Algae blooms happen when simple algae plants start growing out of control. The tiny plants are not usually toxic on their own, but the overabundance creates so-called dead zones because they suck all the oxygen out of the water. In Sweden, researchers have enlisted the aid of native fish that can slow down the out of control growth of algae. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: May 2017
Dogs Help Autistic Children at the Dentist’s Office
Autistic children are naturally sensitive to changes in their routines, including visits to the doctor or dentist. They may become agitated and uncooperative. When a dog trainer in Chile tried bringing dogs to the office to help the children relax, the experiment proved so successful that it evolved into a full-scale business. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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China Simulates Extended Moon Stays Amid Space Drive
China is testing the ability for future astronauts to stay on the moon for extended periods, as Beijing accelerates its space program and looks to put people on the surface of the moon within the next two decades.
The official Xinhua news agency said volunteers would live in a “simulated space cabin” for between 60-200 days over the next year helping scientists understand what will be needed for humans to “remain on the moon in the medium and long terms”.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018, the first ever such trip, and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036.
“While it remains unclear exactly how long China’s first lunar explorers will spend on the surface, the country is already planning for longer stays,” Xinhua said.
Two groups of four volunteers will live in the simulated cabin “Yuegong-1” to test how a life-support system works in a moon-like environment. A similar 105-day trial was carried out successfully in 2014.
The system, called the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS), allows water and food to be recycled and is key to any Chinese probes to the moon or beyond.
“The latest test is vital to the future of China’s moon and Mars missions and must be relied upon to guarantee the safety and health of our astronauts,” Liu Zhiheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the news agency.
The Yuegong-1 cabin has a central living space the size of a “very small urban apartment” and two “greenhouses” for plants.
In March, China announced plans to launch a space probe to bring back samples from the moon this year, while the country’s first cargo space craft docked with an orbiting space lab in April, a major step as Beijing looks to establish a permanently manned space station by 2022.
Despite the advances in China’s space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes, China still lags behind the United States and Russia.
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China: Silk Road Plan Not Tied to Xi Presidency
China’s President Xi Jinping initiated the ambitious Belt and Road development plan but it has become a world plan not tied to his presidency, the Commerce Ministry said Wednesday, days before Xi hosts a global forum on the initiative.
The forum in Beijing next week will draw heads of state to discuss Xi’s plan to expand trade links between Asia, Africa and Europe through billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.
Representatives from more than 100 countries will attend China’s biggest diplomatic event of the year, though only one leader from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, is set to join.
China says that between 2014 and 2016, its businesses signed projects worth $304.9 billion along inland and maritime corridors of the plan, also known as the New Silk Road. But some of the projects could be in development for years.
Judging by recent precedent in China’s political system, Xi is slated to step down from the presidency in early 2023 at the end of his second five-year term.
Asked what guarantee the world had that the initiative would go on after Xi’s second term, Vice Minister of Commerce Qian Keming told a news briefing that its vitality lay in countries’ hopes for development and not in the idea of “who proposed it or what term in office there is later.”
“The Belt and Road initiative was proposed by President Xi in 2013, but this initiative is not an individual proposal, or merely left at a proposal level. Rather it is an initiative that has been widely received by the whole world. It is jointly owned by everyone,” Qian said.
China has repeatedly rebuffed concern that the plan is part of a grand strategy to expand its economic interests for selfish gain and to seek global dominance, saying that anyone can join the plan to boost common prosperity.
Xi has used the initiative to help portray China as an open economy, distinct from a rising wave of global protectionism.
However, the government has faced criticism from foreign business groups and governments alike, who say it has done little to remove discriminatory policies and market barriers that favor Chinese companies.
Foreign business groups have questioned whether multinational companies would be able to compete with Chinese firms through the plan in transparent bidding processes.
Zhang Xingfu, an official from the Commerce Ministry’s cooperation department, played down such concerns.
“Chinese enterprises conducting investment and cooperative business in countries along the Belt and Road initiative will … actively participate in project bidding, and cooperate and compete with international enterprises in the same industries on the same platform,” Zhang said.
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Tesla Selling Solar Tiles, Says They Look Like Traditional Roof
Electric carmaker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles.
As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla’s website. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.
The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They’re designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.
Guaranteed for life of home
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said one of the drawbacks to home solar installations has been the solar panels themselves: They’re often awkward, shiny and ugly. Buyers will want Tesla’s roof, he said, because it looks as good or better than a normal roof.
“When you have this installed on your house, you’ll have the best roof in the neighborhood. The aesthetics are that good,” Musk said in a conference call with media.
The roof is guaranteed for the life of the home, which is longer than the 20-year lifespan for a typical, nonsolar roof, Musk said. It has gone through the same hail, fire and wind testing that normal roofs endure.
Tesla’s website includes a calculator where potential buyers can estimate the cost of a solar roof based on the size of their home, the amount of sunlight their neighborhood receives and federal tax credits. They can also put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a place in line.
$42 per square foot
Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla’s cheaper nonsolar tiles, which would blend in with the solar ones.
It would cost $69,100 to install a solar roof with 40-percent solar tiles on a 2,600-square-foot roof in suburban Detroit, according to Tesla’s website. That includes a $7,000 Tesla Powerwall, a battery unit that stores the energy from the solar panels and powers the home. The roof would be eligible for a $15,500 federal tax credit and would generate an estimated $62,100 in electricity over 30 years. Over that time period, Tesla estimates, the homeowner would save $8,500.
Tesla said the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot for a Tesla solar roof. The cost can be rolled into the homeowner’s mortgage payments and paid for over time, the company said.
Sales to be slow at first
Musk wouldn’t say how many orders the company expects to get this year. He expects the initial ramp-up to be slow.
“It will be very difficult and it will take a long time, and there will be some stumbles along the way. But it’s the only sensible vision of the future,” Musk said.
Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is making the solar tiles at its Fremont, California, factory initially. But eventually all production will move to a joint Tesla and Panasonic Corp. factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic makes the photovoltaic cells used in the solar tiles.
Tesla said it would be installing equipment in the Buffalo factory over the next few months.
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Amazon Trounces Rivals in Battle of the Shopping ‘Bots’
Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who track rivals’ prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working.
Losing access to Amazon.com Inc.’s data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors’ websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.
But a new tactic by Amazon to block these programs — known commonly as robots or bots — thwarted the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer.
Its technology unit, @WalmartLabs, was unable to work around the blockade for weeks, forcing it to retrieve Amazon’s data through a secondary source, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The previously unreported incident offers a case study in how Amazon’s technological prowess is helping it dominate the retail competition.
Now the largest online retailer in the world, Amazon is best known by consumers for its fast delivery, huge product catalog and ambitious moves into areas like original TV programming. But its mastery of the complex, behind-the-scenes technologies that power modern e-commerce is just as important to its success.
Dexterity with bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging more.
“Benchmarking against Amazon is going to become hard,” said Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who now sells pricing software to retailers as chief executive of Mountain View, California-based Boomerang Commerce.
A Wal-Mart spokesman declined to discuss the January episode but said the company improves its technology regularly and has multiple tools for tracking items. He said the company offers value not only through pricing but from discounts for in-store pickup and other benefits.
A spokeswoman for Amazon said the company is aware of competitors using bots to check its listings and denied any “campaign” to stop them. “Nothing has changed recently in how we manage bots on our site,” she said. Still, she said, “we prioritize humans over bots as needed.”
Bots can slow down a website, a big motivator for retailers to block them.
Reuters interviewed 21 people familiar with bots and how they are deployed, including current and former Wal-Mart employees, former Amazon employees and outside specialists. Many spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly.
Most pointed to Amazon’s leadership in the burgeoning bot wars.
The company’s technological edge has been good for its profit margin, and it’s proving a winning formula for investors.
Shares of the internet powerhouse have risen about 15-fold since the market’s bottom in March 2009, while the S&P 500 has more than tripled in value. Amazon hit $100 billion in annual sales in 2015 — faster than any company in history, it said.
Brave new world
Bot-driven pricing has represented a massive change for the retail industry since Amazon helped pioneer the practice more than a decade ago.
Traditionally, brick-and-mortar stores changed prices no more than weekly because of the time and expense needed to swap labels by hand.
In the world of e-commerce, though, retailers update prices with ease, sometimes multiple times a day, helped by algorithms that consider inventory levels, sales forecasts and rivals’ pricing data.
To stay in the game, companies such as online wholesaler Boxed, based in New York, depend on a variety of methods including bots to ensure they do not lag others’ price moves for even 20 minutes.
“That’s like a lifetime during Christmas,” said Chief Executive Chieh Huang, whose company sells bulk staples like toilet paper and pet food. “If we’re not decently priced, we’ll see it almost immediately” in sales declines.
Disguised as humans
Using bots to view massive amounts of data on public websites — a process known as crawling or scraping — has many purposes. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for example, constantly crawls the Web to gather information for its search engine results and to sell ads.
In e-commerce, though, the use of bots has developed into a cat-and-mouse game. Companies try to thwart the practice on their own websites while aiming to penetrate their competitors’ defenses. Third-party services abound to help less-savvy retailers.
To protect data from rivals, some retail websites use what’s known as a “CAPTCHA” — typically a distorted string of letters and numbers that humans can read but most bots can’t. Amazon shies away from the practice because it annoys some customers.
For merchants seeking to evade such defenses, disguising their computer programs as real shoppers is key. Some pricing technology experts have programmed computer cursors to meander through a Web page in the way a person might, instead of going directly to the prized data. Another technique is to use multiple computer addresses so that retailers cannot track a barrage of clicks to a single source.
“It is an arms race,” said Keith Anderson, a senior vice president at e-commerce analytics firm Profitero, based in Ireland. “Every week or every month, there’s some new approach from both sides.”
Amazon’s maneuver that halted Wal-Mart in January took aim at a specialized Web browser called PhantomJS. Unlike, say, Internet Explorer, this browser is designed specifically for programmers — a telltale clue that its users are not typical shoppers. Amazon put up a digital curtain to hide its listings from PhantomJS users, according to three people familiar with the situation.
It was unclear how the move, which was not aimed at Wal-Mart in particular, affected other companies.
Tests conducted in recent weeks for Reuters show that among major U.S. retail chains, Amazon had by far the most sophisticated bot detection in place, both for its home page and for two popular items selected by Reuters because they change price frequently — a De’Longhi coffee maker and a Logitech webcam.
The tests were run by San Francisco-based Distil Networks, which sells anti-bot tools. In one of the tests, Distil programmed bots to hit each retailer’s website 3,000 times, but slowly enough to mimic a person clicking through listings. This tricked most retail behemoths, but not Amazon.
Blocked bots would not have seen, for instance, that Amazon’s price for the De’Longhi espresso machine changed four times in a single 24-hour period starting on the morning of April 25, according to price tracking website camelcamelcamel.com. During that time, the price swung by more than 10 percent, from a low of $80.06 to $88.16.
Swarming with bots
Despite Amazon’s capabilities, the sheer volume of crawling on its site is staggering. At times, as many as 80 percent of the clicks on Amazon product listings have been from bots, people familiar with the matter say, compared with just a third or more of the traffic on other large sites.
In addition to rivals seeking price data, that traffic includes bots from university researchers studying competition, search engines, advertising services and even fraudsters trying to break into Amazon accounts.
For Wal-Mart, a small group in Silicon Valley directs its automated pricing strategy while dozens of engineers in India and around the world handle the code, current and former Wal-Mart employees said.
Amazon had about 40 engineers who would covertly extract and organize rivals’ data with bots as of several years ago, one of the people interviewed said. Amazon did not discuss the size or structure of its teams working with bots.
According to one U.S. patent application, Amazon is working on encryption technology that would force bots, but not humans, to solve a complicated algorithm to gain access to its Web pages.
“Amazon has both the competency to detect bot traffic and the wherewithal to do something about it,” said Scott Jacobson, a former Amazon manager and now managing director of Madrona Venture Group. That “isn’t the case for most retailers.”
your ads here!Rascal Flatts Look to Young Songwriters for Big Hits
Early on in their career, the country group Rascal Flatts often dealt with critics of their pop-country sound and being labeled a country music boy band. Bassist and producer Jay DeMarcus noted that one early review referred to their music as “bouncy, bouncy, flop.”
Seventeen years later with the release of their 10th studio album, “Back to Us,” the trio of DeMarcus, Gary LeVox and Joe Don Rooney say they’ve adapted their material to fit their lives.
“As husbands and fathers and everything, you have to write appropriate material and find appropriate material for where you are,” said DeMarcus.
“And not cutting as many songs about kicking at the club with the fellas,” LeVox joked. “One song is called ‘In Bed By 7.”
Still the group that has had several platinum records and No. 1 hits relies on young songwriters and artists to keep their music sounding fresh.
Grammy-winning pop singer Meghan Trainor’s earliest success as a songwriter came when she contributed to two songs on Rascal Flatts’ 2014 album, including the single “I Like the Sound of That.”
“Back to Us,” out May 19, has songs co-written by Shay Mooney of the rising duo Dan + Shay, a duet with 22-year-old “American Idol” alum Lauren Alaina and a song written by powerhouse performer Chris Stapleton.
“I think it’s important for all of us to help a younger generation of country music artists come along,” said DeMarcus. “And I think the more they have success, the more success there is for all of us. It’s really synergistic from that standpoint.”
But he joked that the band’s relationship with Dan + Shay was more like an internship than a mentorship.
“We made an agreement with Shay early on right when they got signed, if they were going to steal our sound, we had to get first pick of the songs he was writing,” DeMarcus said.
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Microsoft Adds Tools to Flag Bad Content in Amazon, Google Faceoff
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday turned up the heat on other technology giants by launching new image and video recognition products which could help it court businesses worried about running ads next to offensive content.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said its new Video Indexer can identify faces, voices and emotions in moving pictures. Separately, its Custom Vision Search lets companies build apps that recognize images with just a few lines of code.
For brands, knowing what’s in the videos that they sponsor has become a hot-button issue since major companies began canceling ad deals with Alphabet Inc’s Google this year over hate speech playing on its subsidiary YouTube.
Microsoft’s Video Indexer has similarities to a tool Google launched in March; Amazon.com Inc also said last month it could flag insulting images via a cloud-based service.
Microsoft’s latest moves underscore how its focus has evolved from its staple Windows software to the cloud, where it is competing with Amazon to sell data storage and computing power. Extra analytics such as image recognition may prove key to luring Web developers.
“It’s hard to understand what’s in the video” the longer it is, said Irving Kwong, a senior product director at Microsoft, in an interview ahead of the company’s developer conference Build. He said Video Indexer, which analyzes videos far faster than humans can, could help a user “harness and get more out of the video content that you have.”
The tools launched in preview by the Microsoft Cognitive Services unit on Wednesday, including a decision recommendation service, have one aim apart from winning business: data.
Microsoft views the tools as a way to put powerful computing into people’s hands and improve the tools at the same time, because processing more data is key to reaching artificial intelligence. Others including Amazon are pursuing this strategy, with the prize being a new revenue stream.
Research firm International Data Corporation has forecast the market for such tools will balloon to over $47 billion in sales in 2020 from $8 billion in 2016.
Microsoft pulled back the curtain on experiments that are further afield, too. It announced a new Cognitive Labs unit and the so-called Project Prague: technology to allow people to control computers simply with hand gestures.
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Facebook to Play Down Links to Websites With Deceptive Ads
Facebook is planning to intensify its crackdown on so-called clickbait websites, saying it will begin giving lower prominence to links that lead to pages full of deceptive or annoying advertisements.
The downgrade of the links was expected to take effect beginning on Wednesday on News Feed, the home page of Facebook where people go to see posts from friends and family.
Facebook said it wanted to downplay links that people post to websites that have a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, or that have deceptive or sexually suggestive ads along the lines of “5 Tips to be Amazing in Bed” or “1 Crazy Tip to Lose Weight Overnight!”
Links to websites with pop-up ads or full-screen ads also would be downplayed, it said.
People scrolling through their News Feed are often disappointed when they click on such links and do not find valuable information, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of ads and business platform, said in an interview.
“People don’t want to see this stuff,” he said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to find it and rank it further down News Feed when possible.”
Facebook uses a computer algorithm to determine which posts people see first from friends and family, and it frequently refines the algorithm to keep up with spam or other concerns.
The company said in August it was adjusting the algorithm to downplay news stories with clickbait-style headlines, a style of headline that intentionally withholds information or misleads people to get them to click on them.
In December, facing criticism that hoaxes and fake news stories spread too easily on Facebook in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election on November 8, the company made it easier for people to report those kinds of posts.
Facebook, the world’s largest social media network with 1.9 billion monthly users, has enormous power with its algorithms to potentially drive traffic to media publishers or stymie it.
The company said it reviewed hundreds of thousands of websites linked to from Facebook to identify those with little substance but lots of disruptive or shocking ads.
Bosworth declined to name any websites Facebook wants to target. He said only publishers of spam needed to worry about seeing less traffic, and other publishers could see their traffic go up.
“This is a small number of the worst of the worst,” he said.
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Cannes: 2017 Is First and Last for Netflix Unless It Changes
Netflix, the U.S. video-on-demand company, will not be allowed to compete at the Cannes Film Festival after this year unless it changes its policy and gives its movies a cinema release, organizers said Wednesday.
The 2017 festival, which begins next week, has Netflix films in its competition for the first time, a decision that angered the French movie theater sector as the company said the films will only be streamed to subscribers and not shown in cinemas.
Festival Director Thierry Fremaux had said he believed Netflix would arrange some kind of cinema release for the two films in competition — The Meyerowitz Stories and Okja — both highly anticipated, with stars that include Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Stiller and Tilda Swinton.
But the festival said Wednesday that no such deal had been reached, and while the two films would be allowed to remain in competition this year, thereafter no film would be accepted that is not guaranteed distribution in French movie theaters.
“The Festival is pleased to welcome a new operator which has decided to invest in cinema,” the festival said on its website in response to rumors that the Netflix films would be excluded at the last minute from Cannes 2017.
“[Cannes] wants to reiterate its support to the traditional mode of exhibition of cinema in France and in the world,” it continued, adding that from next year its rules would explicitly state any film entered for competition would have to “commit itself to being distributed in French movie theaters.”
In France, which proudly defends its culture and language against the global dominance of the United States, the decision is a victory for the traditional cinema distribution sector.
Since its launch in France, according to French movie magazine Premiere, Netflix has “declared war on movie theaters.” Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings made a brief but defiant comment on his Facebook page: “The establishment closing ranks against us. See Okja on Netflix June 28th. Amazing film that theatre chains want to block us from entering into Cannes film festival competition.”
Another U.S. streaming service, Amazon, also has a film in competition, Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck, but has not been subject to the same opposition as it does screen its films at cinemas as well as online.
The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 17 to May 28.
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New Study Warns of Wage Theft in US
Analysts at a liberal research institution in Washington say U.S. employers are stealing $15 billion a year from workers by failing to pay legally required minimum wages.
The Economic Policy Institute says the wage theft hits nearly one-fifth of low wage workers in the 10 largest U.S. states. The study’s authors say affected workers lose an average of $64 a week, or $3,300 a year out of their modest salaries.
Young people, women, minorities and immigrants are often stuck in low-level jobs and thus are most likely to be affected by wage theft. EPI says the shortfall obviously hurts workers, but also slows demand for goods and services, which can crimp economic growth.
On Thursday, government officials will look at the job market from a different angle, when the weekly jobless claims are published. Economists track the number of Americans who sign up for unemployment assistance to gauge the health of the market.
A survey of economists shows most experts expect the number of such layoffs to rise slightly but still remain at a relatively low level consistent with a strong job market. A separate study produces the U.S. unemployment rate, which was just 4.4 percent in April, less than half the rate during the worst of the recession. Some analysts say with fewer unemployed workers seeking jobs, employers may have to boost wages to attract and keep staff members.
Higher wages could contribute to inflation, and so could rising prices of imports, including oil. Friday, officials will report the latest data on price changes at the retail level with the Consumer Price Index. Experts predict the study will show inflation rose about 2 percent over the past year, a moderate level.
U.S. central bank officials are supposed to guide the economy in ways that keep prices stable and unemployment low. They try to cool inflation by raising interest rates, but do so cautiously to avoid stalling the economy and hurting job growth. That is why experts quoted in the financial press say the Federal Reserve will raise rates again, slightly, at their June meeting.
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In Vitro Fertilization Could Help Restore Vulnerable Coral Reefs
It’s no secret that the world’s coral reefs are at risk. Pollution, dredging, overfishing and, especially, acidic, warming waters are pushing these complex ecosystems to the brink of destruction, and marine scientists and researchers have been stymied in attempts to restore their health.
Saving them isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a necessity if we want to keep our oceans healthy and viable. Coral reefs provide nurseries for nearly a quarter of the ocean’s fisheries, help protect shorelines from storms, and offer underwater wonders for snorkelers and divers.
Now, a project at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences offers hope for what marine biologist Bart Shepherd calls ‘one of the most magical and beautiful places on Earth’. “It’s this incredible city of organisms that all learn to live together. All these animals are competing to try and take over space and try to get access to sunlight, to nutrients in the water.”
Shepherd is director of the Academy’s Steinhart Aquarium, and, with the Academy’s curator of ichthyology, Luiz Rocha, directs the appropriately-named Hope for Reefs initiative.
Reefs under stress
Human activity and increasingly warm and acidic ocean water are taking a heavy toll on the world’s coral reefs. A recent aerial survey found more than two-thirds of the coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing “shocking” amounts of bleaching, and Rocha says human-induced climate change is devastating other reefs as well.
“When coral gets stressed, in most cases because of warm water, it expels the algae,” he explains. Algae have a symbiotic relationship with the coral polyps. The coral provides a protective environment for the algae, which provide corals with essential nutrients and their incredible colors. “So,” Rocha adds, “when the algae gets out, the coral gets bleached and becomes white.” That bleaching can lead to the coral’s death.
Restoring the reef
Various methods have been tried to bring back reefs. The most successful so far has been artificially accelerating a natural process called fragmentation. Researchers purposefully break off coral branches, allow the pieces to recover and grow, and then plant them back onto the reef.
But Shepherd points to a long-term problem with that approach. “You are producing thousands of identical genetic clones of the same coral from one parent colony. So, you’re really reducing the genetic diversity that’s out there on the reef and the ability of the coral to respond, perhaps, to things we don’t even know are going to happen.”
So, the Hope for Reefs crew turned to a unique method pioneered by the coral conservation group Secore International. In 2011, it began using in vitro fertilization to restore the health of dying coral reefs. Endangered elkhorn coral off the coast of its field station in Curaçao was the test case. Shepherd says, “So, we actually have proven that you can go and collect gametes – sperm and eggs, fertilize them and grow them in a laboratory for a short period of time, plant that baby coral back out on the reefs and, within five years, it will grow up and spawn with its wild counterparts on the reef.”
A small window of opportunity
Corals only spawn once a year, at night around a full moon. During those couple of nights, millions of the corals’ sex cells float to the surface, but, Shepherd explains, more than 99 percent don’t make it.
“What we’re able to do is intercede at a point where most of the sperm and eggs will be eaten by fish. We put a net over the coral and we collect those sperm and eggs, bring them back to the lab, cross-fertilize them and go from there.”
Hope for Reefs doesn’t stop with restoration. Shepherd says educating local governments and community stakeholders to save their coral reefs is key to the success of the project — and time is crucial.
“We need communities that want to help manage their reefs, that are going to look at the environmental conditions and why they are the way they are and what we can do to improve them. Reducing sewage outflow, reducing sedimentation, reducing the fishing pressures on herbivores, and there’s a holistic approach to managing reefs that really needs to be in place in order for this to work.”
And, says project co-director Luiz Rocha, that approach includes communication. “We don’t safeguard our results. We know that it is urgent. We know that we have to talk about it as soon as possible. So, we are working on our scientific publications that take quite a while to be published, but we also take to the field with us a media person, a science writer, a photographer that will be talking about our results in real time, most of the time.”
Looking ahead
Hope for Reefs has just finished the first year of its five-year project and everyone involved is optimistic. The challenge is to scale up in vitro fertilization to restore endangered coral reefs worldwide before they are lost. The project hopes to seed one million global corals by 2021.
With a commitment of nearly $13-million from the California Academy of Sciences, and a new partnership with The Nature Conservancy, twenty new expeditions are planned. First up, the degraded reef at Secore International’s field station in Curaçao and, then, on to the Yucatan Peninsula and the Great Maya Reef.
your ads here!Yemen Minister: 60 Percent of Population in Dire Poverty
Yemen’s planning minister says 60 percent of the country’s population is in dire poverty more than two years since the Shi’ite rebels forced the country’s internationally recognized government and president out of the capital.
Mohamed El-Saadi says 22 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian relief, a figure that exceeds the U.N.’s recent estimate that 19.8 million in Yemen need assistance.
El-Saadi spoke during a meeting on Wednesday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, attended by the Gulf Cooperation Council and international organizations.
He warned that the “general security, political and humanitarian situation has witnessed an unprecedented decline.”
A Saudi-led coalition has been battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels March 2015. The war has killed more than 10,000 civilians and pushed a large portion of the population to the brink of famine.
your ads here!Common Painkillers Linked to Increased Risk for Heart Attack
A widely used family of over-the-counter painkillers may increase the risk of having a heart attack, a new study suggests.
According to researchers at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Center (CRCHUM), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) can raise the risk of heart attacks “as early as in the first week of use and especially within the first month of taking high doses of such medication.”
Common forms of NSAIDs include diclofenac, ibuprofen and naproxen.
“Given that the onset of risk of acute myocardial infarction occurred in the first week and appeared greatest in the first month of treatment with higher doses, prescribers should consider weighing the risks and benefits of NSAIDs before instituting treatment, particularly for higher doses,” the researchers said.
Prior studies had pointed to an increase in heart attack risk from using NSAIDs, but this study looked at timing, dose and the duration of taking the medicine.
For the study, the researchers looked at past studies on NSAIDs from Canada, Finland and the United Kingdom. there were 446,763 people studied, and 61,460 had a heart attack.
“The study found that taking any dose of NSAIDs for one week, one month, or more than a month was associated with an increased risk of heart attack,” researchers said in a statement.
The overall risk of heart attack was between 20 and 50 percent higher than those not using NSAIDs, the researchers said.
“To put this in perspective, as a result of this increase, the risk of heart attack due to NSAIDs is on average about one percent annually,” researchers wrote. “The type of analysis the researchers used allowed them to conclude with greater than 90 percent probability that all NSAIDs studied are associated with a heightened risk of heart attack.”
They added that the increased risk was higher with higher doses during the first month of use. The risk did not continue to increase over a longer treatment duration.
“It remains prudent to use NSAIDs for as short time as possible,” researchers wrote.
The researchers said the study did not consider other potential factors for increased risk of heart attack.
The study was published this week in BMJ.
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Measles Hit Minnesota Somalis Amid Low Vaccination Rates
Any outbreak of measles is cause for concern, but the current outbreak in Minneapolis, Minnesota stands out for two reasons. One, almost none of the victims were vaccinated against the disease. Two, nearly all of the victims are ethnic Somalis.
Doctors say the situation is the result of the disproven, but persistent, belief the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) can cause a child to develop autism.
Dr. Mohamed Hagi Aden, an internal medicine specialist at Regions Hospital in neighboring St. Paul, says more than 50 percent of Somali-American children in the area never get the MMR vaccine, due to autism fears.
The result is seen in the measles outbreak statistics. As of Tuesday, the Minnesota Department of Health had recorded 50 cases of measles in the state. It said 45 of those infected were confirmed to be unvaccinated against measles, and 45 of the cases were Minnesotan Somalis (or Somali Minnesotans, as the department put it).
Dr. Aden says opposition to the MMR vaccine stems from a perceived high rate of autism within the local Somali-American community. A report by the University of Minnesota showed that in 2010, about one in 32 Somali children in Minneapolis between the ages of 7 and 9 was identified as having autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
“And while parents were looking for answer, they found a study by a British researcher that linked the autism and the MMR vaccine, and that has created fear and suspicion with the community,” Dr. Aden told VOA’s Somali Service.
The study he cites is real; it was published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1998. But the journal retracted the finding 12 years later, saying it contained errors.
In the meantime, multiple studies have failed to find any evidence to back up the original study’s claims. One study of 95,000 American children found “no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD,” even in cases where kids’ older siblings had been diagnosed with autism.
“There is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism,” says Dr. Aden.
Making the case for vaccination
As the outbreak grows, the Minnesota Department of Health is working to win back trust in vaccines.
It’s harder than it used to be, says the department’s infectious disease director, Kris Ehresmann.
“You used to be able to get up and say, ‘I’m a scientist and X percent of people did Y, and everyone said, ‘Oh yes, OK, we need to change our behavior,'” she said. Now, she says, “It’s a different world.”
And in the case of the Somali-American community, where a large number of people are immigrants and refugees who are less assimilated, “It’s more of getting the community to own the issue and own the solutions.”
That means a lot more community outreach. In the past few years, the Department of Health has hired two Somali outreach workers. One visits mothers’ groups, day care centers and charter schools to talk about vaccines.
Another Somali worker talks to parents about autism and the resources available for special-needs children.
“The community does have very real concerns about autism,” Ehresmann said. “By saying, ‘Oh, vaccines don’t cause autism,’ that’s not sufficient.”
Some of the most important voices advocating for vaccines have been Somali doctors and other health professionals, and the imams from the hardest-hit areas, Ehresmann said.
“These folks are really stepping up to the plate and speaking out on the value of vaccines on their own. It is coming from within the community leadership. That is really important,” she said.
your ads here!Taiwan Rejection From WHO Assembly Further Strains Relations With China
Taiwan’s already precarious relations with old rival China took another step back this week after the self-ruled island said Beijing blocked it from the annual World Health Organization assembly, a move that may prompt Taipei to rethink how they treat the other side.
Officials in Taipei said Tuesday the deadline had lapsed to receive an invitation to the May 22-31 World Health Assembly in Geneva. They blamed China for using its clout in the World Health Organization (WHO) to block the invitation.
“If the other side overlooks our appeals and grave reminders, that is sure to severely hurt people’s feelings and spark a backlash in Taiwan public opinion, even causing cross-Strait (China-Taiwan) relations to drift further,” said Chiu Chui-cheng, spokesman for the Taiwan government’s Mainland Affairs Council.
“We want to appeal once more to the other side not to offend Taiwan public opinion,” Chiu said. “The Beijing authorities should reflect deeply on avoidance of old-fashioned, hawkish policy mentalities and actions that could cause huge harm to a resumption of cross-Strait relations.”
Beijing sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory rather than a state entitled to membership in international organizations. The two sides have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
Taiwan is unlikely to retaliate in real terms over the WHO slight, but the flap brings a string of other China issues into sharper focus and may increase popular anger in Taiwan while prompting a new search for ways Taipei can work with Beijing without selling down local autonomy.
“Taiwan people will feel frustrated with the assertive response of China,” said Huang Kwei-bo, associate diplomacy professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “Beijing’s image will get worse.”
Over the past year, China sailed an aircraft carrier around Taiwan, scaled back Taiwan-bound tourism and, since March, has detained a Taiwanese activist without announcing any formal charges against him.
Under former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, Beijing let Taipei observe the World Health Assembly every year since 2009 as “Chinese Taipei,” implying a link to China.
A spokesman for the Communist government’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Monday Taiwan could not observe this year’s assembly, where the WHO sets policies and approves a budget, because current President Tsai Ing-wen has not endorsed the Beijing view that both sides belong to a single China – a term Ma accepted.
Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party takes a guarded view of relations with China. Some party members want Taiwan to declare formal independence from Beijing.
China’s actions “will definitely push Taiwan people further and further away and severely destroy peace and stability between the two sides,” Tsai’s party said in a statement Tuesday. “The authorities in Beijing must reflect and correctly see this negative outcome.”
Taiwanese see the world health assemblies as opportunities to learn from the 192 WHO member states and share their own experience in infectious disease control, and improve medical services in developing countries.
Taiwan has just 21 diplomatic allies compared to more than 170 that recognize Beijing, making it hard for Taiwan to gain access to international bodies.
“The only barrier is politics and to speak more specifically, it’s just China,” ruling party legislator Yeh Yi-chin said Monday. “But where we’d like to appeal and remind everyone is, does the whole world want to let China, one country, destroy the global medical safety net?”
Beijing periodically uses its diplomatic connections and clout as the world’s second largest economy to block Taiwan from joining the United Nations, of which the WHO is a special agency. Last year Taiwan was rejected from observing a session of the U.N. International Civil Aviation Organization and from participating in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Those barriers would keep affecting how Taiwanese see Beijing. “We need to see what happens next time at the United Nations,” Huang said.
Some Taiwanese may pressure Tsai to find a way of negotiating with China that lets the other side open doors again internationally without making Taiwan give up autonomy. Some scholars expect Tsai to propose a new formula for China relations in the second half of 2017.
The U.S. State Department backed Taiwan’s cause of joining the World Health Assembly this year, saying it supports the island’s “meaningful participation” in international bodies that require statehood.
“The United States remains committed to supporting Taiwan as it seeks to expand its already significant contributions to addressing global challenges,” a spokesperson said this week. “We encourage authorities in Beijing and Taipei to engage in constructive dialogue, on the basis of dignity and respect.”
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For Expatriate Shutterbug, Even Federal Washington Offers Unique Angles
Modern history. Political change. Urbanization, emotion, and the colors of Washington, DC. For Ukrainian-born photographer Val Proudkii, it’s all filtered through the lens of his camera. In his repertoire: numerous photography competition awards and one printed image signed by former president Barack Obama. After spending a day looking at the nation’s capital through his eyes, VOA’s Iuliia Iarmolenko and Dmytro Savchuk have more.
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US Under Increased Pressure to Remain Committed to Climate Change Efforts
Pressure is mounting on the U.S. administration to remain committed to the Paris agreement on climate change. European Union leaders, a former United Nations chief and former U.S. President Barack Obama have joined the chorus of voices emphasizing the need for action to reduce greenhouse emissions worldwide. On Tuesday, the White House announced that President Trump is postponing his decision regarding the climate treaty for the second time. Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Therapists Use VR to Treat Balance Problems
New York University researchers have developed a system combining virtual reality with a pressure sensing mat they say could help people with vestibular dysfunction, which affects parts of the inner ear and brain and results in problems with balance, or those suffering from vertigo or dizziness as a result of a brain injury. Faith Lapidus reports.
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For One Chinese City, New ‘Silk Road’ Leaves Old Problems Unsolved
In August, 2014, planners in the northeastern Chinese city of Hunchun argued in state media that it should be included in the “One Belt, One Road” project, Beijing’s vision laid out the previous year of a new Silk Road across Asia to Europe.
In 2015, the official Xinhua news agency ran stories about how Hunchun was accelerating its “OBOR” plans, and early in 2016, China’s cabinet released a list of Chinese cities included in “OBOR:” Hunchun was on the map.
The fact that the list came about slowly, and that some cities felt moved to lobby to be included, underlines how the pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping is as amorphous as it is ambitious.
The challenge of defining exactly what OBOR means will come to the fore later this month, when heads of state and senior officials from around the world gather in Beijing for the first major summit dedicated to the project.
“Frankly, I don’t really know what the belt and the road are. The reason being that I think Beijing doesn’t know either,” said Tom Miller of Gavekal Dragonomics, who recently wrote a book on the New Silk Road.
Reality is complicated
In theory, incentives for cities, companies and countries to be involved are strong: hundreds of billions of dollars are expected to be spent on roads, railways, pipelines, ports and industrial zones stretching from Sri Lanka to Djibouti.
But as Hunchun shows, the reality of OBOR can be complicated and requires buy-in from other countries.
The city’s position at the apex of Russia, North Korea and China is a blessing and a curse. While Russia is gradually opening up to more trade, North Korea has stalled.
Tantalizingly close to the sea but without a sea port after Russia’s annexation in 1860, local businesses said they wanted to ship more goods via Rason, a nearby North Korean port earmarked as an export hub to China, Japan, South Korea and beyond.
That would open a shipping route to southern China, but with sanctions in place against Pyongyang, global tensions rising over its arms programme and Rason developing slowly, expectations of progress are low.
“We currently transport goods by rail to southern China. We’d like to ship from Rason, but at present that’s not happening,” said Wang Hai, general manager of Guanghai Import and Export Trading Company in Hunchun, a small firm with 12 staff, both Chinese and Russian. “Hunchun is a hub for northeast Asia, so in theory it should play a big role in ‘One Belt, One Road,’ but for now it hasn’t been able to get its act together.”
Russia more promising?
North Korea remains largely shut to the outside world, and China, while remaining its main economic and diplomatic backer, has signed up for tough U.N. sanctions against it.
But China said on Tuesday that North Korea would be sending a delegation to the upcoming OBOR summit.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend, reflecting his country’s importance in China’s OBOR strategy; in Hunchun, some enterprises are already seeing benefits from mutual trade.
Xingyang Seafood, for example, imports 90 percent of its seafood from Russia and 10 percent from North Korea, said chairman Zhao Yang.
“The main advantage of being in Hunchun is that we are close to Russia,” Yang told Reuters. The company is headquartered in northern China’s Shandong province, but in 2015 it opened a branch in Hunchun to exploit its proximity to Russia.
“How does North Korea help us? It doesn’t help us at all, they have hardly any seafood left there.”
Trade with Russia
Hunchun’s spokesman Hao Qiang declined to comment about the city’s relationship with North Korea, because of the “current political situation,” and would not say how many North Koreans were working in the city. “But we can talk about Hunchun’s trade with Russia, the city’s clean air and successful tree-planting initiatives,” he said.
In addition to oil and gas export opportunities between Russia and China, Putin has spoken of roads and bridges being built to strengthen links.
Russia has struggled, however, to lure enough people to sparsely populated regions bordering China’s northeast, and there are concerns among Russians of creeping colonization if too much land is leased to the Chinese.
“They [Chinese] will live there, their relatives will come, they will deepen their roots there, they will take Russian women as wives,” firebrand opposition politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in 2015, when proposals to lease Russian land to Chinese farmers were put forward. “We will only have problems. I see no advantages.”
For Hunchun, OBOR is the latest in a series of development programs aimed at revitalizing Jilin province and China’s northeast.
Benefits of investments are clear
In the 1990s, the United Nations backed the Tumen River Area Development Project, which became the Greater Tumen Initiative linking China, Mongolia, South Korea and Russia.
The benefits of large-scale state investment are clear. From 25th place among smaller cities in Jilin in terms of economic growth, Hunchun now stands third. Foreign trade has doubled since 2011, according to city statistics.
Whether OBOR can add value over the longer term is uncertain, Peter Cai wrote in a report for the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank.
“If the Chinese government fails to connect its domestic projects with overseas components, OBOR will be little different from other domestic infrastructure programs, greatly diminishing its economic and strategic value.”
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Mexico Targets Suppliers, Buyers in Move Against Fuel Theft
Mexico is embarking on a strategy to combat illegal pipeline thefts that includes going after those who purchase and deal in stolen fuel as well as the thieves, the country’s treasury secretary said Tuesday.
Jose Antonio Meade said it’s a problem that costs Mexico somewhere between 15 billion and 20 billion pesos a year, or $780 million to $1 billion, and one that requires a holistic approach to solve.
Mexico’s government wants to reduce the siphoning of gasoline and diesel from illegal pipeline taps by attacking “not only the supply but also the demand,” Meade said, according to a transcript of remarks during a Q&A session released by the Treasury Department.
Besides quick-response actions against thieves, authorities must work to make the illicit business less profitable and make those who buy it face consequences, he said.
Armed gangs add to problem
The topic is front-and-center in Mexico these days after gun battles between the army and suspected thieves killed four soldiers and six gunmen last week in the central state of Puebla. Armed gangs have gotten involved in the business of fuel thefts, and gunmen were said to have used civilians as human shields in one of the clashes.
Fuel thieves are also suspected of being behind a shocking crime in Puebla on May 2, when eight assailants raped a woman and her 14-year-old daughter, killed her toddler son, beat her husband, stole the family’s pickup truck and left on them on a highway at night. In March, three state detectives were abducted and killed by a fuel theft gang allegedly with the help of the local mayor and police officers.
Meade said those who “tear at the social fabric, who in a very cowardly fashion hide behind … women and children,” cause problems for communities and are “terribly dangerous.”
Corrupt workers a concern
Meade acknowledged it’s “very likely” that corrupt workers at state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, are involved in facilitating pipeline thefts. He said officials are working with the company to identify them.
Officials are also looking at gas stations that may be selling stolen fuel, as well as the mass transportation sector. To that end, authorities raided 13 gas stations last month after detecting irregular fuel-buying patterns, Meade said.
“There was even a gas station that had been shut down (by authorities) for a year but was continuing to sell gasoline, which of course was stolen,” he said.
Looking for help from Senate
The secretary said authorities are looking into technology that would allow them to better track illegal pipeline taps and “mark” gasoline to help identify fuel that has been stolen.
Meade also noted legislation passed in the Chamber of Deputies and pending in the Senate would make it easier to prosecute fuel theft.
“The theft is illegal, but possession of stolen gasoline … since we don’t catch them physically and flagrantly stealing, we often find it impossible to take legal action,” he said.
Stolen fuel part of local economy
The Puebla state Public Security Department reported Tuesday that in a series of raids it seized over 21,000 liters (5,600 gallons) of fuel and 12 vehicles apparently involved in thefts.
Some communities in Puebla and elsewhere have come to base much of their economies on selling fuel stolen from the thousands of taps that are drilled into state-owned pipelines each year. It can also be dangerous — on Sunday one such illegal tap exploded into flames.
Meade said Puebla is the state with the highest incidence of fuel theft, followed by Guanajuato and Veracruz.
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States Sue Over Trump Decision to Restart Coal Lease Program
Four U.S. states filed a lawsuit Tuesday over President Donald Trump’s decision to restart the sale of coal leases on federal lands, saying the Obama-era block of the leasing program was reversed without studying what’s best for the environment and for taxpayers.
The attorneys general of California, New Mexico, New York and Washington, all Democrats, said bringing back the federal coal lease program without an environmental review risks worsening the effects of climate change on those states while shortchanging them for the coal taken from public lands.
“Climate change has to be considered when we are talking about compensating states and New Mexico citizens for their resources,” said Cholla Khoury, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas’ director of consumer and environmental protection.
The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management administers 306 coal leases in 10 states, producing more than 4 billion tons of coal over the past decade. Most of that coal — 85 percent — comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.
Production and combustion of coal from federal lands accounted for about 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2014.
The Obama administration blocked the sale of new leases in 2016 to conduct an environmental study and a review of the royalties that mining companies pay the U.S. government for coal that’s extracted. Federal officials and members of Congress said the current royalty rates were shortchanging taxpayers.
In January, Interior officials said they were considering raising those royalty rates to offset the effects of climate change from burning the coal.
In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to amend or withdraw the coal leasing program moratorium.
The next day, Zinke did so, saying the Obama administration’s environmental review would cost “many millions of dollars” and that improvements to the program can be made without a full-scale environmental review.
The lawsuit by the four attorneys general, which was filed in Great Falls, Montana, says the reversal was made “with no justification other than an objection to the time and cost of complying with the law.”
Lifting the moratorium without properly considering the environmental effects or ensuring that the program is providing fair market value for the publicly owned coal violates federal laws, they allege.
“They didn’t follow the law,” Khoury said. “You can’t make piecemeal changes without doing this assessment to fully understand all parts of this program.”
Interior Department officials did not return telephone and email messages seeking comment.
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