YCLOAK

As health experts stare down a looming health care worker shortage and try to find solutions, African nations say they are especially worried in the face of possible U.S. cuts to international aid.

In Uganda, the impact of poor-quality health services and a shortage of skilled health workers can be measured in human lives.

“We are losing 17 mothers and 106 newborns every day,” said Faridah Luyiga Mwanje of White Ribbon Alliance, an advocacy group that campaigns for women’s health and safe childbirth.

Mwanje’s sister became part of that grim statistic in 2013, a tragedy Mwanje attributes to doctors intervening too late and a lack of blood supplies. Her sister bled to death in a high-end hospital in Kampala, leaving behind four children.

Her baby boy survived, but was born with cerebral palsy and suffers from developmental delays and convulsions.

In rural Uganda, Mwanje says, the situation is worse.

“There are no health workers,” she said. “There’s a general lack of lifesaving commodities, the infrastructure is poor, health workers don’t have housing, the [operating] theaters are dilapidated, health facilities are not connected to the national power grid, and there’s no running water in these facilities.”

45 countries convene

Worldwide, that shortage and other health care challenges lead to 2.4 million preventable deaths of mothers and children every year. And making the picture even bleaker, by the year 2030, the World Health Organization estimates the world will be short 18 million health workers, a loss Mwanje says will be keenly felt in countries like Uganda.

Health experts and advocates from 45 countries convened this year in Johannesburg to discuss this looming problem. Stefan Peterson, UNICEF’s Chief of Health, told VOA that major gains can be made without complicated, costly medical research.

“I think we have many effective medical interventions that can save lives, but they don’t reach the people who need it, and the people don’t reach those interventions at the right time,” he said. “So what we’re talking about now is actually reducing access barriers by making health services more accessible, improving quality of those health services, so that these available, and even affordable, medical interventions reach the people who need them. And by doing that, we can save at least two-thirds of those lives without new innovation.”

He says African countries also have benefited from expanding community health programs, with low-level health workers who handle patients’ basic needs and shift some of the burden off nurses and doctors.

Possible funding cuts

But these changes will require money, and top health officials are concerned about possible funding cuts from the United Nations’ largest contributor, the United States. Mwanje says that she isn’t sure her country could recover from that sort of aid setback.

“We are truly concerned that donors are cutting back funding,” she said. “Because our governments, well, they’re not prioritizing health and they’ve relied mainly on donor funding. So, it will take them a long time to adjust — if they actually adjust. So we hope that donors can rethink their decisions and invest in health in countries where there are marginalized people. Because we live in a global village, and health affects all of us.”
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China said Wednesday it is committed to honoring its pledges under the Paris climate change agreement, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that would effectively dismantle environmental regulations put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said combating climate change is a challenge for the entire world, and that China will maintain its approach even if other governments change their policies.

Trump’s order has rekindled the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate and deepened concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.

“We will put our miners back to work” and produce “really clean coal,” Trump said during the signing ceremony Tuesday.

“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

WATCH: Trump orders review of Obama climate rule

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.

“The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals,” Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. “This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.

Half-dozen rules

Trump’s order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration’s future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.

Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” largely because it put in place what he called “job killing” regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.

Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”

International effect

Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”

A hot issue

Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.

Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan. “Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040 half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump’s order “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.” Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.

In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.

The House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.

Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.

“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said. “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”

Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.

Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.

“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, (CO2) and increased funding by 1500% and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
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The House voted Tuesday to block online privacy regulations issued during the final months of the Obama administration, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell the browsing habits of their customers.

The Federal Communications Commission rule was designed to give consumers greater control over how internet service providers share information. But critics said the rule would have added costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among Internet companies.

The House voted 215-205 to reject the rule, and sent the legislation to President Donald Trump for his signature. The vote is part of an extensive effort that Republicans have undertaken to void an array of regulations issued during the final months of Democratic President Barack Obama’s tenure. But the vote was closer this time than previous rescind efforts, with 15 Republicans siding with Democrats in the effort to keep the rule in place.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Republican-led effort was about putting profits over the privacy concerns of Americans.

“Overwhelmingly, the American people do not agree with Republicans that this information should be sold, and it certainly should not be sold without your permission,” Pelosi said. “Our broadband providers know deeply personal information about us and our families.”

Internet companies like Google don’t have to ask users’ permission before tracking what sites they visit. Republicans and industry groups have blasted that discrepancy, saying it was unfair and confusing for consumers.

But proponents of the privacy measure argued that the company that sells you your internet connection can see even more about consumers, such as every website they visit and whom they exchange emails with.

Undoing the FCC regulation leaves people’s online information in a murky area. Experts say federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information — but it doesn’t spell out how or what companies must do. That’s what the FCC rule aimed to do.

The Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, is a critic of the broadband privacy rules and has said he wants to roll them back. He and other Republicans want a different federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission, to police privacy for both broadband companies like AT&T and internet companies like Google. GOP lawmakers said they cared about consumer privacy every bit as much as Democrats did.

“What America needs is one standard across the internet ecosystem and the Federal Trade Commission is the best place for that standard,” said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said the FTC has acted as America’s online privacy regulator since the dawn of the internet. He called the rule an effort to strip the agency of that role.

“The internet has become the amazing tool that it is because it is largely left untouched by regulation — and that shouldn’t stop now,” McCarthy said.

Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas parted ways with his Republican colleagues on the issue. He said the privacy protections were “commonsense measures” that would have ensured internet users continue to have control over their personal information.

“We don’t want the government having access to our information without our consent, and the same goes for private business,” Yoder said.

Broadband providers don’t currently fall under FTC jurisdiction, and advocates say the FTC has historically been a weaker agency than the FCC.

The American Civil Liberties Union urged Trump to veto the resolution, appealing to his populist side.

“President Trump now has the opportunity to veto this resolution and show he is not just a president for CEOs but for all Americans,” said the ACLU’s Neema Singh Guliani.

Republicans repeatedly discounted the privacy benefits generated by the rule. Over the last two months, they’ve voted to repeal more than a dozen Obama-era regulations in the name of curbing government overreach. The criticism of their efforts was particularly harsh Tuesday.

“Lawmakers who voted in favor of this bill just sold out the American people to special interests,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
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Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard?

It may be a mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound.

No matter how tolerant we are, most of us feel uncomfortable if a person sitting close to us in a quiet cinema starts noisily opening a bag of chips and loudly eating them. 

But for some people, who suffer from misophonia, certain repetitive noise can be hardly bearable.

“Mainly sounds made by people’s mouth or breathing. This is certain speech sounds, chewing, certain other sort of noisy wet noises from the mouth, noisy breathing as well. Other ones include things like repetitive noises, pen clicking, foot tapping, keyboards sometimes, packets rustling,” Will Sedley of New Castle University said.

Physical evidence?

Scientists at the Newcastle University wanted to see whether there is a physical evidence of this sensitivity.

Volunteers were asked to rate the level of unpleasantness of different sounds from neutral, such as rainfall or the sound of boiling water, to irritating, like noisy eating, loud breathing or a baby crying.

Their brain scans showed that misophonia has to do with the size of an area in our brains that regulates emotional responses.

“It was smaller and less developed in people with misophonia at a group level. Nothing you’d see on an individual brain screen basis, but suggesting that there may actually be brain structural alterations,” Sedley said.

But the discovery opened new questions.

“It’s difficult to know which is the chicken and which is the egg, whether this is the cause of misophonia or in part, or whether this is the consequence of having this condition or an unpleasant adversant condition like this and how it affects the brain in the long term,” he said.

Scientists say they also want to find out whether severe misophonia is treatable, but they say everybody should be aware that some people are genuinely sensitive to certain noises.
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Researchers have developed a blood test that can rapidly tell whether someone is suffering from tuberculosis. Investigators hope the test can lead to quicker treatment, making a dent in the worldwide TB epidemic.

One-third of the world’s population is infected with a silent form of tuberculosis, according to the World Health Organization. A person can live for years infected with latent TB and show no symptoms.  

But each year, 10 million people develop active TB, which causes severe symptoms — such as coughing, weight loss, fever and night sweats — and kills about 2 million of those people. Prompt diagnosis and treatment is critical for containing the highly contagious disease and saving lives.  

The new blood test promises to provide that speedy diagnosis. Investigators say it can tell within hours whether someone is infected with mycobacterium, the pathogen that causes tuberculosis.

Currently, TB diagnosis is done with a sputum test. The objective is to grow the bacterium in culture from expelled mucus.

Arizona State University bioengineering professor Tony Hu, who helped develop the new test, said the sputum test takes too long.

“That technology needs four to eight weeks to get the final result,” he said. But for the blood test, it’s “only 2½ hours.”

Detects peptides

Called Nanodisk-MS, the rapid TB test takes advantage of nanotechnology to detect minute levels of peptides in the blood. Peptides are amino acid fragments of proteins that TB bacteria release only during active infections.

The highly sensitive blood test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can also measure the severity of the infection.

Nanomedicine such as this, Hu said, could also be used to monitor patients who are being treated with antibiotics to see how well they are responding or whether the antibiotic cocktail is the right one. He called it a form of personalized medicine that “can really save lives.”

Hu said the test needed further validation in clinical trials, but that he hoped it would become part of the arsenal in the global war on tuberculosis.
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The executive order signed by President Trump shelves the Clean Power Plan, the signature Obama-era policy designed to combat climate change.

But it also is a sweeping rollback of decades of U.S. policy regarding not only climate change but environmental protection, energy production and emissions.

Pro-growth, pro-environment

Trump repeatedly promised to overturn the plan during the campaign. At one point, he referred to climate change as a “hoax,” but more generally the president has claimed that restrictive and punitive environmental regulations hurt the energy industry’s ability to turn a profit, and that they cost jobs.

Today’s executive order lays out a White House strategy to get rid of any regulations that “impede” energy production.

White House officials such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have telegraphed this strategy for weeks, saying, “This is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country.”

The Clean Power Plan already is on hold due to legal challenges, but if it had been implemented it would have forced U.S. power plants to significantly cut their emissions of planet warming greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.

Here is a quick rundown of the main points of today’s executive order.

♦ Initiate a review of the Clean Power Plan:

Its goal was to lower U.S. carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent over 2005 levels by 2030. The EPA estimates that would have kept 870 million tons of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere.

The plan was the backbone of the U.S. contribution to the Paris Accords, which was a worldwide, non-binding agreement among 195 nations to keep the planet from warming more than an average of 2 degrees Celsius.

♦ Initiate a 180-day review among all U.S. agencies:

The goal is to identify all regulations and rules that “impede” energy production.

♦ Lift the moratorium on federal coal leasing:

In 2016, the Obama administration put a 3-year moratorium on new leases of federal land for coal mining. At the time, the administration said the program needed to be modernized to ensure U.S. taxpayers were getting a solid return on the money developers were paying for the land, and also to take into account the impact mining has on climate change.

♦ Rescind restrictions on hydraulic fracking:

Current restrictions require drillers to use tanks instead of pits to store fracking wastewater, and to disclose the chemicals that are pumped into fracking wells to draw out the natural gas.

♦ Roll back federal regulations forcing energy companies to limit methane emissions from wells and pipes.

♦ New guidance on the National Environmental Policy Act:

The NEPA is a law passed by Congress in 1970 and signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.  NEPA required that federal agencies prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements on any new development.  These reports state the potential environmental effects of proposed federal agency actions.  The Obama administration included greenhouse gases on the list of things that could have a negative environmental impact.  The executive order takes them back out.

We’ll see you in court

Environmental groups already have vowed to challenge any backsliding on the part of the White House in regard to climate policy.

They point to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled three times that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and qualifies as a “threat” to human health. That gives the EPA not only the legal authority, but the responsibility, to regulate the emission of CO2.

When VOA spoke with Tomas Carbonnel, the lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, he said it is ready to challenge any rollback in court.

“Once the administration undertakes this process,” he said, “it will experience significant challenges in the courts and in public opinion if it attempts to roll back progress in that, that had been made.”

It is unclear how the Supreme Court might rule if Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s pick to sit on the court, is approved by the Senate, but the fate of the executive order, may very well be decided in court.
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Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday exhorted young girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, saying those fields will provide the jobs and innovation for the future.

Their tour of the National Air and Space Museum with a group of middle school students came as the Trump administration proposed further cuts to education and science, drawing harsh criticism from teachers’ unions and others.

Ivanka Trump, a successful entrepreneur who considers herself as a women’s rights activist, lamented that women make up 48 percent of America’s work force but only 24 percent of STEM professionals.

“This statistic is showing that we are sadly moving in the wrong direction. Women are increasingly underrepresented in important fields of science, technology, engineering and math,” Trump said. “But I dare you to beat these statistics and advance the role of women in STEM fields.”

She said she and her 5-year-old daughter Arabella plan to take a coding class together this summer because “coding truly is the language of the future.”

Astronaut Kay Hire and female researchers at NASA also spoke to the students and DeVos urged the children to follow in their footsteps by studying, working hard and mentoring younger peers.

“You can do your part to improve the lives of women in the future,” DeVos said.

As she praised the role of women in the American space program, Ivanka Trump also said her father’s administration has expanded NASA’s space exploration to add Mars as a top objective. But as she spoke, the Trump administration sent Congress a series of “options” for budget cuts, including slashing $3 billion from Education Department, as well as cuts to NASA and the National Institutes of Health.

The American Federation of Teachers accused the administration of hypocrisy.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA’s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “The next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians need support, not budget cuts eliminating the very programs being promoted.”
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President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would effectively dismantle Obama-era environmental regulations, rekindling the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate, and deepening concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.

“We will put our miners back to work” and produce “really clean coal,” Trump said during the signing ceremony.

“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.

“The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals,” Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. “This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.”

Trump’s order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration’s future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.

Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” largely because it put in place what he called “job-killing” regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection Agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.  

Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”

International effect

Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”

A hot issue

Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.

Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan.

“Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040, half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump’s order “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.” Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.

In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.

The House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.

Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.

“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said.  “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”

Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.

Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.

“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, [CO2] and increased funding by 1500 percent and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
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To build a sandcastle here on Earth, the sand needs to be wet so it can stick together. Not so on Saturn’s strange and largest moon Titan, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology say the moon’s non-silicate sand is “electrically charged” and “resistant to motion.” Researchers liken the charge to the static electricity generated when you rub a balloon on your hair.

“If you grabbed piles of grains and built a sand castle on Titan, it would perhaps stay together for weeks due to their electrostatic properties,” said Josef Dufek, the Georgia Tech professor who co-led the study. “Any spacecraft that lands in regions of granular material on Titan is going to have a tough time staying clean. Think of putting a cat in a box of packing peanuts.”

The electrical charge, according to researchers, can last for days or months.

The charge is likely generated by the winds on Titan, which blow at around 30 kilometers per hour. As the sand moves, it begins to hop and collide, becoming charged.

Researchers say the electrification of Titan’s sands could explain why dunes on the moon, some of which are more than 90 meters tall, form in the opposite direction of the prevailing winds.

“These electrostatic forces increase frictional thresholds,” said Josh Mendez Harper, a Georgia Tech geophysics and electrical engineering doctoral student who is the paper’s lead author. “This makes the grains so sticky and cohesive that only heavy winds can move them. The prevailing winds aren’t strong enough to shape the dunes.”

To reach their conclusions, researchers built a model to replicate conditions on Titan. For the model, they put grains of “naphthalene and biphenyl — two toxic, carbon and hydrogen bearing compounds believed to exist on Titan’s surface — into a small cylinder.”

The cylinder was then rotated in a nitrogen environment similar to Titan. Then, they measured the electric characteristics of the grains.

“All of the particles charged well, and about two to five percent didn’t come out of the tumbler,” said Mendez Harper. “They clung to the inside and stuck together. When we did the same experiment with sand and volcanic ash using Earth-like conditions, all of it came out. Nothing stuck.”

Sand on Earth also can pick up an electric charge, but the grains are much smaller and dissipate rapidly.

“These non-silicate, granular materials can hold their electrostatic charges for days, weeks or months at a time under low-gravity conditions,” said George McDonald, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences who also co-authored the paper.

The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Lifting boxes by hand, day after day, in places like warehouses can cause muscle strain and other injuries. But now a new exoskeleton — a rigid external body frame that assists with limb movement can help prevent problems associated with repetitive tasks like handling boxes or materials at construction sites. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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In the U.S. and Africa, communities of African descendants are experiencing a high rate of diet related disorders like diabetes and heart disease. A Nigerian American in Washington wants to change that. Nutritionist Tambra Raye Stevenson is on a mission to inspire young girls and women in the diaspora and in Africa to embrace their heritage from farm to fork and become leaders in nutrition. VOA’s June Soh caught up with Stevenson at a recent event to promote her initiative.
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