We have radars to track flying objects, but a tiny fly may be even better at tracking and grabbing fast moving prey. Scientists at the University of Cambridge learned that not only the number of lenses in the fly’s eye, but also their variety, help it focus on fast moving objects. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The U.S. Air Force is open to buying rides on previously flown SpaceX rockets to put military satellites into orbit, a move expected to cut launch costs for the Pentagon, the head of the Air Force Space Command said on Thursday.
The idea of flying on recycled rockets became a reality a week ago when privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, launched a communications satellite on a Falcon 9 booster that previously put a cargo ship into orbit for NASA.
That Falcon main stage had been recovered from a successful return landing on an ocean platform shortly after its maiden flight last April, then was relaunched and salvaged again last Thursday, marking a spaceflight first.
“I would be comfortable if we were to fly on a reused booster,” General John “Jay” Raymond told reporters at the U.S. Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “They’ve proven they can do it. … It’s going to get us to lower cost.”
SpaceX has so far won three launch contracts to fly military and national security satellites – business previously awarded exclusively to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
All those flights will take place on new Falcon 9 rockets.
SpaceX, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, has a backlog of more than 70 missions worth more than $10 billion.
After last week’s landmark launch, Musk said the company planned to fly about 20 more rockets this year, including the debut blastoff of its new heavy-lift vehicle. Up to six of those missions, including the Falcon Heavy, will use previously flown boosters, he said.
Speaking at the symposium on Wednesday, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the cost of refurbishing and reflying the Falcon 9 first stage was “substantially less than half” the cost of manufacturing a new booster – the most expensive part of the rocket. SpaceX’s website lists the cost of a basic Falcon 9 launch at $62 million.
SpaceX expects to reduce costs even further.
The company’s next goal is to launch and return a rocket and relaunch it within 24 hours. “That’s when we’ll really feel like we’ve got reusability right,” Shotwell said.
Raymond said the Air Force would need to certify that a used booster could safely deliver its satellites into orbit.
“I’m pretty comfortable we’ll get comfortable with doing it,” Raymond said. “This is just beginning.”
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Don’t look to the Kentucky Coal Museum to bring coal back.
The museum is installing solar panels on its roof, part of a project aimed at lowering the energy costs of one of the city’s largest electric customers. It’s also a symbol of the state’s efforts to move away from coal as its primary energy source as more coal-fired power plants are replaced by natural gas. The state legislature recently lifted its decades-old ban on nuclear power.
“It’s a little ironic or coincidental that you are putting solar green energy on a coal museum,” said Roger Noe, a former state representative who sponsored the legislation that created the coal museum. “Coal comes from nature, the sunrays come from nature, so it all works out to be a positive thing.”
The museum is in Benham, once a coal camp town whose population peaked at about 3,000, according to Mayor Wanda Humphrey, 85. Today, it has about 500 people.
The town’s second building was a company commissary known as the “big store,” where Humphrey would visit every day after school to order an RC Cola and a bag of peanuts, charged to her father’s account. Today, that building houses the Kentucky Coal Museum, which opened in 1994 with the help of some state funding. The museum houses relics from the state’s coal mining past, including some items from the personal collection of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” country singer Loretta Lynn.
It’s also the best place in town to get the most direct sunlight, which made it an ideal location for solar panels.
“The people here are sort of in awe of this solar thing,” Humphrey said.
The Southeast Community and Technical College, which owns the museum, expects the solar panels to save between $8,000 and $10,000 a year on energy costs, according to spokesman Brandon Robinson.
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Jupiter is extra close and extra bright this week, and that means some amazing, new close-ups.
The Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on the solar system giant Monday, and NASA released the pictures Thursday. Jupiter was a relatively close 415 million miles (668 million kilometers) away.
The planet’s Great Red Spot is especially vivid. It’s a storm big enough to swallow Earth, but is mysteriously shrinking. Hubble’s ongoing observations may help explain why. Also visible in the photos is Red Spot Jr.
On Friday, Jupiter will be in opposition. That’s when Jupiter, Earth and the sun all line up, with Earth in the middle. Jupiter will appear brighter than usual — the brightest all year. Stargazers won’t want to miss it.
Look for one of the brightest objects in the night sky, visible from sundown to sunrise near the moon.
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Cheap antibiotic disrupts negative associations in the brain
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John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth who later became the world’s oldest astronaut and a longtime U.S. senator, was laid to rest on Thursday at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Glenn, who author Tom Wolfe once called “the last true national hero America has ever had,” died four months ago in his home state of Ohio at the age of 95.
After a private service at a chapel on the cemetery grounds, a horse-drawn carriage pulled Glenn’s flag-draped casket to his burial site. There was a short graveside ceremony broadcast online by NASA Television. Then, Gen. Robert Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps, handed the flag that had draped the casket to Glenn’s 97-year-old widow, Annie Glenn. She kissed him.
Glenn was a Marine Corps test pilot when he was chosen to be one of the seven original U.S. astronauts. He was the third American in space, the first to orbit the earth.
His three laps around the world on Feb. 20, 1962, in a space capsule called Friendship 7, forged a powerful link between the former fighter pilot and the Kennedy-era quest to explore outer space as a “New Frontier.” After his mission, he received a hero’s welcome including a tickertape parade near Wall Street, in New York City’s “Canyon of Heroes.”
Wolfe chronicled the experiences of the original seven U.S. astronauts in his book, “The Right Stuff,” which later became a popular movie.
Glenn’s widespread popularity helped him get elected as a Democratic candidate to the U.S. Senator from his home state of Ohio, which he represented from 1974 to 1999.
Just before the end of his Senate career, in October 1998, the 77-year-old Glenn became the oldest astronaut, serving as a mission specialist on the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Discovery.
The NASA launch announcer at the time said, “Liftoff of Discovery with six astronaut heroes and one American legend.”
The ripple effects of the Zika virus are hitting the poor hard in Latin America and the Caribbean, and could knock back development unless states involve communities in a stronger push to tackle the disease, a U.N.-led study said Thursday.
The mosquito-borne Zika virus will cost the region between $7 billion and $18 billion from 2015 to 2017, said the report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
Large economies like Brazil will shoulder the biggest share of the cost, but poorer countries such as Belize and Haiti will suffer the severest impacts, it added.
Jessica Faieta, UNDP director for the region, said the virus — linked to birth defects in some cases where it infects pregnant women — is not only causing direct economic losses and putting health systems under stress.
“The long-term consequences of the Zika virus can undermine decades of social development, hard-earned health gains and slow progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals,” she said in a statement.
Focusing on Brazil, Colombia and Suriname, the report calculated that the economic impact of the virus was five times higher for the Caribbean than South America, and could cost the Caribbean as much as $9 billion in lost revenues over the three-year period as tourists stay away.
Labelling Zika a “disease of poverty,” the study said support was not reaching the region’s most vulnerable who often lack access to health and social services.
Countries are struggling to coordinate and finance programs to control, monitor and diagnose the virus, it added.
Walter Cotte, IFRC’s director for the Americas, said funds should be used to involve communities in responding to the disease, so as to build their resilience and reduce stigma.
Carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also hosts dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever, Zika has spread to more than 60 countries and territories since the outbreak was identified in 2015 in Brazil.
Here the alarm was raised over Zika’s ability to cause microcephaly — a birth defect marked by small head size and underdeveloped brains — and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder.
Social inequities
Spending more money on tackling Zika now would have long-term benefits and curb the spread of other diseases carried by the same mosquito, said the report.
With women on the fringes of fast-growing cities among those most at risk, it called for states to step up help for poor communities where many lack access to sanitation, health care and jobs.
“While a swift and timely emergency response is a necessary step in controlling the Zika epidemic, there is a growing need to address the quieter effects of the outbreak — the social impacts, economic loss and hardship — which are exacerbated by pre-existing inequities,” the report said.
Families looking after children born with related birth defects will need greater assistance, partly to help with long-term care, which could cost up to $5 billion in lost income as parents stay out of the work force, said the report.
It estimated the cost of microcephaly to be $8 billion, largely because people born with the disorder are unlikely to be able to work, while costs linked to Guillain-Barre could reach $3 billion.
The World Health Organization projected some 3 to 4 million people would be infected with Zika in Latin America by early 2017, saying in February the region was recording lower numbers of infections than last year, but countries must stay vigilant.
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A cancer causing strain of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, has infected 25 percent of men and 20 percent of women in the United States, new statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Furthermore, some 45 percent of men have a genital form of the virus.
“Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually-transmitted infection in the United States,” the team at the NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote.
“Some HPV types can cause genital warts and are considered low risk, with a small chance for causing cancer. Other types are considered high risk, causing cancer in different areas of the body including the cervix and vagina in women, penis in men, and anus and oropharynx [mouth and throat] in both men and women.”
The virus has been linked to head and neck cancer as well as cervical cancer.
According to NBC News, doctors think about 70 percent of head and neck cancers are caused by HPV spread through oral sex. They add that by 2020, head and neck cancers will be more common than the cervical cancer caused by the virus.
Roughly four percent of adults are infected with an oral, cancer causing strain of HPV. Men had a higher rate than women.
For people under 25, there is a vaccine that can defend against the cancer causing strains of HPV. Among older adults, the virus continues to be passed around.
According to NBC, the FDA-approved vaccines are Cervarix and Gardasil.
There are 109 known strains of HPV.
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More than 400 icebergs have drifted into the North Atlantic shipping lanes over the past week in an unusually large swarm for this early in the season, forcing vessels to slow to a crawl or take detours of hundreds of miles.
Experts are attributing it to uncommonly strong counter-clockwise winds that are drawing the icebergs south, and perhaps also global warming, which is accelerating the process by which chunks of the Greenland ice sheet break off and float away.
As of Monday, there were about 450 icebergs near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, up from 37 a week earlier, according to the U.S. Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol in New London, Connecticut. Those kinds of numbers are usually not seen until late May or early June. The average for this time of year is about 80.
In the waters close to where the Titanic went down in 1912, the icebergs are forcing ships to take precautions.
Icebergs force detours
Instead of cutting straight across the ocean, trans-Atlantic vessels are taking detours that can add around 400 miles to the trip. That’s a day and a half of added travel time for many large cargo ships.
Close to the Newfoundland coast, cargo ships owned by Oceanex are throttling way back to 3 or 4 knots as they make their way to their homeport in St. John’s, which can add up to a day to the trip, said executive chairman, Capt. Sid Hynes.
One ship was pulled out of service for repairs after hitting a chunk of ice, he said.
“It makes everything more expensive,” Hynes said Wednesday. “You’re burning more fuel, it’s taking a longer time, and it’s hard on the equipment.” He called it a “very unusual year.”
‘Extreme ice season’
Coast Guard Cmdr. Gabrielle McGrath, who leads the ice patrol, said she has never seen such a drastic increase in such a short time. Adding to the danger, three icebergs were discovered outside the boundaries of the area the Coast Guard had advised mariners to avoid, she said.
McGrath is predicting a fourth consecutive “extreme ice season” with more than 600 icebergs in the shipping lanes.
Most icebergs entering the North Atlantic have “calved” off the Greenland ice sheet. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said it is possible climate change is leading to more icebergs in the shipping lanes, but wind patterns are also important.
Ice patrol a success
In 2014, there were 1,546 icebergs in the shipping lanes — the sixth most severe season on record since 1900, according to the patrol. There were 1,165 icebergs in 2015 and 687 in 2016.
The International Ice Patrol was formed after the sinking of the Titanic to monitor iceberg danger in the North Atlantic and warn ships. It conducts reconnaissance flights that are used to produce charts.
In 104 years, no ship that has heeded the warnings has struck an iceberg, according to the ice patrol.
Teaching is a stressful profession. A 2014 survey found that nearly half of U.S. teachers say they experience a lot of daily stress. That affects their health, well-being, and job satisfaction.
Jayne Donohoe is out to change that, with exercise. The physical education teacher at Gunpowder Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, notes that physical activity produces endorphins — chemicals in the brain that act as natural painkillers — and also improves the ability to sleep, which in turn reduces stress.
She organized a Teachers Fitness group at her school, which meets after the day’s classes and offers a variety of exercise classes.
“Today we’re doing Bodyflow’ which is like a yoga-Pilates-type class. Before that we had a step aerobics class, or we had a Bootcamp,” she said. “We all come from a variety of shapes and sizes and fitness levels. If I can get them to show up, I can usually keep them in here. That’s probably the hardest part because they are tired. I tell them ‘You’re tired. Once you come here and exercise, it’s going to give you energy.’ I started my workday at 7 a.m., so it’s a long day for me, but I know it’s important. So I’m here.”
Watch: Teaching Teachers a Healthier Lifestyle
Keep Teachers Healthy
Many workplaces in the area offer similar programs. But Jenny Ward, spokeswoman for Baltimore County Public schools’ Employee Wellness, says they are especially important for teachers.
“They do have a very specific job during the day and they’re really tied to their classrooms with their students. They don’t have as much free time or flexibility in their day,” she said. “So it’s more difficult for them to schedule physical activity in their day, which is why we offer classes after work. So, as soon as the students left, they can change to their fitness attire and go to the gym with all of their coworkers who participate.”
The program is a big hit. It draws teachers from nearby schools, and they’re not all women.
“We have three men teachers,” Donohoe said. “One was staying today, but when the class got changed to Bodyflow instead of Bootcamp, he decided to go to his gym. The two other teachers are not interested yet. But I’ll get them, don’t you worry!”
Exercise and be happy
Gunpowder Principal Wendy Cunningham has watched attendance rise since Donohoe started the program a year and half ago.
“The teachers are excited to be together, to exercise, to support one another, to be healthy and maintain healthy habits,” she said. “Learning about how to manage stress has been extremely important. That is helping them to be more productive, be more positive in the classroom and have a lot more patience with all students every day,” Cunningham added.
“It’s very important for stress reduction, for just making you feel better about yourself,” Donohoe said.
Participating teachers agree. Third-grade teacher Ashley Schuchardt says being part of this group makes exercising more fun.
“Really, it’s the people,” she said. “They are a great support team. They really help you after a really long day. They help you keep going. I’m not a person who loves exercise, but they really make it fun. So I keep coming back week after week.”
Eating right
Exercise is only one component of Donohoe’s Wellness program. Good nutrition is another.
“We have a weight loss healthy teachers program that I also organize,” she said. “We meet once a week. I bring in guest speakers on motivation and nutrition. We’ve been doing that since last year. We’ve lost over 300 pounds (136 kg), 18 of us, and you feel better and healthier, and you’re drinking more water and you’re eating better.”
Employee Wellness spokeswoman Jenny Ward is excited about the prospects for the program.
“We’re happy to say we have more teachers and staff participating than we have before,” she said. “But it’s still not high enough. We still have quite a few more staff that we try to get involved in healthy eating, healthy activity, stress management, and all components of wellness.”
Ward hopes to see every school offering on-site fitness classes at the end of the workday — in Baltimore and beyond.
Teaching is a stressful job. To help teachers take care of their mind and body, a wellness program was introduced in Baltimore County public schools. Faiza Elmasry visited a school that offers the new program. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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As part of his policy to roll back what he calls “job killing” environmental regulations, President Trump has proposed cancelling funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program – a widely supported environmental project involving six states. In its 34 years, the program has allowed America’s largest estuary to recover from near disaster.
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U.S. astronaut John Glenn, who died in December at age 95, will be buried Thursday in Arlington National Cemetery, a place of honor for members of the U.S. military.
His family and invited guests, including astronauts and dignitaries, will say goodbye to the first American to orbit Earth at a small private service at the Old Post Chapel beginning at 9 a.m.
The U.S. Marine Corps will begin a live stream at 9:40 a.m. (EDT) that will include a processional to the graveside by caisson, a flyover, a graveside service and taps. Streaming video also will be available on NASA TV.
Glenn served as a U.S. senator from Ohio for 24 years and founded the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University.
In Glenn’s honor, President Donald Trump has ordered flags at federal entities and institutions flown at half-staff Thursday, his press secretary tweeted, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich has done the same at public grounds and buildings across Glenn’s home state.
Glenn played a historic part in the U.S. space race, piloting one of the United States’ earliest manned space missions and later, at age 77, returning to space to become the oldest astronaut ever to do so.
Glenn, seen as an all-American hero, has been the subject of heartfelt tributes since his death. After his death December 8, his body lay in state in the Ohio Capitol. He was memorialized in a service at Ohio State University, where his children told mourners that their father repeatedly asked them, “What have you done for your country today?”
Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden memorialized Glenn at that service by saying, “He knew by his upbringing that ordinary Americans can do extraordinary things.”
Arlington Cemetery, Glenn’s final resting place, is where many American military heroes and statesmen are buried. A national monument to unknown soldiers is located there, to honor soldiers whose wartime deaths could not be documented.
The cemetery sits on a hill in Virginia overlooking the Potomac River, with a clear view of the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.
It is one of the most-visited sites in the Washington area.
Some information for this report from AP.
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When people think of osteoporosis, they usually think of women, but men can get osteoporosis, too.
Osteoporosis literally means “porous bones.” Normal bones look somewhat like honeycombs. But with osteoporosis, the bones become so thin in places that even a simple stretch can result in a bone fracture.
Risk factors are smoking, drinking, having a family history of osteoporosis, and leading a sedentary lifestyle.
Two hundred million people have osteoporosis worldwide and that number is expected to shoot up dramatically. The International Osteoporosis Foundation projects that the global incidence of hip fracture will double by 2025, and nearly triple by 2050, when it will affect more than 6 million people.
At least one study says hip fractures will increase in men by 310 percent. Hip fractures in women also are projected to rise by 240 percent.
These fractures can be fatal, so there’s a huge need for preventive strategies. One is exercise, but even active people can have low bone density, which may lead to osteoporosis.
Missourian Dean Hargett bikes more than 160 kilometers a week, but he was shocked to learn it did nothing for his bones. He found out he had low bone density.
“It alarmed me…I don’t want to have fragile bones,” Hargett said.
A decrease in bone density could lead to osteoporosis. Pam Hinton, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, conducts research on nutrition and physical activity on bone health. She said about one in four men will have an osteoporotic-related fracture in their lifetime.
Over a 12-month period, Hinton studied how resistance and jump-training exercises affected the bone health for men ages 25 to 60. The results showed these exercises did more than just slow the rate of bone loss.
“We actually saw an increase in bone mass with either type of exercise that was a very encouraging and exciting result,” Hinton said.
The exercises decreased the level of sclerostin, a protein that slows bone growth. At the same time, it increased a hormone that promotes bone growth.
Hargett now knows he has to do more than cycle and swim to strengthen his bones. Weightlifting is now a regular part of his exercise routine. Besides getting the right kind of exercise, getting enough vitamin D and calcium also can keep bones strong.
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The world’s most advanced space telescope, which NASA plans to launch late next year, is to undergo another important test – this time in a chamber capable of creating deep-space temperatures. VOA’s George Putic reports that being able to function in extremely cold conditions will enable the telescope to go back in time and see how the first planets formed billions of years ago.
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The number of people with osteoporosis is expected to grow dramatically. Weight lifting, resistance training is part of the answer. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on a study about men and bone health at the University of Missouri.
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Russia is open to extending its partnership in the International Space Station with the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada beyond the currently planned end of the program in 2024, the head of the Russian space agency said on Tuesday.
“We are ready to discuss it,” Igor Komarov, general director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told reporters at the U.S. Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, when asked if his country would consider a four-year extension.
The $100 billion science and engineering laboratory, orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, has been permanently staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since November 2000.
The U.S. space agency, NASA, spends about $3 billion a year on the space station program, a level of funding that is endorsed by the Trump administration and Congress.
House panel oversees NASA
A U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees NASA has begun looking at whether to extend the program beyond 2024, or use the money to speed up planned human space initiatives to the moon and Mars.
Komarov said many medical and technological issues remain to be resolved before humans travel beyond the station’s orbit.
“I think that we need to prolong our cooperation in low-Earth orbit because we haven’t resolved all the issues and problems that we face now,” Komarov said.
The U.S.-Russian human space partnership has long endured despite the swirl of political tensions between the two countries. In 1975, for example, at the height of the Cold War, an American Apollo and Russian Soyuz capsule docked together in orbit.
“We appreciate that … political problems do not touch this sphere,” Komarov said.
Russia plans for independent outpost in orbit
Moscow has an alternative if relations with the United States sour. Russia last year unveiled a plan to detach some of its modules and use them to create a new, independent outpost in orbit.
“We adjusted and made some minor changes in our programs … but it doesn’t mean that we don’t want to continue our cooperation,” Komarov said. “We just want to be on the safe side and make sure we can continue our research.”
The United States is dependent on Russia’s propellant module to keep the station in orbit.
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Providing formal land ownership titles to indigenous communities is one of the most effective ways to preserve endangered rainforest in Peru’s Amazon, said a study published on Monday.
Forest destruction dropped 75 percent on land once it was formally granted to indigenous communities, said the study by American researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Analyzing satellite data and land ownership certificates, the researchers compared forest cover on territory before and in the two years after it was formally titled to indigenous communities.
They make the case that granting land titles to indigenous communities who currently control about 10 million hectares of forests in Peru has direct, measurable benefits for Amazon preservation.
“Titling reduces forest clearing by three-quarters,” said Allen Blackman, a senior official with the Inter-American Development Bank and a co-author of the study.
The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, teeming with biodiversity and spanning nine countries in South America – the bulk of it in Brazil. More than half of Peru’s territory is Amazon rainforest.
Protecting the Amazon, which has been shrinking in Peru due to illegal logging and other activities, is crucial for combating climate change because forests suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and regulate the planet’s climate.
“Communities without titles don’t have the legal standing to complain to regulators when their lands have been encroached on,” Blackman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Once land has been formally titled, indigenous communities can get advice from government regulators on the best tactics for forest preservation and other official services, Blackman said.
With a fast-growing economy based on mining and its natural resources, the Andean nation of Peru has about 1,200 indigenous communities inhabited by 330,000 people, researchers said.
Indigenous activists hailed the study.
“Giving indigenous communities formal legal title to our lands protects tropical forest from illegal logging,” said Edwin Vazquez, a land rights campaigner with the Peru-based Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin.
“Without us, the mission to slow the emissions that threaten the … health of our entire planet is doomed to failure,” Vazquez said in a statement.
Indigenous communities and local residents manage about a third of all forests in developing countries – more than twice the share in government-protected areas, Blackman said.
The study implies that titling land for indigenous people could be effective for forest conservation in other countries, Blackman said, but more research is needed to test that hypothesis.
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Former U.S. President George W. Bush touted his signature aid project for Africa during a visit to Botswana on Tuesday, saying he hoped Washington would recognize its importance in saving lives threatened by AIDS.
Launched in 2003 during the first Bush administration, PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is the world’s largest provider of AIDS-fighting medicine and has branched out over the years to include provision of services for cervical cancer, which is linked to HIV infections in women.
U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed steep cuts in the budget for diplomacy and foreign aid but his administration has so far said it will “maintain current commitments and all current patient levels on HIV/AIDS treatment” under PEPFAR.
Bush, visiting a clinic with his wife Laura that provides screening and treatment for cervical cancer, said he hoped such commitments would remain.
“I hope our government when they analyze what works around the world will understand that PEPFAR has saved over 11 million lives,” he said.
“And while progress has been made we’ve got to continue to stay in this battle in order to save lives. Every human life matters. And I hope the people of America understand that through their generosity millions now live.”
Bush said cervical cancer was now the leading cause of death among women in Botswana, a sparsely-populated southern African nation where one in five adults is infected with HIV, according to the United Nations.
Bush, a Republican, had historically low popularity ratings – about 33 percent – when he left office.
But the Obama ministration maintained PEPFAR and the program enjoys bipartisan support – a rarity in Washington’s polarized atmosphere.
Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, an initiative of the George W. Bush Institute, works with PEPFAR on programs to reduce mortality rates among women from cervical and breast cancer in developing countries.
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Doctors have used an electrical stimulation technique that allowed a paralyzed man to move his legs, stand and “make steplike motions.”
Four years ago, a snowmobile accident left Jared Chinnock, in his 20s, of Wisconsin, paralyzed from the mid-torso down.
“I just thought I got the wind knocked out of me and needed to catch my breath and realized I couldn’t get up,” he told KARE television. “I was just pretty much set in my ways of I’m going to be in my wheelchair the rest of my life and I was all right with it.”
But a new technique offers Chinnock some hope.
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic and UCLA found that physical therapy combined with electrical stimulation may one day allow some paralyzed people to “regain control over previously paralyzed movements.”
“We’re really excited, because our results went beyond our expectations,” says neurosurgeon Kendall Lee, principal investigator and director of Mayo Clinic’s Neural Engineering Laboratory. “These are initial findings, but the patient is continuing to make progress.”
To start the study, Chinnock did 22 weeks of physical therapy to prepare his muscles to move. He was regularly tested during that time to see changes and discovered it led them to characterize his injury as “discomplete,” meaning “dormant connections across his injury may remain.
After the physical therapy, surgeons implanted an electrode near the injured part of Chinnock’s spinal cord. The electrode is connected to a computer-controlled instrument under the skin on his abdomen.
The device senses thoughts of leg movement and sends electrical current to the spinal cord allowing Chinnock to move.
After a recovery period, Chinnock resumed physical therapy with the electric stimulation. Within two weeks, he was able to “control his muscles while lying on his side, resulting in leg movements,” make steplike motions while on his side and while standing with some support. He was also able to stand with some support.
“This has really set the tone for our post-surgical rehabilitation – trying to use that function the patient recovered to drive even more return of abilities,” says Kristin Zhao, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and director of Mayo Clinic’s Assistive and Restorative Technology Laboratory.
The results show that others with “discomplete” spinal cord injuries may benefit from the same kind of therapy, though researchers say more study needs to be done.
“While these are early results, it speaks to how Mayo Clinic researchers relentlessly pursue discoveries and innovative solutions that address the unmet needs of patients,” says Gregory Gores, M.D., executive dean of research at Mayo Clinic. “These teams highlight Mayo Clinic’s unique culture of collaboration, which brings together scientists and physician experts who work side by side to accelerate scientific discoveries into critical advances for patient care.”
Though Chinnock could not feel his legs moving, he is optimistic.
“Hopefully maybe walking again someday, if not very far at least a little ways,” he told KARE.
The study appears Tuesday in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
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A common antibiotic called doxycycline can disrupt the formation of negative thoughts and fears in the brain and may prove useful in treating or preventing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to research by British and Swiss scientists.
In a specially designed trial involving 76 healthy volunteers who were given either the drug or a placebo dummy pill, those who were on doxycycline had a 60 percent lower fear response than those who were not.
Scientists said the antibiotic works in this way because it blocks certain proteins outside nerve cells, called matrix enzymes, which our brains need to form memories.
“We have demonstrated a proof-of-principle for an entirely new treatment strategy for PTSD,” said Dominik Bach, a professor at University College London and the University of Zurich, who co-led the research team.
In the trial, volunteers were given either doxycycline or a placebo and put in front of a computer. The screen would flash either blue or red, and one of the colors was associated with a 50 percent chance of getting a painful electric shock. After 160 flashes with colors in random order, participants learned to associate the ‘bad’ color with the shock.
A week later, under no medication, the volunteers repeated the experiment. This time there were no electric shocks, but a loud sound played after either color was shown.
Fear responses were measured by tracking eye blinks, as this is an instinctive response to sudden threats. The fear memory was calculated by subtracting the baseline startle response “to the sound on the ‘good’ color” from the response to the sound when the ‘bad’ color was showing.
While the fear response was 60 percent lower in those who had doxycycline in the first session, the researchers found that, importantly, other cognitive measures – including sensory memory and attention – were not affected.
“When we talk about reducing fear memory, we’re not talking about deleting the memory of what actually happened,” Bach said in a statement about the findings.
“The participants may not forget that they received a shock when the screen was red, but they ‘forget’ to be instinctively scared when they next see a red screen.
“Learning to fear threats is an important ability … helping us to avoid dangers. (But) over-prediction of threat can cause tremendous suffering and distress in anxiety disorders such as PTSD.”
PTSD is caused by an overactive fear memory and includes a broad range of psychological symptoms that can develop after someone goes through a traumatic event.
Bach said he and his team would now like to explore doxycycline’s potential effects further, including in a phenomenon called “reconsolidation” of fear memories – an approach to helping people with PTSD – in which memories and associations can be changed after an event when the patient experiences or imagines similar situations.
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The Trump administration said Monday it was cutting off U.S. funding to the United Nations agency for reproductive health, accusing the agency of supporting population control programs in China that include coercive abortion.
By halting assistance to the U.N. Population Fund, the Trump administration is following through on promises to let socially conservative policies that President Donald Trump embraced in his campaign determine the way the U.S. government operates and conducts itself in the world. Though focused on forced abortion — a concept opposed by liberals and conservatives alike — the move to invoke the “Kemp-Kasten amendment” was sure to be perceived as a gesture to anti-abortion advocates and other conservative interests.
The U.N. fund will lose $32.5 million in funding from the 2017 budget, the State Department said, with funds shifted to similar programs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the U.N. fund would also lose out on tens of millions of additional dollars it has typically received from the U.S. in “non-core” funds.
Under a three-decade-old law, the U.S. is barred from funding organizations that aid or participate in forced abortion of involuntary sterilization. It’s up to each administration to determine which organizations meet that condition. The U.N. Population Fund has typically been cut off during Republican administrations and had its funding resumed when Democrats control the White House.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was notified of the move by the State Department in a letter received Monday. The letter followed a formal designation by Tom Shannon, the State Department’s undersecretary of political affairs, that said the fund “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
In a lengthy memorandum obtained by The Associated Press, the State Department said the U.N. fund partners with China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, responsible for overseeing China’s “two-child policy” — a loosened version of the notorious “one-child policy” in place from 1979 to 2015. It said the U.N. collaborates with the Chinese agency on family planning. Still, the memo acknowledged there was no evidence of U.N. support for forced abortions or sterilization in China.
The U.N. Population Fund, known as UNFPA, said it regretted the U.S. move and argued it was “erroneous” to suggest it was complicit in China’s policies.
“UNFPA refutes this claim, as all of its work promotes the human rights of individuals and couples to make their own decisions, free of coercion or discrimination,” the agency said in a statement.
The designation was the latest move by the Trump administration to prioritize traditionally conservative issues in the federal budget. The Trump administration has vowed to cut all dollars for climate change programming, and also restored the so-called global gag rule, which prohibits funding to non-governmental groups that support even voluntary abortions.
The Trump administration has also signaled that it no longer sees a need for the U.S. to so generously fund U.N. and other international organizations. The White House has proposed cutting roughly one-third from the State Department’s budget, with much of it expected to come from foreign aid and global organization dollars, although Congress is expected to restore at least some of that funding
The U.N. agency’s mission involves promoting universal access to family planning and reproductive health, with a goal of reducing maternal deaths and practices like female genital mutilation. The cut-off funds will be “reprogrammed” to USAID’s Global Health Programs account to focus on similar issues, said a State Department official, who wasn’t authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity.
The Kemp-Kasten amendment, enacted in 1985, led to some of the U.N. agency’s funding being initially cut off, then restored by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993, USAID said in a report. Republican George W. Bush’s administration reversed the decision in 2002, but President Barack Obama — a Democrat — gave the funding back after taking office.
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Babies cry more in Britain, Canada, Italy and Netherlands than in other countries, while newborns in Denmark, Germany and Japan cry and fuss the least, researchers said on Monday.
In research looking at how much babies around the world cry in their first three months, psychologists from Britain have created the first universal charts for normal amounts of crying during that period.
“Babies are already very different in how much they cry in the first weeks of life,” said Dieter Wolker, who led the study at Warwick University.
“We may learn more from looking at cultures where there is less crying — [including] whether this may be due to parenting or other factors relating to pregnancy experiences or genetics.”
The highest levels of colic — defined as crying more than three hours a day for at least three days a week — were found in babies in Britain, Canada and Italy, while the lowest colic rates were found in Denmark and Germany.
On average, the study found, babies cry for around two hours a day in the first two weeks. They then cry a little more in the following few weeks until they peak at around two hours 15 minutes a day at six weeks. This then reduces to an average of one hour 10 minutes by the time they are 12 weeks old.
But there are wide variations, with some babies crying as little as 30 minutes a day, and others more than five hours.
The research, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, was a meta-analysis of studies covering some 8,700 babies in countries including Germany, Denmark, Japan, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Britain.
Wolker said the new crying chart would help health workers reassure parents whether their baby is crying within a normal range in the first three months, or may need extra support.
Cereals such as wheat and barley are important food plants, grown almost everywhere in the world. But they are susceptible to diseases and one of the most damaging is a fungal pathogen that causes the dreaded “wheat head blight” or “wheat scab.” Using modern gene editing technique scientists have discovered a new and effective way to fight the disease.
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