For nuclear physics graduate student Chelsea Bartram, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were the last straw.

President Donald Trump had disputed photographic evidence of the size of his inauguration crowd. Reporters challenged him. Conway’s response — that the administration gave “alternative facts” — has become a widely used hashtag for anything demonstrably untrue.

“A lot of us do care about this notion of an objective reality,”said Bartram, who is pursuing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Many scientists I know, myself included, spend so many hours in the lab sacrificing enormous amounts of their life for this abstract idea” that understanding reality can benefit human civilization, she said. “And then to have someone say, ‘Well, that’s not important anymore,’ it’s so devastating.”

So on Saturday, Bartram plans to join the March for Science, a protest in Washington and more than 500 other cities around the world supporting science’s role in government decisions on health, safety, the economy and more.

The march has more than 200 co-sponsors, including many major scientific and professional societies, zoos, aquaria and advocacy groups. Organizers have not released crowd size estimates.

“This is pretty remarkable and unprecedented,” said geochemist Eric Davidson, president of the 60,000-member American Geophysical Union, one of the march co-sponsors. Many of the group’s members did the climate research that the Trump administration disavows.

“I can’t think of another example where scientists have organized themselves in as many cities with an event as big as this,” he said.

Tipping point

The dispute over crowd sizes was just one small example of what scientists see as a larger pattern. During the campaign, Trump dismissed the scientific consensus about the dangers of human-induced climate change. His appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, also does not accept climate science. He has repeatedly clashed with the agency he now heads.

But scientists say their frustration has been building for decades.

“We might have reached a tipping point now, but acting as though this is a new thing is giving too much credit to the current administration,” said march co-organizer and public health expert Caroline Weinberg. “It’s letting people who have been there for a very long time off the hook.”

And it goes far beyond climate change, Weinberg added. “It’s about not paying attention to the best research on things like food stamps. It’s about cutting things like Head Start and after-school programs,” to name a few. “And that all affects health, because that’s a time to set kids on the right path.”

Critics say a public protest risks further politicizing science, turning scientists into just another interest group.

Bartram sums up a widespread response: on hot-button issues like climate change, opponents have already done it. “I don’t think anything we do is going to further politicize it,” she said.

Disconnect

But if the goal is to get policymakers to listen, “a march isn’t going to change anything. That’s the problem,” said Rob Young, head of coastal research at Western Carolina University.

Young said much of the problem stems from the growing disconnect between scientists and voters, especially the rural and working-class people who voted for Trump. He said most probably have never met a scientist.

“It’s easy to demonize us if those folks don’t know who we are,” he added.

Scientists need to get out of the lab more, he said, and explain how their work affects people’s health and livelihoods.

“I hope that when they’re done marching in Washington, that they will come home and that they will march into their local planning board or local town council,” he concluded.

That’s what march organizers hope, too. Many scientists accept much of the blame for the disconnect with voters.

The American Geophysical Union’s Davidson said a major post-march goal is more public engagement. “I think the day is gone when scientists can stay in their ivory towers and assume that everyone is going to recognize their value,” he added.
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Inland cities in the United States could face stress from migration caused by sea levels rising, says a new study.

According to models created by researchers at the University of Georgia, about 13.1 million people from low-lying cities such as Miami could be forced to relocate because of rising sea levels. Top destinations, researchers say, would be Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix.

“We typically think about sea level rise as a coastal issue, but if people are forced to move because their houses become inundated, the migration could affect many landlocked communities as well,” said the study’s lead author, Mathew Hauer, of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geography.

The researchers say the study is a first to try to predict the impact of rising sea levels, taking into account populations at risk as well as likely migration patterns.

The study suggests that inland cities, as well as coastal areas, have to plan for the potential of higher sea levels.

“Some of the anticipated landlocked destinations, such as Las Vegas, Atlanta and Riverside, California, already struggle with water management or growth management challenges,” Hauer said. “Incorporating accommodation strategies in strategic long-range planning could help alleviate the potential future intensification of these challenges.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
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Scientists like to let the facts speak for themselves. But with the Trump administration’s embrace of what advisor Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts,” many scientists feel it’s time to speak up. An unprecedented March for Science is planned for April 22 and in more than 500 cities around the world.
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In the science fiction series Star Trek, a doctor can use a handheld device called a “tricorder” to check a person’s vital signs and diagnose illness. What once was imagined is now a reality. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE challenged scientists to develop a “tricorder-like” device to improve health care globally. The winners were recently announced in Los Angeles.
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A federal judge in Detroit has ordered a doctor to stay in jail pending trial for alleged female genital mutilation of two 7-year-old girls.

The judge ruled Monday that Dr. Jumana Nagarwala is a danger and a flight risk.

Authorities arrested Nagarwala last week on charges of carrying out the illegal procedure on two young girls whose families brought them to Detroit after allegedly failing to find anyone in Minnesota to do it.

Nagarwala denies cutting the girls. She says all she did was remove mucus membranes from their genitals in a religious ceremony for a ritualistic burial.

Nagarwala belongs to an exclusive Muslim sect called Dawoodi Bohra, which is primarily concentrated in India.

Female genital mutilation involves cutting some of the most sensitive parts of a young girl’s private parts to initiate them into adulthood, control their sexual desire, and the belief it will make them more desirable as marriage partners.

The World Health Organization says the practice is primarily carried out in about 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It has no benefits and can cause severe short- and long-term health problems.

Contrary to what many people believe, female circumcision is not exclusive to Muslims, and many followers of Islam condemn it.

“In general, this is simply something that is not done and is found to be extremely repugnant,” the Michigan head of the Council of American-Islamic Relations Dawud Walid said. “This is something that is overwhelmingly not acceptable amongst the mainstream Muslim community in America.”
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After nine attempts to sneak across the border between Syria and Turkey, with an indescribable amount of fear and painful near-death experiences, 31-year-old Mustafa Hamed finally found a home in Germany, where he is working hard to piece together his life.

“The most important thing is you are lost here. So you have to find a new job, new friends — you have to find a new life,” Hamed said. “So this is a new start for me.”

His priority right now is mastering the language. His dream is to work in journalism. As he works hard to achieve this dream, he constantly struggles with a nightmare — the memory of his days in Aleppo.

“The clashes started in Aleppo in, maybe, 2012,” he recalled. “You can imagine, it was daily and you can hear every night bombing someplace near you — maybe for just two kilometers [away]. The electricity was cut down for a long time. You have to wait for 7 or 8 hours just to charge your phone.”

Resetting their lives

Psychologist and researcher Kenneth Miller, in his book War Torn: Stories of Courage, Love and Resilience, recounts Hamed’s story, among many others from Guatemala, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka.

During his more than 25 years of working with war victims, Miller noticed that the majority of what has been written about war focuses on soldiers. He wanted to draw attention to what’s missing from the conversation: the experience of civilians. In his book, he shares dozens of stories of people he met and worked with in many places around the world.

One of the most compelling stories is from Samad Khan, an Afghan who became a refugee in the 1980s, during his country’s war against the Soviets. Khan participated in Miller’s research in Afghanistan. In one of the counseling sessions on dealing with painful experiences, Khan shared a traumatic memory.

“He was driving a pickup truck with his sister’s family in the back, up a steep, winding mountain road and the road was controlled by the Mujahedeen, the freedom fighters,” Miller said. “They stopped him at one point and asked him to show his papers. So he stopped the car, and got out to show them his papers, but he realized he had forgotten to set the hand brake. He watched in horror as the truck spiraled off the side of the mountain and tumbled hundreds of feet down to the valley below. He had to go down to retrieve the bodies and bring them back to Kabul for burial.”

Overcoming tragedies

However, when Miller met him, Khan was a life-loving community leader. “I said, ‘How did you get over this? You seem to be doing so well now!’ He said it was a combination of the power of his faith and he also had a tremendous support of his extended family and friends,” Miller explained. “They got him through. I tell his story because this is something that recurs in the book, in every country that I worked in, that we are more alike than we are different. His story also captures something that we’ve seen in a lot of refugee communities, which is war, of course, can be devastating, but we’re built to heal. If the conditions are supportive, safe and stable, people have a remarkable capacity to be resilient and to heal.”

When the environment is safe and supportive, Miller says, refugees not only survive painful experiences, but they can thrive.

He tells another story, based on his experience in Guatemala:

“I got adopted by this one family while I was living in the camp for a year. This family fled when they heard about a massacre in a neighboring village where about 370 people were killed. They spent two months hiding in the mountains in the rainy season. They finally came down on the Mexican side of the border and found their way in to the refugee camp. This young fellow, Emilio, had developed a combination of trauma and severe shock. After a couple of days of traditional prayers and use of herbs, he healed. I think more than anything what really helped him heal was this tremendous love and support of his family. He has become a vibrant young professional musician, he became a refugee in Canada, who is doing wonderfully well.”

The social media effect

Miller says he hopes sharing these stories can help raise awareness about refugees’ situations.

“One of the biggest predictors about whether the refugees become severely depressed or adapt successfully is the extent to which they’re either made to feel welcome, given language and the material resources to get a new start, or whether they encounter a lot of discrimination. The more people feel marginalized and discriminated, of course, the harder it is for them to integrate, and the harder it is for them to heal,” he said.

One point Miller raises is the effect of social media. He says these tools can be helpful in raising awareness about the plight of refugees, but they also can be harmful if they’re used to spread misconceptions.

He points to images shared on social media of Syrian refugees on Lesbos, Greece. “When you see this father holding his two children and weeping and just arriving safely after crossing the sea, it mobilizes people and brings them to want to help, do something to counter this. Now, on the other hand, you also see social media being used to spread rumors and lies about refugees. Social media can spread tremendous fear, and that has serious consequences. It gets people turned back. It causes great harm.”

Miller says he also hopes these stories can inspire refugees and help them discover the inner strength they need to survive and start anew.
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The challenge of finding a cure for AIDS may have gotten harder. Scientists have discovered another cell in the body where HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — hides from therapy designed to suppress it to undetectable levels in the blood.

The cells — called macrophages — are part of the immune system and are found throughout the body, including in the liver, lungs, bone marrow and brain. After other immune cells have done their job of destroying foreign invaders, these large white blood cells act as the cleanup crew. They surround and clean up cellular debris, foreign substances, cancer cells and anything else that is not essential to the functioning of healthy cells. In addition, they apparently can harbor HIV.

A new target

While antiretroviral drugs can drive the AIDS virus down to virtually undetectable levels, scientists know if therapy is interrupted, an HIV infection can come roaring back. That’s because of a viral reservoir that until now has been thought only to inhabit immune system T-cells — the cells that are attacked and destroyed by the AIDS virus. Much research is dedicated to trying to find ways to eradicate the T-cell reservoir.

This may mean researchers must find ways to eliminate HIV from macrophages, as well.

The finding was published in Nature Medicine by researchers in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. 

Investigators demonstrated in a mouse model that in the absence of humanized T-cells, antiretroviral drugs could strongly suppress HIV in macrophages. However, when the therapy was interrupted, the virus rebounded in one-third of the mice. This, say researchers, is consistent with persistent infection in the face of drug therapy.

Researchers say their work demonstrates that any possible therapies must address macrophages in addition to T-cells to eradicate viral reservoirs. Investigators say they now have more information pointing to the complexity of the virus, and that targeting the viral reservoir in T-cells in the blood will not necessarily work with tackling HIV persistence in macrophages, which reside in tissues and are harder to observe. 

Senior author Victor Garcia said it’s possible there are other HIV reservoirs still to be discovered.

The lead author of the study, Jenna Honeycutt, called the discovery “paradigm changing” in the way scientists must now try to eliminate persistent infection in HIV-positive individuals. 

Investigators say their next step is to figure out what regulates HIV persistence in infected macrophages. They are also interested in finding HIV interventions that completely eradicate the AIDS virus from the body.
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 It is an image those who saw it will never forget: Prince William and Prince Harry — just boys, really — walking silently behind their mother’s cortege as the world mourned Princess Diana’s death in 1997.

Now Harry has revealed for the first time that losing his mother when he was only 12 left him in emotional turmoil for 20 years, filling him with grief and rage he could only manage after he sought counseling.

Breaking sharply with the royal tradition of maintaining a stoic silence about mental health, the 32-year-old prince told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Monday that he had nearly suffered multiple breakdowns since his mother’s death.

It was by far the most frank interview of Harry’s life and gives the public a much fuller view of Harry and the inner turmoil he suffered growing up in the public eye after losing his mother.

He told the newspaper he “shut down all his emotions” for nearly 20 years and had been “very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.”

He describes a long, painful process of refusing to face his sense of loss that only came to an end when he was in his late 20s and sought professional counseling to cope with the pressures and unhappiness.

 “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?” he said of his teens and 20s, a period in which he embarked on a successful military career but also occasionally attracted unwanted headlines, notably for being photographed playing “strip billiards” in Las Vegas.

In the interview, Harry said he had at times felt “on the verge of punching someone” and had taken up boxing as an outlet for the aggression he felt.

He said the long suppression of his grief eventually led to “two years of total chaos.”

He said he was pretending that life was great until he started counseling and faced his problems head on.

 “All of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with,” he said.

Along with his brother Prince William and sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge, Harry has worked with a charity that promotes mental health. They have argued that mental health problems must be given the same priority as other illnesses and should be spoken about openly and without stigma.

Harry has also worked extensively with wounded veterans and has organized the Invictus Games to foster international sporting competition for injured or ill service personnel and veterans.

Harry told interviewer Bryony Gordon, who has written extensively about her own struggles with depression and other issues, that he is in a “good place” now, and praised William for helping him seek help after many years of suffering in silence.

 He credited counseling with helping him recover.

 “I’ve now been able to take my work seriously, been able to take my private life seriously as well, and been able to put blood, sweat and tears into the things that really make a difference and things that I think will make a difference to everybody else,” he said.

Harry has also formed a romantic relationship with American actress Meghan Markle and in November took the unusual step of chastising the press for harassing her.

Harry and William have both been wary of press coverage, in part because of the way photographers shadowed their mother’s every move.

 
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Prince Harry has broken with royal tradition of maintaining silence about mental health issues by speaking candidly of his severe emotional problems following the death of his mother Princess Diana.

The 32-year-old prince told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Monday that he had nearly suffered breakdowns since his mother’s 1997 death in a car crash and had needed counseling in his late 20s.

He told the newspaper he “shut down all his emotions” for nearly 20 years and had been “very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.”

He describes a long, painful process of refusing to face his sense of loss that only came to an end when he was in his late 20s and sought professional counseling to cope with the pressures and unhappiness.

“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?” he said of his teens and 20s, a period in which he embarked on a successful military career but also occasionally attracted unwanted headlines, notably for being photographed playing “strip billiards” in Las Vegas.

Pretended life was great

He said the long suppression of his grief eventually led to “two years of total chaos.”

He said he was pretending that life was great until he started counseling and faced his problems head on.

“All of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with,” he said.

Brothers share a cause

Along with his brother Prince William and sister-in-law the Duchess of Cambridge, Harry has worked with a charity that promotes mental health. They have argued that mental health problems must be given the same priority as other illnesses and should be spoken about openly and without stigma.

Harry told interviewer Bryony Gordon, who has written extensively about her own struggles with depression and other issues, that he is in a “good place” now, and praised William for helping him seek help after many years of suffering in silence.

Harry has never before spoken publicly about his problems dealing with Diana’s death.
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Parkinson’s disease was first identified 200 years ago, but so far, there is no cure. Most people have the disease for many years before it’s diagnosed, making it too late for effective treatment. So scientists are focusing on research in an effort to stop the disease before symptoms appear. VOA’s Deborah Block has more during Parkinson’s awareness month in the United States.
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