After an unprecedented global rally in support of science-based policymaking, organizers of last Saturday’s March for Science say the real measure of success will be whether they can translate the event’s enthusiasm into action.

After crowds rallied in Washington and more than 600 other locations around the world April 22, march planners now urge those who participated to go out into their communities and advocate for science.

“WE MARCHED. NOW, WE ACT,” reads the updated March for Science website, which lays out It lays out a week of action. Suggestions for Monday target local engagement: Start science game nights or book clubs, for example. Tuesday calls for contacting policymakers on science issues.

The more than 260 groups that backed the march also are urging their members to stay engaged.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), which represents 60,000 earth and space scientists, has five weeks of action planned, with a similar strategy: Write your representatives; speak in your community; organize.

Symptom

As a scientist-led movement, the March for Science is unprecedented in its size and reach. It is a symptom of the concern that has been building in the scientific community. Scientists say ideology has overtaken evidence as the basis for policy on climate change, vaccines and much more.

“Certainly, though, recent political events in the U.S. and around the world have heightened that incentive” to mobilize, said AGU Executive Director Chris McEntee. “So, we are seeing larger and larger numbers of our members who want to participate.”

Others are seeing the same thing. The union representing Department of Energy employees says membership has grown 30 percent in the last four months. Advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has added about 3,000 members to its network of scientists, engineers, economists and other experts. The science network now tops 20,000.

“There’s just a lot of energy out there,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the UCS Center for Science and Democracy. “People want to know what they can do. And many, many people in the science community realize that retreating to your lab and hoping things go OK is just not sufficient in the current climate.”

Some have decided it’s time they step into the political arena. About 5,000 scientists have announced plans to run for office since the beginning of this year, according to 314 Action, an advocacy group that champions scientists seeking elected office.

“That is five times more than our most optimistic projection,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, who founded 314 Action after an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2016.

Scientists have felt under attack since before the Trump administration, she said. But Trump’s hostility to climate science “certainly has been a catalyst for getting more scientists to say, ‘Enough. I can’t just write another polite letter. I need to step up and get more involved.'”
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U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson on Monday broke the record for most accumulated time spent in orbit by an American.

Commander Whitson, who is aboard the International Space Station, was congratulated by U.S. President Donald Trump, who spoke to space station astronauts via video.

“Five-hundred thirty-four days and counting. That’s an incredible record to break,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “On behalf of our nation, and frankly on behalf of the world, I’d like to congratulate you.”

WATCH: Trump congratulates Whitson

The 57-year-old Whitson is the most experienced U.S. spacewoman. She is scheduled to return to Earth in September, at which time she will have spent 666 days in space over the course of three flights.

“It’s actually a huge honor to break a record like this,” Whitson told Trump.

The two also discussed the potential for further space travel, including to Mars, which NASA has said it wants to accomplish by the 2030s. However, Trump moved that deadline up, telling Whitson that he’d like to see a Mars trip “at worst, during my second term.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the president’s comments were meant to be taken literally.

Whitson also explained to Trump how technology in the space station allows astronauts to convert their urine to drinking water. “It’s really not as bad as it sounds,” she said.

“Well that’s good, I’m glad to hear that,” Trump responded. “Better you than me.”

Trump also spoke with U.S. astronaut Jack Fischer, who arrived at the space station for the first time last week. Asked by Trump how his flight went, Fischer, an Air Force pilot, responded: “Sir, it was awesome. It made even my beloved F-22 feel a bit underpowered.”

Trump, who was speaking alongside his daughter Ivanka Trump, said he was honored to speak with the astronauts.

“I’ve been dealing with politicians so much. I’m so much more impressed with these people, you have no idea,” he said.
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The World Health Organization has announced that trials of a new malaria vaccine will take place in three African countries – Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. They have been selected for their high prevalence of malaria and strong existing immunization programs for other diseases. The announcement was made ahead of the U.N.’s World Malaria Day Tuesday – and the chosen theme for this year is ‘a push for prevention’.

Malaria remains one of the world’s deadliest diseases – killing close to half a million people every year, mostly in Africa. So the testing of a new vaccine called RTSS has been greeted as a great step forward. It’s hoped that 360,000 children will be vaccinated between 2018 and 2020 in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi.

The World Health Organization’s Regional Director Dr. Matshidiso Moeti made the announcement Monday in Nairobi.

“We are very appreciative that GSK the pharmaceutical company that is developing the vaccine will provide this for free of charge for this pilot,” she said. “And the vaccine will be assessed as the complementary intervention in Africa that can be added to our existing tool box of proven preventive diagnostic and treatment measures.”

While a malaria vaccine would be an invaluable tool, other methods remain vital in preventing malaria.

Dr. Thomas Churcher of Imperial College London uses mathematical modeling to highlight the best way of killing of blocking the main vector that transmits malaria – the mosquito.

“Currently the majority of control is through the use of bed nets, but there’s an increasing fear that mosquitoes are becoming resistant to some of the insecticide on those bed nets,” he said. “And so therefore there’s a chance that a control that works today might not work as well in the future. And so we need new ways of killing mosquitoes, new types of bed nets, new types of drugs, new types of vaccines.”

Global efforts to reduce transmission have led to a two-thirds reduction in malaria deaths between 2000 and 2015. It’s hoped the development of a vaccine will get us one step closer to one day eradicating the disease, says Churcher.

“Hopefully one day we will have a vaccine that’s good enough to be that silver bullet. The current vaccine can do an awful lot but it’s not going to completely halt malaria transmission,” he said. “The recent studies show that it’s partially effective, and that that effectiveness wears off quite quickly over time.”

The $50 million trials in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi are being funded through a network of NGOs and global institutions. Far greater investment will be needed to roll the vaccine out globally – if the pilots prove successful.
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Concerted campaigns in the Greater Mekong Subregion [GMS] to radically reduce the impact of malaria has lifted hopes a vital target to eradicate malaria from the region may be within reach.

Deyer Gobinath, a malaria technical officer with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Thailand, said the outlook is positive for eliminating severe forms of malaria across the region within the next decade.

The goal is for most of the GMS countries by 2025 to try and eliminate falciparium malaria – the most severe form of malaria – the falciparium malariia – and then by 2030 basically all forms or all species of malaria,” Gobinath said.

In 2015, WHO leaders said there were 14 million malaria cases across Southeast Asia, resulting in 26,000 deaths.  Globally, in the same year, the WHO reported 438,000 lives lost, mostly in Africa and warned that 3.2 billion people – almost half the world’s population – face health risks from the disease. 

Mortality rates decline; challenges remain

The campaigns in Southeast Asia cover Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, all reporting consistent declines in mortality rates, by as much as 49 percent since 2000.

Populations most vulnerable to the mosquito-borne disease are largely in remote border regions, isolated from infrastructure and immediate medical support.

The key areas of concern lie in regions between Thailand and Myanmar – also known as Burma – and in Cambodia among others.

But Saw Nay Htoo, director of the Burma Medical Association, said collaboration between medics and local communities has had a positive impact in reducing malaria’s impact.

“In the ground level we set up the malaria [clinic] post which we have at least one malaria health worker, according to the population they have, to detect malaria,” he said. “And if there is malaria positive then the patient is given the malaria medicine. So we have been doing this for three years. It seems our program is going very well – there are less malaria cases in the border areas.”

Combination of drugs

The fight against malaria is largely based on a combination of drugs known as Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy, or ACT, as the main line of drug treatment.

The World Health Organization’s Gobinath said Thailand’s medical infrastructure and funding support have all contributed to lowering the numbers of malaria cases.

“For malaria in Thailand here’s been quite a remarkable decrease – a steady decrease, decline in the number of confirmed cases of malaria. In the past 10 years or so something like 30,000 cases in 2012; to 2015 it was 19,000 to 20,000 cases. So it’s been a gradual but persistent decline of confirmed malaria cases,” he told VOA.

But he said for progress to be sustained it will require continued “political will and commitment.”

WHO officials said attention needs to focus on migrant worker populations moving across the region’s borders. Thai health authorities have taken steps to enable medical access to migrant populations at risk of malaria, largely in remote border areas.

The battle far from over

But challenges remain, said Maria Dorina Bustos, a WHO technical officer with responsibilities for monitoring drug resistant strains of malaria across 18 countries in the Asia Pacific.

Dorina Bustos said the region with drug resistant forms of malaria is spreading. “The Thai-Cambodia or the Thai-Myanmar border, you need to think about the Thai-Laos border because the Southern Laos drug resistance is also about evident – is documented, it is also there. And what is actually more alarming is happening in the Cambodia side,” she told VOA.

She said drug resistance becomes evident in the delay in clearance of the parasite from the patient. Dorina Bustos says the use of fake drugs and self-treatment also opens the way to drug resistance.

“What we are seeing in the last five years is that it is really emerging in the most parts of the region – initially just in the Western border of Cambodia and now it has also spread to the east and almost the whole country,” Dorina Bustos said.

She said there is a need for close monitoring of major population centers – especially in India and Africa – to ensure successful treatment and avoiding issues of the use of fake medicines.

A positive note has been ongoing investment and research in new drugs, including commitments by major pharmaceutical industries.

“It’s really here in the Mekong where we really have a problem. Cambodia, the borders of Thailand, the borders of Thai/Laos and Cambodia/Vietnam – it’s very specific in the Mekong region,” she said. “For Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and even India, Bangladesh and Nepal the ACT [Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy] is all working perfectly well.”
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This year marks the half-way point in an international campaign to provide children and adults the world over with access to life-saving vaccines. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on the progress – and what’s at stake in this campaign.
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Six years ago, 194 countries signed on to the Global Vaccine Action Plan, an international campaign to provide children and adults around the world with access to life-saving vaccines.

The goal of the program is to prevent millions of people from getting vaccine-preventable diseases by the time it ends in 2020. The idea is to provide universal access to vaccines to protect people of all ages, from the very young to the very old.

Dr. Flavia Bustreo, is the assistant director-general for Family, Women’s and Children’s Health at the World Health Organization.

“Immunization and vaccines are the most powerful public health tools that we have currently, “ she said.

Millions of children saved

Bustreo says 35 years ago, 13 million children lost their lives from diseases that could be prevented by vaccines.

She says that number has been reduced to 6 million, but 6 million is still too high.

Today, 85 percent of children are vaccinated against measles and other deadly diseases, but Bustreo says more children need these vaccines.

“We need to have vaccination coverage that is about 90 percent, in order to have what we call the ‘herd effect’ … which means you cover the children who are vaccinated, but also, because of the reduction of transmission of infections, you also cover the children that are not vaccinated,” Bustreo said.

Final push on polio

Because of vaccines, polio is on the brink of eradication. Polio exists in two conflict zones: in northern Nigeria and along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Last year there were 37 cases. Compare that to the 350,000 cases in 1988 when the eradication campaign began.

There’s a special urgency to vaccinate all children against polio. Dr. David Nabarro has worked on a number of health programs at the World Health Organization and now as a special envoy for the United Nations.

“The last part of eradicating any disease is always the hardest part,” he said. “If you don’t do it, you lose everything. To do it, you’ve got to really bring all the energy and commitment you can to bear, and it requires a special kind of dedication.”

Vaccines have prevented millions of deaths and countless numbers of children from becoming disabled. By 2020, at the conclusion of the Global Vaccine Action Plan, the U.N. wants to see countries strengthen routine immunizations for all children. It wants to complete the effort to end polio and to control other vaccine-preventable diseases. Also, the goal is to be well on the way in developing new vaccines for other diseases that plague our world.
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Drawn-out deaths. Communities torn apart. Survivor’s guilt. Patrick Fallah says his memories of the days when the Ebola virus swept through Liberia are so awful that he sometimes has trouble focusing on the present.

“Sometimes when I have a flashback of the death of my son and others who died in the Ebola treatment unit, I don’t want to speak to people. I grieve so much that my mind is not really on what I am doing,” said Fallah, 30, who lost his 8-month-old son and stepmother and is president of the National Ebola Survivors Network of Liberia.

The trauma of the world’s deadliest Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,300, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, has left many survivors fighting a battle some worry will never end.

But Liberia, one of the world’s poorest countries and with just one psychiatrist, has announced the ambitious goal of expanding access to mental health care to 70 percent of its population in the next few years.

The World Health Organization declared an end to the Ebola outbreak in June, estimating that more than 10,000 people who had been infected have survived in the three West African countries, including more than 4,000 in Liberia.

As the world’s attention has turned to other crises, many Ebola survivors still face the psychological consequences of the epidemic, feeling guilt over their pasts and worry for their futures without resources to deal with the pain.

Mental health is often an expense far beyond the reach of impoverished countries. Liberia is still struggling to rebuild its basic health services after more than a decade of back-to-back civil wars that left a quarter-million people dead, with many killings carried out by drugged, under-age fighters notorious for hacking off survivors’ limbs.

Then Ebola arrived, frightening Liberians with its lack of a cure and its transmission through contact with body fluids. Many people became too scared to touch others or offer comfort as the death toll grew.

Now Liberia’s government has announced its ambition to expand mental health care access to its more than 4.2 million people, with help from the U.S.-based The Carter Center.

“After the civil war, people didn’t go through enough counseling. You have people already going through post-traumatic depression. Then Ebola came, and that built on what was already going on,” said Dr. Francis Kateh, Liberia’s deputy health minister and chief medical officer.

The Carter Center is helping to train Liberia’s health care workers to identify mental health issues.

Last month, 21 clinicians specializing in child and adolescent mental health graduated from the training. They join 187 mental health professionals who have been trained by the center since 2010 to work in prisons, with refugees or in other settings and are based in primary care clinics and hospitals around the country.

The Carter Center hopes to replicate its program in other countries, including Sierra Leone.

But educating the public will take time, the new mental health workers say.

“There are many people living with mental health problems in Liberia without knowing they are,” said one of the new specialists, Theophilus A. Joe.

Stigma remains around mental health issues, said Musulyn Massaqoui, a registered nurse and another recent graduate. Most people come to clinics only for physical issues, she said.

Ebola survivors often have hearing and vision problems, joint pain or chronic fatigue, according to the medical aid charity Doctors Without Borders. Many also are shunned by their communities and family members, making them vulnerable to mental health issues.

Children left orphaned by Ebola or who watched family members die are especially challenged, said Fallah with Liberia’s survivors’ network, which has about 1,800 members.

“They continue to have depression. They are still thinking about their parents,” he said. “Sometimes when they sit in the class, they don’t concentrate.” During the holidays, some feel so neglected that they “want to take up knife to kill themselves.”

Some of Liberia’s newly trained mental health workers have been placed in schools and orphanages to lessen the chances of stigma, said The Carter Center’s mental health program director, Eve Byrd.

That approach is critical, she said. “If you address childhood trauma early, you’re most likely to decrease symptoms of illness as the person ages.”

Stigma in Liberia has proven to be deadly. In March, an Ebola survivor who made the cover of Time magazine for her work as a nurse during the outbreak died when she experienced complications after childbirth and the nurses on duty were too afraid to touch her.

 
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European scientists are taking part in the March for Science demonstration taking place in hundreds of cities around the world to commemorate Earth Day. Science and research skeptics are becoming more mainstream in an era of populist and Eurosceptic movements. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there is less funding to support independent research.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a professor at the University of Leuven, says shifting priorities in Europe has had an impact on the work of scientists.

“Now funds for fundamental research are much more difficult to get. Even if the budget remains the same or sometimes has increased, there was a shift in priorities towards research that is supposed to deliver more immediate results in terms of job creation or that kind of thing. Or research that helps the European industry to bring a product to the market. And climate scientists are not building any products that the European industries can sell.”

The European Union set a target for its member states that they should spend three percent of their budget on science, but many countries are only at around two percent.

Scientists hope that by joining forces globally, they will raise awareness about a global trend that seems to take science less serious. With U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House and populist and Eurosceptic movements gaining popularity in Europe, scientists say their budgets are being reduced and their work is being taken less serious.

Bas Eickhout, a scientist and member of the European Parliament for the Greens Party, says climate change policy should not be seen as a “left wing hobby.” He calls on scientist to be more involved in the decision making process.

“Not in policy making itself but providing information to politicians is crucial. And quite often once we start with decision making, that information is just lost. Scientist are really a bit too scared for the word lobby, and I don’t think its lobbying that your doing, but its also trying to feed decision making also during the negotiations, and not only at the beginning.”

The March for Science is a volunteer based movement and organizers say there is an “alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery.” The organizers aim to celebrate science and hold political and science leaders accountable, but do not affiliate with any political party.

Sofie Vanthournout, director of Sense about Science EU, a charity advocating the importance of science, says the march aims to change the perspective of citizens and politicians who doubt the importance of science:

“The message that we want to bring it is important for every aspect of our lives, for every aspect of society. Whether it’s in technology that we use in our daily lives or whether it is for important decisions that politicians make about our lives. We don’t want scientists to tell politicians what to do but we need the politicians to have access to all of the facts and all of the knowledge that is available.”

One week after the March of Science, the Peoples Climate March will follow. In 2015, the world came together to sign the Paris Accord, an agreement signed by almost all nations in the world to curb global warming.

U.S. President Trump promised during his election campaign to pull the United States out of the international accord, but later softened his stance, saying he thinks there is “some connectivity” between human activity and global warming.

 
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Scientists are taking the unprecedented step of staging marches in more than 600 cities worldwide in the face of what they see as a growing political assault on evidence-based knowledge.

Thousands of scientists and their supporters are attending March for Science events Saturday across the globe, including those in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cape Town, London Madrid, Nigeria and Seoul.

In Berlin, organizers said about 10,000 people marched toward the Brandenberg Gate holding up placards that read “Facts not feelings” and We love experts — those with evidence.”

Marchers in Geneva carried signs that said “Science — A candle in the Dark” and “Science is the Answer.”

In London, demonstrators marched from the Science Museum to Parliament Square in Westminister holding placards supporting science.

The March for Science thrusts scientists, who generally avoid advocacy and whose work is based on impartial experimentation, into a more visible spotlight.   

For nuclear physics graduate student Chelsea Bartram, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were the last straw.

President Donald Trump had disputed photographic evidence of the size of his inauguration crowd. Reporters challenged him, prompting Conway to respond that the administration gave “alternative facts.”

“Many scientists I know, myself included, spend so many hours in the lab sacrificing enormous amounts of their life for this abstract idea” that understanding reality can benefit human civilization, said Bartram, who is pursuing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“And then to have someone say, ‘Well, that’s not important anymore,’ it’s so devastating,” Bartram added.

So Bartram planned to support science’s role in government decisions on health, safety, the economy and more by joining demonstrators at the flagship March for Science event in Washington.

The Washington event featured speakers and several large teach-in tents on the National Mall where scientists, educators and leaders from a variety of disciplines discussed their work, effective science communication strategies and training in public advocacy. Organizers say the event is non-partisan and is not aimed against the Trump administration or any politician or party.

Organizers of the international event, which coincides with Earth Day, say it is the first step in a global movement to acknowledge and defend the vital role science plays in everyday life.

“Science extends our lives, protects our planet, puts food on our table (and) contributes to the economy,” says Caroline Weinberg, national co-chair for the March for Science.

“Policymakers threaten our present and future by ignoring scientific evidence when crafting policy, threatening scientific advancement through budget cuts and limiting the public’s knowledge by silencing scientists,” Weinberg said.

Trump’s most recent budget proposal calls for cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that would eliminate some 56 programs and drastically reduce funding for the agency’s Office of Research and Development and Science Advisory Board. Trump’s budget proposal also recommends some $6 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research funding in the world.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a first-generation Iraqi immigrant, is the pediatrician who alerted officials in Flint, Michigan that the city’s water was contaminated with lead. She is a March for Science honorary national co-chair. “We march for science so that scientists have the freedom like I did, to speak out, free from politicization and to continue to make the world a better place.”

Tipping point

Organizers have not released expected crowd size estimates. But the dispute over crowd sizes was just one small example of what scientists see as a larger pattern. During the U.S. presidential campaign, Trump dismissed the scientific consensus about the dangers of human-induced climate change. His appointee to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, also does not accept climate science. He has repeatedly clashed with the agency he now heads.  

But scientists say their frustration has been building for decades.

“We might have reached a tipping point now, but acting as though this is a new thing is giving too much credit to the current administration,” said Weinberg.

And it goes far beyond climate change, Weinberg added. “It’s about not paying attention to the best research on things like food stamps. It’s about cutting things like Head Start and after-school programs,” to name a few. “And that all affects health, because that’s a time to set kids on the right path.”

Critics say a public protest risks further politicizing science, turning scientists into just another interest group.

Bartram sums up a widespread response: on hot button issues like climate change, opponents have already done it. “I don’t think anything we do is going to further politicize it,” she said.

Disconnect

But if the goal is to get policymakers to listen, “A march isn’t going to change anything,” said Rob Young, head of coastal research at Western Carolina University.

Young says much of the problem stems from the growing disconnect between scientists and voters, especially the rural and working class people who voted for Trump. He says most probably have never met a scientist.

Scientists need to get out of the lab more, he said, and explain how their work affects people’s health and livelihoods.

That’s what march organizers hope, too.

The American Geophysical Union’s Davidson said a major post-march goal is more public engagement.

“I think the day is gone when scientists can stay in their ivory towers and assume that everyone is going to recognize their value,” he added.
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The founder of Microsoft, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, has given a passionate defense of foreign aid while voicing fears the political climate in the U.S. and in Britain could result in cuts to aid budgets. In a speech this week in London, he warned that withdrawing aid would “create a leadership vacuum that others will fill.”

Gates, who gives $5 billion a year to development aid through the foundation he set up with his wife, Melinda, is one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. In a speech at London’s Royal United Services Institute this week, he voiced fears that the political tide is turning against foreign aid.

“It concerns me that some world leaders are misinterpreting recent events as reasons to turn inward instead of seeing them for what they are: problems that although they are difficult and will take time, can be solved — if we invest in the long-term solutions that are necessary,” Gates said.

Watch: Billionaire Philanthropist Bill Gates Warns Against Cuts to Aid Budgets

The United States remains by far the world’s biggest donor, funding long-term programs and emergency relief across the globe. But President Donald Trump is proposing significant cuts to the $43-billion foreign aid budget as part of efforts to reduce government debt.

Gates argues that many critics of foreign aid don’t realize the major progress that has been achieved.

“If you could only pick one number to highlight the effectiveness of the development agenda since 1990, I would pick the number 122 million. That’s the number of children’s lives that have been saved,” he said.

He disputed the notion that funding foreign aid is a bottomless pit.

“As you bring down that childhood death rate, families choose to have less children,” he said. “The population goes down very substantially. Which brings within reach all of the things society is trying to do: better health, better education, economic opportunity.”

Gates’ speech in London comes as Britain gears up for a snap election in June. The UK is one of the few developed countries to meet the U.N. aid budget target of 0.7 percent of GDP. Current Prime Minister Theresa May has committed to keeping that pledge but many in her party want aid money diverted to the military.

Gates said he wanted to make the case for the facts.

“When aid is mismanaged it is a double crime, stealing both from the taxpayer and from the poor.” he said. “But let’s be clear. The bulk of this aid is getting to its recipients and having an incredible effect. There will always be a need to adjust, we’re working in very tough countries, so you’ll never get 100 percent perfect effectiveness. But you can learn. And every year, the aid is better spent.”

Aid agencies say the debate could not come at a worse time, with about 65 million refugees around the world, worsening conflicts in the Middle East and famine striking East Africa.
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Ear infections are one of those things almost everyone has to deal with. They’re painful, but generally easily treatable. But for many people, chronic ear infections can significantly affect their hearing and their quality of life. Polish doctors may have discovered a tiny solution for what can be a big problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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In 16 U.S. cities, citizen scientists, including schoolchildren, spent a few days this month documenting plant and animal species and helping scientists understand their regions’ diversity and the challenges many species face.

The City Nature Challenge, held April 14-18, is a competition that was started last year by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences. This year, it involved institutions across the United States. The challenge is to see which city can document the most species; results are to be announced Saturday, which is Earth Day.

“Last year, it was San Francisco against Los Angeles,” said Lila Higgins, manager of citizen science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “This year, it’s L.A. versus San Francisco and New York and Chicago and Seattle and many, many other cities.”

The young citizen scientists took photos and recorded observations on their cellphones, uploading the data through a phone app called iNaturalist.

Frank Az, 9, of Esperanza Elementary School in Los Angeles said he loves observing nature, “finding different species of birds and insects.” He was outside the museum with binoculars and a cellphone camera, along with other students.

His friend, Andrea Garcia, was excited as she described finding “two mourning doves in their nest” as well as “ants, bees and a house finch.”

The children worked with some adult scientists who monitor species in this region, including Greg Pauly, a specialist on amphibians and reptiles at the Natural History Museum. Pauly said that Los Angeles is one of the world’s 35 top biodiversity hot spots, but that the sprawling urban complex also faces “a large threat to that biodiversity.”

The children documented their sightings of insects, flowers and birds alongside their teachers. It is something they do regularly at school. Principal Brad Rumble of Esperanza Elementary said the migration of one bird species had captured the children’s interest.

“Every year, we do a contest to predict when will the yellow-rumped warbler first arrive on campus,” he said. The students vote, and those who correctly guess the date when the tiny visitor appears get a trip to the Natural History Museum.

“That little bird,” said Rumble, “brings up so many wonderings about geography and range and weather, and why does it like this tree? These questions form in students’ minds, and they’re off and running.”

The children are learning many lessons, said museum President Lori Bettison-Varga.

“We are part of this environment, and they are part of this environment — the plants, the animals, the critters that live here,” she said, “so it’s really helping us to understand how to increase the health of our environment.”

And this annual competition, she said, gets people of all ages involved in science.
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft faces one last perilous adventure around Saturn.

Cassini swings past Saturn’s mega moon Titan early Saturday for a gravity-assisted, orbit-tweaking nudge.

“That last kiss goodbye,” as project manager Earl Maize calls it, will push Cassini onto a path no spacecraft has gone before — into the gap between Saturn and its rings. It’s treacherous territory. A particle from the rings — even as small as a speck of sand — could cripple Cassini, given its velocity.

Cassini will make its first pass through the relatively narrow gap Wednesday. Twenty-two crossings are planned, about one a week, until September, when Cassini goes in and never comes out, vaporizing in Saturn’s atmosphere.

Launched in 1997, Cassini reached Saturn in 2004 and has been exploring it from orbit ever since. Its European traveling companion, Huygens, landed on Titan in 2005. Cassini’s fuel tank is practically empty, so with little left to lose, NASA has opted for a risky, but science-rich grand finale.

“What a spectacular end to a spectacular mission,” said Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science division director. “I feel a little sad in many ways that Cassini’s discoveries will end. But I’m also quite optimistic that we’re going to discover some new and really exciting science as we probe the region we’ve never probed before.”

There’s no turning back once Cassini flies past Titan, Maize said. The spacecraft on Wednesday will hurtle through the 1,200-mile-wide gap (1,900 kilometers) between Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings, at a breakneck 70,000-plus mph (113,000 kph).

From a navigation standpoint, “this is an easy shot,” Maize said. The operation will be run from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The concern is whether computer models of Saturn’s rings are accurate. On a few of the crossings, Cassini is “kind of flirting with the edge of where we think it’s safe,” he noted.

For at least the first trip through the gap, Cassini’s big dish antenna will face forward to shield the science instruments from any ring particles that might be lurking there. A couple instruments will provide a quick rundown on the dust situation.

Scientists anticipate lots of lightweight impacts, since the spacecraft will be going through extremely small material, more like smoke than distinct particles. Material from the innermost D ring — which is slowly extending into Saturn — should be diffuse enough “that we should be fine,” Maize said.

If the models are wrong and Cassini is clobbered by BB-size material, it still will end up exactly where NASA is aiming for on Sept. 15 — at Saturn. The space agency wants to keep the 22-foot-high, 13-foot-wide spacecraft away from Titan and its lakes of liquid methane and from the ice-encrusted moon Enceladus and its underground ocean and spouting geysers. It doesn’t want to shower contaminating wreckage onto these worlds that might harbor life.

This last leg of Cassini’s 20-year, $3.27 billion voyage should allow scientists to measure the mass of the multiple rings — shedding light on how old they are and how they formed — and also to determine the composition of the countless ring particles. First spotted by Galileo in 1610, the rings are believed to be 99 percent ice; the remaining 1 percent is a mystery, said project scientist Linda Spilker. A cosmic dust analyzer on Cassini will scoop up ring particles and analyze them.

“Imagine the pictures we’re going to get back of Saturn’s rings,” Spilker said.

Cassini will have the best views ever of Saturn’s poles, as it skims its surface. Near mission’s end, Spilker said, “we’re actually going to dip our toe” into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back measurements until the last possible moment.

All this is on top of a science mission that already has rewritten the textbooks on the Saturnian system.

“But the best is still yet to come — perhaps,” Maize said at a news conference in early April. “But we are certainly going to provide more excitement.”
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In some of the world’s remotest corners, health workers armed with smartphones, digital maps and medication are making steady progress in eliminating trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, a leading expert said.

Better living conditions have wiped out trachoma in many countries but some 200 million people are still at risk of contracting the disease, according to the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI).

Trachoma is categorized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), one of a group of 18 debilitating and sometimes fatal illnesses that affect 1.5 billion people, mainly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Efforts to treat trachoma include improving access to clean water and decreasing the number of infected people by treating them with antibiotics.

ITI Director Paul Emerson said antibiotics donation programs, increased government spending, a global mapping project identifying hotspots and the use of smartphones to collect data had been gamechangers in fighting trachoma.

“We know where the disease is, we know what to do about it and where do it,” Emerson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“That may sound simple but we can only reach our goal of eliminating trachoma through a combination of joined-up efforts.”

Trachoma can be prevented in childhood by having facilities for children to wash their faces and if caught soon enough the disease is easily treatable with repeated doses of antibiotics.

Those suffering with an advance stage of the disease, in which the eyelashes turn inward and scrape the cornea, can be treated with simple surgery.

This week, governments and private donors pledged more than $800 million at a meeting in Geneva to accelerate the fight against NTDs.

The Geneva gathering came five years after a meeting in London brought a commitment by the public and private sectors to achieve WHO goals for the control and elimination of NTDs.

Fight Gathers Steam

In 2015, nearly one billion people received treatments donated by pharmaceutical companies for at least one NTD, a 36 percent increase since 2011, the WHO said this week.

The fight against trachoma has also gathered momentum as the number of people at risk dropped by 50 percent in the last six years, while those requiring treatment now stands at 182 million, down from 325 million, according to the ITI.

Emerson said thanks to the Global Trachoma Mapping Project (GTMP), an effort to document where the disease is endemic, health workers can now say for sure where treatment is needed.

Ethiopia is one of the countries that has made significant strides in fighting trachoma, said Emerson.

The government has included fighting trachoma as a target in its national health plan, provided significant domestic funding, participated in the mapping project and is training doctors to conduct surgeries to correct the effects of trachoma.

Health workers in Ethiopia use smart phones to collect data in the field that are then streamed to an analyst who can call the field team to correct errors in real time, he said.

But despite progress in fighting trachoma and other NTDs, experts agree that drug companies need to step up donations of medicines.

“The challenge now is in reaching the most neglected populations, communities in conflict and in closing the funding gaps,” said Emerson.
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Decades’ worth of man-made junk is cluttering up Earth’s orbit, posing a threat to spaceflight and the satellites we rely on for weather reports, air travel and global communications.

More than 750,000 fragments larger than a centimeter are already thought to orbit Earth, and each one could badly damage or even destroy a satellite.

Last year, a tiny piece of debris punched a gaping hole in the solar panel of Copernicus Sentinel-1A, an observation satellite operated by the European Space Agency, or ESA. A solar array brought back from the Hubble Telescope in 1993 showed hundreds of tiny holes caused by dust-sized debris.

Experts meeting in Germany this week said the problem could get worse as private companies such as SpaceX, Google and Arlington, Virginia-based OneWeb send a flurry of new satellites into space over the coming years. They said steps should be taken to reduce space debris.

Getting all national space agencies and private companies to comply with international guidelines designed to prevent further junk in orbit would be a first step. At the moment those rules — which can be costly to implement — aren’t legally binding.

ESA’s director-general, Jan Woerner, told The Associated Press on Friday that so-called mega-constellations planned by private companies should have a maximum orbital lifetime of 25 years. After that, the satellite constellations would need to move out of the way, either by going into a so-called `graveyard orbit’ or returning to Earth.

That’s because dead satellites pose a double danger: they can collide with other spacecraft or be hit by debris themselves, potentially breaking up into tiny pieces that become a hazard in their own right.

The nightmare scenario would be an ever-growing cascade of collisions resulting in what’s called a Kessler syndrome — named after the NASA scientist who first warned about it four decades ago — that could render near-Earth orbits unusable to future generations.

“Without satellites, you don’t have weather reports, live broadcasts from the other side of the planet, stock market, air travel, online shopping, sat-nav in your car,” Rolf Densing, ESA’s director of operations, said. “You might as well move into a museum if all the satellites are switched off.”

Even if future launches adhere to the guidelines, though, there’s the question of what to do with all of the debris already in orbit.

“We have to clean the vacuum, which means we need a vacuum cleaner,” Woerner said.

Just how such a device would work is still unclear. Proposals include garbage-cleaning spacecraft armed with harpoons, nets, robotic arms and even lasers to fry really small bits of debris.

Luisa Innocenti, the head of ESA’s “clean space” initiative, said a mission is already in the works to bring down a very large piece of debris.

“It’s a very complex operation because nobody wants to fail,” she said. “Nobody wants to hit the debris and create another cloud of debris.”
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The United Nations’ World Health Organization says millions of lives could be saved if people infected with viral hepatitis were tested and treated for these potentially fatal diseases.

New WHO data from the just released Hepatitis 2017 report show an estimated 325 million people globally are living with chronic hepatitis B or hepatitis C virus infections.

WHO said hundreds of thousands of people infected with these diseases are dying because they lack access to life-saving testing and treatment. The agency noted that most people are untested and do not even know that they are infected.

Consequently, WHO said they remain untreated and are at risk of “a slow progression to chronic liver disease, cancer and death.”

Hepatitis B virus is transmitted between people through contact with blood or other body fluids. Hepatitis C virus is spread through direct contact with infected blood.

Latest estimates show that viral hepatitis caused 1.34 million deaths in 2015 and that some 1.75 million people were newly infected with hepatitis C, bringing the total number of people living with this disease globally to 71 million.

Comparable to TB

Gottfried Hirnschall, director of WHOs department of HIV/global hepatitis program, said that the number of deaths from viral hepatitis was comparable to that of tuberculosis.

However, he noted that hepatitis kills more people than HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and significantly more than malaria.

“What is, however, the difference between hepatitis and those three other diseases is that the trend for hepatitis is upwards. We are seeing an increase in mortality while for the other three diseases, it has been going down over the years,” Hirnschall said. “Since 2000 and 2015, we have seen a 22 percent increase from one million, as I said, to 1.34 million.”

Hirnschall said there was a range of interventions and tools, including highly effective vaccines and medicines that can prevent hepatitis from becoming a chronic and fatal disease.

WHO estimates 257 million people worldwide were living with chronic hepatitis B in 2015. However, it noted that new infections have been falling dramatically thanks to increased coverage of HBV vaccination among children.

Hepatitis B is mainly transmitted in the first years of life from mother to child and is most prevalent in the Western Pacific and African regions.

While this safe and effective vaccine has been around since 1982, nations have been slow to use it. But Ana Maria Henao Restrepo, team leader of the department of immunization, vaccines and biologicals, observed that this has changed.

She said 95 percent or 185 countries now use the hepatitis B vaccine in routine immunization programs.

“That is great and as I mentioned because of this, 85 percent of the infants worldwide are protected with three doses of hepatitis B vaccine. Where we are lagging behind is on the first dose that is given after birth. It is very important to prevent infections from the mother,” she said.

Restrepo said only 50 percent of countries were delivering this vaccine. Without this vaccine, she said “people become chronically infected and require medication and diagnosis” throughout their lifetime.

Unsafe injections

Unsafe injections in health care settings and injecting drug use are the most common modes of hepatitis C transmission. The problem is most widespread in the Eastern Mediterranean and European regions.

While using clean needles and syringes will prevent transmission of the disease, Gottfried Hirnschall said there is a highly effective drug that can cure hepatitis C within a relatively short time.

“A person needs to take a single tablet or a tablet every day for two to three months and most of the people will be cured.”

He said few people have availed themselves of this treatment for a long time because of the exorbitantly high $84,000 price tag.

“They were very high to start with. They are still very high in many countries, particularly in high-income countries,” he said.

“But, as the report also points out, the price of these treatments has come down considerably. It costs as little as $200 in some countries now, per cure for treatments, which is quite striking.”

Charles Gore, President of the World Hepatitis Alliance said WHO’s Global Hepatitis Report provides an understanding of the true impact of the disease, providing “new data and a set of very specific, global and regional targets to reach by 2030.

“For instance, global deaths from hepatitis must be brought down from 1.34 million to lower than 469,000 people per year,” he said.

Hirnschall said the new possibilities of cure for hepatitis C and the possible elimination of hepatitis B through vaccination have created some positive momentum and greater public attention on these heretofore “silent epidemics.”

“The momentum has clearly been driven by the excitement around some new opportunities we do now have,” he said.
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Catch a wave, and you’re sitting on top of the world. You’re also sitting on top of a unique biome. What does that do to our bodies? One surfer, who is also a chemistry graduate student, is trying to find out what all this wave time is doing to surfers’ bodies. This report by Kevin Enochs is narrated by Robert Raffaele.
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An award-winning documentary has captured the innovative ways farmers and others are trying to make the planet a greener, more sustainable place.

Winner of the 2016 César for best documentary, the French equivalent of an Oscar, Tomorrow charts a road trip in which co-directors Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent roam the globe in search of solutions to environmental problems.

Their journey takes them to Icelandic volcanoes, Indian slums and French farmlands, among other places, to tell the stories of ordinary people fighting climate change.

The decision to steer away from doomsday narratives — most recently seen in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood” — came from the realization that such an approach failed to spur people into action, Dion said.

“When we focus on catastrophe, and on things that raise fear, it triggers mechanisms in the brain of rejection, flight and fear,” the longtime environmental activist said in a phone interview ahead of the film’s U.S. release Friday.

The film begins in the United States, where two California professors discuss their milestone 2012 study concluding climate change may signal a new cycle of mass extinction.

Soon afterward, Dion and Laurent — a French actress known for her role in “Inglourious Basterds” — hit the road.

Public plantings

In Britain, they visit the market town of Todmorden where residents have seized public spaces to plant fruit, vegetables and herbs — which pedestrians are encouraged to pick.

In the French city of Lille, the CEO of an envelope company shows them how bamboo is grown in the factory’s wastewater to feed a wood boiler that powers the unit’s central heating.

And in Copenhagen, local planners explain how building a labyrinth of bike paths is part of efforts to become first carbon-free capital by 2025.

“We don’t make the cities to make the cars happy, to make the modernistic planners and architects happy,” Jan Gehl, a local architect and urban planner, says in the film. “We have to make the cities so that citizens can have a good life and a good time.”

Dion said he was confident the film would appeal to American viewers despite the many U.S. lawmakers who are skeptical about climate change and oppose regulation to combat it.

Since being sworn in January, President Donald Trump has taken several steps to undo climate change regulations put in place by the previous administration.

Trump also promised during his election campaign to pull the United States out of the global climate change pact reached in Paris in 2015.
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They are homely, buck-toothed, pink, nearly hairless and just plain weird, but one of the many odd traits of rodents called naked mole-rats that live in subterranean bliss in the deserts of East Africa could someday be of great benefit to people.

Scientists said on Thursday the rodents, when deprived of oxygen in their crowded underground burrows, survive by switching to a unique type of metabolism based on the sugar fructose rather than the usual glucose, the only animal known to do so.

Metabolizing fructose is a plant strategy, and the researchers were surprised to see it in a mammal. They now hope to harness lessons learned from this rodent to design future therapies for people to prevent calamitous damage during heart attacks or strokes when oxygenated blood cannot reach the brain.

Naked mole-rats, they found, can survive up to 18 minutes with no oxygen and at least five hours in low-oxygen conditions that would kill a person in minutes.

More closely related to porcupines than moles or rats, they thrive in colonies boasting up to 300 members including a breeding queen in an insect-like social structure of cooperation in food-gathering and tunnel-digging.

With all those rodents breathing and clogging up burrows, they often encounter low-oxygen and high-carbon dioxide conditions.

“Naked mole-rats have evolved in an extremely different environment from most other mammals and they have had millions of years to figure out how to survive dramatic oxygen deprivation,” said neurobiologist Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who helped lead the study published in the journal Science.

In low-oxygen conditions, they enter a coma-like state and release fructose into the blood. By shifting their metabolism from the normal glucose-based system that relies on oxygen to a fructose-based system that does not, they can fuel vital organs such as the heart and brain.

Naked mole-rats live up to 30 years, decades longer than other rodents, are nearly immune to cancer and do not feel many types of pain. As the only cold-blooded mammal, they huddle together in mole-rat piles in order to keep warm. Their lips close behind their teeth so that they can dig with their teeth without getting dirt in their mouths. Their ears and eyes are tiny, and they have poor eyesight.

“Fructose has been linked to obesity and metabolic syndrome but that’s because we over-consume it in sweet beverages and junk food. Perhaps there is a use, and an important one, for fructose in moderate doses after all,” added molecular biologist Jane Reznick of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association in Berlin.
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Scientists have discovered that compounds derived from some bacteria can lower blood sugar levels in obese people with prediabetes, possibly preventing diabetes itself from developing.

Scientists call the bacteria-derived compounds postbiotics. They are not like probiotics, which are whole, live bacteria people take to change the microbial environment of the gut to ward off disease and improve digestion.  

Postbiotics instead are beneficial pieces of bacteria cell walls that are easily absorbed by the body, which seem to make insulin work better. Postbiotics can also be derived from disease-causing microbes, say researchers.

Role of insulin

Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas that ferries glucose from food into cells to nourish the body.  

In people with prediabetes, insulin becomes less effective at its job.

Postbiotics seem to boost the hormone’s effectiveness.  At least that’s what researchers at McMaster University in Canada’s Ontario province saw in experiments with obese mice.  

Obesity is a risk factor for prediabetes, also known as metabolic syndrome. Other risk factors for metabolic syndrome include high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol.

Researchers say their work is designed to help obese individuals with prediabetes.  

Biomedical sciences professor Jonathan Schertzer is senior author of a paper on postbiotics published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

To the extent that postbiotics are byproducts of bacteria in the gut, Schertzer says it’s just a matter of unleashing their beneficial effects.

“The bacteria in our guts are constantly dying and being turned over, and they’re producing a lot of this compound, this post-biotic,” Schertzer said. “So now we want to see if it’s a viable approach to increase that in obese people, or allow it to get through the gut, because the gut is a significant barrier.  It’s supposed to keep all of these things out.

“But there are good things that the gut is keeping out as well. … We want to see if we can manipulate that and get some of the good things to get through,” he added.

Reducing the risk

Reducing inflammation to lessen the risk of diabetes and other diseases is an active area of research.

Schertzer says that’s why there’s interest in postbiotics and some other anti-inflammatory compounds contained in the pain reliever aspirin.

There also is an existing drug to treat a cancer called osteosarcoma, he says, that seems to work on the same biological pathways as postbiotics.  

McMaster researchers are interested in seeing if that drug also reduces blood glucose levels in obese animals.

Schertzer says investigators are poised to begin human clinical trials of postbiotics,as a way to head off diabetes in obese individuals headed in that direction.
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Marijuana enthusiasts in the United States celebrate April 20 — or 4/20 — as an informal holiday, but this year they have something else to get excited about: New polling data show support for legalization of the drug is at an all-time high.

Sixty percent of Americans say they support the legalization of marijuana, according to a poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University. The same poll taken in December 2012 showed 51 percent of respondents supported legalization.

“From a stigmatized, dangerous drug bought in the shadows, to an accepted treatment for various ills, to a widely accepted recreational outlet, marijuana has made it to the mainstream,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.

According to the poll, an overwhelming 94 percent of respondents said they support the use of marijuana by adults for medicinal purposes — also the highest level of support seen in the poll’s history.

Seventy-three percent of Americans said they oppose enforcement of federal laws against marijuana in states that have legalized medical or recreational marijuana.

Currently, 29 states have legalized marijuana use for medicinal purposes, and eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational use.

Marijuana advocates across the country held events to observe the annual 4/20 quasi-holiday. In Washington, D.C., activists planned to distribute free joints to congressional staffers on Capitol Hill. However, Capitol Police interrupted the event, arresting two women and one man, and charging them with possession with intent to distribute pot. Four other women were charged with simple possession.

One of the organizers, Nikolas Schiller, told the Associated Press that police “decided to play politics” with the demonstration and that the people arrested committed no crimes. “We’ll see them in court,” Schiller said.
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Dow Chemical is pushing the Trump administration to scrap the findings of federal scientists who point to a family of widely used pesticides as harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.

Lawyers representing Dow, whose CEO also heads a White House manufacturing working group, and two other makers of organophosphates sent letters last week to the heads of three Cabinet agencies. The companies asked them “to set aside” the results of government studies the companies contend are fundamentally flawed.

The letters, dated April 13, were obtained by The Associated Press.

Dow Chemical chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to President Donald Trump. The company wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities.

Pesticide study

Over the last four years, government scientists have compiled an official record running more than 10,000 pages showing the three pesticides under review — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — pose a risk to nearly every endangered species they studied. Regulators at the three federal agencies, which share responsibilities for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, are close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used.

The industry’s request comes after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced last month he was reversing an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children’s brains. In his prior job as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt often aligned himself in legal disputes with the interests of executives and corporations who supported his state campaigns. He filed more than one dozen lawsuits seeking to overturn some of the same regulations he is now charged with enforcing.

‘Restore regulatory sanity’

Pruitt declined to answer questions from reporters Wednesday as he toured a polluted Superfund site in Indiana. A spokesman for the agency later told AP that Pruitt won’t “prejudge” any potential rule-making decisions as “we are trying to restore regulatory sanity to EPA’s work.”

“We have had no meetings with Dow on this topic, and we are reviewing petitions as they come in, giving careful consideration to sound science and good policymaking,” said J.P. Freire, EPA’s associate administrator for public affairs. “The administrator is committed to listening to stakeholders affected by EPA’s regulations, while also reviewing past decisions.”

The office of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Natural Marine Fisheries Service, did not respond to emailed questions. A spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, referred questions back to EPA.

Dow’s rebuttal

As with the recent human studies of chlorpyrifos, Dow hired its own scientists to produce a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies showing the risks posed to endangered species by organophosphates.

The EPA’s recent biological evaluation of chlorpyrifos found the pesticide is “likely to adversely affect” 1,778 of the 1,835 animals and plants accessed as part of its study, including critically endangered or threatened species of frogs, fish, birds and mammals. Similar results were shown for malathion and diazinon.

In a statement, the Dow subsidiary that sells chlorpyrifos said its lawyers asked for the EPA’s biological assessment to be withdrawn because its “scientific basis was not reliable.”

“Dow AgroSciences is committed to the production and marketing of products that will help American farmers feed the world, and do so with full respect for human health and the environment, including endangered and threatened species,” the statement said. “These letters, and the detailed scientific analyses that support them, demonstrate that commitment.”

FMC Corp., which sells malathion, said the withdrawal of the EPA studies will allow the necessary time for the “best available” scientific data to be compiled.

“Malathion is a critical tool in protecting agriculture from damaging pests,” the company said.

Diazinon maker Makhteshim Agan of North America Inc., which does business under the name Adama, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Acceptable methods

Environmental advocates were not surprised the companies might seek to forestall new regulations that might hurt their profits, but said Wednesday that criticism of the government’s scientists was unfounded. The methods used to conduct EPA’s biological evaluations were developed by the National Academy of Sciences.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Dow’s experts were trying to hold EPA scientists to an unrealistic standard of data collection that could only be achieved under “perfect laboratory conditions.”

“You can’t just take an endangered fish out of the wild, take it to the lab and then expose it to enough pesticides until it dies to get that sort of data,” Hartl said. “It’s wrong morally, and it’s illegal.”

Derived from nerve gas

Originally derived from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany, chlorpyrifos has been sprayed on citrus fruits, apples, cherries and other crops for decades. It is among the most widely used agricultural pesticides in the United States, with Dow selling about 5 million pounds domestically each year.

As a result, traces of the chemical are commonly found in sources of drinking water. A 2012 study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 87 percent of umbilical-cord blood samples tested from newborn babies contained detectable levels of chlorpyrifos.

In 2005, the Bush administration ordered an end to residential use of diazinon to kill yard pests such as ants and grub worms after determining that it poses a human health risk, particularly to children. However it is still approved for use by farmers, who spray it on fruits and vegetables.

Malathion is widely sprayed to control mosquitoes and fruit flies. It is also an active ingredient in some shampoos prescribed to children for treating lice.

A coalition of environmental groups has fought in court for years to spur EPA to more closely examine the risk posed to humans and endangered species by pesticides, especially organophosphates.

“Endangered species are the canary in the coal mine,” Hartl said. Since many of the threatened species are aquatic, he said they are often the first to show the effects of long-term chemical contamination in rivers and lakes used as sources of drinking water by humans.

Dow, which spent more than $13.6 million on lobbying in 2016, has long wielded substantial political power in the nation’s capital. There is no indication the chemical giant’s influence has waned.

When Trump signed an executive order in February mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations, Dow’s chief executive was at Trump’s side.

“Andrew, I would like to thank you for initially getting the group together and for the fantastic job you’ve done,” Trump said as he signed the order during an Oval Office ceremony. The president then handed his pen to Liveris to keep as a souvenir.

Rachelle Schikorra, the director of public affairs for Dow Chemical, said any suggestion that the company’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural committee was intended to help influence regulatory decisions made by the new administration is “completely off the mark.”

“Dow actively participates in policymaking and political processes, including political contributions to candidates, parties and causes, in compliance with all applicable federal and state laws,” Schikorra said. “Dow maintains and is committed to the highest standard of ethical conduct in all such activity.”
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The hits, they just keep coming!

News was made in February when astronomers found seven potential earth-like planets orbiting the red dwarf star Trappist-1.

Wednesday, another red dwarf star is making headlines with the announcement of a ‘super earth’ found orbiting around the small red star LHS 1140.

Super Earth?

VOA spoke with Jason Dittmann, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, about the find.

He is the lead author of the paper laying out the new findings, which is being published Thursday in the journal Nature.

He calls the planet a “Super Earth,” not because it’s any better than our blue-green sphere, but because it “is somewhere between the size of the Earth (the largest rocky planet in the Solar System) and Neptune. These planets are actually pretty common, but we don’t have any of them in our own Solar System so we don’t know much about them.”

Finding one is a big deal in general. But this one, dubbed LHS 1140b, is extra-special because it has turned up in the dwarf star’s habitable zone, that area in space where liquid water can exist on the surface.

The planet is 10 times closer to the star than Earth is to the sun, but red dwarfs are much smaller and much cooler than the giant inferno that keeps us warm.

The other special thing about this planet is that it’s about 5 billion years old, and according to Dittmann, “Five billion years should be more than enough time for life to develop [if it’s easy to develop, no one knows!] So this is definitely a good thing.”

Too close for comfort

In general, one big problem with the habitable planets scientists have found around red dwarfs — and this goes for a few of the seven they’ve found on Trappist-1 — and Proxima b, another found last year — is that they are so close to their star that the stellar radiation that is bombarding the planets can literally strip away any atmosphere.

And this may be the case here.

But LHS 1140, according to team member Nicola Astudillo-Defru, “spins more slowly and emits less high-energy radiation than other similar low-mass stars.” That’s good news because the planet is so old and so big that chances are decent that it’s managed to hold onto an atmosphere.

Another bit of good news is that terrestrial planet LHS 1140b as seen from earth passes almost directly in front of its star, and that makes it a lot easier to do follow up research that Dittmann and his colleagues are already planning.

“We’re definitely already applying for as much telescope time as we can get our hands on,” Dittmann says, “to start looking at this planet’s atmosphere. And when the next generation of telescopes come online [The James Webb Space Telescope, and the ground-based Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and European-Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) ], we’ll be in a great spot to find out what sorts of atmospheres planets around M dwarfs have.”

The Webb telescope is expected to launch next year, but the Giant Magellan telescope won’t be online until 2025, and the EELT won’t be working until 2024.

That’s a long time to wait, and undoubtedly there’ll be a long list of planets to explore by then. But the hope is that by studying the atmosphere of all these planets in the habitable zone, we might find some of the biological signatures of living things. Two of the European members of the team, Xavier Delfosse and Xavier Bonfils say that it’s the best candidate so far.

“The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterization of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1. This has been a remarkable year for exoplanet discoveries!” wrote Delfosse and Bonfils.

And there certainly will be more on the way.

 
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A new report says 40 percent of Americans live in counties with unhealthy levels of particle air pollution.

The annual “State of the Air” report, released Wednesday by the American Lung Association, also found that six of the 10 cities with the worst air pollution were in California.

The report found that 125 million Americans experience unhealthy levels of pollution, which has been linked to lung cancer, asthma and cardiovascular damage.

“While most of the nation has much cleaner air quality than even a decade ago, many cities reported their highest number of unhealthy days since the report began [18 years ago],” the report read.

The 10 worst cities for short-term particle air pollution were Bakersfield, Calif., Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, Calif., Fresno-Madera, Calif., Modesto-Merced, Calif., Fairbanks, Ala., San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, Calif., Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem, Utah, Logan, Utah-Idaho, Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif. and Reno-Carson City-Fernley, Nev.

California’s air quality issues are a result of a growing population and its numerous valleys that allow polluted air to settle, the report said. The high number of sunny days in Southern California also boost ozone levels, the report said, adding that the state would be in worse shape were it not for strict auto emission regulations as well as limiting coal-fired power plants.

The cities with the worst year-round particle air pollution were Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, Calif., Bakersfield, Calif., Fresno-Madera, Calif., San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, Calif., Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif., Modesto-Merced, Calif., El Centro, Calif., Pittsburgh-New Castle-Weirton, Pa.-Ohio-W.Va., Cleveland-Akron-Canton, Ohio and San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles-Arroyo Grande, Calif.

Just six cities recorded no days of unhealthy levels of pollution: Burlington, Vt.; Honolulu; Wilmington, N.C.; Fort Myers / Naples, Fla.; Melbourne, Fla., and Elmira, N.Y.

The report said that year-round levels of air pollution have improved, but shorter term spikes of very polluted air have risen.

“Even with continued improvement, too many people in the United States live where the air is unhealthy for them to breathe,” the report said.

The report used data from states, cities, counties, tribes and federal agencies from 2013 to 2015.

 
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