YCLOAK

Shining their flashlights into the darkest corners of Singapore, a small group of ant hunters searches for an elusive winged insect.

With luck, they will find a queen ant to lay eggs and start a colony under the watchful eye of a collector.

“You can search for a few hours without finding anything at all. So, it’s really luck,” Leland Tan, 14, said after he hit the jackpot, and found two queen ants in one night.

Singapore, a tropical city-state home to more than 40 ant species, has a small but growing community of ant collectors.

Ants Singapore, a Facebook group that has grown to 380 members since last December, aims to connect “ant lovers and even those who are interested in keeping ants.”

Followers share tips on catching and breeding ants, do-it-yourself ant farms and links to videos such as the giant killer ants in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

While most ants in Singapore are harmless, the insects are often regarded as a nuisance. That is something Chris Chan is hoping to change.

“I want people to look at ants differently,” said Chan, a 29-year-old Uber driver and member of Ants Singapore.

“Now, a lot of people still think that ants are pests, but with enough education, I can educate them that keeping ants can be safe,” he told Reuters Television.

Chan lives across the border in the southern Malaysian city of Johor Bahru with his girlfriend, her family and up to 30 ant colonies living in 10 formicariums, or ant farms.

Helen Teh, the mother of Chan’s girlfriend, said she was curious why the couple needed so much sand and wood in their home.

“He said, ‘Oh Auntie, I’m keeping ants,'” Teh said, recalling her initial surprise.

“Later, when I knew it is something that he loves … I said, ‘It’s no harm done,'” she said.

Chan has turned to social media to promote his hobby.

He has started a YouTube channel for new collectors and answers questions about ant care on the group’s Facebook page.

Chan also organizes ant-hunting trips to teach people how to find and catch the tiny insects that he says can hold his attention for hours.

“Some people can stare at an aquarium for hours. Same, just like my ants,” Chan said.
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A small U.S. biotech has successfully regenerated skin and stimulated hair growth in pigs with burns and abrasions, paving the way for a scientific breakthrough that could lead to the regeneration of fully functional human skin.

Salt Lake City-based PolarityTE Inc’s patented approach to tissue engineering is designed to use a patient’s own healthy tissue to re-grow human skin for the treatment of burns and wounds.

Despite recent advances in reconstructive surgery, plastic surgeons cannot give burn victims what they require the most — their skin.

Current approaches to treat serious burns are “severely limited” in their effectiveness and in some cases, are rather expensive, PolarityTE’s founder and CEO Denver Lough said in an interview.

Epicel, a skin graft widely used in burn units that is sold by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vericel Corp, does not result in fully thick and functional skin — which is PolarityTE’s objective.

PolarityTE conducted its pre-clinical study on wounded pigs at an animal facility in Utah. The use of therapy resulted in scar-less healing, growth of hair follicles, complete wound coverage and the progressive regeneration of all skin layers, the company said.

As pig skin is more complex and robust than human skin, successful swine data is typically seen as a precursor to effectiveness in human trials.

PolarityTE expects to begin a human trial later this year and the cell therapy could hit the market 12 to 18 months thereafter, said Lough, who served as senior plastic surgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital before creating PolarityTE last year.

“If clinically successful, the PolarityTE platform could deliver the first scientific breakthrough in wound healing and reconstructive surgery in nearly half a century,” Lough said.

The technology also has the potential to develop fully-functional tissues, including bone, muscle, cartilage and the liver, PolarityTE said.

The company said it would “be opportunistic with financing,” to fund upcoming trials but declined to provide details.

PolarityTE is backed by pharma industry veteran Phil Frost, currently the chief executive of OPKO Health Inc, and a small number of other industry executives.

Shares of the company rose as much as 16.5 percent to $20.98 on the Nasdaq, but pared most gains to trade up 1.6 percent in the midday session on Thursday.
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Poaching and wildlife trafficking have left some of Africa’s most iconic species endangered. The loss of the animals has cost African countries critical tourism revenue. But what if those national parks could get a second chance? The nonprofit African Parks has been trying to give just that. Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi which just welcomed some new inhabitants – four cheetahs relocated there by African Parks from South Africa.
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Poaching and wildlife trafficking have endangered some of Africa’s most iconic species and the loss of the animals has cost African countries critical tourism revenue.

But at least one national park is getting a second chance. Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi has just welcomed some new inhabitants – four cheetahs relocated there from South Africa courtesy of the nonprofit African Parks group.

Park rangers lured the first cheetah out into its new home with a fresh carcass. It’s the first cheetah Malawi has had in the wild in two decades. 

The cheetah is the fastest land animal in the world, but even that couldn’t protect the species in Malawi. Poachers killed off the cheetahs’ prey and ultimately the cheetahs themselves. 

“They were last seen in Malawi about 20 years ago,” said Craig Reid of the Liwonde National Park. “Specifically in Liwonde area, they have been absent for over a 100 years. So, as part of the rehabilitation of the park, we feel it is very important to bring back the cheetah to Malawi and Liwonde specifically.”

A total of four cheetahs – two males and two females – were airlifted to Liwonde from South Africa in May.

Before being released into the park, the cheetahs spent their first three weeks in an enclosure to allow them to become acclimated to their new surroundings. 

Liwonde National Park has a population of 12,000 large mammals. These include bush buck, water buffalo and antelope.

The cheetah is the first large predator to be reintroduced to the park. 

“We have a very healthy animal base and now that the protection measures are in place as we have got a very good law enforcement in the park,” Reid said. “The numbers of animals are increasing very rapidly and, as a result to that, there are more than enough animals to provide for some carnivorous animals such as the cheetah”. 

Officials are holding meetings with communities surrounding the park. 

“Those people are likely to face danger,” said David Nongoma of African Parks. “And our message to the community is to say that…they refrain from entering the park and stop doing what they used to be doing because these animals are definitely very dangerous. They can kill a human being.”

Park officials say they also plan to reintroduce leopards and lions to restore the park’s lost glory.
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Someday, your immune system may be pressed into service to fight heart disease.  Researchers have discovered that a simple sugar can stimulate immune system “clean up” cells to reduce disease-causing plaque in arteries.  

Marcophages are the garbage men of the body.  These immune system cells mop up cellular toxins and debris that are produced through cells’ normal functioning.

But scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis wondered, what if macrophages could be pressed into service to eliminate or degrade the accumulation of plaque as well? The fatty substance collects inside blood vessels and is a leading cause of heart disease and stroke.

Cardiology researcher Babak Razani has pondered that possibility. “If you, you could imagine this, that you could somehow manipulate it to rev it up, to stimulate its function, then you could make a macrophage into a super-macrophage, one that’s really stimulated to degrade.”

In a two-part study published in the journal Nature Communications, Razani and colleagues described how they manipulated and activated a genetic molecule called TFEB that goes into the nucleus of macrophages, supercharging their housekeeping skills inside cells.

Researchers then showed that a simple sugar, called trehalose, stimulated macrophages in the same way.  In experiments with mice prone to atherosclerotic plaques, injection of the sugar molecule decreased plaque size by 30 percent.  

“So that’s what we found here,” Razani reports, “that this simple, natural compound, that is very safe, could be very atherogenic as therapy for cardiovascular disease.”

In their unaltered state, macrophages try to fix damaged arteries by cleaning up cellular waste, including misshapen proteins, excess fat and dysfunction cellular structures called organelles.

But Razani says they eventually become overwhelmed by the task in people with atherosclerotic plaques, contributing to the debris problem that leads to inflammation and more disease.

Razani said supercharging macrophages with trehalose, so they resist damage and are able to continue their housekeeping function, offers a potential treatment for plaques, in addition to cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Because it’s a natural substance found in yeast, mushrooms and crustaceans, Razani said trehalose is completely safe.

Investigations found the sugar is broken down and doesn’t work when swallowed. Trehalose reduced the size of arterial plaques only when injected into mice. Other sugars did not have any effect.

So the challenge for researchers now is to find a way to turn trehalose into a form that is effective in humans to fight heart disease and possibly other health conditions like fatty liver disease and diabetes.
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Kenya has become the latest African country to introduce HIV self-testing kits in a bid to get more people to know their status and seek treatment. The government estimates that there are as many as half a million people in Kenya who are HIV-positive but don’t know it. Lenny Ruvaga reports for VOA from Nairobi.
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The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on Wednesday with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.

Scientists determined that skulls, limb bones and teeth representing at least five individuals were about 300,000 years old, a blockbuster discovery in the field of anthropology.

The antiquity of the fossils was startling – a “big wow,” as one of the researchers called it. But their discovery in North Africa, not East or even sub-Saharan Africa, also defied expectations. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.

“This material represents the very root of our species,” said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who helped lead the research published in the journal Nature.

Before the discovery at the site called Jebel Irhoud, located between Marrakech and Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils were known from an Ethiopian site called Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago.

“The message we would like to convey is that our species is much older than we thought and that it did not emerge in an Adamic way in a small ‘Garden of Eden’ somewhere in East Africa. It is a pan-African process and more complex scenario than what has been envisioned so far,” Hublin said.

The Moroccan fossils, found in what was a cave setting, represented three adults, one adolescent and one child roughly age 8, thought to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

These were found alongside bones of animals including gazelles and zebras that they hunted, stone tools perhaps used as spearheads and knives, and evidence of extensive fire use.

An analysis of stone flints heated up in the ancient fires let the scientists calculate the age of the adjacent human fossils, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Shannon McPherron said.

There is broad agreement among scientists that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. These findings suggest a complex evolutionary history probably involving the entire continent, with Homo sapiens by 300,000 years ago dispersed all over Africa.

Morocco was an unexpected place for such old fossils considering the location of other early human remains. Based on the shape and age of the Moroccan fossils, the researchers concluded that a mysterious, previously discovered 260,000-year-old partial cranium from Florisbad, South Africa also represented Homo sapiens.

The Jebel Irhoud people had large braincases that lacked the globular shape of those today. Max Planck Institute paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz said the findings indicate the shape of the face was established early in the history of Homo sapiens, but brain shape, and perhaps brain function, evolved later.

But given their modern-looking face and teeth, Hublin said, these people may have blended in today if they simply wore a hat.

Homo sapiens is now the only human species, but 300,000 years ago it would have shared the planet with several now-extinct cousins in Eurasia – Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east – and others in Africa.

Hublin did not hazard a guess as to how long ago the very first members of our species appeared, but said it could not have been more than 650,000 years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that led to Homo sapiens split from the one that led to the Neanderthals.
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Nearly 16,000 young children die every day around the world, says researcher Sue Grady, citing U.N. figures. The Michigan State University medical geographer says newborns account for about half of the deaths.

A U.N. study of neonatal mortality around the world found that Africa has the highest rate, at 28 deaths for every 1,000 live births. In a study pertaining to 14 sub-Saharan African countries, Grady and her student investigators found that neonatal mortality was significantly associated with, among other factors, home births, where babies are delivered without the supervision of a trained professional.

Grady said many of the newborns succumbed immediately after birth to asphyxiation or an inability to take their first breath. Other common causes of death were infection and diarrhea from unclean water.

Grady said newborn deaths in East and West Africa could be dramatically reduced if babies were delivered in medical facilities with trained personnel standing by.

“Focusing on real hygienic conditions as the baby is being delivered, really cleaning the umbilical cord well [and] being very, very careful as far as the water the baby receives after birth” are critical, she added.

Targeting resources

The study conducted by Grady and colleagues is aimed at informing the United Nations in its global efforts to reduce infant mortality by targeting resources where they are most needed.  

Since 1990, when the U.N. Millennium Development Goals were adopted, infant mortality has decreased 53 percent, from nearly 12 million deaths a year to about 6 million.

Those goals have been replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals, a universal call to action to reduce scourges of poverty.

In Africa, Grady said, many women can not afford or access medical care or prefer to deliver their babies at home, surrounded by family and community. Newborn mortality also increases with the age of the mother, she noted.

And a disturbing trend also was found: More female babies were dying than male infants. Grady’s study, which looked at more than 344,000 births in East and West Africa, did not identify the possible causes for that, but “we do know there is some bias, so we would want to better understand why female infants were less likely to survive.”

The findings were published in the journal Geospatial Health.
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A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council has called for the urgent retooling of what it calls an outdated mental health care system. The report contends the current system is injurious to mental well-being and violates the human rights of patients.

Dainius Puras is the author of the report and special investigator on the right to physical and mental health. His work found that mental health was grossly neglected within systems around the world and where they exist, “they do so in isolation, segregated from regular health care despite the intimate relationship between physical and mental health.”

He said there is a harmful overreliance on biological factors in the treatment of mental illness to the exclusion of psychological, environmental and social influences.

“Today, there is unequivocal evidence that the…excessive use of psychotropic medicines is a failure,” he said. “Yet, around the world, biomedical interventions dominate mental health investment and services.”

He said people with mild and moderate forms of depression too often are encouraged to use psychotropic medications “despite clear evidence that they should not.”

Worldwide problem

The World Health Organization reports nearly one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Currently, it estimates around 450 million people suffer from such conditions. It notes depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide, affecting more than 300 million people.

Despite the enormity of the problem, Puras said things have barely changed regarding the treatment of mentally ill people. He said governments worldwide continued to favor institutional care, a system he called outdated and open to human rights abuses.

He told VOA that the warehousing of people with mental disabilities in large institutions should stop and be replaced by community-based health care systems.

“The West investment is to invest in institutional care and I am very openly advocating to stop investing in institutional care. It is against human rights and it is the most expensive way of caring for people because it is 24-hour service.”

While community-based services may not be cheap, Puras said they respect the dignity of people with psychosocial, intellectual or other forms of mental disabilities. Unlike institutions, he said community systems do not “breed human rights violations, hopelessness and social exclusion.”

Outdated concepts

He said the entire mental health field has to be liberated from outdated and scientifically unsound concepts that undermine the human rights of people with mental disabilities.

For example, he said people who are diagnosed as having mental health conditions may be considered dangerous “and that is why they are often deprived of their liberty.”

He said another outdated, and seriously misused belief is that people who are diagnosed with a mental condition need some form of medical intervention.

“If they do not agree,” he said, “quite often force is used to provide treatment,” which research now shows “is not necessarily effective.”

Parus is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and professor at Vilnius University in Lithuania. He is particularly incensed at the thought that eight million children globally are living in institutional care, even though some of them have one or both parents.

“But, for some reason the State decides that they are better parents. So, instead of empowering parents, we enclose children into institutional care. This is a very bad investment,” he said.

Parus recommends that children without parental care be placed in a family setting instead. He said treating the mentally ill within communities breaks down dangerous and erroneous myths and lessens discrimination against them.

“If you have never seen and do not know a person with a psycho-social disability, your mind will be occupied by all these stigmatizing myths, that they are dangerous, they are hopeless and so on,” he said. “So, this integration of children and adults into society is very helpful. It brings about tolerance.”

“The biggest problems I see are not on the side of persons with disabilities, but on the side of so-called normal society, which is very seriously biased by all these outdated concepts,” he added.
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India is likely to experience deadly heat waves more frequently in the years ahead, even though there only has been a slight increase in human-driven warming over the past few decades, according to a study released Wednesday.

“It’s getting hotter, and of course more heat waves are going to kill more people,” said climatologist Omid Mazdiyasni of the University of California, Irvine, who led an international team of scientists analyzing a half-century of data collected by the Indian Meteorological Department.

After tracking temperature, heat waves and heat-related mortality, Mazdiyasni said, “We knew there was going to be an impact, but we didn’t expect it to be this big.” The findings are especially sobering considering the average temperature in India rose about one-half of one degree Celsius over 49 years.

The unveiling of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, follows President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during this century.

The scientists said that, even despite the relatively slight rise in mean temperatures in India between 1960 and 2009, the probability of India experiencing a massive heat-related mortality event – defined by more than 100 deaths – has shot up by 146 percent. Roughly speaking, that means dying in a heat wave in India is now about two and one-half times as likely as it was in the mid-20th century.

Country mostly unprepared

Most of India has experienced a 25 percent rise in the number of heat-wave days during that period. The study’s authors said the vast majority of the country’s cities and states are not prepared to handle such heat crises, even if they understand the devastation they can wreak.

In 2010, 1,200 people died from heat-related causes in the western city of Ahmedabad, prompting city officials to introduce seven-day weather forecasts and warnings, extra water supplies and cool-air shelters in the summer.

After more than 2,500 people were killed by heat in ravaged areas of India in 2015, nine other cities rolled out a plan to educate children about heat risk, stock hospitals with ice packs and extra water, and train medical workers to identify heat stress, dehydration and heat stroke.

But those nine cities have only about 11 million people, not even 1 percent of the country’s population.

The same methodology can be applied in any region to get a sense of how vulnerable a country or population might be, the authors said. Recent events underscore years of warnings by scientists that climate change will make future heat waves more intense, more frequent and longer lasting.
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Cancer patients are being urged to speak up about their experiences with side-effects from chemotherapy. This, following a new study that shows reporting symptoms can improve their chances of survival. Faith Lapidus reports.
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The United Nations Ocean Conference opens next week in New York and is to call for action to help protect marine life from the threats of global warming, over-fishing and pollution. But in some cases, climate change is already affecting some of the ocean’s iconic species. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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