ceremonial rooms — in ancient Mesa Verde communities than it does the churches in New Mexico, he said.

Another line of evidence is similarities in the facial structures of the remains of ancient people from the Mesa Verde region and New Mexico, Ortman said.

Respect for Ancestral Puebloan remains

Examining human DNA from Ancestral Puebloan remains would provide a more definitive answer, Ortman said. But some contemporary Pueblo Indians object to doing that, and Ortman and others said they respect their wishes.

Theresa Pasqual, a member of the Acoma Pueblo in northwestern New Mexico and the pueblo’s former preservation director, said she knows of no pueblos that would consent to DNA testing on ancestral remains because of spiritual and cultural concerns.

Pasqual, who is studying archaeology at the University of New Mexico, said she was heartened by the turkey DNA study because it supports the oral traditions of Acoma and other present-day pueblos that point to ancestral ties to the Mesa Verde region.

Some Acoma families still raise domestic turkeys and hunt wild ones, but it would be difficult to trace that tradition to the Ancestral Puebloans, Pasqual said.

The Ancestral Puebloan sites are a key factor in what she called Acoma’s “migration narrative.”

“These places have been a part of our narrative and a part of our history and a part of our present-day life for as long as we can remember,” Pasqual said.

 
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A farmers’ group in South Sudan’s Imotong state says it has found a way to combat the dreaded fall armyworm, which has devastated crops across the state.

Robert Lokang, leader of the Bidaya Farm association, says he regularly sprays his crops with a concoction of tree leaves, ash, powdered soap and water.  The all-natural formula is designed to kill the armyworms while not harming the plants.

It’s not a new invention – Lokang says he learned it decades ago as a child, when his father used the same concoction to ward off pests.  

He says about a year ago, the NGO Care International showed local farmers how to use the mixture as a replacement for pesticides.  He says his group decided to try it on the fall armyworm and it worked.

Fall armyworms, which are native to the Americas, have spread across Africa since 2015, raising alarm among farmers and agriculture officials.  The pests thrive in warm and humid climates, travel great distances quickly, and devour maize, cotton, sorghum, and vegetable crops.

They were first detected in South Sudan in June, although they could have arrived earlier.  

Lokang says he suffered severe financial losses last season after fall armyworms tore into his eggplants, tomatoes, onions and cabbages.

 

“They are eating the leaves and other insects. They also destroy the roots and the ones we transplant when the fruit is ready, they also get rotten,” Lokang told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.

Lokang’s concoction is fairly simple to make.  “We collect the neem leaves, almost one bucket, then we soften or grind [them] using stone, then we get ashes and some Omo [powdered soap] and mix it in a basin of water, and keep it for two to three days before spraying,” he said.

 

Imatong farmer Mary Peter said mixing the concoction and spraying it manually is tedious, but effective.

 

“This is the fourth planting that I am seeing some changes after we have used neem and red pepper. After [the spraying] they have grown bigger,” she said.

 

United Nations and government officials say regular insecticides do not work on the fall armyworm.

Awello Obale, an official at the state agriculture ministry, said Lokang’s method is cost-effective since there is no other immediate solution to the fall armyworm infestation.

 

“We encourage farmers… to use the cultural practices to control not only armyworm but other insects also,” Obale said.

 

Fortunately, neem trees are plentiful in the area.  Obale says farmers should take advantage of Lokang’s simple method.

 

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization officials say they will introduce new crop varieties in Imotong State thought to be resistant to armyworms and other pests.  The new crop varieties include maize, rice, cow peas, groundnuts and beans.
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They’re muscular, fit, and in much better physical shape than most people. They’re competitive body builders, and many of them in the U.S. are women, something that was evident at a recent Washington-area competition called the OCB Presidential Cup. At that event, three-quarters of the competitors were women. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi hit the gym and a few places you might not expect in this report on what it takes to make it in the world of competitive bodybuilding.
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Reading to children is one of the best ways to prepare them for a lifetime of learning. It introduces babies to language and teaches youngsters about colors, shapes and letters. But an Australian quantum physicist is experimenting with something different. He’s writing science books for babies and toddlers. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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A landmark global treaty aimed at keeping millions safe from the horrors of mercury poisoning took effect Wednesday.

The 2013 Minamata Convention was named for the Japanese bay from which mercury-tainted fish left thousands of people with severe brain damage in 1956. Industrial wastewater had been dumped into the bay for more than 20 years.

So far, 128 countries have signed the treaty and 74 have ratified it.

“The Minamata Convention shows that our global work to protect our planet and its people can continue to bring nations together,” UN environmental chief Erik Solheim said Wednesday. “We did it for the ozone layer and now we’re doing it for mercury, just as we need to do it for climate change.”

Mercury was commonly used in batteries, fluorescent lights, felt production, thermometers and barometers. These uses have been phased out. The treaty requires governments to stop mercury mining, continue to cut mercury use in industry and slash emissions.

Mercury is an extremely poisonous metal that never breaks down. Contact with it attacks the nervous system and can cause brain damage, severe emotional problems, coma and even death. Children are especially at risk.

Mercury forms naturally in the environment, but is also man-made for industrial uses.

“There is no safe level of exposure to mercury nor are there cures for mercury poisoning,” the U.N. says.

Governments that signed the treaty must also meet tough conditions for storing and safely disposing mercury waste.
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Ronald Dantowitz has been looking forward to Monday’s solar eclipse for nearly 40 years.

An astronomer who specializes in solar imaging, he’s been photographing eclipses for more than three decades, and will be using 14 cameras to capture the August 21 event.

The cameras have solar filters to capture the eclipse in its partial phases, along with custom modifications that can photograph the corona and light wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye, allowing scientists to view and study the sun’s temperature and composition in a way only possible during a total eclipse, he said.

Dantowitz, who is based at Dexter Southfield School in Brookline, Massachusetts, is lending his expertise to NOVA’s Eclipse Over America, airing at 9 p.m. EDT Monday on PBS. That hourlong special, which will incorporate his images, is among extensive coverage planned on TV and online of the first solar eclipse to cross the United States in 99 years.

Still, witnessing totality — when the sun is completely obscured by the moon — is best done with the naked eye, not a camera, Dantowitz said, adding that the total eclipse is safe to view without special lenses. (NASA warns that, except for the totality period, looking directly at the sun is unsafe; the only safe way to look directly at an uneclipsed or partly eclipsed sun is through special solar filters, or “eclipse glasses.”)

“Enjoying totality by eye is more rewarding,” he said. “There is much to see: stars during the daytime, the million-degree solar corona, and seeing the sun blacked out during the daytime.

“I have been waiting almost 40 years for this eclipse, and although I will be operating 14 cameras during totality, I will certainly take a moment to gaze at the eclipse the same way people have done for thousands of years: with wonder.”

For those not in the 14 states in the eclipse’s “path of totality,” here’s a look at some of the viewing opportunities online and on TV:

 

— Eclipse of the Century: In partnership with Volvo, CNN plans two hours of livestreaming, 360-degree coverage accessible in virtual reality through Oculus and other VR headsets beginning at 1 p.m. EDT. Accompanying television coverage will include reporting from Oregon, Missouri, Tennessee and South Carolina.

 

— Eclipse Over America: The PBS science series NOVA is planning a quick turnaround on its eclipse documentary premiering Monday. Senior executive producer Paula S. Apsell said Eclipse Over America, which delves into why eclipses occur and what scientists can learn from them, will incorporate images of the event from across the country shot earlier that day with Dantowitz’s high-tech cameras.

 

— Great American Eclipse: The Science Channel will broadcast its live coverage from Madras, Oregon, from noon to 4 p.m. EDT, with commentary from educators and astronomers from the Lowell Observatory.

 

— The Great American Eclipse: David Muir will anchor ABC’s two hours of live coverage, with correspondents reporting from viewing parties across the country. NBC also plans live coverage, with Lester Holt hosting special reports at 1 and 2 p.m. EDT featuring correspondents reporting from Oregon, Illinois, Wyoming and South Carolina. Shepard Smith will break into typical broadcasting on Fox News Channel from noon to 4 p.m. EDT to update viewers on the eclipse and introduce footage from NASA and observatories around the country.

 

— Solar Eclipse: Through the Eyes of NASA: NASA will offer hours of coverage online and on NASA Television beginning at noon Eastern. It plans livestreaming of the eclipse beginning at 1 p.m. EDT with images from satellites, research aircraft, high-altitude balloons and specially modified telescopes.

 

— The Total Solar Eclipse: The Weather Channel is kicking off its live coverage at 6 a.m. EDT and continuing throughout the day with dispatches from seven locations along the “path of totality.”
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An intervention based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was found to be more effective than traditional therapy in helping women struggling with depression or anxiety after experiencing gender-based violence, research shows. It is estimated that more than a third of women around the world have been exposed to such violence, which includes rape, sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

The intervention, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to help anyone facing adversity, had already been proven effective for Pakistanis struggling emotionally after exposure to terrorism.

Psychologist Richard Bryant at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, developed the program with colleagues there and others from WHO and the World Vision Institute. To test its effectiveness, 421 women in Nairobi, Kenya, were treated with either five sessions of the CBT program administered by a lay health care worker, or were referred to area health care centers for standard treatment administered by nurses.

The nurses had four more years of education than the lay workers, who had no previous experience with mental health care. A program simple enough for lay volunteers to administer is important in areas with little mental health infrastructure.

Reducing symptoms

The study, published Tuesday in PLOS Medicine, found that women who received the CBT treatment showed 20 percent fewer anxious and depressive symptoms five weeks after the end of treatment than the control group, and 45 percent fewer than they did before treatment. Following this work, WHO will begin distributing the treatment more broadly to areas with little mental health infrastructure.

“The vast majority of people in the world don’t get access to evidence-based care for mental health problems,” Bryant told VOA. “So there really is, from a global mental health perspective, an urgent need to have a different way of thinking about how we deliver care. And we can’t be relying on specialists.  We can’t be relying on lengthy sessions, lengthy treatment durations. We can’t be relying on systems that require long trainings to upskill people.”

CBT was developed in the 1970s. Unlike psychoanalysis, which aims to reveal the historical, root causes for a patient’s problems, cognitive behavioral therapists work to reveal thoughts and behaviors that currently contribute to a patient’s troubles.

Bryant said this particular intervention was designed to be as easy to administer as possible, and focuses on changing behavior. The WHO treatment coaches patients to be active, engage in social networks, and problem solve. Bryant said much of the cognitive side of CBT was left out, not only to make it easier to train practitioners, but also to make the intervention shorter. That allows treating more people with less money. Traveling to treatment can be expensive and dangerous in many places, and missing work is costly, so a treatment that requires fewer sessions is beneficial to patients.

Avoiding stigma

One challenge in helping people who have been exposed to gender-based violence is finding them. Rape and abuse carry a heavy stigma, and it can be dangerous for women to speak out.

Consequently, the program wasn’t advertised as being about gender-based violence. Researchers instead looked for women experiencing anxiety and depression. However, during treatment, they found that four out of five participants had experienced some form of gender-based violence — most often from an intimate partner.

“Really, I think what this tells us is that when you go to many of these settings where we know that gender-based violence and other forms of violence are so prevalent, you can actually assist these people — alleviate many of their mental health problems in an effective way — without actually creating the problems of identifying them and exacerbating the social stigma,” Bryant said.

Since the completion of the study in 2015, 1,400 volunteer counselors in Kenya have been trained in CBT, and 3,500 women have received the treatment.

Researchers in Australia have been leaders in CBT, Bryant said. In the early 2000s, researchers at Australian National University developed MoodGYM, free software that allows anyone with an internet connection to receive online CBT treatment at any time.

Numerous studies have shown that patients who complete internet-delivered CBT fare as well as those who receive treatment in person. However, those self-administering CBT without external encouragement are much less likely to complete a full course of treatment.
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The Philippines will deploy hundreds of troops to hasten the culling of about 600,000 fowl, the farm minister said Wednesday, as part of efforts to rein in the Southeast Asian nation’s first outbreak of bird flu.

There has been no case of human transmission after the flu was detected on a farm in the province of Pampanga, about 75 km (47 miles) north of the capital Manila, but it has spread to about 36 other farms and nearly 40,000 birds have died.

Troops to be sent

“I have asked the Philippine army to provide us with additional warm bodies to help us in depopulating the farms,” Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol told a news conference. “Six hundred thousand is no mean job. Our personnel are facing a difficult task and we lack people.”

Pinol said the government had about 200 men in the area, but fewer than 20,000 birds had been culled since the outbreak was reported.

Brigadier-General Rodel Mairo Alarcon said at least 300 soldiers would be sent to the province Thursday to assist in the cull of chicken, quail and ducks.

“The Philippines army and the Armed Forces of the Philippines is 100 percent in support of this effort,” Alarcon said.

Soldiers will be given protective gear and doses of Tamiflu to guard them against possible infection.

Specific strain unknown

Two sick farm workers from the area have tested negative for the virus, health ministry spokesman Eric Tayag said.

Although the health ministry has yet to identify the specific strain of the virus that hit the Philippines, health and farm officials say initial tests have ruled out the highly pathogenic H5N1.

Samples are being sent to Australia for further testing to determine the presence of the N6 variety of the strain.

The Philippines is the latest country in Asia, Africa and Europe and Africa to suffer the spread of bird flu viruses in recent months. Many strains only infect birds, but the H7N9 strain has led to human cases, including deaths, in China.
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