Month: September 2020

Weather forecasters have started using the Greek alphabet to designate new storms after running out of conventional names.The U.S. National Weather Service says Tropical Storm Wilfred formed Friday in the eastern Atlantic, followed by Subtropical Storm Alpha off the coast of Portugal a short time later.Meanwhile, forecasters say tropical depression 22 in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to be named Beta later Friday. At last report, the storm was about 400 kilometers southeast of the Texas-Mexico border and could become a hurricane threatening the U.S. Gulf Coast in the next few days.The threat comes days after Hurricane Sally came ashore in the southern U.S. as a Category 2 hurricane, and less than a month after the destructive Hurricane Laura came ashore in Louisiana. Meanwhile, Hurricane Teddy is headed toward Bermuda, which took a direct hit from Paulette earlier this week.The U.S. National Hurricane Center says Wilfred poses no threat to land.Weather officials say Alpha became the first Greek-named storm since 2005. That year the named storms made it all the way to Zeta, the end of the Greek alphabet, the only time on record that has happened. …

A drug company said Friday that a medicine it sells to tamp down inflammation has helped prevent the need for breathing machines in hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the first large study that primarily enrolled Hispanics and Blacks.Switzerland-based Roche reported the results for tocilizumab, sold now as Actemra and RoActemra for treating rheumatoid arthritis and some other diseases. The company said it would quickly publish the results, which have not yet been reviewed by independent scientists, and would speak with regulators about next steps.The drug, given through an IV, tamps down a protein called interleukin-6 that’s often found in excess in COVID-19 patients. It failed in a previous study that tested it in people more severely ill from the coronavirus. The new study was done in the United States, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Mexico and Peru. About 85% of the 389 participants were Hispanic, Black, Native American or other ethnic or racial minorities. These groups have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic.About 12% given the drug needed a breathing machine or died within 28 days versus about 19% of patients given a placebo.Looked at separately, there were fewer deaths among those on the drug — 8.6% versus 10.4% on placebo — but the difference was too small to say it might not have been due to chance.It’s unclear how the results will be viewed; another drug that works in a similar way failed in an experiment rigorously testing it in COVID-19 patients but some less scientific, observational studies have suggested benefit.This …

Rare bipartisan support for new climate legislation brings the U.S. one step closer to ditching a group of potent planet-warming chemicals.Democratic and Republican senators recently introduced an FILE – A coal-fired power plant is silhouetted against the morning sun in Glenrock, Wyoming, July 27, 2018. Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) have been found to be up to 4,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.More than 100 countries have ratified the Kigali Amendment, making it legally binding. The United States is not among them.The White House has said little about why it has not ratified the Kigali document, despite urging by Republican senators.  “It’s very important that other countries, especially the bigger countries, commit to [the Kigali Amendment],” said RIVM’s Velders. “A lot of countries look to Europe, the United States and Japan to lead initiatives. It’s important that they lead by example. Otherwise, for other developing countries, it’s quite easy for them to say, ‘Well, why should we worry if the most polluting countries don’t comply with it?’”  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump has rolled back previous steps to regulate HFCs and dozens of other environmental regulations, though courts have struck down some of these measures.The new proposed legislation would require an 85% reduction in HFC production and use by 2036. HFCs would still be allowed in “essential” products that don’t have available substitutes. The list includes defense sprays such as bear repellents, medical inhalers and mission-critical military uses.“At the end of the day, whether we ratify Kigali and …

The world’s worst air this week is not in pollution hot spots like India or China. It’s in the western United States, where record-breaking wildfires are blanketing the region with smoke.Portland, Oregon, has topped the air pollution charts for major cities this week at monitoring company FILE – Flames and smoke from the Bobcat Fire are pictured after an evacuation was ordered for the residents of Arcadia, Calif., Sept. 13, 2020.What’s increasingly concerning is that these huge wildfires are no longer isolated incidents.”We are continuing to see the increase in the duration of these events, the severity of these events and the frequency,” said Keith Bein of the Air Quality Research Center at the University of California-Davis.”The bigger question becomes: [What are the impacts of] being exposed to this every summer for longer and longer periods and higher and higher concentrations?” he said. Those exposures likely add up.Gases and particlesSmoke from wildfires is made up of gases and particles that can harm health in a number of ways.The ozone that fires generate irritates the eyes, nose and throat. It can trigger inflammatory responses leading to asthma attacks in sensitive people and impacts on other organs.But the more insidious effects come from tiny particles 1/30th the width of a human hair. They are known as PM2.5, shorthand for particulate matter that is 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller.FILE – The San Francisco Bay Bridge and city skyline are obscured in orange smoke and haze as seen from Treasure Island in San …

Pregnant women living in bushfire-prone areas in Australia are being urged to protect themselves and their unborn babies from smoke as the fire season returns. Doctors in the worst-affected regions say they are horrified by the effects of the smoke from last summer’s catastrophic conditions.Doctors have said particles from bushfire smoke in Australia have left placentas that nourish an unborn child resembling those in women who are heavy smokers. Instead of being a healthy shade of pink, distressed organs are left grey and grainy.The result can be premature and underweight babies. One specialist said some were “unexpectedly and unpredictably small.”There’s a warning that newborns could suffer the consequences throughout their entire lives.General practitioner Rebecca McGowan said she believes global warming is exacerbating Australia’s bushfire danger and that babies are at risk of harm.“This is the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “We are starting to see literally the effects. It is not a sci-fi movie. This is happening in real life. We are starting to see the effects on the unborn, and we are starting to see these babies born now with major effects of climate change and we cannot deny it anymore. It is happening in front of us.”There is not a large amount of scientific knowledge on the long-term effects of bushfire smoke on pregnant women. Some experts have suggested that stress could also lead to premature births and smaller newborns. Australian health authorities have said there was no data or evidence to gauge the risk to …

Nearly half of Americans, or 49%, said they definitely or probably would not get an inoculation if a coronavirus were available today, while 51% said they would, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this month.The 49% who lean toward rejecting the inoculation cited concerns about side effects from the vaccine.The public’s trust in a safe COVID-19 vaccine coming to market has taken a tumble. In May, a Pew survey revealed 72% of Americans said they would be inoculated if the vaccine were available.Only 21% in this month’s poll said they would definitely get the vaccine.The recent Pew survey found that 77% of Americans believe the vaccines in development in the United States would likely be approved before their safety and effectiveness are completely understood.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can A young woman wearing a face mask walks across the medieval Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic, Sept. 18, 2020.A further breakdown of the numbers shows that Hispanic children made up 44% of the fatalities, and Black children made up 29%, compared with 14% for white children. American Indian and Alaska Natives accounted for 4% of COVID-19 deaths, with Asian and Pacific Islanders making up the same amount.The CDC report also found that 75% of those who died had at least one underlying health condition such as asthma, obesity, neurologic and developmental conditions or cardiovascular conditions. Researchers pointed out that certain social conditions, including crowded living environments, food and housing insecurity, …

Researchers on a quest to find life in the universe got promising news this week.  Space agencies are joining forces to defend the planet from an aggressive asteroid, and a look at one of the best places on Earth to view the stars.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us “The Week in Space.”Producer: Arash Arabasadi. …

The British auction house Christie’s announced this week that it would sell the largest and most complete known skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex in early October.The auction house said the dinosaur skeleton is nearly 12 meters long and just under 5 meters tall. It has been known as Stan, named after amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison, who discovered it in the upper Midwestern U.S. state of South Dakota in 1987.Christie’s science and natural history specialist James Hyslop said scientists that looked at the bones initially misidentified them as belonging to a triceratops, a more common dinosaur discovery.It was not until Sacrison took the remains to the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in 1992 that anyone realized what he had found.A detail of the teeth of Stan, one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossils discovered, is pictured Sept. 15, 2020, at Christie’s in New York.Hyslop said the paleontologists from the institute carefully excavated and reassembled the skeleton, ultimately finding 188 of the estimated 300 total bones in a T. rex, more than for any previously found specimen.Hyslop said Stan eventually went on tour to Japan between 1995 and 1996, and he later went on permanent display in Hill City, South Dakota.Complete T. rex skeletons are very rare, and the last time one was put up for auction was in 1997, when the Field Museum in Chicago bought the now-famous Sue for $8.36 million. Hyslop said Christie’s hopes to beat that price when Stan goes up for auction October …

Experts from the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say the sun is in the first year of a new cycle of activity, and they are watching it closely in an effort to guard against solar storms that could cause problems on Earth.Officials at NOAA explain that the sun, just like Earth, goes through “seasonal” cycles, which astronomers have been recording since 1755. The Solar Prediction Panel, chaired by experts from NOAA and the NASA space agency, monitors these cycles that last about 11 years. They report a solar minimum between Solar Cycle 24 and 25 — the period when the sun is least active — happened in December 2019, putting Earth eight months into the first year of Solar Cycle 25. The panel expects sunspot or solar flare activity to peak over the next five years.  Elsayed Talaat, NOAA’s director of planning and analysis, said if solar flares — bursts of electromagnetic energy out of the sun — are big enough, they can cause serious problems on Earth, including high frequency communication used by airlines or emergency responders, satellites, GPS navigation systems, cellphones, solar panels and more. Radiation from solar flares can also be dangerous for astronauts, especially those working outside the International Space Station, and for future explorers to the moon.Talaat said NASA and NOAA have developed the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan to help mitigate these events. “We have instituted space weather as part of the international, national emergency and local, state and local emergency management exercises,” …

As if the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t bad enough, flu season is about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere, adding millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths to the already-strained American health care system.”We really, really want to emphasize the potential for disaster, actually,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America board of directors, at a recent briefing for reporters.Experts are urging everyone to get flu shots in order to take some of the load off of health workers and hospitals.FILE – A general view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, Sept. 30, 2014.Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, up to 61,000 people A women reacts to getting an influenza vaccine shot at Eastfield College in Mesquite, Texas, Jan. 23, 2020.It’s not clear how much the weather affects the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It’s a question scientists are actively studying.But the coronavirus is related to other viruses that cause the common cold, and “what we see with those viruses is that come October, November, December they skyrocket,” Mina said.”I hope that for some reason this virus behaves differently, but I don’t anticipate that it will,” he added.Get your flu shotWhile a safe coronavirus vaccine is still months away, health officials are urging everyone to get a flu shot.In most years, Dr. William …

Scientists say they have found what may be the oldest specimen of fossilized sperm ever discovered, inside a tiny crustacean trapped in a piece of amber 100 million years ago.The researchers say the discovery in amber from Myanmar’s Kachin province, described in a paper published Wednesday in the science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, provides an extremely rare opportunity to study the evolution of the reproductive process.The scientists suspect the crustacean in which the sperm was found, a newly discovered species of ostracod about 1 millimeter long, was likely covered in amber shortly after mating.They say the sperm cell found in the animal was significant, not only because of the age of the specimen but also because of its size — about one-fifth the size of the entire animal that produced it.The researchers say that while most animals produce huge numbers of tiny sperm, there are still animals that exist today that produce so-called “giant” sperm. Some modern ostracods and species of fruit flies produce sperm many times longer than their bodies.One of the authors of the study, the University of Munich’s Renate Matzke-Karasz, says the most significant aspect of the discovery is that it shows this method of reproduction has been around a very long time.The researchers say it is unclear what evolutionary advantage producing a small number of giant sperm, as opposed to a large number of tiny sperm, may have. While a large sperm might have a better chance of reaching an egg, …

The U.N. Secretary-General warned Wednesday the coronavirus pandemic is “out of control,” and he called for global solidarity in making a future vaccine affordable and available to all. “The virus is theNo. 1global security threat in our world today,” Antonio Guterres told reporters. There have been nearly 30 million confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and more than 936,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, which tracks global data on the virus.People wearing face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus walk in downtown Madrid, Spain, Sept. 16, 2020.Guterres spoke ahead of Tuesday’s start of the U.N. General Assembly annual debate, which typically draws more than a hundred presidents, prime ministers and other senior officials to New York each year. But due to the pandemic, leaders will send pre-recorded video messages, and side meetings will be held virtually. The U.N. chief said he will appeal next week for full implementation of his March 23 call for a global cease-fire by the end of this year so all attention could be focused on defeating the virus. As scientists around the globe race to find an effective COVID-19 vaccine, Guterres cautioned that “there is no panacea” for the pandemic. “A vaccine alone cannot solve this crisis, certainly not in the near term,” he said. “We need to massively expand new and existing tools that can respond to new cases and provide vital treatment to suppress transmission and save lives, especially over the next 12 months.” He emphasized …

Fires burning in California are the largest on record. In Washington state, a larger area burned in five days than have burned in any previous year on record save one. And in Oregon, one-tenth of the state’s population was under fire evacuation warnings or orders last week. Scientists say climate change is making fires worse in the American West. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more. …