The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Across the tundra, the rapid changes are affecting creatures large and small. That includes the ferocious Arctic mosquito and the caribou it torments. It’s a snapshot of how climate change is rippling through entire ecosystems around the world. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
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After years of decline, teen deaths from drug overdoses have inched up, a new U.S. government report shows.

The drop in teen deaths had been a rare bright spot in the opioid epidemic that has seen adult overdose deaths surge year after year, fueled by abuse of prescription painkillers, heroin and newer drugs like fentanyl.

“This is a warning sign that we need to keep paying attention to what’s happening with young people,” said Katherine Keyes, a Columbia University expert on drug abuse issues who wasn’t part of the study.

What’s not clear is why

It’s not clear why teen overdose deaths increased in 2015 or whether the trend will continue, said lead researcher Sally Curtin of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC released the report Wednesday focusing on adolescents ages 15 to 19.

The overdose death rate rose to 3.7 per 100,000 teens in 2015, from 3.1 in 2014. Most of the deaths were accidental and were mainly caused by heroin, researchers found.

Clearly, drug overdoses have been a far smaller problem in teens than in adults. Tens of thousands of adults die from overdoses each year compared to about 700 to 800 teens.

Another difference: Unlike adults, teen overdose deaths have not been climbing every year.

Teen overdoses were down

To their surprise, CDC researchers found that teen overdose deaths actually fell after 2008, and dropped as low as about 3 per 100,000 during 2012 through 2014.

The drop tracks with previously reported declines in teen drug use, smoking, drinking, sex and other risky behaviors, Keyes noted. Some experts believe those declines are related to more time spent on smartphones and social media.

The decline was driven by boys, who account for about two-thirds of teen overdose deaths. The boys’ overdose death rate fell by a third in those years, but the girls’ rate held fairly steady.

Then came the increase. The overdose death rate among boys rose to 4.6 per 100,000 in 2015 from 4 in 2014. Among girls, it increased to 2.7 from 2.2. Though small, it was the highest overdose death rate for girls since at least 1979, Curtin said.

More lethal drugs

Health expert said it’s likely teen overdoses edged up in 2015 because of the increasing availability of newer and more lethal kinds of opioids such as fentanyl, which is sometimes cut into heroin.

“If the drugs are more potent, your chances of it (drug use) being fatal have perhaps increased,” Curtin said. 
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Researchers at a top U.S. laboratory announced Tuesday that they have produced the highest resolution scan ever done of the inner workings of a fossilized tyrannosaur skull using neutron beams and high-energy X-rays, resulting in new clues that could help paleontologists piece together the evolutionary puzzle of the monstrous T. rex.

Officials with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science said they were able to peer deep into the skull of a “Bisti Beast,” a T. rex relative that lived millions of years ago in what is now northwestern New Mexico.

The images detail the dinosaur’s brain and sinus cavities, the pathways of some nerves and blood vessels and teeth that formed but never emerged.

Never-seen-before views

Thomas Williamson, the museum’s curator of paleontology and part of the team that originally collected the specimen in the 1990s, said the scans are helping paleontologists figure out how the different species within the T. rex family relate to each other and how they evolved.

“We’re unveiling the internal anatomy of the skull so we’re going to see things that nobody has ever seen before,” he said during a news conference Tuesday.

T. rex and other tyrannosaurs were huge, dominant predators, but they evolved from much smaller ancestors.

The fossilized remnants of the Bisti Beast, or Bistahieversor sealeyi, were found in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area near Farmington, New Mexico. Dry, dusty badlands today, the area in the time of the tyrannosaur would have been a warmer, swampy environment with more trees.

T. rex family member

The species lived about 10 million years before T. rex. Scientists have said it represents one of the early tyrannosaurs that had many of the advanced features, including big-headed, bone-crushing characteristics and small forelimbs, that were integral for the survival of T. rex.

Officials said the dinosaur’s skull is the largest object to date for which full, high-resolution neutron and X-ray CT scans have been done at Los Alamos. The technology is typically used for the lab’s work on defense and national security.

The thickness of the skull, which spans 40 inches (102 centimeters), required stronger X-rays than those typically available to penetrate the fossil. That’s where the lab’s electron and proton accelerators came in.

Sven Vogel, who works at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, said the three-dimensional scanning capabilities at the lab have produced images that allow paleontologists to see the dinosaur much as it would have been at the time of its death, rather than just the dense mineral outline of the fossil that was left behind after tens of millions of years.

The team, which included staff from the University of New Mexico and the University of Edinburgh, is scheduled to present its work at an international paleontology conference in Canada next week.

More detail in new scans

Kat Schroeder, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico who has been working on the project for about a year, said the scanning technology has the ability to uncover detail absent in traditional X-rays and the resulting three-dimensional images can be shared with fellow researchers around the world without compromising the integrity the original fossil.

Schroeder’s work centers on understanding the behavior of dinosaurs, so seeing the un-erupted teeth in the Bisti Beast’s upper jaw was exciting.

“Looking at how fast they’re replacing teeth tells us something about how fast they’re growing, which tells me something about how much energy they need and how active they were,” she said. “It’s those little things that enable us to understand more and more about prehistoric environments.”
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University of Rhode Island and Harvard University professors are collaborating through a new research center to study chemicals that have contaminated water at sites nationwide.

The chemicals, called perfluorinated chemicals, have been linked to cancer and other illnesses but aren’t regulated in drinking water. Water has been contaminated near sites of industrial facilities and U.S. military bases.

URI announced Tuesday that it received a five-year, $8 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish a center focused on gaining a better understanding of how these chemicals make their way into water, through the food chain, and affect people and animals.

They will work with communities in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where contamination has been an issue. They also want to develop new detection tools. 

They chemicals are found in many household products and in firefighting foam used by the U.S. military.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued stricter guidelines last year regarding human exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOS and PFOA, which are currently unregulated in drinking water.

“So frustratingly little has been done on the regulatory side, I thought a center like this could help,” said professor Rainer Lohmann of the URI Graduate School of Oceanography.

Lohmann, an environmental chemist, said he wants to give regulators the information they need to help communities dealing with contamination. He’s trying to devise a better way to sample and measure water for perfluorinated chemicals.

Lohmann applied for the funding to start the research center with his URI colleagues, experts at Harvard and at the nonprofit Silent Spring Institute in Massachusetts.

Philippe Grandjean, who leads a research group at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has done studies suggesting that breast milk is a major source of exposure during infancy and that these chemicals may adversely affect immune system development, thereby reducing the effectives of vaccines in children. Grandjean will contribute research to the center.

Many of his studies are focused on the Faroe Islands, a country between Norway and Iceland, where the homogeneous population makes it easier to measure the effects of chemical exposure from marine food contaminants.

Elsie Sunderland, who teaches at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is trying to understand how the geochemistry of an area affects how far the chemicals will travel and enter into drinking water. She’s also figuring out how to better discern the source of the chemicals and how fish respond once exposed to contaminated water.

“For the compounds we’ve already released into the environment, we have to figure out how to assess risk from their exposure and where action needs to be taken,” she said. “More broadly, we want to raise awareness about these compounds so we don’t make any more mistakes about their release or use in ways that have unanticipated health effects down the line. The effects we’re seeing are alarming.”

Sunderland is looking at sites around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Elevated levels of perfluorinated chemicals have been found near Joint Base Cape Cod. Firefighting foam containing these compounds was used during training exercises at the base, she said.
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Each summer, climatologists and ship captains, as well as Inuits living in the Arctic, have been reporting that the ice cover is getting smaller and smaller. This may be good for Arctic tourism and fishing, but it’s very bad for polar bears. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A SpaceX capsule rocketed to the International Space Station on Monday, carrying tons of science research, plus ice cream.

As has become customary on these cargo flights, SpaceX landed its leftover booster back at Cape Canaveral shortly after liftoff, a key to its long-term effort to recycle rockets and reduce costs.

“Gorgeous day, spectacular launch,” said Dan Hartman, NASA’s deputy manager of the space station program.

Experiments make up most of the 6,400 pounds of cargo, which should reach the orbiting lab Wednesday. That includes 20 mice that will return alive inside the SpaceX Dragon capsule in about a month.

Ice cream aboard

The Dragon is also doubling as an ice cream truck this time.

There was extra freezer space, so NASA packed little cups of vanilla, chocolate and birthday cake ice cream, as well as ice cream candy bars. Those treats should be especially welcomed by U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson, in orbit since November. She’s due back at the beginning of September. Newly arrived U.S. spaceman Randolph Bresnik turns 50 next month.

The space station was zooming 250 miles above the Atlantic, just off Nova Scotia, when the Falcon took flight.

It was the 14th successful booster landing for SpaceX and the sixth on the giant X at the company’s touchdown spot at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, just a few miles from its NASA-leased pad at Kennedy Space Center.

“It’s right on the bull’s-eye, and a very soft touchdown,” said SpaceX’s Hans Koenigsmann.

The experiments

The mice on board are part of a study of visual problems suffered in space by some male astronauts. Scientists will study the pressure in the animals’ eyes, as well as the movement of fluid in their brains. Thirty days for mice in space is comparable to three years for humans, according to Florida State University’s Michael Delp, who’s in charge of the experiment. The study may help explain why female astronauts don’t have this vision problem, which can linger long after spaceflight, he added.

The Dragon also holds an instrument to measure cosmic rays from the space station. This type of device has previously flown on high-altitude balloons. The Army has an imaging microsatellite on board for release this fall from the station. It’s a technology demo; the military wants to see how small satellites like this, with low-cost, off-the-shelf cameras and telescopes, might support critical ground operations. It’s about the size of a dormitory-room refrigerator.

Also going up on behalf of the Michael J. Fox Foundation: protein crystals that, in space, might shed light on Parkinson’s disease. The mission got a televised plug from Fox, an actor who has the disease.

Three Americans, one more than usual, and an Italian will tackle all this scientific work in orbit. The station also is home to two Russians; that number will go back up to three in a year or so.

SpaceX delivery

This is the 13th delivery by the Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, one of two private shippers hired by NASA. The other is Orbital ATK; its next supply run is in November from Wallops Island, Virginia.

The SpaceX Dragon is the only supply ship capable of returning items to Earth. It parachutes into the Pacific; the others burn up during re-entry.

This particular Dragon is brand new, as is the Falcon rocket. In June, SpaceX launched its first reused Dragon, and in March, its first reused Falcon. From now on, the company said it may only fly used Dragons.

SpaceX is also developing a crew Dragon for NASA astronauts, set to debut next year. Boeing is working on its own capsule to ferry space station astronauts.

In the meantime, SpaceX is aiming for a November debut of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which will feature three first-stage boosters and 27 engines, versus the single booster and nine engines on the Falcon 9. It will have two-thirds the thrust of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which was used during the Apollo moon program. All three of the Falcon Heavy’s first-stage boosters are meant to fly back to a touchdown.
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The sun is about to spill some of its secrets, maybe even reveal a few hidden truths of the cosmos. And you can get in on the act next week if you are in the right place for the best solar eclipse in the U.S. in nearly a century.

Astronomers are going full blast to pry even more science from the mysterious ball of gas that’s vital to Earth. They’ll look from the ground, using telescopes, cameras, binoculars and whatever else works. They’ll look from the International Space Station and a fleet of 11 satellites in space. And in between, they’ll fly three planes and launch more than 70 high-altitude balloons .

“We expect a boatload of science from this one,” said Jay Pasachoff, a Williams College astronomer who has traveled to 65 eclipses of all kinds.

Scientists will focus on the sun, but they will also examine what happens to Earth’s weather, to space weather, and to animals and plants on Earth as the moon totally blocks out the sun. The moon’s shadow will sweep along a narrow path, from Oregon to South Carolina.

Between NASA and the National Science Foundation, the federal government is spending about $7.7 million on next Monday’s eclipse. One of the NASA projects has students launching the high-altitude balloons to provide “live footage from the edge of space” during the eclipse.

But it’s not just the professionals or students. NASA has a list of various experiments everyday people can do.

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

Penn is chief scientist for a National Science Foundation-funded movie project nicknamed Citizen CATE. More than 200 volunteers have been trained and given special small telescopes and tripods to observe the sun at 68 locations in the exact same way. The thousands of images from the citizen-scientists will be combined for a movie of the usually hard-to-see sun’s edge.

Mike Conley, a Salem, Oregon, stock trader whose backyard is studded with telescopes, jumped at the chance to be part of the science team.

“Who knows? Maybe a great secret will come of this, the mysteries of the sun will be revealed, because we’re doing something that’s never been done before and we’re getting data that’s never been seen before,” he said. “A big discovery will come and everybody will say, `Hey, we were part of that!”’

You don’t need to have telescopes to help out. You can use the iNaturalist app via the California Academy of Sciences and note the reaction of animals and plants around you. You can go to a zoo, like the Nashville Zoo, where they are asking people to keep track of what the animals are doing. The University of California, Berkeley, is seeking photos and video for its Eclipse Megamovie 2017, hoping to get more than 1,000 volunteers.

Even with all the high-tech, high-flying instruments now available, when it comes to understanding much of the sun’s mysteries, nothing beats an eclipse, said Williams College’s Pasachoff. That’s because the sun is so bright that even satellites and special probes can’t gaze straight at the sun just to glimpse the outer crown, or corona. Satellites create artificial eclipses to blot out the sun, but they can’t do it as well as the moon, he said.

The corona is what astronomers really focus on during an eclipse. It’s the sun’s outer atmosphere where space weather originates, where jutting loops of red glowing plasma lash out and where the magnetic field shows fluctuations. The temperature in the outer atmosphere is more than 1 million degrees hotter than it is on the surface of the sun and scientists want to figure out why.

“It’s ironic that we’ve learned most about the sun when its disk is hidden from view,” said Fred “Mr. Eclipse ” Espenak, a retired NASA astronomer who specialized in eclipses for the space agency.

And they learn other things, too. Helium – the second most abundant element in the universe – wasn’t discovered on Earth until its chemical spectrum was spotted during an eclipse in 1868, Espenak said.

But that discovery is eclipsed by what an eclipse did for Albert Einstein and physics.

Einstein was a little known scientist in 1915 when he proposed his general theory of relativity, a milestone in physics that says what we perceive as the force of gravity is actually from the curvature of space and time. It explains the motion of planets, black holes and the bending of light from distant galaxies.

Einstein couldn’t prove it but said one way to do so was to show that light from a distant star bends during an eclipse. During a 1919 eclipse, Arthur Eddington observed the right amount of bending, something that couldn’t be done without the moon’s shadow eclipsing the sun.

“It marked a complete change in the understanding of the universe,” said Mark Littmann of the University of Tennessee, a former planetarium director. “Bang. Right there.”
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Science has been searching for a definitive reason why domesticated honeybee colonies continue to suddenly die off. But Colony Collapse disorder, as it is called, is still somewhat of a mystery. To try and get some answers, a university is using high-tech monitoring tools to listen in on the bees’ conversations for clues to their health. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The Perseid meteor shower peaks every year about this time as the Earth passes debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet, but this year the annual shower will come about a week before a total solar eclipse.

The meteor shower, which occurs each year in July or August, will see hundreds of meteors pass through the sky in an event that will be visible around the world.

Experts expect the shower to peak overnight Saturday into Sunday, though the Perseids could be a bit harder to see this year with the moon nearly full. Typical rates are about 80 meteors per hour – last year, 2016, the rate was 150-200 meteors per hour.

The shower occurs when the Earth travels through the tail of dust and ice left behind as the Swift-Tuttle comet orbits the sun. The actual meteors are usually no bigger than a grain of sand, but when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at speeds upwards of 60 kilometers per second, they burn up in a mesmerizing color show of white, orange and green hues.

The Perseids are named after the Perseus constellation, as that is where they appear to originate from in the northeastern night sky.

While the Perseids likely will draw large crowds of spectators around the world, those based in the United States will have the chance to see an even bigger astronomical event next week when the U.S. will witness the first total solar eclipse across the country in almost 100 years.

During the eclipse on August 21, the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, completely blocking the face of the sun and darkening skies all the way from Oregon on the West Coast to South Carolina on the East Coast.

While total solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth almost every year, they mostly occur in remote locations or over the ocean, where few if any people actually witness them. The last time a total eclipse happened over the contiguous U.S. was in 1979.
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Pilates is a fitness regimen that has been around for nearly 100 years, using controlled movements to build strength and improve flexibility. Now, a pilates class in New York City is taking on a 21st century malady specific to our digital culture and obsession with texting. VOA’s Tina Trinh went to the Gramercy Pilates NYC studio to check out their “Pilates for Text Neck” class.
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In the sports world, repetitive movements and muscle overuse eventually lead to strain and injury.

The consequences of staring down at our phones day in and day out? Text neck. It’s the poor posture that results from your bent head adding tension to your neck and spine.

One Pilates class in New York City — “Pilates for Text Necks” — is tackling this 21st century malady.

“The more and more that people are texting and being on their computers,” said Kimberly Fielding, creator of the class and director of teacher training at Gramercy Pilates NYC. “They’re suffering later on.”

Watch: Got Text Neck? Try Pilates

Havoc for the body

The problem, as she sees it, is that anything that changes the curve of the neck can create havoc for the rest of the body. 

“Instead of the cervical spine going inward, the curve can be a little bit different, and it causes nerve pain and herniation and different muscle tension headaches, different things that really can reduce quality of life,” she said.

Fielding created the class after noticing more and more of her clients coming in with forward head posture, wherein the head and neck tended to be stretched forward instead of properly aligned over the spine.

The class uses different exercises to release tension in the neck, shoulders and upper body, while strengthening back and neck muscles.

“It’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s because those muscles a lot times are so weak from being overstretched and being in this other position,” Fielding said.

Start with breathing

The class works with the whole body, incorporating chin tucks, neck stretches and upper and lower body strengthening exercises. Breathing and posture awareness are essential components.

Fielding recommends aiming for a “360-degree expansion” of your ribcage, getting your breath to move up and down your torso, back, middle and front, by breathing in through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

“The easiest thing that someone can do is to start to breathe, to try to release some of those muscles that are in our back and in our neck,” she said.

Outside of the Pilates studio, there are everyday fixes. Chin tucks (tucking your chin down and back to make a double chin) are one. The action helps bring your neck in alignment with your spine. Fielding recommends doing 10 chin tucks at a time, holding each for 5 seconds.

Then there’s the not-so-cool solution: Holding your phone at eye level like an actor onstage giving Julius Caesar’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech.

“I have a feeling that more and more people are going to be doing this, because we have to save our spine, right?” she said.

‘I have a neck now’

Students report positive results. 

“I feel a big difference,” said Yasmin Venable. “I used to carry a lot of tension, especially in my upper arms and have like this, ugh feeling and now I feel like, I have a neck now.”

Skeptics may have their doubts, but texting isn’t going away anytime soon. Not to mention video games, laptops and computers, where text neck positions are often assumed.

With some corrective action, the aches and pains associated with these digital-age habits no longer have to be a pain in the neck.
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There’s no doubt Antarctica is getting warmer. Not only is the ice melting, but native moss covers more of the frozen continent and it’s growing faster, according to British researchers. For people who live on the coasts, it means there will likely be more unwelcome water in their future. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Children and teenagers have become busier than ever. But neurologists and psychologists say pushing kids to be constantly learning and practicing, even during summer vacation, is not good for them.

Strength vs. weaknesses

Helping children succeed and thrive is one of the issues psychologist Lea Waters has been researching for two decades. In her book, The Strength Switch, she suggests that parents focus on building up their child’s strengths rather than fixing their weaknesses. 

“If you’re only focusing on what’s wrong with your child, what’s missing, what needs to be fixed, really the best results you can ever hope for is to take them from weakness to above average. But if you start putting more of your time and attention as a parent on what’s right, amplifying their strength, that’s when they really reach their full potential.”

Waters calls this approach the strength-based parenting. But she cautions that sometimes parents can go overboard trying “to get them extra tutoring, to get them into … every class possible and potentially risking over-structuring their life with the idea that practice equals building the strength. In some senses that’s true, but it’s only partly true.”

The result is often an overcrowded schedule, keeping kids’ brains constantly busy with learning, gathering information and practicing.

“Yes, practice builds up strength, but so does downtime,” she said.

What other experts find

Waters’ book is mainly based on her research in positive psychology, parenting and education at the University of Milbourn, Australia. She also refers to a variety of studies by other researchers.

She cites Deena Weisberg and her colleagues at Columbia University who have studied play curriculum and what happens to a child’s well-being and ability to think when play is deliberately incorporated into the school environment.

“And I love Kathy Hirsh-Pasek’s research at Temple University on not overscheduling your kids. She’s really influenced the way I parent my kids personally,” Waters added.

“I love Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s research. She’s a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. She’s done a lot of work on the idea that our brains have two alternative systems.”

Brain’s default mode

The brain’s two alternative modes or networks are on-task focus and free-form attention.

Researcher Immordino-Yang says the on-task focus is about perceiving one’s environment, watching and paying attention. That happens when you play sports, for example.

“You need to be watching other people on your team, and running fast and coordinating emotions and reacting to the things you’re perceiving,” Immordino-Yang explained. “Then, there is another network that’s extremely important for being able to make sense of what you’re doing. This network seems to be deactivated when people are sort of playing sports and attending to the outside and it’s activated when you’re resting and just daydreaming, thinking about your memories, imagining things that don’t exist here and now. You need both modes of attention in order to function as a person in the world.”

Psychologist Waters says slowing down actually helps kids reach their full potential.

“It’s a little bit like if you have too many programs running on your computer,” Waters said. “Your computer starts to slow down. And when you shut these programs down, the computer speeds up again. It’s very much like that for the child’s brain.”

Goofing off

Waters says machines need to reboot and kids need to goof off.

“What I mean by goofing off is really allowing kids to have some downtime, where they are not focused on any specific task, something that they choose to do like shooting baskets, or doing a creative project, or cooking,” she said. “It’s a project they’re interested in doing that they can do it automatically and get enjoyment from.”

Goofing off doesn’t mean the brain becomes inactive.

“It goes into this default network mode and uses that time to process all the information it had during the day, to integrate the new information,” she said.

Waters hopes parents understand that children don’t have to be busy constantly and, instead, should be given permission to goof off every now and then.
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There’s a word that everybody should learn because in a few years it may be in almost every day use.

According to scientists at Harvard University, advances in research of xenotransplantation, or transplantation of animal organs to humans, promises to bridge the huge gap between the number of human organs available for transplants and the number of patients on waiting lists.

The experiments stem from the fact that humans share a lot of DNA with mammals, specifically pigs. Pig heart valves are already being routinely transplanted into humans, some diabetes patients have transplanted pig pancreas cells and pig skin is often used for treating patients with severe burns.

Combining gene editing technique called CRISPR with cloning, Harvard scientists created piglets that do not harbor viruses harmful to humans. This, they say, may lead to the first direct xenotransplantation within as little as two years.

Such patients would still be required to take anti-rejection drugs so the ultimate goal is to grow pigs with human ready organs that don’t require any medication.

Other scientists express skepticism saying a lot more research is needed before xenotransplantation becomes widely available.
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As the Trump administration reviews a government report that contradicts its views on climate change, another report confirms that humans have pushed the planet to record-setting temperatures. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
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Climate change is affecting the timing of river floods across Europe, and societies may have to adapt to avoid future economic and environmental harm, scientists said Thursday.

River floods are among the costliest natural disasters worldwide, causing annual damage of more than $100 billion. They affect millions of people each year because many towns and cities are built along rivers.

Examining flood data across 50 years, researchers found significant shifts in timing along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe from 1960 to 2010.

According to a paper published in the journal Science, half of the measurement stations from England to Portugal showed floods were occurring on average at least 15 days earlier by 2010 compared with a half century earlier.

In northeastern Europe, earlier snowmelts also brought river floods forward by at least eight days over the 50 years, while areas around the North Sea are now seeing floods happen more than a week later than in 1960.

“If the trends in flood timing continue, considerable economic and environmental consequences may arise, because societies and ecosystems have adapted” to the average timing of floods, the authors concluded.

Farming, water provision

They cited possible harm to farming around the North Sea from later winter floods that leave the ground softer going into spring. Water utility companies in northeastern Europe may need to begin filling reservoirs with the earlier water surges rather than waiting for later flooding to ensure sufficient supply for hydropower plants and irrigation, they said.

The study’s authors, led by Guenter Bloeschl of Vienna’s Technical University, cautioned that the precise mechanism by which flood patterns change is complex and still needs to be fully understood.

While data on the timing of floods showed a clearer link with climate change than past studies that looked into flood severity, the researchers noted that several factors affect the timing of floods — including the amount of rainfall, the nature of the soil, upriver snowmelt and land use. Not all the shifts are necessarily caused by man-made global warming, they said.

Bloeschl said the researchers would try to use their findings to predict future changes in the timing of seasonal floods.

“We really expect these trends to increase,” he said.
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The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for a baby’s first six months and continued breastfeeding up to two years of age. Uganda’s parliament has been promoting breastfeeding with a free, day care center for female legislators and staffers. Halima Athumani reports for VOA.
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A study published this month in the online scientific journal Nature stunned the world: Scientists were able to fix a hereditary genetic mutation in a human embryo. The milestone achievement was quickly tempered by the ethical question: Will this lead to the making of designer babies?’ VOA’s George Putic explains.
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Many indigenous populations suffer from high rates of viral hepatitis, and are 2 to 5 times as likely as the surrounding general population to contract it. But efforts to eliminate the diseases have begun to show promise, some researchers say.

Globally, 71 million people have hepatitis C and 257 million have hepatitis B. The viruses cause inflammation of the liver and can lead to cirrhosis and, especially with hepatitis C, liver cancer.

Most cases come from contact with infected blood, drug use, tattoos with unclean needles, or sexual transmission. Before the screening of blood in 1992, blood transfusions were a frequent source. The infection also can pass from a mother to her newborn child.

At the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Viral Hepatitis this week in Anchorage, Alaska, scientists reported on the problem and the efforts to solve it, including one of the first efforts to eliminate hepatitis C from a population.

​Reasons for high rates of infection

Homie Razavi and Devin Razavi-Shearer, epidemiologists from the Polaris Observatory, examined why infection rates were so high among indigenous communities. In Canada, hepatitis B rates were five times higher than the general population, and hepatitis C, three times higher. In Australia, indigenous people were four times as likely to contract hepatitis B and three times as likely to contract hepatitis C.

The researchers said the rates were likely because to “disproportionately high rates of poverty, injection drug use, and incarceration in indigenous populations. This, in combination with the lack of access to health care and prevention measures, greatly increases the risk and thus prevalence of hepatitis C.”

But great progress is being made. In the 1980s, vaccination programs began to cut infection rates of hepatitis B.

Dr. Brian McMahon, director of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, told the conference that new surveys have shown that the disease has been virtually eliminated in young indigenous people in Alaska.

Eliminating infection

Jorge Mera, director of infectious diseases for Cherokee Nation Health Services in Oklahoma, reported on an effort there to eliminate hepatitis C.

“Of the people we think have hepatitis C in the community, we’ve treated one-third of them,” he told VOA, “and that’s pretty good for a program that we started two years ago.”

That program is the first effort in the United States, and one of the first in the world, to attempt to wipe out the virus. Treatments for hepatitis C have improved dramatically over the past decade, making these efforts possible.

Mera said there are many programs around the world in the planning stages, and he pointed to a number of things those programs can learn from the Cherokee Nation’s effort.

“Most of the patients that we’re detecting positive are coming in through the urgent care and emergency department,” he said, “so if you have limited resources, these are areas that I would focus on.”

Health officials in the Cherokee Nation are screening everyone between the ages of 20 and 69. This effort includes screening people during dental appointments.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended screening older adults, but Mera said there were high rates of hepatitis infection in people in their 20s and 30s. He suggested that others setting up elimination programs first determine the prevalence of infection in their respective communities before deciding whom to screen.

He said history has led to high rates of hepatitis in indigenous populations. 

“When you have a population that has been oppressed or traumatized for centuries due to the nature of how the Western colonization process developed, those are factors that may lead substantial portions of that population to seek some relief in nonconventional ways like intravenous drug use,” Mera said.

Preventing transmission is crucial to eliminating hepatitis C, Mera said. One way to combat transmission, he said, is to legalize and expand needle exchanges and opiate-substitution programs.
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A ferocious seagoing crocodile that menaced coastal waters about 164 million years ago during the Jurassic Period has been given a name honoring the similarly ferocious heavy-metal rocker Lemmy, the late frontman for the British band Motörhead .

Scientists said on Wednesday they had named the 19-foot-long (5.8 meters) reptile Lemmysuchus, meaning “Lemmy’s crocodile.” Its fossils were unearthed near the eastern English city of Peterborough in 1909 and were recently re-examined and determined to be a distinct genus in need of a name.

Its enlongated, narrow snout resembled those of modern fish-eating crocs from India called gharials. It boasted large, blunt teeth, perfect for crushing turtle shells or other hard-bodied prey like hard-scaled fish, said University of Edinburgh paleontologist Michela Johnson, lead author of the study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

“It’s big, ugly and quite scary. We think that Lemmy would have liked it. For me, this is a career high, and I can now die happy,” added another of the researchers, Lorna Steel, who came up with the name.

Known for hard living and hard rocking, gravelly voiced Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, died of cancer at age 70 in 2015 in Los Angeles. He formed his influential band Motörhead in 1975.

“I wanted to name something after Lemmy after he died,” said Steel, senior curator for fossils from the croc family, birds and flying reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London.

“At that time, late December 2015, I was working with colleagues from Edinburgh University on this particular fossil specimen,” she said. “I kept the thought to myself for a while but then floated the idea past the others. They all thought it was great, and it really is the most appropriate fossil to bear Lemmy’s name.”

Lemmysuchus was a member of a group called teleosaurs, seagoing crocodiles that thrived for tens of millions of years during the age of dinosaurs. The seas at the time were also populated by a number of types of marine reptiles, including long-necked plesiosaurs and dolphin-like ichthyosaurs.

Johnson studied the fossil specimen held at the Natural History Museum and determined that it had been incorrectly classified as another teleosaur called Steneosaurus.
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Scientists have the first major evidence that blood tests called liquid biopsies hold promise for screening people for cancer. Hong Kong doctors tried it for a type of head and neck cancer, and boosted early detection and one measure of survival.

The tests detect DNA that tumors shed into the blood. Some are used now to monitor cancer patients, and many companies are trying to develop versions of these for screening, as possible alternatives to mammograms, colonoscopies and other such tests. The new study shows this approach can work, at least for this one form of cancer and in a country where it’s common.

“This work is very exciting on the larger scale” because it gives a blueprint for how to make tests for other tumor types such as lung or breast, said Dr. Dennis Lo of Chinese University of Hong Kong. “We are brick by brick putting that technology into place.”

He led the study, published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. Lo is best known for discovering that fetal DNA can be found in a mom’s blood, which launched a new era of non-invasive testing for pregnant women.

The study involved nasopharyngeal cancer, which forms at the top of the throat behind the nose. It’s a good test case for DNA screening because it’s an aggressive cancer where early detection matters a lot, and screening could be tried in a population where the cancer is most common — middle-aged Chinese men.

Also, the Epstein-Barr virus is involved in most cases, so tests could hunt for viral DNA that tumors shed into the blood in large quantities, rather than rare bits of cancer cells themselves. 

About 20,000 men were screened, and viral DNA was found in 1,112, or 5.5 percent. Of those, 309 also had the DNA on confirmatory tests a month later. After endoscope and MRI exams, 34 turned out to have cancer.

More cases were found at the earliest stage — 71 percent versus 20 percent of a comparison group of men who had been treated for nasopharyngeal cancer over the previous five years. That’s important because early cases often are cured with radiation alone, but more advanced ones need chemotherapy and treatment is less successful.

Screening also seemed to improve how many survived without worsening disease — 97 percent at three years versus 70 percent of the comparison group.

Only one person who tested negative on screening developed nasopharyngeal cancer within a year. 

The researchers estimate 593 people would need to be screened at a total cost of $28,600 to identify one cancer case. It may be worth it in Hong Kong, but maybe not in places like the U.S. where the disease is rare, and more people would have to be screened at a greater cost to find each case, said Dr. Richard Ambinder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who wrote a commentary in the journal.

Still, “this is showing that liquid biopsies have great promise,” he said. “This is an advance that will indeed save lives.”

The study was sponsored by an Asian foundation and the Hong Kong government. Lo and some other authors founded Cirina, a Hong Kong-based company focused on early cancer detection, and get royalties related to DNA blood tests. In May, Cirina merged with Grail Inc., a California company working on cancer screening blood tests with more than $1 billion from drug companies and big-name investors such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
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The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is calling for rapid action to prevent a cholera epidemic in South Sudan from spiraling out of control as the rainy season in the country progresses.

More than 18,000 cases of cholera, including 328 deaths have been reported in South Sudan since June 2016. The International Organization for Migration warns the number of cases and deaths is likely to grow as the rainy season this year will leave as much as 60 percent of the country inaccessible by road.

IOM spokeswoman, Olivia Headon, tells VOA a combination of factors including the ongoing crisis, the rainy season and the movement of displaced people across the country is making it extremely difficult to contain this deadly disease.

“So, if you are maybe infected with cholera or someone in your family if you come in contact with this and then you move to a different part of the country, you are also bringing the infection with you,” she said. “We hope that it does not spiral out of control and IOM with other partners in the U.N. and NGO [non-governmental organization] implementers on the ground are working so it does not.”

IOM reports the scale of needs in this conflict-ridden country is unprecedented, with more than 7.5 million people dependent on humanitarian aid. The agency says disease outbreaks, such as cholera, are particularly dangerous for displaced and vulnerable populations. This includes children under five, thousands of whom are severely acutely malnourished and at risk of dying without therapeutic help.

Headon says IOM and partners are leading oral cholera vaccination campaigns across South Sudan. She says they are distributing cholera kits, including jerry cans, water treatment supplies and soap. She says aid workers also are repairing boreholes and conducting hygiene promotion in cholera-affected areas across the country.

 
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The World Health Organization in Myanmar says a recent outbreak of H1N1 in the country is not unusual for the time of the year, and while there may be more cases in the future the available data suggests it is not a cause for panic.

Myanmar’s state media reported on Wednesday that since July 21 there have been 166 confirmed cases and 17 deaths from the virus, known commonly as swine flu after a global pandemic in 2009 was found to have originated in infected pigs. The respiratory infection is now considered a normal human flu.

Seasonal event

Dr. Stephan Paul Jost, WHO’s country representative in Myanmar, said in an interview the consensus based on the evidence so far is that “this is a seasonal event, it’s a seasonal influenza, and there are likely to be also more cases because it is seasonal. And it is not in itself a cause for alarm.”

“Influenza of course can be a serious disease and people can also die from it,” he added. “It happens in every country in the world in the flu season and sometimes even outside it.”

The damp and slightly cooler conditions of Myanmar’s rainy season are also favorable for the influenza virus.

But Jost said the numbers are generally in line with what WHO is seeing in countries in the region.

“It is not in itself an unusual event. Of course we are keeping a close eye on it,” he said.

Monitoring

Dr. Than Htun Aung, the deputy director of the public health department with Myanmar’s Ministry of Health and Sports, said the government is in the process of stepping up monitoring and that it’s too early to say whether the virus has tapered off.

“Now we’re controlling. We are waiting [for] more information from the surveillance. We can’t say now,” he said. “I think we can control like other countries did. USA was the same, they had more patients than we had. Now we’re learning what they have done and planning procedures.”

WHO is providing technical support in terms of specific guidelines, consulting with regional experts, and facilitating samples to be sent to laboratories abroad.

It has also worked with Facebook representatives in the region and locally to look at various messaging and discussion about H1N1 on social media, which some believe contributed to an unnecessary panic over the outbreak, with large numbers of people in the commercial capital Yangon donning surgical masks as a main line of defense.

“We’re looking at the different terminology used in Facebook for influenza and for this particular outbreak to see whether we can work together to get more systematic and authoritative messages out that are quite simple but … recommended by WHO,” Jost said, adding it was an ongoing process. “We are still working together on this to actually find the best way forward.”

A representative for the social media platform in Singapore was not immediately available for comment as August 9 is a public holiday in the country.

Surgical masks

Jost described the use of surgical masks in Myanmar as perhaps a “bit overdone,” in particular N95 masks, which are not recommended for the public as they are difficult to wear and better for hospital environments and health workers.

However, light surgical masks that fit easily on the face can be useful in some situations, he said, especially if you know you have the flu. They may even cut down on transmission in crowded places like buses.

“Influenza is transmitted by a fine droplet. It’s not airborne, you don’t get it just by breathing air. It’s fine droplets, by sneezing and coughing, that are dispersed, that’s transmitted, and that’s usually then also by hand, either by shaking hands or it lands in your hand and you rub your eyes and it enters your system,” he said. “So even masks would not protect from that. You could have a mask and you are rubbing your eyes and you are still getting it.”

“But if you are sick [and wearing a mask] you are preventing then the dispersal of these fine droplets to others. That is definitely helping. That is good,” he added.

One of the other issues that arose in response to the outbreak was a lack of past data that could help authorities assess the scope of the problem.

Jost said WHO had suggested health officials could strengthen the surveillance of cases so “a picture would really emerge that is more consistent, more complete than what is currently available and would give us a better idea historically, what is the historical activity of the influenza viruses in the country.”

He said Myanmar had a lot of cases in 2010, the year after the worldwide outbreak, and also in 2014.

“But how complete this information is we are not as sure as perhaps we could be. And that’s true for many countries,” he said.

Jost also complimented Myanmar’s health officials and government partners on the outbreak response, saying it was “very encouraging.”

Aung Naing Soe contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump says the United States had no alternative but to defeat an epidemic of opioid drug use, which kills more than 100 Americans daily. Speaking from New Jersey, Trump promised measures to combat the “scurge,” including tougher prosecution of drug-related crimes, better controls at the southern U.S. border. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has a report.
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