Month: November 2018

Many athletes have been doing it for a long time without even knowing it is now a fitness trend. It’s called plogging, a combination of jogging and picking up. And what is being picked up is trash. The Swedes are credited with starting the trend and now it’s spreading in the United States. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, many athletes in Washington seem to like multi-tasking with a group of likeminded runners and keeping their city clean and beautiful. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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For decades, Americans have migrated toward urban areas seeking opportunities, emptying out large swaths of countryside. In their wake, they have left shrinking communities that struggle to support multiple businesses, schools and hospitals.

This is a common theme in the Midwestern state of Iowa, whose population has grown by less than a million people in the past century. As family farms have consolidated into megafarms run by large corporations, rural residents have moved to cities like Des Moines, the state capital, or left the state altogether.

​Shrinking rural America

The northwest region of Iowa has been hit especially hard, forcing those who remain to drive farther and farther for things like groceries, education and health care.

At its peak, the town of Mallard hosted several grocery stores and restaurants, four churches, a cinema and two schools, one of them private. Today, its population of about 265 supports little more than a gas station and a couple of bars. The 100-year-old Catholic Church closed last summer, and the public school will close next year, forcing students to ride on buses to a neighboring town.

Kayla Lanning, a former horse training assistant, takes it all in her stride.

“We’re used to it. It’s not any big deal to us to have to travel a little ways,” she said. In her case, “a little ways” can mean a two-hour drive.

When Lanning learned she would be giving birth to twins, she was told that she could either schedule a cesarean section at her nearest hospital, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) away, or travel to a better-equipped hospital 135 kilometers (85 miles) away. She and her husband, John, chose to make the long drive and avoid the C-section.

Luckily for the Lannings, the drive to the hospital was uneventful, aside from a police officer pulling them over for speeding. The babies were delivered in the hospital, but prematurely; that meant being transferred to yet another hospital, even farther away.

Lanning admits to being a little “irritated” by the distances involved, but accepts it as the part of the trade-off for staying in Mallard.

​Fewer options

But not everyone is able to make it to a hospital with a proper obstetrics unit.

“It’s not uncommon for me to get a call from an ER (emergency room), where they say, ‘We have a patient. She started bleeding, she’s 28 weeks along, and she came in here’” to a hospital with no such unit, said Dr. Neil Mandsager, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies.

Many hospitals don’t even have an ultrasound machine to check the status of a baby, said Mandsager, the medical director of obstetrics at Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines. As a result, he travels about 865 kilometers (540 miles) each month to pay weekly visits to patients in rural health care centers.

The problem isn’t isolated to Iowa, which ranks 36th among the 50 states in terms of population density. According to a University of Minnesota study published earlier this year, “18 million reproductive-age women live in America’s rural counties, but over half of these counties have no hospital” where a woman can give birth.

Bigger gaps

Mandsager said Iowa “does a pretty good job of creating a system that works as best as it can for the pregnant woman, but there’s still definitely some gaps, and these gaps are getting bigger as these small hospitals close.”

Typically, obstetrics services in one to three maternity hospitals or obstetrics units close in Iowa each year, but this year, the number has spiked.

“I can’t remember a year when eight [obstetrics units] closed. That’s a pretty high number,” he said.

Mandsager, along with Stephanie Trusty, a nurse clinician at the Iowa Department of Public Health, attributes the closings to concerns over quality of care, malpractice insurance, profitability and low patient volume. They say it’s also difficult to attract and retain physicians.

“In rural Iowa, delivering babies is not scheduled. If they’re a single practitioner in a rural area, then they’re on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, that’s hard,” Trusty said.

In addition, there is the worry that so few deliveries can impact a physician’s and nurse’s ability to keep up their skills. Trusty said she looked at the maternity records of the eight hospitals that closed their obstetrics units or shut down altogether this year and found that three of them averaged less than one birth per week.

New mothers surveyed

The Iowa Department of Public Health for years has used a survey given to new mothers as a way to assess concerns. The patient survey collects data on issues such as distance traveled and quality of care received. Trusty said the survey has had an extremely high response rate. Of the 40,000 yearly births in the state, the department receives about 20,000 survey responses.

Surprisingly, she said, those responses haven’t reinforced their fears.

“We asked ‘did they have trouble getting prenatal care,’ and very few were refused care, and most people said it was still easy to get access,” Trusty said. “On how many miles they drove? The data didn’t change for years and years, so we took it off our survey.”

That was five years ago. Because of the large number of maternity ward closings this year, Trusty said they will reintroduce the question about “distance traveled” in next year’s survey.

As for whether couples may be dissuaded from settling in smaller towns because of these longer commutes, Lanning said it didn’t factor into her decision.

“We are so grounded here. John grew up here, and everything we know and do is here. So yeah, that doesn’t affect that,” she said.
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After traveling hundreds of millions of miles through space, NASA’s latest Mars probe will arrive Monday at the Red Planet. 

Scientists have carefully chosen where they want the probe, called InSight, to land, selecting a large volcanic plain named Elysium Planitia. They say the site has few rocks and less chance of wind gusts that could potentially knock over the lander. 

The spacecraft will take a crucial six minutes to enter Mars’ atmosphere, descend and land. During that time, InSight will decelerate from an initial speed of 19,300 kmh (12,000 mph) down to just 8 kmh (5 mph) when it touches down. To aid the landing, scientists have equipped InSight with a parachute, descent thrusters and shock-absorbing legs. 

If all goes well, InSight will make the eighth successful landing on Mars. 

“My heart is beating inside of my chest like a drum,” NASA project manager Tom Hoffman said Wednesday during a news conference about the planned landing. 

Scientists say they are trying to determine whether the craft needs a small nudge to put it in the proper place for landing. Since InSight launched May 5, scientists have made four small tweaks to its path to ensure it arrives on target. Engineers were able to skip an additional nudge because the other maneuvers went so smoothly, and they say they might also be able to skip the final adjustment scheduled for Sunday.  

By the time it lands, InSight will have traveled 484 million kilometers (300.7 million miles). However, once the lander is on the Martian surface, it cannot move, as it is not a rover. Scientists say it is critical that InSight land in the correct location, because wherever it lands is where it will stay. 

NASA says the landing site has been particularly quiet in recent weeks, with few storms. 

“We’re expecting a very plain day on Mars for the landing, and we’re very happy about that,” said Rob Grover who is overseeing the landing phase. 

Once landed, Insight has a unique mission to explore Mars’ interior. While other missions have sought to better understand the planet’s surface and atmosphere, this is the first to focus exclusively on what is under Mars’ surface. 

The $850 million InSight mission is planned to last about two years and will try to gather an array of information, including Mars’ below-ground temperature and seismic activity, as well as to carry out an underground mapping project. 

Insight is armed with a crane, heat probe and seismometer and is able to hammer 5 meters (16.4 feet) below the surface. 

Scientists are hoping the mission will help answer questions about the composition and evolution of the planet and whether Mars was formed from the same mixture of materials as Earth. 

Once InSight touches down, it will wait for 16 minutes to allow the dust that it kicked up to settle down again. Then it will deploy solar arrays, a critical step that will allow the lander to power itself for the next two years. InSight also has a battery system, but that will only last one day. 

The lander is expected to touch down on Mars about 3 p.m. EST (2000 UTC) on Monday. Scientists hope to know quickly whether the landing was successful but say if communication with the spacecraft is delayed, they might not know InSight’s status for several hours or even days. 

NASA’s website will be broadcasting news of InSight’s approach and landing all day Monday. 
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Meredith Ellis gets a bit rapturous about the little patch of earth under her feet.

When she bought this northern Texas land several years ago, it was overgrazed and overrun with weeds. Now, she’s thrilled to find a dark green blob of fungus she rolls under her sparkly-nail-polished thumb. She picks a tiny patch of the green moss from between clumps of tall brown grass gone dormant with the fall chill.

“Look at all these little bits of biodiversity,” she said. “That’s like a little fantasy world going on in there.”

Bringing it back has been a labor of love — love of the G Bar C Ranch where she grew up, and for the 4-year-old son she’s raising here.

“Everything I do, I think about him now,” she said. “I think about his future, and what is this world going to look like when he’s my age?”

Ellis worries about the droughts, floods and other calamities he may face from climate change. She wonders if there even will be enough food to go around.

It’s a big reason why she raises her cattle a bit differently than most.

The differences not only help to combat climate change. They also provide more clean water. They can even save ranchers money. And if one project goes forward, farmers may get financial rewards for making the changes.

Meadows vs. lawns

Ellis’s fields look like meadows. Her cattle forage among an assortment of thigh-high native grasses.

Other ranches nearby look like giant lawns. Cows have grazed the grass monocultures nearly down to the ground.

The difference matters, says rangeland scientist Jeff Goodwin with the Noble Research Institute, because the native grass is “not only feeding this cow herd. It’s also feeding the underground herd: the microbes, the biology in the soil. That’s what really makes that soil an active, living, breathing system.”

It’s a system with the potential to remove tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“The more forage production that we’re getting, the deeper the root systems, the more carbon we’re sequestering out of the atmosphere,” Goodwin added.

That’s increasingly important. Scientists warn that the world needs to do more than just stop producing greenhouse gases in order to avoid the worst of climate change. Carbon dioxide needs to be actively removed from the atmosphere in order to keep the planet from potentially catastrophic warming.

While engineers puzzle over high-tech solutions, a recent report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says nature offers tools that are ready to go today.

Valuable ecosystem services

Grasslands and the soils beneath them act as giant carbon sinks, the report notes.

But not if they are overgrazed.

Around the world, one estimate says, about 200 million hectares are overgrazed, an area roughly the size of Mexico. 

One study estimates that optimizing grazing could cut greenhouse gas emissions by about 89 million metric tons, roughly the same as permanently parking 19 million cars.

Plus, overgrazed land erodes more easily. That’s a double whammy. Ranchers lose fertile soil, and it ends up muddying drinking water downstream, which increases the cost to make it tap-ready.

On the other hand, healthy grassland soils that store carbon also store and filter water.

Those benefits should be worth money, Goodwin said. They’re known as ecosystem services, and the Noble Research Institute is working to develop a marketplace for them. Ranchers would earn credits based on their soil’s carbon content and its water storage and filtration capacity.

Some major food and beverage companies are interested in the market. Many have set goals to improve sustainability up and down their supply chains.

“There’s not really a solid path forward” for many of them to meet those goals, Goodwin said. “We feel like we’re sitting in a very good position to be able to provide that opportunity.”

All profits from the soil

Many of the steps ranchers could take to earn ecosystem service credits would help their bottom lines anyway.

“A lot of people want to talk about soil health building as a thing to do for the environment. But really, it’s something we need to be doing for our profitability as well,” said Michael Vance, managing partner at Stark Ranch, a short drive from Ellis’ operation.

“All your profit comes from the soil,” he added.

He stood in a field where cattle had recently been grazing, but you’d never know it. The grass still stood tall. His neighbors don’t understand why he doesn’t let the cows graze it all the way down. They think he’s wasting it.

“We get phone calls where people want to drive a bailer in here and bail up this grass, but they don’t realize the positives that come by leaving it standing,” he said.

The field grows more grass when cattle are moved off it sooner. That means Vance buys less feed.

Even if it’s more profitable, it’s not easy for people to change their ways, and ranchers are a conservative bunch.

“You realize things that you were raised doing, things that your dad and your granddad did, maybe weren’t the best things to do,” Vance said, “from an environmental perspective, maybe from even a profitability perspective.”

Financial incentives might help other ranchers make changes, he adds.

The Noble Research Institute plans to launch a pilot ecosystem services market in 2019 and is aiming for a full rollout in 2022.
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Australian researchers have made a breakthrough in the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis using immunotherapy. Their world-first trial has produced promising results for the majority of patients enrolled, they said, including a reduction in fatigue and improvements in mobility and vision.

The treatment targets the Epstein-Barr virus in the brain that Australian researchers believe plays a role in the development of Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, a disease of the central nervous system. Immune cells extracted from patients’ blood have been “trained” in a laboratory to recognize and destroy the virus.

“What happens in MS, there is an immune reaction going on in your brain that is represented as if that your immune system is attacking the brain cells,” said Rajiv Khanna, a professor at Queensland’s QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. “Once that happens, your normal function in the brain gets impaired. We are trying to develop a treatment that could actually, sort of, make the immune system to work properly rather than going in the wrong direction.”

Researchers hope the treatment could stop the progression of MS. They say the trial is significant because they have shown the technique is safe and has had positive improvements in an autoimmune disease.

Seven of the 10 participants in the Queensland trial have reported positive changes, including Louise Remmerswaal, a mother from Queensland.

“Ever since the trial, it has just improved so much that now I can go out and spend time with my family and friends,” she said.

Further research is planned in Australia and the United States.

The new therapy is developed by the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane and the University of Queensland.

The results of the clinical trial have been published in the peer-reviewed journal, JCI Insight.
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