YCLOAK

A key decision on whether to place a $1.4 billion telescope in Hawaii to further astronomy research has been delayed, leaving open the possibility the project may be moved to Spain, a panel said Friday.

The board of governors for the project dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory still wants to build the telescope on its preferred site of Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaii.

But an alternative location in Spain’s Canary Islands remains under consideration, the board said in a statement after meeting this week to discuss legal and regulatory challenges to the Hawaii telescope plan that could last years.

“We continue to assess the ongoing situation as we work toward a decision,” said Ed Stone, the executive director of the observatory.

He said no decision could be made on where to put the telescope “until we have a place to go, and we don’t decide when we have a place to go — that’s decided by the courts and agencies.”

Dormant volcano

The 30-meter (98 feet) diameter telescope would be placed on one side of Mauna Kea and is far more advanced than the world’s largest current telescopes that measure 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. The new telescope could potentially allow scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries about black holes, exoplanets, celestial bodies, and even detect indications of life on other planets. 

Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano and Hawaii’s tallest mountain, was selected in July 2009 as the target location for the telescope after a five-year search.

Scientists called it the best site in the world for astronomy, given a stable, dry, and cold climate, which allows for sharp images. The atmosphere over the mountain also provides favorable conditions for astronomical measurements, according to the TMT website.

The island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which already has an astronomical observatory, is considered a viable alternative. But scientists have said the telescope’s design would have to be altered for more adaptive optics given the mountain site’s lower altitude and different climate. That means it would take scientists more time to achieve the same discoveries they could make at Mauna Kea, Stone said.

Years of debate

The Hawaii site has been subject to years of public debate and legal challenges. Researchers say it will help usher in scientific and economic developments, while opponents maintain it will hurt the environment and desecrate land considered sacred by some Native Hawaiians. Mauna Kea already houses a number of high-powered telescopes at its summit. 

“Thirty years of astronomy development has resulted in adverse significant impact to the natural and cultural resources of Mauna Kea,” said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, an indigenous, Native Hawaiian group that works on environmental issues. “Trying to build more would have added to the cumulative impact.” 

On Thursday, the Hawaii Senate approved a bill to ban new construction atop Mauna Kea, and included a series of audits and other requirements before the ban could be lifted. But House leaders said they don’t have plans to advance the bill. Democratic House Speaker Scott Saiki told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the “bill is dead on arrival in the House.” 

There are also two appeals before the Hawaii Supreme Court. One challenges the sublease and land use permit issued by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources. The other has been brought by a Native Hawaiian man who says use of the land interferes with his right to exercise cultural practices and is thus entitled to a case hearing. 

The telescope project is a collaboration among universities in the U.S. and California, including the University of Hawaii and national science and research institutes of Japan, China, and India. 

“It’s a privilege to practice astronomy on Mauna Kea and we’re not satisfied with where we’re at right now,” Dan Meisenzahl, a spokesperson for the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. “We will continue to push ourselves to improve our stewardship of the mountain.” 

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Scientists will leave their labs and march on Washington and more than 200 other cities around the world Saturday, protesting government policies on issues from climate change to gun violence that they say ignore scientific evidence.

It comes a year after the first March for Science, three months into the Trump administration, when researchers feared that science would be pushed aside in the new president’s zeal to eliminate government regulations.

WATCH: Rough Year in Science Policy Brings Researchers Back to March

This year, “I think our worst fears are coming to fruition,” said Chris Zarba, who retired in February as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board staff office. Those panels evaluate the evidence guiding decisions on government environmental regulations.

EPA woes

Last October, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive that changed the rules governing membership on those panels.

Pruitt barred researchers who had received EPA grants. He said agency funding could compromise their objectivity.

“Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt said in a statement. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will be financially independent from the agency.”

But scientists with funding from the industries EPA regulates are not held to the same standard, Zarba said.

“Nobody believes now that those panels are independent,” he added.

As the Trump administration undoes what it calls job-killing regulations on climate change, air and water pollution, pesticides and more, Zarba said industry has a voice but science does not.

“Human health and the environment will suffer,” he said.

It’s one reason Zarba said he would be marching Saturday.

Politics and science

But march organizers say the attacks on science did not start with the Trump administration. For decades, they say, ideology has overtaken evidence on issues in women’s health, gun violence and other controversial subjects.

“This isn’t a new phenomenon,” said March for Science Interim Executive Director Caroline Weinberg. “We reached a tipping point. But these protests should have been happening for years.”

In a polarized country, however, the march walks a fine line. 

“I’m always cautious about trying to politicize something as important as science,” said Rob Young, director for the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

“Certainly, scientists have had a rough go for the last year,” he added, and a march advocating for science is fine. “But to the extent that that’s incorporated with political messages, or slings and arrows against the president or members of his administration, then that’s a little bit more problematic.”

​Fired up

It’s Trump administration policies that have scientists fired up, however, from withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement to loosening air and water pollution rules.

“There’s no question that there’s fear and anxiety, given the elections of 2016,” said Chris McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, the professional society representing Earth and space scientists. 

She said that in the eight years she has been with AGU, it has become easier to get members to speak up on policy issues. 

“What we’re seeing is scientists coming to us to want to engage,” McEntee said.

More members are writing letters to elected officials and getting training on communicating science to policymakers and the public, she said. New programs AGU launched to help scientists communicate are overflowing.

And they are scoring some victories. Science agencies got a raise in the latest federal budget. 

“It’s been a very long time, actually, since we had significant increases,” McEntee noted.

New issues

Scientists are wading into controversial issues that many had previously avoided.

This year, March for Science organizers rallied support to lift a ban on gun violence research. Weinberg said they debated whether the issue was too partisan for the group to weigh in on. But they decided that it was more important to support research that would help policymakers make good decisions.

“It’s only partisan because we’ve let that become the conversation,” she said. “Pushing against that, I think, is one of the most vital roles we can play.”
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If cancer is suspected in a patient, surgeons, in most cases, would have to cut some of the suspected tissue out and test it. Getting the results could be a long process. A new invention called a MasSpec Pen could cut the wait time to just seconds. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Austin, Texas, where the pen was created.
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On Saturday, researchers who say they are fed up with politicians ignoring science will once again take to the streets in Washington and hundreds of cities around the world. The second March for Science takes place after a turbulent year in science policy under the Trump administration. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Nonprofit international organization for public competitions XPRIZE has announced 10 finalists in its race to develop new technologies to lower carbon-dioxide emissions. Each team will get an additional incentive of $5 million to scale up their ideas and present them for the top prize of $20 million. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Researchers say the love youngsters have for wildlife may be clouding the public’s mind about how endangered those creatures are.

The study in the journal PLOS Biology lists what the authors say are the world’s 10 most charismatic animals: tigers, lions, elephants, giraffes, leopards, pandas, cheetahs, polar bears, gray wolves and gorillas.

The common depiction of these animals in cartoons and movies and as toys has led to what the authors call “virtual populations” — people believe the animals are not at risk of extinction in the wild because they appear to be everywhere.

The study uses the popular French baby toy “Sophie the Giraffe” as an example. Eight hundred thousand Sophie toys were sold in France in 2010 — more than eight times the number of real giraffes living in Africa.

The authors recommend that toy companies and others who use endangered species as trademarks donate some of their profits to wildlife conservation.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) says breastfeeding all babies for the first two years would save the lives of more than 820,000 children under the age of five every year. The WHO is issuing a new 10-step guide aimed at promoting breastfeeding in health facilities around the world.

The World Health Organization and U.N. Children’s Fund launched the Baby-friendly Hospital initiative in 1991, a voluntary program that encourages new mothers to breastfeed. The two agencies want to expand this program so that breastfeeding becomes a standard of care for all babies in all hospitals, with the aim of achieving 100-percent coverage.

Technical Officer in WHOs Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, Laurence Grummer-Strawn, says the updated 10-step guidance advises health facilities on how care should be offered to new mothers and babies.

“It focuses on issues, such as placing the mother and baby together, skin to skin, immediately post-partum, starting breastfeeding within a few minutes after the birth,” he said. “It is about avoiding the use of formula unless there is a medical reason to…The other thing that is new about these 10 steps is that they clearly apply to all babies. The key principles behind the 10 steps also apply to premature infants, low birth weight babies, sick babies.”

Grummer-Strawn says globally only about 40 percent of babies under six months old are exclusively breastfed. He tells VOA coverage of baby friendly hospitals in Africa is very low — only four percent. He says that is of concern as fewer women receive the guidance they need regarding the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding.

“We totally believe that the lack of breastfeeding contributes significantly to mortality,” he said. “Neo-natal mortality rates have not dropped nearly as rapidly as child mortality rates. And, one of the concerns is that we are not adequately providing good nutrition particularly to low-birth babies and so addressing this early care in a better way can prevent some of that.”

Health advocates say breastfeeding confers many benefits. They say it protects newborns from acquiring infections and reduces mortality. It improves I-Q, school readiness and attendance. They say children and adolescents who were breastfed as babies are less likely to be overweight or obese. They say breastfeeding also reduces the risk of breast cancer in mothers.

 
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The opioid crisis leaves no community in the U.S. untouched. It’s nationwide, but it hits small towns and rural states particularly hard. 

In tiny Bellevue, Ohio, population 8,000, Koriann Evans had just gotten fentanyl from her dealer. Fentanyl is a drug dozens of times more powerful than heroin, and Evans couldn’t wait to get home to take it so she took it in her car and was driving home with her two young children in the back seat when she started to overdose. 

One of her daughters asked if she was OK. “Mommy can’t breathe,” Evans told her. Evans managed to hit the brakes before passing out. She was lucky. She was taken to a hospital where doctors revived her before it was too late. 

Evans has since stopped taking opioids.

“I almost killed my kids. I didn’t have it (the car) in park. I could have flipped that car and killed them or I could have killed other people,” she said.

WATCH: Opioid Deaths Still Rising in the US

Sheriff John Tharp in Lucas County Ohio near Lake Erie, says the number of accidents caused by people overdosing on heroin and other drugs “has just skyrocketed.” Tharp says people commonly shoot up in their cars after buying the drugs. 

Manchester, with 110,000 residents, is the most populous city in New Hampshire. Its opioid addiction problem is so notorious that President Donald Trump traveled there to announce his plan to combat the country’s opioid crisis.

Three years ago, after overdose emergency calls exploded in Manchester,  firefighters started a program called “Safe Station,” a program that encourages addicts to seek help at every firehouse in the state without judgment. It started when one of the firefighters helped a colleague’s brother, addicted to drugs, and on the verge of suicide. In its first month, 80 people sought help. Now the average is almost twice as many. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 40,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2016, a five-fold increase from 1999. More recent statistics are not yet available. 

Rural doctors can feel overwhelmed. Dr. Jennifer Allen practices medicine in Hannibal, Missouri, population 17,000. Allen says she feels alone. The next clinic is a two-hour drive from Hannibal. At her clinic, Allen witnesses first hand how hard families and individuals suffer because of the opioid epidemic. 

Hannibal, Manchester and Bellevue, like many small towns across the U.S., don’t have the resources to fight this epidemic alone.

“No one agency can do this, no one city can do this,” Manchester’s Fire Chief Daniel Goonan said. “This is way above my pay grade! It’s above any community’s pay grade, any state’s pay grade. This has got to be an all out, all hands on deck effort to fix this thing, nationwide.”

The University of Missouri School of Medicine is making a difference in its state. It started a program that uses video conferencing to help doctors in rural areas. 

Inside a secure room at the University of Missouri, doctors from across the state can talk to trained specialists. Dr. Doug Burgess, with the University of Missouri at the Kansas City campus, assists with the program.

“We have therapists, we have pharmacologists, we have primary care doctors and physicians, and as a group there is a lot of expertise there,” he said.

Dr. Karen Edison, the medical director at the university’s School of Medicine says the doctors become part of a learning collaborative where they can ask their questions, present their patients and come up with a strategy that will help that patient. 

One out of every 66 deaths in Missouri is related to opioid or heroin overdoses, higher than the national average. 

Doctors, firefighters and police in small towns throughout the U.S. understand it will take a team approach to change the trajectory of this epidemic. 

In Hannibal, Allen says the program helps her to understand “that yes, OK, we’re doing things right or, no, here is something we can change or improve on.” 

Addicts need help without the fear of being stigmatized or being arrested. The crisis is so widespread that the surgeon general is urging people to carry naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of drug overdoses and saves lives.

Ending the crisis is indeed an all hands on deck effort, and those hands have to be made up of the entire nation.
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The opioid crisis leaves no community in the U.S. untouched. It’s become a nationwide epidemic, but it’s hitting small towns and rural states especially hard. VOA’s Carol Pearson looks at the scope of the problem and what some states are doing to tackle the crisis.
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Thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy contracts in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia have been signed, seriously challenging the financial viability of major hydropower projects on the river, an energy expert told a water conference last week.

Buoyed by a recent Thai government decision to delay a power purchase deal with a major mainstream Mekong dam, clean-energy proponents and economists told the third Mekong River Commission summit that the regional energy market was on the cusp of a technological revolution.

Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit in Washington dedicated to enhancing global peace and security, said 6,000 megawatts’ worth of wind and solar contracts had been signed in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos in the last six months.

He said that in January 2017, he and his colleagues had suggested that more solar and wind energy projects be incorporated into Cambodia’s power development plan, the prospect of which had been “basically off the table” at the time. “In a year’s time, Cambodia has entirely restructured its energy sector” to emphasize solar projects in the country, “and if Cambodia’s doing it, you can bet that the other countries are doing it as well.”

Two gigawatts of wind and solar projects were announced in Vietnam in February and March alone according to a spreadsheet provided by the Stimson Center.

Hyunjung Lee, senior energy economist at the Asian Development Bank’s Southeast Asia Energy Division, said technologies such as wind and solar power were “going to hit the region very significantly, in my view.”

“The atmosphere in the region has been changed,” she said, even in just the past year. “We see a lot of development can happen in solar and wind in the region,” though more integrated approaches were needed.

Lee said the ADB was working to set up a Regional Power Coordination Center that would mimic a highly successful project in southern Africa to create an efficient, integrated regional market.

Impact on river system

A six-year Mekong River Commission Council study on development plans for the Mekong, which was the focus of the summit, suggested catastrophic impacts upon the health of the river system if all planned hydropower dams — 11 mainstream projects and more than 100 on tributaries — were built.

In a January report, the International Renewable Energy Agency found that the cost of electricity generated by solar facilities that supply utilities had fallen by 73 percent from 2010 to 2017, and the cost was forecast to be cut in half again by 2020. 

At that price trajectory, the cost of solar power would fall below that of hydropower by 2020, long before many planned Mekong dams go online.

Global solar capacity grew 32 percent, adding 94 gigawatts in 2017, while renewables across the board increased by 8.3 percent, the IREA survey of 15,000 data points found. Renewables and solar grew faster in Asia than anywhere else in the world, while the amount of hydropower commissioned across the globe was the lowest in a decade.

Wang Wenling, an assistant professor at Yunnan University’s Institute of International Rivers and Eco-Security, said she had just seen firsthand how far the price of solar technology had plummeted on a recent trip to North Carolina in the United States.

“I was super surprised how their solar power production cost per unit is actually cheaper than hydropower. I don’t know how they make it — it’s almost impossible for me — but their cost is only about 15 percent of the cost in China,” she said.

“So I think we have a lot of alternatives and it needs to be considered,” she said.

Some participants, particularly from Laos and Cambodia, remained skeptical of the technology.

“I think we need some more figures,” said a Cambodian member of the audience, raising concerns about stability. “We also think about some figure for the comparison between the occupation of the land of hydropower with solar energy.”

Attractive idea for Cambodia

Jake Brunner, program coordinator for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the figures for solar were particularly attractive in Cambodia, where land remained relatively cheap, while energy demand was high in neighboring southern Vietnam.

“We calculated that if you took one 10,000-hectare economic land concession in Cambodia, for example, and you made some very conservative assumptions, you could generate about 3 gigawatts, which is pretty close to Cambodia’s entire national consumption,” he said.

Land is a particularly sensitive issue in Cambodia, where rights group Licadho says more than half a million people have been affected by land conflicts.

Gregory Thomas, executive director of the Natural Heritage Institute, told the summit his organization had researched a solar photo-voltaic alternative for Cambodia that didn’t require any land at all.

Instead of building the massive planned Sambor dam on the Mekong, a “no dam alternative” study commissioned by the Cambodian government had recommended placing solar cells on the existing reservoir of the Lower Sesan II dam in Stung Treng.

“The advantage of integrating solar arrays on a hydropower reservoir that already exists is that you can use the unoccupied space on the reservoir without any land use conflicts whatsoever,” he said. “And, of course, the reservoir storage acts as a battery, essentially, to backstop the intermittent nature of the solar generation.”

Such a project could be cost-competitive and go online much more quickly than a hydropower dam, with 100 megwatts deployable in year, he said.

Floating solar projects are being developed around the world, including in China, where an enormous 150-megawatt installation on a lake that used to be a deserted coal mine is expected to go online in May, powering 15,000 homes.
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Doctors are increasingly optimistic that new advances in gene therapy will change the outlook for patients living with ALS and other Motor Neuron Diseases. Neurodegenerative disorders selectively affect cells that control the body’s voluntary muscles, leading to difficulty speaking, walking, swallowing and moving. As VOA’s Faith Lapidus reports, researchers have now identified the faulty gene which may cause the condition in some people with a family history of the disease.
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