A new report finds gender inequality strips women of their ability to control their sexual and reproductive options and limits their right to choose when and if they wish to start a family. The United Nations Population Fund released this year’s State of the World Population report titled “Unfinished Business: The Pursuit of Rights and Choices for All.”

Since the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was created 50 years ago, the number of births per woman has dropped by nearly half to 2.5 births. Also, there has been a significant decrease in fertility rates in the least developed countries, as well as deaths from pregnancy-related causes.

But the UNFPA reports more than 200 million women worldwide are subjected to unwanted pregnancies because they have no access to modern contraceptives. In addition, more than 800 pregnant women die each day from preventable causes because of limited access to reproductive health services. Two-thirds of maternal deaths today occur in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report.

Director of UNFPA in Geneva, Monica Ferro, says gender inequality is often used to control women’s sexuality and reproduction.

“Gender inequality limits the ability of women to freely make fundamental decisions about when and with whom to have sex, about the use of contraception or health care, and about whether and when to seek employment, or whether to seek higher education,” Ferro said. 

The report says hundreds of millions of women worldwide — typically poorer, rural and less educated — are being left behind, unable to enjoy their rights to sexual and reproductive health.

Women fare best in countries that have invested most in gender-equality policies and programs, Ferro tells VOA, adding that most of these countries are in the developed world.

“If you look at the countries who are the most challenged ones, it is countries where women still face many barriers in accessing health, in accessing especially sexual, reproductive, health and rights,” she said. “And this has to do also with specific challenges, be it specific economic crises, shortfalls.” 

The UNFPA has set several goals timed to meet the sustainable development goals by 2030, including eliminating preventable maternal deaths, creating universal access to family planning, and achieving zero tolerance for violent and abusive practices that harm women and girls.
…

your ads here!

Using eight radio telescopes literally spanning the globe, scientists have taken the first-ever photograph of a black hole.

The supermassive black hole is at the center of a huge galaxy called M-87, which is 55 million light-years from Earth.

The picture, the result of decades of work by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC), isn’t much to look at. It’s a fuzzy orange and yellow donut floating in space, but the implications for physics, and the incredibly intricate way that researchers got the picture, is science at its best.

The picture is exactly what scientists, particularly the late Albert Einstein, predicted it would look like. There is the eponymous center black hole where gravity is so powerful even light cannot escape, and a circular area of superheated energy rotating around the celestial entity at nearly the speed of light, called the event horizon.

“We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M-87,” EHTC scientist Shep Doeleman announced at a press conference Wednesday in Washington. “And this is the strongest evidence that we have to date for the existence of black holes.”

This picture is so important because while scientists have been seeing the effects that black holes have on the structures around them, they have never actually seen one, and this photo in effect proves their existence, as well as one of the foundational principles of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

200 scientists

At its center, the black hole is so big that even though it’s a long distance away, scientists reasoned it was likely to be the largest such structures viewable from Earth. For that reason, M-87 was chosen for the experiment.

More than 200 scientists worked for about a decade to link the global network of eight radio telescopes, using atomic clocks. One by one in an exact sequence, the instruments were pointed at M-87 at what was, in effect, the same time, back in April 2017.

When the experiment was over, the researchers had five petabytes — or a million gigabytes — of visual information to review. At the press conference, researchers told the story about how it was much quicker to take the data by plane to the various supercomputers being used to analyze the information. They said this was easier than trying to transfer that much data into the cloud.

It took two weeks for a group of supercomputers to analyze the data and begin to form all the collected information into the modest photo that scientists released Wednesday.

And once that photo was collected, the researchers waited two years to publish their data while scientists from all over the world checked their work and signed off on the idea that what was photographed was actually a black hole.

What happens now?

The team isn’t done, though. They already are planning to create even bigger telescopes than the Earth-sized one they used by incorporating space telescopes like the Hubble and the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope. This should allow researchers to take photos of dozens of other black holes.
…

your ads here!

An international scientific team has unveiled a landmark achievement in astrophysics – the first photo of a black hole

News conferences were held in Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo to disclose a “groundbreaking result” from the Event Horizon Telescope project, begun in 2012 to directly observe a black hole using a global network of telescopes and international cooperation of more than 200 researchers.

They targeted two super-massive black holes residing at the center of different galaxies

A black hole swallows stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation -theoretically, all that can be seen are objects reacting to the black hole, not the hole itself.

 “Black holes are thought to evolve at the end of a lifetime of a star, and you can think of a star collapsing in on itself to make a super, super dense object.In the case of our own galaxy, we know that there is a black hole, a super-massive black hole, lurking at its heart,” London Science Museum Director of External Affairs Roger Highfield explains.”It is about as big as the orbit of Mercury, it is a few million times the mass of our own sun and we now think that these super-massive black holes lurk at the heart of every galaxy.”
…

your ads here!

The U.N. population agency chief says she regrets the U.S. government’s decision to cut funding for programs that help ensure safe pregnancies worldwide.

Dr. Natalia Kanem said Wednesday that more than half the $70 million Washington used to give the agency annually was used for life-saving humanitarian programs.

 

The Trump administration announced in 2017 it was cutting all funding to UNFPA, a gesture to American conservatives.

 

Launching the agency’s annual report in Berlin, Kanem said “we do regret the decision of the United States to deny funding to UNFPA as we saved so many lives of women and girls together.”

 

She said UNFPA works in countries such as Venezuela to provide hospitals with supplies for safe births, train doctors “and also to provide contraception to women.”

 

 
…

your ads here!

As the planet heats up, experts say we need to stop burning the fossil fuels that have powered civilization for centuries, and switch to renewable energy. In that upheaval, there will be winners and losers. VOA’s Steve Baragona went to Holyoke, Massachusetts, a small town at the heart of the energy transition.
…

your ads here!

New York City declared a public health emergency Tuesday and ordered mandatory vaccinations for measles in a part of Brooklyn that is home to a large Orthodox Jewish community.

The city took the unusual step amid a surge of 285 measles cases in the city since September, most in one densely packed neighborhood where people now have to get vaccines or risk a $1,000 fine.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there have been 465 cases so far this year, two-thirds of them in New York state. That compares to 372 cases in the U.S. for all of last year. Besides New York, there have been outbreaks this year in Washington state, California. Michigan and New Jersey.

The disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which means it was not being spread domestically.

But cases have been rising in recent years, in part the result of misinformation that makes some parents balk at a crucial vaccine.

Most of the reported illnesses are in children. The CDC says roughly 80 percent of the U.S. cases are age 19 or younger.

Here are some questions and answers about measles:

Question: How dangerous is measles?

Answer: Measles typically begins with a high fever, and several days later a characteristic rash appears on the face and then spreads over the body. Among serious complications, 1 in 20 patients get pneumonia, and 1 in 1,000 get brain swelling that can lead to seizures, deafness or intellectual disability.

While it’s rare in the U.S., about 1 in every 1,000 children who get measles dies, according to the CDC.

Question: How does it spread?

Answer: By coughing or sneezing, and someone can spread the virus for four days before the telltale rash appears.

The virus can live for up to two hours in the air or on nearby surfaces. Nine of 10 unvaccinated people who come into contact with someone with measles will catch it.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, recently called it “one of the most contagious viruses known to man.”

Q: Is a problem outside of the U.S.?

A: Measles is far more common around the world — the World Health Organization said it claimed 110,000 lives in 2017. The WHO says there’s been a 30 percent increase in measles cases in recent years. Unvaccinated Americans traveling abroad, or foreign visitors here, can easily bring in the virus.

For example, a huge outbreak in Madagascar has caused more than 115,000 illnesses and more than 1,200 deaths since September. But you don’t need to go as far as Madagascar — common tourist destinations like England, France, Italy and Greece had measles outbreaks last year. Nearly 83,000 people contracted measles in Europe in 2018, the highest number in a decade.

Q: How many U.S. children are vulnerable?

A: Overall about 92 percent of U.S. children have gotten the combination vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, known as the MMR vaccine. Two shots are required, one around the first birthday and a second between age 4 and 6. Full vaccination is 97 percent effective at preventing measles.

But the CDC says 1 in 12 children do not receive the first dose on time, and in some places vaccination rates are far lower than the national average. For example, an outbreak in Washington state is linked to a community where only about 80 percent of children were properly vaccinated.

Q: Is the vaccine safe?

A: Yes. In the late 1990s, one study linked MMR vaccine to autism but that study was found to be a fraud. Later research found no risk of autism from the vaccine.

Q: Why isn’t everyone vaccinated?

A: Some people can’t be immunized for medical reasons — including infants and people with weak immune systems — and most states allow religious exemptions. But while vaccination against a list of contagious diseases is required to attend school, 17 states allow some type of non-medical exemption for “personal, moral or other beliefs,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Washington state, lawmakers are debating ending that personal or philosophical exemption, as are several other states. California ended a similar exemption in 2015 after a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened 147 people and spread across the U.S. and into Canada.

Q: Why so many cases in New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities?

A: Most families in Brooklyn’s Orthodox enclaves do have their children vaccinated, and most rabbis say there is no religious reason not to get them. But anti-vaccine propaganda has found an audience among a larger than usual percentage of parents in a community used to cultural clashes with city officials. It is also a community whose members travel frequently to other countries where measles is more prevalent. 
…

your ads here!

Scientists have mapped the genome of a strain of cholera extracted a century ago from a sick British soldier during World War I and found clues to how some cholera bacteria strains cause epidemics today.

The bug – thought to be the oldest publicly available sample of the V. cholerae bacterium – was isolated in 1916 from the soldier’s “choleraic diarrhea” while he was convalescing in Egypt, the researchers said.

But their analysis of its genetic code showed it was a non-toxigenic strain and that the soldier was probably sick with some other infection.

The strain was, however, distantly related to strains of cholera bacteria that are causing current outbreaks and have sparked epidemics in the past.

“Even though this isolate (bacterial sample) did not cause an outbreak it is important to study those that do not cause disease as well as those that do,” said Nick Thomson, who co-led the study at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, U.K.

“Studying strains from different points in time can give deep insights into the evolution of this species of bacteria and link that to historical reports of human disease.”

Cholera is a severe diarrhoeal disease caused by eating or drinking food or water contaminated with toxigenic cholera bacteria. It can spread rapidly in areas with poor sanitation and has cause several historical global epidemics, or pandemics.

Experts say one of these outbreaks, known as the “sixth pandemic,” coincided with World War I.

Outbreaks of cholera are currently spreading in several countries including Yemen and Mozambique. The World Health Organization says the disease is “a global threat,” and experts estimate there are between 1.3 and 4.0 million cases and between 21,000 and 143,000 cholera deaths worldwide each year.

Matthew Dorman, who co-led the research, said the analysis of also revealed the 1916 strain had certain faults, including lacking a flagellum — a thin tail that enables bacteria to swim.

“We discovered a mutation in a gene critical for growing flagella, which may be the reason for this,” Dorman said.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal on Wednesday.
…

your ads here!

Scientists are using fake eggs to spy on whooping cranes in hopes of learning why some chicks die in the egg, while others hatch.

Data gathered by the spy eggs could help biologists in Louisiana and Canada preserve the endangered long-legged birds, which have made a tenuous rebound after dwindling almost to extinction in the 1940s.

“It’s a fascinating way of spying on endangered species’ reproduction in a way that allows us to assist in the recovery,” said Dr. Axel Moehrenschlager, the Calgary Zoo’s director of conservation and science.

The Calgary Zoo lent eight of the spy eggs, more properly known as “data loggers,” to Louisiana researchers.

The Louisiana wildlife biologists swap the egg-shaped data loggers for one of the two eggs that many cranes lay. The real eggs come to Audubon Nature Institute ’s Species Survival Center in New Orleans, where they’re incubated until they’re nearly ready to hatch … or not.

Then the biologists in Louisiana swap the real eggs back into the nests .

The electronic data loggers use infrared connections to transfer information to nearby computers. It’s sent for analysis to scientists in Calgary, where the only remaining wild natural flock of whooping cranes is based.

Whoopers are the tallest birds and rarest cranes in North America. They stand about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, with black-tipped wings that span nearly 7 feet (2.1 meters).

Overhunting and habitat loss cut their numbers to 21 in the 1940s, but with some help from humans the number had risen to about 850 at the end of 2018.

Louisiana is home to 74 whooping cranes in the wild.

“We’ve got some pairs that haven’t been successful, and we want to see if we could see what might be going on with them,” said Sara Zimorski, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries .

“In the bigger picture, we don’t know a lot about wild nest incubation,” she said. The new information may help improve provisions for captive pairs and settings for incubators.

Richard Dunn, curator at the Species Survival Center, says he hopes to learn if he needs to tweak incubator settings to more closely mimic Louisiana’s climate, which is hotter and damper than the northern settings where previous studies were done.

A crane expert who’s not affiliated with the Louisiana effort said those are entirely reasonable aims. Scott A. Shaffer, a San José State University professor, has been working with data logger eggs since 2010 to study a variety of birds in a number of places. He said the tiny, low-power sensors that reorient tablet and smartphone displays as the devices are moved have helped drive technology that checks for egg turning, allowing second-by-second studies of eggs.

The whooping crane data logger eggs record temperature, humidity and position once a minute. They can also detect when eggs are turned — an important part of keeping developing birds healthy. They were developed by a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists who compared nests of captive whooping cranes and sandhill cranes at the Calgary Zoo’s Devonian Wildlife Conservation Centre to incubators, hoping to improve the hatching rate of incubated eggs.

Their study, published in 2012, helped people raising the cranes in Canada and the U.S. to adjust incubator temperature and humidity settings, Moehrenschlager said.

The Species Survival Center on New Orleans’ west bank houses 36 of the 163 whooping cranes currently living in captivity, including 10 destined for a new facility under construction by the Dallas Zoo . None of the birds at Audubon has yet begun nesting, Dunn said.

Zimorski and fellow Louisiana wildlife biologist Phillip Vasseur put a few data loggers out last year to be sure the birds would tolerate the intrusion of eggs being swapped in and out.

Zimorski said the birds decide much of the wild deployment, since many this year are nesting in inaccessible swamps where biologists keep tabs on them through airplane flyovers.

Both Zimorski and Dunn said there’s nowhere near enough data yet for any conclusions.

“We need a couple more years so we can get additional pairs and some years of repeat data,” Zimorski said.
…

your ads here!

Scientists are using fake eggs to spy on whooping cranes in hopes of learning why some chicks die in the egg, while others hatch.

Data gathered by the spy eggs could help biologists in Louisiana and Canada preserve the endangered long-legged birds, which have made a tenuous rebound after dwindling almost to extinction in the 1940s.

“It’s a fascinating way of spying on endangered species’ reproduction in a way that allows us to assist in the recovery,” said Dr. Axel Moehrenschlager, the Calgary Zoo’s director of conservation and science.

The Calgary Zoo lent eight of the spy eggs, more properly known as “data loggers,” to Louisiana researchers.

The Louisiana wildlife biologists swap the egg-shaped data loggers for one of the two eggs that many cranes lay. The real eggs come to Audubon Nature Institute ’s Species Survival Center in New Orleans, where they’re incubated until they’re nearly ready to hatch … or not.

Then the biologists in Louisiana swap the real eggs back into the nests .

The electronic data loggers use infrared connections to transfer information to nearby computers. It’s sent for analysis to scientists in Calgary, where the only remaining wild natural flock of whooping cranes is based.

Whoopers are the tallest birds and rarest cranes in North America. They stand about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, with black-tipped wings that span nearly 7 feet (2.1 meters).

Overhunting and habitat loss cut their numbers to 21 in the 1940s, but with some help from humans the number had risen to about 850 at the end of 2018.

Louisiana is home to 74 whooping cranes in the wild.

“We’ve got some pairs that haven’t been successful, and we want to see if we could see what might be going on with them,” said Sara Zimorski, a biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries .

“In the bigger picture, we don’t know a lot about wild nest incubation,” she said. The new information may help improve provisions for captive pairs and settings for incubators.

Richard Dunn, curator at the Species Survival Center, says he hopes to learn if he needs to tweak incubator settings to more closely mimic Louisiana’s climate, which is hotter and damper than the northern settings where previous studies were done.

A crane expert who’s not affiliated with the Louisiana effort said those are entirely reasonable aims. Scott A. Shaffer, a San José State University professor, has been working with data logger eggs since 2010 to study a variety of birds in a number of places. He said the tiny, low-power sensors that reorient tablet and smartphone displays as the devices are moved have helped drive technology that checks for egg turning, allowing second-by-second studies of eggs.

The whooping crane data logger eggs record temperature, humidity and position once a minute. They can also detect when eggs are turned — an important part of keeping developing birds healthy. They were developed by a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists who compared nests of captive whooping cranes and sandhill cranes at the Calgary Zoo’s Devonian Wildlife Conservation Centre to incubators, hoping to improve the hatching rate of incubated eggs.

Their study, published in 2012, helped people raising the cranes in Canada and the U.S. to adjust incubator temperature and humidity settings, Moehrenschlager said.

The Species Survival Center on New Orleans’ west bank houses 36 of the 163 whooping cranes currently living in captivity, including 10 destined for a new facility under construction by the Dallas Zoo . None of the birds at Audubon has yet begun nesting, Dunn said.

Zimorski and fellow Louisiana wildlife biologist Phillip Vasseur put a few data loggers out last year to be sure the birds would tolerate the intrusion of eggs being swapped in and out.

Zimorski said the birds decide much of the wild deployment, since many this year are nesting in inaccessible swamps where biologists keep tabs on them through airplane flyovers.

Both Zimorski and Dunn said there’s nowhere near enough data yet for any conclusions.

“We need a couple more years so we can get additional pairs and some years of repeat data,” Zimorski said.
…

your ads here!

New York City has declared a public health emergency over a measles outbreak and ordered mandatory vaccinations for some people who may have been exposed to the virus.

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the order Tuesday. It covers people who live in four ZIP codes in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, where more than 250 people have gotten measles since September.

 

The declaration requires all unvaccinated people in those areas who may have been exposed to the virus to get the vaccine, including children over 6 months old.

 

People who resist could be fined $1,000.

 

The outbreak has been centered in Williamsburg’s large community of Orthodox Jews.

 

Earlier this week, the city ordered religious schools and day care programs serving that community to exclude unvaccinated students or risk being closed down.

 
…

your ads here!

New York City has declared a public health emergency over a measles outbreak and ordered mandatory vaccinations for some people who may have been exposed to the virus.

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the order Tuesday. It covers people who live in four ZIP codes in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, where more than 250 people have gotten measles since September.

 

The declaration requires all unvaccinated people in those areas who may have been exposed to the virus to get the vaccine, including children over 6 months old.

 

People who resist could be fined $1,000.

 

The outbreak has been centered in Williamsburg’s large community of Orthodox Jews.

 

Earlier this week, the city ordered religious schools and day care programs serving that community to exclude unvaccinated students or risk being closed down.

 
…

your ads here!

Venom from a dangerous spider could give stroke patients a better chance of survival, according to Australian biochemists.

A bite from the Fraser Island funnel-web spider can kill a person in 15 minutes, but its venom could be used to develop a drug to prevent brain damage. Scientists say the toxins can shut off a pathway in the brain that triggers the widespread death of cells after a stroke. 

Researchers at the University of Queensland believe it’s a breakthrough that could protect stroke patients while they are being taken to hospital. Doctors talk about a four-and-a-half-hour window to give proper care and drugs to stroke patients, meaning those who live far from a hospital can miss that window.

The research team believes a drug developed from spider venom could be administered immediately by paramedics, protecting patients from further brain damage following a stroke.

“The brain becomes acidic, and it turns out there is this little ion channel sitting on your neurons called acid sensing ion channel, which senses this decrease in PH,” said lead scientist Professor Glenn King. “It turns on and it sets off a cell death pathway for reasons we do not understand and your neurons begin to die, and so what we found in the venom of the Fraser Island funnel-web spider is the best known inhibitor of that channel, and if you inhibit that channel you prevent the neurons dying. So we cannot stop neurons that have already died, but we have shown that you can give this drug up to eight hours after the stroke and still get really massive protection of the brain.”

The Fraser Island funnel-web spider is unique to the Australian state of Queensland. It lives in burrows beneath soil and sand.

Clinical trials are some way off, but the team says that experiments with rodents have been successful.

The World Health Organization says that stroke is the second leading cause of death globally, and the third leading cause of disability. 

In Australia, it is estimated that 56,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
…

your ads here!

Venom from a dangerous spider could give stroke patients a better chance of survival, according to Australian biochemists.

A bite from the Fraser Island funnel-web spider can kill a person in 15 minutes, but its venom could be used to develop a drug to prevent brain damage. Scientists say the toxins can shut off a pathway in the brain that triggers the widespread death of cells after a stroke. 

Researchers at the University of Queensland believe it’s a breakthrough that could protect stroke patients while they are being taken to hospital. Doctors talk about a four-and-a-half-hour window to give proper care and drugs to stroke patients, meaning those who live far from a hospital can miss that window.

The research team believes a drug developed from spider venom could be administered immediately by paramedics, protecting patients from further brain damage following a stroke.

“The brain becomes acidic, and it turns out there is this little ion channel sitting on your neurons called acid sensing ion channel, which senses this decrease in PH,” said lead scientist Professor Glenn King. “It turns on and it sets off a cell death pathway for reasons we do not understand and your neurons begin to die, and so what we found in the venom of the Fraser Island funnel-web spider is the best known inhibitor of that channel, and if you inhibit that channel you prevent the neurons dying. So we cannot stop neurons that have already died, but we have shown that you can give this drug up to eight hours after the stroke and still get really massive protection of the brain.”

The Fraser Island funnel-web spider is unique to the Australian state of Queensland. It lives in burrows beneath soil and sand.

Clinical trials are some way off, but the team says that experiments with rodents have been successful.

The World Health Organization says that stroke is the second leading cause of death globally, and the third leading cause of disability. 

In Australia, it is estimated that 56,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
…

your ads here!

U.S. measles cases are continuing to jump, and most of the reported illnesses are in children.

Health officials say 465 measles cases have been reported this year, as of last week. That’s up from 387 the week before.

The numbers are preliminary. The 2019 tally is already the most since 2014, when 667 were reported. The most before that was 963 cases in 1994.

Outbreaks have hit several states, including California, Michigan and New Jersey. New York City accounted for about two-thirds of the U.S. cases reported last week.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated the numbers Monday. Roughly 80% of the cases are age 19 or younger.

The CDC recommends that all children get two doses of measles vaccine. It says the vaccine is 97% effective.
…

your ads here!

U.S. measles cases are continuing to jump, and most of the reported illnesses are in children.

Health officials say 465 measles cases have been reported this year, as of last week. That’s up from 387 the week before.

The numbers are preliminary. The 2019 tally is already the most since 2014, when 667 were reported. The most before that was 963 cases in 1994.

Outbreaks have hit several states, including California, Michigan and New Jersey. New York City accounted for about two-thirds of the U.S. cases reported last week.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated the numbers Monday. Roughly 80% of the cases are age 19 or younger.

The CDC recommends that all children get two doses of measles vaccine. It says the vaccine is 97% effective.
…

your ads here!

Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a mild electrical current improved a form of memory enough that they performed like people in their 20s, a new study found.

 

Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.

 

The treatment is aimed at “working memory,” the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it’s crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said.

 

“It’s where your consciousness lives … where you’re working on information,” he said.

 

The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it’s notable for showing success in older people and because the memory boost persisted for nearly an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.

 

One scientist who has previously reported boosting working memory with electrical stimulation noted that the decline in this ability with normal aging is not huge. But “they removed the effects of age from these people,” said Dr. Barry Gordon, a professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

 

“It’s a superb first step” toward demonstrating a way to improve mental performance, said Gordon, who was not involved in the new study.

 

Reinhart agreed that more research is needed before it can be formally tested as a treatment.

 

The electrical current was administered through a tight-fitting cap that also monitored each subject’s brainwaves. For study participants, that current felt like a slight tingling, itching or poking sensation under the electrodes for about 30 seconds, Reinhart said. After that, the skin got used to the current and it was imperceptible.

 

The researchers’ idea was to improve communication between the brain’s prefrontal cortex in the front and the temporal cortex on the left side, because the rhythms of activity in those two regions had fallen out of sync with each other.

 

So the researchers applied the current to those two regions to nudge the activity cycles back into a matching pattern. The results provided new evidence that a breakdown in that communication causes the loss of working memory with age, Reinhart said.

 

Part of the study included 42 participants in their 20s, plus 42 others aged 60 to 76. First they were tested on a measure of working memory. It involved viewing an image such as a harmonica or broken egg on a computer screen, then a blank screen for three seconds, and then a second image that was either identical to the first or slightly modified. The subjects had to judge whether it was the same image or not.

 

During a sham stimulation, the older group was less accurate than the younger participants. But during and after 25 minutes of real brain stimulation, they did as well. The improvement lasted for at least another 50 minutes after the stimulation ended, at which point the researchers stopped testing. It’s not clear how long the benefit reached beyond that, Reinhart said, but previous research suggests it might go for five hours or more after stimulation stops.

 

Researchers got the same result with a second group of 28 subjects over age 62.
…

your ads here!

Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a mild electrical current improved a form of memory enough that they performed like people in their 20s, a new study found.

 

Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.

 

The treatment is aimed at “working memory,” the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it’s crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said.

 

“It’s where your consciousness lives … where you’re working on information,” he said.

 

The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it’s notable for showing success in older people and because the memory boost persisted for nearly an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.

 

One scientist who has previously reported boosting working memory with electrical stimulation noted that the decline in this ability with normal aging is not huge. But “they removed the effects of age from these people,” said Dr. Barry Gordon, a professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

 

“It’s a superb first step” toward demonstrating a way to improve mental performance, said Gordon, who was not involved in the new study.

 

Reinhart agreed that more research is needed before it can be formally tested as a treatment.

 

The electrical current was administered through a tight-fitting cap that also monitored each subject’s brainwaves. For study participants, that current felt like a slight tingling, itching or poking sensation under the electrodes for about 30 seconds, Reinhart said. After that, the skin got used to the current and it was imperceptible.

 

The researchers’ idea was to improve communication between the brain’s prefrontal cortex in the front and the temporal cortex on the left side, because the rhythms of activity in those two regions had fallen out of sync with each other.

 

So the researchers applied the current to those two regions to nudge the activity cycles back into a matching pattern. The results provided new evidence that a breakdown in that communication causes the loss of working memory with age, Reinhart said.

 

Part of the study included 42 participants in their 20s, plus 42 others aged 60 to 76. First they were tested on a measure of working memory. It involved viewing an image such as a harmonica or broken egg on a computer screen, then a blank screen for three seconds, and then a second image that was either identical to the first or slightly modified. The subjects had to judge whether it was the same image or not.

 

During a sham stimulation, the older group was less accurate than the younger participants. But during and after 25 minutes of real brain stimulation, they did as well. The improvement lasted for at least another 50 minutes after the stimulation ended, at which point the researchers stopped testing. It’s not clear how long the benefit reached beyond that, Reinhart said, but previous research suggests it might go for five hours or more after stimulation stops.

 

Researchers got the same result with a second group of 28 subjects over age 62.
…

your ads here!

Spacewalking astronauts tackled battery and cable work outside the International Space Station on Monday.

It was the third spacewalk in just 2 { weeks for the space station crew. NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques hustled through their part in battery swap-outs that began last month. “All right, you rock,” Mission Control radioed.

Next up: laying cable outside the 250-mile-high outpost to provide a backup power circuit for the station’s Canadian-made robot arm and expand wireless communications.

The ongoing battery work involves re-installing two old batteries. One of six new lithium-ion batteries did not work, so McClain had to remove an adapter plate she put in.

Last week, flight controllers used the space station’s robot arm to remove the failed battery along with an associated charging device. Working remotely, the controllers also installed a spare charging device and one of the old batteries made of nickel hydrogen. The second outdated battery will go in — robotically — later this week.

NASA said it will send up another new battery, although it’s uncertain when. Until then, this combination of old and new batteries is expected to work fine, according to managers.

McClain has now logged two spacewalks and Saint-Jacques one. Their six-month mission began in December.

The next spacewalk will be next month by the two Russians on board. Two other Americans round out the six-person crew.
…

your ads here!

Spacewalking astronauts tackled battery and cable work outside the International Space Station on Monday.

It was the third spacewalk in just 2 { weeks for the space station crew. NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques hustled through their part in battery swap-outs that began last month. “All right, you rock,” Mission Control radioed.

Next up: laying cable outside the 250-mile-high outpost to provide a backup power circuit for the station’s Canadian-made robot arm and expand wireless communications.

The ongoing battery work involves re-installing two old batteries. One of six new lithium-ion batteries did not work, so McClain had to remove an adapter plate she put in.

Last week, flight controllers used the space station’s robot arm to remove the failed battery along with an associated charging device. Working remotely, the controllers also installed a spare charging device and one of the old batteries made of nickel hydrogen. The second outdated battery will go in — robotically — later this week.

NASA said it will send up another new battery, although it’s uncertain when. Until then, this combination of old and new batteries is expected to work fine, according to managers.

McClain has now logged two spacewalks and Saint-Jacques one. Their six-month mission began in December.

The next spacewalk will be next month by the two Russians on board. Two other Americans round out the six-person crew.
…

your ads here!

When the weather turns cold and stormy around Cape Cod, it’s common for some sea turtles to get stranded in the choppy waters and end up on the areas beaches. But the numbers of turtles getting beached has been going up dramatically every year, and that’s worrying local scientists. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

your ads here!

When the weather turns cold and stormy around Cape Cod, it’s common for some sea turtles to get stranded in the choppy waters and end up on the areas beaches. But the numbers of turtles getting beached has been going up dramatically every year, and that’s worrying local scientists. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

your ads here!

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. scientists warn that a growing number of patients in Venezuela are getting vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, diphtheria and polio. One of the main hospitals at the Colombia-Venezuelan border says it’s seeing more people who need treatment. Cristina Caicedo Smit has the story.
…

your ads here!