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For the first time an underwater robot is to be used to plant baby coral to parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef damaged by mass bleaching, as scientists plan to collect hundreds of millions of coral spawn off the Queensland city of Cairns in the coming weeks.

Most coral reproduce through spawning, where eggs and sperm are pushed into the water at the same time.  In northern Australia, researchers are preparing to harvest this mass release of coral spawn on the Great Barrier Reef.  They will be reared into baby corals in floating enclosures.  Then they will be delivered as so-called ‘larval clouds’ to Vlasoff Reef about an hour’s sailing from Cairns by a semi-autonomous robot.

Professor Peter Harrison, the director of the Marine Ecology Research Center at Southern Cross University, said science is giving a nature a helping hand.

“What we are trying to do now is compensate for the loss of corals that would normally provide enough larvae for the system to naturally heal,” Harrison said.

Large areas of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been damaged by severe bleaching – or loss of the algae that gives coral its color.  The bleaching is caused by rising water temperatures and made worse by climate change.

The experiment on Vlasoff reef, which was badly affected by the mass bleaching, will be coordinated by divers, who will guide the spawn-spreading robot, known as the LarvalBot.   

Professor Matthew Dunbabin from the Queensland University of Technology says time is of essence.

“In future projects we are hoping that we can start to do that more autonomously, but this is very new and we are up against the clock in terms of trying to get this in the field as quick as possible to make sure that we can have a reef to preserve,” Dunbabin said.

A coral reef is made up of millions of tiny animals called coral polyps.  The reefs are critical ecosystems, and provide a home for at least a quarter of all marine species.

The Great Barrier Reef is about the same size as Italy or Japan.  Thirty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises have been recorded along the reef.

It faces a range of threats, from climate change and overfishing, to the run-off of pollution from farms, to coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.

 
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Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. But, until recently, little was known about a father’s diet and exercise choices.

Matthew Hurt is teaching his young sons how to hit a baseball. He wants them to enjoy sports and exercising.

“I want it to be just natural for them. I don’t want it to be a chore. I want them to just want to go outside, want to be active and enjoy life to its fullest.”

Impact of exercise

A study at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center looked at the impact of fathers’ exercise habits on their offspring.

Kristin Stanford is a member of Ohio State’s Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center. She co-led the study. The results showed that even moderate exercise before a baby was conceived “resulted in an improved metabolic health in their adult offspring. Essentially, it improved their glucose metabolism, decreased body weight and increased their insulin sensitivity.”

The World Health Organization says 1 in 4 adults worldwide are dangerously inactive. That increases the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

Inactivity also has social and economic consequences.

The research at Ohio State was done in mice. More work needs to be done to see if it applies to people as well.

“The idea would be that if you have a dad who wants to have a child, if they would exercise maybe just a month prior to conception, that would have a really dramatic effect on their child’s life.” 

Poor diet? Just exercise

The researchers also found that exercise helped even with a poor diet. Sedentary mice fed a high fat diet passed along negative health issues like obesity and insulin resistance, but those effects were completely reversed by exercise.

“A high-fat diet, even mild high-fat diet, in this case it was only three weeks, changes the profile, but exercise kind of restored it back to normal.”

More work needs to be done to see if the same applies to humans. But in the animal studies, exercise for the male mouse was key to the health of his offspring. 
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Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. Many women try to shed excess weight and check with their doctors to optimize their health. But, until recently, little was known about the role a father’s diet and exercise choices might play. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on a study that shows, just like for women, there is a link between the father’s health and that of his unborn children.
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Scientists across the world have set an ambitious goal for themselves: to sequence the genome of every known life form on Earth within the next decade.

The Earth BioGenome Project, launched this week in London, is attempting to map the entire DNA of every known animal, plant, fungus and protozoan on the planet, roughly 1.5 million species.

Scientists say the project rivals in importance the Human Genome Project, which took 13 years to map the human genetic code. That project was completed in 2003.

Contributions from around world

The new project will rely on scientists contributing data from around the world, with the largest pledge so far coming from Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, which says it will map 66,000 species. The institute was also a large contributor to the Human Genome Project.

The cost of the massive project is estimated to be $4.7 billion, which will come from charities and governments around the world.

Scientists say the result of the grand-scale project would be a huge resource for researchers that could offer insights into a range of topics, including a better understanding of evolution, the development of diseases, and insight into the aging process.

Researchers also hope the information could help in efforts to conserve threatened species by better understanding how life forms can adapt to changes.

Why not sequence everything?

Project member and evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia told Nature, “Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge.”

“The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?” she said.

Supporters of the project say the initiative will help to coordinate the efforts of researchers from around the world and will ensure that all life forms are sequenced and not just those that have previously drawn interest.

They say the project will also set standards for the collection of samples, the sequencing of data and for sharing information. Proponents say such standards are essential for making sure the final data is useful to scientists everywhere.

Scientists say part of the appeal of the project is that they don’t fully know what the results will lead to.
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U.S. regulators have approved a powerful new opioid tablet to be used in hospitals over objections from critics who fear the pill will be abused.

The new drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday is five to 10 times more potent than pharmaceutical fentanyl and will be used as an alternative to intravenous (IV) painkillers in medical settings.

Approval for the drug, which will be manufactured by a California company called AcelRx and marketed under the name Dsuvia, was supported by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon wants to have a pill that it can give soldiers on the battlefield to relieve pain when using an IV is not possible.

Critics say the pill could be diverted to illicit use and could worsen the country’s opioid crisis.

One of the pill’s critics is the head of an FDA committee tasked with advising regulators about whether drugs should be approved. This month, in a rare dissent with his committee, Raeford Brown urged the FDA to reject the drug and predicted the medicine would be abused inside and outside medical settings.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement Friday that there would be “very tight restrictions” placed on the drug’s distribution and that the medicine was intended only for supervised settings like hospitals. The drug will not be available in retail pharmacies.

Gottlieb also said he would seek more authority for the FDA to consider whether there are too many similar drugs on the market, a move that could limit the number of new opioid drugs approved by the agency in the future.

“We won’t sidestep what I believe is the real underlying source of discontent among the critics of this approval — the question of whether or not America needs another powerful opioid while in the throes of a massive crisis of addiction,” Gottlieb wrote.

Preliminary figures from a report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released Friday showed more than 49,000 opioid-related deaths in 2017. That was a rise from the reported 42,249 opioid overdose deaths in 2016.

The DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment report shows that heroin, fentanyl and other opioids continue to pose the highest drug threat in the nation.

Developers of the new opioid pill say the tablet is placed under the tongue and starts reducing pain in 15 to 30 minutes. It contains sufentanil, a chemical cousin of the fentanyl, which is commonly used after surgery and in emergency rooms. Each pill will come in a plastic applicator that looks like a syringe and will sell for $50 to $60.

The FDA says that because of the controls on drugs in medical facilities, medicines rarely get into the hands of general public through hospitals. However, the agency acknowledges that the greatest risk of misuse of such drugs is among medical personnel themselves.

Sidney Wolfe, founder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a statement: “It is certain that Dsuvia will worsen the opioid epidemic and kill people needlessly. It will be taken by medical personnel and others for whom it has not been prescribed. And many of those will overdose and die.” 
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Participants at the first ever WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution have adopted a plan for reducing air pollution, which every year prematurely kills an estimated seven million people.  

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called the conference a resounding success, noting 900 people attended, twice as many as expected.  Furthermore, it says more than 70-member states, non-governmental organizations, and other participants have made voluntary commitments to take action to reduce air pollution.

Director of the WHO’s Department of Public Health and Environment Maria Neira said the WHO is taking a leading role in setting forth action to tackle air pollution for a cleaner, healthier world.  

“WHO, as the global health agency, made, as well, very strong commitments, starting by proposing an aspiration target of reducing by two-thirds the mortality caused by air pollution by the year 2030.  And, this is really a big challenge that we will mobilize and, we will call for everyone to contribute to that,” she said.  

Neira said prompt action is needed to reach that goal.  For example, she says people need to stop burning solid waste and agricultural waste.  She said they have to move away from fossil fuels.  She said people in Africa and other areas with populations in great need must be helped to meet the goal.

“We need to liberate those three billion people that today, they are still relying on fossil fuels at the household level to cook or heat or light their house.  We need to make sure that they will have access to clean sources of energy,” said Neira.

The WHO plans to put in place a tracking system to monitor commitments made by the participants.  The system is intended to gauge the progress being made toward achieving better health for all by freeing the world of air pollution.   

 
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Uganda will begin administering the experimental Ebola vaccine to approximately 2,000 health care and front-line workers along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, the Ministry of Health said.

Uganda has no confirmed cases of Ebola, but as the threat worsens in the DRC, the preventive measure is seen as necessary because of heavy border traffic. More than 20,000 people cross from the DRC into Uganda and back every week, the ministry says.   

“The public high risk of cross-border transmission of Ebola to Uganda was assessed to be very high at national level,” said Jane Ruth Aceng, Uganda’s minister for health. “Hence, the need to protect our health workers with this vaccine. Currently in Uganda, we have 2,100 doses of the vaccine available at the National Medical Stores and preparations are in high gear, including training of the health workers that are to be targeted.”

Many of those crossing the border are from the DRC’s North Kivu province, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Ugandan border, where armed conflict has made fighting the Ebola outbreak a challenge. 

The vaccine, known as rVSV, has been used during recent outbreaks in Congo, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and is currently being dispensed in North Kivu.

Uganda’s Health Ministry says the Ebola vaccine will be given with the consent of Uganda’s health workers, since it is being used outside of clinical trials.

Despite being experimental, the vaccine is absolutely safe, Aceng says.

“The vaccine is a recombinant vaccine genetically developed by getting a particle of the Ebola gene, replacing a particle of the gene with another virus called the vesicular stomatitis virus. The vaccine therefore is a genetically modified organism, that is able to replicate and cause antibody production against the Ebola virus but not cause Ebola virus disease,” she explained. 

The Ebola virus causes a severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has confirmed 250 cases of Ebola — causing 180 deaths — and another 41 suspected cases.
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A paralyzed man you’re about to meet didn’t have much hope that one day he’d be able to walk again. But thanks to a new medical device, things are looking up for him. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Two U.S. government agencies are giving conflicting interpretations of a safety study on cellphone radiation: One says it causes cancer in rats. The other says there’s no reason for people to worry. 

No new research was issued Thursday. Instead, the National Toxicology Program dialed up its concerns about a link to heart and brain cancer from a study of male rats that was made public last winter.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees cellphone safety, disagreed with the upgraded warning. And “these findings should not be applied to human cellphone usage,” said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, FDA’s chief of radiological health.

What’s most important is what happens in humans, not rats, said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

 “The incidence of brain tumors in human beings has been flat for the last 40 years,” Brawley said. “That is the absolute most important scientific fact.”

 The original study

 In a $30 million study, scientists put rats and mice into special chambers and bombarded them with radiofrequency waves, like those emitted by older 2G and 3G phones, for nine hours a day for up to two years, most of their natural lives. 

The levels the rodents experienced were far higher than people are typically exposed to. 

The findings

Last February, the National Toxicology Program said there was a small increase in an unusual type of heart tumor in male rats, but not in mice or female rats. The agency concluded there was “some evidence” of a link. Also, the February report cited “equivocal evidence” of brain tumors in the male rats.

Thursday, the agency upgraded its description of those findings. The heart tumor increase marked “clear evidence” of cancer in male rats, it announced. There is “some evidence” of brain cancer.

The change came after the agency asked outside experts to analyze the findings.

“We believe that the link between radio frequency radiation and tumors in male rats is real, and the external experts agreed,” said John Bucher, the toxicology agency’s senior scientist.

While his agency said the risks to rats don’t directly apply to people, the study raises safety questions.

The disagreement

The FDA immediately disagreed, firing off a press release assuring Americans that “decades of research and hundreds of studies” has made the health agency confident that the current safety limits for cellphone radiation protect the public health.

Plus, FDA pointed out confusing findings from the rodent study — such as that the radiated rats lived longer than comparison rats that weren’t exposed to the rays. The toxicology agency said it appeared that the radio frequency energy helped older rats’ kidneys.

There’s a reason two different government agencies are clashing — they’re asking different questions, said George Washington University public health professor George Gray. 

A former science chief for the Environmental Protection Agency, Gray said the toxicology program examined how cellphone radiation affected animals. By looking at what it means for humans, the FDA “brings in more sources of information and data than just these recent tests in rats and mice,” he said in an email.

So are cellphones safe?

“I’m calling you from my cellphone,” noted the cancer society’s Brawley. 

He pointed out one well-known risk from cellphones: Car crashes when drivers are distracted by them.

As for cancer, if people are concerned, they could use earphones or speakers, he said.

Those who study risk aren’t hanging up.

“My family and I won’t change our mobile phone habits based on this news,” said George Washington’s Gray, co-author of the book “Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You.”
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Men with prostate cancer who get surgery or radiation are also more likely start taking antidepressants than their counterparts who don’t get aggressive treatment, a recent study suggests.

Many men with early-stage prostate cancer may not need treatment right away, or ever, because these tumors often don’t grow fast enough to cause symptoms or prove fatal. In the absence of symptoms or tests that suggest tumors are growing quickly, doctors may advise men to put off immediate treatments like surgery or radiation and instead get regular screenings to reassess whether the cancer is dangerous enough to warrant

intervention.

For the current study, researchers examined data on men with early-stage prostate cancer, including 4,952 people who had surgery, 4,994 who got radiation and 2,136 who opted instead for surveillance, or “watchful waiting.” In the year before their cancer diagnosis, 7.7 percent of the men were prescribed antidepressants, and this climbed to 10.5 percent in the first

year after diagnosis.

Compared to a control group of men in the general population without a prostate cancer diagnosis, men with prostate cancer were 49 percent more likely to be taking antidepressants five years after surgery and 33 percent more likely to take antidepressants five years after radiation treatment, the study found.

But watchful waiting wasn’t linked to any increase in the odds of men taking antidepressants.

“Prostate cancer patients often fit the demographic profile (white, older age, and male) of someone at risk for depression,” said senior study author Dr. Robert Nam of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

“Once they receive treatment for prostate cancer, whether that is surgery or radiation, they may experience treatment-related side effects, such as erectile dysfunction, incontinence, and bowel dysfunction, which can significantly

worsen quality of life,” Nam said by email.

Roughly half of men diagnosed with prostate cancer receive treatment known as androgen deprivation therapy, which suppresses production of the male sex hormone testosterone and contributes to mood disorders, Nam added.

Men in the study who received surveillance tended to be older and were more likely to have multiple chronic health problems than the patients who got surgery or radiation.

Limiting factors

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how different approaches to prostate cancer treatment might directly impact mental health. Another limitation is the potential for factors not measured in the study to have influenced both the treatment decisions men made and their mental health, researchers note in European Urology.

A separate study in the same journal, however, looked at trends in management of erectile function after prostate cancer surgery and offered fresh evidence that many men may be missing out on interventions that could improve their sexual health and quality of life.

The study examined data on 2,364 patients who had prostate cancer surgery at one U.S. academic medical center between 2008 and 2015.

Researchers didn’t find any meaningful changes in the proportion of men who had erectile dysfunction up to two years after surgery, despite advances in surgical care and postoperative penile rehabilitation during the study period.

This study also wasn’t a controlled experiment, and it’s possible that results from a single medical center might not reflect outcomes for men who got prostate cancer treatment elsewhere.

The study also didn’t examine how any use of antidepressants might have played a role in men’s sexual health after prostate cancer surgery.

“Sexual dysfunction is a common adverse effect of antidepressants,” Nam said. 

“Identifying the cause of the sexual dysfunction can be complicated as these symptoms are also associated with depression and can be improved once the patient’s depression is treated,” Nam added. “A healthy lifestyle, consisting of a well-balanced diet and exercise, is an important way to promote good sexual function, regardless of underlying medical

conditions.”
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A 10th person died amid a viral outbreak at a pediatric care center while a different strain of the virus was found at another facility in the state, New Jersey health officials said Thursday. 

The state Health Department confirmed in a statement that the “medically fragile child” at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation had the adenovirus infection. 

There have been 28 cases associated with the respiratory virus at the center, where the affected children had severely compromised immune systems. One of those who died was a young adult. 

“The loss of these young lives is heartbreaking, and our thoughts are with the families who are affected,” Health Commissioner Dr. Shereef Elnahal said in a statement. 

The state also said there were four confirmed adenovirus cases among pediatric patients at Voorhees Pediatric Facility, near Philadelphia, but preliminary tests have ruled out it’s the same strain affecting Wanaque. 

The department said it’s working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the illness and announced earlier this week that infection control teams were being sent to New Jersey’s four long-term pediatric centers to help with training. 

Officials have said there is not a wider public health concern stemming from the outbreak. 

New patients are not being admitted at Wanaque. 

The department also said Thursday that the illness was last detected on Tuesday. The previous date had been Monday. But, the department said, that’s not a surprise since the disease has a long incubation period of up to two weeks. 

The outbreak won’t be considered over until four weeks without a new illness goes by. 

Little risk, usually

Adenovirus usually poses little risk for healthy people. It can cause mild cold or flu symptoms, and some strains also cause diarrhea and pink eye. 

The strain found in the Wanaque rehab center outbreak is called type 7 and is among the more potent types. It sometimes causes more serious respiratory illness, especially among those with weak immune systems. 

Elnahal had earlier said all the cases of the outbreak occurred in a respiratory, or ventilator, unit. The department has since said one staff member became ill but has recovered. 

The identities of those who died and the affected patients have not been disclosed. 

Over the past decade, severe illness and death from type 7 adenovirus have been reported in the United States, according to the CDC, but it’s unclear how many have died from it. 

The CDC cited a 2001 scientific paper that reported a 1998 outbreak of type 7 at a facility in Chicago that left eight patients dead. The paper said civilian outbreaks were not frequently reported because of a lack of lab resources. 
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A new report recently published in the journal Nature suggests the Earth’s oceans are absorbing more of the planet’s excess heat than previously thought.

Scientists have known for some time that oceans store excess heat energy, and this helps keep the planet in its balmy, just-right temperature for supporting the explosion of life on Earth.

Knowing how hot the ocean is getting, and how fast that temperature is rising, helps scientists understand more about human-impacted climate change. It helps them know how much excess energy is being produced, and it helps them predict how much heat the ocean is capable of absorbing and how much warming will be felt on the Earth’s surface.

Up until the report was issued this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it had a pretty good handle on how much excess energy the oceans were absorbing. Using those numbers, the panel set targets for the amount of carbon reduction necessary to slow, and ultimately reverse, potentially devastating planetary warming.

But these new numbers suggest those targets may have to be revised upward by 25 percent. Research by the study’s lead author, Princeton professor Laure Resplandy, indicates our oceans are absorbing about 60 percent more heat energy than previously estimated.

According to Resplandy, the world’s oceans have taken up more than 13 zettajoules of energy every year between 1991 and 2016. A joule is the standard unit of energy; a zettajoule is one joule, followed by 21 zeroes.

“Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep,” Resplandy said. “Our data show that it would have warmed by 6.5 degrees Celsius every decade since 1991. In comparison, the estimate of the last IPCC assessment report would correspond to a warming of only 4 degrees Celsius every decade.”

How they got the new numbers

It’s not that the old numbers were wrong; it’s that the new numbers relied on new techniques and new ways to measure ocean warming. The old techniques used spot measurements of ocean temperature. But Resplandy and her team measured the amount of oxygen and carbon in the air, a number they call “Atmospheric Oxygen Potential (APO).” As oceans warm, they release oxygen and carbon into the atmosphere, which increases APO.

Another factor that raises APO is the burning of fossil fuels. Resplandy and her team compared the expected rise in APO due to the burning of fossil fuels, and compared it to the actual APO they were seeing. By looking at the difference, the team was able to predict how much carbon and oxygen were being released by the oceans and, therefore, how warm the world’s oceans were getting.

Why the new numbers matter

A host of countries, including the U.S. and China, signed the Paris Climate Accord in 2015, which aims to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Many climate scientists predict that if temperatures go above that mark, humans will be faced with devastating long-term global affects. Keeping those temperatures down requires cutting the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere.

The U.S. has since pulled out of that climate agreement, but most of the rest of the world remains focused on limiting the rise of the world’s average temperatures.

This new research suggests that accomplishing that goal requires countries to pull 25 percent more carbon out of the atmosphere than they’ve already committed to cleaning up.
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