NEWS

Study Ties Premature Death to Air Pollution

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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UN Pushes ‘Smart Crops’ as Rice Alternative to Tackle Hunger in Asia

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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Unusual Fog-clearing Apparatus Keeps Airline Passengers Moving

Make-believe fog is a frequent special effect used in the theater and at rock concerts. Usually created with dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide crystals, the smokey mist rolling across the stage creates a sense of mystery and suspense. But when real fog settles over an airfield, it creates delays or even danger.

At an airport in the western state of Oregon, ground crews take matters in their own hands when freezing fog threatens to delay takeoffs and landings. And they use the same substance to clear the fog that’s used to create it – dry ice.

“The dry ice collects the moisture [in the air] and it falls to the ground as basically just snow or ice,” explains Howard Volkman, the operations and maintenance supervisor at Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport.

When Mother Nature throws travelers a curve ball and freezing fog descends over the airport, he and his co-workers jump into action. First, they load crushed dry ice into a hopper suspended under a big helium balloon.

The five-and-a-half-meter-diameter balloon is tethered with a winch cable to an airport pickup truck. The crew lets it rise to 152 meters, then, with a remote control, turns on the dry ice spreader.

A driver and an operator make slow loops around the runway with the balloon and its dry ice spreader in tow, scattering the crystals into the mist.

“We’re clearing a hole in the fog,” Volkman says, “just for the airplanes to be able to see the runway.”

A friendly ghost

The staff nicknamed their white balloon CASPER, after the friendly cartoon ghost. Then they came up with an acronym that fit: Cable Attached System Providing Effective Release.

CASPER first took to the air in 2010, and has deployed 14 times this winter.

Medford Airport Director Bern Case says it is “very effective,” reducing flight cancellations to near zero.

“It’s all about dollars. Cancellations and diversions for airlines are very expensive, not only to the airlines, but if a person is trying to get to Tokyo and they can’t get out of here, it can ruin an entire trip,” he said.

This fog-busting method only works at temperatures of zero Celsius and below. So it is not that useful for airports in coastal cities where it’s usually warmer when fog forms.

Case says the Medford airport provided the blueprints for the one-of-a-kind balloon system to the airport authorities in Spokane, Washington and Anchorage, Alaska.

International inquiries about Medford, Oregon’s fog-clearing technology have come from Russia, South Africa and Scotland.

While fog-clearing operations are still necessary for private planes and older aircraft, recent advances in precision navigation technology mean newer jets can take off and land with barely any visibility.
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Fossils From 1.6 Billion Years Ago May Be Oldest-known Plants

Fossils unearthed in India that are 1.6 billion years old and look like red algae may represent the earliest-known plants, a discovery that could force scientists to reassess the timing of when major lineages in the tree of life first appeared on Earth.

Researchers on Tuesday described the tiny, multi-cellular fossils as two types of red algae, one thread-like and the other bulbous, that lived in a shallow marine environment alongside mats of bacteria. Until now, the oldest-known plants were 1.2-billion-year-old red algae fossils from the Canadian Arctic.

The researchers said cellular structures preserved in the fossils and their overall shape match red algae, a primitive kind of plant that today thrives in marine settings such as coral reefs but also can be found in freshwater environments. A type of red algae known as nori is a common sushi ingredient.

“We almost coul  have had sushi 1.6 billion years ago,” joked Swedish Museum of Natural History geobiologist Therese Sallstedt, who helped lead the study published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. There is evidence indicating life first appeared in the form of marine bacteria roughly 3.7 to 4.2 billion years ago. Only much later did plants and subsequently animals appear in the primordial seas.

“Plants have a key role for life on Earth, and we show here that they were considerably older than what we knew, which has a ripple effect on our appreciation of when advanced life forms appeared on the evolutionary scene,” Sallstedt said.

The fossils were found in phosphate-rich sedimentary rocks from Chitrakoot in central India. The thread-like fossils contained internal cellular features including structures that appear to be part of the machinery of photosynthesis, the process used by plants to convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthesis and the advent of plants helped build the atmosphere’s oxygen content.

The fossils also contained structures at the center of each cell wall typical of red algae.

At the time, Earth’s land surfaces were largely barren, life was mainly microbial and atmospheric oxygen was at 1 to 10 percent of current levels, said study co-leader Stefan Bengtson, a Swedish Museum of Natural History paleobiologist.

The fossils also represent the oldest-known advanced multi-cellular organisms in the broad category called eukaryotes that includes plants, fungi and animals, indicating complex life flourished much earlier than previously assumed, the researchers said.
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Teen Pregnancies Create Health Challenges in Cameroon

Two-month-old Pride Nalova cries as her mother slaughters and roasts chicken in a restaurant in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. Beatrice Nalova, the baby’s 15-year-old mother, says she was forced to drop out of school when her mother found out that she was pregnant.

“When she took me to a nearby hospital, the doctor found out that I was six months pregnant,” Beatrice said. “My mother hid it from my father and tried to evacuate the pregnancy. It did not work. At last I gave birth, and my father was surprised that I was pregnant and drove me out of the house. He said it was something like bad luck in the family. I left and stayed with my aunt.”

Beatrice was a student at Government Bilingual High School Nkol Eton in Yaounde. Philemon Enonchong, the vice principal, said the school does not allow pregnant girls to study alongside their peers in the school.

“When we discover that a student is pregnant, we advise the parents to come and take the child back home,” Enonchong said. “We would not just drive the child away or create a scene. When it is time for exams, then this child can come and write.”

Teen pregnancy abounds

The Cameroon Medical Council reports that 25 percent of pregnancies occur in girls of school age, and 20 percent of pregnant teens do not return to school.

Dr. Ndansi Elvis Noka of the Unite for Health Foundation, a group that strives to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions, said the council’s figures might be low, because less than 30 percent of the population visits conventional health services.

“Their fear is that of parental ostracization, like, ‘My mom is going to kill me, my dad is going to slaughter me. What are my friends going to think about me?’ The 25 percent is what government has identified based on those who have already overcome the fear of parents, the fear of friends, the fear of teachers.”

Contraceptives are still taboo in most communities, and poverty levels are still very high, forcing many girls into prostitution. The country’s demographic health survey adds that traditional practices that encourage early marriages, especially in the Muslim-dominated northern regions, are also responsible for teenage pregnancies.

Psychologist Mireille Ndje Ndje said the increase in teenage pregnancies also is linked to increased communication and interaction between people. This is a period, she said, when the world is a global village and people can communicate at all moments, wherever they are. She sad adolescent girls have a greater challenge because they are exposed to the Internet and social media, which have videos that entice them to try having sexual relations.

Childbirth complications

Gynecologist Vivian Verbe Sale of Cameroon’s Ministry of Health said severe bleeding, infections and high blood pressure before and after birth are some complications that cause death during childbirth among girls under age 15. She did not have statistics on how many teenagers die while giving birth.

“When a little girl gets pregnant at that age,” Sale said, “she is likely to have what we call an obstructed labor because of the small pelvis. And because of that, if she is not having the baby in a center where the staff is qualified to identify that on time to do a C-section to save the baby, she will likely have what we call vesicovaginal fistula” — a resulting abnormal passage between the bladder and vagina that allows continuous involuntary discharge of urine into the vaginal vault.

The World Health Organization says teenage pregnancies constitute a serious health and social problem worldwide, with most of them occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
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Now Hear This: Loud Sound May Pose More Harm Than We Thought

Matt Garlock has trouble making out what his friends say in loud bars, but when he got a hearing test, the result was normal. Recent research may have found an explanation for problems like his, something called “hidden hearing loss.”

Scientists have been finding evidence that loud noise – from rock concerts, leaf blowers, power tools and the like – damages our hearing in a previously unsuspected way. It may not be immediately noticeable, and it does not show up in standard hearing tests.

But over time, Harvard researcher M. Charles Liberman says, it can rob our ability to understand conversation in a noisy setting. It may also help explain why people have more trouble doing that as they age. And it may lead to persistent ringing in the ears.

The bottom line: “Noise is more dangerous than we thought.”

His work has been done almost exclusively in animals. Nobody knows how much it explains hearing loss in people or how widespread it may be in the population. But he and others are already working on potential treatments.

To understand Liberman’s research, it helps to know just how we hear. When sound enters our ears, it’s picked up by so-called hair cells. They convert sound waves to signals that are carried by nerves to the brain. People can lose hair cells for a number of reasons – from loud noise or some drugs, or simple aging – and our hearing degrades as those sensors are lost. That loss is what is picked up by a standard test called an audiogram that measures how soft a noise we can hear in a quiet environment.

Liberman’s work suggests that there’s another kind of damage that doesn’t kill off hair cells, but which leads to experiences like Garlock’s.

A 29-year-old systems engineer who lives near Boston, Garlock is a veteran of rock concerts.

“You come home and you get that ringing in your ears that lasts for a few days and then it goes away,” he said.

But after he went to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday, and visited a couple of dance clubs, it didn’t go away. So he had the audiogram done, in 2015, and his score was normal.

Last fall, he came across a news story about a study co-authored by Liberman. It was a follow-up to Libermans’ earlier work that suggests loud noise damages the delicate connections between hair cells and the nerves that carry the hearing signal to the brain.

The news story said this can cause not only persistent ringing in the ears, but also a lingering difficulty in understanding conversations in background noise. After the Vegas trip, Garlock sensed he had that problem himself.

“I notice myself leaning in and asking people to repeat themselves, but I don’t notice anybody else doing that,” he said.

Garlock emailed one of Liberman’s colleagues and volunteered for any follow-up studies.

It’s hard to be sure that Garlock’s situation can be explained by the research. But the seeming contradiction of hearing problems in people with perfect hearing tests has puzzled experts for years, says Robert Fifer of the University of Miami’s Mailman Center for Child Development.

He’s seen it in Air Force personnel who worked around airplanes and in a few music-blasting adolescents.

“We didn’t have a really good explanation for it,” said Fifer, who’s an official of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

But the work by Liberman and others helps solve the mystery, he said.

The connections between hair cells are called synapses, and a given hair cell has many of them. Animal studies suggest you could lose more than half of your synapses without any effect on how you score on an audiogram.

But it turns out, Liberman says, that losing enough synapses erodes the message the nerves deliver to the brain, wiping out details that are crucial for sifting conversation out from background noise. It’s as if there’s a big Jumbotron showing a picture, he says, but as more and more of its bulbs go black, it gets harder and harder to realize what the picture shows.

The study Garlock noticed is one of the few explorations of the idea in people. Researchers rounded up 34 college students between ages 18 and 41 who had normal scores on a standard hearing test. The volunteers were designated high-risk or low-risk for hidden hearing loss, based on what they said about their past exposure to loud noise and what steps they took to protect their hearing,

The higher-risk group reported more difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations, and they scored more poorly on a lab test of that ability. They also showed evidence of reduced function for hearing-related nerves.

It’s a small study that must be repeated, Liberman says, but it adds to evidence for the idea.

One encouraging indication from the animal studies is that a drug might be able to spur nerves to regrow the lost synapses, said Liberman, who holds a financial stake in a company that is trying to develop such treatments.

In the meantime, he says, the work lends a new urgency to the standard advice about protecting the ears in loud places.

“It isn’t awesome to have your ears ringing. It’s telling you (that) you did some damage,” he said.

Liberman’s own hearing scores are pretty good, but at age 65, he sometimes can’t understand his kids in a loud setting. He figures some of that may be from his years of handyman chores, like using a belt sander or a table saw.

“I wear earplugs when I mow the lawn now.”

 
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This Day in History: Famed Physicist Albert Einstein is Born in 1879

On this day in 1879, famed physicist Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany.

Best known for his theories of relativity, Einstein would toil alone with his obsessive queries of the universe for years in the Swiss patent office before gaining international recognition by winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 1921.

Space and time and E = mc 2

In 1905, Einstein addressed what he termed his special theory of relativity. In special relativity, time and space are not absolute, but relative to the motion of the observer. 

In other words, Einstein posited that the universe was not static, but instead, expanding.  

Thus, two objects traveling at great speeds with regard to each other would not necessarily observe simultaneous events in time at the same moment, nor agree on their measurements of space. He theorized that the speed of light, which is the limiting speed of any body having mass, is constant in all frames of reference.

​He expanded on this theory, searching for a mathematical equation that could calculate his belief that mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein famously created that equation, known as E = mc 2.

General relativity

In 1916, he published The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity, which proposed that gravity, as well as motion, impact time and space. 

According to Einstein, gravitation is not a force, as his longtime scientific hero Isaac Newton had argued; rather, Einstein believed gravity was a curved field in the space-time continuum, created by the presence of mass. 

An object of very large gravitational mass, such as the sun, would therefore appear to warp space and time around it, which could be demonstrated by observing starlight as it skirted the sun on its way to earth.

In 1919, astronomers studying a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity, propelling him to instant celebrity. 

As a world-renowned public figure, he became increasingly political, taking up the cause of Zionism and speaking out against militarism and rearmament.

In his native Germany, this made him an unpopular figure. After Nazi leader Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship, freeing him from military service, and left the country. He later moved to the United States and became a U.S. citizen.

The atom bomb

In 1939, despite his lifelong pacifist beliefs, he agreed to write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of a group of scientists who were concerned with American inaction in the field of atomic-weapons research. 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Albert Einsten

Like the other scientists, he feared sole German possession of such a weapon.

He played no role in the subsequent Manhattan Project and later deplored the use of atomic bombs against Japan.

After the war, he called for the establishment of a world government that would control nuclear technology and prevent future armed conflict.

Later in life, he worked on a unified field theory, which he never completed to his or other scientists’ satisfaction.

Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1999, Time magazine named him Person of the Century.
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Burundi Says Malaria Reaches Epidemic Proportions

Health experts say more than 700 people have died of malaria so far this year in Burundi, prompting the government to declare the disease an epidemic.

The determination was based on findings of a survey by Burundian and World Health Organization experts, said Josiane Nijimbere, Burundi’s Minister of Health.

She said there have been 1.8 million cases of malaria registered since the beginning of the year — a huge number in a country with a population of less than 11 million.

The minister attributed the increase of malaria partly to climate change.

“There is a strong association between malaria and warm temperatures, which have led to significant increase in malaria cases because of the spread of mosquitoes,” Nijimbere told reporters Monday.

According to the World Health Organization, some 8.2 million Burundians — 73 percent of the total population — were affected by malaria in 2016. More than 3,800 died.

The health minister said government is dispatching doctors and health care providers to villages to care for patients who cannot afford to go to hospitals.

The government says it needs at least $31 million to fight the epidemic.

Aid agencies have warned that Burundi’s ongoing political crisis is hurting the economy and contributing to a humanitarian crisis.

The small African country has been in turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza ran for a controversial third term in 2015. Some 400,000 Burundians have fled to neighboring countries to escape political violence and reported human rights abuses.

A U.N. report last month said the number of people in need of assistance increased from 1.1 million to at least 3 million.
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Quality Physical Therapy Just a Mouse Click Away

Victims of stroke often face years of grueling, physical therapy, if they can even find a qualified therapist. Now a Portuguese inventor has created a computer program that delivers high quality, monitored therapy, and it’s just a mouse click away. Faith Lapidus narrates this report from Kevin Enochs.
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Madrid to Ban Old Cars by 2025 in Crackdown on Air Pollution

Madrid’s city government announced plans on Monday to ban the oldest and most polluting vehicles from the city center by 2025 in a bid to crackdown on air pollution.

The local government will prohibit the use within the city’s limits of gasoline cars registered before 2000 and diesel-powered cars registered before 2006, which at the moment account for 20 percent of all those registered.

The ban would lower nitrogen dioxide levels in the city by an estimated 15 percent, a poisonous gas behind respiratory problems, Madrid’s local  government said in a presentation.

Madrid has failed to meet European Union-set limits on air quality for the last eight years. Other European cities such as Paris and Berlin have already put similar plans in place to curb emissions.

“This is plan A for air quality in Madrid. It’s plan A because there can’t be any plan B,” Madrid’s mayor Manuela Carmen said at an event to present the new plan.

Madrid’s local government has allocated 544 million euros ($580.83 million) to completing 30 measures included in the  plan, which also encourages greater use of renewable energy and regenerating urban areas, according to the presentation.

 
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