In a medical emergency, an ambulance with a qualified medical team on board can be a lifesaver. But in Nepal, this service is rare if not nonexistent. To help provide the best possible medical emergency services, a team of doctors from Stanford University in California spent 12 weeks training four dozen medical technicians in Kathmandu. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Each day in the United States hundreds of thousands of yellow-painted buses carry millions of children to schools and back home. Scientists at the University of Maryland are developing algorithms that can help transport students more efficiently. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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In Greece’s grinding economic crisis, a home for abused children is now taking in those whose parents are struggling to feed them.
It is perhaps the darkest sign of economic devastation in Greece, where traditionally strong family ties are starting to crumble after years of depression.
A quarter of Greece’s workforce is unemployed and a quarter of its children live in poverty, according to United Nations figures, forcing parents to depend on grandparents for handouts.
But pensions too have been cut a dozen times.
In Athens, the Model National Nursery, set up a century ago for orphans of war, can hardly keep up with the number of parents turning to it for help. Unable to cover their basic needs, parents leave their children in the home all week.
Iro Zervaki, its head, says at least 40 children are on the waiting list, four times as many as a couple of years ago.
The home sleeps 25 in a bare room with rows of beds draped in blue blankets, and lacks the staff and funds to increase capacity, she said. Most places are for abused children.
Dozens of other children, all aged two to five, come in daily, but the days away from their parents are long.
“We had incidents where children even attempted to leave, to run away, to go to their mother,” Zervaki said.
In the buzzing playground, a little girl tugged the social worker’s blouse and yelled: “Miss! When will I go to my mum?” “They can’t tell the days apart so every day they ask: ‘Is it Friday?'” Anthoula Zarmakoupi, the social worker, said. “They know mum will pick them up at the weekend.”
But sometimes even that was not possible, she said. “We have children whose parents are homeless so it’s very difficult for them to even collect them for the weekend.”
For the home too, brighter days seem as far away as ever.
State funding has been cut and covers just half of the staff’s wages. The home depends on donations for food and clothes, and Zervaki says it is hard to tell if she will be able to make next month’s payments.
“It doesn’t look like tomorrow will be any better,” she said. “It will take some years. I hope not too many.”
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It could be a Hollywood screenplay. Juliana Armelin and her husband Paulo Siqueira decided to radically change their lives in 2010, quitting jobs in Sao Paulo’s financial sector and moving to a farm seven hours away to start growing coffee.
Seven years later, they clinched for a second consecutive year Brazil’s most prestigious coffee award, beating hundreds of established producers in a country that has exported coffee for more than 200 years.
“I would never imagine we could reach this status in such a short period,” Siqueira told Reuters on Friday after the couple received the annual award from Italian roaster Illy.
“I used to say that we don’t have a story on coffee, but only some chapters so far,” said Armelin.
The couple met during college, graduating in engineering from Brazil’s top ranked university, USP. They spent some years together in the United States getting Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Chicago before starting careers in Sao Paulo.
Armelin is a former Mckinsey & Company consultant, while Siqueira held positions as a fund manager at Credit Suisse and boutique investment firm Vector Investimentos.
They ended up in the coffee business due to Armelin’s father, who decided to start producing the beans.
“I helped him in the research and started to like the idea.
We already had thoughts at running something together,” Armelin said.
After studying the possibility, they bought a 210-hectare (518 acres) farm in the municipality of Ibiá in a coffee-producing region known as the Cerrado Mineiro, in Minas Gerais state.
“It was an old cattle ranch, only pasture,” Siqueira recalled. They planted the first trees in 2011, collected the first beans two years later and had their first full harvest in 2015. Within a year, they received the first award.
The couple’s farm is a state-of-the-art facility. The fields are 100 percent irrigated, with a fully mechanized harvest. The washed arabicas are put to dry in raised beds to avoid contact with the soil, which could affect the flavor.
“We studied a lot, talked to a lot of people who knew how to produce high quality coffee and we did everything they said we should,” said Armelin. “Some people used to say that we were nerds that went to coffee production. And we used to say, ‘yes, we are.'”
The Terra Alta farm was chosen for aspects like the plentiful availability of water and its flat terrain to allow for mechanization.
The couple used as much government-backed credit as they could to buy all the equipment. “We have debt for the rest of our lives,” said Armelin, smiling.
The farm today exports 80 percent of its production, which varies from 10,000 to 13,000 60-kg bags per year. Many deals are done directly with gourmet coffee sellers in the United States.
Siquiera said the coffee community in the Cerrado region has always been very receptive, despite their unusual background.
But the couple stops short of recommending their experience to others.
“Even if you have the money, it really is not easy. Growing coffee requires extreme dedication,” Armelin said, adding that she takes care of the financial details while her husband likes to be out in the fields.
But they have no regrets. “We like this a lot. We will probably be coffee growers for the rest of our lives,” she said.
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Airbnb expects to maintain its rapid growth in Africa this year and double its customer numbers to 1.5 million, its Chief Executive Brian Chesky and regional head told Reuters on Friday.
The number of people using the online room rental service on the continent rose by 143 percent to about 765,000 guests in 2016 from the year before, said Nicola D’Elia, the firm’s Africa and Middle East chief.
“If you just look at 2017, it’s going to double, you will have 1.5 million people at the end of this year,” added D’Elia.
Airbnb CEO Chesky confirmed that the California-based company expected to double African customer numbers this year.
“Certainly that would be the forecast,” he said in an interview in Cape Town, adding: “This is literally just the beginning. It [Africa] is still relatively under-penetrated.”
Chesky said the company had 77,000 homes across Africa – out of its 3 million globally – but that it could easily have “hundreds of thousands” in a continent that’s home to over a billion people.
The 77,000 homes represented an increase of 95 percent from 2015 to 2016, the company said.
South Africa, which was an early adopter of Airbnb, is the top-ranked country in Africa in terms of listings and visitors, who mainly come from the United States, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.
The top five cities in Africa are Cape Town, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Casablanca, although listings are found in diverse locations from St Helena island in the south Atlantic Ocean to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and even a smattering in Somalia.
Chesky, who described Africa as “an incredibly exciting emerging market for travel”, was speaking to Reuters in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township where he put in an appearance to surprise graduates from an Airbnb training program.
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As deaths from painkillers and heroin abuse spiked and street crimes increased, the mayor of Everett took major steps to tackle the opioid epidemic devastating this working-class city north of Seattle.
Mayor Ray Stephanson stepped up patrols, hired social workers to ride with officers and pushed for more permanent housing for chronically homeless people. The city says it has spent millions combating OxyContin and heroin abuse – and expects the tab to rise.
So Everett is suing Purdue Pharma, maker of the opioid pain medication OxyContin, in an unusual case that alleges the drugmaker knowingly allowed pills to be funneled into the black market and the city of about 108,000. Everett alleges the drugmaker did nothing to stop it and must pay for damages caused to the community.
Everett’s lawsuit, now in federal court in Seattle, accuses Purdue Pharma of gross negligence and nuisance. The city seeks to hold the company accountable, the lawsuit alleges, for “supplying OxyContin to obviously suspicious pharmacies and physicians and enabling the illegal diversion of OxyContin into the black market” and into Everett, despite a company program to track suspicious flows.
“Our community has been significantly damaged, and we need to be made whole,” said Stephanson, who grew up in Everett and is its longest-serving mayor, holding the job since 2003.
He said the opioid crisis caused by “Purdue’s drive for profit” has overwhelmed the city’s resources, stretching everyone from first responders to park crews who clean up discarded syringes. The lawsuit doesn’t say how much money the city is seeking, but the mayor says Everett will attempt to quantify its costs in coming months.
Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma says the lawsuit paints a flawed and inaccurate picture of the events that led to the crisis in Everett.
“We look forward to presenting the facts in court,” the company said in a statement.
Purdue said it is “deeply troubled by the abuse and misuse of our medication,” and noted it leads the industry in developing medicines with properties that deter abuse, even though its products account for less than 2 percent of all U.S. opioid prescriptions.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma and its executives paid more than $630 million in legal penalties to the federal government for willfully misrepresenting the drug’s addiction risks. The same year, it also settled with Washington and other states that claimed the company aggressively marketed OxyContin to doctors while downplaying the addiction risk. As part of that settlement, it agreed to continue internal controls to identify potential diversion or abuse.
While numerous individuals and states have sued Purdue, this case is different because Everett is getting at the results of addiction, said Elizabeth Porter, associate law professor at the University of Washington.
She thinks Everett may have a shot at winning, though it will have to overcome some legal burdens, including showing that diverted OxyContin from rogue doctors and pharmacies was a substantial factor in the city’s epidemic.
Stephanson said he was “absolutely outraged” after the Los Angeles Times reported last summer it found Purdue had evidence that pointed to illegal trafficking of its pills but in many cases did nothing to notify authorities or stop the flow. That newspaper investigation prompted the city’s lawsuit.
In response to the newspaper’s reporting, Purdue said in a statement that in 2007, it provided LA-area law enforcement information that helped lead to the convictions of the criminal prescribers and pharmacists referenced by the Los Angeles Times. The company also pointed to court documents that showed a wholesaler alerted the Drug Enforcement Administration about suspicious activity at a sham clinic noted in the newspaper’s story.
Still, Everett contends Purdue created a market for addicts that didn’t exist until the company let its pills flood the streets.
The region saw two spikes in overdose deaths: first from OxyContin and other opioid painkillers in 2008 and then, after the drug was reformulated in 2010, a spike from heroin as people switched to a potent but cheaper alternative, officials said.
The city contends Purdue’s wrongful conduct fueled a heroin crisis in Everett. Between 2011 and 2013, nearly one in five heroin-related deaths in Washington state occurred in the Everett region.
In response to the drug epidemic, Everett last year began sending social workers on routine patrols with police officers. Sgt. Mike Braley says the community outreach and enforcement team strikes a balance between enforcement and connecting people to addiction treatment, mental health and other services.
“We understand that we can’t arrest our way out of problems that addiction is causing our city,” Braley said.
Sometimes it takes many follow-ups and hours of handholding to get people help. On their first stop one morning, Braley and his team check under a street overpass, a popular hangout for addicts. They find plenty of needles, drug packaging and mounds of garbage but none of the people they had encountered there recently.
They swing by a woody vacant piece of city property to follow up with a homeless man who told social workers he was on a housing list. He previously was reluctant to talk but opens up this time.
Social worker Kaitlyn Dowd offers to check on the man’s housing status with a local nonprofit provider and then punches her number into a cellphone he recently got.
“You can call me, and I have your number,” she tells him.
Social worker Staci McCole said they come across many cases where highly functioning residents were introduced to opiates or heroin.
“So many of these people – somehow it’s taken a hold of them, and their lives now have forever changed,” she said.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it had awarded $100 million to upgrade Flint, Michigan’s drinking water infrastructure to address a crisis that exposed thousands of children to lead poisoning.
The grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will enable the city to “accelerate and expand” its work to replace lead pipes and make other improvements, according to the EPA. Estimates of the upgrade’s cost range from $200 million to $400 million.
Friday’s announcement made the disbursement official. Last year, Congress passed and former president Barack Obama signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to allocate $100 million to aid Flint.
$31.5 million to be paid immediately
The EPA’s state revolving funds, which Congress can allocate to help with cleanup efforts, were one of the few programs that the Trump administration did not slash in its proposed budget for the agency.
“Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure,” said a statement from agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The EPA will make $31.5 million immediately available for lead pipe replacements and upgrades, and Michigan will provide a $20 million required match.
The remaining $68.5 million will come after the city and Michigan complete additional public comment and technical reviews.
“Today we have good news for families in Flint who have already waited far too long for their water system to be fixed,” said a statement from U.S. Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, and Congressman Dan Kildee, all Michigan Democrats.
Flint mayor meets Trump
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, also a Democrat, said the funds would help the city reach its goal of replacing 6,000 pipes this year. She met briefly with President Donald Trump on Wednesday.
In January, 1,700 Flint residents filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Michigan, saying the EPA failed to warn them of the dangers of the toxic water or take steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The plaintiffs seek $722 million in damages.
Midwestern politicians are worried about the elimination in the proposed U.S. budget of funding for an effort to clean up the Great Lakes, from which some states draw their drinking water.
Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014. The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from pipes and into the drinking water.
The city returned to its original water source in October 2015.
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Zander Dejah, 25, pays $1,900 a month rent to live in a downtown San Francisco house with at least 40 other people, many of whom sleep in bunk beds.
Dejah is a resident of The Negev, a communal living space that styles itself as a home for millennial tech workers to brainstorm ideas, write code and create apps, even if they have to share toilets and bathrooms with dozens of others.
Houses like The Negev, located in a neighborhood known as “SoMa” or South of Market, have cropped up around San Francisco as an influx of young professionals, many of whom are tech workers, have faced the city’s notoriously high rents and apartment shortages. It has three floors and roughly 50 rooms, filled with bunk beds, beer bottles and laptops, according to residents.
Dejah, born and raised in New York, graduated last year with a degree in computer science and math from McGill University.
Unemployed, he moved to California six months ago and found his room at The Negev on Craigslist.
“I thought New York was expensive,” said Dejah, who quickly landed a job as a virtual reality engineer at consulting firm moBack. “It’s basically an extension of college. We sort of live in a frat house.”
The home is certainly filled with parties on weekends, but the residents make sure to sit down every Sunday for a communal dinner, akin to a traditional family gathering.
While some say communal housing provides a solution for many first-time workers fresh out of college, such housing also has created its share of controversy. Housing advocates have complained that this new dorm-like style of living has pushed up rents and forced longtime residents to move out.
Alon Gutman, who co-founded a company called The Negev and began leasing the building on Sixth Street in 2014, said, “We have never made somebody move out of that building,” adding that his tenants pay 30 percent to 50 percent less than others in the neighborhood.
“We are trying to solve the housing crisis and increase density in a positive way.”
The Negev company runs nine communal properties, three of which are in San Francisco. The others are in Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.
The Negev properties, generally in run-down, low-income neighborhoods, are restructured to accommodate a large number of tenants, Gutman explained.
Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, said housing problems have arisen because occupants leave buildings being converted to communal homes and cannot afford to move back in or the space is no longer suitable for them.
“The Negev house takes affordable housing and makes it unaffordable,” said Sherburn-Zimmer. “All they’ve done is take away housing from people who had it and loved it and pushed them out to make a quick buck.”
Kumar Srikantappa, 31, who also pays $1,900 a month for a single room at The Negev, said he chose the house because of the social experience. After eight months there, the software engineer for Oracle Corp said he would soon be ready to live elsewhere.
“I met a bunch of friends, and I just want to move on to another location and into a bigger place,” he said. “It’s time.”
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Australian scientists, working with counterparts in Myanmar, are hoping to reduce Myanmar’s high death toll from snake bites in rural communities, especially among vulnerable populations facing inadequate emergency care.
The official toll from snake bites in Myanmar is 600 deaths a year out of some 13,000 cases among a rural population dependent on rice harvesting for a living. But rice paddy fields and rice stacks lure rats and mice, and in turn draw snakes, the most venomous being the Russell’s vipers and cobras.
But the hopes for survival are often challenged by long distances from emergency care, with poor roads and infrastructure between snake bite victims and life-saving medical treatment.
Chen Au Peh, a renal specialist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia, said speedy access to emergency medical treatment is crucial.
“So all these factors accumulate to a long delay between bite and administration of an anti-venom. So to help them, we have to help them produce more anti-venom, to get the anti-venom to where it’s required to help them keep the anti-venom in the refrigerator and to help the health professionals,” Peh said.
Lifestock also affected
The project has also involved ensuring higher survival rates of horses used in the production of the anti-venom after being injected with snake venom. High mortality rates were evident among the horses due to anemia, nutritional problems and veterinary practices. Changes in practice included learning the skills developed by Myanmar horse handlers.
“In the last 10 months the average horse mortality is something like six or seven per month – compared to 50 per month – and this is very good news not only for horses but for human patients who may need the anti-venom. The more horses that survive the month, the more vials of anti-venom you can produce,” Peh said.
As a result, production of anti-venom has risen sharply to 100,000 vials from 60,000 vials.
The team’s work, part of a $1.77 million effort begun in 2014 with support from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and working with Myanmar’s Ministries of Industry and Health, is focused on the northern city of Mandalay, a region that faces an estimated 700 to 800 snake bite victims each year.
The Australian team, which includes Afzal Mahmood, a senior lecturer in public health at the University of Adelaide and Julian White, a world renowned toxicologist from the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, is working with specialists in Myanmar and local partners on guidelines, protocols and standard operating procedures for the health sector.
Real numbers higher
Mahmood said a recent survey indicated the rate of snake bites was considerably higher than official figures.
“It is not a new phenomenon, it happens because many people do not reach the health system where recording takes place. Some people get treated by the traditional healers; some may die without actually reaching the health system and some may suffer and get healed,” Mahmood told VOA.
But he said the program has succeeded in boosting the skills among the local medical and non-medical community.
“We have produced revised guidelines for the doctors [and] some diagnostic tests, and the training of some 200 health care providers,” he said.
The work has reached about 150 villages with local community meetings targeting around 7,000 people to promote awareness of snake bite treatments.
The goal, the scientists said, is to shorten the time to treatment by providing solar powered refrigerators near to local communities with supplies of anti-venom.
Mahmood says the challenges go beyond the initial treatment.
“Psychological issues post-bite [affect] not only the person but the family themselves suffer. It’s a very life-changing experience,” he said.
Victims of snake bites are among Myanmar’s poorest. They often face long periods of hospitalization, leaving families facing high medical bills, often equivalent to several months of real earnings as they struggle to meet hospital and transport expenses, even those receiving subsidies.
To ensure the project is sustainable, its goal is to provide a model that can be applied elsewhere in Myanmar.
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In the latest outreach effort following a contentious campaign, top Trump administration officials – as well as first daughter Ivanka Trump – met Thursday with Hispanic business leaders.
Underscoring her unusual role working outside the administration, Ivanka Trump attended a round-table discussion Thursday morning with Hispanic women business owners in Washington.
Later, White House officials, including chief of staff Reince Priebus, held a meeting with other Hispanic business leaders, focused on jobs, the economy and access to capital.
The meetings were organized by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, whose president, Javier Palomarez, slammed Donald Trump during the presidential campaign, calling him a buffoon, among other slights. He has since joined the president’s National Diversity Coalition and says he’s open to working with the president on issues they agree on.
“The reality of it is,” Palomarez said, “I’d much rather campaign from the inside than complain from the outside.”
Trump has been eyed warily by the Hispanic community since the beginning of his presidential campaign, when he claimed Mexico was sending its criminals over the border and railed against illegal immigration. Nonetheless, Trump won about 28 percent of the Latino vote – a similar share to Mitt Romney in 2012, according to exit polls.
“My representatives had a great meeting w/ the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce at the WH today,” the president tweeted after the meetings.”Look forward to tremendous growth & future mtgs!”
Palomarez said Ivanka Trump, who has no official role in the administration, spent an hour and a half with the women business owners, talking about issues such as entrepreneurship and science education.
“She made it clear that she has a passion around empowering women,” Palomarez said in an interview between the two meetings, adding that the topics of Trump’s proposed border wall and his crackdown on people living in the U.S. illegally had not been raised.
“There will be time and the circumstances to do that,” said Palomarez, adding: “They’re not done deals. The negotiation, the conversation continues.”
Trump said Thursday night at a rally in Nashville that his wall is “way ahead of schedule,” and he has signed orders making it easier to deport people living in the U.S. illegally.
Foreign tourism to the United States, which supports millions of American jobs, is slowing, possibly because President Donald Trump sought controversial travel restrictions on some Muslim-majority nations. Online searches for flights to the United States are down in most major nations, not just those hit by restrictions. Jim Randle reports some travel experts say the push to restrict immigration is making some foreign tourists and students wary of visiting.
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What’s the largest organ in the human body? It’s skin, of course. Ask any doctor about its role in protecting what’s inside us from all kinds of trouble. That’s why it’s such a big deal that university scientists in Spain have learned how to manufacture what they say is fully functional human skin with a 3-D printer. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Carmakers and suppliers gave widely differing timelines Thursday for the introduction of self-driving vehicles, showing the uncertainties surrounding the technology as well as a split between cautious established players and bullish new entrants.
Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world’s top chipmaker after Intel’s $15 billion deal to buy Mobileye, an autonomous driving technology firm, this week, gave the most optimistic predictions.
Chief Executive Jens-Hsun Huang said carmakers may speed up their plans in the light of technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025.
“Because of deep learning, because of AI [artificial intelligence] computing, we’ve really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles,” he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin.
Germany’s Bosch, however, the world’s biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.
Technology, liability among hurdles
Progress is fraught by issues including who is liable when a self-driving car has an accident, bringing down the costs of sensor technology and guarding against hacking.
“Of course, we still have to prove that an autonomous car does better in driving and has less accidents than a human being,” Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner told a news conference.
Nvidia has applied its market-leading expertise in high-end computer graphics to the intense visualization and simulation needs of autonomous cars, and has been working on artificial intelligence — teaching computers to learn to write their own software code — for a decade.
“No human could write enough code to capture the vast diversity and complexity that we do so easily, called driving,” Huang said.
Together with Bosch executives, Huang presented a prototype AI on-board computer that is expected to go into production by the beginning of the next decade. The computer will use Nvidia’s processing power to interpret data gathered by Bosch sensors.
Degrees of autonomy
On the way to fully self-driving cars, levels of autonomy have been defined, with most cars on the road today at level two, and Tesla ready to switch from level four to five — full autonomy — as soon as it is permitted.
Level three means drivers can turn away in well-understood environments, such as highway driving, but must be ready to take back control, while level four means the automated system can control the vehicle in most environments.
Independent technology analyst Richard Windsor wrote this week that he doubted automakers would have autonomous vehicles leaving factories by a typical self-imposed deadline of 2020, mainly because the liability issue was unresolved.
“This is good news for the automotive industry, which is notoriously slow to adapt to and implement new technology as it will have more time to defend its position against the new entrants,” he wrote.
But Nvidia’s Huang said he expected to have chips available for level three automated driving by the end of this year and in customers’ cars on the road by the end of 2018, with level four chips following the same pattern a year later.
That is at least a year ahead of the plans of most carmakers that have an autonomous-driving strategy.
BMW says market will decide
The head of autonomous driving at BMW told the conference the luxury carmaker was on its way to deliver a level three autonomous car in 2021, but could produce level four or five autonomous cars in the same year.
“We believe we have the chance to make level three, level four and level five doable,” he said. He told Reuters the decision on which levels to release would depend in part on the market, and that cars with more autonomy might first be produced in small batches for single fleets.
Bosch said it saw level three vehicles being released with its on-board computer at the end of the decade, and level four driving not before 2025.
Uber, Baidu and Google spin-off Waymo are testing self-driving taxis, while carmakers including Volvo, Audi and Ford expect to have level four cars on the road by 2020 or 2021.
Nvidia’s Huang predicted those plans would speed up: “In the near future, you’re going to see these schedules pull in.”
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The human nose, in all its glorious forms, is one of our most distinctive characteristics, whether big, little, broad, narrow or somewhere in between.
Scientists are now sniffing out some of the factors that drove the evolution of the human proboscis.
Researchers said on Thursday a study using three-dimensional images of hundreds of people of East Asian, South Asian, West African and Northern European ancestry indicated local climate, specifically temperature and humidity, played a key role in determining the nose’s shape.
Wider noses were more common in people from warm and humid climates, they found. Narrower noses were more common in those from cold and dry climates.
The nose’s primary functions are breathing and smelling. It has mucous and blood capillaries inside that help warm and humidify inhaled air before it reaches more sensitive parts of the respiratory tract.
Having narrower nasal airways might help increase contact between inhaled air and tissues inside the nose carrying moisture and heat, said Penn State University geneticist Arslan Zaidi, lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS Genetics.
“This might have offered an advantage in colder climates. In warmer climates, the flip side was probably true,” Zaidi said.
Our species appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago and later migrated to other parts of the world. The researchers said people with narrower nostrils may have done better and produced more offspring than those with wider nostrils in colder, drier locales, driving a gradual decline in nose width.
The finding generally supports what’s called Thomson’s rule, formulated by British anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Thomson (1858-1935), that people from cold, dry climates tend to have longer and thinner noses than people from warm, humid climates.
Zaidi said most previous evidence regarding Thomson’s rule came from skull measurements, while this study expanded on that by analyzing external nose shape.
The researchers studied nose width, nostril width, nose height, length of the nose ridge, nose tip protrusion, external surface area and total nostril area.
“What we have tested is a very simple hypothesis about the nose, which likely had a very complex evolutionary history. There’s a lot we don’t know,” Zaidi said, citing the need to probe genes underlying nose shape.
“One can imagine how cultural differences in attractiveness could have led to some of the differences in nose shape between populations. For example, were wider noses considered more attractive in some populations relative to others?”
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Brazil’s Health Ministry says 424 people have been infected with yellow fever in the largest outbreak the country has seen in years. Of those, 137 have died.
An update published Thursday said that more than 900 other cases are under investigation. During the current outbreak in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer rainy season, the vast majority of the confirmed cases have been in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
Much of Brazil is considered at risk for yellow fever, and people in those areas are supposed to be vaccinated. But this outbreak struck some areas not previously considered at risk, and Brazil is rushing vaccines to those areas.
Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne disease that cause causes fever, body aches, vomiting and can cause jaundice, from which it gets its name.
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A U.N. body on Thursday added two chemicals used to make the drug fentanyl, which killed music star Prince, to an international list of controlled substances, which the United States said would help fight a wave of deaths by overdose.
Fentanyl is a man-made opioid 100 times more powerful than morphine. Roughly 20,000 U.S. overdose deaths in 2015 involved heroin or synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
An annual meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which also acts as the governing body of the Vienna-based U.N. office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), voted to “schedule” two fentanyl precursors and a fentanyl-like substance, meaning they would be added to an international control list.
Putting the chemicals on the control list ensures closer international monitoring of suspicious orders and transactions, which should make it harder for people aiming to produce fentanyl illegally to get hold of these chemicals.
“None of us lives under the illusion that this is a silver bullet to solving our opioid crisis,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said in response to the decision.
“But this vote will make it harder for the criminals that are illicitly producing fentanyl to access the necessary resources. It will require countries to regulate the production, sale, and export of the precursors to fentanyl, and to criminalize sale or trafficking outside of those regulations.”
The UNODC named the two precursors as 4-anilino-N-phenethylpiperidine (ANPP) and N-phenethyl-4-piperidone (NPP). A fentanyl analogue called butyrfentanyl, a drug similar to fentanyl, was also added, it said.
The State Department spokeswoman said they were the two leading chemicals used to illegally produce fentanyl in the United States.
United Nations and U.S. officials also emphasized that Thursday’s decision was an example of effective action by the United Nations at a time when the Trump administration is aiming to slash funding for both the State Department and the United Nations.
“The U.S. mission [to the United Nations in Vienna] … welcomes this decision as a concrete example of how international action can have a clear benefit for the United States, as we face a crisis taking a tremendous toll on American communities,” it said in a statement.
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Developers of an experimental blood test for autism say it can detect the condition in more than 96 percent of cases and do so across a broad spectrum of patients, potentially allowing for earlier diagnosis, according to a study released on Thursday.
The findings, published in PLoS Computational Biology, are the latest effort to develop a blood test for autism spectrum disorder, which is estimated to affect about 1 in 68 babies. The cause remains a mystery although it has been shown that childhood vaccines are not responsible.
The hope for such tests, if proven accurate, is that they could reassure parents with autism fears and possibly aid in the development of treatments, coauthor to the study, Dr. Juergen Hahn of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Reuters Health.
They could also speed the age at diagnosis. Autism encompasses a wide spectrum of disorders, ranging from profound inability to communicate and mental retardation to relatively mild symptoms, as in Asperger’s Syndrome.
Doctors typically diagnose children by observing behaviors associated with the disorder, such as repetitive behaviors or social avoidance. Most children are not diagnosed until around age 4, although some skilled clinicians can pick it up earlier.
Hahn and colleagues measured levels of 24 proteins that have been linked to autism and found five that, in the right combination, seemed most predictive of the condition, which affects about 1.5 percent of children and can vary widely in severity and how it manifests.
Dr. Max Wiznitzer of the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, who was not involved in the research, called the finding “interesting, but not earth-shattering,” saying that it needs to be tested by many more at-risk children.
“We don’t know if this is a marker specific to autism or whether it’s a marker for any chronic illness of any kind,” he told Reuters Health. “They have quite a way to go before they can show if it has any meaning.”
The researchers derived the combination by testing 83 children age 3 to 10 who had been diagnosed with autism through conventional means. While the combination was present in 97.6 percent, it was absent in 96.1 percent of 76 normal children.
Wiznitzer noted that the research offers no evidence that the chemical combination being blamed for autism “will be there for infants and toddlers.”
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Twice a week, fisherman Romould Compton puts on scuba gear to dive to the seabed and clean tiny elkhorns growing in the coral nursery off the Caribbean island of Carriacou, tending them until they can be transplanted to a damaged reef nearby.
He hopes his conservation work will help to bring back more of the fish, such as red snapper, king butterfish and hind, that many islanders depend on.
“In my area we depend on the reef for our survival and livelihoods, and a lot of reef is dead,” said Compton by phone from Windward, Carriacou, one of the lush, mountainous islands that make up Grenada in the southeast of the Caribbean.
“A lot of unemployment has been happening so we’ve got to turn to the sea to keep our livelihood going.”
Across the Caribbean, scores of projects are underway to restore battered coral reefs and replant damaged mangroves, crucial to livelihoods from fishing and income from the millions of tourists who flock to the tropical beaches each year.
The intricate reefs and salt-tolerant mangrove swamps also offer protection against storms and hurricanes on climate-vulnerable islands which often lack resources to build extensive engineered coastal defenses.
Insurers are now looking closely at how ecosystems can help bolster coastal resilience, while high-tech models help determine how new hotels and infrastructure might impact the fragile ecological balance as well as local communities.
“When you talk to the prime minister of any country in the Caribbean, they absolutely recognize the path of climate change,” said Luis Solorzano, executive director of The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) program in the Caribbean, which is working to restore marine habitats.
“They’re also thinking, instead of providing assistance, what can we do to prevent, to try and minimize the expected damage of what we know is going to be an increasing frequency of extreme events,” he said.
Using ecosystems to help buffer against extreme events such as hurricanes and storm surges could generate cost-savings of “billions if not trillions” of dollars, he said.
Climate resistance
At the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, scientists are trying to replicate the sea conditions they expect to see in 50 to 100 years to determine which corals are the hardiest, then cross strains to produce climate-resistant species that can be transplanted onto reefs across the Caribbean, said David Vaughan, who manages Mote’s reef restoration program.
One of Vaughan’s most important discoveries came by chance: He accidentally shattered an elkhorn coral and found micro-fragmentation can cause it to grow up to 40 times faster.
“If people think climate change is just a theory, they should just look at that wonderful thermometer in the field that’s called corals and that’ll tell them differently,” said Vaughan, whose laboratory works with TNC and produces 1,000 corals a day, including bulbous brain and mountain corals.
He hopes the new coral “offspring” will be “better prepared in the future for whatever man or mother nature hands to them.”
The 63-year-old, who has vowed to plant a million corals by the time he retires, said Mote is planning a laboratory to train up to 50 people each week from around the world, who could eventually replicate its coral restoration project.
With that scale-up, “we could literally plant a billion corals around the world,” he said.
Getting ahead
Alongside bringing in tourist dollars, healthy coral reefs, seagrasses and salt-tolerant mangroves provide habitats for many species that generate an income for fishermen — from spiny lobsters in Belize to bonefish in the Bahamas.
Reefs can also act like breakwaters to dramatically reduce wave strength, while mangroves can buffer against hurricane winds and storm surges.
Marine scientist Michael Beck calculates coral reefs can slash up to 97 percent of the wave energy that would otherwise hit the shoreline, while a 100-meter-wide (330 feet) band of mangrove can cut wave height by up to two-thirds.
High-tech modelling is helping Caribbean governments bolster coastal resilience by demonstrating how development can affect coastal ecosystems, livelihoods and property, said Katie Arkema, lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project, which has used its technology in Belize and the low-lying islands of the Bahamas.
“What we seek to do is understand how will our decisions and the decisions of governments … affect ecosystems and how in turn will those ecosystem changes affect people,” said Arkema.
The World Bank, which is helping pilot a coastal insurance project offering reduced premiums to governments working to make the region’s over-exploited fisheries more resilient, said Jamaica, Grenada and St. Lucia were among those interested.
But payouts would likely hinge on countries agreeing to invest a slice of the money in marine habitats, he said.
“Increasingly, Caribbean governments are finding ways to make better use of their marine resources, [to] take advantage of their marine ecosystems, the natural assets that are so important to them,” said Miguel Angel Jorge, senior fisheries specialist with the World Bank.
“They want to be much smarter about how they invest and plan with the likely climate impacts in mind.”
In Grenville, Grenada, where many low-income families depend on fishing, efforts to boost coastal resilience were partly driven by the community — which is involved in projects to replant mangroves and establish an artificial reef, said Nealla Frederick, TNC’s Eastern Caribbean conservation planner.
“Just everybody has recognized this is happening and wants to try to get ahead of it,” she said.
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Each year, aspiring tech entrepreneurs from all over the world head to the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, to prove their worth. VOA reporter Tina Trinh met with the latest wave of tech disrupters to learn what it takes to stand apart from the competition.
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Under the Trump administration, there will likely be challenges for the U.S. tech industry when it comes to attracting foreign talent.
But it’s never been a better time to start a company, said Dave McClure, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
“The general trend for start-ups under Trump or anyone else is still fantastic,” according to McClure, who was interviewed on stage this week at South by Southwest, the tech, music, gaming and film conference and festival in Austin, Texas.
McClure is a founding partner of 500 Startups, a global venture capital seed fund firm. Since its inception in 2010, the firm has invested in more than 1,500 technology companies in more than 60 countries.
It also takes investors, start-up founders and Silicon Valley executives on several tours each year – dubbed “Geeks on a Plane” – to burgeoning high-growth technology markets. Its next trip will be later this month to four cities in Africa — Lagos, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa.
Some aspects of 500 Startups’ work have become more uncertain since President Donald Trump took office, such as whether the firm can bring foreign entrepreneurs to the United States, as it does for its four-month seed program, McClure said. The United States is “shooting ourselves in the head by limiting immigration,” he said.
But when McClure looks out across the world, he sees entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon not relegated just to U.S. tech industry hubs or even hot spots such as China and Western Europe.
One sign of whether a region has the potential to take off is whether there are large investors beyond those offering an entrepreneur initial funding. Another sign is whether there have been successful “exits,” which can be when a company is bought by a larger firm or has a successful public offering.
Some countries might tout their number of entrepreneurs or point to high tech industrial parks as signs of a growing innovation ecosystem. But McClure looks at another measurement – the number of venture capitalists per capita. The United States and China have the most venture capitalist per capita, he said, whereas countries such as Brazil and Mexico have just a handful.
But as the U.S. government helped plant the seeds of Silicon Valley, foreign governments can step in and help a region’s start-up culture take root, he said.“Get that cycle going,” he said. “And that’s what gets the cycle going in other parts of the world.”
As for people interested in investing globally, by all means, write the checks, he said. The key is patience.
“If you are going to do international investing, you have to do it for the long haul,” McClure said. “You need to wait three to five years before it takes off.”
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Africa’s rising youth population is outpacing available jobs in the public and private sectors, leaving would-be workers vulnerable to exploitation, terrorism and human rights abuses. Nigerian entrepreneur Tony Elumelu believes the solution to Africa’s unemployment problem is for the private sector to lead and drive growth, a philosophy he calls “africapitalism”. He was on a two-day working visit to Ghana.
The president of Coca-Cola, Central, East and West Africa, Kelvin Balogun, says almost 50 percent of graduates churned out by universities in Africa each year do not find jobs.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the youth unemployment rate in sub-Saharan Africa is nearly 12 percent. A World Bank report in 2016 said nearly half, (48 percent) of Ghanaian youth are unemployed. Analysts blame the country’s poor macroeconomic performance and a surge in population growth for the problem.
African leaders have committed to reduce poverty in the continent to below 20 percent by 2030, but the entrepreneur Tony Elumelu said this cannot be achieved if entrepreneurs are not empowered.
Elumelu believes the solution to unemployment is his ‘africapitalism’ philosophy- a concept in which the private sector leads and transforms development in Africa.
Elumelu says African entrepreneurs must partner to create more jobs for its youth. VOA caught up with him after he gave a lecture to students at the University of Ghana.
“Partnerships don’t work well in Africa and we must address this because collective effort is better than singular effort,” said Elumelu. “From my experience I think trust is very important. So alignment of interest is key panacea for addressing partnership failures in Africa.
VOA: And africapitalism is the solution?
Elumelu: “Africapitalism is the solution because (of) Africans coming together from (the) private sector perspective to address the development of our continent. Africans realizing that (there is) no one but us to develop Africa. Africans realizing that saving our monies abroad is not the solution. We need to let our governments know that what is good for private sector is good for the society.”
In Accra, John Amoah Kusi, enrolled in a master’s degree program in business at the University of Ghana, hoping to be more employable. But if a job doesn’t come his way Kusi says he’ll go back to school again.
“One other option is trying to look for PhD programs outside Ghana or probably in Ghana,” said Kusi. “It’s not just about the jobs. Yes, I want to get the experience but . . .
VOA: So if the job doesn’t come you’ll further your education?
Kusi: “Sure.”
VOA: And you’re certain that with the PhD you’ll get a job?
Kusi: “That’s a high possibility.”
Parry Allotey, a freshman at the University of Ghana, is also worried about not finding a job after graduating.
“I feel very worried because being unemployed is not a good thing,” said Allotey. “So I think going for leadership roles or you can go for internship or your masters. Like doing something that would make you look solid (for work).”
In Ghana, the unemployment problem was worsened by four years of interrupted electricity supply, which resulted in the loss of thousands of existing jobs and closure of many businesses.
Zimbabwe has opened its 2017 tobacco-selling season with hopes the “golden leaf” will change the economic fortunes of the southern African nation. Officials say the tobacco yield has been increasing after a downward turn in 2000 when the government chased white commercial farmers off their land.
Zimbabwean farmers applauded after the 2017 tobacco selling season began Wednesday in Harare at the country’s biggest auction floor.
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor John Mangudya saluted the farmers.
“Producers of tobacco are indeed our heroes. You are important to this economy. The foreign currency you produce is above $800 million a year. That amount is enough to [buy oil for] Zimbabwe throughout the whole year. Zimbabwe spends about $60 million in fuel per month. You do produce enough fuel in this economy, therefore your importance can never be underestimated,” Mangudya said.
This year, the government says it expects 205 million kilograms, three million kilograms more than last year. That is more than in the early 2000’s when the agriculture industry took a nosedive after President Robert Mugabe’s government took white commercial farmers’ land and replaced them with black farmers.
Zimbabwe Minister of Agriculture Joseph Made said the yield and quality of tobacco are due to good rains.
“As a result, the nation is naturally elated by the prospects of growth in the agriculture sector. Already the minister of finance [Patrick Chinamasa] has revised his [national] projections on the back of that anticipated performance [to 3.7 percent]. I really commend farmers for doing so well,” Made said.
Farmers still face uphill battle
But farmers at the auction said they do not feel enough gratitude from the government. Besides delays in payments, the farmers said they spend days queueing to withdraw cash from banks, due to a national cash shortage.
Farmer Laina Magombedzi says she can spend up to a week at the auction floors waiting to be served.
She says the farmers get “a raw deal” because the buyers re-sell the tobacco on the black market for more money. She says she has been waiting five hours and the farmers are not told how the sales are progressing and are not allowed at the auction of their tobacco. She adds that a new electronic auction system has not improved the process.
No improvement is what many Zimbabweans have been saying for years.
Independent economist John Robertson says this year’s tobacco yield is higher, but will not quickly improve Zimbabwe’s economy.
“We need to … greatly broaden the agriculture aspect. We need to bring the large commercial farmers back. Small-scale farmers cannot feed the nation. Now that half the nation is nearly urbanized, we need [to get] large-scale farmers into wheat growing, cotton growing, soybean growing, all the things we used to do better than we are doing now. We will be importing food this year, in spite of a better season.”
Before Mugabe’s land reform, Zimbabwe was a breadbasket of southern Africa. The United Nations says about five million Zimbabweans are now relying on food handouts.
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A North Korean hacking group known as Lazarus was likely behind a recent cyber campaign targeting organizations in 31 countries, following high-profile attacks on Bangladesh Bank, Sony and South Korea, cybersecurity firm Symantec Corp said Wednesday.
Symantec said in a blog that researchers have uncovered four pieces of digital evidence suggesting the Lazarus group was behind the campaign that sought to infect victims with “loader” software used to stage attacks by installing other malicious programs.
“We are reasonably certain” Lazarus was responsible, Symantec researcher Eric Chien said in an interview.
North Korea denies involvement
The North Korean government has denied allegations it was involved in the hacks, which were made by officials in Washington and Seoul, as well as security firms. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
Symantec did not identify targeted organizations and said it did not know if any money had been stolen. Nonetheless, Symantec said the claim was significant because the group used a more sophisticated targeting approach than in previous campaigns.
“This represents a significant escalation of the threat,” said Dan Guido, chief executive of Trail of Bits, which does consulting to banks and the U.S. government.
History of hacks
Lazarus has been blamed for a string of hacks dating back to at least 2009, including last year’s $81 million heist from Bangladesh’s central bank, the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment that crippled its network for weeks and a long-running campaign against organizations in South Korea.
Guido, who reviewed Symantec’s finding, said that it was troubling to see a hacking group focus on attacking banks using increasingly sophisticated techniques.
“This is a dangerous development,” he said.
Symantec, which has one of the world’s largest teams of malware researchers, regularly analyzes emerging cyberthreats to help defend businesses, governments and consumers that use its security products.
Latest attacks surfaced in Poland
The firm analyzed the hacking campaign last month when news surfaced that Polish banks had been infected with malware. At the time, Symantec said it had weak evidence to blame Lazarus.
Reuters has been unable to ascertain what happened in that attack. Poland’s biggest bank lobbying group, ZBP, in February said the sector was targeted in a cyberattack but did not provide further details. Government authorities declined comment on the incident.
Authorities in Poland could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.
Symantec said the latest campaign was launched by infecting websites that intended victims were likely to visit, which is known as a “watering hole” attack.
The malware was programmed to only infect visitors whose IP address showed they were from 104 specific organizations in 31 countries, according to Symantec. The largest number were in Poland, followed by the United States, Mexico, Brazil and Chile.
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Scientists can tell by your blood whether you have cancer cells, how well your organs are functioning, and if they’ve been affected by cancer. Now there’s a new blood test that could help prevent heart attacks and strokes.
Jeff Meeusen, Ph.D., developed the test at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Meeusen told VOA in a Skype interview that the test will determine who’s at risk for a heart attack or stroke, “and it seems to have a chance to determine who’s at risk, even accounting for current gold standard tests like LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol.” LDL cholesterol is considered the “bad” cholesterol because it becomes part of plaque, the waxy stuff that can clog arteries.
The test measures the amount of ceramides in the blood. Ceramides are waxy molecules strongly linked to cardiovascular disease. They are similar to cholesterol, but unlike cholesterol, they are biologically active.
Meeusen explained that when we start to have cardiovascular risk factors, the ceramide levels build up and then they can promote things like the LDL cholesterol crossing into the vascular wall. Once it’s there, he said, ceramides develop atheroscopic plaque, which causes hardening of the arteries.
“Even if you have a very low LDL cholesterol, this ceramide test is able to identify who is going to be at risk for developing a heart attack or stroke later in life,” Meeusen said. Meeusen is a clinical chemist and co‑director of Cardiovascular Laboratory Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
The test could be used to help patients who have progressing coronary artery disease as well as to find out who is at risk for developing coronary artery disease.
Our physicians are really embracing this new test,” Meesen said. “There’s been a need for tests that can help identify those people that are at higher risk, and they’re using this test among individuals that would otherwise seem to be at target, on track. They have good cholesterol. They don’t have too many other risk factors. And yet, if you have an elevated ceramide score, being able to prescribe a statin, or encourage that patient to exercise and diet, is going to prevent these events in the long run.”
Meeusen said the test provides an incentive to patients to take better care of their health. What’s more, the test is available to doctors and their patients outside the Mayo Clinic hospital network.
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