Month: July 2018

A consortium of astronomers said Thursday they had for the first time confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing the gravitational effects of a supermassive black hole on a star zipping by it.

The German-born theoretical physicist had posited that large gravitational forces could stretch light, much like the compression and stretching of sound waves we perceive with the change of pitch of a passing train.

Researchers from the GRAVITY consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics realized that they had a “perfect laboratory” to test Einstein’s theory with the Sagittarius A* black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

Black holes are so dense that their gravitational pull can trap even light, and the supermassive Sagittarius A* has mass four million times that of our sun, making it the biggest in our galaxy.

Astronomers followed the S2 star as it passed close to the black hole on May 19 at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) per hour.

They then calculated its velocity and position using a number of instruments and compared it with predictions made by Einstein that the light would be stretched by the gravity in an effect called gravitational redshift. Newtonian physics doesn’t allow for a redshift.

“The results are perfectly in line with the theory of general relativity” and are “a major breakthrough towards better understanding the effects of intense gravitational fields,” said the research team, whose findings are published in Friday’s issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

This is the first time observers have been able to measure such an effect.

The European Southern Observatory, whose Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to make the observations, had watched S2 pass by Sagittarius A* in 2016 but the instruments it was using then were not sensitive enough to detect the gravitational redshift.

“More than 100 years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more — in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined,” said the ESO in a statement.

Astronomers already use another effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — that a black hole can bend passing light. Called gravitational lensing, researchers have used it to peer behind black holes.

Astronomers hope they can make practical use of the latest confirmation of Einstein’s theory to track shifts in S2’s trajectory due to gravity, which could yield information on mass distribution around the black hole.

“I am always blown away by Einstein’s predictions, by the power of his reasoning which yielded this theory and which has never been faulted,” French astrophysicist Guy Perrin, a member of the GRAVITY consortium, told AFP.

Partnering with the Max Planck Institute in the consortium were French research institute CNRS, the Paris Observatory and several French universities along with Portugal’s CENTRA astrophysics center.
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Pet owners are always happy to share a memory about the time their dog responded to their distress by coming to them or trying to get their attention. But those seemed to just be stories, until new research in the journal Learning & Behavior found that dogs really do feel empathy toward their owners.

According to Ripon College psychology professor Julia Meyers-Manor, the research was inspired by her earlier work on empathy in rats.

“One of the challenges we face when we’re trying to study empathy is that the idea behind empathy is you are recognizing the emotional states of another individual and responding to it,” she told VOA.

The problem is you can’t tell why a rat would help another rodent. For example, it might help to free a trapped friend because the other rat is stressed, or the first rat might be just lonely or bored.

“I can’t make rats have an emotional state” for an experiment, said Meyers-Manor, “but I can ask humans to adopt an emotional state.”

Human actors

To help researchers find out if dogs recognize and react to others’ feelings, they asked humans to mimic behaviors that reflect different feelings.

Her lead study author, Emily Sanford of Johns Hopkins University, added, “People tend to think that dogs really care about their emotions, but we were interested in seeing if there was any scientific evidence to back that up.”

The researchers tested dogs’ prosocial reaction, or their willingness to help another, in a simple door-opening task. The owner sat in a small room with a clear door that the pups could easily push open. The owner was instructed to either pretend to cry or hum a tune. The dog was released into the adjacent room and videotaped to see whether it would push open the door to check on its owner.

When the researchers looked at which condition led dogs to open the door, Meyers-Manor said, “we found it was about equal between the dogs in the distressed, the crying condition, and in the dogs in the humming condition.” In other words, most of the dogs often opened the door regardless of what their owner was doing.

The real difference between the crying and humming conditions was seen in the amount of time it took for the dogs to act. The dogs whose owners appeared to be crying were much faster to check on them than those whose owners were humming. The speed of the dogs’ response was also predicted based on their bond with their owners.

‘Impossible task’

“There’s some research that says that when dogs are faced with a task they can’t solve, that they will direct their attention more to an owner whom they have a close bond with,” said Meyers-Manor. So they gave the dogs what’s called “the impossible task,” which places them in a room with both their owner and a stranger. They are shown an inaccessible treat and the researchers then time how long the dogs looked at their owner for help compared with the time it took to turn to the stranger.

Sanford said this was where individual differences appeared among dogs in the crying condition. “We actually found that dogs that gazed at their owners longer during the impossible task were faster to open the door during the prosocial helping task.”

A second way to predict how quickly a dog would open the door, if at all, was based on stress levels. The researchers collected physiological data and watched the dogs for signs of stress during the main task. Dogs who showed lots of stress behaviors like whining or excessive panting were less likely to push open the door.

“The dogs who opened [the door] were actually the dogs who are the most calm and collected,” said Meyers-Manor. “The dogs who were more distressed shut down. They showed lots of distress behaviors, but they couldn’t seem to get past that distress to open the door.”

Therapy dogs

About half of the dogs in this experiment were nationally certified therapy dogs. Although there was some sense that these trained pooches might respond more quickly than their untrained counterparts, this wasn’t borne out in the data.

“So certainly if you ask the therapy dog owners, I’m sure they would say, yes, their dogs are more empathetic than the average. But that’s not what our research says,” Meyers-Manor said.

James Serpell, director of the Center for Interaction of Animals and Society, agreed that therapy dogs aren’t necessarily more empathetic. “They don’t necessarily need to be any more friendly or empathic than any pet dog,” he told VOA. “They just need to not be aggressive or react violently when someone drops a crutch or something next to them.”

Whether they’re certified or not, this research demonstrates that our dogs do recognize our emotional states and respond to them.

As Sanford put it, “Your pet dogs are part of your family and they do feel feelings towards you. And if you are talking to them, they might not necessarily understand all the words that you’re saying, but they certainly understand the emotions behind them.”
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Brazilian researchers are developing an innovative process using pineapples to speed the healing process for skin wounds. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Since 2011, a year when Kentucky was flooded with 371 million doses of opioid painkillers, state officials have cracked down on pain clinics, sued pharmaceutical companies and limited how many pills doctors can prescribe.

The result is nearly 100 million fewer opioid prescriptions in 2017 — and an 11.5 percent increase in drug overdose deaths.

That’s the sobering findings of a new report from the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy in a state on the front lines of the nation’s opioid epidemic. The report says 1,565 people died from drug overdoses in 2017, a 40 percent increase in the past five years.

Deaths attributed to prescription painkillers and heroin are declining. But other drugs have taken their place. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, accounted for more than half of all the deaths. And methamphetamine has made a comeback, accounting for 360 deaths. That’s a 57 percent increase in just one year.

“We are in a crisis state,” Republican Gov. Matt Bevin said. “While we are putting money at it and while we are drawing attention to it, until we start to truly address this and look at underlying causes of these things and what is leading to this it is not going to be addressed.”

​42,000 deaths in US in 2016 

Nationally, opioids accounted for more than 42,000 deaths in 2016. States with the highest rates of drug overdose deaths that year were West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Every year, Kentucky lawmakers have been passing more laws designed to address the opioid problem. They have increased penalties for heroin dealers. They have diverted more money to drug treatment programs. And they limited patients to a three-day supply of prescription painkillers unless a doctor gives them written permission for a larger amount.

State officials spent $500,000 to create 1-833-8KY-HELP, a hotline to connect people with treatment options. And they have spent thousands of dollars giving first responders naloxone, medicine that can reverse an opioid overdose.

Medicaid expansion helped

Anti-drug advocates celebrate those changes, but their celebration is tempered once a year when the new numbers come out detailing how many more people have died.

“Most of the things we do we realize are not going to take that immediate effect,” said Van Ingram, executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. “It just never gets any easier.”

Many anti-drug advocates have credited the Affordable Care Act with helping people get treatment. The law, known as Obamacare, expanded the Medicaid program to give more than 400,000 Kentuckians health coverage. Many used that coverage to get drug treatment.

Bevin wants to require people in Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid population to get a job, go to school or do volunteer work to keep their coverage. He also wants to charge them small monthly premiums to model private insurance plans.

Critics have said the result will be fewer people on Medicaid with fewer treatment options. But Bevin’s plan would exempt people with substance abuse disorder from complying with the new rules. Those rules were supposed to go into effect July 1, but were blocked by a federal judge.
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One girl between the ages of 15 and 19 is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, every three minutes of every day, a United Nations report found.

The report, released Wednesday at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, said teenage girls are bearing the brunt of the AIDS epidemic, largely due to gender inequality.

Henrietta Fore, head of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), called it a “crisis of health.”

“In most countries, women and girls lack access to information, to services, or even just power to say no to unsafe sex,” she said. “HIV thrives among the most vulnerable and marginalized, leaving teenage girls at the center of the crisis.”

The report said while there was significant progress in the battle against AIDS in other age groups, it is notably lacking among adolescents.

While AIDS-related deaths among all other age groups have been falling since 2010, those among children aged 15 to 19 have seen no reduction.

In 2017, 1.2 million 15- to 19-year-olds were living with HIV, three in five of them were girls, according to UNICEF.

Actress and activist Charlize Theron addressed the issue in her speech at the conference.

The AIDS epidemic is “not just about sex or sexuality,” she said. It is also about “the second-class status of women and girls worldwide.”

The solution, according to Angelique Kidjo, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador who contributed to the report, is education and economic empowerment.

“We need to make girls and women secure enough economically that they don’t have to turn to sex work,” she said. “We need to make sure they have the right information about how HIV is transmitted and how to protect themselves.”
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Belgian doctors have euthanized three minors in the past two years, according to a report from the nation’s chief euthanasia regulatory body released earlier this month.

The report, produced by Belgium’s Federal Commission for Euthanasia Control and Evaluation, said these three minors were the first to be euthanized since the country’s parliament voted to lift age restrictions on euthanasia in the country, the first such law in the world. Euthanasia for adults has been legal in Belgium since 2002.

“There is no age for suffering,” said Professor Wim Distelmans, chairman of the euthanasia committee. “Fortunately, euthanasia among young people remains very exceptional. Even if it were only one, the law would have been very useful. ”

The minors were 9, 11 and 17 years old, according to the report. Their conditions ranged from muscular dystrophy to brain tumors to cystic fibrosis. The conditions of all three were determined to be terminal, and euthanasia was approved unanimously by the committee.

The report, part of a series released by the committee every two years, examined all euthanasia cases within Belgium from January 2016 to December 2017. The report said 4,337 euthanizations were administered in Belgium during that time. The majority of euthanizations — 2,781 — were for cancer patients. The second leading cause was “poly-pathologies,” ranging from dementia and heart disease to incontinence and hearing loss, with 710 euthanizations listing “poly-pathology” as its primary reason.

Euthanasia cases rising

Since euthanasia was first legalized in Belgium in 2002, the number of deaths from it have steadily increased every year. In 2016, the report found, the number of people who died via euthanasia was 2,028. In 2017, that number jumped to 2,309, nearly a 14 percent increase.

The Netherlands and Belgium are the only two countries in the world that permit the euthanasia of minors. The Netherlands, however, restricts euthanasia to minors above the age of 12.

The 2014 law stipulated that before euthanasia can be considered for a minor, he or she must be suffering from terminal illness, face “unbearable physical suffering” and repeatedly request to die.

“The law says adolescents cannot make important decisions on economic or emotional issues, but suddenly they’ve become able to decide that someone should make them die,” said Andre-Joseph Leonard, head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, following the passage of the 2014 law.

In 2017, a doctor resigned from Belgium’s euthanasia commission, alleging that the committee had euthanized a demented patient who had not formally requested to die. 
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Most pet owners are ready to share stories of how their pets have consoled or responded to them during a time of distress. Most were just cute pet stories, until now — as new research is showing that dogs actually feel empathy for others. Sadie Witkowski has more.
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