YCLOAK

Millions of Americans converged on a narrow corridor stretching from Oregon to South Carolina to watch the moon blot out the midday sun Monday for a wondrous couple of minutes in the first total solar eclipse to sweep coast to coast in 99 years.

Veteran eclipse watchers warned the uninitiated to get ready to be blown away.

Planetariums and museums posted “Sold out of eclipse glasses” on their front doors. Signs along highways reminded motorists of “Solar Eclipse Monday,” while cars bore the message “Eclipse or bust.”

WATCH: Solar Eclipse Fuels Demand, Anxiety, for Viewing Lenses

With 200 million people within a day’s drive of the path of totality, towns and parks braced for monumental crowds. It’s expected to be the most observed, most studied and most photographed eclipse ever. Not to mention the most festive, what with all the parties.

In Salem, Oregon, a field outside the state fairgrounds was transformed into a campground in advance of an eclipse-watching party for 8,500.

“It’s one of those ‘check the box’ kind of things in life,” said Hilary O’Hollaren, who drove 30 miles from Portland with her two teenagers and a tent, plus a couple friends.

Astronomers consider a full solar eclipse the grandest of cosmic spectacles.

The Earth, moon and sun line up perfectly every one to three years, briefly turning day into night for a sliver of the planet. But these sights normally are in no man’s land, like the vast Pacific or the poles. This will be the first eclipse of the social media era to pass through such a heavily populated area.

The moon hasn’t thrown this much shade at the U.S. since 1918. That was the country’s last coast-to-coast total eclipse.

In fact, the U.S. mainland hasn’t seen a total solar eclipse since 1979 — and even then, only five states in the Northwest experienced total darkness before the eclipse veered in Canada.

Monday’s total eclipse will cast a shadow that will race through 14 states, entering near Lincoln City, Oregon, at 1:16 p.m. EDT, moving diagonally across the heartland and then exiting near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:47 p.m. EDT. The path will cut 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) across the land and will be just 60 to 70 miles (96 kilometers to 113 kilometers) wide.

Mostly clear skies beckoned along much of the route, according to the National Weather Service.

Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois will see the longest stretch of darkness: 2 minutes and 44 seconds.

All of North America will get at least a partial eclipse. Central America and the top of South America will also see the moon cover part of the sun.

Michele Arsenault of New York City and her son, Michael, spent Sunday driving south and stopped for dinner in Asheville, North Carolina, at the Tupelo Honey Cafe where several other tables were also occupied by travelers heading to eclipse zones.

Arsenault has been comparing weather charts for days as she finalized plans and had lodging reserved in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a reserved parking spot in Sweetwater, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away. Her son, who’s about to start graduate school, said he tagged along because “I appreciate the idea of a good adventure.”

NASA and other scientists will be watching and analyzing the eclipse from telescopes the ground and in orbit, the International Space Station, airplanes and scores of high-altitude balloons, which will beam back live video. Citizen scientists will monitor animal and plant behavior as daylight turns into twilight and the temperature drops.

NASA’s associate administrator for science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen, took to the skies for a dry run Sunday. He will usher in the eclipse over the Pacific Coast from a NASA plane.

“Can’t wait for the cosmic moment Mon morning,” he tweeted.

Near Victoria, British Columbia, where 91 percent of the sun will be eclipsed, science and math teacher Clayton Uyeda is planning to watch from a ferry along with his wife. He said he is “expecting to have a real sense of connection with the heavens.”

He has similarly lofty hopes for his students if they can bring themselves to look up at the sky instead of down at their electronic devices.

Scientists everywhere agree with Uyeda: Put the phones and cameras down and enjoy the greatest natural show on Earth with your own (protected) eyes.

The only time it’s safe to look directly without protective eyewear is during totality, when the sun is 100 percent covered. Otherwise, keep the solar specs on or use pinhole projectors that can cast an image of the eclipse.

The next total solar eclipse in the U.S. will be in 2024. The next coast-to-coast one will not be until 2045.
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A fourth-grade class at a suburban Kansas City school erupted in wonder when they tried on their solar eclipse glasses for the first time and turned toward the sun for an eclipse “practice.”

“The sun looks like the moon!” “It’s really dark!” “There’s just a little circle of light!” “It’s just a speck up there!”

The students at Clardy Elementary School in North Kansas City were practicing the proper use of the glasses Friday in anticipation of Monday’s solar eclipse. Their teacher, Christy Lister, had gone through slides detailing how and when to wear the glasses, how to care for them and proper behavior during the eclipse. It was only the third day of the school year, but the students had already talked about eyes, the solar system and other eclipse-related topics.

The district’s teachers and administrators began planning for the big event last May and worked through the summer on age-specific activities for the district’s 20,000 students. The activities will include kindergartners using beads that react to ultraviolet light from the sun, while others will conduct experiments measuring atmospheric changes during the eclipse or create solar viewers with 3-D printers.

U.S. schools along and near the coast-to-coast path where the sun will be totally blacked out by the moon during the eclipse are taking widely varying approaches. While some districts are seizing the opportunity for ready-made lessons, others are closing for the day or keeping kids inside because of safety concerns.

In Idaho, districts in and around Twin Falls are using the day for science education, while many districts in the eastern part of the state either canceled school or will start the school year a day later. In Wyoming, the Laramie School District moved the first day of school to Tuesday after the superintendent said he had “grossly underestimated” the event’s significance.

North Kansas City found the educational opportunity irresistible, said Jill Hackett, a deputy superintendent.

“Students will gain a lot more by watching, discussing what they see with their teachers and other students,” she said. “I think it will be extraordinary.”

Smaller towns expecting huge influxes of visitors have concerns about transportation. The primary worry for many districts is the risk of eye injuries for students who gaze at the sun without properly wearing the right glasses.

In St. Joseph, Missouri, district officials decided to close schools out of concern that the expected tens of thousands of out-of-towners could tie up traffic.

“We were concerned with the bus routes, there would be kids sitting and waiting for hours for their buses,” said district spokeswoman Bridget Blevins, who said city and county officials “strongly urged” the district to close.

Citing warnings of possible eye damage, Cumberland Valley School District in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, canceled recess Monday and Broward County public schools in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, canceled all outdoor activities during the eclipse. Schools in Crocker, Missouri, will be closed after the district’s insurance company required a liability waiver from parents and students concerning possible eye damage.

Other districts made changes to help students see the eclipse, even in areas where the moon won’t totally cover the sun. The New Albany Floyd County Schools in southern Indiana plans to extend the school day 15 minutes, timing it for the height of the eclipse. Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., will take students to its football field to see the event.

In North Kansas City, students can stay inside if they or their parents request it.

“We will be mindful of the exposure and making sure we’re safe,” Hackett said. “We plan field trips all the time, we teach students how to properly use tools, how to do experiments in labs. It just requires safety, very clear instructions and careful monitoring.”

For 9-year-olds Kyle Hurt, Jack Leech and Sierra Geary, the chance to see a solar eclipse brought nothing but excitement.

“It’s going to be a great event for us, for the school and for even the whole country,” Kyle said. “I can’t wait.”
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While Monday’s total solar eclipse in the U.S. will be a once-in-a-lifetime sky show for millions, there’s a small group of people who have experienced it all before and they can’t get enough of it.

Glenn Schneider has seen 33. Fred Espenak has watched 28. Donald Liebenberg has logged 26. For newbie Kate Russo, it’s 10 and counting.

These veteran eclipse chasers spend lots of money and craft intricate plans all to experience another mid-day darkening of the sky. Many work in science and related fields and they’ll travel around the world, even to Antarctica, to see one more.

“I do this not so much as an avocation, but as an addiction,” said Schneider, a University of Arizona astronomy professor.

Russo, a psychologist in Ireland who wrote a book about people’s eclipse experiences, said some people find the experience life-changing. That happened to her.

“Eclipse chasing isn’t just a hobby or interest,” Russo wrote in an email from Wyoming, where she traveled to see Monday’s eclipse. “Eclipse chasing is a way of life. It becomes who you are.”

Monday’s eclipse will cut a 70-mile-wide (112-kilometer) path of totality across the country, when the moon moves between Earth and the sun, blocking it for as much as 2 1/2 minutes. It’s the first coast-to-coast full eclipse since 1918. Many of the big eclipse chasers are planning to be in Oregon or Wyoming because there’s a better chance of clear weather there in August. They’ll be ready to drive hundreds of miles if need be to find good weather.

Total solar eclipses happen on average every 18 months or so, but they usually aren’t near easy-to-drive highways. Norma Liebenberg has been to a dozen, mostly joining her avid eclipse watcher husband, Donald, in remote places like Libya, Zambia and Western China.

“It’s sort of mind-boggling that there are 1,000 people out in these isolated places to see it,” she said. She even forgave her husband when he missed their first anniversary to go to a clouded-out eclipse in the South Pacific.

There’s a compulsiveness to eclipse chasers, especially photographers, said Dr. Gordon Telepun, an Alabama plastic surgeon who has seen only three.

“It’s very anxiety-producing, it’s very challenging,” said Telepun, who even developed a talking phone app that times an eclipse so photographers don’t miss anything. “It’s an adrenaline rush man, I’m telling you.”

Telepun said his hero is “Mr. Eclipse” Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, who explains why chasers are the way they are.

“It’s the closest any of us will come to being an astronaut and being in space,” Espenak said.

Eclipse chasers say their first always hooks them.

Schneider, who got a telescope at age 5, planned out his first eclipse precisely. He was 14 in 1970 and he traveled from New York City to East Carolina University’s stadium. He had choreographed how he was going to spend the 2 minutes 53 seconds of darkness. Then came the moment.

“I was frozen in place,” he recalled. “I had binoculars around my neck for two and a half minutes and I never picked them up.”

When it was over “I was shaking. I was crying. I was overwhelmed,” he said. “It was at that instant when I said ‘Yeah, this is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life’.”

Now Schneider takes his grown daughter with him to eclipses. And he invented what he calls the “lug-o-scope,” a telescope that folds into its own luggage to make his eclipse chasing easier.

“Flexibility is probably No. 1,” Schneider said. “Keeping your options and open and be ready to take that option if that’s what’s needed.”

A veteran of 28 eclipses, Espenak often leads groups of 50 some people to view eclipses, lecturing both about the beauty and the science. Except when the hour grows close and the skies get dark, he goes silent.

“On eclipse day he’s all business. He does not want to be diverted from his checklist of everything he wants to do,” explains University of Tennessee’s Mark Littmann, co-author with Espenak of the book “Totality.” “It’s like you’re kind of trying to chat with a pilot coming in for an emergency landing. It isn’t that he’s just not friendly, it’s just not the right time anymore.”

Donald Liebenberg has seen and blogged about his 26 eclipses for Clemson University, where he does research. He holds the record for most time in totality because the retired federal scientist used to view them by airplane whenever possible. In 1973, he convinced the French to let him use the supersonic Concorde for eclipse viewing and he flew at twice the speed of sound. He got 74 minutes of eclipse time in that one flight.

After spending more than 60 years flying around the world, this time the Liebenbergs are only going as far as their driveway.

This eclipse is coming directly to them in South Carolina.
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A total solar eclipse will march across the United States on Monday, casting a shadow from Oregon’s Pacific Coast, across the U.S. heartland, all the way to South Carolina’s Atlantic Coast.

Why is this eclipse so anticipated?

This will be the first time in 38 years that the mainland United States will experience a total eclipse, and it will be the first time in 99 years that a total eclipse will pass from the U.S. Pacific Coast to the U.S. Atlantic Coast. The last time that happened was in 1918, traveling from Washington state to Florida.

Hawaii experienced a total solar eclipse in 1991.

Total eclipses happen every one to three years somewhere in the world, however, they are most likely to take place over the ocean since most of the Earth is covered by water.

What is an eclipse?

A total eclipse happens when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun and completely blots out the sun’s light, except for the corona of its outer atmosphere.

From Earth, the moon will appear to be the same size as the sun. This is possible because while the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun in diameter, it is also 400 times closer to Earth than the sun. When the two line up exactly, the skies go dark.

Where can I see the eclipse?

The path of totality, where the moon’s shadow will completely cover the sun, is a diagonal band that cuts across the country, about 100 kilometers wide. Those outside that narrow band can still see a partial eclipse, extending up to Canada and down to the top of South America.

Totality will begin near Lincoln City, Oregon, cross the states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and finally South Carolina.

The biggest cities in the path include Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Salem, Oregon.

How long will it last?

The total eclipse will last longest near Carbondale, Illinois: 2 minutes and 44 seconds.

The first city to enter the totality will be Lincoln Beach, Oregon, at 10:16 a.m. Pacific time and last to exit the totality is Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time.

How can I watch it?

About 12 million people are estimated to live in the path of totality while tens of thousands of others are planning to travel to witness the event, many to remote parks and rangelands across the U.S. heartland.

To avoid eye damage, experts say everyone should wear special solar glasses. Many cities have seen long lines of people waiting to pick up protective eye glasses and the price for such glasses have spiked online.

WATCH: Solar Eclipse Fuels Demand, Anxiety, for Viewing Lenses

What about the weather?

Heavy clouds will hide the most dramatic effects of the eclipse, causing travelers to carefully plan where to go to find the best visibility. The forecast looks best in the Western U.S., while South Carolina is the one place in the totality most likely to see clouds. Some travelers are preparing several options in the hopes of finding clear skies, although officials say there could also be gridlocked roads as the eclipse approaches and tourists chase blue skies.

When is the next one?

The next total solar eclipse to touch the U.S. won’t be for another seven years. In 2024, a line of totality will cross from Texas, up through the Midwest, and then over to New York, New England and New Brunswick, Canada.

Outside of the United States, the next eclipse will occur in 2019 and will be viewable from the South Pacific, Chile, and Argentina.
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Conservation efforts come in many forms – financial, political, personal… and even religious. A former Catholic seminary in Brazil has helped protect South America’s largest canid, the maned wolf. Faith Lapidus reports
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After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the era of nuclear nightmares — of the atomic arms race, of backyard bomb shelters, of schoolchildren diving under desks to practice their survival skills in the event of an attack — seemed to finally, thankfully, fade into history.

Until now.

For some baby boomers, North Korea’s nuclear advances and President Donald Trump’s bellicose response have prompted flashbacks to a time when they were young, and when they prayed each night that they might awaken the next morning. For their children, the North Korean crisis was a taste of what the Cold War was like. 

“I’m not concerned to where I can’t sleep at night. But it certainly raises alarms for Guam or even Hawaii, where it might be a real threat,” said 24-year-old banker Christian Zwicky of San Bernardino, California.

People of his parents’ generation were taught to duck and cover when the bombs came.

“Maybe those types of drills should come back,” Zwicky said.

He isn’t old enough to remember the popular 1950s public service announcement in which a cartoon character named Bert the Turtle teaches kids how to dive under their desks for safety. But Zwicky did see it often enough in high school history classes that he can hum the catchy tune that plays at the beginning. That’s when Bert avoids disaster by ducking into his shell, then goes on to explain to schoolchildren what they should do.

“I do remember that,” says 65-year-old retiree Scott Paul of Los Angeles. “And also the drop drills that we had in elementary school, which was a pretty regular thing then.”

Even as a 10-year-old, Paul said, he wondered how much good ducking under a desk could do if a bomb powerful enough to destroy a city fell nearby. No good at all, his teacher acknowledged.

Then there were backyard bomb shelters, which briefly became the rage during the missile crisis of 1962, when it was learned the Soviets had slipped nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba and pointed them at the United States.

After a tense, two-week standoff between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that some believe brought the world the closest it’s ever come to nuclear war, the missiles were removed and the shelters faded from public interest.

Now they, too, seem to be having a revival.

“When Trump took office it doubled our sales, and then when he started making crazy statements we got a lot more orders,” says Walton McCarthy of Norad Shelter Systems LLC of Garland, Texas. “Between now and a year ago, we’ve quadrupled our sales.”

His competitor, California-based Atlas Survival Shelters, says it sold 30 shelters in three days last week. During its first year in business in 2011 it sold only 10.

Bill Miller, a 74-year-old retired film director living in Sherborn, Massachusetts, thinks these days are more nerve-wracking than the standoff in October 1962.

“I think it’s much, much crazier, scarier times,” he said. “I think the people who were in charge in the Kennedy administration had much more of a handle on it.”

Nathan Guerrero, a 22-year-old political science major from Fullerton, California, agrees, saying he learned in history class that the “shining example” of a way to resolve such a conflict was how Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, brokered the tense negotiations.

“But knowing the way the current administration has sort of been carrying itself, it doesn’t look like they are keen to solving things diplomatically,” he said.

“As a young person, honestly, it’s pretty unsettling,” he continued.

Had he given any thought to building a backyard bomb shelter?

“I’d be lying if I said such crazy things haven’t crossed my mind,” he said, laughing nervously. “But in reality it doesn’t strike me as I’d be ready to go shopping for bunkers yet.” Instead, he studies for law school and tries “not to think too much about it.”

Other Americans are more sanguine about the possibility of nuclear war. Rob Stapleton has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, since 1975, and he is aware that Alaska has been considered a possible target because it is within reach of North Korean missiles.

“There’s been some discussion about it around the beer barrel and I’m sure the United States is taking it seriously, but we’re not too concerned around here,” he said.

Alaska is so vast and spread out, said Stapleton, that he and his friends can’t imagine why North Korea would waste its time attacking The Last Frontier.

“I mean sure you’d be making a statement, but you’d not really be doing any damage,” he said.
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Forty years after blasting off, Earth’s most distant ambassadors — the twin Voyager spacecraft — are carrying sounds and music of our planet ever deeper into the cosmos.

Think of them as messages in bottles meant for anyone — or anything — out there.

Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of NASA’s launch of Voyager 2, now almost 11 billion miles distant. It departed from Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1977, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.

Voyager 1 followed a few weeks later and is ahead of Voyager 2. It’s humanity’s farthest spacecraft at 13 billion miles away and is the world’s only craft to reach interstellar space, the vast, mostly empty space between star systems. Voyager 2 is expected to cross that boundary during the next few years.

Each carries a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record (there were no CDs or MP3s in 1977) containing messages from Earth: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, chirping crickets, a baby’s cry, a kiss, wind and rain, a thunderous moon rocket launch, African pygmy songs, Solomon Island panpipes, a Peruvian wedding song and greetings in dozens of languages. There are also more than 100 electronic images on each record showing 20th-century life, traffic jams and all.

Tweets, photos

NASA is marking the anniversary of its back-to-back Voyager launches with tweets, reminiscences and still-captivating photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune taken by the Voyagers from 1979 through the 1980s.

Public television is also paying tribute with a documentary, The Farthest — Voyager in Space, airing Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. EDT.

The two-hour documentary describes the tense and dramatic behind-the-scenes effort that culminated in the wildly successful missions to our solar system’s outer planets and beyond. More than 20 team members are interviewed, many of them long retired. There’s original TV footage throughout, including a look back at the late astronomer Carl Sagan of the 1980 PBS series Cosmos. It also includes an interview with Sagan’s son, Nick, who at 6 years old provided the English message: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco — who joined Voyager’s imaging team in 1980 — puts the mission up there with man’s first moon landing.

‘Iconic’ achievement

“I consider Voyager to be the Apollo 11 of the planetary exploration program. It has that kind of iconic stature,” Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

It was Sagan who, in large part, got a record aboard each Voyager. NASA was reluctant and did not want the records eclipsing the scientific goals. Sagan finally prevailed, but he and his fellow record promoters had less than two months to rustle everything up.

The identical records were the audio version of engraved plaques designed by Sagan and others for Pioneers 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973.

The 55 greetings for the Voyager Golden Records were collected at Cornell University, where Sagan taught astronomy, and the United Nations in New York. The music production fell to science writer Timothy Ferris, a friend of Sagan living then in New York.

For the musical selections, Ferris and Sagan recruited friends along with a few professional musicians. They crammed in 90 minutes of music recorded at half-speed; otherwise, the discs would have held just 45 minutes’ worth of music.

How to choose from an infinite number of melodies and melodious sounds representing all of Earth?

Beethoven, Bach and Mozart were easy picks. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven represented jazz, Blind Willie Johnson gospel blues.

Chuck Berry

For the rock ‘n’ roll single, the group selected Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode.” Bob Dylan was a close runner-up, and the Beatles also rated high. Elvis Presley’s name came up (Presley died four days before Voyager 2’s launch). In the end, Ferris thought “Johnny B. Goode” best represented the origins and creativity of rock ‘n’ roll.

Ferris still believes it’s “a terrific record” and he has no “deep regrets” about the selections. Even the rejected tunes represented “beautiful materials.”

“It’s like handfuls of diamonds. If you’re concerned that you didn’t get the right handful or something, it’s probably a neurotic problem rather than anything to do with the diamonds,” Ferris told the AP this week.

But he noted: “If I were going to start into regrets, I suppose not having Italian opera would be on that list.”

The whole record project cost $30,000 or $35,000, to the best of Ferris’ recollection.

NASA estimated the records would last 1 billion to 3 billion years or more — potentially outliving human civilization.

For Ferris, it’s time more than distance that makes the whole idea of finders-keepers so incomprehensible.

A billion years from now, “Voyager could be captured by an advanced civilization of beings that don’t exist yet. … It’s literally imponderable what will happen to the Voyagers,” he said.
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On Monday, Aug. 21, for the first time in 99 years, a solar eclipse will march across the United States from west coast to east coast, and excitement is building across the nation. Experts advise that people wear specific, protective eyewear to view the eclipse, but as VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, finding the special lenses is becoming a difficult task.
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A prosthetic hand is a critical tool that allows amputees to find normalcy in their lives, but some elements, such as complete freedom of movement and sensations of touch, are not the same as a real hand.

“They’ve come a long way and they have a long way to go,” said amputee Charity McFarland, who lost her left hand in a car accident almost four years ago.

McFarland said of the accident, “All I saw were lights and I basically was trying to avoid getting hit, but then the accident happened, so it was like a rollover. They told me that I rolled over three times.”

An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S are missing a limb, according to research at Rice University in Houston.

While existing prosthetic limbs allow amputees to regain some of their abilities, there are very few devices that provide sensory feedback for the users.

Researchers from Rice University, the University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology are working to allow amputees to better perceive what their prosthesis is doing.

McFarland heard about the research and volunteered to help. The focus of the research is to create what are called haptic devices to better replicate a biological hand for amputees.

“Haptics is anything that has to do with the sense of touch. Any textures that you discern or even the ability to realize that you’re making contact with something. How much pressure you’re putting on it, if it’s slipping, all of those are haptic sensations,” said Rice University graduate student Janelle Clark, who was one of the researchers who measured how well test subjects could distinguish the sizes of objects grasped by a prosthesis with and without haptic feedback.

The tests include a rocker placed onto the subject’s remaining limb that moves back and forth and stretches the skin so the person can sense what the prosthesis is doing. The amount of stretch correlates to how opened or closed the prosthetic hand is on the user.

“The idea behind the research that we’re doing here is to create haptic devices that are simple, they’re intuitive, they’re not going to break and so that people can start to have an understanding of what’s going on with their prosthetic without looking at it all the time,” Clark said.

Researchers found blindfolded test subjects were able to more than double their ability to distinguish the size of objects grasped with a prosthetic hand when they received haptic feedback from a skin-stretch device.

McFarland, however, wasn’t one of them. “I still wasn’t able to sense what it was doing completely,” she said.

“This is going to be a long-term project… to create some sort of artificial hand that has the same capabilities, but maybe there are other changes in the short term that would also be appreciated,” Rice researcher Clark said.

For now, McFarland says she would appreciate a prosthesis that looks like a hand and allows the fingers to move and the wrist to bend and rotate just like a real hand.
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President Trump proposes to make big cuts in spending on global health research that could affect work to end malaria, AIDS and protect against other infectious diseases. Although the president’s proposal is essentially a wish list and Congress doesn’t have to go along with it, some see it as part of a disturbing trend. Carol Pearson reports.
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Scientists are drilling down through kilometers of Arctic ice to read the world’s climate history as a way to predict the planet’s future. VOA’s Steve Baragona visited Greenland to see what you can learn from a hole in the ice.
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