Scientists working at Cambridge University in England have coaxed a collection of mouse stem cells to turn into a mouse embryo. This breakthrough could change the way scientists study early development and how it can go wrong early in a pregnancy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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If you were a casual observer watching Argonne National Laboratory scientist Seth Darling work, it would be easy to miss the low-tech but groundbreaking invention he’s concocted in his brightly lit workspace. 

It doesn’t have wires or circuitry, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t do much of anything. It is in fact, at least at first glance, simply a sponge.

“It looks real simple when you demonstrate it, right?” Darling explained as he lowered the small, dark-colored foam sponges into a bowl of water mixed with blue oil. “I mean, you just stick it down there and it works. But behind that is a lot of work.”

Darling explains that what we can see with the human eye — these dark-colored pieces of foam, or sponges — isn’t the major breakthrough. 

It’s what’s in, and on, the sponges that is revolutionary.

“After we do our treatment to it, and we create this Oleo Sponge, you put it on there and it’s got a voracious appetite for oil. It just soaks that oil right up,” he said.

Cleaning, saving oil

While the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago is best known for its contributions to nuclear energy development, it is also an incubator for technological innovation and discovery, the very environment where Darling created the Oleo Sponge.

“So we’ve been working on this Oleo Sponge project for almost two years,” Darling told VOA. “The underlying technology is something that we’ve been working on for much longer.”

He explains the treatment that gives the Oleo Sponge that “voracious appetite” is the real innovation developed at Argonne — something Darling and his associates call Sequential Infiltration Synthesis, or SIS.

“It was just a new way to make materials,” Darling said.

SIS works at the nano level. When hard metal oxide atoms “with complicated nanostructures” are infused throughout the fibers of the foam, it gives it the extremely effective quality of allowing the foam to bind with the oil in the water, essentially separating the two liquids.

The breakthrough could dramatically change cleanup of oil spills, particularly the more difficult task of retrieving oil below the surface of the water.

“Once it all goes down below the surface of the water and you have clouds of droplets under the surface, I’m not aware of any technology today that can actually clean those up. And Oleo Sponge can,” Darling said.

But the Oleo Sponge doesn’t just clean up the oil — it saves it. 

Oil spilled into water is usually burned off or unusable after cleanup efforts, but the Oleo Sponge can collect, separate and deposit the oil for further use. 

Flood of interest

The sponge itself can also be re-used and recycled, all qualities that have brought a flood of interest to Argonne’s doors.

“It’s a wide variety of companies that are interested in it,” said Hemant Bhimnathwala, with Argonne Laboratory’s Business Development Group. “We’ve got inquiries from about 100-plus companies in the last few days … who want to be partners in a slew of things from manufacturing the foam to distribution.”

While oil spill cleanup in bodies of water is the most clearly identifiable use for the Oleo Sponge, the SIS technology behind it could offer breakthroughs in a variety of other ways, yet to be discovered.

“This application is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bhimnathwala said.

It is an iceberg Seth Darling and other scientists at Argonne are still delving into, while the Oleo Sponge continues to make its journey into the wider market — and hopefully the world’s bodies of water — in the coming years.
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday salvaged half of the $6 million nosecone of its rocket, in what the space entrepreneur deemed an important feat in the drive to recover more of its launch hardware and cut the cost of space flights.

Shortly after the main section of SpaceX’s first recycled Falcon 9 booster landed itself on a platform in the ocean, half of the rocket’s nosecone, which protected a communications satellite during launch, splashed down via parachute nearby.

“That was the cherry on the cake,” Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, told reporters after launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Measuring 43 feet (13 meters) long and 17 feet (5 meters) in diameter, the nosecone is big enough to hold a school bus. It separates into two pieces, exposing the satellite, about 4 minutes after liftoff.

As a test, SpaceX outfitted the fairing with thrusters and a steerable parachute.

“It’s its own little spacecraft,” Musk said. “The thrusters maintain its orientation as it re-enters and then … the parachute steers it to a particular location.”

SpaceX has focused most of its efforts and more than $1 billion into developing technologies to recover the Falcon 9’s main section, which accounts for about 75 percent of the $62 million rocket. Musk’s goal is to cut the cost of spaceflight so that humanity can migrate beyond Earth.

“I hope people will start to think about it as a real goal to establish a civilization on Mars,” he said.

Landing on ‘bouncy castle’

After some debate about whether the nosecone could be recovered, Musk said he told his engineering team, “Imagine you had $6 million in cash on a pallet flying through the air that’s just going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that? Yes, you would.”

Musk envisions deploying a kind of “bouncy castle” for the fairing to land on so it can be recovered intact and reused.

The company plans up to six more flights of recycled boosters this year, including two that will strapped alongside a third, new first stage for the debut test flight of a heavy-lift rocket.

Originally slated to fly in 2013, Falcon Heavy is now expected to fly late this summer.

“At first it sounded easy: We’ll just take two first stages and use them as strap-on boosters,” Musk said. “It was actually shockingly difficult to go from single core to a triple-core vehicle.”

SpaceX also may try to land the rocket’s upper-stage section, a feat the company has never attempted. “Odds of success low, but maybe worth a shot,” Musk wrote Friday on Twitter.

Privately owned SpaceX also is developing a commercial space taxi to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a venture to send two space tourists on a trip around the moon and a Mars lander that is slated to launch in 2020.
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U.S. researchers have begun enrolling people in the next phase of testing for a vaccine to protect against Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that can cause birth defects in pregnant women.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told reporters Friday that the Zika vaccine had cleared preliminary safety hurdles and would now be tested on human volunteers to see whether it is effective.

In the study, funded by the U.S. government, researchers aim to enroll more than 2,400 healthy volunteers from areas where mosquitoes carry the Zika virus — parts of the southern United States, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Panama and Mexico.

Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the trial would begin with a small number of people testing different doses or strengths of vaccine. Once the dosage is decided, the larger part of the study could begin by June, when the volunteers will receive either the vaccine or a placebo.

Participants will be monitored for two years to see whether the vaccine protects against Zika infection.

The vaccine being tested is a new type, called a DNA vaccine. Traditionally, vaccines are made using killed or weakened viruses, which increase the recipients’ ability to fight off an active infection.

The DNA vaccine contains no actual virus, but has genes extracted from Zika viruses. Once inside the body, the genes form particles resembling Zika that cannot cause infection. If all goes well, the gene particles should induce volunteers’ immune systems to produce antibodies capable of repelling the full virus.

NIH researchers also are studying more traditional Zika vaccines, but those are not yet ready for human trials.       

The DNA vaccine trial is expected to cost $100 million, but Fauci said the government was in talks with pharmaceutical companies to share the costs of the final stage of testing, in return for rights to manufacture the vaccine in the future.

Zika typically causes no symptoms or only mild ones, such as fever and body aches. If the virus infects a pregnant woman, however, it can result in birth defects in newborns, including microcephaly, which is characterized by an abnormally small head and brain, accompanied by marked developmental disorders.

Zika is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes, but it can also be transmitted via sexual contact.
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“This is nice, it tickles me,” Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.

Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings songs, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions, aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

If Finn gets too rough, the similarly sized Kaspar cries: “Ouch, that hurt me.” A therapist is on hand to encourage the child to rectify his behavior by tickling the robot’s feet.

Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark World Autism Day on Sunday, the university want Kaspar to help more people.

“Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to,” Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.

Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.

TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early-years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.

“We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues,” said deputy principal Alice Lynch. “We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he’s started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So, things like that are just a massive progression.”

Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar’s designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy-to-process features.

Autism support groups have been impressed.

“Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too,” Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society’s Centre for Autism, told Reuters.

“This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum.”
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Deadly cholera is spreading through drought-ravaged Somalia as clean water sources dry up, a top aid official said, deepening a humanitarian crisis in a country that is on the verge of famine.

The Horn of Africa nation has recorded more than 18,000 cases of cholera so far this year, up from around 15,000 in all of 2016 and 5,000 in a normal year, Johan Heffinck, the Somalia head of EU Humanitarian Aid, said in an email on Thursday.

The current strain of the disease is unusually deadly, killing around 1 in 45 patients.

Somalia is suffering from a severe drought that means more than half of its 12 million citizens are expected to need aid by July. Families have been forced to drink slimy, infected water after the rains failed and wells and rivers dried up.

“We are very close to famine,” Heffinck said.

The Security Information Network (FSIN), which is co-sponsored by the United Nations food agency, said in a report on Friday Somalia was one of four African countries at high risk of famine.

Somalia’s rainy season normally runs from March to May, but there has been no rain this month.

The drought has hit particularly hard in the breakaway northern region of Somaliland, where the rains began to fail in 2015, killing off animals that nomadic families rely on to survive.

‘This is the last bottle’

Listless, skinny children last week lay in crowded wards in the main hospital in the regional capital Hargeisa.

Three-year-old Nimaan Hassid had diarrhea for 20 days before his mother brought him to hospital. He weighs only 6.5 kilograms, less than half the normal weight for his age.

Doctors say he is suffering from severe malnutrition but his grandmother, 60-year-old Fadumo Hussein, told Reuters the family has no money for food or clean water.

“We don’t have mineral water to give to the sick child. This is the last bottle,” she said, carefully pouring it into a feeding tube inserted through his nose.

In the malnutrition ward in the general hospital of Somaliland’s second city Burao, Doctor Hamud Ahmed said children were also being hit hard by diseases like tuberculosis, meningitis and measles.

Children’s admissions reached almost 60 in March, up fourfold from October.

“This is due to the drought,” Ahmed said. “When families lose all their livestock and children do not get milk, this is the famine that causes the children to suffer.”

If the rains fail, the country could tip into famine.

Somalia’s last famine, in 2011, killed more than 260,000 people. Heffinck said aid agencies were working overtime to try to prevent a similar disaster, trucking in clean water and stepping up the distribution of food and cash.

“The big difference this time is that we have started the preparation and scaling up of the relief operations earlier,” he said.
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When Ebola struck Liberia, consumption of bushmeat dropped dramatically. But in an odd twist, poorer households cut their consumption much more than well-to-do households.

The findings have implications for public health, as well as wildlife conservation. Education campaigns about the risks and consequences of bushmeat hunting have focused on rural villagers near protected nature reserves.

But, it turns out, the more tenacious consumers may be the wealthier city-dwellers.

Bushmeat — wild animals like monkeys, duikers and pangolins — is an essential protein source for many rural West Africans, but it’s also a favorite of urbanites.

Satisfying that demand has created, in some places, “empty forests” that are otherwise pristine but are devoid of critical wildlife.

In addition, bushmeat can spread diseases like Ebola because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “human infections have been associated with hunting, butchering and processing meat from infected animals.”

Before the 2015 Ebola outbreak, Jessica Junker and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology based in Leipzig, Germany, had studied Liberians’ preferences for bushmeat compared to chicken or fish.

Tradition, taste

“We asked people, ‘If you were at a party and you could choose the type of meat you could eat there, what would you like to eat?'” Junker told VOA. That scenario aimed to take cost out of the equation.

Bushmeat often topped the list.

People prefer the taste, Junker said. Bushmeat also is often cheaper than domesticated meat. Plus, it’s a traditional part of their diet.

“Many people have told me, ‘Well, we’ve always eaten bushmeat. Our fathers have eaten bushmeat,'” Junker said.

When Ebola hit, she decided it would be a good time to see how attitudes toward eating wildlife had changed.

Bushmeat consumption dropped, as expected. However, it dropped less among wealthier people.

Rich or poor, before Ebola, people said they ate bushmeat every other day on average. During the outbreak, that dropped to once a month among the lowest-income survey respondents, but once a week among the highest-income respondents.

It’s not clear why that should be, but Junker notes that poorer people hunt bushmeat themselves. “During the Ebola crisis, a lot of people didn’t leave their houses,” she said.

In the cities, it was illegal to sell bushmeat. But “there was an underground bushmeat market,” she said. “If you wanted to get bushmeat, you could still get it,” as long as you had money.

Awareness campaigns

The study was published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

It presents a challenge for those seeking to preserve wildlife or protect public health.

“If you really like something, you’re not very likely to change that,” Junker said. “Ebola is quite a drastic event, but it doesn’t change your preference. You stop eating it because it’s dangerous.”

She says her group would like to repeat the survey now that the crisis is over. They suspect that people have gone back to their old eating habits.

And, she notes, the study suggests education efforts may need a change in focus.

“Most of the awareness campaigns nowadays are centered around protected areas where the animals actually live. But maybe those are not the people who then consume the bushmeat,” she noted. “It might be people much farther away in the urban centers and who need to be educated about the impact this has.”
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Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry are spearheading a campaign to encourage people to talk openly about mental health issues.

The young royals released 10 films Thursday as part of their Heads Together campaign to change the national conversation on mental health.

The videos feature celebrities and members of the public talking about the breakthrough conversation that helped them come to terms with their mental health problems.

The former England cricket captain Andrew Flintoff and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell are among those seen speaking about their experiences of anxiety or depression.

The films can be viewed on the Heads Together website and YouTube page.

 
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A video game from the 1980s could help those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institutet say Tetris, a simple game of stacking variously shaped blocks, can “prevent the unpleasant, intrusive memories that develop in some people after suffering a traumatic event.”

Researchers found that survivors of deadly car crashes show fewer PTSD symptoms if they play a game of Tetris in the hospital within six hours of the event.

PTSD is common among survivors of natural disasters, war and violent crimes, and sufferers often complain of intrusive flashbacks to their trauma. Researchers say a common way to treat PTSD is through trauma-focused behavioral therapy. 

There are no current methods to prevent the symptoms from developing, researchers say.

“Our hypothesis was that after a trauma, patients would have fewer intrusive memories if they got to play Tetris as part of a short behavioral intervention while waiting in the hospital emergency department,” said Emily Holmes, professor of psychology at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience. “Since the game is visually demanding, we wanted to see if it could prevent the intrusive aspects of the traumatic memories from becoming established, i.e. by disrupting a process known as memory consolidation.”

For the Tetris study, the researchers looked at 71 car crash victims. Half of the subjects played Tetris while in the emergency room waiting room, and the other half performed another task. All were given the tasks within six hours of the accident.

Those who played Tetris showed fewer intrusive memories during the following week. What intrusive memories they did have “diminished more quickly,” according to researchers.

While promising, researchers say more studies need to be done.

“Anyone can experience trauma,” Holmes said. “It would make a huge difference to a great many people if we could create simple behavioral psychological interventions using computer games to prevent post-traumatic suffering and spare them these grueling intrusive memories.”

The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
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As health experts stare down a looming health care worker shortage and try to find solutions, African nations say they are especially worried in the face of possible U.S. cuts to international aid.

In Uganda, the impact of poor-quality health services and a shortage of skilled health workers can be measured in human lives.

“We are losing 17 mothers and 106 newborns every day,” said Faridah Luyiga Mwanje of White Ribbon Alliance, an advocacy group that campaigns for women’s health and safe childbirth.

Mwanje’s sister became part of that grim statistic in 2013, a tragedy Mwanje attributes to doctors intervening too late and a lack of blood supplies. Her sister bled to death in a high-end hospital in Kampala, leaving behind four children.

Her baby boy survived, but was born with cerebral palsy and suffers from developmental delays and convulsions.

In rural Uganda, Mwanje says, the situation is worse.

“There are no health workers,” she said. “There’s a general lack of lifesaving commodities, the infrastructure is poor, health workers don’t have housing, the [operating] theaters are dilapidated, health facilities are not connected to the national power grid, and there’s no running water in these facilities.”

45 countries convene

Worldwide, that shortage and other health care challenges lead to 2.4 million preventable deaths of mothers and children every year. And making the picture even bleaker, by the year 2030, the World Health Organization estimates the world will be short 18 million health workers, a loss Mwanje says will be keenly felt in countries like Uganda.

Health experts and advocates from 45 countries convened this year in Johannesburg to discuss this looming problem. Stefan Peterson, UNICEF’s Chief of Health, told VOA that major gains can be made without complicated, costly medical research.

“I think we have many effective medical interventions that can save lives, but they don’t reach the people who need it, and the people don’t reach those interventions at the right time,” he said. “So what we’re talking about now is actually reducing access barriers by making health services more accessible, improving quality of those health services, so that these available, and even affordable, medical interventions reach the people who need them. And by doing that, we can save at least two-thirds of those lives without new innovation.”

He says African countries also have benefited from expanding community health programs, with low-level health workers who handle patients’ basic needs and shift some of the burden off nurses and doctors.

Possible funding cuts

But these changes will require money, and top health officials are concerned about possible funding cuts from the United Nations’ largest contributor, the United States. Mwanje says that she isn’t sure her country could recover from that sort of aid setback.

“We are truly concerned that donors are cutting back funding,” she said. “Because our governments, well, they’re not prioritizing health and they’ve relied mainly on donor funding. So, it will take them a long time to adjust — if they actually adjust. So we hope that donors can rethink their decisions and invest in health in countries where there are marginalized people. Because we live in a global village, and health affects all of us.”
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China said Wednesday it is committed to honoring its pledges under the Paris climate change agreement, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that would effectively dismantle environmental regulations put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said combating climate change is a challenge for the entire world, and that China will maintain its approach even if other governments change their policies.

Trump’s order has rekindled the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate and deepened concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.

“We will put our miners back to work” and produce “really clean coal,” Trump said during the signing ceremony Tuesday.

“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

WATCH: Trump orders review of Obama climate rule

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.

“The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals,” Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. “This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.

Half-dozen rules

Trump’s order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration’s future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.

Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” largely because it put in place what he called “job killing” regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.

Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”

International effect

Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”

A hot issue

Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.

Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan. “Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040 half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump’s order “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.” Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.

In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.

The House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.

Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.

“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said. “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”

Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.

Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.

“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, (CO2) and increased funding by 1500% and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
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The House voted Tuesday to block online privacy regulations issued during the final months of the Obama administration, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell the browsing habits of their customers.

The Federal Communications Commission rule was designed to give consumers greater control over how internet service providers share information. But critics said the rule would have added costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among Internet companies.

The House voted 215-205 to reject the rule, and sent the legislation to President Donald Trump for his signature. The vote is part of an extensive effort that Republicans have undertaken to void an array of regulations issued during the final months of Democratic President Barack Obama’s tenure. But the vote was closer this time than previous rescind efforts, with 15 Republicans siding with Democrats in the effort to keep the rule in place.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Republican-led effort was about putting profits over the privacy concerns of Americans.

“Overwhelmingly, the American people do not agree with Republicans that this information should be sold, and it certainly should not be sold without your permission,” Pelosi said. “Our broadband providers know deeply personal information about us and our families.”

Internet companies like Google don’t have to ask users’ permission before tracking what sites they visit. Republicans and industry groups have blasted that discrepancy, saying it was unfair and confusing for consumers.

But proponents of the privacy measure argued that the company that sells you your internet connection can see even more about consumers, such as every website they visit and whom they exchange emails with.

Undoing the FCC regulation leaves people’s online information in a murky area. Experts say federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information — but it doesn’t spell out how or what companies must do. That’s what the FCC rule aimed to do.

The Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, is a critic of the broadband privacy rules and has said he wants to roll them back. He and other Republicans want a different federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission, to police privacy for both broadband companies like AT&T and internet companies like Google. GOP lawmakers said they cared about consumer privacy every bit as much as Democrats did.

“What America needs is one standard across the internet ecosystem and the Federal Trade Commission is the best place for that standard,” said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said the FTC has acted as America’s online privacy regulator since the dawn of the internet. He called the rule an effort to strip the agency of that role.

“The internet has become the amazing tool that it is because it is largely left untouched by regulation — and that shouldn’t stop now,” McCarthy said.

Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas parted ways with his Republican colleagues on the issue. He said the privacy protections were “commonsense measures” that would have ensured internet users continue to have control over their personal information.

“We don’t want the government having access to our information without our consent, and the same goes for private business,” Yoder said.

Broadband providers don’t currently fall under FTC jurisdiction, and advocates say the FTC has historically been a weaker agency than the FCC.

The American Civil Liberties Union urged Trump to veto the resolution, appealing to his populist side.

“President Trump now has the opportunity to veto this resolution and show he is not just a president for CEOs but for all Americans,” said the ACLU’s Neema Singh Guliani.

Republicans repeatedly discounted the privacy benefits generated by the rule. Over the last two months, they’ve voted to repeal more than a dozen Obama-era regulations in the name of curbing government overreach. The criticism of their efforts was particularly harsh Tuesday.

“Lawmakers who voted in favor of this bill just sold out the American people to special interests,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
…

Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard?

It may be a mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound.

No matter how tolerant we are, most of us feel uncomfortable if a person sitting close to us in a quiet cinema starts noisily opening a bag of chips and loudly eating them. 

But for some people, who suffer from misophonia, certain repetitive noise can be hardly bearable.

“Mainly sounds made by people’s mouth or breathing. This is certain speech sounds, chewing, certain other sort of noisy wet noises from the mouth, noisy breathing as well. Other ones include things like repetitive noises, pen clicking, foot tapping, keyboards sometimes, packets rustling,” Will Sedley of New Castle University said.

Physical evidence?

Scientists at the Newcastle University wanted to see whether there is a physical evidence of this sensitivity.

Volunteers were asked to rate the level of unpleasantness of different sounds from neutral, such as rainfall or the sound of boiling water, to irritating, like noisy eating, loud breathing or a baby crying.

Their brain scans showed that misophonia has to do with the size of an area in our brains that regulates emotional responses.

“It was smaller and less developed in people with misophonia at a group level. Nothing you’d see on an individual brain screen basis, but suggesting that there may actually be brain structural alterations,” Sedley said.

But the discovery opened new questions.

“It’s difficult to know which is the chicken and which is the egg, whether this is the cause of misophonia or in part, or whether this is the consequence of having this condition or an unpleasant adversant condition like this and how it affects the brain in the long term,” he said.

Scientists say they also want to find out whether severe misophonia is treatable, but they say everybody should be aware that some people are genuinely sensitive to certain noises.
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Researchers have developed a blood test that can rapidly tell whether someone is suffering from tuberculosis. Investigators hope the test can lead to quicker treatment, making a dent in the worldwide TB epidemic.

One-third of the world’s population is infected with a silent form of tuberculosis, according to the World Health Organization. A person can live for years infected with latent TB and show no symptoms.  

But each year, 10 million people develop active TB, which causes severe symptoms — such as coughing, weight loss, fever and night sweats — and kills about 2 million of those people. Prompt diagnosis and treatment is critical for containing the highly contagious disease and saving lives.  

The new blood test promises to provide that speedy diagnosis. Investigators say it can tell within hours whether someone is infected with mycobacterium, the pathogen that causes tuberculosis.

Currently, TB diagnosis is done with a sputum test. The objective is to grow the bacterium in culture from expelled mucus.

Arizona State University bioengineering professor Tony Hu, who helped develop the new test, said the sputum test takes too long.

“That technology needs four to eight weeks to get the final result,” he said. But for the blood test, it’s “only 2½ hours.”

Detects peptides

Called Nanodisk-MS, the rapid TB test takes advantage of nanotechnology to detect minute levels of peptides in the blood. Peptides are amino acid fragments of proteins that TB bacteria release only during active infections.

The highly sensitive blood test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can also measure the severity of the infection.

Nanomedicine such as this, Hu said, could also be used to monitor patients who are being treated with antibiotics to see how well they are responding or whether the antibiotic cocktail is the right one. He called it a form of personalized medicine that “can really save lives.”

Hu said the test needed further validation in clinical trials, but that he hoped it would become part of the arsenal in the global war on tuberculosis.
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The executive order signed by President Trump shelves the Clean Power Plan, the signature Obama-era policy designed to combat climate change.

But it also is a sweeping rollback of decades of U.S. policy regarding not only climate change but environmental protection, energy production and emissions.

Pro-growth, pro-environment

Trump repeatedly promised to overturn the plan during the campaign. At one point, he referred to climate change as a “hoax,” but more generally the president has claimed that restrictive and punitive environmental regulations hurt the energy industry’s ability to turn a profit, and that they cost jobs.

Today’s executive order lays out a White House strategy to get rid of any regulations that “impede” energy production.

White House officials such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have telegraphed this strategy for weeks, saying, “This is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country.”

The Clean Power Plan already is on hold due to legal challenges, but if it had been implemented it would have forced U.S. power plants to significantly cut their emissions of planet warming greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.

Here is a quick rundown of the main points of today’s executive order.

♦ Initiate a review of the Clean Power Plan:

Its goal was to lower U.S. carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent over 2005 levels by 2030. The EPA estimates that would have kept 870 million tons of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere.

The plan was the backbone of the U.S. contribution to the Paris Accords, which was a worldwide, non-binding agreement among 195 nations to keep the planet from warming more than an average of 2 degrees Celsius.

♦ Initiate a 180-day review among all U.S. agencies:

The goal is to identify all regulations and rules that “impede” energy production.

♦ Lift the moratorium on federal coal leasing:

In 2016, the Obama administration put a 3-year moratorium on new leases of federal land for coal mining. At the time, the administration said the program needed to be modernized to ensure U.S. taxpayers were getting a solid return on the money developers were paying for the land, and also to take into account the impact mining has on climate change.

♦ Rescind restrictions on hydraulic fracking:

Current restrictions require drillers to use tanks instead of pits to store fracking wastewater, and to disclose the chemicals that are pumped into fracking wells to draw out the natural gas.

♦ Roll back federal regulations forcing energy companies to limit methane emissions from wells and pipes.

♦ New guidance on the National Environmental Policy Act:

The NEPA is a law passed by Congress in 1970 and signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.  NEPA required that federal agencies prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements on any new development.  These reports state the potential environmental effects of proposed federal agency actions.  The Obama administration included greenhouse gases on the list of things that could have a negative environmental impact.  The executive order takes them back out.

We’ll see you in court

Environmental groups already have vowed to challenge any backsliding on the part of the White House in regard to climate policy.

They point to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled three times that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and qualifies as a “threat” to human health. That gives the EPA not only the legal authority, but the responsibility, to regulate the emission of CO2.

When VOA spoke with Tomas Carbonnel, the lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, he said it is ready to challenge any rollback in court.

“Once the administration undertakes this process,” he said, “it will experience significant challenges in the courts and in public opinion if it attempts to roll back progress in that, that had been made.”

It is unclear how the Supreme Court might rule if Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s pick to sit on the court, is approved by the Senate, but the fate of the executive order, may very well be decided in court.
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Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday exhorted young girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, saying those fields will provide the jobs and innovation for the future.

Their tour of the National Air and Space Museum with a group of middle school students came as the Trump administration proposed further cuts to education and science, drawing harsh criticism from teachers’ unions and others.

Ivanka Trump, a successful entrepreneur who considers herself as a women’s rights activist, lamented that women make up 48 percent of America’s work force but only 24 percent of STEM professionals.

“This statistic is showing that we are sadly moving in the wrong direction. Women are increasingly underrepresented in important fields of science, technology, engineering and math,” Trump said. “But I dare you to beat these statistics and advance the role of women in STEM fields.”

She said she and her 5-year-old daughter Arabella plan to take a coding class together this summer because “coding truly is the language of the future.”

Astronaut Kay Hire and female researchers at NASA also spoke to the students and DeVos urged the children to follow in their footsteps by studying, working hard and mentoring younger peers.

“You can do your part to improve the lives of women in the future,” DeVos said.

As she praised the role of women in the American space program, Ivanka Trump also said her father’s administration has expanded NASA’s space exploration to add Mars as a top objective. But as she spoke, the Trump administration sent Congress a series of “options” for budget cuts, including slashing $3 billion from Education Department, as well as cuts to NASA and the National Institutes of Health.

The American Federation of Teachers accused the administration of hypocrisy.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA’s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “The next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians need support, not budget cuts eliminating the very programs being promoted.”
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President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would effectively dismantle Obama-era environmental regulations, rekindling the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate, and deepening concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.

“We will put our miners back to work” and produce “really clean coal,” Trump said during the signing ceremony.

“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.

“The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals,” Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. “This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.”

Trump’s order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration’s future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.

Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” largely because it put in place what he called “job-killing” regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection Agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.  

Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”

International effect

Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”

A hot issue

Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.

Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan.

“Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040, half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump’s order “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.” Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.

In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.

The House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.

Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.

“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said.  “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”

Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.

Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.

“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, [CO2] and increased funding by 1500 percent and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
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To build a sandcastle here on Earth, the sand needs to be wet so it can stick together. Not so on Saturn’s strange and largest moon Titan, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology say the moon’s non-silicate sand is “electrically charged” and “resistant to motion.” Researchers liken the charge to the static electricity generated when you rub a balloon on your hair.

“If you grabbed piles of grains and built a sand castle on Titan, it would perhaps stay together for weeks due to their electrostatic properties,” said Josef Dufek, the Georgia Tech professor who co-led the study. “Any spacecraft that lands in regions of granular material on Titan is going to have a tough time staying clean. Think of putting a cat in a box of packing peanuts.”

The electrical charge, according to researchers, can last for days or months.

The charge is likely generated by the winds on Titan, which blow at around 30 kilometers per hour. As the sand moves, it begins to hop and collide, becoming charged.

Researchers say the electrification of Titan’s sands could explain why dunes on the moon, some of which are more than 90 meters tall, form in the opposite direction of the prevailing winds.

“These electrostatic forces increase frictional thresholds,” said Josh Mendez Harper, a Georgia Tech geophysics and electrical engineering doctoral student who is the paper’s lead author. “This makes the grains so sticky and cohesive that only heavy winds can move them. The prevailing winds aren’t strong enough to shape the dunes.”

To reach their conclusions, researchers built a model to replicate conditions on Titan. For the model, they put grains of “naphthalene and biphenyl — two toxic, carbon and hydrogen bearing compounds believed to exist on Titan’s surface — into a small cylinder.”

The cylinder was then rotated in a nitrogen environment similar to Titan. Then, they measured the electric characteristics of the grains.

“All of the particles charged well, and about two to five percent didn’t come out of the tumbler,” said Mendez Harper. “They clung to the inside and stuck together. When we did the same experiment with sand and volcanic ash using Earth-like conditions, all of it came out. Nothing stuck.”

Sand on Earth also can pick up an electric charge, but the grains are much smaller and dissipate rapidly.

“These non-silicate, granular materials can hold their electrostatic charges for days, weeks or months at a time under low-gravity conditions,” said George McDonald, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who also co-authored the paper.

The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Lifting boxes by hand, day after day, in places like warehouses can cause muscle strain and other injuries. But now a new exoskeleton — a rigid external body frame that assists with limb movement can help prevent problems associated with repetitive tasks like handling boxes or materials at construction sites. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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In the U.S. and Africa, communities of African descendants are experiencing a high rate of diet related disorders like diabetes and heart disease. A Nigerian American in Washington wants to change that. Nutritionist Tambra Raye Stevenson is on a mission to inspire young girls and women in the diaspora and in Africa to embrace their heritage from farm to fork and become leaders in nutrition. VOA’s June Soh caught up with Stevenson at a recent event to promote her initiative.
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Broadband access in the United States is not universal, with a longtime digital divide between urban and rural areas. But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no internet service at all, because Green Bank, W.Va., is the site of the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, so internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic waves are banned. VOA’s Lesya Bakalets traveled to Green Bank as we see in this report narrated by Joy Wagner.
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Spinach is known as a super food for its nutritional value, but a new experiment reveals another power of the green leaf.

Researchers say they’ve grown beating human heart cells on spinach leaves, using the vascular network of the plant to transport fluids. The finding could eventually lead to being able to grow working human cardiac tissue that could one day be used to replace heart cells damaged by heart attacks.

“Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals, and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures,” said researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. “The development of decellularized plants for scaffolding opens up the potential for a new branch of science that investigates the mimicry between plant and animal.”

The breakthrough is important because so far, bioengineering such as 3-D printing, can’t replicate the complex system of blood vessels in the human body that deliver the oxygen, nutrients, and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth.

For the experiment, researchers first stripped plant cells from spinach leaves and passed beads the size of human blood cells through the leftover vascular system and seeded the spinach veins with human cells that line our blood vessels.

“We have a lot more work to do, but so far this is very promising,” said Glenn Gaudette, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at WPI and corresponding author of the paper. “Adapting abundant plants that farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years for use in tissue engineering could solve a host of problems limiting the field.”

Researchers added that other plants have been shown to offer the same kind of promise, including parsley, Artemesia annua (sweet wormwood), and peanut hairy roots.

“The spinach leaf might be better suited for a highly vascularized tissue, like cardiac tissue, whereas the cylindrical hollow structure of the stem of Impatiens capensis (jewelweed) might better suit an arterial graft. Conversely, the vascular columns of wood might be useful in bone engineering due to their relative strength and geometries,” the authors wrote.

Using plants could also be economical.

“By exploiting the benign chemistry of plant tissue scaffolds,” researchers wrote, “we could address the many limitations and high costs of synthetic, complex composite materials. Plants can be easily grown using good agricultural practices and under controlled environments. By combining environmentally-friendly plant tissue with perfusion-based decellularization, we have shown that there can be a sustainable solution for pre-vascularized tissue engineering scaffolds.”

The paper, “Crossing kingdoms: Using decelluralized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds” is published online in advance of the May 2017 issue of the journal Biomaterials.
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President Donald Trump’s aides opened the door to working with moderate Democrats on health care and other issues while Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer quickly offered to find common ground with Trump for repairing former President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Schumer said Sunday that Trump must be willing to drop attempts to repeal his predecessor’s signature achievement, warning that Trump was destined to “lose again” on other parts of his agenda if he remained beholden to conservative Republicans.

Trump initially focused the blame for the failure on Democrats and predicted a dire future for the current law. But on Sunday he turned his criticism toward conservative lawmakers for the failure of the Republican bill, complaining on Twitter: “Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”

The Freedom Caucus is a hard-right group of more than 30 GOP House members who were largely responsible for blocking the bill to undo the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”

The bill was pulled from the House floor Friday in a humiliating political defeat for the president, having lacked support from conservative Republicans, some moderate Republicans and Democrats.

In additional fallout from the jarring setback, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said he was leaving the caucus. Poe tweeted Friday that some lawmakers “would’ve voted against the 10 Commandments.”

“We must come together to find solutions to move this country forward,” Poe said Sunday in a written statement. “Saying `no’ is easy, leading is hard but that is what we were elected to do.”

On Sunday, Trump aides made clear that the president could seek support from moderate Democrats on upcoming legislative battles ranging from the budget and tax cuts to health care, leaving open the possibility he could revisit health care legislation. Whether he would work to repair Obama’s law was a big question.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus scolded conservative Republicans, explaining that Trump had felt “disappointed” with a “number of people he thought were loyal to him that weren’t.”

“It’s time for the party to start governing,” Priebus said. “I think it’s time for our folks to come together, and I also think it’s time to potentially get a few moderate Democrats on board as well.”

As he ponders his next steps, Trump faces decisions on whether to back administrative changes to fix Obama’s health care law or undermine it as prices for insurance plans rise in many markets. Over the weekend, the president tweeted a promise of achieving a “great healthcare plan” because Obamacare will “explode.”

Priebus did not answer directly regarding Trump’s choice, saying that fixes to the health law will have to come legislatively and he wants to ensure “people don’t get left behind.”

“I don’t think the president is closing the door on anything,” he said.

Schumer, a New York Democrat, suggested that “if he changes, he could have a different presidency.”

“But he’s going to have to tell the Freedom Caucus and the hard-right special wealthy interests who are dominating his presidency … he can’t work with them, and we’ll certainly look at his proposals,” Schumer said.

Their comments came after another day of finger-pointing among Republicans, both subtle and otherwise. On Saturday, Trump urged Americans in a tweet to watch Judge Jeanine Pirro’s program on Fox News that night. She led her show by calling for House Speaker Paul Ryan to resign, blaming him for the defeat of the bill in the Republican-controlled chamber.

Priebus described the two events as “coincidental,” insisting that Trump was helping out a friend by plugging her show and no “preplanning” occurred.

“He doesn’t blame Paul Ryan,” Priebus said. “In fact, he thought Paul Ryan worked really hard. He enjoys his relationship with Paul Ryan, thinks that Paul Ryan is a great speaker of the House.”

Priebus said Trump was looking ahead for now at debate over the budget and a tax plan, which he said would include a border adjustment tax and middle-class tax cuts.

“It’s more or less a warning shot that we are willing to talk to anyone. We always have been,” he said. “I think more so now than ever, it’s time for both parties to come together and get to real reforms in this country.”

Congressman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the Freedom Caucus, acknowledged he was doing a lot of “self-critiquing” after the health care defeat. He insisted the GOP overhaul effort was not over and that he regretted not spending more time with moderate Republicans and Democrats “to find some consensus.”

Priebus spoke on Fox News Sunday, and Schumer and Meadows appeared on ABC’s This Week.
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As East Africa struggles through a drought, scientists say climate change may be making the situation worse as a warming planet may be altering the weather patterns that bring rain to the region.

In Somalia, the rains failed late last year. And the rains before that were meager. Livestock have died. Crops have failed.

Famine threatens Somalia for the second time this decade.

While drought is not uncommon in this dry region, it has gotten worse, Chris Funk, a climate scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said.

“What we’ve seen over, say, the last 35 years is that the rainfall during what’s called the long rains in East Africa has declined substantially,” Funk said.

He added the explanation may lie in an atmospheric cycle that links East Africa and the Pacific Ocean.

WATCH: Experts: Climate change may be making drought worse

Warm, wet air rises over the western Pacific, causing rain over Southeast Asia.

On the other side of the cycle, dry air descends over East Africa. That is why not much rain falls here even in normal years.

But when the western Pacific is warmer, it pushes the whole system harder: more rain over Southeast Asia, and more dry air descending on East Africa.

More dry air means more drought.

And Funk said the ocean is getting warmer.

“The warming over the western Pacific appears to be pretty much directly related to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he said.

Research shows that in the past, a warmer ocean meant a drier East Africa. But Funk says it is not entirely clear whether the current drying trend will continue.

“One of the things making it hard to look into the future is the fact that the story told by the global climate models, the climate change models, is pretty much the exact opposite of what we’re seeing in East Africa,” Funk said.

The models predict it should be getting wetter. But experts increasingly think the models may be flawed in this area.

Funk and others are working on it.

The short term is more clear. The western Pacific is still warmer than average. Which means the forecast is for a third season of disappointing rains.
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