Month: May 2018

Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations ended Thursday as countries failed to resolve differences about implementing the Paris climate accord.

The negotiations will resume in Bangkok in September, where an extra week’s meeting has now been scheduled.

The pact’s 197 signatories have set a December deadline to agree on the precise rules that countries have to stick to under the Paris agreement.

The lack of progress threatens to unravel three years’ worth of work to complete the Paris agreement, a landmark deal reached in 2015 that set a goal to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Overall progress at the meeting in Bonn was very slow, with some countries such as China looking to renegotiate aspects of the Paris deal.

Patricia Espinosa, head of the U.N. agency that oversees climate talks, described the package being negotiated as “highly technical and complex.” It aims to ensure that the efforts countries claim they’re making in the fight against global warming can be verified and compared.

The administration of President Barack Obama was widely credited with helping to bring together the diverging interests of rich and poor countries in the drive to secure the Paris deal. His successor, President Donald Trump, withdrew the U.S. from the accord in June 2017. His administration has attacked climate science, saying it questions whether human activity is behind climate change, and is focused on boosting the fossil fuel industry.
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Young men who smoke are more likely to have a stroke before age 50 than their peers who avoid tobacco, a small study suggests.

Smoking has long been linked to an increased risk of stroke in older adults, but research to date examining this connection in younger adults has mainly focused on women. For the current study, researchers examined data on 615 men who had a stroke before age 50 and compared their smoking habits to a control group of 530 similar men who didn’t have a history of stroke.

Overall, current smokers were 88 percent more likely to have a stroke than men who never smoked, the study found.

Light smokers who had fewer than 11 cigarettes a day were 46 percent more likely to have a stroke. Heavy smokers with a two pack-a-day habit, or more, were over five times more likely to have a stroke.

‘Simple takeaway’

“The simple takeaway is the more you smoke, the more you stroke,” said lead study author Janina Markidan of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Smoking causes inflammation in blood vessels that increases the risk of blood clots forming, which in turn increases the risk of stroke, Markidan said by email.

“Although reducing the number of cigarettes smoked can reduce your risk of stroke, quitting is still the best choice for smokers,” Markidan added.

For the study, researchers focused on what’s known as an ischemic stroke, the most common kind, which occurs when a clot blocks an artery carrying blood to the brain.

Study has limitations

Among the stroke cases included in the study, 239 men had never smoked and 108 were former smokers. Another 103 men smoked less than 11 cigarettes daily, while 97 men smoked between 11 and 20 cigarettes a day and 40 men smoked 21 to 39 cigarettes daily.

An additional 28 men who had strokes smoked more than 40 cigarettes, or two packs, a day.

Most of the men who had strokes in the study were between 35 and 49 years old.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how smoking habits might directly influence the potential for a stroke in younger men.

Another limitation is that researchers lacked data on other tobacco products participants used in addition to cigarettes, which might influence their risk of stroke, researchers note in the journal Stroke.

Results hold true for younger smokers

The study team also lacked data on other factors that can independently influence the risk of stroke such as alcohol consumption or exercise habits.

Even so, the results suggest the link between smoking and strokes that is well established for older adults also holds true for younger smokers, said Allan Hackshaw, a researcher at University College London in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“It shows that smoking has a serious impact even when people are younger,” Hackshaw said by email. “Because treatments for stroke are much better now (fewer die from it straight away), many people who suffer one can have long-lasting consequences and physical disabilities at an age when they are usually expected to be working and physically active/fit.” 
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There’s a budding industry that’s trying to solve the problem of the limp lettuce and tasteless tomatoes in America’s supermarkets.

It’s full of technologists who grow crops in buildings instead of outdoors, short-cutting the need to prematurely harvest produce for a bumpy ride often thousands of miles to consumers in colder climes.

More than 30 high-tech companies from the U.S. to Singapore hoping to turn indoor farming into a major future food source, if only they can clear a stubborn hurdle: high costs.

These companies stack plants inside climate-controlled rooms, parse out nutrients and water, and bathe them with specialized light. It’s all so consumers can enjoy tasty vegetables year-round using a fraction of the water and land that traditional farming requires. Farmers can even brag the produce is locally grown.

But real estate around cities is pricey. Electricity and labor don’t come cheap. And unlike specialty crops like newly legal marijuana, veggies rarely command premium prices. (It’s tough to compete with plants grown in dirt with free sunlight, after all.)

Even the best-funded indoor farming company on the planet — Plenty, which has raised nearly $230 million so far — has embraced a longtime farmers’ crutch: government handouts. It hasn’t found any takers yet.

“We believe society should consider investing in this new form of agriculture in the way it invested in agriculture in the 1940s,” said Plenty CEO Matt Barnard in a recent interview.

Barnard says public aid — in the form of cheaper power — is one way to turn a good but elusive idea into a sustainable venture.

Last year, the U.S. paid farmers $9.3 billion in direct support, and subsidized weather-related crop insurance to the tune of $5.1 billion. In a nutshell, Barnard argues that some of that money could be diverted to crops that grow in rain or shine.

Plenty grows kale, mixed greens, basil and natural sweetener stevia in a grey, low-rise warehouse complex in the industrial suburb of South San Francisco.

Visitors arriving via the back door must don full-body overalls and rubber boots dipped in disinfecting shoe baths before entering the air-tight workspace.

Seedlings are grown on flatbeds and bathed in purple light that gives them the look of a 3D movie watched without glasses. Maturing plants are stuffed into columns where they grow sideways, fed by drip irrigation, and irradiated by columns of light-emitting diodes.

The plants will be clipped and packaged before heading to stores later this year.

But there are some noticeable gaps in the menu. There are no carrots or tomatoes, because long roots that grow down and vines that require human pruning don’t do well on walls.

For indoor farms, making money has largely meant shipping in bulk to grocery stores, a conundrum if costs aren’t in line.

Investment in indoor farming soared to $271 million last year, up from just $36 million in 2016, according to market research firm Cleantech Group.

“The question is, how are they going to scale?” asks Pawel Hardej, CEO of Civic Farms, a vertical farming consultancy in Austin, Texas.

There have been plenty of indoor farming failures already.

FarmedHere shuttered its operations in Louisville, Kentucky, and Bedford Park, Illinois, in January last year due to cost overruns.

Georgia-based PodPonics, which filed for bankruptcy in 2016, cited labor costs as its biggest drag.

Google’s X, the search giant’s secretive “moonshot factory,” killed its indoor farming efforts because it couldn’t grow food staples like grains and rice.

Even fans of the technology aren’t sure it can beat another sheltered alternative: greenhouses.

“Vertical farming to a lot of [investors] is an ‘if’ and a ‘maybe’ versus a ‘when,'” says Cleantech adviser Yoachim Haynes. “The question that needs to be answered is, ‘Can they do it with cheaper electricity and cheaper labor?’ This is not a question that many have been able to answer.”

Barnard says Plenty can prosper if it spends 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour on power — well below the 10.4 cents that is the average price nationwide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

While Plenty announced plans to build a 100,000 square-foot facility in the Seattle suburb of Kent in November, it said it isn’t in talks about power breaks with any U.S. city now.

Most public support has so far been in rebates for energy-efficient lighting, not running costs.

Seattle City Light provided $10,000 worth of energy-efficient lighting to an indoor growing facility that helped feed the city’s homeless. But it already offers the lowest power rate of the top 25 cities in America. “That’s the deal that’s on the table,” says spokesman Scott Thomsen.

Chicago provided some $344,000 in construction grants since 2008 to The Plant , a former pork processing plant that is home to multiple indoor farms.

While that helped with structural improvements, it didn’t help with operations, says John Edel, the president of Bubbly Dynamics LLC, which owns The Plant.

Supplying grocery stores in large volumes is “harder than it sounds,” he says. And other ways of obtaining cheap power — like The Plant’s plan to install a bio-gas guzzling turbine — have faced obstacles that make it uneconomical.

“There isn’t a whole lot in the way of incentives for farms here,” Edel says. “There needs to be.”

 
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The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth, a magical water source supposedly capable of reversing the aging process. But scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, are working to extend human life span and delay the onset of multiple age-related diseases and disabilities. VOA Maia Kay has the story.
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Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo are racing to contain a new Ebola outbreak announced this week. At least two people are confirmed to have died of Ebola this month in a remote village of northwest DRC, very close to the border of the smaller, neighboring Republic of Congo.

The DRC’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga, has been keeping people updated on social media, tweeting that on Thursday — some 24 hours after the initial announcement — a team of 12 experts landed in Mbandaka, the city closest to the outbreak.

Ilunga said that Ebola had been confirmed in two of 17 hemorrhagic fever deaths seen in recent weeks in the northwest village of Bikoro. The area has reported 21 cases of hemorrhagic fever in all.

“Our country,” he said in an open letter to the Congolese population, “is facing a new epidemic of Ebola that is a public health emergency of international concern.”

The World Health Organization has released $1 million from its emergency fund to respond to this outbreak. WHO and medical aid group Doctors Without Borders are leading the response, and have sent experts to the site.

“MSF’s DRC emergency team is already on site and has been supporting the Ministry of Health to deploy a rapid and tailored response to the emergency since last Saturday,” the group, known by its french acronym MSF, said in a statement. “MSF will continue to adapt its response according to the needs on the ground.”

The aid group declined to give more details, saying its experts were still gathering information.

‘This is not the first time’

This is not Congo’s first encounter with the hemorrhagic fever, which causes an acute, serious illness which is often fatal if left untreated. It is transmitted to people from wild animals and can be spread through human-to-human transmission.

Ebola derives its name from the place it was first discovered, the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo River, in 1976. The average survival rate is 50 percent, according to the WHO.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told VOA this is Congo’s ninth outbreak of Ebola since the virus was first identified, including one last year that he said “was contained relatively quickly.”

“So we are hoping to do the same thing this time around — to send quickly teams to the area where the virus has been confirmed to be circulating, to be in position to identify those who are sick, to be in position to identify those who have been potentially exposed, to put in place all those necessary measures that are used every time when there is an Ebola outbreak to try to stop the transmission as fast as possible,” he said.

This latest outbreak has occurred in an area near the banks of the Congo River, just across the border from the Republic of Congo. Because this region is poor in infrastructure, its many waterways are vital for transport and trade activities.

Ebola killed more than 11,000 people in a two-year epidemic that ravaged Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016. So far, none of the recent outbreaks in Congo have been connected to that event.

The WHO’s Jasarevic said that to contain the newest outbreak, it is crucial that people in and around Bikoro cooperate with local health authorities.

“It is really important that communities in this particular area are engaged, are working together with authorities in terms of safe burial practices, in terms of proper contact tracing, to be compliant with those procedures,” he said. “The community engagement has been proven as a key component in successful containment of an Ebola outbreak.”
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The eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano could intensify in the coming weeks, possibly spraying boulders, rocks and ash for miles around, the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday.

Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, erupted last week. Lava flows from fissures on its eastern flank have destroyed at least 36 homes and other buildings and forced the evacuation of about 2,000 residents.

The USGS said the risk would rise if the lava dropped below the groundwater level beneath the summit’s caldera.  An influx of water inside could cause steam-driven explosions. 

The agency said more violent eruptions could send “ballistic rocks” weighing up to a ton for about a kilometer or smaller ones much farther. 

The emergence of two new vents prompted Hawaii County to issue a cellphone alert ordering stragglers in two communities on the volcano’s eastern flank to get out immediately. Police followed up with personal visits.

Both communities are in a forested, remote part of the Big Island on the eastern flank of Kilauea, which has been erupting continuously since 1983. 

In recent years, the volcano has mostly released lava in hard-to-reach areas inside a national park or along the coastline. But last week, vents popped open and released lava, gas and steam inside neighborhoods.   

There’s no indication when the eruption might stop, or how far the lava might spread.
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The 104-year-old scientist who has traveled to Switzerland to end his life hopes that his highly publicized move will change the way people think of euthanasia. 

Australian ecologist David Goodall is scheduled to die Thursday at an end-of-life clinic in Basel.

Goodall does not have a terminal illness but says his quality of life has deteriorated significantly in recent years.

“One should be free to choose the death, when death is at an appropriate time,” Goodall told dozens of journalists at a news conference Wednesday in Basel.

“My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want to continue life. I’m happy to have the chance tomorrow to end it,” said the centenarian, wearing a pullover emblazoned with the words “Aging Disgracefully.”

Goodall is one of hundreds of people from around the world who travel to Switzerland each year in hopes of ending their lives.

The Swiss federal statistics office says the number of assisted suicides has been growing fast: Nine years ago, there were 297. By 2015, the most recent year tabulated, the figure had more than tripled to 965. Nearly 15 percent of the cases last year were people under 65 years old.

Most assisted suicides in Switzerland are done using sodium pentobarbital, according to DIGNITAS, a right-to-die organization.The drug sends the patient into a deep coma and then paralyzes the respiratory system, causing him or her to stop breathing.

Allowed for decades

While assisted suicides are illegal in most countries, it has been allowed in Switzerland since the 1940s, if performed by someone with no direct interest in the death. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2002 for patients considered to be suffering unbearable pain with no cure.

Australia has forbidden such practices, though the state of Victoria became the first to pass a euthanasia bill last November to allow terminally ill patients to end their lives, which would have excluded Goodall. It takes effect in June 2019.

In the United States, assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, Vermont, Washington, California, Colorado, Hawaii and the District of Columbia.

Goodall and other supporters of assisted suicide say other countries should legalize the procedure so people in very poor health as well as those who are ready to die don’t have to travel to Switzerland.

On Wednesday, surprised by the turnout at the news conference, Goodall said he would have preferred to die at his home in Australia. He told reporters that medically assisted suicide should be more widely available and not only viewed as a last resort for the terminally ill.

Goodall told reporters he had no last-minute doubts about his decision. But, the centenarian said he was not without regrets: “There are many things I would like to do, but it’s too late. I’m content to leave them undone.”
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