YCLOAK

Patients who survive infection with the Ebola virus often continue to face numerous health problems. New research finds 80 percent of Ebola survivors suffer disabilities one year after being discharged from the hospital.

Approximately 11,000 people died in the Ebola outbreak that hit West Africa from 2014 to 2016; tens of thousands more who were infected survived.

Of those survivors, many battled vision problems and headaches that lasted for months.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are studying what’s called post-Ebola syndrome. One of the senior authors of the study, Dr. Janet Scott, says researchers are unsure why survivors experience such disabilities.

“I’m not sure we’ve quite gotten to the bottom of it yet,” Scott said. “The idea that you go through something as horrific as Ebola and just walk away from that unscathed was always a bit of a vain hope.  So, it could be the inflammatory response. It could be damage to the muscles, and it could be the persistence of virus in some cases. It could be all of those things.”

Scott says problems found in Ebola survivors’ eyes may provide clues to what is happening elsewhere in the body.

“They show some quite distinct scarring patterns,” she said. “There’s definitely scar tissue there. We can see it in the eyes. We can’t see it in the rest of the body, but I’m sure it’s in the rest of the body because the patients are coming in with this huge range of problems.”

The disabilities were reported in past Ebola outbreaks, as well. However, because past outbreaks were smaller and there were few survivors, researchers were not able to do major, long-term studies on the aftereffects.

This time, said Scott, “There are 5,000 survivors or thereabouts in Sierra Leone, and more in Guinea and Liberia. So, it’s an opportunity from a research point of view to find out the full spectrum of sequelae … the things that happen after an acute illness.”

Military Hospital 34 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, also took part in the study, helping to recruit 27 Ebola survivors and 54 close contacts who were not infected. About 80 percent of survivors reported disabilities compared to 11 percent of close contacts.

“The problems we’re seeing in Ebola survivors, this is not due just to the tough life in Sierra Leone. This is more than likely down to their experience in Ebola,” Scott said.

The research was led by Dr. Soushieta Jagadesh, who said “a year following acute disease, survivors of West Africa Ebola Virus Disease continue to have a higher chance of disability in mobility, cognition and vision.”

“Issues such as anxiety and depression persist in survivors and must not be neglected,” she added.

Scott hopes the findings can be used to provide better care in the event of another Ebola outbreak, no matter where it is. In the West Africa outbreak, the first goal was to contain the epidemic, followed by reducing the death rate.

“If I was treating an Ebola patient again, it has to be more than just surviving,” Scott said. “You have to try to make people survive well. Surviving with half your body paralyzed or with your vision impaired and being unable to care for your family or earn a living isn’t really enough. So, what I would like to do is to focus on that aspect to make people survive better and survive well.”
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SpaceX has unveiled a sleek white spacesuit for astronauts on its crewed flights coming up next year.

Chief executive Elon Musk made the big reveal via Instagram on Wednesday. He says it’s not him in the new suit, rather a SpaceX engineer.

SpaceX is developing a crew version of its Dragon cargo capsule for NASA astronauts. Boeing is also working to get U.S. astronauts flying again from home soil. Boeing is going blue for spacesuits for its Starliner capsules.

U.S. astronauts last rocketed away from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2011. They’ve since been riding Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station.

Musk says the new SpaceX suit has been tested on Earth — and works. He says it was incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function.
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Food alone cannot solve the world’s malnutrition crises but only three countries are looking beyond hunger to the other major driver, according to a global study released Thursday.

Water, sanitation and hygiene, usually treated by governments and NGOs as a separate policy area from food and nutrition, make up the second leading cause of stunted growth in children, after underweight births, said the report.

But only Cambodia, Niger, and Zimbabwe among the 10 countries covered by the report are linking their response to malnutrition and water by bringing together the responsible agencies, according to charity WaterAid.

“Improving child health is a long-term issue. It’s not as simple as giving food and that improves malnutrition — right?” Dan Jones of WaterAid told Reuters.

Jones said governments that treat food and water separately cannot prevent malnutrition. Instead, they must tackle the poor sanitation that causes malnutrition, via infection and disease.

In 2016, 155 million children younger than five were stunted due to a lack of nutrition, according to the United Nations World Health Organization.

Diseases caused by dirty water and lack of sanitation such as gut infections, intestinal worms, and diarrhea prevent young bodies from absorbing the nutrients needed for growth, according to WaterAid, which produced the report with charities Action Against Hunger and SHARE.

Jones said malnutrition can leave children with invisible cognitive, emotional and physical damage.

Yet the effects are clear, and span all areas of development, from economic growth to schooling, said Jones.

“If they have clean water … girls, when they grow up to be mothers, are more likely to give birth to healthy children, and to be able to help them to grow and develop and provide them with clean water and food — and those children can go to school and concentrate in school,” said Jones.

Jones singled out Cambodia for linking up its response.

One in three Cambodian children younger than five is stunted, but Prime Minister Hun Sen has brought together the ministries responsible for nutrition, health, agriculture, and water and sanitation to create a joint response.

“It sounds very obvious, but those ministers really talking to each other can make a huge difference,” Jones said.
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U.S. wildlife managers erred when they declined to list as endangered a small population of grizzly bears in the remote reaches of Idaho and northwest Montana, a federal judge has ruled in what conservationists on Wednesday hailed as a huge victory.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 determined the fewer than 50 grizzlies that roam the Cabinet Mountains and Yaak River drainage in the Northern Rockies were not in danger of extinction and did not warrant reclassifying as endangered or threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The Montana conservation group Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued, arguing the so-called Cabinet-Yaak population of grizzlies would go extinct unless U.S. wildlife managers tightened restrictions on logging, mining and other activities in bear habitat, all safeguards that would come with endangered status.

On Tuesday a federal judge in Missoula, Montana, sided with the conservation group in a ruling that found that the Fish and Wildlife Service had violated U.S. law in determining that the number of outsized, hump-shouldered bears in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem could reach a targeted recovery goal of 100 without added protections.

In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen found that the agency had long recognized that population of grizzlies was warranted for listing as an endangered species because of human-caused mortality and other threats.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 reported Cabinet-Yaak grizzlies were declining at an annual rate of about 0.8 percent per year and that the percentage of bears unlawfully or accidentally killed by humans had tripled by 1999-2012 compared with 1982-1998.

Yet the agency in 2014 reversed course, finding the bears did not need additional safeguards because their population trend had changed to stable from declining.

Christensen ruled that reversal was unlawfully arbitrary and capricious and ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to rework any proposal that would downgrade the status of the bears. Alliance head Michael Garrity on Wednesday said the judge’s decision was a victory for the grizzles.

“Now they have a chance at survival,” Garrity said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request by Reuters for comment.

Grizzlies in 1975 were listed as threatened in the lower 48 states after they neared extinction.

The Cabinet-Yaak bears are among just a handful of grizzly populations that exist outside Alaska. The grizzlies in and around Yellowstone Park, the second-largest group of bears in the Lower 48 states, were delisted this summer.
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Engineers at a lab in Florida have been working quietly for 2½ years on building one of the most powerful magnets in the world.

And on Monday, they succeeded. The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory — whose main location is housed at Florida State University — met its goal and reclaimed its status as home to the world’s strongest resistive magnet.

They called it “Project 11,” a nod to the comedy film “This is Spinal Tap,” about a fictional heavy metal band whose guitarist boasts an amplifier whose volume goes up to 11, not just 10.

Lab officials said they tested a 41.4-tesla magnet, which is roughly 20 times the strength of a magnet used in medical imaging machines and vastly stronger than the ones that get stuck to the door of a household refrigerator. The Earth’s magnetic field, by comparison, is one-twenty thousandth (.00005) of a tesla. A tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength.

The new magnet, which cost $3.5 million to build, beat the old mark for resistive magnets, which was held by a 38.5-tesla magnet in China. The National MagLab had previously held the record for 19 years.

Greg Boebinger, the lab’s director, said the loss of the record prompted officials to tell engineers, “Go ahead and make the thing bigger, go ahead and use more power, just go full volume to 11 and see what you can do.”

Continuous operation

Resistive magnets are a type of electromagnet used for research. They differ from pulsed magnets, which can reach a higher Tesla but can sustain that power for only a fraction of a second. Resistive magnets can run continuously. Superconducting magnets use less power but tap out at a lower field strength. Hybrid magnets combine superconducting and resistive elements and can reach even higher fields. The National MagLab has the world’s strongest hybrid magnet, which reaches 45 tesla.

Researchers say they can use these powerful magnets to answer many questions, such as: What kinds of materials will work best in quantum computers? How does a potential Alzheimer’s drug change the brain? What molecules make up a sample of crude oil — and will it be worth drilling for?

The new record-setting magnet is powerful enough that lab officials use non-magnetic tools, but it’s not as powerful as some imagine.

“Local people think we change the weather,” said Boebinger, who said he gets asked about Magneto all the time. “We don’t even change the magnetic field outside our building.”

Instead, the magnetic field created by the new magnet will be used by researchers and scientists from around the world as a way to look at and study various types of materials and perhaps make breakthroughs in medicine, engineering and energy.
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A federal research vessel will launch on a cruise this week to study how Beaufort Sea wind affects plant and animal life in a changing Arctic Ocean.

The Sikuliaq, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, will depart Friday from Nome for the trip through the Bering Strait to waters on and off the continental shelf in the Beaufort.

Climate warming in recent decades has resulted in far less summer seasonal ice in the Beaufort, which stretches from the northeast coast of Alaska across Canada. East winds that formerly blew over sea ice now blow over open water, said Steve Okkonen, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Wind drives water at the surface of the shallow continental shelf, at depths of about 300 feet (91 meters), north to water off the shelf, which drops to depths of more than 10,000 feet (3,050 meters).

The result is a phenomenon called “upwelling.” Deep, cold water rises toward the surface carrying large concentrations of plankton, which scientists hypothesize will attract fish, especially Arctic cod. Large numbers of cod in turn attract beluga whale and seabirds that prey on cod.

Aerial surveys have shown belugas congregating on the shelf break, said Carin Ashjian, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who will serve as chief scientist on the cruise.

“What we hope to do, and what we’re planning to do, is to basically document and describe how the physical forcing of the wind produces this favorable feeding environment for the beluga whales,” she said Tuesday. “It’s one thing to say, `Oh, they can find food along this shelf break.’ But we want to find out why they find their food along the shelf break, with numbers.”

Upwelling events in the Beaufort are projected to increase as sea ice continues to trend downward, Okkonen said. Last year the minimum sea ice for 2016 was recorded Sept. 10, when ice covered 1.6 million square miles (4.14 square kilometers), tied with Sept. 18, 2007, for the second-lowest minimum on records since satellite measurements began in 1978. The lowest year on record was Sept. 17, 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, when sea ice fell to 1.31 million square miles (3.39 million square kilometers).

Wind covering a greater distance over open water becomes a greater force on the ocean.

“We have a much bigger fetch,” Okkonen said.

Researchers on board the 261-foot (80-meter) Sikuliaq will record oceanographic conditions, sample for plankton levels and cod numbers, and survey marine mammals and seabirds.

The ship will sail transects in a box roughly 37 by 62 miles (60 by 100 kilometers) starting 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 kilometers) offshore.

The scientists want to share the research story with the public, particularly with Alaskans, and will offer a Facebook page, with reports from the vessel, titled, “Arctic Winds, Fish, Fins and Feathers.”

Researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Rhode Island and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be on board. Researchers are scheduled to return to Nome on Sept. 18.
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When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.

But Dijkstra, a University of New Hampshire marine biologist, saw only a patchy seafloor before her. The sugar kelp had declined dramatically and been replaced by invasive, shrub-like seaweed that looked like a giant shag rug.

“I remember going to some dive sites and honestly being shocked at how few kelp blades we saw,” she said.

Warming oceans probable culprit

The Gulf of Maine, stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is the latest in a growing list of global hotspots losing their kelp, including hundreds of miles in the Mediterranean Sea, off southern Japan and Australia, and parts of the California coast.

Among the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems, kelp forests are found on all continental coastlines except for Antarctica and provide critical food and shelter to myriad fish and other creatures. Kelp also is critical to coastal economies, providing billions of dollars in tourism and fishing.

The likely culprit, according to several scientific studies, is warming oceans from climate change, coupled with the arrival of invasive species. In Maine, the invaders are other seaweeds. In Australia, the Mediterranean and Japan, tropical fish are feasting on the kelp.

Most kelp are replaced by small, tightly packed, bushy seaweeds that collect sediment and prevent kelp from growing back, said the University of Western Australia’s Thomas Wernberg.

“Collectively these changes are part of a recent and increasing global trend of flattening of the world’s kelp forests,” said Wernberg, co-author of a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that 38 percent of kelp forest declined over the past 50 years in regions that had data.

Great Southern Reef threatened

Kelp losses on Australia’s Great Southern Reef threaten tourism and fishing industries worth $10 billion. Die-offs contributed to a 60 percent drop in species richness in the Mediterranean and were blamed for the collapse of the abalone fishery in Japan.

“You are losing habitat. You are losing food. You are losing shoreline protection,” said University of Massachusetts Boston’s Jarrett Byrnes, who leads a working group on kelp and climate change. “They provide real value to humans.”

The Pacific Coast from northern California to the Oregon border is one place that suffered dramatic kelp loss, according to Cynthia Catton, a research associate at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Davis. Since 2014, aerial surveys have shown that bull kelp declined by over 90 percent, something Catton blamed on a marine heat wave along with a rapid increase in kelp-eating sea urchins.

Without the kelp to eat, Northern California’s abalone fishery has been harmed.

“It’s pretty devastating to the ecosystem as a whole,” Catton said. “It’s like a redwood forest that has been completely clear-cut. If you lose the trees, you don’t have a forest.”

Kelp hasn’t recovered

Kelp is incredibly resilient and has been known to bounce back from storms and heat waves.

But in Maine, it has struggled to recover following an explosion of voracious sea urchins in the 1980s that wiped out many kelp beds. Now, it must survive in waters that are warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans — most likely forcing kelp to migrate northward or into deeper waters.

 “What the future holds is more complicated,” Byrnes said. “If the Gulf of Maine warms sufficiently, we know kelp will have a hard time holding on.”

On their dives around Maine’s Appledore Island, a craggy island off New Hampshire that’s home to nesting seagulls, Dijkstra and colleague Larry Harris have witnessed dramatic changes.

30-year-old drive logs

Their study, published by the Journal of Ecology in April, examined photos of seaweed populations and dive logs going back 30 years in the Gulf of Maine. They found introduced species from as far away as Asia, such as the filamentous red seaweed, had increased by as much 90 percent and were covering 50 to 90 percent of the gulf’s seafloor.

They are seeing far fewer ocean pout, wolf eel and pollock that once were commonplace in these kelp beds. But they also are finding that the half-dozen invasive seaweeds replacing kelp are harboring up to three times more tiny shrimp, snails and other invertebrates.

“We’re not really sure how this new seascape will affect higher species in the food web, especially commercially important ones like fish, crabs and lobster,” said Dijkstra, following a dive in which bags of invasive seaweed were collected and the invertebrates painstakingly counted. “What we do think is that fish are using these seascapes differently.”

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered a halt to research on the potential health hazards of people who live near mountaintop coal mining operations.

The U.S. Interior Department ordered the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to end a study of surface coal mining sites in the Appalachian Mountains, pending a review of projects that cost more than $100,000.

Last year the Interior Department, under then President Barack Obama, commissioned research into possible health risks among those who live near current or former mining sites in Appalachia.

The agency allocated $1 million in 2015 for a two-year study at the request of officials from West Virginia, located in the heart of Appalachia.

But the Interior Department ordered an immediate halt to the research, defending it as necessary to ensure the responsible expenditure of taxpayer money.

Trump proposed a $1.6 billion cut to Interior’s budget in 2018, including 4,000 jobs.

The decision, which took effect Monday, comes as the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers collaborate to eliminate policies they believe restrict the mining and use of coal.

Trump promised during his presidential campaign to create jobs by reviving the coal industry, and signed an executive order in March that lifted a ban on leases for mining coal on federal land.

Environmentalists maintain the removal of coal from mountaintops releases pollutants into water and air, causing numerous health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and birth defects.

Indiana University health science professor Michael Hendryx told House lawmakers in 2015 that his studies have connected mountaintop removal to higher rates of lung cancer, heart and kidney disease and other illnesses.

The Sierra Club’s Appalachia organizer, Bill Price, described the decision as “infuriating.”  “Trump has once again shown the people of Appalachia that we mean nothing to him,” he said in a statement.

 
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