Mysterious black holes, thought to reside in the center of every galaxy, are difficult to study because even the closest one, in the center of our own Milky Way, is still some 27,000 light years away. But researchers at the University of Nottingham’s Quantum Gravity Laboratory have found that some of the physical phenomena linked to black holes can be studied in an ordinary bathtub. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Records are made for breaking, and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is breaking them in droves. When she returns to Earth on Sept, 2, she’ll have earned a place among the nation’s greatest space explorers. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Scientists have successfully used “reprogrammed” stem cells to restore functioning brain cells in monkeys, raising hopes the technique could be used in the future to help patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Since Parkinson’s is caused by a lack of dopamine made by brain cells, researchers have long hoped to use stem cells to restore normal production of the neurotransmitter chemical.

Now, for the first time, Japanese researchers have shown that human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) can be administered safely and effectively to treat primates with symptoms of the debilitating disease.

So-called iPS cells are made by removing mature cells from an individual — often from the skin — and reprogramming them to behave like embryonic stem cells. They can then be coaxed into dopamine-producing brain cells.

The scientists from Kyoto University, a world-leader in iPS technology, said their experiment indicated that this approach could potentially be used for the clinical treatment of human patients with Parkinson’s.

In addition to boosting dopamine production, the tests showed improved movement in affected monkeys and no tumors in their brains for at least two years.

The human iPS cells used in the experiment worked whether they came from healthy individuals or Parkinson’s disease patients, the Japanese team reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“This is extremely promising research demonstrating that a safe and highly effective cell therapy for Parkinson’s can be produced in the lab,” said Tilo Kunath of the MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the research.

The next step will be to test the treatment in a first-in-human clinical trial, which Jun Takahashi of Kyoto University told Reuters he hoped to start by the end of 2018.

Any widespread use of the new therapy is still many years away, but the research has significantly reduced previous uncertainties about iPS-derived cell grafts.

The fact that this research uses iPS cells rather human embryonic stem cells means the treatment would be acceptable in countries such as Ireland and much of Latin America, where embryonic cells are banned.

Excitement about the promise of stem cells has led to hundreds of medical centers springing up around the world claiming to be able to repair damaged tissue in conditions such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s.

While some treatments for cancer and skin grafts have been approved by regulators, many other potential therapies are only in early-stage development, prompting a warning last month by health experts about the dangers of “stem-cell tourism.”
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A test version of a spacecraft resembling a mini space shuttle was carried aloft over the Mojave Desert by a helicopter Wednesday in a precursor to a free flight in which it will be released to autonomously land on a runway as it would in a return from orbit.

Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser craft was lifted off the ground at 7:21 a.m., at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, California, and was carried to the same altitude and flight conditions it will experience before release in a free flight.

A control team sent commands to the wingless vehicle and collected data before the helicopter brought it down at 9:02 a.m., the company said.

“Everything we have seen points to a successful test with useful data for the next round of testing,” director of flight operations Lee “Bru” Archambault said in a statement.

A second captive-carry test is scheduled this year and if it is successful, a free flight test will follow.

The Dream Chaser is being developed to carry cargo to and from the International Space Station without a crew aboard. The version flown Wednesday is for tests in the atmosphere. The version that will be launched into space is still in development.

With the addition of life-support equipment, a Dream Chaser could transport a crew of seven.

Last month, Sierra Nevada selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket to launch the first two Dream Chaser cargo missions, which are scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2020 and 2021. Those missions will land at Kennedy Space Center.

The Dream Chaser is a type of craft known as a “lifting body” in which aerodynamic lift is generated by its shape rather than wings like those of a conventional aircraft. Tail fins angling upward at the rear of the craft provide control.

NASA proved the lifting body concept by flying a series of wingless aircraft at Edwards in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Dream Chaser is 30 feet (9 meters) long, about one quarter the length of a space shuttle.

Sierra Nevada is headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, and the Dream Chaser is being developed by the company’s Louisville, Colorado-based Space Systems business.
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The world’s biggest T. rex is getting ready for a cutting-edge makeover.

The Field Museum in Chicago said Wednesday that it would take down and remount the 40½-foot-long (12.3-meter) Tyrannosaurus nicknamed Sue, perhaps the world’s most famous dinosaur fossil, in a way that embodies the latest understanding of this ferocious Cretaceous Period predator.

The big T. rex will move to a new exhibition space in the museum, while a cast of the skeleton of the largest-known dinosaur, Patagotitan mayorum, will take the spot Sue now occupies in the museum’s Stanley Field Hall.

Patagotitan, a long-necked, four-legged plant-eater that was 122 feet (37.2 meters) long and weighed 70 tons, lived in Argentina 100 million years ago, more than 30 million years before T. rex stalked western North America. The biggest land animal on record, it was a member of a dinosaur group called titanosaurs.

The museum next spring will unveil the fiberglass Patagotitan skeleton, which is being cast from fossils of seven Patagotitan individuals, and for two years will display some of the genuine fossils, including an 8-foot (2.4-meter) thighbone.

Named for the woman who discovered the fossils in South Dakota in 1990, Sue is the largest, most complete and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever unearthed. The museum bought the fossils at auction for $8.4 million.

Sue will be taken down in February and put up again with noteworthy changes in anatomy and stance in its new exhibition hall in spring 2019, museum scientists said.

“We are making several adjustments to the skeleton to reflect new and improved knowledge,” said paleontologist Pete Makovicky, the museum’s associate curator of dinosaurs.

The most striking change, Makovicky said, will be the addition of gastralia, bones resembling an additional set of ribs spanning the belly that may have provided structural support to help the dinosaur breathe. Adding these bones will illustrate just how massive Sue was and that it boasted a bulging belly, he added.

The scientists concluded that the bone mounted as Sue’s wishbone was misidentified in 2000, and they will replace it with the dinosaur’s actual wishbone, or furcula, the fused collarbones typical of meat-eating dinosaurs and their evolutionary descendants, the birds.

They also will adjust the ribs to produce a slimmer, less barrel-shaped chest and arrange the right leg so Sue is not crouching as much.

“Often when you do something as expensive as mounting a vertebrate fossil skeleton for display, you only get one shot at it. I’m happy we’re going to fix and update this incredible fossil,” said paleontologist Bill Simpson, who heads the museum’s geological collections.

Lifespan and bite force

Makovicky noted the accumulation of knowledge about T. rex and its cousins since 2000.

“We now know more about tyrannosaur lifespans — around 30 years; how they grew — very fast as teenagers; and using computer models of Sue, we revised their body mass upward to 9 or more tons, from 5 to 7 tons,” Makovicky said.

Ongoing research is examining the molecular composition of cartilage preserved in T. rex bones, and recent studies have shown it possessed the most powerful bite of any land animal ever, Makovicky added.

When the Patagotitan skeleton is mounted, visitors will be able to walk underneath it and touch it. Its head will reach the museum’s second-floor balcony nearly 30 feet (9 meters) up.

Another Patagotitan skeleton is displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The museum said a $16.5 million gift from the Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund, established by the founder and chief executive of hedge fund firm Citadel LLC, enabled it to carry out Sue’s makeover and add the Patagotitan. The changes coincide with the museum’s 125th anniversary in 2018.
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With rising urban populations and ever scarcer water supplies, cities and companies are teaming up to invest billions of dollars in water management projects, a report said on Tuesday.

Around two thirds of cities from London to Los Angeles are working with the private sector to address water and climate change stresses with 80 cities seeking $9.5 billion of investment for water projects, according to a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit environmental research group.

Water investment opportunities are greatest in Latin America, with Quito in Ecuador seeking $800 million to manage its water supply, including building three hydropower stations and cleaning up its contaminated rivers and streams.

City in India prepares for future

The cities most concerned about their water supply lie in Asia and the Pacific, the report found, with serious risks also identified in Africa and Latin America.

The key issues for cities include declining water quality, water shortages and flooding.

The Indian city of Chennai faced extreme floods in 2015 which killed hundreds and left survivors without access to clean water, while businesses were also severely disrupted.

The city is now investing in boosting its resilience to future water crises, with water conservation education, building a storm water management system and new infrastructure.

“We are seeing critical shifts in leadership from cities and companies in response to the very real threat of flooding, for example, to local economies,” said Morgan Gillespy, head of CDP’s Water Program.

Climate change is another underlying threat to all cities with an increase in extreme weather events from droughts to floods, with cities in North America more concerned than those in Europe, the report found.

Tropical Storm Harvey, pounding the U.S. Gulf Coast, has killed at least eight people, led to mass evacuations and paralyzed Houston, the fourth most-populous U.S. city.

The storm is most likely linked to climate change, said the U.N. weather agency.

Companies are also concerned about the effects of climate change on water supplies, with $14 billion of water impacts such as loss of production reported by companies last year, the report found.

UN predicts global water shortfall

The United Nations predicts a 40 percent shortfall in global water supply by 2030, while global demand is set to increase by 55 percent due to growing domestic use, manufacturing and electricity generation.

“From our work with cities around the world, water has consistently come up as a key resilience challenge,” said Claire Bonham-Carter, Principal and City Resilience Lead at AECOM, a global infrastructure firm and partner on the report.

“Many of them, regardless of size, from Mexico City, Mexico to Berkeley, California, are addressing both long-term water supply issues as well as chronic urban flooding.”
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A 15-year-old schoolgirl in northern India has launched a charity to provide oxygen to impoverished patients after 63 people, nearly half of them children, died due to a lack of oxygen at the main government hospital in her home town.

The patients died from encephalitis, a disease which causes brain inflammation, after the hospital in Gorakhpur ran out of oxygen due to unpaid bills, triggering outrage over India’s poorly managed state-run healthcare system.

“This tragedy was something that could have been prevented,” said teenager Khushi Chandra, who set up Oxygen Gorakhpur, to raise funds for oxygen in hospitals.

“This is very personal for me as it happened right at my doorstep… No child can be denied the right to life, and in this case the right to breathe,” she said in a statement.

“As an accountable citizen of my city and my country, I feel responsible towards ensuring such tragedies do not happen again,” she added.

Acute Encephalitis Syndrome and Japanese Encephalitis outbreaks are common in India, especially during the monsoon season, and claim hundreds of lives.

Often known as “brain fever,” encephalitis causes high fever, vomiting and, in severe cases, seizures, paralysis and coma. Infants and elderly people are particularly vulnerable.

Outbreaks of the virus tend to occur in poor, flood-hit areas such as Gorakhpur, where monsoons leave pools of stagnant water, allowing mosquitoes to breed and infect villagers.

Television pictures in mid-August — which showed parents holding the bodies of infants and saying they died because they did not have oxygen — led to widespread criticism of authorities in Uttar Pradesh state, where Gorakhpur is located.

The state, which is governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, has fired the head of the hospital, as well as the head of the pediatrics department.

But the sacked hospital chief says he had repeatedly written to the administration to release funds to pay oxygen suppliers.

Government expenditure on public health is about one percent of GDP, among the world’s lowest. In recent years, Modi’s government has increased health spending and vowed to make healthcare more affordable.

But Chandra said Indians should help under-resourced hospitals provide basics like oxygen to prevent needless deaths.

“I seek support from other like-minded citizens to join hands to ensure that oxygen never runs out in our hospitals,” she said.
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Forests in the northeastern United States and southern Canada could be ravaged by tree-killing beetles in coming decades as a warming climate expands the pest’s habitat, a study has found.

Over the next 60 years, southern pine beetles could infest forests in new areas of the United States and Canada, disrupting industries and ecosystems alike, it said.

Warmer winter nights allow spread

The red-brown insects, the size of a grain of rice, known to feast on pine-tree bark, has typically only thrived in the hotter climate of Central America and the southeastern United States.

But in recent years warmer than usual winter nights have allowed it to survive the cold months and spread as far north as the U.S. state of New York. The coldest winter night has warmed by 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years in various parts of the United States, the study’s authors said.

Using computer-based climate models, they predicted the beetles should gradually march north along the Atlantic coast, infesting forests including in the U.S. states of Maine and Ohio all the way to Canada’s Nova Scotia.

Pest moves fast

By 2080, the pest should proliferate to red — and jack-pine forests in a 270,000 square miles (700,000 square km) area of the United States and Canada — roughly the size of Afghanistan, the researchers wrote in Nature Climate Change.

That would not only upend ecosystems, but also disrupt several key industries “in already struggling rural areas,” said lead author Corey Lesk, a researcher at Columbia University in New York.

“Residents of these regions could see a direct hit to their pocketbooks,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday in a phone interview.

Infestations costly to timber industry

Where the southern pine beetle has struck in the past, timber industries have been hard hit.

Infestations of pine beetles have cost an estimated $100 million a year in timber losses from 1990 to 2004 in the southeastern United States, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Thousands of adult beetles can kill a tree in two to four months as the insects carve S-shaped tunnels under the bark, depriving their host of needed nutrients.

The tourism industry would also likely suffer, said Lesk, with the potential destruction of iconic forests including the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island.

Europe faces same problem

In Europe, previous research has shown that bark beetles have similarly been chewing through pine and spruce trees in forests from the Swiss Alps to Belarus alongside temperature increases.

Land managers have found the best way to fight off bark beetles has been thinning high-density forests and cutting out infested trees, though with limited success, the researchers said.

“The key question is whether those strategies would be able to keep up with rapid advance of the pest into regions with little or no experience managing it,” Lesk said.

 
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There are two ways to deal with climate change: stop or slow it through controlling emissions, or adapt to it. Chances are we’re going to have to do both in the next 80 years. In the dry areas of Texas and California, researchers are getting started on the adapting part. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Countries need to quadruple spending to $150 billion a year to deliver universal safe water and sanitation, helping to reduce childhood disease and deaths while boosting economic growth, said the World Bank.

Investments should be better coordinated and targeted to ensure services reach the most vulnerable, and governments need to engage the private sector more closely to meet the high costs, said the World Bank in a report released on Monday.

“Millions are currently trapped in poverty by poor water supply and sanitation,” Guangzhe Chen, senior director of the World Bank’s global water practice, said in a statement.

“More resources, targeted to areas of high vulnerability and low access, are needed to close the gaps and improve poor water and sanitation services.”

The high cost of clean water risks jeopardising the ability of countries to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of providing access to safe and affordable sanitation for all by 2030, said the World Bank.

More than three quarters of those without piped water supplies live in rural areas, where only 20 percent have access to “improved sanitation” said the report. In cities, poor people are up to three times less likely to have piped water than people in better off areas.

The risk of diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation is creating a “silent emergency”, with stunted growth affecting more than 40 percent of children under five in countries including Guatemala, Niger, Yemen and Bangladesh, said the report.

It said under-nutrition could have long-term effects on children, including poor mental development and reduced ability to work, which would eventually affect economic development.

Some countries fail to maintain infrastructure or struggle to cope with growing populations. Nigeria provided piped water to fewer than 10 percent of city dwellers in 2015, down from 29 percent 25 years earlier. In Haiti, only 7 percent of households have piped water, compared to 15 percent previously.

“Water and sanitation services need to improve dramatically or the consequences on health and well-being will be dire,” said Rachid Benmessaoud, Nigeria country director for the World Bank.

No single solution

In some countries, tap water is even more unsafe than pond water, with around 80 percent of Bangladesh’s piped supplies contaminated by E.coli bacteria, said the report.

It urged governments to better inform people and encourage more household water treatment.

Providing piped water in cities could generate economies of scale, the bank said, urging greater private-sector involvement in urban water provision where recovering costs may be easier.

Researchers, decision makers and aid specialists are meeting in Stockholm for the annual World Water Week where they will focus on how to reduce waste in water use.

Water and sanitation improvements should be linked to health programs to better tackle disease and malnutrition, said the World Bank report.

“Renewed efforts are needed to address those populations at greatest risk of death and disease due to inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene, which threatens human capital and economic development,” it said.

 
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