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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University of Maryland researchers came to a recently held energy summit in Washington DC to show how air-conditioning technology could also be made more efficient. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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“Hackers,” whether they’re Wikileaks or malicious computer coders, have a bad reputation. But there are also hackers who are simply trying to create a more user-friendly world. Think of them as New Age do-it-yourselfers.
And they have playgrounds where they do their hacking.
Hacker Safe Spaces
Tinkerers around the world are starting to come together at so-called hacker spaces, to share tools and camaraderie. These hacker spaces include a member-financed club in a warehouse in Oakland, California called Ace Monster Toys.
Jose’s full time work is as an architect, but in his spare time, he hangs out at Ace Monster Toys so he can use big “toys” like a buzz saw.
He hacks guitars out of old wood, including one created entirely from triangular scraps of highly-prized purple heartwood that a carpenter had thrown away after completing a project.
Different rooms, different tech
Rachel McCrafty, an artist, designer, and maker whose real name is Rachel Sadd, runs Ace Monster Toys. She says Jose’s work represents the heart of what they do here.
“That he made something epically beautiful out of trash,” she says, “that’s the essence, to me, of hacking.”
She says Ace is a great place to hack, tinker and collaborate on a variety of projects.
There’s a textile room, where quilt squares made in the beginner’s sewing class are displayed on one wall. The highlight is the club’s professional sewing machine.
In another part of the building, it’s more high-tech. Software engineer Walt joins Jason, a sound engineer, to experiment with Jason’s latest “toy.” It’s a programmable music cube he’s developed that flashes green and yellow as it changes pitch, all in a clear cube that’s no bigger than the palm of your hand.
Upstairs at an electrician’s table, red lights flash as part of a baton-sized gizmo for scaring pets away from cars. Kam, its creator, is a salesman for a semiconductor equipment maker. He says that he’s learned new ways to program gadgets, thanks to other Ace Club members.
In fact, the people who hack here say that one of the best things about this place, is the people who hack here.
“Whenever I run into problems, people here help me,” Kam says. “They are very nice people. Very helpful.”
McCrafty says she planned it that way.
“Our teachers are volunteers, our tool stewards are volunteers, our board members serve as volunteers. They’re just incredibly generous.”
A cooperative space
The club’s 150 members pay monthly dues to cover the building’s rent, and to get their hands on cool stuff, like a 3-D desktop printer, and a monster-sized laser cutter that can cleanly cut wood into the curvy front of an electric guitar, or make something as delicate as a paper octopus. Members can use the tools anytime, day or night. McCrafty says it works out, thanks to rules that emphasize communication and respect.
“Respect yourself. Be safe. Respect the space,” she says. “Respect the people you’re sharing with.”
These values pay off, as they did for Owen and Arun. The young entrepreneurs are here every day, all day, using computers in the club’s shared office space. They’re programming Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa to be a virtual banking expert that readily answers financial questions.
By hanging out at Ace, Owen says they’ve learned more about how a high-tech probability model can enhance Alexa’s virtual banking expertise.
“It was actually our friend, Walt. We had just met him then, and he said, ‘Hey, I couldn’t help but overhear, you guys were talking about a Bayesian classifier. Let me tell you how I use that in my current job.'”
Looking around at his fellow hackers, Owen added, “So I think it’s pretty critical that we’re in a space where people are generous with their time, they’re super motivated and working on their own projects. It just creates these chance encounters.”
It all makes this hackerspace greater than the sum of its parts, or its members, all of them offering unique ways for people to “play” together.
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McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.”
The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week.
The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages of visiting can be “stressful,” and the chain is making changes to improve the overall customer experience. That includes introducing ordering kiosks, which McDonald’s says can help ease lines at the counter and improve the accuracy of orders – another frustration for customers. Easterbrook has also talked about the potential of delivery.
With its mobile order-and-pay option, McDonald’s says customers place an order on its app then go to a restaurant and “check in” to select how they want to get their food. That could be at the counter, in the drive-thru, or with curbside delivery, where an employee brings out orders to a designated space. Orders are prepared once customers check in at the restaurant.
Starbucks has already found success using its mobile app and loyalty program to encourage people to visit more often and spend more when they do. The chain has also said its mobile order-and-pay option was so popular that it caused congestion at pick-up counters last year, leading some customers who walked into stores to leave without buying anything. Starbucks said it is working on fixing those issues.
It’s not clear whether McDonald’s will be able to get the same level of usage for its mobile app and order-and-pay option. Since coffee tends to be more of a daily habit, for instance, people may be more willing to download an app for it on their phones.
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Those encrypted messaging apps you may have been using to avoid prying eyes had a major flaw that could have allowed access to hackers, according to a cybersecurity firm.
According to Check Point Software Technologies, both Telegram and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, were vulnerable.
The company said it withheld the information until the security holes were patched, saying “hundreds of millions” of users could have been compromised.
The vulnerability involved infecting digital images with malicious code that would have been activated upon clicking the pic. That, according to Check Point, could have made accounts susceptible to hijacking.
“This new vulnerability put hundreds of millions of WhatsApp Web and Telegram Web users at risk of complete account take over,” Check Point head of product vulnerability Oded Vanunu said in a news release. “By simply sending an innocent looking photo, an attacker could gain control over the account, access message history, all photos that were ever shared, and send messages on behalf of the user.”
Both apps tout so-called end-to-end encryption to ensure privacy, but according to Check Point, that made it hard to spot malicious code.
Patching the vulnerability involved blocking the code before the messages were encrypted.
WhatsApp claims to have more than one billion users, while Telegram has more than 100 million.
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President Donald Trump is to tell American autoworkers Wednesday in the state of Michigan that he is setting aside strict fuel-economy requirements imposed by the previous administration in its waning days.
The Trump White House contends that action broke an earlier agreement with the auto industry to wait until 2018 to review the standards.
“The auto industry, rightly, cried foul,” a senior White House official told reporters Tuesday. “We’re going to get this midterm review back on track.”
Advocates of the tougher standards dispute that.
The year 2018 “was the deadline by which they were obligated to complete the review. No agreement was broken,” Therese Langer, transportation program director at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) told VOA News.
“The agencies completed a comprehensive technical assessment report in July 2016, which made clear that the standards as adopted remained feasible and cost-effective. At that point, making the decision promptly was consistent with the goal of providing adequate lead time for manufacturer product planning.”
Setting standards
The Trump administration wants to set standards “that are technologically and economically feasible,” according to the official who briefed reporters on condition he not be named.
Some automakers argued that the tougher standards, set just prior to the January inauguration, will be too costly.
The pro-business president and his new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who has expressed skepticism about the scientific consensus on climate change, support rolling back the stricter standards.
But the administration cannot scrap the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) mandate completely without Congress’ consent. Lawmakers originally approved the CAFE regulations in the mid-1970s, following the oil embargo by OPEC members.
The current issue deals with rules on fuel economy and emissions affecting automobiles that will appear in showrooms from the years 2022 through 2025.
The proposed vehicle standards for those model years “will save consumers tens of billions of dollars at the pump and help domestic automakers stay competitive in a global vehicle market that is moving steadily toward highly efficient vehicles,” ACEEE executive director Steve Nadel told VOA.
Detroit automakers
But the move to cars and trucks that do not rely on conventional fossil fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, has slowed, say those in the Trump administration and in the auto industry.
“Because we have low gas prices, consumers just aren’t buying those vehicles” that run on batteries in addition to or instead of fuel, said the Trump administration official briefing reporters at the White House.
Trump’s trip to Michigan will include meetings with Detroit automakers, suppliers and unions, and then attending a rally of automakers.
At the last event Wednesday, the president is to announce his intention to stall the goal of having a fleet average of 54.5 miles per gallon (23.2 kilometers per liter) by the year 2025.
One hitch for the industry and other proponents of the looser standards is that 13 states say they will follow California in adhering to stricter fleet fuel efficiencies – a market that makes up more than 40 percent of the U.S. automotive sales market.
“That’s an issue we’ll have to confront, but it’s farther down the road,” the senior White House official said when asked about that issue by reporters.
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China is warning about the possible impact of a trade war with the United States, even as the world’s two biggest economies take steps to map out relations under the administration of President Donald Trump.
Speaking at an annual news conference Wednesday, at the end of high-level political meetings in Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang talked up the benefits of good relations between the two countries. He said he was optimistic about ties, but also warned a trade war would hurt American businesses first.
“We do not want to see any trade war breaking out between the two countries. That would not make our trade fairer and would harm both sides,” Li said. “Our hope on the Chinese side is that no matter what bumps the China-U.S. relationship hits, we hope it will continue to move forward in a positive direction.”
Getting personal
Chinese state media this week have been releasing a steady drumbeat of opinion pieces and editorials supporting that view. Some even going so far as to highlight the personal benefits Trump’s business empire would reap through better economic relations with China.
One opinion piece in the Communist Party-backed Global Times highlighted the huge business interests Trump’s commercial empire has in China and Beijing’s recent and unprecedented “preliminary approval” of more than 30 Trump trademarks. The approval of so many trademarks at once – covering business ventures such as golf clubs, hotels and restaurants – has surprised analysts.
Much like Li did in the press conference Wednesday, the Global Times article argued that American businesses would suffer if there was a trade war. It also added a not so subtle threat: “Trump’s position as U.S. president would not offer his business immunity from a trade war with China and would be impacted just as other U.S. enterprises if Sino-U.S. relations were to suffer.”
The piece ended by arguing that one tough test of Trump’s political wisdom will be how he manages following through on his pledge to put “America First” while avoiding setbacks in U.S.-China relations.
Tough talk
On the campaign trail and since his election, President Trump’s blunt criticisms of China have unnerved leaders in Beijing. Trump has talked and Tweeted about a wide range of issues from trade to the South China Sea, as well as Beijing’s handling of North Korea.
But it is his threats on the campaign trail to label China a currency manipulator and to impose huge tariffs on Chinese goods that worry Beijing the most. So far, he has not followed through on either of those pledges, but the U.S. Treasury will issue a semi-annual currency report in April.
That continues to unnerve Beijing despite recent signs that the two sides are beginning to engage.
Reports this week have suggested that Trump and Xi could meet in early April in Florida. On Saturday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will make his first trip to Beijing.
Fairer trade
In an interview with CNBC earlier this week, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton said Tillerson’s visit would help set up the relationship going forward and lay out a framework for issues on which Washington wants to see progress.
And one of the key issues for that visit that she highlighted in that interview was fairer trade.
“While we have a very important economic relationship with China, it hasn’t been a level playing field vis a vis U.S. companies and U.S. interests,” Thornton said. “We are going to be insisting that there be fair trade measures that be put in place and that be observed and implemented.”
Concerns about the lack of a level-playing field for American businesses in China and the impact of trade on U.S. jobs persist. Last year, the United States trade deficit with China was $347 billion, down only slightly from the previous year.
At his press conference, Li pledged that China would continue to open up its economy and argued that American companies and others were already seeing benefits.
“We may have different statistical methods, but I believe whatever differences we may have, we can always sit down and talk to each other, and work together to reach consensus,” Li said.
China’s premier also added that statistics show that trade and investment between the two countries created over one million jobs in the United States last year.
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The Trump administration may be ready to roll back some regulations covered by the Clean Air Act limiting some pollutants that contributed to smog-choked American cities in the 1970s.
But new research from China suggests clean air can save millions of lives.
More pollution, more deaths
Researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention compared the levels of particulate air pollution in 38 of China’s largest cities.
The pollution they studied is tiny, less than 10 microns. That’s smaller than the width of a human hair.
Over a three-and-a-half-year period from 2010 to 2013, the researchers recorded more than 350,000 deaths.
Examining those deaths, the researchers found that 87 percent of them could be tied to high levels of particulate matter in the air.
And the more research they did they discovered that air pollution “appeared to have a much greater impact on deaths due to cardiorespiratory diseases,” the researchers said in a press release, “such as asthma and chronic lung disease (COPD), than it did on deaths due to other causes.”
They also found that air pollution seems to have a larger effect on women and older people than on men or younger people.
The researchers predict that just lowering air pollution to the standards suggested by the World Health Organization could prevent “3 million premature deaths each year.”
The research is published in the journal BMJ.
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With a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at Purdue University are researching new methods for affordable large-scale monitoring of crucially important traits of industrial crops. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Springtime is allergy season, and many people suffer from recurring headaches and congestion. But while medication and nasal sprays provide relief to some patients, those with chronic sinus problems may need complex treatment and sometimes surgery. A breakthrough procedure called balloon sinuplasty is less invasive and has shown to be highly effective. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke looks into how it works.
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Hacking means tinkering, whether with computers, woodworking or really anything. Tinkerers around the world come together at hacker-spaces, to share tools, camaraderie and expertise. Shelley Schlender takes us to a hacker space in Oakland, California, called Ace Monster Toys, where members lend each other a “hacking” hand.
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Asia needs to make extra efforts to defeat hunger after progress has slowed in the last five years, including promoting so-called “smart crops” as an alternative to rice, the head of the U.N. food agency in the region said.
Kundhavi Kadiresan, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Asia, said the region needs to focus on reaching the most marginalized people, such as the very poor or those living in mountainous areas.
The Asia-Pacific region halved the number of hungry people from 1990 to 2015 but the rate of progress slowed in many countries – such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Cambodia – in the last five years, according to a December FAO report.
“The last mile is always difficult.. so extra efforts, extra resources and more targeted interventions are needed,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of a business forum on food security in Jakarta on Tuesday.
She said government and businesses needed to develop policies to help make food more affordable, while changing Asians’ diets that rely heavily on rice.
“We have focused so much on rice that we haven’t really looked at some of those crops like millets, sorghum and beans,” she said.
A campaign is underway to promote these alternatives as “smart crops” to make them more attractive, Kadiresan said.
“We are calling them smart crops to get people not to think about them as poor people’s food but smart people’s food,” she said, adding that they are not only nutritious but also more adaptable to climate change.
Soaring rice prices, slowing economic expansion and poorer growth in agricultural productivity have been blamed for the slowdown in efforts to tackle hunger.
More than 60 percent of the world’s hungry are in Asia-Pacific, while nearly one out of three children in the region suffers from stunting, according to the FAO.
Achieving zero hunger by 2030 is one of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals adopted by member states in 2015.
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