American workers are facing a paradox – many of them cannot find work while a lot of companies say they cannot find suitable candidates for job openings. Experts say the problem is in the so-called ‘skill gap,’ the incompatibility between available skills and job requirements. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Bonobos are primates that are very closely related to chimpanzees, and humans. They are found exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s not completely clear how many of them there are, but it is known that their numbers are on the decline. But the world’s only bonobo sanctuary is committed to ensuring these animals survive and stay wild. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A new device, developed by an Israeli start-up, could make routine visits to the doctor’s office a thing of the past. Faith Lapidus reports.
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In spite of many attempts to replace it with a more suitable material, asphalt concrete remains the best and cheapest material for paving roads. Vulnerable to heat, ice, ultraviolet light and mechanical stress, it has a relatively short lifespan and has to be repaired or replaced at regular intervals. Swiss engineers say they may have found a formula for asphalt with self-healing properties VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The Olive Ridley Sea Turtle is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the IUCN. Threats come on land and sea. Thousands of turtles die every year in fishing nets, and their eggs are considered a delicacy. But on one protected beach in Mexico, the Olive Ridley turtles are swarming. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Marine authorities in the U.S. and Canada said Friday they will marshal resources to try to find out what’s behind a string of deaths of endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The animals are among the rarest marine mammals in the world, with only about 500 still living. The countries will collaborate on a report that could help craft future regulations that protect the vulnerable whales, representatives said.

Representatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Fisheries and Oceans Canada both said ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear have played roles in the deaths of the whales, and that other factors also could have played a role.

The goal of the countries is to find out more about why 13 of the whales have been found dead this year and respond with solutions, said David Gouveia, protected species monitoring program branch chief for NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region.

“The North Atlantic right whale is fragile, and one of NOAA and DFO’s most difficult conservation challenges,” Gouveia said. “Every factor impacting their ability to thrive is significant.”

This year, 10 dead whales have been found off Canada’s coast and three off the coast of Massachusetts, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare the deaths an “unusual mortality event” on Thursday and to launch an investigation. The agency said that designation triggers a “focused, expert investigation” into the cause of the deaths.

The report will take months to assemble, and a budget for the investigation has not been developed, officials said. The effort will involve collecting data on each whale that died and considering factors such as changes to the environment and habitat, they said.

An average number of dead right whales would be about four, Gouveia said. Representatives for both countries said strategies to protect the whales could include fishing gear modifications, ship speed restrictions and changes to shipping traffic patterns.

“The priority is to protect these whales,” said Matthew Hardy, aquatic resources management division manager for Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Conservationists have said the right whale population is so small that a year of poor reproduction and heavy mortality could threaten its survival. Only a few baby right whales were born this year, said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, a senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Biologist Regina Asmutis-Silvia of Whale and Dolphin Conservation has called this year’s number of deaths “unprecedented.” She and other conservationists have said right whales haven’t suffered such high mortality since the whaling era, when their populations were decimated. Hunting right whales became illegal 80 years ago.

The whales migrate north every summer to feed. Scott Kraus, who heads the New England Aquarium’s right whale research program, has said it’s possible the whales are more vulnerable to hazards because they are traveling more due to changes in the availability of food.
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The Saffir-Simpson scale of a hurricane’s intensity is used to estimate potential property damage and coastal flooding caused by storm surge. The scale is determined by wind speed. Storm surge is an abnormal rise of water above the normal tide, generated by a storm. Flooding from storm surge depends on many factors, such as the track, intensity, size, and forward speed of the storm and the characteristics of the coastline where it comes ashore or passes nearby.

Category 1

Winds of 74-95 mph (120-150 kph). Storm surge of 4 to 5 feet (1 to 1.5 meters) above normal. Damage primarily to unanchored mobile homes, shrubbery and trees. Some damage to poorly constructed signs and piers. Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days.

Category 2

Winds of 96-110 mph (155-175 kph). Storm surge 6 to 8 feet (1.8-2.4 meters) above normal. Some roof, door and window damage to buildings. Considerable damage to mobile homes, small watercraft, trees, poorly constructed signs and piers. Flooding of coastal and low-lying areas. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.

Category 3

Winds of 111-129 mph (180-210 kph). Storm surge 9 to 12 feet (3 to 4 meters) above normal. Some structural damage to small homes. Mobile homes destroyed and large trees blown down. Coastal flooding destroys smaller structures and floating debris damages larger structures. Terrain lower than 5 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level may flood as far as 8 miles (13 kilometers) inland. Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, was a Category 3 storm at landfall in 2005 after being a Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico. At least 1,800 people died.

Category 4

Winds of 130-156 mph (210-250 kph). Storm surge 13 to 18 feet (4-5 meters) above normal. Wall failures and roof collapses on small homes, and extensive damage to doors and windows. Complete destruction of some homes, especially mobile homes. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Major coastal flooding damage. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months. Two 2004 storms were Category 4: Hurricane Ivan, which made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Hurricane Charley, which hit the Florida Gulf Coast near Fort Myers. Charley killed at least 21 people and left thousands homeless. The total U.S. damage was estimated to be near $15 billion.

Category 5

Winds greater than 157 mph (250 kph). Storm surge greater than 18 feet (5 meters) above normal. Complete roof failure on many homes and industrial buildings. Smaller buildings and mobile homes blown over or completely blown away. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than 15 feet (4.5 meters) above sea level and within 500 yards (460 meters) of the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas on low ground within 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 kilometers) inland may be required. The last Category 5 storm to hit the United States was Hurricane Andrew in 1992. An estimated 250,000 were left homeless and the storm caused more than $20 billion in damage in the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana. Fifty-five people were killed.

Source: National Hurricane Center
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After decades of a one-therapy-fits-all approach to fighting deadly diseases such as cancer or cystic fibrosis, physicians and researchers around the world are increasingly turning to a new tactic called personalized medicine. Practices are tailored to individual patients because different people’s response to the same drug may be different. And instead of testing various drugs on patients, researchers are now testing them on mini copies of their organs. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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A group of Egyptian students have built a machine they say can produce fuel from worn-out vehicle tires.

The device heats the tires until they reach evaporation point. The vapor then enters a condenser. The result is a product “very similar in properties to pure diesel, and the carbon or black coal is just left inside the container,” said Mohamed Saeed Ali, one of 12 students who worked on the machine as a graduation project.

The students are searching for investors for their project.

“Instead of polluting the environment, we recycle them [the tires] properly in an eco-friendly manner,” Saeed said.

Egypt raised fuel prices by up to 50 percent in June as a condition of a $12 billion International Monetary Fund program the country signed last year.
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The oceans are rising faster and faster, threatening coastal cities around the world. The quickening pace is due, in part, to changes happening in the Arctic that scientists are just beginning to understand. From Greenland, VOA’s Steve Baragona reports on how warming temperatures are driving more warming.
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Patients who survive infection with the Ebola virus often continue to face numerous health problems. New research finds 80 percent of Ebola survivors suffer disabilities one year after being discharged from the hospital.

Approximately 11,000 people died in the Ebola outbreak that hit West Africa from 2014 to 2016; tens of thousands more who were infected survived.

Of those survivors, many battled vision problems and headaches that lasted for months.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are studying what’s called post-Ebola syndrome. One of the senior authors of the study, Dr. Janet Scott, says researchers are unsure why survivors experience such disabilities.

“I’m not sure we’ve quite gotten to the bottom of it yet,” Scott said. “The idea that you go through something as horrific as Ebola and just walk away from that unscathed was always a bit of a vain hope.  So, it could be the inflammatory response. It could be damage to the muscles, and it could be the persistence of virus in some cases. It could be all of those things.”

Scott says problems found in Ebola survivors’ eyes may provide clues to what is happening elsewhere in the body.

“They show some quite distinct scarring patterns,” she said. “There’s definitely scar tissue there. We can see it in the eyes. We can’t see it in the rest of the body, but I’m sure it’s in the rest of the body because the patients are coming in with this huge range of problems.”

The disabilities were reported in past Ebola outbreaks, as well. However, because past outbreaks were smaller and there were few survivors, researchers were not able to do major, long-term studies on the aftereffects.

This time, said Scott, “There are 5,000 survivors or thereabouts in Sierra Leone, and more in Guinea and Liberia. So, it’s an opportunity from a research point of view to find out the full spectrum of sequelae … the things that happen after an acute illness.”

Military Hospital 34 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, also took part in the study, helping to recruit 27 Ebola survivors and 54 close contacts who were not infected. About 80 percent of survivors reported disabilities compared to 11 percent of close contacts.

“The problems we’re seeing in Ebola survivors, this is not due just to the tough life in Sierra Leone. This is more than likely down to their experience in Ebola,” Scott said.

The research was led by Dr. Soushieta Jagadesh, who said “a year following acute disease, survivors of West Africa Ebola Virus Disease continue to have a higher chance of disability in mobility, cognition and vision.”

“Issues such as anxiety and depression persist in survivors and must not be neglected,” she added.

Scott hopes the findings can be used to provide better care in the event of another Ebola outbreak, no matter where it is. In the West Africa outbreak, the first goal was to contain the epidemic, followed by reducing the death rate.

“If I was treating an Ebola patient again, it has to be more than just surviving,” Scott said. “You have to try to make people survive well. Surviving with half your body paralyzed or with your vision impaired and being unable to care for your family or earn a living isn’t really enough. So, what I would like to do is to focus on that aspect to make people survive better and survive well.”
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SpaceX has unveiled a sleek white spacesuit for astronauts on its crewed flights coming up next year.

Chief executive Elon Musk made the big reveal via Instagram on Wednesday. He says it’s not him in the new suit, rather a SpaceX engineer.

SpaceX is developing a crew version of its Dragon cargo capsule for NASA astronauts. Boeing is also working to get U.S. astronauts flying again from home soil. Boeing is going blue for spacesuits for its Starliner capsules.

U.S. astronauts last rocketed away from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2011. They’ve since been riding Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station.

Musk says the new SpaceX suit has been tested on Earth — and works. He says it was incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function.
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Food alone cannot solve the world’s malnutrition crises but only three countries are looking beyond hunger to the other major driver, according to a global study released Thursday.

Water, sanitation and hygiene, usually treated by governments and NGOs as a separate policy area from food and nutrition, make up the second leading cause of stunted growth in children, after underweight births, said the report.

But only Cambodia, Niger, and Zimbabwe among the 10 countries covered by the report are linking their response to malnutrition and water by bringing together the responsible agencies, according to charity WaterAid.

“Improving child health is a long-term issue. It’s not as simple as giving food and that improves malnutrition — right?” Dan Jones of WaterAid told Reuters.

Jones said governments that treat food and water separately cannot prevent malnutrition. Instead, they must tackle the poor sanitation that causes malnutrition, via infection and disease.

In 2016, 155 million children younger than five were stunted due to a lack of nutrition, according to the United Nations World Health Organization.

Diseases caused by dirty water and lack of sanitation such as gut infections, intestinal worms, and diarrhea prevent young bodies from absorbing the nutrients needed for growth, according to WaterAid, which produced the report with charities Action Against Hunger and SHARE.

Jones said malnutrition can leave children with invisible cognitive, emotional and physical damage.

Yet the effects are clear, and span all areas of development, from economic growth to schooling, said Jones.

“If they have clean water … girls, when they grow up to be mothers, are more likely to give birth to healthy children, and to be able to help them to grow and develop and provide them with clean water and food — and those children can go to school and concentrate in school,” said Jones.

Jones singled out Cambodia for linking up its response.

One in three Cambodian children younger than five is stunted, but Prime Minister Hun Sen has brought together the ministries responsible for nutrition, health, agriculture, and water and sanitation to create a joint response.

“It sounds very obvious, but those ministers really talking to each other can make a huge difference,” Jones said.
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U.S. wildlife managers erred when they declined to list as endangered a small population of grizzly bears in the remote reaches of Idaho and northwest Montana, a federal judge has ruled in what conservationists on Wednesday hailed as a huge victory.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 determined the fewer than 50 grizzlies that roam the Cabinet Mountains and Yaak River drainage in the Northern Rockies were not in danger of extinction and did not warrant reclassifying as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The Montana conservation group Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued, arguing the so-called Cabinet-Yaak population of grizzlies would go extinct unless U.S. wildlife managers tightened restrictions on logging, mining and other activities in bear habitat, all safeguards that would come with endangered status.

On Tuesday a federal judge in Missoula, Montana, sided with the conservation group in a ruling that found that the Fish and Wildlife Service had violated U.S. law in determining that the number of outsized, hump-shouldered bears in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem could reach a targeted recovery goal of 100 without added protections.

In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen found that the agency had long recognized that population of grizzlies was warranted for listing as an endangered species because of human-caused mortality and other threats.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 reported Cabinet-Yaak grizzlies were declining at an annual rate of about 0.8 percent per year and that the percentage of bears unlawfully or accidentally killed by humans had tripled by 1999-2012 compared with 1982-1998.

Yet the agency in 2014 reversed course, finding the bears did not need additional safeguards because their population trend had changed to stable from declining.

Christensen ruled that reversal was unlawfully arbitrary and capricious and ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to rework any proposal that would downgrade the status of the bears. Alliance head Michael Garrity on Wednesday said the judge’s decision was a victory for the grizzles.

“Now they have a chance at survival,” Garrity said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request by Reuters for comment.

Grizzlies in 1975 were listed as threatened in the lower 48 states after they neared extinction.

The Cabinet-Yaak bears are among just a handful of grizzly populations that exist outside Alaska. The grizzlies in and around Yellowstone Park, the second-largest group of bears in the Lower 48 states, were delisted this summer.
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Engineers at a lab in Florida have been working quietly for 2½ years on building one of the most powerful magnets in the world.

And on Monday, they succeeded. The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory — whose main location is housed at Florida State University — met its goal and reclaimed its status as home to the world’s strongest resistive magnet.

They called it “Project 11,” a nod to the comedy film “This is Spinal Tap,” about a fictional heavy metal band whose guitarist boasts an amplifier whose volume goes up to 11, not just 10.

Lab officials said they tested a 41.4-tesla magnet, which is roughly 20 times the strength of a magnet used in medical imaging machines and vastly stronger than the ones that get stuck to the door of a household refrigerator. The Earth’s magnetic field, by comparison, is one-twenty thousandth (.00005) of a tesla. A tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength.

The new magnet, which cost $3.5 million to build, beat the old mark for resistive magnets, which was held by a 38.5-tesla magnet in China. The National MagLab had previously held the record for 19 years.

Greg Boebinger, the lab’s director, said the loss of the record prompted officials to tell engineers, “Go ahead and make the thing bigger, go ahead and use more power, just go full volume to 11 and see what you can do.”

Continuous operation

Resistive magnets are a type of electromagnet used for research. They differ from pulsed magnets, which can reach a higher Tesla but can sustain that power for only a fraction of a second. Resistive magnets can run continuously. Superconducting magnets use less power but tap out at a lower field strength. Hybrid magnets combine superconducting and resistive elements and can reach even higher fields. The National MagLab has the world’s strongest hybrid magnet, which reaches 45 tesla.

Researchers say they can use these powerful magnets to answer many questions, such as: What kinds of materials will work best in quantum computers? How does a potential Alzheimer’s drug change the brain? What molecules make up a sample of crude oil — and will it be worth drilling for?

The new record-setting magnet is powerful enough that lab officials use non-magnetic tools, but it’s not as powerful as some imagine.

“Local people think we change the weather,” said Boebinger, who said he gets asked about Magneto all the time. “We don’t even change the magnetic field outside our building.”

Instead, the magnetic field created by the new magnet will be used by researchers and scientists from around the world as a way to look at and study various types of materials and perhaps make breakthroughs in medicine, engineering and energy.
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A federal research vessel will launch on a cruise this week to study how Beaufort Sea wind affects plant and animal life in a changing Arctic Ocean.

The Sikuliaq, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, will depart Friday from Nome for the trip through the Bering Strait to waters on and off the continental shelf in the Beaufort.

Climate warming in recent decades has resulted in far less summer seasonal ice in the Beaufort, which stretches from the northeast coast of Alaska across Canada. East winds that formerly blew over sea ice now blow over open water, said Steve Okkonen, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Wind drives water at the surface of the shallow continental shelf, at depths of about 300 feet (91 meters), north to water off the shelf, which drops to depths of more than 10,000 feet (3,050 meters).

The result is a phenomenon called “upwelling.” Deep, cold water rises toward the surface carrying large concentrations of plankton, which scientists hypothesize will attract fish, especially Arctic cod. Large numbers of cod in turn attract beluga whale and seabirds that prey on cod.

Aerial surveys have shown belugas congregating on the shelf break, said Carin Ashjian, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who will serve as chief scientist on the cruise.

“What we hope to do, and what we’re planning to do, is to basically document and describe how the physical forcing of the wind produces this favorable feeding environment for the beluga whales,” she said Tuesday. “It’s one thing to say, `Oh, they can find food along this shelf break.’ But we want to find out why they find their food along the shelf break, with numbers.”

Upwelling events in the Beaufort are projected to increase as sea ice continues to trend downward, Okkonen said. Last year the minimum sea ice for 2016 was recorded Sept. 10, when ice covered 1.6 million square miles (4.14 square kilometers), tied with Sept. 18, 2007, for the second-lowest minimum on records since satellite measurements began in 1978. The lowest year on record was Sept. 17, 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, when sea ice fell to 1.31 million square miles (3.39 million square kilometers).

Wind covering a greater distance over open water becomes a greater force on the ocean.

“We have a much bigger fetch,” Okkonen said.

Researchers on board the 261-foot (80-meter) Sikuliaq will record oceanographic conditions, sample for plankton levels and cod numbers, and survey marine mammals and seabirds.

The ship will sail transects in a box roughly 37 by 62 miles (60 by 100 kilometers) starting 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 kilometers) offshore.

The scientists want to share the research story with the public, particularly with Alaskans, and will offer a Facebook page, with reports from the vessel, titled, “Arctic Winds, Fish, Fins and Feathers.”

Researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Rhode Island and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be on board. Researchers are scheduled to return to Nome on Sept. 18.
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When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.

But Dijkstra, a University of New Hampshire marine biologist, saw only a patchy seafloor before her. The sugar kelp had declined dramatically and been replaced by invasive, shrub-like seaweed that looked like a giant shag rug.

“I remember going to some dive sites and honestly being shocked at how few kelp blades we saw,” she said.

Warming oceans probable culprit

The Gulf of Maine, stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is the latest in a growing list of global hotspots losing their kelp, including hundreds of miles in the Mediterranean Sea, off southern Japan and Australia, and parts of the California coast.

Among the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems, kelp forests are found on all continental coastlines except for Antarctica and provide critical food and shelter to myriad fish and other creatures. Kelp also is critical to coastal economies, providing billions of dollars in tourism and fishing.

The likely culprit, according to several scientific studies, is warming oceans from climate change, coupled with the arrival of invasive species. In Maine, the invaders are other seaweeds. In Australia, the Mediterranean and Japan, tropical fish are feasting on the kelp.

Most kelp are replaced by small, tightly packed, bushy seaweeds that collect sediment and prevent kelp from growing back, said the University of Western Australia’s Thomas Wernberg.

“Collectively these changes are part of a recent and increasing global trend of flattening of the world’s kelp forests,” said Wernberg, co-author of a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that 38 percent of kelp forest declined over the past 50 years in regions that had data.

Great Southern Reef threatened

Kelp losses on Australia’s Great Southern Reef threaten tourism and fishing industries worth $10 billion. Die-offs contributed to a 60 percent drop in species richness in the Mediterranean and were blamed for the collapse of the abalone fishery in Japan.

“You are losing habitat. You are losing food. You are losing shoreline protection,” said University of Massachusetts Boston’s Jarrett Byrnes, who leads a working group on kelp and climate change. “They provide real value to humans.”

The Pacific Coast from northern California to the Oregon border is one place that suffered dramatic kelp loss, according to Cynthia Catton, a research associate at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Davis. Since 2014, aerial surveys have shown that bull kelp declined by over 90 percent, something Catton blamed on a marine heat wave along with a rapid increase in kelp-eating sea urchins.

Without the kelp to eat, Northern California’s abalone fishery has been harmed.

“It’s pretty devastating to the ecosystem as a whole,” Catton said. “It’s like a redwood forest that has been completely clear-cut. If you lose the trees, you don’t have a forest.”

Kelp hasn’t recovered

Kelp is incredibly resilient and has been known to bounce back from storms and heat waves.

But in Maine, it has struggled to recover following an explosion of voracious sea urchins in the 1980s that wiped out many kelp beds. Now, it must survive in waters that are warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans — most likely forcing kelp to migrate northward or into deeper waters.

 “What the future holds is more complicated,” Byrnes said. “If the Gulf of Maine warms sufficiently, we know kelp will have a hard time holding on.”

On their dives around Maine’s Appledore Island, a craggy island off New Hampshire that’s home to nesting seagulls, Dijkstra and colleague Larry Harris have witnessed dramatic changes.

30-year-old drive logs

Their study, published by the Journal of Ecology in April, examined photos of seaweed populations and dive logs going back 30 years in the Gulf of Maine. They found introduced species from as far away as Asia, such as the filamentous red seaweed, had increased by as much 90 percent and were covering 50 to 90 percent of the gulf’s seafloor.

They are seeing far fewer ocean pout, wolf eel and pollock that once were commonplace in these kelp beds. But they also are finding that the half-dozen invasive seaweeds replacing kelp are harboring up to three times more tiny shrimp, snails and other invertebrates.

“We’re not really sure how this new seascape will affect higher species in the food web, especially commercially important ones like fish, crabs and lobster,” said Dijkstra, following a dive in which bags of invasive seaweed were collected and the invertebrates painstakingly counted. “What we do think is that fish are using these seascapes differently.”

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered a halt to research on the potential health hazards of people who live near mountaintop coal mining operations.

The U.S. Interior Department ordered the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to end a study of surface coal mining sites in the Appalachian Mountains, pending a review of projects that cost more than $100,000.

Last year the Interior Department, under then President Barack Obama, commissioned research into possible health risks among those who live near current or former mining sites in Appalachia.

The agency allocated $1 million in 2015 for a two-year study at the request of officials from West Virginia, located in the heart of Appalachia.

But the Interior Department ordered an immediate halt to the research, defending it as necessary to ensure the responsible expenditure of taxpayer money.

Trump proposed a $1.6 billion cut to Interior’s budget in 2018, including 4,000 jobs.

The decision, which took effect Monday, comes as the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers collaborate to eliminate policies they believe restrict the mining and use of coal.

Trump promised during his presidential campaign to create jobs by reviving the coal industry, and signed an executive order in March that lifted a ban on leases for mining coal on federal land.

Environmentalists maintain the removal of coal from mountaintops releases pollutants into water and air, causing numerous health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and birth defects.

Indiana University health science professor Michael Hendryx told House lawmakers in 2015 that his studies have connected mountaintop removal to higher rates of lung cancer, heart and kidney disease and other illnesses.

The Sierra Club’s Appalachia organizer, Bill Price, described the decision as “infuriating.”  “Trump has once again shown the people of Appalachia that we mean nothing to him,” he said in a statement.

 
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Authorities in Japan are trying to decide what to do with the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water being stored at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which went into meltdown following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

It is estimated the huge water storage tanks surrounding the site contain more than 750,000 tons of water contaminated with tritium, considered one of the less harmful radioactive isotopes.

Watch: Japan Considers Release of Fukushima Tritium-Contaminated Water Into Pacific

Local media reported last month that plant owner TEPCO planned to release the water into the Pacific Ocean, prompting an outcry from environmental groups and local fishermen. The general manager of TEPCO’s nuclear division, Takahiro Kimoto, says the company has yet to make a decision.

“One option is to release the tritium-contaminated water into the ocean. However, there are other options such as vaporizing it, but we have not decided yet which option to take to dispose of the water. Since there may be an influence on the environment, and because there have been harmful rumors about what effects it may have on people and the environment, we are still consulting with various stakeholders before finally deciding on the solution,” Kimoto told VOA in an interview.

Tritium releases

TEPCO points out all nuclear power plants around the world release tritium into the environment.

Tritium is considered one of the less dangerous radioactive isotopes, said leading marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. He has been monitoring the effects of the Fukushima disaster on the Pacific Ocean.

“There are natural sources up in cosmic rays interacting in the atmosphere. And the biggest source by far was the weapons testing in the 1960s. So you’re talking about adding to what’s already there. If it’s all released on one day, that’s a very different scenario for the oceans than if it’s released sequentially over the course of several years.”

A purification system called ALPS is designed to remove other, more harmful isotopes from the contaminated water. Buesseler said more oversight is needed.

“Independently, I want to see for each tank, what are the levels not only of the tritium, which dominates by far the radioactivity, but all those minor elements, cesium, strontium, that are still there to some degree.”

Nuclear fuel removal

Longer-term, Japanese authorities face the task of trying to remove the nuclear fuel. Robots have recorded footage of what appear to be melted fuel rods inside reactor 3, but in other reactors soaring levels of radioactivity have crippled the robots within minutes.

“Around the fall of this year, we are hoping to reveal a big plan on our future policy, and the method we will use to remove this fuel,” said TEPCO’s Kimoto.

The Japanese government estimates the total cleanup cost, including compensation, decommissioning and decontamination, will reach $190 billion in a process likely to take at least 40 years.
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Authorities in Japan are trying to decide what to do with the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water being stored at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which went into meltdown following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Tokyo, plant operator TEPCO says it is safe to release the water into the Pacific Ocean, but scientists want a closer analysis of the water’s radioactivity levels.
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Heat from deep within the earth is an underused source of renewable energy. The United States is the world’s largest producer of geothermal energy, but it makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s power generation. By contrast, geothermal plants in the Philippines and Iceland contribute around 30 percent of their electricity production. Now, geothermal power is heating up in Australia. Faith Lapidus reports.
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There is a saying that “lightning never strikes twice” in any location. The same could be said for a total solar eclipse over the United States, a rare event … except in a small patch of the United States that includes a small Missouri town, a place VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports is a prime location for current and future stargazers to study a rare phenomenon.
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A rare total solar eclipse began in the Western state of Oregon Monday, as millions of people across the U.S. are watching the phenomenon from the Pacific to the Atlantic for the first time in 99 years.

The temperature in Oregon dropped significantly as the moon moved to cover the sun.

An estimated 200 million people live within a day’s drive of Monday’s path of totality, which starts from Oregon’s Pacific Coast, across the U.S. heartland, all the way to South Carolina’s Atlantic Coast.

WATCH: Washington, D.C. eclipse watchers on watching big event

Cities, towns and parks across the path have been prepared for an influx of people with telescopes, cameras and protective glasses to watch what NASA said it expects to be the most watched and documented eclipse in history.

More than 100,000 people gathered in Madras, a town in Oregon with a population of 7,000 and one of the first places that will witness the celestial event. According to the Los Angeles Times, the National Guard had to be called in to assist with traffic jams in Madras because so many people wanted to view the eclipse there.

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

“It’s chilling, it’s cool, it’s a life experience,” Gregg Toland, who traveled from Palatine, Illinois to the airport in Perryville Missouri to see the eclipse in the path of totality through his telescope, told VOA.

“It’s something you’ll never forget,” he said.

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

A total solar 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.

VOA’s Kane Farabaugh and Carolyn Presutti contributed to this report.
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China has been an “incredible partner” in cracking down on synthetic opioids seen as fueling fast-rising overdose deaths in the United States, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said Monday during a visit to the country considered the source of many of the deadly substances sought by addicts.

Price said China has been quick to respond when regulators identify a threat from a dangerous drug such as fentanyl, the powerful opioid blamed for thousands of fatal overdoses, including the death of entertainer Prince.

“When a particular drug is identified as being a problem, China has been an incredible partner in helping to stop the production of drugs like fentanyl in China,” Price told The Associated Press.

A bigger challenge comes from the “rapidly changing ability of individuals to formulate new chemical makeups that are a different drug and that aren’t in the controlled arena,” Price said. “The challenge is to get those taken care of much more rapidly. And so that’s the conversations that we need to be having.”

Last month, China banned a designer drug called U-47700 and three others following U.S. pressure to do more to control synthetic opioids.

In China, U-47700 had been a legal alternative to fentanyl and potent derivatives like carfentanil. Its usage has been growing among U.S. opioid addicts.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has long said that China is the top source country for synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its precursors, assertions Beijing has said lack firm evidence. Still, the two countries have deepened cooperation as the U.S. opioid epidemic intensifies.

Price also expressed support for continued funding of the World Health Organization amid questions about President Donald Trump’s commitment to the United Nations. The U.S. is currently the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget.

Those in Congress responsible for drawing up budget plans “appreciate the importance of WHO, appreciate the incredible importance of the United States’ support of WHO, not just rhetorically, but financially as well,” Price said.

 
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