Year: 2023

Plumes of smoke, questions about dead animals, worries about the drinking water. A train derailment in Ohio and subsequent burning of some of the hazardous chemicals has people asking: How worried should they be?  It’s been more than a week since about 50 cars of a freight train derailed in a fiery, mangled mess on the outskirts of East Palestine near the Pennsylvania state line, apparently because of a mechanical issue with a rail car axle. No one was injured in that wreck. But concerns about air quality and the hazardous chemicals on board the train prompted some village residents to leave, and officials later ordered the evacuation of the immediate area as fears grew about a potential explosion of smoldering wreckage.  Officials seeking to avoid the danger of an uncontrolled blast chose to intentionally release and burn toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars, sending flames and black smoke again billowing high into the sky. The jarring scene left people questioning the potential health impacts for residents in the area and beyond, even as authorities maintained they were doing their best to protect people.  In the days since, residents’ concerns and questions have only abounded — amplified, in part, by misinformation spreading online.  More on what we know:  Controlled burn   Vinyl chloride is associated with increased risk of certain cancers, and officials at the time warned burning it would release two concerning gases — hydrogen chloride and phosgene, the latter of which was used as a weapon in World …

Health rights campaigners in Malawi are welcoming a national campaign against a record cholera outbreak, which has affected all 29 districts in the country and killed nearly 1,400 people. President Lazarus Chakwera launched the campaign Monday, pledging to reduce the transmission and mortality rate of the water-borne illness. Chakwera said the spread is largely because people in the country are not following good hygiene practices. “And because the behavior is not changing, the situation has become dire,” he said. “So far, over 1,300 funerals have happened around the country because of cholera. And the disease is still spreading at an alarming rate. We are getting between 500 to 600 cholera cases every day in our health facilities throughout the country.” The campaign, known as “Tithetse Kolera” or “Let’s end cholera,” focuses on repairing water kiosks across the country and helping people construct toilets in their homes. Chakwera said statistics show that about 40 percent of Malawians do not have toilets and instead use the bush to relieve themselves. Several organizations in Malawi have long been running campaigns against the practice of open defecation, but with little result. “We are human beings with dignity, not animals that can just use any place as a toilet. If any place is not a toilet, don’t treat it as a toilet,” Chakwera said. “And a toilet is not something that is given to you by the government or something that is donated from abroad or something that comes down from heaven. It is something …

Equatorial Guinea announced its first outbreak of the Marburg virus, a highly infectious disease similar to Ebola, the World Health Organization said in a statement Monday.  The small central African nation of about 1.6 million people reported nine deaths and 16 more suspected cases after a sample sent to a laboratory in Senegal on February 7 came back positive.  Health Minister Mitoha Ondo’o Ayekaba told reporters that a health alert had been declared in Kie-Ntem province and the neighboring district of Mongomo, after consulting with the World Health Organization and the United Nations, Agence France-Presse reported. The nine deaths occurred between January 7 and February 7, Ayekaba said. The Marburg virus has a fatality rate of up to 88% and spreads from person to person through direct contact with bodily fluids, WHO said. The disease comes from the same family of viruses as Ebola. Symptoms consist of high fever and severe headache, with many patients developing hemorrhagic symptoms within seven days. WHO said officials have been deployed in Equatorial Guinea to “trace contacts, isolate and provide medical care to people showing symptoms of the disease.” “Marburg is highly infectious. Thanks to the rapid and decisive action by the Equatorial Guinean authorities in confirming the disease, emergency response can get to full steam quickly so that we save lives and halt the virus as soon as possible,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa. WHO said there are currently no vaccines or antiviral treatments for the virus. However, …

The Biden administration says it’s working with the governments of Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador to combat a documented rise in the availability and lethality of illegal drugs containing fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be up to 100 times stronger than morphine. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the potency of pills is rising — in 2022, six out of 10 pills contained a potentially lethal dose of the narcotic. President Joe Biden mentioned the deadly drug in his recent State of the Union address, in which he spoke of “a record number of personnel working to secure the border, arresting 8,000 human smugglers, seizing over 23,000 pounds of fentanyl in just the last several months.” And Biden outlined his administration’s plan to tackle the epidemic in different ways, including funding screening measures, checking packages and “expanding access to evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery.” VOA’s Jorge Agobian spoke to Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to find out how the U.S. is battling the overdose epidemic both inside and beyond its borders. “The problem of fentanyl and synthetic drugs is not limited exclusively to the United States or Mexico,” Gupta said. “It’s a global problem. And secondly, the supply chain is also global. So whether it’s precursor chemicals that are converted into fentanyl, coming from China into Mexico or North America, or the synthesis of these drugs, we need to be making sure that we’re monitoring all of it, and we’re addressing …

An uncrewed Russian supply ship docked at the International Space Station has lost cabin pressure, the Russian space corporation reported Saturday, saying the incident doesn’t pose any danger to the station’s crew. Roscosmos said the hatch between the station and the Progress MS-21 had been locked so the loss of pressure didn’t affect the orbiting outpost. “The temperature and pressure on board the station are within norms and there is no danger to health and safety of the crew,” it said in a statement. The space corporation didn’t say what may have caused the cargo ship to lose pressure. Roscosmos noted that the cargo ship had already been loaded with waste before its scheduled disposal. The craft is set to be undocked from the station and deorbit to burn in the atmosphere Feb. 18. The announcement came shortly after a new Russian cargo ship docked smoothly at the station Saturday. The Progress MS-22 delivered almost 3 tons of food, water and fuel along with scientific equipment for the crew. Roscosmos said that the loss of pressure in the Progress MS-21 didn’t affect the docking of the new cargo ship and “will have no impact on the future station program.” The depressurization of the cargo craft follows an incident in December with the Soyuz crew capsule, which was hit by a tiny meteoroid that left a small hole in the exterior radiator and sent coolant spewing into space. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio were …

On the packed streets of Nairobi, Cyrus Kariuki is one of a growing number of bikers zooming through traffic on an electric motorbike, reaping the benefits of cheaper transport, cleaner air and limiting planet-warming emissions in the process. “Each month one doesn’t have to be burdened by oil change, engine checks and other costly maintenance costs,” Kariuki said. Electric motorcycles are gaining traction in Kenya as private sector-led firms rush to set up charging points and battery-swapping stations to speed up the growth of cleaner transport and put the east African nation on a path toward fresher air and lower emissions. But startups say more public support and better government schemes can help further propel the industry. Ampersand, an African-based electric mobility company, began its Kenyan operations in May 2022. The business currently operates seven battery-swapping stations spread across the country’s capital and has so far attracted 60 customers. Ian Mbote, the startup’s automotive engineer and expansion lead, says uptake has been relatively slow. “We need friendly policies, taxes, regulations and incentives that would boost the entry into the market,” said Mbote, adding that favorable government tariffs in Rwanda accelerated its electric transport growth. Ampersand plans to sell 500 more electric motorbikes by the end of the year. Companies say the savings of switching to electric and using a battery-swap system, rather than charging for several hours, are key selling points for customers. “Our batteries cost $1.48 to swap a full battery which gives one mobility of about 90 to …

While others in her Zimbabwean village agonize over a maize crop seemingly headed for failure, Jestina Nyamukunguvengu picks up a hoe and slices through the soil of her fields that are lush green with a pearl millet crop in the African country’s arid Rushinga district. “These crops don’t get affected by drought, they are quick to flower, and that’s the only way we can beat the drought,” the 59-year old said, smiling broadly. Millets, including sorghum, now take up over two hectares of her land — a patch where maize was once the crop of choice. Farmers like Nyamukunguvengu in the developing world are on the front lines of a project proposed by India that has led the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization to christen 2023 as “The Year of Millets,” an effort to revive a hardy and healthy crop that has been cultivated for millennia — but was largely elbowed aside by European colonists who favored corn, wheat and other grains. The designation is timely: Last year, drought swept across much of eastern Africa; war between Russia and Ukraine upended supplies and raised the prices of foodstuffs and fertilizer from Europe’s breadbasket; worries surged about environmental fallout of cross-globe shipments of farm products; many chefs and consumers are looking to diversify diets at a time of excessively standardized fare. All that has given a new impetus to locally-grown and alternative grains and other staples like millets. Millets come in multiple varieties, such as finger millet, fonio, sorghum, and teff, …

Don’t feed the bears!  Wildlife biologists and forest rangers have preached the mantra for nearly a century at national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and for decades in areas where urban development increasingly invaded native wildlife habitat.  But don’t feed the birds? That may be a different story — at least for one bird species at Lake Tahoe.  Snowshoe and cross-country ski enthusiasts routinely feed the tiny mountain chickadees high above the north shore of the alpine lake on the California-Nevada border. The black-capped birds of Chickadee Ridge will even perch on extended hands to snatch offered seeds.  New research from University of Nevada scientists found that supplementing the chickadees’ natural food sources with food provided in feeders or by hand did not negatively impact them, as long as proper food is offered and certain rules are followed.  “It’s a wonderful experience when the birds fly around and land on your hand to grab food. We call it ‘becoming a Disney princess,’” said Benjamin Sonnenberg, a biologist/behavioral ecologist who co-authored the six-year study.  But he also recognized “there’s always the question of when it is appropriate or not appropriate to feed birds in the wild.”  State wildlife officials said this week that they generally frown on feeding wildlife. But Nevada Department of Wildlife spokeswoman Ashley Sanchez acknowledged concerns about potential harm are based on speculation, not scientific data.  The latest research project under the wings of professor Vladimir Pravosudov’s Chickadee Cognition Lab established feeders in the Forest Service’s Mount Rose …

Experts predict that psychedelic compounds could become a billion-dollar industry for treating depression and trauma after initial clinical trials in the United States show promising results. Out of respect for medical privacy some full names were not used. Aron Ranen has the story from New York. …

The coolest thing on social media these days may be celebrities and regular folks plunging into frigid water or taking ice baths. The touted benefits include improved mood, more energy, weight loss and reduced inflammation, but the science supporting some of those claims is lukewarm. Kim Kardashian posted her foray on Instagram. Harry Styles has tweeted about his dips. Kristen Bell says her plunges are “brutal” but mentally uplifting. And Lizzo claims ice plunges reduce inflammation and make her body feel better. Here’s what medical evidence, experts and fans say about the practice, which dates back centuries. The mind You might call Dan O’Conor an amateur authority on cold water immersion. Since June 2020, the 55-year-old Chicago man has plunged into Lake Michigan almost daily, including on frigid winter mornings when he has to shovel through the ice. “The endorphin rush … is an incredible way to wake up and just kind of shock the body and get the engine going,” O’Conor said on a recent morning when the air temperature was a frosty 23 degrees (minus-5 Celsius). Endorphins are “feel good” hormones released in response to pain, stress, exercise and other activities. With the lake temperature 34 degrees (1 Celsius), the bare-chested O’Conor did a running jump from the snow-covered shore to launch a forward flip into the icy gray water. His first plunge came early in the pandemic, when he went on a bourbon bender and his annoyed wife told him to “go jump in the lake.” The …

SpaceX is a big step closer to sending its giant Starship spacecraft into orbit, completing an engine-firing test at the launch pad on Thursday. Thirty-one of the 33 first-stage booster engines ignited simultaneously for about 10 seconds in south Texas. The team turned off one engine before sending the firing command and another engine shut down _ “but still enough engines to reach orbit!” tweeted SpaceX’s Elon Musk. Musk estimates Starship’s first orbital test flight could occur as soon as March, if the test analyses and remaining preparations go well. The booster remained anchored to the pad as planned during the test. There were no signs of major damage to the launch tower. NASA is counting on Starship to ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon in a few years, linking up with its Orion capsule in lunar orbit. Further down the road, Musk wants to use the mammoth Starships to send crowds to Mars. Only the first-stage Super Heavy booster, standing 230 feet (69 meters) tall, was used for Thursday’s test. The futuristic second stage _ the part that will actually land on the moon and Mars _ was in the hangar being prepped for flight. Altogether, Starship towers 394 feet (120 meters), making it the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It’s capable of generating 17 million pounds of liftoff thrust, almost double that of NASA’s moon rocket that sent an empty capsule to the moon and back late last year. SpaceX fired up to 14 …

If your image of nuclear power is giant, cylindrical concrete cooling towers pouring out steam on a site that takes up hundreds of acres of land, soon there will be an alternative: tiny nuclear reactors that produce only one-hundredth the electricity and can even be delivered on a truck. Small but meaningful amounts of electricity — nearly enough to run a small campus, a hospital or a military complex, for example — will pulse from a new generation of micronuclear reactors. Now, some universities are taking interest. “What we see is these advanced reactor technologies having a real future in decarbonizing the energy landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” said Caleb Brooks, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The tiny reactors carry some of the same challenges as large-scale nuclear, such as how to dispose of radioactive waste and how to make sure they are secure. Supporters say those issues can be managed and the benefits outweigh any risks. Universities are interested in the technology not just to power their buildings but to see how far it can go in replacing the coal and gas-fired energy that causes climate change. The University of Illinois hopes to advance the technology as part of a clean energy future, Brooks said. The school plans to apply for a construction permit for a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor developed by the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, and aims to start operating it by early 2028. Brooks is the project lead. …

The two Sudanese women thought they had malaria and were taking their medication, but things took a dire turn. Both complained of a splitting headache and fever that didn’t respond to the antimalaria treatment. By the time she was diagnosed with dengue fever, Raqiya Abdsalam was unconscious. “Soon after they examined me, I fell into a coma,” she said, recounting her ordeal some three months ago. Both women have since recovered and are at home in the city of El Obeid in the central province of North Kordofan. For decades, Sudan’s underfunded public health sector has struggled to effectively diagnose or treat patients as significant government spending went to its vast security services. A recent spike in mosquito-borne diseases — such as dengue fever and malaria — has underscored the fragility of the African country’s health system, boding ill for future challenges driven by climate change. Sudan’s best-equipped hospitals are concentrated in the capital, Khartoum, leaving those from far-flung provinces reliant on aid projects. But many of those have disappeared. In October 2021, Sudan’s leading military figure, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, led a coup that derailed the country’s short-lived democratic transition. The move spurred a sharp reduction in aid, with the U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting that funding levels fell to less than 50% of required needs for both 2021 and 2022. Burhan with his ruling generals and several other political forces pledged in December to install a new civilian government. But political wrangling is impeding a …

Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California. “I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview. Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California desert. “They were skeptical that the mobility solutions that we were proposing would actually work,” he said. That skepticism, said Caetano, came from the simplicity of their design. “It’s a robot that moves like a snake, and then the head and the tail connect, and then it rolls,” he said. NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge prompted teams of college students to compete to develop solutions for the agency’s ambitious goals in the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, which Caetano explains are “extreme lunar terrain mobility.” Northeastern’s COBRA is designed to move through the fine dust, or regolith, of the lunar surface to probe the landscape for interesting features, including ice and water, hidden in the shadows of deep craters. “They …

A single-injection antiviral treatment for newly infected COVID-19 patients reduced the risk of hospitalization by half in a large-scale clinical trial, a study published Wednesday said. Stanford University professor Jeffrey Glenn, co-author of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, said the new drug “showed profound benefits for vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike.” While the number of Americans dying daily of the disease caused by a coronavirus has fallen to about 500, treatments for COVID-19 remain limited. One of the most common — Paxlovid, made by Pfizer — involves taking 30 pills over five days. The new treatment involves a single dose of pegylated interferon lambda, a synthetic version of a naturally occurring protein that infected cells secrete to defend against viral infection. “What it does is it binds receptors on the surfaces of cells that activate our own antiviral defense mechanisms,” said Glenn, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology who heads the Stanford Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness Initiative. “So if a virus has infected the cell, it will turn on processes that aim to destroy the virus’s replication,” he said. “It will also send signals to neighboring cells to warn them viruses are on their way and get ready to defend yourself.” Receptors for interferon lambda are primarily in the linings of the lungs, airways and intestine — the main places COVID-19 strikes. “We’re turning on these antiviral mechanisms in the cells, the lung, where the infection is happening,” Glenn said. The phase three trial …

Whether out-of-the-box thinking or a sign of desperation, scientists on Wednesday proposed the regular transport of moon dust to a point between Earth and Sun to temper the ravages of global warming.  Ideas for filtering solar radiation to keep Earth from overheating have been kicking around for decades, ranging from giant space-based screens to churning out reflective white clouds.  But the persistent failure to draw down planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions has pushed once-fanciful geoengineering schemes toward center stage in climate policy, investment and research.  Blocking 1%-2% of the Sun’s rays is all it would take to lower Earth’s surface by a degree or two Celsius, roughly the amount it has warmed over the last century.  The solar radiation technique with the most traction so far is the 24/7 injection of billions of shiny sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere.  So-called stratospheric aerosol injection would be cheap, and scientists know it works because major volcanic eruptions basically do the same thing. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top in 1991, it lowered temperatures in the northern hemisphere by about 0.5 Celsius for nearly a year.  But there are serious potential side-effects, including the disruption of rain patterns upon which millions depend for growing food.   However, a new study in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Climate explores the possibility of using moon dust as a solar shield.  A team of astronomers applied methods used to track planet formation around distant stars — a messy process that kicks up vast quantities …

The small distant world called Quaoar, named after a god of creation in Native American mythology, is producing some surprises for astronomers as it orbits beyond Pluto in the frigid outer reaches of our solar system. Researchers said Wednesday they have detected a ring encircling Quaoar akin to the one around the planet Saturn. But the one around Quaoar defies the current understanding of where such rings can form – located much further away from it than current scientific understanding would allow. The distance of the ring from Quaoar places it in a location where scientists believe particles should readily come together around a celestial body to form a moon rather than remain as separate components in a disk of ring material. “This is the discovery of a ring located in a place that should not be possible,” said astronomer Bruno Morgado of the Valongo Observatory and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. Discovered in 2002, Quaoar is currently defined as a minor planet and is proposed as a dwarf planet, though it has not yet been formally given that status by the International Astronomical Union, the scientific body that determines such things. Its diameter of about 1,110 kilometers is about a third that of Earth’s moon and half that of the dwarf planet Pluto. It has a small moon called Weywot, Quaoar’s son in mythology, with a diameter of 170 kilometers, orbiting beyond the ring.   …

A serpentlike robot designed by students from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, could revolutionize how NASA astronauts explore the lunar surface. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more …