U.S. health officials are concerned about the increasing number of American teenagers smoking electronic cigarettes, a practice commonly known as vaping. So many teenagers are taking up the habit that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is worried that it’s become an epidemic. Nina Vishneva reports from New York in this report narrated by Anna Rice.
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China launched a groundbreaking mission Saturday to land a spacecraft on the largely unexplored far side of the moon, demonstrating its growing ambitions as a space power to rival Russia, the European Union and the U.S. 

 

A Long March 3B rocket carrying a lunar probe blasted off at 2:23 a.m. from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province in southwestern China, the official Xinhua News Agency said. 

 

With its Chang’e 4 mission, China hopes to be the first country to make a soft landing, which is a landing of a spacecraft during which no serious damage is incurred. The moon’s far side is also known as the dark side because it faces away from Earth and remains comparatively unknown. It has a different composition than sites on the near side, where previous missions have landed. 

 

If successful, the mission would propel the Chinese space program to a leading position in one of the most important areas of lunar exploration. 

 

China landed its Yutu, or “Jade Rabbit,” rover on the moon five years ago and plans to send its Chang’e 5 probe there next year and have it return to Earth with samples — the first time that will have been done since 1976. A crewed lunar mission is also under consideration.  

Chang’e 4 is also a lander-rover combination and will explore both above and below the lunar surface after arriving at the South Pole-Aitken basin’s Von Karman crater following a 27-day journey. 

 

It will also perform radio-astronomical studies that, because the far side always faces away from Earth, will be “free from interference from our planet’s ionosphere, human-made radio frequencies and auroral radiation noise,” space industry expert Leonard David wrote on the website Space.com. 

 

It may also carry plant seeds and silkworm eggs, according to Xinhua. 

 

Chang’e is the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology. 

 

China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, making it only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so. It has put a pair of space stations into orbit, one of which is still operating as a precursor to a more than 60-ton station that is due to come online in 2022. The launch of a Mars rover is planned for the mid-2020s. 

 

To facilitate communication between controllers on Earth and the Chang’e 4 mission, China in May launched a relay satellite named Queqiao, or “Magpie Bridge,” after an ancient Chinese folk tale. 

 

China’s space program has benefited from cooperation with Russia and European nations, although it was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station, mainly because of U.S. legislation barring such cooperation amid concerns over its strong military connections. Its program also suffered a rare setback last year with the failed launch of its Long March 5 rocket. 
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NASA’s new Mars lander has captured the first sounds of the “really unworldly” Martian wind.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory released audio clips of the alien wind Friday. The low-frequency rumblings were collected by the InSight lander during its first week of operations at Mars.

The wind is estimated to be blowing 10 mph to 15 mph (16 kph to 24 kph). These are the first sounds from Mars that are detectible by human ears, according to the researchers.

“Reminds me of sitting outside on a windy summer afternoon … In some sense, this is what it would sound like if you were sitting on the InSight lander on Mars,” Cornell University’s Don Banfield told reporters.

Scientists involved in the project agree the sound has an otherworldly quality to it.

Thomas Pike of Imperial College London said the rumbling is “rather different to anything that we’ve experienced on Earth, and I think it just gives us another way of thinking about how far away we are getting these signals.”

The noise is of the wind blowing against InSight’s solar panels and the resulting vibration of the entire spacecraft. The sounds were recorded by an air pressure sensor inside the lander that’s part of a weather station, as well as the seismometer on the deck of the spacecraft.

The low frequencies are a result of Mars’ thin air density and even more so the seismometer itself — it’s meant to detect underground seismic waves, well below the threshold of human hearing. The seismometer will be moved to the Martian surface in the coming weeks; until then, the team plans to record more wind noise.

The 1976 Viking landers on Mars picked up spacecraft shaking caused by wind, but it would be a stretch to consider it sound, said InSight’s lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt, of JPL in Pasadena, California.

The “really unworldly” sounds from InSight, meanwhile, have Banerdt imaging he’s “on a planet that’s in some ways like the Earth, but in some ways really alien.”

InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26.

“We’re all still on a high from the landing last week … and here we are less than two weeks after landing, and we’ve already got some amazing new science,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, acting director of planetary science. “It’s cool, it’s fun.”
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Gorillas at a zoo in England have demonstrated a distinctly human trait while attempting to solve a puzzle: cheating.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for urgent action to put a brake on road traffic crashes that kill 1.35 million people every year, mostly in poor developing countries.

In Geneva, the U.N. agency launched its global status report on road safety 2018.

The report found road traffic injuries to be the leading killer of children and young people aged five to 29 years, with a death occurring every 24 seconds. The report said more than half of those killed are pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcycle riders and passengers.

Etienne Krug, head of the U.N. Agency’s Department on Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention, called these deaths a huge inequality issue.

“Low-income countries have one percent of the vehicles in the world and 13 percent of all the deaths; while high-income countries have 40 percent of all the vehicles,” Krug said. “So, that is 40 times more, but only seven percent of the deaths.That is half of the deaths with 40 times more vehicles.”

The report said death rates are highest in Africa and lowest in Europe. Some of the key risk factors include speeding, drinking and driving, and failure to use seat belts, motorcycle helmets and child restraints.

Krug said putting the right measures in place will save lives. These include the right legislation and enforcement, creating special lanes for cyclists and improving the quality of vehicles.

“It is not acceptable that vehicles are being sold in developing countries that look the same as the vehicles that we see here in Switzerland or the U.S. or anywhere else, but that are not,” Krug told VOA. “Because to make them cheaper, they have been stripped of all of their safety features, such as air bags or electronic stability control, etc.”

WHO noted that 48 middle- and high-income countries that have implemented strong road traffic laws and other safety measures have made progress in reducing road deaths.

However, it said no such progress has been made in low-income countries where safety measures are lacking.
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MRI scans help doctors diagnose diseases or injuries without radiation. MRI technology uses powerful magnets, radio waves and a computer to make detailed pictures inside the body.

This is especially important for heart patients. With an MRI, doctors can check to see if blood vessels are blocked. They can also check for heart damage after a heart attack.

The downside is that patients must lie motionless in a long tube for a long period of time, which is especially challenging for people with claustrophobia.

University of Missouri School of Medicine researcher Dr. Talissa Altes says the procedure can be very difficult for some patients.

“It can be very hard. It can be very tiring, and they are often very long exams. We schedule them in 90 minute, an hour and a half, slots, which if you have ever been in an MR scanner, that is a long time,” Altes said.

In order to get a clear picture, patients must hold their breath, over and over.

“In general, an MRI takes a long time to acquire a single image, and if you are moving during the acquisition of that image, you will get blurring,” said Robert Thomen, another researcher on the University of Missouri School of Medicine team.

Thoman and Altes are working on a project called Heart Speed. With Heart Speed, data analysis software pulls out motion information from the magnetic resonance images. Their colleague, Steve Van Doren, says Heart Speed would allow radiologists to see the heart clearly even if a patient is breathing normally.

“We found that we could separate breathing motion from the heart motion quite well using the software, and we thought we should try to start applying this to real patient data,” Van Doren said.

The goal? A more comfortable scan for patients who can breathe at a normal pace. Without repeated breath holds, scans would also be much shorter — just 15 to 30 minutes.

“Patients will benefit because it will be easier for them to do the exam,” Altes said, adding that “hopefully the radiologist who reads it or the cardiologist who reads the MRI will benefit because the images will be much better.”

The researchers estimate the Heart Speed technology will be available for clinical use within five years.  
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When people get magnetic resonance imaging scans, known as MRI’s, they spend a long time in a tube with very little head room. The procedure is especially difficult for people who are claustrophobic. At the University of Missouri, researchers are working to make the experience better for both doctors and patients. More from VOA’s Carol Pearson.
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In the three months since the Ebola outbreak began in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the hemorrhagic fever has sparked debate in communities and become a talking point for politicians ahead of the Dec. 23 election. It is, they say, a war of information to persuade locals to take precautions and to trust health officials. So far, more than 420 cases have been reported. VOA’s Anita Powell accompanied Ebola awareness campaigners in eastern Congo and brings us this report.
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Divisions deepened at the U.N. climate talks Thursday, pitting rich nations against poor ones, oil exporters against vulnerable island nations, and those governments prepared to act on global warming against those who want to wait and see.

The stakes were raised by a scientific report that warned achieving the most ambitious target in the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit emissions is getting increasingly difficult. Fresh figures released this week showed that emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped the highest in seven years, making the task of cutting those emissions one day to zero even more challenging.

Negotiators at the climate talks in Katowice, Poland, still disagree on the way forward but have just a few days to finish their technical talks before ministers take over.

“It’s going to be a big challenge,” said Amjad Abdulla, the chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. “We are going to forward the sticky issues to next week.”

Among the splits that need to be overcome before the conference ends on Dec. 14 are:

• The question of what kind of flexibility developing countries will have when it comes to reporting their emissions and efforts to curb them.

The issue is central to the Paris rulebook, which countries have committed to finalizing this year. Environmental activists insist that countries such as Brazil, with its vast Amazon rainforest, and China, the world’s biggest polluter, should have to provide hard data on emissions and not be treated like poorer nations who don’t have the ability to do a precise greenhouse tally.

Complicating matters, a group of rich countries that includes the United States and Australia is seeking similar leeway as developing nations.

• Several oil-exporting countries have objected to the idea of explicitly mentioning ways in which global warming can be kept at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body made up of scientists from around the world, recently proposed “policy pathways” that would achieve this goal, which foresee phasing out almost all use of coal, oil and gas by 2050.

But Saudi Arabia and some of its allies say it would be wrong to cite those pathways in a text about future ambitions.

• Developing countries are frustrated that rich nations won’t commit themselves to providing greater assurances on financial support for poor nations facing hefty costs to fight the effects of climate change. European governments argue that they are bound by budget rules that limit their ability to allocate money more than a few years in advance.

What’s clear is that few countries are moving in the right direction to halt global warming.

“The first data for this year point to a strong rise in the global CO2 emissions, almost all countries are contributing to this rise,” said Corinne Le Quere, who led the team that published the emissions study this week.

“In China, it’s boosted by economic stimulation in construction. In the U.S., an unusual year, cold winter and hot summer, both boosting the energy demand. In Europe, the emissions are down but less than they used to be, and that’s because of growing emissions in transport that are offsetting benefits elsewhere,” she told the meeting in Katowice.

Le Quere, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in England, noted some positive news.

“We have renewable energy,” she said. “It is displacing coal in the U.S. and in Europe, and it is expanding elsewhere.

“It’s not enough to meet the growing energy demand in developing countries in particular,” she said. “But the industry is growing.”

Host nation Poland, which depends on coal for 80 percent of its energy needs, is among those demanding help for workers in coal and gas industries who could lose their jobs as nations shift to cleaner energy.

In light of the deep divisions over how to best fight climate change, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is considering returning to Katowice to push for a strong declaration.

“It very much remains a possibility,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Thursday. “If he feels his presence will be useful, he will go back. But no decision has yet been made.”
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rolling back a regulation for coal plants that would allow new plants a lower standard on carbon emissions.

The EPA made the announcement Thursday, saying the Obama-era ruling required new coal plants to produce no more than 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour. The change would allow new plants to produce up to 1,900 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour.

Under the Obama regulation, plants were to cut their carbon emissions by using some natural gas, installing some carbon-capture equipment, or changing to more efficient technology that is not yet widely available.

EPA acting head Andrew Wheeler said Thursday at a news conference in Washington, “We are rescinding unfair burdens, leveling the playing field.”

Two new coal plants are planned in the United States over the next four years. President Donald Trump vowed during his campaign to shore up the coal industry, which has been facing competition in the past decade from cheaper and more plentiful natural gas.

Renewable resources like wind and solar power have also been growing in use, cutting into the energy market that coal once dominated.

Coal use in the United States has fallen 44 percent since its peak in 2007. The U.S. Energy Information Agency expects 2018 to mark the lowest level of coal consumption since 1979.

The rollback on regulations comes ahead of an international conference next week in Poland, where U.S. officials plan to host a panel on fossil fuel technology.
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Many car companies are looking at adding sensors to monitor your vital signs while you drive. The University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing, which is focused on digital health and innovation, brings together experts to look at the benefits and dangers of this next step in automotive design and technology. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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Israel will likely allow exports of medical cannabis by the end of the year, a top lawmaker said on Thursday, a move that would boost state coffers and slow the growing number of firms establishing farms abroad.

Israeli companies – befitting from a favorable climate and expertise in medical and agricultural technologies – are among the world’s biggest producers of medical cannabis.

The finance and health ministries estimate exports could bring in about $1 billion a year – but some MPs have up to now stopped Israeli-grown cannabis going abroad, fearing more cultivation could push more drugs onto the streets at home.

Things changed when Yoav Kisch, chairman of parliament’s internal affairs and environment committee, submitted a bill to allow exports that imposed tougher regulations on exporters and threatened jail terms and hefty fines for violations.

That passed its first of three votes in parliament last week, and is back with Kisch’s committee for revisions. “I aim to finish the legislation by the end of the year,” Kisch told Reuters.

“We believe it’s medicine and it’s important … It’s a big potential for Israeli farmers and the economy,” added Kisch, who estimates the regulation could boost tax income by 1 billion shekels ($268 million) a year.

There are currently eight cultivating companies in Israel – many of whom have resorted to opening farms abroad to get into the international market. The government says there have been many requests form business owners awaiting authorization.

Cannbit – a newcomer which has a farm in southern Israel and this week signed a deal with local medical cannabis supplier Tikun Olam – said it was looking into opening a farm in Portugal if the new regulations do not go through.

“If there will be exports from Israel there is less tendency for investments in other places,” said CEO Yaron Razon.

Together, another Israeli cannabis grower, has already started up farms in Europe after signing a $300 million contract to supply cannabis products to a Canadian company.

“Exporting from Israel can have a big impact on the industry and economy,” said Alex Rabinovitch, controlling shareholder of InterCure, which recently bought medical cannabis firm Canndoc.

 
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For experts in the field of ocean mapping, it is no small irony that we know more about the surfaces of the moon and Mars than we do about our planet’s sea floor.

“Can you imagine operating on the land without a map, or doing anything without a map?” asked Larry Mayer, director of the U.S.-based Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, a research body that trains hydrographers and develops tools for mapping.

“We depend on having that knowledge of what’s around us, and the same is true for the ocean,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

With their deep craters and mountain ranges, the contours of the earth beneath the waves are both vast and largely unknown.

Seabed 2030

But a huge mapping effort is underway to change that. 

The U.N.-backed project, called Seabed 2030, is urging countries and companies to pool data to create a map of the entire ocean floor by 2030. The map will be freely available to all.

“We obviously need a lot of cooperation from different parties, individuals as well as private companies,” said Mao Hasebe, project coordinator at the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organization supporting the initiative. “We think it’s ambitious, but we don’t think it’s impossible,” Hasebe said.

The project, which launched in 2017, is expected to cost about $3 billion. It is a collaboration between the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO, a nonprofit association of experts that is already involved in charting the ocean floor.

The result would be greater knowledge of the oceans’ biodiversity, improved understanding of the climate, advanced warning of impending disasters, and the ability to better protect or exploit deep-sea resources, Hasebe said.

​Recent advances

So far, the biggest data contributors to Seabed 2030 have been companies, in particular Dutch energy prospector Fugro and deep-sea mapping firm Ocean Infinity. Both were involved in the search for the Malaysian airliner MH370, which disappeared in 2014.

To map the ocean floor, high-tech multibeam echosounders transmit a fan of acoustic beams from a ship, which ping back depending on the depth and topography of the ocean floor. That creates data points, which can be converted into a map.

“With advanced sonar technology, it really is like seeing. I think we’ve come out of the era of being the blind man with the stick,” said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey.

“We can survey much more efficiently, and, not only that, but in much greater detail,” he said, adding that the work was painstaking. “The ocean’s a big place!” he said.

The advent of new technology, such as underwater drones and robots, is also speeding up the mapping process.

A global competition hosted by energy giant Shell, the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, is also under way, offering $7 million to teams that can develop technologies to conduct ocean exploration autonomously, rapidly and to a high resolution.

A team from Seabed 2030 has reached the final stages of the competition with an idea based on remotely operated robots working in extreme depths to map territory independently.

Economic benefits

Exploring Earth’s final frontier will do more than satisfy scientific curiosity, it should bring economic benefits, too.

More than 90 percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a U.N. body, making safe navigation a key motivator for mapping.

“If a ship runs aground it’s a terrible day for the economy, it’s a terrible day for the environment and it’s a bad day for the captain, too,” Mayer said.

Seabed 2030’s map would have other benefits, experts said: In a warming world, it would provide a better idea of sea levels as ice melts and, importantly, warn about impending tsunamis that could devastate coastal communities.

They said it would also help the so-called “blue economy” as countries and companies seek to protect or exploit deep-sea resources, from exploring for oil and gas to installing wind farms or laying fiber-optic cables for the internet.

That is predicted to become more important in the coming years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It expects the ocean economy to contribute $3 trillion to the world economy by 2030, up from $1.5 trillion in 2010.

Political rifts

Some parts of the oceans — the East Coast of the United States, areas around Japan, New Zealand and Ireland — are relatively well-mapped, experts said. Others, including the West African coast or that off the Caribbean, remain largely blank.

The introduction of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty, allowed countries to determine their continental shelves and exclusive economic zones, legitimate territorial claims off their coasts.

It also spurred a rush to map and claim land, Larter said.

“That’s the biggest land grab in recent history,” he said.

For Julian Barbiere of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, it would be a “paradox” if, after collaboration at a scientific and technical level to share data, countries used that knowledge against each other in geopolitical spats.

“There are already tensions in some parts of the world, and one of the reasons for that is access to resources,” he said.

Some countries, he added, are reluctant to give up strategic proprietary data to the Seabed 2030 project, largely because of national security concerns or in areas with sensitive geopolitical tensions, such as the South China Sea.

“There is already a lot of data, which is sitting there but it’s not being released. We hope to change attitudes and to really get countries to contribute,” Barbiere said.

The next phase of the project, he said, is to encourage data donors and crowdsourcing, not just from exploration vessels but from cargo ships, recreational sea-users and fishing boats.

“(It) goes back to this principle: the ocean is an international space by definition … part of the common heritage of mankind,” he said.

Looking ahead, in a bid to meet the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 14 — to conserve and sustainably use the oceans — mapping will take center stage during negotiations to be completed by 2020, as nations create a new, legally binding treaty to protect the high seas.

“There are so many benefits to knowing more about the ocean floor,” Hasebe said. “Humanity as a whole would be able to benefit.”
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Emissions of planet-warming gases will hit an all-time high this year, according to a new report.

The figures are the latest indication of how far the world is from meeting the goal set out in Paris in 2015 to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

The report comes as U.N. negotiators meet in Poland for the latest round of talks on confronting climate change.

Emissions are projected to rise 2.7 percent this year, according to three studies released Wednesday from the Global Carbon Project, an international scientific collaboration of academics, governments and industry that tracks greenhouse gas emissions. That follows a 1.6 percent rise last year. However, emissions were stable for the three years before that.

“Possibly, this year is unusual,” said lead author Corinne Le Quere at the University of East Anglia. But probably not, she added. “We think that emissions are probably still going to go up for some years unless things change drastically.”

“I’m not that surprised,” said Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute research center, who was not involved in the research. “The world economy is growing, and the cheapest, most scalable easiest way to meet much of that growth still comes from incumbent fossil fuel technologies.”

Projected emissions from China, the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, rose by 4.7 percent this year. Le Quere said a government effort to boost construction and stimulate the economy increased demand for emissions-intensive steel, aluminum and cement.

In the United States, coal continued to give way to cleaner natural gas. But a cold winter and a hot summer both raised energy demands, contributing to an estimated 2.5 percent increase in emissions.

Rising oil use for transportation also was a factor, as American consumers are once again buying bigger cars.

Emissions declined by 0.7 percent in the 28-nation European Union, though emissions from oil increased.

The transportation sector is the “biggest problem, I would say, worldwide,” Le Quere added. “We are really not making a dent in emissions from transport, in spite of the fact that the technology for electric cars is there.”

The good news is that renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds. That should help take the edge off the emissions curve, even as growth picks up in another Asian giant — India.

“We’re not going to see what we saw in China in the early 2000s” when that country overtook, and then doubled, emissions of the previous leader, the United States, she said.

Trembath cautions, however, that Africa remains a question mark. “We see China- and India-like growth numbers, 5 to 10 percent annual GDP growth, coming from a lot of sub-Saharan African countries,” he said. “That could mean a lot more oil consumption, a lot more natural gas consumption.”

That’s not a bad thing on many levels, he added. “These are desperately poor countries that are just trying to achieve the same standard of living we enjoy in the United States.”
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“I’m not going to put the country out of business trying to maintain certain standards that probably don’t matter,” President Donald Trump told VOA when asked about the economic impacts of climate change.

When not denying its existence, the Trump administration’s approach to

climate change essentially comes down to three arguments: the United States has already cut its greenhouse gas emissions more than other countries, regardless of any international agreement; regulations to cut emissions come with high costs and few benefits; and those regulations would put the United States at a disadvantage because other countries will not follow.

“When you look at China, and when you look at other countries where they have foul air,” Trump added, “we’re going to be clean, but they’re not, and it costs a lot of money.”

As U.N. climate negotiations get under way in Poland to work out rules for implementing the Paris climate agreement — from which Trump intends to withdraw the United States — experts weigh in on the administration’s claims.

Emissions cuts

It’s true that the United States has reduced its greenhouse gas production more than any other country. U.S. emissions peaked in 2005. In the last decade, they have fallen by about 13 percent, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

But the United States was the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases until 2006. And, others have made bigger cuts by percentage. Hungary’s levels, for example, decreased 14 percent.

U.S. emissions started to fall when the fracking boom took off.

The new technique of hydraulic fracturing turned the United States into a major natural gas producer. As the price of natural gas has dropped, it has been steadily replacing coal as the dominant fuel for electricity generation. Because burning natural gas produces far less carbon dioxide than coal, greenhouse gas emissions have decreased.

More recently, renewable sources such as solar and wind power have started to make inroads on the power grid.

While U.S. emissions have fallen since the 2000s, China’s have soared.

The country pursued astonishing economic growth with an enormous investment in coal-fired power plants. China is now the leading producer of greenhouse gases by far, roughly doubling U.S. output.

Cost-benefit

Trump has argued that regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions would hobble the U.S. economy. He has moved to undo the Obama administration’s proposed rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and efficiency standards for vehicles and appliances, among others.

Critics question whether those regulations would cost as much Trump suggests.

“None of these policies were going to have dramatic increases in the prices that consumers would see,” Duke University public policy professor Billy Pizer said. He added that normal price swings would likely swamp the cost of the regulations Trump targets.

The emissions reductions the Obama administration pledged in Paris “were built largely on a continuation of the coal-to-gas transition and a continuation of growth in renewable energy that’s already happening,” said Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute research center. As such, he added, they “don’t imply a large cost. In fact, they imply a marginal increased benefit to the U.S.”

Those benefits come, for example, because burning less coal produces less air pollution, which lowers health costs.

Not to mention the direct results of climate change: wildfires, floods, droughts and so on.

“We have enough science and enough economics to show that there are damages resulting from us releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that that is not a free thing,” University of Chicago public policy professor Amir Jina said. “And yet, we are artificially setting it as free because we’re not paying the price of that externality.”

He said economists nearly unanimously support a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade program or some other way to put a price on carbon emissions.

Collective action

Few nations have taken the necessary steps to meet the emissions reduction pledges they made in Paris, according to the most recent United Nations emissions gap report.

Even those pledges would fall far short of the Paris goal of limiting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the report adds. Reaching that target will take “unprecedented and urgent action.” A 2016 report said an additional $5.2 trillion investment in renewable energy will be necessary worldwide over the next 25 years.

Trump’s statement — “we’re going to be clean, but they’re not, and it costs a lot of money” — sums up why nations are reluctant to act: no one wants to take on burdens that they think others won’t.

“It’s the thing which has been dogging action on climate change for generations,” Jina said.

“We only really solve the problem if everybody acts together,” he added. “And if enough people are not acting, then we don’t.”

Paris depends on countries following through on increasingly ambitious emissions cuts.

Each country decides what it is willing to do. Every five years, countries come together and show their progress.

“You over time build confidence in each other,” Pizer said. “Ideally, you ratchet up the commitments as you see your actions reciprocated by other countries.”

Trump’s backpedaling on the U.S. commitment raises questions about the prospects.

However, the first of these check-ins is five years away. Trump can’t formally withdraw the United States from the agreement until 2020.

Pizer notes that the predecessor to the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, failed in part because it imposed caps on countries’ carbon emissions, and most of the world balked.

“In my mind, this is the best we can do,” he said. “If there were a different way to do it, I’d be all over that.”
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Gorillas at a zoo in England have demonstrated a distinctly human trait while attempting to solve a puzzle: cheating. 

 

The gorillas were presented with a wall-mounted puzzle that requires the user to guide a peanut through a series of obstacles by poking a stick through various holes. Eventually, the peanut reaches the bottom of the device and drops out. 

Some gorillas, however, figured out an easier way to retrieve the nut. 

 

“We’ve seen a lot of cheating behavior where they’ve been putting their lips up against the device and sucking the nut out, which was not how we intended the device to be used. But it just shows you that they’re very flexible. They’re capable of creating new solving strategies to access the food,” Dr. Fay Clark from Bristol Zoo Gardens told Reuters. 

 

“They have some fascinating problem-solving abilities that have probably not been witnessed before,” she added. 

In addition, the endangered western lowland gorillas, which were introduced to a prototype device earlier this year, have shown that they quite like the game. They regularly returned to play with it, even when there were no more nuts to win, scientists said. 

 

Experts from the University of Bristol and Bristol Zoological Society developed the “Gorilla Game Lab” to encourage the gorillas’ cognitive and puzzle-solving abilities. The prototype device had to be strong enough to withstand a frustrated gorilla, which can be seven times stronger than humans. It also had to be engaging enough to keep them coming back for more. 

 

Each of the modules in the game “are removable, so we can take the modules out, redesign them and put in an additional module or change the actual structure. So it creates an endless stream of new and novel puzzles for them to solve,” said Dr. Stuart Gray of the University of Bristol. 

While the main aim of the project is to create a “positive psychological state of pleasure and satisfaction in the gorillas,” the researchers are already setting their sights on more advanced models that would help zookeepers better understand both the mental and physical conditions of the animals. 

 

“Things like eyesight, hearing, other cognitive functions — all of these could be measurable further on down the line,” Gray said. 
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The U.N. secretary-general on Tuesday urged world leaders to use a climate change summit he will host in 2019 to explain how they plan to ratchet up their efforts to reverse worsening global warming that is leading to a “very dramatic situation.”

Antonio Guterres said the gathering at the United Nations in New York in September would be an “essential piece” in raising ambition to cut heat-trapping emissions, and helping countries cope better with wilder weather and rising seas.

The summit also will seek to raise more funding to ensure wealthy governments keep a 2020 promise to deliver $100 billion annually to help poor countries develop cleanly and adapt to a hotter planet, the U.N. chief added.

“We all know the massive scale of the climate challenge we face,” he told reporters at climate talks in Poland. “And we all know we are not on track.”

In 2020, countries are due to submit to the United Nations updated national climate action plans that are the lynchpin of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015.

Under that accord, nearly 200 governments have committed to limit the rise in global temperatures to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

There has already been an increase of about 1 degree C, and current pledges to reduce emissions are still likely to lead to warming of about 3 degrees C this century, scientists have said. In the coming year, U.N. agencies will work with governments to strengthen their climate action plans covering the decade to 2030, as well as their long-term strategies, Guterres said.

Climate experts said on Tuesday they expected countries to issue a political declaration at the end of the December 2-14 climate talks in Katowice that would firmly signal their intention to do more to cut emissions from 2020.

They should then “sharpen their pencils” and consult with government authorities, businesses and civil society back home to work out how to achieve that, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The world has seen “a technology revolution since Paris,” he said, with renewable energy generation and storage now far cheaper — something countries must make the most of in revising their 2020 plans to cut emissions.

In Katowice, government officials are hammering out rules on how to measure and track emissions reductions under the Paris deal, seeking a formula to achieve widespread and ambitious cuts that is fair to countries with fewer resources.

There are also complex discussions on how rich states should track the funding they have provided and indicate the amount they will contribute in future years — a touchy subject with some governments reluctant to make promises.

Guterres said a central objective of his 2019 summit would be to provide a “transparent approach” to delivering $100 billion to vulnerable countries each year from 2020-2025, when a new target is due to kick in.

He urged donors to replenish the coffers of the flagship Green Climate Fund by the time of the summit, a process the fund’s board has said it aims to complete by October 2019.

The summit, designed to spur political commitment to action, will also involve different groups tackling climate change, from cities and companies to young people, the U.N. said in a briefing note.

The summit aims to win promises for on-the-ground change in polluting industries from oil to cement, and target how supply chains and technology can cut emissions and waste, particularly from farming and food systems.

It also wants cities to make new commitments on low-emission buildings, mass transport and green urban infrastructure, as well as protection for poor communities such as slum dwellers.

“The summit is not an end in itself,” Guterres said. “It is … a tool to leverage unprecedented ambition, transformation and mobilization.”
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The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the throes of its worst-ever Ebola outbreak, with more than 420 cases in the country’s volatile east, and a mortality rate of just under 60 percent. But this outbreak — the nation’s tenth known Ebola epidemic — is unusual because more than 60 percent of patients are women.

Among them is Baby Benedicte. Her short life has already been unimaginably difficult.

At one month old, she is underweight, at 2.9 kilograms. And she is alone. Her mother had Ebola, and died giving birth to her. She’s spent the last three weeks of her life in a plastic isolation cube, cut off from most human contact. She developed a fever at eight days old and was transferred to this hospital in Beni, a town of some half-million people in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

More than 400 people have been diagnosed with Ebola here since the beginning of August, and more than half of them have died in a nation the size of Western Europe that struggles with insecurity and a lack of the most basic infrastructure and services. That makes this the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history, after the hemorrhagic fever killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2013 and 2016.

This is 10th outbreak to strike the vast country since 1976, when Ebola was first identified in Congo. And this particular outbreak is further complicated by a simmering civil conflict that has plagued this region for more than two decades.

Guido Cornale, UNICEF’s coordinator in the region, says the scope of this outbreak is clear.

“It has become the worst outbreak in Congo, this is not a mystery,” he said.

What is mysterious, however, is the demographics of this outbreak. This time, more than 60 percent of cases are women, says the government’s regional health coordinator, Ndjoloko Tambwe Bathe.

“All the analyses show that this epidemic is feminized. Figures like this are alarming. It’s true that the female cases are more numerous than the male cases,” he said.

Bathe declined to predict when the outbreak might end, though international officials have said it may last another six months. Epidemiologists are still studying why this epidemic is so skewed toward women and children, Cornale said.

“So now we can only guess. And one of the guesses is that woman are the caretakers of sick people at home. So if a family member got sick, who is taking care of him or her? Normally, a woman,” he said.

Or a nurse. Many of those affected are health workers, who are on the front line of battling this epidemic. Nurse Guilaine Mulindwa Masika, spent 16 days in care after a patient transmitted the virus to her. She says it was the fight of her life.

“The pain was enormous, the pain was constant,” she said. “The headache, the diarrhea, the vomiting, and the weakness — it was very, very bad.”

For the afflicted, the road to recovery is long and lonely. Masika and her cured colleagues face weeks of leave from work to ensure the risk of infection is gone. In the main hospital in the city of Beni, families who have recovered live together in a large white tent, kept four meters from human contact by a bright orange plastic cordon. They yell hello at their caretakers, who must don protective gear if they want to get any closer.

And for Baby Benedicte, who is tended to constantly by a nurse covered head to toe in protective gear, the future is uncertain. Medical workers aren’t entirely sure where her father is, or if he is going to come for her.

She sleeps most of the day, the nurse says, untroubled by the goings-on around her. Meanwhile, the death toll rises.

 

 

 

 
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The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the throes of its worst-ever Ebola outbreak, with more than 420 cases in the country’s volatile east, and a mortality rate of just under 60 percent. But this outbreak — the nation’s tenth known Ebola epidemic — is unusual because more than 60 percent of patients are women. VOA’s Anita Powell visited the two Ebola hotspots, and brings us this report from the town of Beni.
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“Nature sometimes isn’t pretty,” said University of Maryland environmental scientist Peter May, grabbing a clump of slimy green-brown gunk.

That gunk lines the bottom of what’s called an algal turf scrubber at the Port of Baltimore. The meter-wide, shallow channel runs the length of a football field alongside one of the port’s giant parking lots.

“Actually, it’s always pretty,” May corrected himself. Even the gunk. Because that gunk is removing pollution from the Chesapeake Bay. Plus, May’s colleagues are turning it into clean, renewable electricity.

The Chesapeake needs the help.

​Algal feast

Like many waterways around the world, the bay is polluted with excess nutrients from farm fertilizer runoff, city wastewater and other sources. Algae feast on those nutrients, triggering massive growth that chokes out other aquatic life. Last summer, algal growth left an average of 4.6 cubic kilometers of the bay without oxygen.

A third of the pollution reaching the bay literally falls out of the sky.

Fossil fuels burned in power plants, cars and elsewhere create nitrogen oxide air pollution, which ultimately ends up in the bay, either attached to airborne particles or dissolved in rainwater.

Forests would soak up that pollution. But like many urban areas, the Port of Baltimore has a pavement problem. There’s not a tree to be found at the entire 230-hectare Dundalk Marine Terminal, where the algae scrubber is located.

So regulators require the port to remove as much pollution from the bay as its parking lots allow in. That’s where the algal turf scrubber comes in.

Putting algae to work

The scrubber is like “a controlled algal bloom on land,” May said, “which puts the algae to work pulling nutrients out of the water.”

The city of Durham, N.C., is planning to build another scrubber to clean up a local reservoir. A pilot study found it would cost about half as much as typical pollution control measures, such as constructed wetlands, and much less than retrofitting existing systems. Others are up and running in Florida.

The algal turf scrubber creates one big challenge, May said.

“What do we do with that algae? You have to have an end use or else you’re going to pile that algae up very quickly,” he said.

It’s high in protein and omega-3 fatty acids. It’s been turned into animal feed. It can be fermented into biofuels. Some of May’s colleagues have used it to launch a fertilizer business.

But here at the Port of Baltimore, they’re turning it into electricity.

Digesting for power

May works with University of Maryland colleague Stephanie Lansing, an expert in a process called anaerobic digestion. It’s not much different from our own digestion.

“You have bacteria in your gut that break down food. We’re doing that same process in an anaerobic digester,” Lansing said. “We’re breaking down the material, and we’re producing energy in the process.”

In this case, the microbes digesting the algae produce methane biogas. The biogas runs a fuel cell.

“The fuel cell is actually a very efficient way to use the energy,” she said. This small, pilot system produces a modest amount of electricity. 

“You can use it to charge batteries. You can use it for lights. You can use it for fans,” she added.

The Port of Baltimore plans to build a larger system that will cover about a third of a hectare, which could produce a few hundred kilowatts — still modest, but not bad, when you start with just polluted water and algae.

“It’s an entire cycle where you’re dealing with not only a water pollution problem, but an air pollution issue,” Lansing said.
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The first global award recognizing the achievements of women with disabilities aims to break through stereotypes to show their skills as leaders and problem solvers, its founder said Monday.

A filmmaker, a political campaigner and a public health expert were named the first winners of the Her Ability awards, which were announced to coincide with World Disability Day.

Its founder, Ethiopian campaigner Yetnebersh Nigussie, said she wanted to put a spotlight on disabled women’s achievements to combat the idea that they are passive victims.

“We really wanted to change that image and cherish their abilities and their victories,” Nigussie, who lost her sight at age five, told Reuters.

“In order to change things, people need to really see our abilities and our problem-solving skills that we have developed through life by overcoming attitudinal as well as physical and policy barriers everywhere.”

More than a billion people — about 15 percent of the world’s population — have some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization.

Women with disabilities have been recognized as doubly vulnerable by experts, who say they face additional barriers.

The first winners of the awards, which were set up by Nigussie and the global disability organization Light for the World, all came from the developing world.

They included Toyin Janet Aderemi, the first Nigerian wheelchair-user to study and practice pharmacy, who was recognized for her work on disability-inclusive health and as a lobbyist for disability rights.

She lost the ability to walk due to a childhood bout of polio and had to be carried on her mother’s back until she got her first wheelchair at age 15.

“Winning this award showcases what is possible and how society starts to benefit when you are able to educate a girl child with a disability,” Aderemi said.

“Attitudes are changing but very slowly. … We are just starting to educate our people to rid their minds of the misconceptions they have about disability.”

Ashrafun Nahar, who founded the Women with Disabilities Development Foundation in Bangladesh, won in the rights award category for her campaigns for inclusive policy and equal opportunities in education and work.

The arts winner was Zambian filmmaker Musola Cathrine Kaseketi, who suffered paralysis to a leg in childhood and now works to highlight social issues affecting women with disabilities both through her films and education work.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Monday that gene editing may have “unintended consequences” and said it was establishing a team of experts to set clear guidelines and standards after studying ethical and safety issues.

The Chinese government last Thursday ordered a temporary halt to research activities for people involved in the editing of human genes, after a Chinese scientist said he had edited the genes of twin babies.

Scientist He Jiankui said he used a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of the twin girls born this month. He said gene editing would help protect them from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“Gene editing may have unintended consequences, this is uncharted water and it has to be taken seriously,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, told a news briefing.

“WHO is putting together experts. We will work with member states to do everything we can to make sure of all issues — be it ethical, social, safety — before any manipulation is done.”

He’s announcement, which has not been verified, sparked an international outcry about the ethics and safety of such research.

“We are talking about human beings, editing should not harm the welfare of the future person,” WHO’s Tedros said. “We have to be very careful, the working group will do that with all openness and transparency.”
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