Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel that reaches homes through underground pipes. Unfortunately, older pipes often leak, wasting fuel and releasing unburned methane, a potent greenhouse gas. To find and measure leaks, Colorado scientists teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund and Google Street View Cars to make “methane maps.” From Fort Collins, Colorado, Shelley Schlender reports.
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Climate change could make much of South Asia, home to a fifth of the world’s population, too hot for human survival by the end of this century, scientists warned Wednesday.

If climate change continues at its current pace, deadly heat waves beginning in the next few decades will strike parts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a study based on computer simulations by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Key agricultural areas in the Indus and Ganges river basins will be hit particularly hard, reducing crop yields and increasing hunger in some of the world’s most densely populated regions, researchers said.

“Climate change is not an abstract concept. It is impacting huge numbers of vulnerable people,” MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Business as usual runs the risk of having extremely lethal heat waves.”

The areas likely to be worst affected in northern India, southern Pakistan and Bangladesh are home to 1.5 billion people, said Eltahir, the study’s co-author.

Currently, about 2 percent of India’s population is sometimes exposed to extreme combinations of heat and humidity; by 2100 that will increase to about 70 percent if nothing is done to mitigate climate change, the study said.

Heat waves across South Asia in the summer of 2015 killed an estimated 3,500 people, and similar events will become more frequent and intense, researchers said.

Persian Gulf

Projections show the Persian Gulf region will be the world’s hottest region by 2100 as a result of climate change.

But with small, wealthy populations and minimal domestic food production requirements, oil-rich states in the Gulf will be better able to respond to rising heat than countries in South Asia, Eltahir said.

The study does not directly address migration, but researchers said it is likely that millions of people in South Asia will be forced to move because of blistering temperatures and crop failures unless steps are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Disaster experts from South Asian countries met in Pakistan last month to launch a toolkit to help city governments develop ways to manage the impact of heat waves in urban areas.

Ahmedabad, in western India, has already introduced a heat action plan — South Asia’s first early-warning system against extreme heat waves.

Authorities in the city of 5.5 million have mapped areas with vulnerable populations and set up “cooling spaces” in temples, public buildings and malls during the summer.
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U.S. scientists have succeeded in altering the genes of a human embryo to correct a disease-causing mutation, making it possible to prevent the defect from being passed on to future generations.

The milestone, published this week in the journal Nature, was confirmed last week by Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), which collaborated with the Salk Institute and Korea’s Institute for Basic Science to use a technique known as CRISPR-Cas9 to correct a genetic mutation for a heart condition.

Until now, published studies using the technique had been done in China with mixed results.

CRISPR-Cas9 works as a type of molecular scissors that can selectively trim away unwanted parts of the genome, and replace it with new stretches of DNA.

“We have demonstrated the possibility to correct mutations in a human embryo in a safe way and with a certain degree of efficiency,” said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and a co-author of the study.

To increase the success rate, his team introduced the genome editing components along with sperm from a male with the targeted gene defect during the in vitro fertilization process.

They found that the embryo used the available healthy copy of the gene to repair the mutated part.

The Salk/OHSU team also found that its gene correction did not cause any detectable mutations in other parts of the genome – a major concern for gene editing.

Still, the technology was not 100 percent successful – it increased the number of repaired embryos from 50 percent, which would have occurred naturally, to 74 percent.

The embryos, tested in the laboratory, were allowed to develop for only a few days.

“There is still much to be done to establish the safety of the methods, therefore they should not be adopted clinically,” Robin Lovell-Badge, a professor at London’s Francis Crick Institute who was not involved in the study, said in a statement.

‘Utmost Caution’

Washington’s National Academy of Sciences (NAS) earlier this year softened its previous opposition to the use of gene editing technology in human embryos, which has raised concerns it could be used to create so-called designer babies. There is also a fear of introducing unintended mutations into the “germline,” meaning cells that become eggs or sperm.

“No one is thinking about this because it is practically impossible at this point,” Izpisua Belmonte said. “This is still very basic research … let alone something as complex as what nature has done for millions and millions of years of evolution.”

An international group of 11 organizations, including the American Society of Human Genetics and Britain’s Wellcome Trust, on Wednesday issued a policy statement recommending against genome editing that culminates in human implantation and pregnancy, while supporting publicly funded research into its potential clinical applications.

The latest research involved a gene mutation linked to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the most common cause of sudden death in otherwise healthy young athletes. It affects around 1 in 500 people.

Salk’s Izpisua Belmonte, emphasizing that much more study is needed, said the most important practical application for the new technology could be in correcting genetic mutations in babies either while they are still in utero or right after they are born.

“It is crucial that we continue to proceed with the utmost caution, paying the highest attention to ethical considerations,” he said.
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The World Health Organization and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recommend that mothers breastfeed within the first hour after giving birth and continue until their children reach age 2, with supplemental food as they grow older. Yet no country in the world meets these standards or provides enough support for breastfeeding mothers, according to a report the agencies released Tuesday.

“Breast milk works like a baby’s first vaccine, protecting infants from potentially deadly diseases and giving them all the nourishment they need to survive and thrive,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said in a press release.

Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF, posed this question on UNICEF’s website: “What if governments had a proven, cost-effective way to save babies’ lives, reduce rates of malnutrition, support children’s health, increase educational attainment and grow productivity?”

Lake provided the answer: “They do: It’s called breastfeeding. And it is one of the best investments nations can make in the lives and futures of their youngest members — and in the long-term strength of their societies.”

According to the Global Breastfeeding Initiative, a partnership of 20 international agencies whose goal is to increase investment in breastfeeding worldwide under the leadership of UNICEF and WHO, breastfeeding can bolster brain development, which in turn can lead to a smarter, more productive work force.

Furthermore, breastfeeding saves mothers’ and babies’ lives. In the first six months of life, it helps prevent diarrhea and pneumonia, two major causes of infant death. Breastfeeding also reduces the risk of ovarian and breast cancer, two leading causes of death among women.

The World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, wants to see at least 50 percent of the world’s children under 6 months of age exclusively breastfed by 2025. Reaching that target will require an investment of an additional $5.7 billion, or just $4.70 per newborn, for such things as improving breastfeeding practices in maternity facilities and improving access to lactation counseling — and it could generate $300 billion in economic gains  across lower- and middle-income countries by 2025 and save 520,000 children’s lives in the next 10 years, according to a World Bank study.

Because nursing mothers need support from their families and communities, and governments worldwide need to implement policies such as paid maternity leave and nursing breaks, the U.N. agencies declared August 1-7 World Breastfeeding Week.
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The Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” — the area where there’s too little oxygen to support marine life — is the biggest ever measured this year.

The low-oxygen dead zone along the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast measured 22,720 square kilometers (8,776 square miles), about the size of the U.S. state of New Jersey. 

Scientist Nancy Rabalais found a solid band of water along the Gulf bottom with oxygen levels of less than 2 parts per million stretching from just west of the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana well into the Texas coast area near Houston. Rabalais said the area was likely even larger, but the mapping cruise had to stop before reaching the western edge.

She and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the latest measurement Wednesday.

“The number of dead zones throughout the world has been increasing in the last several decades and currently totals 500,” the news release said. “The dead zone off the Louisiana coast is the second-largest human-caused coastal hypoxic area in the global ocean and stretches from the mouth of the Mississippi River into Texas waters and less often, but increasingly more frequent, east of the Mississippi River.”

Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution enters the Mississippi throughout its watershed, which includes runoff from Midwest crop farms and meat producers that stimulate massive algal growth that eventually decomposes, which uses up the oxygen needed to support life in the Gulf.
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When it rains in Emusala village, a person sick with a fever can find it hard to get to the nearest health center, which requires a trip along the slippery footpaths that lead to the nearest main road some 10km (6 miles) away, in the heart of Western Kenya’s Kakamega County.

But if the fever spells the onset of malaria, rapid diagnosis and treatment are essential.

That’s where Nicholas Akhonya comes in. With the aid of a simple medical kit and his mobile phone, Akhonya, a trained community health volunteer, is able to diagnose villagers with malaria in their own homes, offer treatment, and refer acute cases and pregnant women to health facilities for specialized care.

Malaria cases are on the increase in Kenya, and experts attribute the upsurge to changes in the climate.

According to Dr. James Emisiko, coordinator for the Division of Vector Borne and Neglected Tropical Diseases in Kakamega County, mosquitoes breed particularly well in stagnant water in warm temperatures.

The females feed on human blood in order to produce eggs, and if a mosquito carrying the malaria-causing plasmodium parasite bites a person, it is likely to infect them.

Kenya’s recent drought — the harshest in East Africa since 2011— followed by sporadic rainfall in the middle of this year has created a perfect breeding environment for mosquitoes, Emisiko told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The result is an upsurge of malaria cases, especially in the Western Kenya region and around Lake Victoria.

“The only way to control deaths from this life-threatening disease is to ensure that all fever cases are tested wherever the patients are, malaria-positive cases [are] treated and all complicated cases referred to nearby health centers,” the doctor said.

He said that parents in rural areas often initially give painkillers to children with fever. When families finally seek proper medical attention, it is often too late for those who have malaria to respond to simple anti-malarial drugs, and they require expensive hospitalization instead.

Calling in the Volunteers

To tackle the problem, for the past two years county governments in malaria-prone areas have worked with non-governmental organizations to train community health volunteers to diagnose the disease in patients’ homes, using rapid diagnostic kits.

The volunteers then treat those who test positive, and refer complicated cases to the nearest health center.

“In case of any complication, all I need is to have power on my mobile phone so that I can communicate with medical experts using the toll-free number for further advice,” said Akhonya, one of the volunteers.

The U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that there are 6.7 million new clinical cases of malaria in Kenya each year and 4,000 deaths, most of them in Western Kenya.

According to Moses Makokha, clinical officer in charge of the Bumala-A sub-county health center in Busia County, some malaria cases can be fatal little more than 24 hours after symptoms occur, especially in children below the age of five years and pregnant women.

In pregnant women, malaria can lead to miscarriage or other serious complications, Makokha said.

“It is always an easy disease to manage – but only if it is identified at the onset of the fever and treated immediately using the correct medication,” Makokha said.

Kakamega County’s government has trained 4,200 community health volunteers to manage simple malaria, working with Community Asset Building and Development (CABDA), a local NGO, and with support from Amref Health Africa, an international Kenyan medical charity headquartered in Nairobi.

The volunteers are supplied with test kits and basic drugs to treat the disease at no cost to patients.

Treating malaria at the village level, among other interventions, has helped reduce the prevalence of the disease in Kakamega County from 38 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2016, according to County Health Executive Peninah Mukabane.

“This is one of the success stories that we are all proud of,” Ephy Imbali, CABDA’s executive director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Cash – and Status

Refresher questions from trainers keep the volunteers on their toes, and ongoing training helps to keep their skills sharp, said Imbali. Experts from county health departments visit frequently to monitor the program.

Each volunteer receives a monthly motivational stipend of 2,000 Kenyan shillings ($20).

“Apart from the stipend, I have learned so many things in terms of health interventions which are not just important for my immediate family but also to the community where I live,” said Miriam Opechi, one community health volunteer and a mother of three children.

“I feel very happy whenever a patient gets well after my intervention. It gives me a complete satisfaction, and makes me feel a valuable member of the society, commanding a lot of respect from the villagers,” she said.

According to Imbali, the program makes it possible for residents of rural areas to get access to medicines even on weekends and holidays when public health facilities are usually closed.

Emisiko, Kakamega County’s health official, said the volunteers’ efforts reduce crowding at local health facilities, making it easier for health providers to attend to other important ailments.

But the work of community health volunteers is not always limited to malaria.

Simon Ondeyo, who hails from Emusala, said in a telephone interview that community health volunteers had treated his children for malaria a number of times.

But Ondeyo is himself is a tuberculosis patient who had given up on an arduous treatment regimen until community health volunteers began visiting him daily to ensure that he took his drugs.

Today he feels fully recovered — though is still completing his course of treatment.

“Without the volunteers, I do not know if I would be alive today,” he said.
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Scientists searching for everything from oil and gas to copper and gold are adopting techniques used by companies such as Netflix or Amazon to sift through vast amounts of data, a study showed Tuesday.

The method has already helped to discover 10 carbon-bearing minerals and could be widely applied to exploration, they wrote in the journal American Mineralogist. “Big data points to new minerals, new deposits,” they wrote of the findings.

The technique goes beyond traditional geology by amassing data about how and where minerals have formed, for instance by the cooling of lava after volcanic eruptions. The data can then be used to help find other deposits.

“Minerals occur on Earth in clusters,” said Robert Hazen, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and an author of the study.

“When you see minerals together, it’s very like the way that humans interact in social networks such as Facebook,” he said.

Hazen said the technique was also like Amazon, which recommends books based on a client’s previous orders, or by media-streaming company Netflix, which proposes movies based on a customer’s past viewing habits.

“They are using vast amounts of data and make correlations that you could never make,” he told Reuters.

Lead author Shaunna Morrison, also at the Deep Carbon Observatory and the Carnegie Institution, said luck often played a big role for geologists searching for new deposits.

“We are looking at it in a much more systematic way,” she said of the project.

Among the 10 rare carbon-bearing minerals discovered by the project were abellaite and parisite-(La). The minerals, whose existence was predicted before they were found, have no known economic applications.

Gilpin Robinson of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who was not involved in the study, said the USGS had started to collaborate with the big data project.

“The use of large data sets and analytical tools is very important in our studies of mineral and energy resources,” he wrote in an email.

The DCO project will also try to collect data to examine the geological history of the moon and Mars.
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The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has called an emergency meeting this Wednesday in South Africa of all countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) following an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Aid workers are concerned what this could mean for food security in the region, where a fall armyworm invasion and drought have decimated crops in recent years.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says besides Zimbabwe, the other countries in the region hit by the avian influenza outbreak are the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.

While officials haven’t released figures for the numbers of birds affected, the FAO said the outbreak is currently concentrated in one province of Zimbabwe and three in South Africa. Earlier this year, the FAO issued a warning to the SADC regional bloc, after the virus was detected in the Lake Victoria area in East Africa.

David Phiri, the head of FAO in Southern Africa, told VOA it is urgent to contain the outbreak.

“Avian influenza is a trans-boundary pest and disease, and it can move from one country to another, from one site to another. So there is a possibility, very easily that it could spread in those particular countries or even beyond the borders. For this reason, we need to control it and to also ensure that there is also prevention measures – both by the countries affected and other countries that have not been affected….”

“Poultry is what a lot of families depend on for protein. It is the cheapest protein. It [The outbreak] is also coming in the backdrop of two years of heavy droughts, last being affected by El Nino. That was a disaster itself for the sub-region. More recently, we have had an outbreak of fall armyworm which has affected some farmers very, very badly. So we cannot afford another very serious outbreak that could reduce food security and livelihoods in the sub-region,” he said.

Dr. Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatolu, chief veterinary officer of the Zimbabwe Ministry of Agriculture, has this advice for farmers.

“Just make sure that birds that are produced do not have contact with anything from outside that is not well-managed. Sometimes in traditional systems, people receive poultry as gifts and they put it among the poultry that they are having at home. That is very dangerous. Normally, some of these viruses can cause diseases in people, but this one is a bit different. That gives a bit of joy, but it is not easy to deal with because it spreads very quickly and it kills birds. So those doing businesses with high numbers of birds are very, very susceptible,” said Obatolu.

In recent years, African countries have responded to avian flu outbreaks by closing their borders to poultry imports and culling large numbers of exposed birds.
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A report released this week found that climate change is part of the reasons why Indian farmers are increasingly destitute and committing suicide.  

Each year, 130,000 people die by suicide in India, many of them farmers in significant debt.  This review of three decades of weather and suicide data marks the first effort to quantify the role that climate change may play in this crisis in India, where the suicide rate has doubled since 1980.  And it is one of the first attempts to study the relationship between suicide and climate change.

Tamma Carleton, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  She found that nearly 70 additional suicides would occur for each day and each degree Celsius of temperature rise.  It’s important to note that the effect only occurred during the growing season.

In total, Carleton estimates that climate change has contributed to 59,300 deaths in India over the past three decades, and accounts for 6.8 percent of the increase.  The report is a stark reminder that humans have already begun to see the effects of climate change.

There have been previous attempts to quantify death toll from climate change, which is generally harder to quantify than effects like displacement due to sea-level rise.  A 2015 report commissioned by the governments of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations concluded that climate change was already killing 400,000 people each year though impacts like heat waves, communicable disease, flooding, and decreased crop yields.

But most of these efforts have either been focused globally or on developed countries, says Marshall Burke, assistant professor at Stanford University, who was not associated with the study.  “One of the nice contributions here is that it’s a broad scale look at the country that’s going to have the largest global population,” he told VOA.

In examining the data, Carleton looked for signals that farmers were able to adapt in any way.  For example, if they were more sensitive to short-term warming than long-term warming, that could indicate that farmers had been able to adapt over the long-term. But she found no evidence of any adaptation, and says there is a larger lesson to be learned from this.

“There’s a lot of optimism often about the future of climate because there’s sort of an assumption or a hope that we will adapt as the temperatures gradually warm,” she told VOA.  “It hasn’t looked like it’s been easy to adapt in the past and so it’s concerning when we think about what this might mean for the future.”

Burke said researchers have looked for adaptation in other ways and that those results were consistent with what Carleton found.

While researchers have extensively investigated the effect that climate change has on the environment, this report is one of the first to consider how climate change may be affecting human populations.  “There’s a lot of basic things about human responses to changes in climate that we still don’t understand, and that’s why I think papers like this are so important,” said Burke.

In 2015, an Indian farmer died after hanging himself outside a protest in New Delhi, drawing national attention to the issue and forcing a response by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Protesters have since returned to the capital saying that campaign promises of crop insurance and loan forgiveness have not been met.  

Carleton comes from a long line of farmers and as a child, most of her food came from the garden.  “Growing my own food has been something that I’ve absolutely enjoyed… and it’s really heartbreaking to see that in many other parts of the world this occupation is so difficult and so stressful that some are choosing to commit suicide.”
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The last time a total solar eclipse blacked out the sun in Oregon nearly 40 years ago, Gene Brick was working in a timber mill that refused to shut down for the spectacle.   

The World War II veteran and amateur astronomer was devastated when his friends raved about experiencing a pitch-dark sky in the middle of the day.

“Everyone who was outside got to see it, and they enjoyed telling me all about it — and I was hurt by that,” said Brick, now 92. “But work is work, you know.”

Brick will get another chance to witness history this month, when a total solar eclipse begins its path across the U.S. in Oregon.

Coast to coast event

The one he missed in 1979 covered the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. This total eclipse will be visible from coast to coast across the nation — something that hasn’t happened in 99 years.

Brick plans to watch the event with his son using two telescopes: a fancy new one and one the two crafted together 53 years ago in their basement.

The men will peer at the sun through both during the eclipse’s totality, when the moon’s shadow completely covers the sun for just over two minutes. They also will use special filters to photograph the eclipse through the newer machine.

For Brick, who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler during the Battle of Okinawa, the opportunity is the experience of a lifetime.

“I always loved to look at the moon,” he said, after peering through the telescope the pair crafted in 1964. “I still do.”

Prime location for viewing

The Bricks will have a prime location for their father-son moment. The town of Madras, in central Oregon, is in the high desert, where summertime skies are often clear and cloudless. Up to 100,000 people are expected to flock to the town and surrounding Jefferson County for the Aug. 21 event, creating worries about overcrowding and traffic.

Brick’s son, Bartt Brick, is on the Madras City Council and will be on call during the eclipse. But taking the time to watch the event with his father is important to him. The elder Brick got the last four credits he needed for his high school diploma by signing up for the U.S. Navy and never attended college — but even in his 90s, he’s studying particle physics.

The pair decided to build the telescope when the younger Brick was 14, after finding a piece of glass in his late grandfather’s garage that was hand-ground into a concave lens for a telescope. Gene Brick worked long, hard days cutting logs at the mill then stayed up into the night working on the project with his teenage son.

“We’d bought ourselves a book on telescopes and a new dictionary, and after about — what — four or five months, we had a telescope,” Bartt Brick recalled on a recent summer day.

“I’d sleep about half the night,” his father added with a chuckle.

Spotted Ring Nebula

The two dragged the telescope outside on the night they finished, aimed it toward the heavens by propping it on a stepladder, and peered into the night sky until they spied the Ring Nebula, a dying star in a constellation about 2,000 light years from Earth.

“We were so excited, we ran in and told Mom. But at 2 o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t as thrilled as we were,” the younger Brick said.

Over the years, the telescope got a lot of use from the family and from a string of neighborhood children who lined up most evenings to peer at the moon.

But when the 1979 total solar eclipse came along, the elder Brick was working, the younger Brick no longer lived at home, and the telescope went unused.

When Bartt Brick moved back to Madras three years ago, the stars aligned for another crack at a shared celestial show.

Three generations will gather

On Aug. 21, three generations of Bricks will assemble. They’ll have a sleek black, new telescope equipped with a remote control and a USB cord for snapping photos through a computer.

But they’ll also have on hand the unassuming, unmounted metal cylinder they worked on so long ago.

“Dad’s had a message for me ever since I was 2 years old, and it was, ‘Be curious,’” Bartt Brick said. “And boy, did I learn how to be curious with this.”
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Online searches about suicide and suicide methods spiked in the weeks following the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, a show that dramatizes the suicide of a teenage girl, according to a U.S. study released Monday.

Google searches about suicide were 19 percent higher than average in the 19 days following the show’s release on March 31, translating into 900,000 to 1,500,000 more searches, researchers reported in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine. 

The study did not examine whether the actual number of suicides increased following the series’ release, but researchers said the internet search trend is troubling.

Google search volumes for things like “how to commit suicide,” “commit suicide” and “how to kill yourself” all decisively spiked during the 19-day window after the show’s release. A 2009 study suggested “suicide search trends are correlated with actual suicides,” according to a letter accompanying the study in JAMA.

Many mental health experts concluded that Netflix acted unethically by releasing the series. In it, a high school girl leaves behind 13 cassette tapes that explain the decision to take her own life. The series, which some argue glamorizes suicide, has been renewed for a second season.

The San Diego State University researcher who led the study, John Ayers, called on Netflix to reconsider the show and the effects it is having on its teenage-skewing audience.

“Psychiatrists have expressed grave concerns because the show ignores the World Health Organization’s validated media guidelines for preventing suicide,” Ayers told VOA in an email. “Tragically, it is unsurprising then that we find the show has increased suicidal thoughts.

“The show’s makers must swiftly change their course of action, including removing the show and postponing a second season. If not, subscribers should consider canceling their subscriptions so not to support programming that can cause premature death. I am no longer a subscriber.”

Currently, the most violent episodes are prefaced with warnings. Netflix has also created a website equipped with suicide hotlines for each of the countries in which it can be streamed. In a statement, Netflix defended 13 Reasons Why, saying that the show has spurred an important conversation.

“We always believed this show would increase discussions around this tough subject matter,” Netflix said. “This is an interesting quasi-experimental study that confirms this. We are looking forward to more research and taking everything we learn to heart as we prepare for season two.”

The study analyzed Google trends between March 31, 2017, and April 18. They halted their research on that date because former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide on April 19, a development that might have skewed the data.

Researchers used the period between January and March 2017 as a control to determine the expected volume of suicide-related Google search queries.
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Evidence of the role that a healthy gut plays in overall human health, both physical and even mental, is growing every day. To strengthen gut health, food researchers are trying to incorporate live bacteria, called probiotics, into all kinds of products, even beer.
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By the end of this year, scientists may be able to create a fully artificial genome of yeast. This rapid development of genetic engineering may lead to the creation of much more complex organisms, even humans. Scientists say they are aware of the risks but also the enormous benefits.
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A proposed new law that would require carmakers to build alarms for back seats is being pushed by child advocates who say it will prevent kids from dying in hot cars.

The law also would streamline the criminal process against caregivers who cause the deaths – cases that can be inconsistent but often heavier-handed against mothers.

The latest deaths came in Arizona on triple-digit degree days over the weekend, with two baby boys found forgotten in vehicles in separate incidents.

More than two dozen child and road safety groups are backing the Senate bill introduced last week aimed at preventing those kinds of deaths by requiring cars to be equipped with technology that can alert drivers if a child is left in the back seat once the vehicle is turned off. It could be a motion sensor that can detect a baby left sitting in a rear-facing car seat and then alert the driver, in a similar way that reminders about tire pressure, open doors and seat belts now come standard in cars.

“The technology would help because if you’re in a vehicle, your child is in the back seat, and you ignore that alarm: Go jail. Do not pass go. You had a chance,” said Janette Fennell of the advocacy group Kids and Cars. “You talk to any of the judges, they’ll tell you, they’re beyond the hardest things they have to deal with.”

Police say 1-year-old Josiah Riggins was in the car for hours Saturday, discovered dead only after his father drove roundtrip, twice, between their suburban home and a Phoenix church to drop off the mother and a sibling.

Zane Endress, who was 7 months old, died Friday in Phoenix after being left in the car in the driveway at home, as his usual daycare drop-off routine was lost by his grandparents.

“A simple sensor could save the lives of dozens of children killed tragically in overheated cars each year, and our bill would ensure such technology is available in every car sold in the United States,” bill sponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said in a statement. “It can take mere minutes on a hot day for a car to turn into a deathtrap for a small child.”

No charges have been filed against the caregivers in either Arizona case, as police say the death investigations are underway. Detectives will determine criminality based on the caregiver’s neglect, intent and mindset, while also being sensitive to the family’s deeply felt loss of a child, Phoenix police Sgt. Mercedes Fortune said.

“Those are the very difficult questions. Each case is different. I can’t tell you there’s a set answer for any case because there really isn’t,” Fortune said.

Kids and Cars, which has tracked more than 800 children who have died in this way since 1990, said criminal cases vary greatly, even when the circumstances are identical. Fennell said 90 percent of cases involve pure accidents, most likely a child forgotten by an adult.

In this month alone, a Tennessee couple was charged in the death of their 11-month-old daughter. A nearly 2-year-old boy was found dead in his father’s BMW in south Florida.

The nonprofit’s analysis shows charges are filed about half of the time, though very rarely are the parents found guilty objectively because it was proven that the child was left behind to be harmed. There is also a noted gender bias: Mothers are more often charged than fathers, and among the convicted, women caregivers receive longer prison sentences than men, the study found.

“I think society feels sort of like moms are in charge, and they’re supposed to do everything,” Fennell said. “It’s also a defense mechanism. If I make monsters out of these people, then it could never happen to me.”

 
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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, more than a 100 million years ago.

Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. Illinois fisheries biologist Randy Sauer says they disappeared from the state’s waterways in the 1990s, although they continued to thrive in southern U.S. rivers.

“We want to restore the ecosystem because it is important to have top predators to balance the species below them in order to keep check on some more abundant species,” he said.

Beyond that, alligator gar make for great big game fishing. The diamond-scaled animals, which breathe both air and water, can grow up to 2.7 meters and weigh more than 136 kilograms. In fact, Sauer says, their large size is what did them in originally in the state.

“It was pretty much extirpated out of its range because of misconceptions about it eating sport fish,” he said. “People would target it and put bounties on it.”

Everything is on the menu

The alligator gar is an opportunistic feeder, meaning it will eat whatever it encounters — from an occasional turtle or small duck to invasive species such as Asian and silver carp. Sauer hopes the re-introduction program will help the state’s efforts to control the carp.

Because gar can live up to 60 years, this program is going to take decades to fully expand.

“The (female) alligator gar does not sexually mature until 11 years, and the male not till 6 or 7 years,” Sauer said, “so at the outset of this project we’re probably going to stock more heavily than 10 or 20 years down the road when hopefully these fish will find each other and start doing the job on their own.”

To date, 7,000 alligator gar fingerlings have been fitted with tiny transponder tags so that they can be tracked and then released into Illinois waterways. As it rains and floods, biologists expect some of the fish to follow the rivers all the way down to join other populations in Louisiana and Texas.
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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, over a hundred million years ago. Erika Celeste reports from Kaskaskia River State Fish and Wildlife Area.
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According to a recent study, an examination of the brains of 111 deceased players of professional American football showed that all but one of them had a degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Scientists say even when it looks mild, a concussion can have severe effects, so prompt diagnosis and treatment are crucial. VOA’s George Putic talked with a neurosurgeon who treats many victims of concussion.
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A bioresearch and manufacturing institute that hopes to develop transplant tissues and organs for injured American soldiers and other patients has opened in New Hampshire.

The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, which opened Friday in Manchester, will be led by Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway personal transporter, an all-terrain electric wheelchair and several other devices. The University of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will be part of the institute.

Kamen, speaking after an opening ceremony, said he was optimistic the institute could develop artificial skin, bones and nerves and eventually organs that could be implanted into patients in the next few years. He said it would start with developing the technology allowing for the production of pieces of organs and “way down the road” producing livers, kidneys and lungs. He said one of the challenges is figuring out which organs would be easiest to reproduce.

Kamen said the goal was to scale up the developments in regenerative medicine by forming this public-private partnership, which brings together 26 universities and medical centers, 80 private companies and nearly $300 million in government and private-sector funding.

“What we are saying is that there are all sorts of miracles that already exist in roller bottles and petri dishes at medical schools, labs,” Kamen said, comparing their effort to what Campbell’s Soup Co. has done with the production of soup. “We said, ‘Let’s go out to the biggest, best companies that do automation, controls, sensors, and that understand process, that understand high-level manufacturing, and let’s bring them to the same place as all the people who have the magic in their roller bottles.’ ”

The state’s Democratic congressional delegation and Republican Governor Chris Sununu welcomed the project, saying it would bring good jobs to Manchester and give the state’s college graduates opportunities to work on cutting-edge biomedical research.

“It is an exciting day for Manchester and New Hampshire, and, as Dean said, for our war fighters and the country,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen said, recalling a 2006 event she attended at Harvard University, where Kamen talked of one day being able to produce organs and replace a lost kidney.

Sununu called the opening “awesome” and said it was another sign the state’s business climate is on the upswing.
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The U.S. government is proposing cutting the nicotine level in cigarettes for the first time in its history.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday it has directed the agency’s staff to develop new regulations to make cigarettes less addictive. Tobacco stocks fell Friday following the news.  

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency plans to explore ways to limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.  

“A renewed focus on nicotine can help us to achieve a world where cigarettes no longer addict future generations of our kids,” Gottlieb said in a speech to staff in Silver Spring, Maryland.

E-Cigarettes

Along with reducing nicotine, the FDA plans to ease the path of entry for less-harmful nicotine delivery systems, such as e-cigarettes. The agency said it will give e-cigarette makers four more years to comply with FDA oversight of their products, giving them more time on the market without regulation.

“While there’s still much research to be done on these products and the risks that they may pose, they may also present benefits that we must consider,” Gottlieb said.

E-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive, but they do not contain tar or many of the other substances in traditional cigarettes, which make them deadly. Battery-powered e-cigarettes turn liquid nicotine into an inhalable vapor.

“Nicotine itself is not responsible for the cancer, the lung disease and heart disease that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year,” Gottlieb said. “It’s the other chemical compounds in tobacco and in the smoke created by setting tobacco on fire that directly cause illness and death.”

However, Gottlieb said he was concerned that e-cigarette makers are using “kid-appealing flavors” which he said the FDA would consider regulating.

“I have real concerns about kids use of e-cigarettes and I know many others share those concerns, especially for those products marketed with obviously kid-appealing flavors,” he said.

Response

Anti-smoking activists hailed the announcement and said that reducing the level of nicotine in traditional cigarettes could make it easier for people to switch to e-cigarettes or less harmful tobacco products.

However, some activists say the amount of nicotine in cigarettes needs to be reduced dramatically, and say if nicotine is only reduced a small amount it will just encourage smokers to use more cigarettes.

Altria Group, which sells Marlboro and other cigarettes in the United States, said it would comply with all FDA rules, but said in a statement Friday that any new rules should be based on evidence and not lead to unintended consequences.

While the new policies could be bad business for cigarette companies, Altria and other groups, like Philip Morris International, have been spending billions of dollars to make to products that they say have less health risks such as e-cigarettes.  

The FDA has had the power to regulate nicotine levels since 2009 but has not yet done so.

The U.S. government says tobacco use causes more than 480,000 deaths annually, and is the leading cause of preventable heart disease.
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A new crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, giving NASA for the first time four astronauts to boost U.S. research projects aboard the orbiting laboratory.

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three spaceflight veterans slipped into a docking port aboard the station at 5:54 p.m. EDT (2154 GMT) as the $100 billion research outpost sailed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) over Germany, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

Strapped inside the capsule, which blasted off aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan six hours earlier, were Randy Bresnik, with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Sergey Ryazanskiy, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos; and Italy’s Paolo Nespoli, with the European Space Agency.

The men will join two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut already aboard the station, a project of 15 nations.

Their arrival means the U.S. space agency now has four crew members instead of three available for medical experiments, technology demonstrations and other research aboard the station, the U.S. space agency said.

The extra astronaut will effectively double the amount of time for research, program manager Kirk Shireman said at a station conference last week.

NASA does not oversee the Russian staff, which was reduced to two in April until a long-delayed research module joins the station next year.

Previously, Russia flew three cosmonauts, with the remaining three positions filled by a combination of European, Japanese, Canadian and U.S. astronauts, who are trained and overseen by NASA.

Space taxis

By the end of next year, NASA intends to begin flying astronauts aboard space taxis under development by SpaceX and Boeing. Both spaceships have room for a fourth seat, bumping the station’s overall crew size to seven once Russia returns to full staffing.

NASA is using the station to prepare for human missions to the moon and Mars and to stimulate commercial space transportation, pharmaceutical research, manufacturing and other businesses.

The agency also conducts physics, astronomy and Earth science investigations aboard the outpost, which has been staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since 2000.

Bresnik, 49, last flew on the space shuttle in 2009 during a space station assembly mission. Ryazanskiy, 42, spent 5½ months aboard the station in 2013-14. Nespoli, 60, is making his third space flight, having previously served on both space shuttle and space station crews.

The men are slated to return to Earth in December.
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A United Nations-led polio immunization campaign to stem an outbreak of this crippling disease is under way in Syria’s Deir Ezzor Governorate. The campaign, headed by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, started on July 22.

The campaign got off to a good start. The World Health Organization reports that hundreds of vaccinators going door to door in this embattled Syrian city managed to inoculate nearly 60,000 children under the age of five on the first day. Security problems had delayed the start of the campaign in Deir Ezzor and continue to pose dangers for the health workers.

WHO reports 89 cases of acute flaccid paralysis, which is mainly caused by a wild polio virus, have been detected this year in Deir Ezzor. It also reports another 26 cases of vaccine-derived polio type 2 cases in the area.

The agency says one case of vaccine-derived polio has been discovered in Tell Abyad district in Raqqa along with 14 cases of acute flaccid paralysis in the whole region.

WHO spokesman Tariq Jasarevic said the campaign aims to vaccinate 328,000 children in Deir Ezzor and 120,000 children in Raqqa, when a planned vaccination campaign in that governorate gets under way.

“Hopefully, we will be able to stop this outbreak because even though the vaccine-derived polio is in a way less virulent than the wild polio, it is paralyzing children and it also reflects that there is a low level of immunization,” he said.

WHO reports 355 vaccination teams from local non-governmental organizations are immunizing children at fixed sites or going door to door to make sure no child is missed. Jasarevic said the community acceptance is high.

He said two immunization rounds are planned for Deir Ezzor, although no date for the second round has been set. He said polio vaccines for two rounds have been shipped to Qamishli, in preparation for the planned campaign in Raqqa; however, the raging battle to retake Raqqa — Islamic State’s de facto capital — from the militants puts the starting date of the polio immunization campaign in the outskirts of the city in question.
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An estimated 47 million people around the world have dementia, a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to interfere with daily life. The most common form of the condition is Alzheimer’s disease. Now, research shows the way you speak may indicate whether you are at risk of developing dementia. A new study says pauses and filler words may be a sign of early mild cognitive impairment, and that could help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s much quicker. VOA’s Deborah Block reports.
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Jabulani Zilawe lost all 11 of his children to AIDS. Now he is the only one left to care for their orphans.

“This has become my life — with my grandchildren. All their parents died. AIDS killed them. I had 11 children, six of them were girls who had moved to South Africa to seek better life, but they all came back dead — one after the other,” Zilawe told the Thompson Reuters Foundation as he surveyed his small grandchildren scrambling around him.

Zilawe lives in a dilapidated homestead outside Norton, a town 40 kilometers from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.

His bedroom is a thatched mud hut that sits near 12 mounds marking the remains of his wife and children.

“My sons, who became illegal gold miners, also suffered from AIDS before they died. You can see the graves here; the additional one belongs to my wife, who also died some two years ago, leaving me to look after our orphaned grandchildren,” said Zilawe, 76.

Nearby, some of his grandchildren wrestled over a pot of leftover porridge. None is in school; instead, like their grandfather, each child passes the day at the homestead, idling and seeking a spot to bask in the sunshine.

Some of the little ones fall ill — regularly, said Zilawe, who didn’t know whether any carried the virus that had killed their parents.

“I don’t know anything about my grandchildren’s HIV status; maybe they have the disease or maybe not,” he said.

Ailing caregivers

His life is tough. Yet many other Zimbabweans in Zilawe’s age bracket are not just caregivers but are also coping with AIDS diagnoses of their own.

“It’s sad. It’s worrying when you look at the rate of HIV/AIDS amongst aged persons here. The percentage of elderly persons aged 60 years and above living with HIV is around 15.3 percent,” said Marck Chikanza, national coordinator of the National Age Network of Zimbabwe (NANZ), an organization that caters to older people’s needs.

NANZ said more than 115,000 older people are living with HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe, one in 10 of the 1.2 million Zimbaweans who the United Nations says are living with HIV/AIDS.

“There has been a decline in the rate of people living with HIV across all age groups except in the 50+ age group, where there has been a rise from 13.8 percent to around 14.3 percent,” said Tadiwa Pfupa-Nyatanga of the NAC organization, which coordinates the government’s response to HIV/AIDS.

According to 2016 official statistics, about 185,000 AIDS-orphaned Zimbabwean children are living under the guardianship of their grandparents — people like Zilawe, who struggle to cope.

“Most aged persons here hardly have the capacity to produce or buy food on their own. And most of the orphaned kids they look after are far too young to be working to produce food for their families. And the burden, at the end of the day, rests with the grandparents — who, in a true sense, are also dependents,” Anatalia Mabeza, who chairs an HIV/AIDS support group in Norton, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation..

Some orphaned children say their grandparents offer little or no medical help for the health problems they inherited.

“I was openly told by my mother before she died that I was born with the HIV/AIDS condition, but now as I live with my grandmother, who is in her 60s, she has never bothered to monitor my condition,” said Lillian Muranda, 14, who lives in Caledonia informal settlement, 25 kilometers east of Harare.

‘I was bewitched’

“She tells me I was bewitched, but I’m always ill and absent from school most of the time,” Muranda told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

As Muranda delved deeper into the bewitching story, her grandmother, Agnes Muranda, stepped in sharply to intervene: “Why do you bother her? You newsmen are very bad. You want to rule out witchcraft from my granddaughter’s illness. Leave us.”

Superstitious beliefs like this hinder government efforts to combat AIDS, and even if a grandparent has good information and plenty of intent, it doesn’t mean that help will follow.

“We have no means to support our AIDS-orphaned grandchildren besides the treatment drugs they receive from government health care centers. What we can only do is to make sure they take their medication. Remember, we are also victims of a failing economy and there are also many amongst aged persons who are living with HIV,” said Jonathan Mandaza, who chairs the Zimbabwe Older Persons’ Organization.

As Zilawe sees it, he is shunned as an aging irrelevance yet is left to pick up the pieces of his children’s lost lives.

“As older persons, we are not consulted on HIV and AIDS issues, yet there is also a strong misconception that sex matters don’t concern us. As such, access points for condoms and other HIV/AIDS services only favor younger people, leaving us out,” said Zilawe.
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Scientists have developed an experimental surgical glue inspired by the mucus secreted by slugs that could offer an alternative to sutures and staples for closing wounds.

While some medical glues already exist, they often adhere weakly, are not particularly flexible and frequently cannot be used in very wet conditions.

To get around those problems, a group of scientists from Harvard and other research centers decided to learn from slugs, which — as well as making slime to glide on — can produce extremely adhesive mucus as a defense mechanism.

The slugs’ trick is to generate a substance that not only forms strong bonds on wet surfaces but also has a matrix that dissipates energy at the point of adhesion, making it highly flexible.

Strong, nontoxic

The man-made version of this tough adhesive is based on the same principles and in a series of experiments reported in the journal Science on Thursday it was shown to adhere strongly to pig skin, cartilage, tissue and organs. It also proved nontoxic to human cells.

In one test, the new glue was used to close a wound in a blood-covered pig’s heart and successfully maintained a leak-free seal after the heart was inflated and deflated tens of thousands of times.

In another case it was applied to a laceration in a rat’s liver and performed just as well as a hemostat, a surgical tool often used in operations to control bleeding.

“There are a variety of potential uses and in some settings this could replace sutures and staples, which can cause damage and be difficult to place in certain situations,” said researcher David Mooney, professor of bioengineering at Harvard.

Mussel-inspired glue

Mooney and colleagues envisage the new adhesive will be made in sheets and cut to size, although they have also developed an injected version for closing deep wounds. The injection would be hardened using ultraviolet light, like dental fillings.

It is not the first time that scientists have taken inspiration from nature to devise a better medical adhesive.

Four years ago, another research group developed a glue inspired by the underwater sticking properties of mussels, but Mooney thinks slugs win hands-down in terms of stickiness and flexibility.

The scientists are applying for patents, although it will require a commercial company to then license the technology and take it into the next phase of human clinical trials.
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