Day: November 19, 2020

The National Science Foundation announced Thursday that it would close the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in a blow to scientists worldwide who depend on it to search for planets, asteroids and extraterrestrial life. The independent, federally funded agency said it was too dangerous to keep operating the single-dish radio telescope — one of the world’s largest — given the significant damage it recently sustained. An auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole in the reflector dish and damaging the dome above it. Then on November 6, one of the telescope’s main steel cables snapped, leading officials to warn that the entire structure could collapse. NSF officials noted that even if crews were to repair all the damage, engineers found the structure would still be unstable in the long term. The main entrance of the Arecibo Observatory is seen in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Nov. 19, 2020.”This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but the safety of people is our No. 1 priority,” said Sean Jones, the agency’s assistant director for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. “We understand how much Arecibo means to this community and to Puerto Rico.” He said the goal was to preserve the telescope without placing people at risk, but “we have found no path forward to allow us to do so safely.” The telescope was built in the 1960s with money from the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. In its 57 years of operation, it endured hurricanes, endless humidity and a recent string of strong earthquakes. The telescope boasts a 305-meter-wide (1,000-foot-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond movie “GoldenEye.” Scientists worldwide have used the dish, along with the 900-ton platform hanging 450 feet above it, to track asteroids on a path to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and determine if a planet is potentially habitable. In recent years, the NSF-owned facility has been managed by the University of Central Florida.  Reaction to newsAlex Wolszczan, a Polish-born astronomer and professor at Pennsylvania State University who helped discover the first extrasolar and pulsar planets, told The Associated Press that while the news wasn’t surprising, it was disappointing. He worked at the telescope in the 1980s and early 1990s.  “I was hoping against hope that they would come up with some kind of solution to keep it open,” he said. “For a person who has had a lot of his scientific life associated with that telescope, this is a rather interesting and sadly emotional moment.” One of three concrete support towers for the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope is seen in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Nov. 19, 2020.The announcement saddened many beyond the scientific world as well, with the hashtag #WhatAreciboMeansToMe popping up on Twitter along with pictures of people working, visiting and even getting married or celebrating a birthday at the telescope. Slow farewellRalph Gaume, director of NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, stressed that the decision has nothing to do with the observatory’s capabilities, which have allowed scientists to study pulsars, to detect gravitational waves, as well as search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed. “The telescope is currently at serious risk of unexpected, uncontrolled collapse,” he said. “Even attempts at stabilization or testing the cables could result in accelerating the catastrophic failure.” The NSF said it intends to restore operations at the observatory’s remaining assets, including its two LIDAR facilities, one of which is on the nearby island of Culebra. Those are used for upper atmospheric and ionospheric research, including analyzing cloud cover and precipitation data. Officials also aim to resume operations at the visitor center. Wolszczan said the value of the telescope won’t instantly disappear because he and many other scientists are still working on projects based on observations and data taken from the observatory. “The process of saying goodbye to Arecibo will certainly take some years,” he said. “It won’t be instantaneous.” 
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Just as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, in February, four people set sail for one of the most remote places on Earth – a small camp on Kure Atoll, at the edge of the uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.There, more than 1,400 miles from Honolulu, they lived in isolation for eight months while working to restore the island’s environment. Cut off from the rest of the planet, their world was limited to a tiny patch of sand halfway between the U.S. mainland and Asia. With no television or internet access, their only information came from satellite text messages and occasional emails.Now they are back, emerging into a changed society that might feel as foreign today as island isolation did in March. They must adjust to wearing face masks, staying indoors and seeing friends without giving hugs or hearty handshakes.”I’ve never seen anything like this, but I started reading the book The Stand by Stephen King, which is about a disease outbreak, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, is this what it’s going to be like to go home?'” said Charlie Thomas, one of the four island workers.The group was part of an effort by the state of Hawaii to maintain the fragile island ecosystem on Kure, which is part of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, the nation’s largest contiguous protected environment. The public is not allowed to land anywhere in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.Charlie Thomas, of Auckland, New Zealand, describes what her camp was like on Kure Atoll in Honolulu, Nov. 5, 2020.Kure is the only island in the northern part of the archipelago that is managed by the state, with the rest under the jurisdiction of the federal government. A former Coast Guard station, the atoll is home to seabirds, endangered Hawaiian monk seals and coral reefs that are teeming with sea turtles, tiger sharks and other marine life.Two field teams go there each year, one for summer and another for winter. Their primary job is removing invasive plants and replacing them with native species and cleaning up debris such as fishing nets and plastic that washes ashore.Before they leave, team members are often asked if they want to receive bad news while away, said Cynthia Vanderlip, the supervisor for the Kure program.”A few times a day, we upload and download email so people stay in touch with their family and friends. That’s a huge morale booster, and I don’t take it lightly,” Vanderlip said. “People who are in remote places … rely on your communication.”Thomas, the youngest member of the team at 18, grew up in a beach town in New Zealand and spent much of her free time with seabirds and other wildlife. She finished school a year early to start her first job as a deckhand for an organization dedicated to cleaning up coastlines before volunteering for the summer season on Kure Atoll.The expedition was her first time being away from home for so long, but she was ready to disconnect.”I was sick of social media, I was sick of everything that was sort of going on,” she said. “And I thought, you know, I am so excited to get rid of my phone, to lose contact with everything … I don’t need to see all the horrible things that are going on right now.”Once on Kure, getting a full picture of what was happening in the world was difficult.”I guess I didn’t really know what to think because we were getting so many different answers to questions that we were asking,” she said.Thomas is now in a hotel in quarantine in Auckland, where she lives with her parents, sister and a dog named Benny. She will miss hugs and “squishing five people on a bench to have dinner,” she said.Joining her on the island was Matthew Butschek II, who said he felt most alone when he received news about two deaths.His mother emailed to tell him that her brother had died. Butschek said his uncle was ill before the pandemic, and he was not sure if COVID-19 played a role in his death. He could not grieve with his family.Then Butschek, 26, who lives near Dallas, received word that one of his best friends had been killed in a car accident.”I remember reading that, thinking it was a joke and then realizing it wasn’t, so my heart started pounding and I was breathing heavily,” he said.While in quarantine last week, Butschek looked out the window of his cabin in Honolulu and saw school-aged children playing on rocks and climbing trees – all wearing face masks. It reminded him of apocalyptic movies.”It’s not normal for me. But everyone is like, yeah, this is what we do now. This is how we live,” he said.Leading the camp on Kure was wildlife biologist Naomi Worcester, 43, and her partner, Matthew Saunter, who live together in Honolulu.Worcester first visited the island in 2010 and has returned every year since. She’s a veteran of remote fieldwork in Alaska, Washington, Wyoming and the Sierra Nevada mountains.Working on the atoll means getting information about the world slowly, and often not at all, Worcester said.A few weeks ago, she departed Kure and arrived on Midway Atoll, where she and the rest of the crew stayed for several days before flying back to Honolulu. Midway has limited internet access and basic cable television. During a moment alone, she turned on a TV.”I think I turned it on during the middle of the World Series,” she recalled. “And it’s like some people are wearing face masks and some people aren’t. And there is the thing about the guy that tested positive in the middle of the game or something. I was just like … I don’t know, this is too much!”She also worries about the pandemic’s cost in a larger sense.”With so much uncertainty and so many emotions running high and, you know, our country is divided on so many things … there is kind of an underlying fear as far as what the future could hold and how people could respond.”Saunter, 35, has worked on Kure since 2010, the same year he met and began dating Worcester. They have been partners in life and on the island for a decade.In 2012, they began leading teams at the field camp.After so many years at the camp, Saunter said, isolation isn’t much of a factor for him. He believes the leadership skills he’s learned in the wilderness will translate well to life in the pandemic.To be successful on Kure, you have to tackle problems head-on and control your emotions, he said.”You know people’s emotions are getting the better of them, and it’s kind of at the cost of everybody, so it seems very irresponsible,” he said. “If we had taken it more seriously and practiced more precautions, we could have squashed this thing.”He remembers being on Kure when his sister called the outbreak a “pandemic.””I got an email from my sister and she used the word ‘pandemic,'” he said. “I thought to myself, huh, maybe we need to look that up, because what’s the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic?”Now “it’s a word that’s in everybody’s vocabulary.”
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As the deadly coronavirus continues to rage across the U.S. and around the world, people are turning to COVID-19-related apps to figure out their day-to-day risks. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
Producers: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum
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India’s capital, New Delhi, is battling twin health emergencies, as it copes with deadly air pollution that spikes in winter months and a record surge in coronavirus cases. Doctors say the city’s fight against the pandemic has become harder as the toxic air makes the city more vulnerable to the virus. Anjana Pasricha reports.Videographer:  P Pallavi, Producer: Henry Hernandez
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The head of Germany’s disease control agency said Thursday that while the coronavirus infection rate in the country remains serious, there are signs a partial lockdown is working.Germany implemented restrictive measures in early November to curb a nationwide surge in cases, closing bars, restaurants and other leisure venues but keeping schools and shops open.Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Robert Koch Institute chief Lothar Wieler said the number of new infections has since plateaued, with 22,609 reported on Thursday – roughly the same number as a week ago. He said the fact they are not rising is good news but cautioned that it was too early to say if this is a trend.Wieler said the overall number of cases is still too high, and there is a risk that hospitals may become overwhelmed. Wieler, however, also expressed optimism the numbers will start to go down now that they have stabilized.Wieler also said the news this week that at least two potential vaccines are showing better than 90 percent effectiveness was “extremely encouraging.” He said, “I know if the vaccines have an efficacy of more than 90% then they would be great weapons. That’s great.”Wieler said it was unclear how long the restrictions would remain in place. When they were implemented, Chancellor Angela Merkel said the plan was for them to run through November, in hopes the nation would be able to lift some of them in time for the Christmas holiday in December.The Robert Koch Institute reports Germany now has seen a total of 855,916 cases and 13,370 deaths from the infection. The coronavirus causes the COVID-19 disease. 
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Thursday brought further good news from the global effort to produce a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.  A report published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet says that a potential vaccine developed by British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford was safe and produced a strong immune response in both younger and older participants. 
The two-dose vaccine was given to 560 healthy adult volunteers in a second-stage clinical trial, including 240 volunteers 70 years of age and older.  Dr. Maheshi Ramasamy, a  University of Oxford researcher and co-author of the study, described the antibody and T-cell responses in the older volunteers as “robust.”  Pfizer Says Its Coronavirus Vaccine is 95% EffectivePfizer to seek approval within days for emergency use of vaccine COVID-19 poses the greatest risk for older adults and people with preexisting health conditions.  “We hope that this means our vaccine will help protect some of the most vulnerable people in society,” Ramasamy said, but he noted that further research still needs to be conducted.  The vaccine is currently undergoing final late-stage global clinical trials to prove its ultimate safety and efficacy.  The data from the Oxford-AstraZeneca Phase 2 trial comes as two U.S.-based  pharmaceutical companies report their COVID-19 vaccines are more than 90% effective against the virus.  Pfizer announced Wednesday that it will seek emergency approval for the vaccine it has developed in collaboration with Germany’s BioNTech. Moderna announced earlier this week that its vaccine is nearly 95% effective after an interim analysis of its late-stage study.   Moderna Announces  Second COVID Vaccine More Than 90% Effective Vaccine may be more accessible in rural areas and developing countries than Pfizer’sThe apparent progress toward a COVID-19 vaccine comes as many nations reimpose strict restrictions or lockdowns to fight a new wave of the virus.   Authorities in Tokyo announced Thursday it has raised its coronavirus alert level to its highest mark on a four-level scale after reporting a record-high 534 new COVID-19 cases.  The number of nationwide cases also surpassed 2,000 cases on Wednesday, another single-day record.   The Japanese government imposed a nationwide state of emergency in April, in the early days of the pandemic, but was not empowered to impose a mandatory quarantine under its constitution, which weighs heavily in favor of civil liberties.Russia has also reached a grim milestone, surpassing 2 million total coronavirus cases on Thursday after reporting 23,610 new cases over a 24-hour period, including 463 deaths. Of the more than 56.3 million total worldwide cases, Russia is in fourth place behind the United States, India, Brazil and France.  
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As the deadly coronavirus continues to rage across the U.S. and around the world, people are turning to COVID-19-related apps to figure out their day-to-day risks. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
Producers: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum
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The United States has surpassed 250,000 coronavirus deaths as new cases surge in many parts of the country.New York City on Wednesday announced the closure of its school system, the nation’s largest, with the city recording a seventh consecutive day with a COVID-19 positivity rate above 3%.“Public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out [of] an abundance of caution. We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter.New York City has reached the 3% testing positivity 7-day average threshold. Unfortunately, this means public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out an abundance of caution. We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19.— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) November 18, 2020In-person school resumed for New York children between late September and early October, when the seven-day positivity rate was under 2%.Other major cities, including Boston and Detroit, have made recent moves to halt in-person classes for their schools.Across the United States there have been more than 11.5 million confirmed cases since the pandemic began.The current wave of infections is adding to that number at an increased rate with an average of nearly 160,000 new cases each day during the past week. That is about triple the number of new daily cases in the United States one month ago. More than 1,100 people are dying per day.Health care workers are dealing with the strain of a record number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients.The surge has pushed leaders in many states to reimpose certain restrictions in order to try to slow the spread of the virus.Among the latest, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced Wednesday that all restaurants, bars and gyms would close for four weeks. Minnesota is adding four times as many new infections each day as it was in mid-October.Officials are expressing concerns about the approaching Thanksgiving holiday, a time when millions of Americans typically gather with family members and often travel to other parts of the country.Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam urged people in his state to stay home, saying doing so would be “an act of love.” He added that if people do decide to celebrate with others, they should do so in small groups and be outdoors.U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar urged similar caution in a Wednesday briefing.“Gathering indoors with people who aren’t members of your household is a high-risk activity for spreading the virus,” he said.There has been some optimistic news this week with two pharmaceutical companies announcing preliminary results showing their COVID-19 vaccines have been effective in trials.Azar said those developments mean that within weeks the Food and Drug Administration could authorize the vaccines and they could be ready for distribution.“Because of this work, by the end of December, we expect to have about 40 million doses of these two vaccines available for distribution, pending FDA authorization—enough to vaccinate about 20 million of our most vulnerable Americans—and production would continue to ramp up after that,” Azar said.The U.S. government has pursued a vaccination development program with the intention of making it so that no one in the country has to pay out of their own pocket to get a vaccine.
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Would you give up nearly a decade of your life looking at your cellphone?Calculated by today’s usage, the average person spends a little over 76,500 hours – or 8.74 years – on a smartphone over a lifetime, according to a FILE – Marilu Rodriguez checks a news website on her smartphone before boarding a train home at the end of her workweek in Chicago, March 13, 2015.This widespread usage of smartphones has sparked worries among teens themselves, with 54% of U.S. teens saying they spend too much time on their phones. And 52% have also reported trying to take steps to reduce mobile phone use. A JAMA Network study found that only 5% of 59,397 U.S. high school students surveyed spent a balanced time sleeping and staying physically active while limiting screen time.Too much time on a phone has been linked to a number of physical and mental health risks.In a study of 3,826 adolescents, researchers found an association between social media and television use with symptoms of depression, according to JAMA Pediatrics.Increased screen time has also been linked with a higher risk of obesity and diabetes.
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