Year: 2023

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The cosmos is offering up a double feature in August: a pair of supermoons culminating in a rare blue moon. Catch the first show Tuesday evening as the full moon rises in the southeast, appearing slightly brighter and bigger than normal. That’s because it will be closer than usual, just 357,530 kilometers (222,159 miles) away, thus the supermoon label. The moon will be even closer the night of Aug. 30 — a scant 357,344 kilometers (222,043 miles) distant. Because it’s the second full moon in the same month, it will be what’s called a blue moon. “Warm summer nights are the ideal time to watch the full moon rise in the eastern sky within minutes of sunset. And it happens twice in August,” said retired NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, dubbed Mr. Eclipse for his eclipse-chasing expertise. The last time two full supermoons graced the sky in the same month was in 2018. It won’t happen again until 2037, according to Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project. Masi will provide a live webcast of Tuesday evening’s supermoon as it rises over the Coliseum in Rome. “My plans are to capture the beauty of this … hopefully bringing the emotion of the show to our viewers,” Masi said in an email. “The supermoon offers us a great opportunity to look up and discover the sky.” This year’s first supermoon was in July. The fourth and last will be in September. The two in August …

PHOENIX — By the time Aaliyah Ibarra started second grade, her family had moved five times in four years in search of stable housing. As she was about to start a new school, her mother, Bridget Ibarra, saw how much it was affecting her education. At 8 years old, her daughter did not know the alphabet. “She was in second grade and couldn’t tell me any of the letters. I would point them out and she didn’t know,” Bridget Ibarra said. “She would sing the song in order, but as soon as I mixed them up, she had no idea.” “I just didn’t know what letters were which,” says Aaliyah, now 9. “I know them now.” The family’s struggles coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic that forced Aaliyah to begin her school experience online. Unfamiliar with a computer, Aaliyah was regularly kicked out of the virtual classroom, her mother said. Teachers complained she was not looking at the screen and took too many breaks. Zoom school was especially difficult for Aaliyah because she was homeless — and like thousands of students nationally, her school didn’t know. Homeless students often fell through the cracks during the tumult of the pandemic, when many schools struggled to keep track of families with unstable housing. Not being identified as homeless meant students lost out on eligibility for crucial support such as transportation, free uniforms, laundry services and other help. Years later, the effects have cascaded. As students nationwide have struggled to make up for missed …

The EU is looking to prohibit chemicals deemed unsafe for children — especially ones that disrupt growth hormones — in imported toys under new rules proposed Friday by the European Commission. China is overwhelmingly the biggest manufacturer of toys imported into the European Union, accounting for 83% of the value of toys brought in in 2021, according to the official EU statistics agency Eurostat. “Enforcement will be stepped up thanks to digital technologies, allowing unsafe toys to be more easily detected, notably at EU borders,” EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton said. The commission’s proposed Toy Safety Regulation aims to address loopholes in existing EU legislation dating from 2009 that dictates safety standards in toys sold across the 27-nation bloc. It also seeks to update the rules to better address online sales. A commission statement emphasized that toys bought in the EU are “already among the safest ones in the world.” But it said more needed to be done, given “the high number of unsafe toys that are still sold in the EU, especially online,” and particularly imported ones. The proposed revision zeroes in on “chemicals that affect the endocrine system, and chemicals affecting the respiratory system or are toxic to a specific organ” in toys. The endocrine system comprises glands that produce hormones. In children, chemicals that disrupt its normal operation can affect growth, thyroid functions and puberty, and contribute to diabetes or obesity. To ensure that all toys sold in the European Union are safe, the commission is …

This week President Joe Biden announced additional measures to protect communities from extreme heat that has hit parts of the United States. In Los Angeles, authorities are coping as best they can and trying some innovative ways to beat the heat. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian …

Arizona’s saguaro cacti, a symbol of the U.S. West, are leaning, losing arms and in some cases falling over during the state’s record streak of extreme heat, a scientist said on Tuesday. Summer monsoon rains the cacti rely on have failed to arrive, testing the desert giants’ ability to survive in the wild as well as in cities after temperatures above 43 Celsius degrees (110 Fahrenheit) for 25 days in Phoenix, said Tania Hernandez. “These plants are adapted to this heat, but at some point the heat needs to cool down and the water needs to come,” said Hernandez, a research scientist at Phoenix’s 140-acre (57-hectare) Desert Botanical Garden, which has over 2/3 of all cactus species, including saguaros which can grow to over 12 meters (40 feet). Plant physiologists at the Phoenix garden are studying how much heat cacti can take. Until recently many thought the plants were perfectly adapted to high temperatures and drought. Arizona’s heat wave is testing those assumptions. Cacti need to cool down at night or through rain and mist. If that does not happen they sustain internal damage. Plants now suffering from prolonged, excessive heat may take months or years to die, Hernandez said. Cacti in Phoenix are being studied as the city is a heat island, mimicking higher temperatures plants in the wild are expected to face with future climate change, Hernandez said. …

NEW YORK — More than 100,000 people in the U.S. have become allergic to red meat since 2010 because of a weird syndrome triggered by tick bites, according to a government report released Thursday. But health officials believe many more have the problem and don’t know it. A second report estimated that as many as 450,000 Americans have developed the allergy. That would make it the 10th most common food allergy in the U.S., said Dr. Scott Commins, a University of North Carolina researcher who co-authored both papers published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials said they are not aware of any confirmed deaths, but people with the allergy have described it as bewildering and terrifying. “I never connected it with any food because it was hours after eating,” said one patient, Bernadine Heller-Greenman. The reaction, called alpha-gal syndrome, occurs when an infected person eats beef, pork, venison or other meat from mammals — or ingests milk, gelatin or other mammal products. It’s not caused by a germ but by a sugar, alpha-gal, that is in meat from mammals — and in tick saliva. When the sugar enters the body through the skin, it triggers an immune response and can lead to a severe allergic reaction. Scientists had seen reactions in patients taking a cancer drug that was made in mouse cells containing the alpha-gal sugar. But in 2011 researchers first reported that it could spread through tick bites, too. They tied it to the lone …

A 20-year-old, U.S.-funded AIDS relief program that is credited with saving tens of millions of lives around the world may not be reauthorized if conservative and anti-abortion activists are successful in a campaign against it. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was launched in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush, and since then it has channeled more than $110 billion in support for the fight against the AIDS epidemic in more than 50 countries around the world. It has been particularly successful in Western and sub-Saharan Africa, where it helps provide antiretroviral medication to the more than 25 million people who are living with the disease. The program received $6.9 billion in fiscal 2023. Through its history, the program has typically been reauthorized for five years at a time, in order to provide some certainty about the flow of relief dollars. It was last authorized in 2018. Advocates of the program are calling for a “clean” reauthorization that does not alter the program or introduce uncertainty about the flow of funds. However, that reauthorization is now in doubt, as conservative lawmakers and activists have expressed concern that the program works with various organizations around the world that, in addition to combating AIDS, provide reproductive health services, including abortion. ‘Radical’ ideology In a joint letter to key members of Congress this spring, dozens of anti-abortion groups urged lawmakers to reconsider their support for the program unless new rules are put in place that restrict the way it can spend …

The Biden administration on Thursday announced the first cancer-focused initiative under its advanced health research agency. The goal is to help surgeons more easily differentiate between healthy tissue and cancerous cells. The Precision Surgical Interventions program, which is being launched under the administration’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, will aim to significantly improve cancer outcomes over the next few decades. In a Thursday statement announcing the initiative, President Joe Biden called the investment “a major milestone in the fight to end cancer as we know it.” The initiative is part of Biden’s “cancer moonshot” initiative. The hope is that the investment will help doctors develop tools that will remove all cancerous cells while avoiding healthy nerves and blood vessels. Biden said he eventually wants the cancer death rate to be cut in half. “Harnessing the power of innovation is essential to achieving our ambitious goal of turning more cancers from death sentences to treatable diseases and — in time — cutting the cancer death rate in half,” he said. “As we’ve seen throughout our history, from developing vaccines to sequencing the genome, when the U.S. government invests in innovation, we can achieve breakthroughs that would otherwise be impossible, and save lives on a vast scale. ARPA-H follows in that tradition of bold, urgent innovation,” Biden said, using an acronym for his Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health initiative. “What’s true is that many cancer treatments still start with surgery,” Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of …

The World Health Organization on Thursday warned that health threats are surging as the war in Sudan escalates and millions of people, many sick and wounded, flee for safety within Sudan and across borders to neighboring countries where health services are fragile and hard to reach. The war, which erupted April 15 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, is not contained within the country but has profound regional implications. The conflict has displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, including 2.5 million inside Sudan. Nearly 760,000 people have been forced to flee as refugees to six neighboring countries, with many people reportedly arriving in poor health, carrying infectious diseases and other afflictions. The Federal Ministry of Health reports at least 1,136 people have been killed and more than 12,000 injured since the conflict began. “Of course, this is very underreported of the number of casualties,” said Nima Abid, World Health Organization representative in Sudan. He said the scale of the health crisis triggered by the conflict in Sudan was enormous, noting that the fragile health system in Sudan was unable to cope with the multiple emergencies that exist as “two-thirds of the hospitals in the affected areas are not functional” and are unable to respond to the huge public health needs. WHO has verified 51 attacks on health facilities since the conflict began, resulting in 10 deaths and 24 injuries and “cutting off access to urgently needed care.” Abid said that “all the organizational activities have stalled; …

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that it is not too late to “stop the worst” of the climate crisis, but only with “dramatic, immediate” action. “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” Guterres told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York, where the temperature outside was approaching 86 degrees Fahrenheit before 10 a.m. and set to hit 91 degrees Fahrenheit later in the day. He spoke as the World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service released new data confirming July is set to be the hottest month ever recorded. “According to the data released today, July has already seen the hottest three-week period ever recorded; the three hottest days on record; and the highest-ever ocean temperatures for this time of year,” Guterres said. The U.N. chief, who has been ringing the alarm bell on the climate crisis since he entered office in January 2017, noted it has been a difficult summer in many parts of the world because of climate-related events, including fires, floods and scorching heat. “For the entire planet, it is a disaster,” he said. “And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.” He said the rising temperatures are consistent with all the scientific predictions; the only surprise is how fast it is happening. He acknowledged progress on renewable energies and positive steps from industrial sectors but warned that none of it is going far or fast enough. “Accelerating temperatures demand accelerated action,” …

A system of ocean currents that transports heat northward across the North Atlantic could collapse by midcentury, according to a new study. Scientists have said that such a collapse could cause catastrophic sea level rise and extreme weather across the globe.  In recent decades, researchers have both raised and downplayed the specter of Atlantic current collapse. It even prompted a movie that strayed far from the science. Two years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said any such catastrophe was unlikely this century. But the new study published in Nature Communications suggests it might not be as far away and unlikely as mainstream science says.  The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is a vital system of ocean currents that circulates water throughout the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s a lengthy process, taking an estimated 1,000 years to complete, but has slowed even more since the mid-1900s.  A further slowdown or complete halting of the circulation could create more extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere, sea level rise on the East Coast of the United States and drought for millions in southern Africa, scientists in Germany and the U.S. have said. But the timing is uncertain.  In the new study, Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen, two researchers from Denmark, analyzed sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic between 1870 and 2020 as a way of assessing this circulation. They found the system could collapse as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095, given current …

The U.S. government “absolutely” has recovered extraterrestrial craft, according to a former combat officer who was a member of a Department of Defense task force that investigated unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. Dave Grusch, in response to a House member’s questions during a congressional hearing Wednesday, said he knows the exact locations of such alien craft and that he had provided this information to the intelligence community’s inspector general. Grusch, who has become a whistleblower and testified that he has faced retaliation for his revelations, told lawmakers that the U.S. government also possesses evidence of non-human biologics. Grusch did not elaborate, stating he had not seen any alien craft or beings himself, but was basing his testimony on dozens of interviews he had conducted within the U.S. intelligence community. The Air Force veteran, who also worked for two intelligence agencies, was one of three former military officers who appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee, which held a 135-minute open televised hearing on unidentified flying objects. The technology “is beyond anything we have,” said David Fravor, who in 2004 as a U.S. Navy pilot videotaped off the coast of California a physics-defying flight of an object, known as the “Tic-Tac.” “There’s four sets of human eyeballs [that witnessed the incident], we’re all very credible,” testified Fravor. “It’s not a joke.” A third witness, Ryan Graves, was an F/A-18 Super Hornet U.S. Navy pilot stationed in Virginia in 2014 when his squadron first began encountering unknown objects. He described …

Next year, a daily oral birth control pill will be available in the United States without a prescription for the first time. Reproductive health advocates say the move will improve the well-being of women in the country, but some groups have raised concerns. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias explains. …

The fingerprints of climate change are all over the intense heat waves gripping the globe this month, a new study finds. Researchers say the deadly hot spells in the American Southwest and Southern Europe could not have happened without the continuing buildup of warming gases in the air. These unusually strong heat waves are becoming more common, Tuesday’s study said. The same research found the increase in heat-trapping gases, largely from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas has made another heat wave — the one in China — 50 times more likely with the potential to occur every five years or so. A stagnant atmosphere, warmed by carbon dioxide and other gases, also made the European heat wave 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter, the one in the United States and Mexico 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer and the one in China one 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) toastier, the study found. Several climate scientists, using tree rings and other stand-ins for temperature records, say this month’s heat is likely the hottest Earth has been in about 120,000 years, easily the hottest of human civilization. “Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,” said study lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London. She called heat waves in Europe and North America “virtually impossible” without the increase in heat from the mid-1800s. Statistically, the one in China could have happened without global warming. Since …

In 2022, doctors recorded the first confirmed case of tick-borne encephalitis virus acquired in the United Kingdom. It began with a bike ride. A 50-year-old man was mountain biking in the North Yorkshire Moors, a national park in England known for its vast expanses of woodland and purple heather. At some point on his ride, at least one black-legged tick burrowed into his skin. Five days later, the mountain biker developed symptoms commonly associated with a viral infection — fatigue, muscle pain, fever. At first, he seemed to be on the mend, but about a week later, he started to lose coordination. An MRI scan revealed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. He had been infected with tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, a potentially deadly disease that experts say is spreading into new regions due in large part to global warming. For the past 30 years, the U.K. has become roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on average compared to the historical norm. Studies have shown that several tick-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent because of climate change. Public health officials are particularly concerned about TBE, which is deadlier than more well-known tick diseases such as Lyme, due to the way it has quickly jumped from country to country. Gábor Földvári, an expert at the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary, said the effects of climate change on TBE are unmistakable. “It’s a really common problem which was absent 20 or 30 years ago,” he added. …

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is exploring ways artificial intelligence can help detect illegal shipments of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. VOA footage by Adam Greenbaum …

Beach season has started across Japan, which means seafood for holiday makers and good times for business owners. But in Fukushima, that may end soon.  Within weeks, the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is expected to start releasing treated radioactive wastewater into the sea, a highly contested plan still facing fierce protests in and outside Japan.  Residents worry that the water discharge, 12 years after the nuclear disaster, could deal another setback to Fukushima’s image and hurt their businesses and livelihoods.  “Without a healthy ocean, I cannot make a living,” said Yukinaga Suzuki, a 70-year-old innkeeper at Usuiso beach in Iwaki about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the plant. And the government has yet to announce when the water release will begin.  While officials say the possible impact would be limited to rumors, it’s not yet clear if it will be damaging to the local economy. Residents say they feel “shikataganai” — meaning helpless.  Suzuki has requested officials hold the plan at least until the swimming season ends in mid-August.  “If you ask me what I think about the water release, I’m against it. But there is nothing I can do to stop it as the government has one-sidedly crafted the plan and will release it anyway,” he said. “Releasing the water just as people are swimming at sea is totally out of line, even if there is no harm.”  The beach, he said, will be in the path of treated water traveling south on the Oyashio current …