India’s heaviest, newly-developed rocket hurtled into space Monday evening carrying a communication satellite of more than three tons from Sriharikota in eastern India. It marks another milestone in the country’s ambitious space program and brings India a step closer to sending astronauts into space.

 

“Today is a historic day.…we have been able to successfully put the satellite into the orbit,” a smiling A.S. Kiran Kumar, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization said after the launch.

 

Space scientists count many benefits of the 640 ton Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mk III rocket which can carry a four ton payload into higher orbit. It will reduce India’s dependency on foreign space agencies to put its heavier satellites in space leading to huge savings, it can over time make it possible to send manned missions and enhance deep space exploration capabilities.

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that the “mission takes India closer to the next generation launch vehicle and satellite capability. The nation is proud!”

 

Although India has been dreaming big in space – mulling a manned mission to space and interplanetary missions to Venus and Jupiter, its lack of heavy lift technology remained a hurdle in giving concrete shape to those plans.

 

“To be very honest there was a major limitation of thinking slightly big in space,” says Ajay Lele at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. “Without a heavy launcher you cannot have ambitious programs. Even though India had gone to Moon and Mars, India had carried a very small amount of a payload. Now future missions to all those planets can help India to do major scientific research.”

 

The technology has not come easy — India’s space agency has spent about 15 years to develop the heavy lift rocket.

 

The new rocket will also help the country enhance the commercial potential of its space program – putting satellites into space is a lucrative $ 300 billion business that India has begun exploiting. It was limited to putting smaller satellites in space so far, but can now consider heavier launches.

 

In the last three years India’s space program has come into international limelight with a series of landmark programs: In 2014, it sent the world’s cheapest mission to Mars, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi points out cost less than the Hollywood movie “Gravity”. Earlier this year it achieved a record by putting 104 small satellites in a single launch simultaneously into space.
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More than a billion people around the world rely on food from the ocean as their primary source of protein. But as the planet’s oceans become more polluted, they are changing and all kinds of marine life are being impacted. VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer reports that this week ((June 5-9)) more than 4,000 government, scientific, business and civil society leaders will meet in New York to mobilize for action to stop the decline of our oceans.
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If you’re being treated for cancer, speak up about any side effects. A study that had patients use home computers to report symptoms like nausea and fatigue surprisingly improved survival – by almost half a year, longer than many new cancer drugs do.

 

The online tool was intended as a quick and easy way for people to regularly report complications rather than trying to call their doctors or waiting until the next appointment. Researchers had hoped to improve quality of life but got a bonus in longer survival.      

 

“I was floored by the results,” said the study leader, Dr. Ethan Basch. “We are proactively catching things early” with online reporting.

 

Patients were able to stick with treatment longer because their side effects were quickly addressed, he said.

 

People shouldn’t assume that symptoms are an unavoidable part of cancer care, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

 

“You want to be able to reach your provider as early and easily as possible,” because a sign like shortness of breath may mean treatment isn’t working and needs to be changed, he said.

 

The study was featured at the cancer group’s annual meeting in Chicago on Sunday and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

Earlier studies suggest that doctors miss about half of patients’ symptoms.

 

Catching problems sooner

Much of this happens between visits when patients are out of sight and out of mind,” said Basch, a researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

 

Sometimes patients just put up with a problem until their next exam.

 

“The spouse will say, `My husband was laid up in bed, exhausted or in pain,’ and I’ll say `Why didn’t you call me?’” Basch said.

 

The study tested whether the online tool could catch problems sooner. It involved 766 people being treated for various types of advanced cancers at Sloan Kettering. Some were given usual care and the rest, the online symptom tool.

 

Patients were as old as 91, and 22 percent has less than a high school education, but using a computer proved easy. “The older patients really grabbed onto it very quickly,” Basch said.

 

The online group was asked to report symptoms at least once a week – sooner if they had a problem – and given a list of common ones such as appetite loss, constipation, cough, diarrhea, shortness of breath, fatigue, hot flashes, nausea or pain.

 

Doctors saw these reports at office visits, and nurses got email alerts when patients reported severe or worsening problems.

 

“Almost 80 percent of the time, the nurses responded immediately,” calling in medicines for nausea, pain or other problems, Basch said.

 

Six months later, health-related quality of life had improved for more of those in the online group and they made fewer trips to an emergency room. They also were able to stay on chemotherapy longer – eight months versus six, on average.

 

Median survival in the online group was 31 months versus 26 months for the others.

 

A larger study will now test the online reporting system nationwide.

 

A colon cancer patient, 53-year-old James Sylvester of New York, is using a version of the one tested in the study to report any problems to his doctors at Sloan Kettering. He hasn’t had many side effects, but a rash led to referral to a dermatologist to see if it was related to his cancer medicine.

 

“The main benefit is they go holistically all over your body” with the list, asking about things that folks may not realize could be due to cancer, such as a rash or trouble with balance, he said.

 

“Some of the things you might not tell your doctor, or you might forget,” Sylvester said. The tool ensures the doctor has that information ahead of time, “so when you have that face time, it’s more focused.”
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SpaceX launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station on Saturday, another milestone in its bid to drive down flight costs.

After a two-day delay caused by thunderstorms, the unmanned Falcon rocket blasted off carrying a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago. When this refurbished Dragon reaches the orbiting lab on Monday, it will be the first returning craft since NASA’s now-retired shuttles.

The first-stage booster flown Saturday afternoon was brand-new, and as is now the custom, returned to Cape Canaveral following liftoff for a successful vertical touchdown. “The Falcon has landed,” SpaceX Mission Control declared from company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and a cheer went up.

Reusable booster

The plan is to launch the booster again, instead of junking it in the ocean as so many other rocket makers do. Just two months ago, SpaceX launched its first recycled booster on a satellite mission. Another flight featuring a reused booster is coming up later this month.

This Dragon capsule, meanwhile, came back for take two following a few modifications and much testing. Shortly before liftoff, a SpaceX vice president, Hans Koenigsmann, called the Dragon reflight “a pretty big deal.”

It’s all part of the company’s quest, Koenigsmann said, to lower the cost of access to space through reusability.

The Dragon soaring Saturday has the same hull and most of the same parts from its 2014 flight. SpaceX installed a new heat shield and parachutes, among a few other things, for the trip back to Earth at flight’s end. The Dragon is the only supply ship capable of surviving re-entry; all the others burn up in the atmosphere. NASA’s other supplier, Orbital ATK, will see its cargo carrier depart the 250-mile-high complex on Sunday, six weeks after arriving.

Besides the usual supplies, the 6,000-pound shipment includes mice and flies for research, a new kind of roll-up solar panel and a neutron star detector.

Similar risk

For now, SpaceX said savings are minimal because of all the inspections and tests performed on the already flown parts. NASA’s space station program manager, Kirk Shireman, told reporters earlier in the week that SpaceX did a thorough job recertifying the Dragon and that the risk is not substantially more than if this were a capsule straight off the factory floor. He said the entire industry is interested in “this whole notion of reuse,” first realized with the space shuttles.

It was the 100th launch from NASA’s hallowed Launch Complex 39A, the departure point for the Apollo moon shots as well as dozens of shuttle missions, including the last one in 2011. SpaceX now leases the pad from NASA; the company’s first launch from there was in February.

SpaceX has been hauling station supplies for NASA for five years, both up and down. This is the company’s 11th mission under a NASA contract. The company’s next step is to deliver astronauts using modified Dragons. That could occur as early as next year.

Until SpaceX and Boeing start transporting crews, astronauts will continue to ride Russian rockets. On Friday, a Russian and Frenchman returned from the space station in their Soyuz capsule, leaving two Americans and a Russian behind. The station was zooming over Oman in the Persian Gulf when the Falcon took flight.
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U.S. President Donald Trump “believes the climate is changing,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says.

“President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of the equation,” Haley said during an excerpt of a CNN interview released Saturday. The interview will be broadcast Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

On Thursday, Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate change pact, tapping into his “America First” campaign theme. He said participating in the pact would undermine the U.S. economy, wipe out jobs, weaken national sovereignty and put his country at a permanent disadvantage.

On Friday, nobody at the White House was able to say whether Trump believed in climate change. In recent years, he has expressed skepticism about whether climate change is real, sometimes calling it a hoax. But since becoming president, he has not offered an opinion.
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A Polish musician has created an unusual interactive instrument – a larger-than life music box bristling with xylophones and drums – that he says can help educate children and aid their development through musical play.

The Musicon comprises a rotating wooden drum fitted with removable smaller instruments. Children play notes by placing pegs in holes on the rotating drum’s surface – much like a music box – but one that allows children to play any melody they like.

“Musicon is not only music, it is only a tool for learning, for development,” said Kamil Laszuk, who invented the instrument and has developed it with the help of a team of close friends. “There is also programming here, learning physics, cooperation in a team and also the development of manual skills. Music is the reward.”

Laszuk developed the instrument for a project during his industrial design studies at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Following a positive reaction to his creation, his parents sold their house to help fund its development.

Warsaw’s Synapsis Foundation, which helps children with autism and Asperger syndrome, suggested the instrument could be enjoyable for children suffering from those conditions.

“It is very important that there is no possibility of failure, that they can freely experiment in their own way,” psychologist Joanna Burgiell said.

The instrument is due to go into production by the end of 2017.
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Better treatment strategies for pediatric cancers are helping survivors live longer, with fewer serious health problems related to their treatment, U.S. researchers said Friday.

The finding, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, is based on analysis of data from 23,600 participants in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Overall, severe health conditions arising within 15 years of childhood cancer diagnosis fell to 8.8 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from 12.7 percent in the 1970s, the study found.

The findings show that childhood cancer survivors who were given more modern treatment approaches, such as reduced exposure to radiation and lower doses of chemotherapy, were faring better, said Todd Gibson of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who led the study.

“Not only are more children being cured, but they also have lower risk for developing serious health problems due to cancer treatments later in life,” he said in a statement.

The researchers focused on severe, disabling, life-threatening or fatal health problems that occurred within 15 years of being diagnosed with a pediatric cancer between 1970 and 1999.

The biggest declines in health problems related to treatment occurred in survivors of Wilms’ tumor, a rare kidney cancer. In this group, serious complications fell to 5 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from a high of 13 percent in the 1970s.

Improvements

In survivors of childhood Hodgkin lymphoma, latent complication rates fell to 11 percent, from 18 percent in the 1970s. Improvements were also seen for astrocytoma, the second most common childhood cancer, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer.

There were no reductions in long-term side effects among survivors of neuroblastoma, acute myeloid leukemia, soft-tissue sarcoma and osteoscarcoma.

The biggest improvements were seen with regard to endocrine conditions such as diabetes, thyroid disease or growth hormone deficiency. The researchers saw endocrine problems fall to 1.6 percent for childhood cancer survivors surveyed in the 1990s, compared with 4 percent in the 1970s.

The emergence of secondary cancers fell to 1.6 percent in the 1990s, compared with 2.4 percent in the 1970s.

Gastrointestinal and neurological conditions also improved.

But there was no improvement in rates of heart or lung conditions, which the researchers said served as a reminder of the need for close follow-up in childhood cancer survivors.
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It will be a few more days before Space X’s Dragon cargo capsule reaches the International Space Station (ISS). Bad weather postponed the launch scheduled for Thursday until Saturday. Among other supplies for the ISS crew, it carries an unusual telescope designed to look at not-well-known objects called neutron stars. These relatively small celestial bodies have some mind-boggling features, for example, a teaspoon of their matter weighs about 10 million tons.

Looking at a life-size model of the Neutron Star Composition Explorer, or NICER for short, displayed at the Goddard Space Center, one can immediately see that it is not an optical telescope.

The most visible part of Nicer is a one-meter-wide cube, made of solid aluminum with 56 holes drilled through its face. The instrument houses its own array of special lenses that deflect x-rays and focus them towards sensors fixed on the inner wall behind them.

Outside, it looks a little like the WWII Katyusha rocket launcher.

On top, it has a few appendages housing auxiliary equipment, as well as a socket for the ISS’s robotic arm that will eventually install it outside the orbital station.

Neutron stars

Standing next to the cube, deputy principal investigator for the NICER Mission, astrophysicist Zaven Arzoumanian, says that not much is known about neutron stars, the densest objects in the universe.

“They are only about 16 to 20 kilometers across but can contain the mass of up to two of our suns compressed into that tiny volume so we think they are made mostly of neutrons.”

But how is that possible when everything we know is made of atoms?

That’s true, Arzoumanian explains, “but the distance between nuclei of individual atoms is very large and is occupied by electrons that have very little mass, so it’s mostly empty space. If you could imagine having a lump of gold and crushing it to the point where you bring the nuclei closer and closer together until they’re touching, when there’s no more empty space the electrons are absorbed by the protons, they cancel each other out, they turn into neutrons and you’re left with a ball of neutrons.”

The only force that is capable of crushing atoms together to that point is gravity, and for gravity to be strong enough to do that you need one or two times the mass of the Sun collapsing and compressing, crushing itself under its own weight and you’re left with what we think is a neutron star,” he said.

At this point, the physics of a neutron star becomes murky. Perhaps under those conditions, neutrons and protons aren’t able to maintain their identities any more, Arzoumanian suggests. They may dissolve into a soup of even smaller particles – quarks and gluons. What we know, he adds, is that neutron stars rotate at very fast and constant speed and that they are very powerful sources of x-rays.

Pulsating beacons

If the Earth is in the path of the rotating beams, we see them as pulsating sources of light, as well as x-rays, which is why such neutron stars are also called pulsars.

“Imagine that you have a beach ball with a hot spot in the front and a hot spot in the back and the beach ball is spinning,” says Arzoumanian. “You see the hotspot come around towards you, you see the brightness increase, but there’s a hot spot in the back as well and eventually that swings around. So imagine the brightness as a function of time, it goes up and down deeply as the spots swing in and out of view.”

In a simplified way, he says, how deep that light variation is, how deeply it is modulated or how it varies, is a measure of how big the star is, how compact it is and it will tell us about its interior contents.

Spider’s eye

Building the NICER’s 56 eyes, sensitive to x-rays, required some marvelous ingenuity, as those rays don’t behave like visible light. Its lenses are in fact 24 concentric aluminum cylinders, coated with a thin layer of gold, and bent very slightly lengthwise.

“X-rays prefer to pass through things rather than to be focused,” explains Arzoumanian, “so there’s a unique geometry to these mirrors, which is very similar to skimming a stone on a pond. If you drop a pebble into water vertically it passes through. X-rays work the same way. But if you throw the pebble onto the water at a very sharp angle, you can skim it off the surface and these mirrors work the same way, the x-rays come in at a grazing angle and are redirected very slightly to focus at some distance downstream.”

But neutron stars emit all kinds of radiation, from low frequency radio waves to extremely high frequency gamma rays. Why concentrate on x-rays?

There are two reasons, says Arzoumanian, one scientific and one technological.

“The surface of the neutron star is glowing in x-ray light and for us to understand the size of the star, which is a direct way of understanding the interior makeup of the star, we need to be looking at the surface and the surface is glowing and x-rays so we look where we have to look to understand.”

The other technological reason, he says, has to do with the SEXTANT Mission that will use the same telescope.

Celestial GPS

A sextant is the optical instrument that mariners, and later airmen, have used since the 18th century to navigate when far from dry land. It was essential on ships until the U.S. military satellite-based navigation system, now known as GPS, was made available for civilian use.

GPS, which stands for Global Positioning System, relies on a number of satellites in geostationary orbit. When a GPS receiver, now embedded in most smartphones, establishes contact with at least three satellites that are over the horizon, the computer in it automatically calculates its exact position.

SEXTANT stands for Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. Jason Mitchell, the mission’s project manager, says pulsars are so stable in the rotation that often you’ll hear the analogy of a celestial lighthouse or a celestial clock.

“Their spins are so accurate,” says Mitchell, “they rival atomic clocks here on Earth. So in analogy to GPS global positioning system, you can think about pulsars as objects in very precise orbits that transmit very precise timing signals.”

Mitchell says the worst possible scenario we can think of happening to future manned space explorations would be the inability to communicate with Earth. So we want to make sure that in such an event, the astronauts can perform their function and return home safely. An autonomous navigation system like this could certainly help, he says, as strong x-ray emissions from pulsars could serve as guiding beacons.

Mitchell adds that the SEXTANT team plans to conduct two experiments with the NICER telescope – one relatively early in the mission and another toward the end of its use by NASA researchers, about 18 months after its launch.

After that time, the telescope will become available to scientists and researchers worldwide.
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Earthquakes are a fact of life in Pacific Rim countries, but most are small shocks that don’t do much damage. But a major quake – one registering more than 6.0 on the open-ended Richter scale – can devastate communities, even those that have prepared for disaster. In many urban centers around the Pacific Rim, it could be weeks or a month – or more – before water service gets restored after a major earthquake – not to mention electricity, sewage and fuel supplies too. So leaders on both sides of the Pacific are being forced to make cost-benefit choices.

Japan has a deserved reputation as one of the best prepared countries in the world for earthquakes. But even there, quakes can causes massive and lasting damage.

The magnitude 6.9 earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995 knocked out water and electricity, collapsed a main highway and railway and killed more than 6,000 people. Fires consumed entire neighborhood blocks as firefighters were stymied by the failure of the water supply

Kobe is now in the process of replacing nearly 4,800 kilometers of cast-iron water distribution lines with flexible pipe to make its system earthquake resistant.

Hitoshi Araike, an assistant manager at the city’s Waterworks Bureau, explained “The damage we have received in the earthquake kind of determined that we will do that, replace the pipes.”

Araike and an interpreter led foreign journalists deep underground to see a new large transmission main that can double as emergency water storage. It cost more than $300 million.

Automatic shutoff valves have been installed at reservoirs to keep water from draining away after a quake. Flexible pipes and new-style connectors with reinforced sleeves resist breakage. They’re being deployed at both the waterworks and a rebuilt sewage treatment plant, and once the new technology is in place, Araike expects “zero disruption” of Kobe’s water service after the next great earthquake.

Earthquake resilience elsewhere

Other Pacific Rim countries with memories of great earthquakes are investing in seismic strengthening, notably Chile, Taiwan, China and New Zealand. In any case, it takes a long time and a lot of money to make a difference, at a city or regional level. Lack of resources or building code enforcement can be a barrier in less developed countries such as Pakistan or Cambodia.

A big public utility on the U.S. West Coast also has an ambitious earthquake resilience goal.

“We’d like to get back up and be operating within three to four days,” says Jim Miller, engineering superintendent for Everett Public Works in western Washington state. “That’s our goal from a level of service standpoint.”

Miller says his utility assessed its earthquake vulnerability and has prioritized a list of improvements. First, contractors are reinforcing walls and ceilings to earthquake-proof the operations building at Everett’s drinking water treatment plant, which serves 600,000 people north of Seattle.

Next, the Public Works Department wants to install flexible joints at some pipeline water crossings. Everett’s full list of seismic upgrades could take 20 years – and many millions of dollars – to complete. City residents would have to cover that cost with higher water bills, but Miller says that the price of resilience.

“If we did nothing, that’s more business as usual and you could keep rates lower. But we’ve found people for the most part expect a reliable system,” he said. “Once they understand what it’s for, they seem — In fact our wholesale customers have actually encouraged us to make our system more resilient.”

Other utilities in the region are taking similar steps. Seattle Public Utilities aims to finish a comprehensive vulnerability assessment of its own by the end of this year.  It has already invested $60 million in seismic upgrades to existing water infrastructure to date – such as switching from above-ground to buried reservoirs.

In Oregon, a state resilience plan set a goal for water supply systems to be mostly operational within two weeks after a Cascadia mega-quake.

“We’re nowhere close to that,” admts Theresa Elliott, Portland Water Bureau chief engineer at a conference earlier this year.

Be prepared for a long wait

Earthquake resilience experts in both Pacific Coast states delivered nearly identical recommendations a few years ago. They said Oregon and Washington should require utilities to do vulnerability assessments and make plans to mitigate the deficiencies. But that remains largely a suggestion, not a requirement, and that could limit the effectiveness of efforts to increase resiliency.

A regional water supply group for the greater Seattle area recently estimated outage times for a big offshore earthquake and close-by shallow ones. Their analysis found it currently could take up to 60 days to restore service to most customers.

Those projections for long outages of vital services mean residents need to prepare to survive on their own. State and federal emergency managers used to recommend to stockpile food, water and medicines for three days. Now Oregon and Washington state suggest people in earthquake country prepare a kit with two weeks’ worth of disaster supplies.
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A Russian cosmonaut and a French astronaut returned to Earth on Friday aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule after six months at the International Space Station, while their U.S. crewmate remained on the orbiting laboratory for an extended stay, a NASA television broadcast showed.

Russia’s Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet, with the European Space Agency, strapped themselves inside the spacecraft and left the station at 6:47 a.m. EDT (1047 GMT) as the complex sailed 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

They made a parachute landing southwest of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 10:10 a.m. EDT (1410 GMT).

One seat aboard the capsule was empty as U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson, who flew to the station with Novitskiy and Pesquet in November, will remain in orbit until September. She is filling a vacancy left after Russia scaled down its station crew size to two members from three.

“We of course are going to miss Oleg and Thomas. They are exceptional astronauts,” an emotional Whitson said during a ceremony on Thursday, where she turned over command of the $100 billion station to Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.

“Peggy is a legend,” Pesquet said. “We’re a little bit sad to leave her behind, but we know she’s in very, very capable hands.”

Whitson, Yurchikhin and astronaut Jack Fischer, also with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will manage the station until a new crew launches in late July.

“That will be a little challenging,” Whitson said during an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “I was up here on my previous two expeditions and it was only a three-person crew, but it was a much smaller station at that point in time.”

“Still, I think it’s quite doable,” she said.

Whitson, who is serving on the station for a third time, broke the U.S. record in April for cumulative time in space. By the time she returns to Earth in September, she will have accumulated more than 660 days in orbit.

Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, with 878 days in orbit, is the world’s most experienced space flier.
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In the past seven years, the number of children in India classified as obese has risen to 30 percent of the population. That number is expected to double over the next eight years. All that extra weight has led to an increase in weight-related type 2 diabetes. Doctors are sounding the alarm about the health trend that in many cases can be treated with diet and exercise. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Astronomers said Thursday that they had detected a third ripple in the fabric of space-time, a remnant of a cosmic crash of two black holes 3 billion years ago.

These invisible ripples, called gravitational waves and first theorized by Albert Einstein, first burst into science’s view to great fanfare in February 2016 after a new $1.1 billion international experiment went online.

Experiment spokesman David Shoemaker, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the latest discovery shows these waves can be anywhere in the sky and may be commonplace in the universe.

Two black holes, which most likely were originally far apart, eventually merged into a giant one — 49 times the size of the sun — sending an invisible wave rippling out. It traveled 3 billion light-years until hitting twin detectors in Louisiana and Washington.
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A new report showed greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union rose in 2015, the first increase since 2010, even as European officials on Thursday urged the United States to remain part of a global climate pact.

Emissions grew by 0.5 percent compared with 2014, mainly due to increases from transportation and a colder winter, the European Environment Agency said.

 

Greenhouse gases are a major contributor to man-made climate change and most countries around the world have pledged to reduce emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

 

The report was released as the EU is trying to emphasize its commitment to combating global warming, with senior European officials appealing to President Donald Trump not to quit the Paris accord. Trump was scheduled to announce his decision Thursday afternoon in Washington.

 

“Higher emissions were caused mainly by increasing road transport, both passenger and freight, and slightly colder winter conditions in Europe, compared to 2014, leading to higher demand for heating,” the European Environment Agency said.

 

It noted that improvements in fuel efficiency failed to offset the growth in traffic.

 

“Road transport emissions — about 20 percent of total EU greenhouse gas emissions — increased for the second year in a row in 2015, by 1.6 percent,” the agency said.

 

It noted, however, that the EU has achieved a long-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2015 of 22.1 percent despite economic growth of 50 percent.

 

This decoupling of economic growth from emissions during the 25-year period occurred due to a mix of green policies, such as encouraging the use of renewable energy and improving fuel efficiency, and changes in European economies that have seen a shift away from heavily polluting industries toward service jobs.

 

Milder winters have also contributed to a decline in heating fuel use, the agency said.

AP-WF-06-01-17 1407GMT

 
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Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s entry into the commercial space race has been revealed.

Allen posted a picture of a plane nicknamed the “Roc” on Twitter, showing an extremely unusual and enormous plane that he hopes will eventually launch rockets into space.

The Roc has six engines, two fuselages, 28 wheels and is built by Allen’s company Stratolaunch Systems.

The plane has a wingspan of more than 117 meters, the longest ever built, and weighs more than 227,000 kilograms. To put the wingspan into perspective, it is longer than an official soccer pitch, which measure between 100 and 110 meters.

The aircraft is 72.5 meters from nose to tail and stands 15.2 meters tall from the ground to the top of the tail.

In his tweet, Allen said the plane was being taken out of its hangar for fuel testing. Next will come engine testing and taxi testing.

“Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be actively conducting ground and flightline testing at the Mojave Air and Space Port,” Stratolaunch Systems CEO Jean Floyd said. “This is a first-of-its-kind aircraft, so we’re going to be diligent throughout testing and continue to prioritize the safety of our pilots, crew and staff.”

The plane’s maximum takeoff weight can be up to 589,000 kilograms. The company says the plane will first launch an Orbital ATK Pegasus XL rocket, but that it will be capable of launching up to three rockets in one flight.
…

The U.S. state of Ohio filed a lawsuit Wednesday against five prescription drug manufacturers, saying they used deceptive practices that fueled an opioid addiction epidemic.

“These drug manufacturers led prescribers to believe that opioids were not addictive, that addiction was an easy thing to overcome, or that addiction could actually be treated by taking even more opioids,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said. “They knew they were wrong, but they did it anyway.”

Five companies

The state wants the companies to stop misrepresenting the drugs, to pay damages for the amount of money the state spent on excessive opioid prescriptions and resulting addiction treatments for patients, and to reimburse patients as well.

The lawsuit names Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Allergan, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary Cephalon, and Johnson & Johnson with its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

A Janssen statement called the lawsuit legally and factually unfounded and said the company has acted appropriately and responsibly. Purdue said it shares DeWine’s concerns about the opioid crisis and wants to work together on a solution.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says opioids are most commonly given for moderate-to-severe pain after surgery or injury, but that in recent years there has been an increase in their prescription for chronic pain “despite serious risks and the lack of evidence about their long-term effectiveness.”

Tens of thousands died

Opioids, including prescription varieties, and heroin killed a record 33,000 people in the United States in 2015, according to the CDC.

Ohio’s lawsuit says 2.3 million people, or nearly 20 percent of its population, were prescribed an opioid drug last year, and that the drugs are the main source of unintentional overdose deaths in the state. It called the opioid crisis in the state “catastrophic.”

“Because they know prescribing doctors and other health care providers rely on drug companies’ statements in making treatment decisions, drug companies must tell the truth when marketing their drugs and ensure that their marketing claims are supported by science and medical evidence. Defendants broke these simple rules and helped unleash a health care crisis that has had far-reaching financial, social and deadly consequences in the state of Ohio.”

Crisis across US

The effects of the opioid crisis have been felt across the United States, and Ohio is not the first to sue drug companies. Kentucky settled a lawsuit with Purdue in 2015, while a group of 27 states did so with Purdue as well in 2007. Oregon also reached a settlement with another drug maker, Insys, in 2015.

U.S. President Donald Trump pledged during his campaign last year that he would fight the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged many of the rural areas and small towns where Trump received strong support.

The president has created a drug addiction task force, but critics of the budget proposal he unveiled last month said his planned cuts in government spending would hurt the opioid epidemic fight.

Trump’s spending plan would slash funding for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy by 95 percent, eliminating its drug-free communities and high-intensity drug trafficking programs that each have bipartisan congressional support.
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The United States space agency NASA says it will launch a mission next year to send a spacecraft directly into the sun’s atmosphere.

NASA announced the plan at the University of Chicago Wednesday during a ceremony to honor astrophysicist Eugene Parker, whom the Parker Solar Probe is named after.

The probe will gather data on solar activity and give us a better idea of how space-weather events can impact life of Earth.

It will orbit within four million miles of the sun’s surface, about eight times closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever flown. It will need to withstand heat and radiation no human could endure.

“Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we’ve puzzled over for more than six decades,” said mission scientist Nicola Fox.

“It’s a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.”

Parker was the first scientist to study the phenomenon now known as solar wind and his research changed the way scientists understand the way stars interact with the worlds that orbit them.

WATCH: Parker on solar probe

Solar winds are made of charged gases emanating from the sun. Those winds eventually flow past the Earth at around 1.6 million kilometers per hour and scientists believe they have the capability to cause serious damage to the planet.

At its closest point to the sun, the spacecraft’s 12-centimeter-thick solar shields will need to withstand temperatures of 1300 degrees Celsius.

The probe is on track to launch in August 2018 and is scheduled to last until June 2025.
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The Czech Republic on Wednesday enforced a smoking ban in bars, restaurants and cafes, putting to an end to the country’s status as one of the last havens for tobacco smokers in Europe.

The ban, which applies to inside areas of bars and restaurants as well as public places like cinemas, theaters and sports venues, was approved by Parliament following years of heated debate and signed by President Milos Zeman, a chain smoker.

Unlike most of Europe, Czechs had remained tolerant of smoking up until now — and it was up to restaurant owners to decide whether to allow it in their establishments.

According to data from the European Union, 17 member states have comprehensive smoke-free laws in place. But some, including Austria, Portugal, Romania and Serbia, only have partial bans on indoor smoking in restaurants and bars.

Others, like Greece, have official bans but the rules are flouted — even by government ministers.

After the Czech ban, Slovakia appeared to be the only EU country left with no official ban in place inside bars.

The Czech Health Ministry said it estimated 18,000 Czechs die of smoking every year and another two thousand non-smokers die due to exposure to second-hand smoke.

From Wednesday, which is World No Tobacco Day, violating the ban would incur a fine of up to 5,000 koruna ($190).

Most Czechs approve the ban, but a group of lawmakers have challenged it at the Constitutional Court.

Jakub Storek, owner of the Cafe Liberal in Prague — a popular hangout among local smokers — said he opposed the ban.

“It’s hard to predict the impact at the moment,” he said. “But I guess it would be different clients coming here in the future.”

Stepan Ourecky said he would still come, but may have a smoke outside the cafe.

“Or perhaps, I will smoke less,” the 18-year-old student said.
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Most smokers in China, the world’s largest tobacco consumer, have no intention of kicking the habit and remain unaware of some of its most damaging health effects, Chinese health officials and outside researchers said Wednesday.

An estimated 316 million people smoke in China, almost a quarter of the population, and concerns are growing about the long-term effects on public health and the economy.

 

The vast majority of smokers are men, of whom 59 percent told surveyors that they have no plans to quit, according to a decade-long study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Canadian researchers with the International Tobacco Control project.

 

Such numbers have prompted efforts to restrict the formerly ubiquitous practice. Major cities including Beijing and Shanghai having recently moved to ban public smoking, with Shanghai’s prohibition going into effect in March. In 2015, the central government approved a modest nationwide cigarette tax increase.

But Chinese and international health officials argue that more is needed, including a nationwide public smoking ban, higher cigarette taxes and more aggressive health warnings. Such actions are “critically important,” Yuan Jiang, director of tobacco control for the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said in a statement released with Wednesday’s study.

 

A public smoking ban appeared imminent last year. The government health ministry said in December that it would happen by the end of 2016, but that has yet to materialize.

 

“They have to figure out what’s important as a health policy,” said Geoffrey Fong of Canada’s University of Waterloo, one of the authors of Wednesday’s study. “Every third man that you pass on the street in China will die of cigarettes. …When you have cheap cigarettes, people will smoke them.”

 

In line with global trends, smoking rates among Chinese have fallen slowly over the past 25 years, by about 1 percent annually among men and 2.6 percent among women, according to a separate study published in April in the medical journal The Lancet.

 

Yet because of China’s population growth — 1.37 billion people at last count — the actual number of smokers has continued to increase. Rising prosperity means cigarettes have become more affordable, while low taxes keep the cost of some brands at less than $1 a pack.

 

Sixty percent of Chinese smokers were unaware that cigarettes can lead to strokes and almost 40 percent weren’t aware that smoking causes heart disease, according to the study, which was released on World No Tobacco Day, when the World Health Organization and others highlight health risks associated with tobacco use.

 

Judith Mackay, an anti-tobacco advocate based in Hong Kong, said China has made strides with the public smoking bans in some cities and a similar ban covering schools and universities, but that’s not enough.

 

“This is the first time there has been a report looking at the overall picture of where China stands,” said Mackay, senior adviser at Vital Strategies, a global health organization. “The reality is, it’s falling behind.”

 

Mackay blamed behind the scenes lobbying by China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly for impeding efforts to toughen tobacco policies. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Government agencies and research institutes in China, Canada and the United States funded the study.
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What is Climate Change? This video explains the basic concept of this hot political topic.
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The United Nations predicts that by 2025 nearly two billion people will be living in places where there’s not enough water to go around. And since on average water makes up about 60% of the human body, not having it has a host of devastating effects that go way beyond just being thirsty. That’s why some new technology to turn saltwater into drinkable water holds so much promise, VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Lowering expectations, Iowa’s two Republican senators say the long-promised repeal of “Obamacare” is unlikely, and any final agreement with the Republican-controlled House is uncertain.

The comments Tuesday by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst come as the Republican-controlled Senate moves forward on its work to dismantle the 2010 health care bill while facing conflicting demands within their own party and lockstep Democratic opposition. Both senators are active players in the health care debate.

“You can’t repeal it in its entirety,” Ernst told reporters after a joint appearance with Grassley in suburban Des Moines.

Frank admission

It was a frank admission from loyal conservatives representing a state Republican Donald Trump carried in November.

The Senate’s filibuster rule means that Republicans — who control the Senate with 52 seats — can’t repeal the entire law.

“You’ve got to have 60 votes and we don’t have 60 votes at this point,” Grassley said.

Grassley, in his seventh term, is a senior member of the Finance Committee, which oversees the law’s tax and Medicaid provisions. Ernst, elected in 2014, says has been part of an informal GOP health care working group’s discussions.

“As much as I’d love to go back and scrap the whole darn thing, we’re simply unable to do that,” Ernst said.

Other Senate rules permit the GOP majority to repeal portions of Obamacare without Democratic support but render other parts of the law off limits.

“That just allows us to tinker around the edges,” Ernst earlier told Eric Borseth, an Altoona, Iowa, businessman who implored her to “get rid of that monstrosity.”

What Grassley and Ernst did not mention are divisions within the Republican caucus in the Senate. Getting every Republican on board is proving arduous.

House measure

House Republicans passed a measure May 4 axing major parts of the 2010 law, including hundreds of billions in extra Medicaid money that 31 states now receive for expanding to cover more lower-income Americans under the federal insurance program.

Such provisions, as well as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 23 million Americans would lose health insurance, make the House bill a non-starter with several Republican senators.

Erasing Obama’s health care law was a top promise of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, and by congressional GOP candidates since its 2010 enactment.

But writing legislation that can pass with only Republican votes has proven agonizing.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin canceled a March vote after opposition from party conservatives and moderates would have sealed its defeat, and the two wings of the GOP spent weeks blaming each other for the bill’s demise.

Ernst says the Senate will be able to make individual changes to Obama’s law where only a simple majority vote is required.

For instance, she mentioned changing mandatory health care benefits required by insurers as ripe for Senate action.

Ernst stopped short of saying whether any legislation passed in the Senate would be accepted by the House.

“We will be working with the House,” she said.
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DNA from mummies found at a site once known for its cult to the Egyptian god of the afterlife is unwrapping intriguing insight into the people of ancient Egypt, including a surprise discovery that they had scant genetic ties to sub-Saharan Africa.

Scientists on Tuesday said they examined genome data from 90 mummies from the Abusir el-Malek archaeological site, located about 70 miles (115 km) south of Cairo, in the most sophisticated genetic study of ancient Egyptians ever conducted.

The DNA was extracted from the teeth and bones of mummies from a vast burial ground associated with the green-skinned god Osiris. The oldest were from about 1388 BC during the New Kingdom, a high point in ancient Egyptian influence and culture.

Genomes provide a surprise

The most recent were from about 426 AD, centuries after Egypt had become a Roman Empire province.

“There has been much discussion about the genetic ancestry of ancient Egyptians,” said archeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, who led the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Are modern Egyptians direct descendants of ancient Egyptians? Was there genetic continuity in Egypt through time? Did foreign invaders change the genetic makeup: for example, did Egyptians become more ‘European’ after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt?” Krause added. “Ancient DNA can address those questions.”

The genomes showed that, unlike modern Egyptians, ancient Egyptians had little to no genetic kinship with sub-Saharan populations, some of which like ancient Ethiopia were known to have had significant interactions with Egypt.

The closest genetic ties were to the peoples of the ancient Near East, spanning parts of Iraq and Turkey as well as Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Middle-class mummies

Egypt, located in North Africa at a crossroads of continents in the ancient Mediterranean world, for millennia boasted one of the most advanced civilizations in antiquity, known for military might, wondrous architecture including massive pyramids and imposing temples, art, hieroglyphs and a pantheon of deities.

Mummification was used to preserve the bodies of the dead for the afterlife. The mummies in the study were of middle-class people, not royalty.

The researchers found genetic continuity spanning the New Kingdom and Roman times, with the amount of sub-Saharan ancestry increasing substantially about 700 years ago, for unclear reasons.

“There was no detectable change for those 1,800 years of Egyptian history,” Krause said. “The big change happened between then and now.”
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday urged the Trump administration not to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, saying the deal would have long-term benefits for the U.S. economy and even its security.

Speaking to an audience of students, civil society and business leaders at New York University, Guterres delivered his subtle pitch to the U.S. administration, which has said a decision about whether to stay in the 2015 agreement will come soon.

“If one country decides not to be present — I’m talking about countries with an important global reach, like it is the case with United States or China — if one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it,” Guterres said in response to a student’s question about dealing with the Trump administration’s skepticism about climate change.

Guterres said he was engaging with the administration and Congress to try to convince them that it is in the United States’ interest to stay in the deal, which seeks to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius.

“There are many good arguments that in my opinion should lead an administration that has a concern to put its own interests first, and the interests of its people and its country first, to invest in what is necessary to preserve the global reach of its economy and to preserve the security of its citizens,” Guterres said, alluding to Trump’s “America First” policy.

“And so my argument today is that it is absolutely essential that the world implements the Paris Agreement, and that we fulfill that duty with increased ambition,” Guterres said during his prepared address.

He said the science was “beyond doubt” and that the effects of global warming already were being felt around the world.

Nearly every country has signed on to the Paris Agreement, and a majority have ratified it. The accord entered into force last November. In addition to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it seeks to mitigate the effects already felt by global warming.

“The sustainability train has left the station,” Guterres said. “Get on board or get left behind. Those who fail to bet on the green economy will be living in a grey future.”

He praised China for its “massive shift to other forms of energy,” saying the country had made a “very strong bet recently in greening its economy.”

Renewable energy

The U.N. chief noted that renewable forms of energy were growing in use and decreasing in cost.

“Last year, solar power grew 50 percent, with China and the United States in the lead,” he said. “Around the world, over half of the new power generation capacity now comes from renewables. In Europe, the figure is more than 90 percent.”

He said 80 percent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — and that would not change overnight. But it is important, he said, to engage the energy industry and governments to use those energy sources as moderately as possible while making the transition to renewable, clean ones.

“I think they are working towards having an answer for that, and so we’ll wait and see what that answer is,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told reporters earlier Tuesday when asked about the administration’s plans.
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The World Health Organization warns that more than 7 million people die prematurely every year from tobacco-related causes, and it’s a costly drain on national economies.

In advance of World No Tobacco day, to be observed Wednesday, the global health agency urged governments to implement strong tobacco control measures for the health of their people and their economies.

WHO calls tobacco a threat to development. Besides the heavy toll in lives lost, global estimates show that “tobacco costs the global economy $1.4 trillion a year,” or 1.8 percent of global gross domestic product. The WHO notes this estimate takes into consideration “only medical expenses and lost productive capacities.”

Despite effective tobacco control measures, WHO reports the number of people dying from smoking is increasing because those dying today have mostly been long-term smokers and it takes time for tobacco control policies to make an impact.

Vinayak Prasad, program manager of the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, told VOA, “What we are seeing is that if the policies were not in place, the number of 7.2 million would have been higher. We are seeing a reduction of tobacco use prevalence in most countries. The only regions now which are seeing higher growth are the African continent and Middle Eastern region. The rest of the world is seeing a decline.”

Diseases, disabilities

Besides leading to premature death, the WHO has found, countless millions of people who smoke suffer from a wide variety of tobacco-related diseases and resultant serious disabilities, including blindness, amputation, impotence and poor oral health.

Andrew Black of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Secretariat noted that smoking is an addiction largely taken up in childhood and adolescence, “so it is crucial to reduce the number of young people taking up smoking in the first place. We must stop the tobacco industry’s powerful advertising and promotion, which can all too often be oriented toward young people.”

Black said tobacco widens social inequalities and is a driver of poverty around the world.

“We know that those living on lower incomes in virtually all countries are likely to smoke, and therefore more likely to suffer the consequences of tobacco use,” he said.

Black said that by 2030, about 80 percent of the world’s tobacco-related mortality will be in low- and middle-income countries.

“High rates of tobacco use being promoted by aggressive strategies from the tobacco industry are projected to lead to a doubling of the number of tobacco-related deaths in low- and middle-income countries between 2010 and 2030,” he said.

Study issued

To mark World No-Tobacco Day, the U.N. Development Program and the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control issued a study that focuses on the harmful effects of tobacco on both health and on efforts aimed at achieving the U.N.’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Dudley Tarlton, UNDP program specialist on health and development, told VOA that tobacco undermines the SDGs because “household consumption on tobacco displaces consumption on other goods and services that might lead to a better end.

“So, it affects poverty. It affects hunger. Education is affected. Children get ear infections because they are exposed to household smoke in the home,” he said.

For the first time, the WHO and UNDP released a joint report showing the bad impact tobacco has on the environment.

Prasad acknowledged that the data received from the tobacco industry and from governments were relatively weak. Nevertheless, he said, “the evidence is really astounding as to how tobacco is extremely dangerous and harming the environment.”

He said using land to grow tobacco “can lead to severe damage because of the widespread use of agrochemicals.”

Use of trees

Prasad noted that more than 11 million metric tons of wood was required to cure and dry tobacco, “which essentially means deforestation is already happening.”

The report found that tobacco waste contains over 7,000 toxic chemicals that poison the environment, including human carcinogens, and that tobacco smoke contributes “thousands of tons of human carcinogens, toxicants and greenhouse gases to the environment.”

Prasad said that cigarettes are bad news for tree lovers because “for every 300 cigarettes, we need to cut a tree. … Even conservatively, if we are looking at 6 trillion cigarettes, we are looking at almost 15 to 20 billion trees to cut.

“We have 6 trillion trees in the world, so we are almost looking at a big cut, which is going to happen, if we do not hold this,” he said.

And regarding the sullying of the world’s environment, he noted that cigarette butts “account for 30 to 40 percent of all items collected in coastal and urban cleanups.”
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