Day: October 10, 2021

In a Rocky Israeli Crater, Scientists Simulate Life on Mars

From the door of the expedition base, a few small steps to the left an autonomous rover passes by. A few giant leaps to the right is an array of solar panels. The landscape is rocky, hilly, tinged with red. Purposefully it resembles Mars.

Here, in the Ramon Crater in the desert of southern Israel, a team of six – five men and one woman – has begun simulating what it will be like to live for about a month on the red planet.

Their AMADEE-20 habitat is tucked beneath a rocky outcrop. Inside they sleep, eat and conduct experiments. Outside they wear mock space suits fitted with cameras, microphones and self-contained breathing systems.

“We have the motto of fail fast, fail cheap, and have a steep learning curve. Because for every mistake we make here on Earth, we hope we don’t repeat it on Mars,” said Gernot Gromer, director of the Austrian Space Forum.

The Austrian association is running the project together with the Israel Space Agency and local group D-MARS.

A number of recent Mars probes have captivated astronomy fans across the world with robotic rovers like NASA’s Perseverance and, for the first time, the helicopter Ingenuity, offering a glance of the planet’s surface. But a manned mission is likely more than a decade off.

With AMADEE-20, which was supposed to happen in 2020 but was postponed due to COVID-19, the team hopes to bring new insight that will help prepare for that mission, when it comes.

“The habitat, right now, is the most complex, the most modern analog research station on this planet,” said Gromer, standing beside the 120-square meter structure shaped like two large, connected yurts.

The six team members are constantly on camera. Their vital signs monitored, their movements inside are tracked to analyze favorite spots for congregating. All this to better understand the human factor, Gromer said.

Outside, other engineers and specialists work with a drone and rover to improve autonomous navigation and mapping on a world where GPS is not available.

Altogether they will carry out more than 20 experiments in fields including geology, biology and medicine and hope to publish some of the results when finished.

“We are six people working in a tight space under a lot of pressure to do a lot of tests. There are bound to be challenges,” said Alon Tenzer, 36, wearing the space suit that carries some 50 kilograms of equipment. “But I trust my crew that we are able to overcome those challenges.”

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Paul McCartney: John Lennon Responsible for Beatles Breakup

Paul McCartney has revisited the breakup of The Beatles, flatly disputing the suggestion that he was responsible for the group’s demise.

Speaking on an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “This Cultural Life” that is scheduled to air on Oct. 23, McCartney said it was John Lennon who wanted to disband The Beatles.

“I didn’t instigate the split,” McCartney said. “That was our Johnny.”

The band’s fans have long debated who was responsible for the breakup, with many blaming McCartney. But McCartney said Lennon’s desire to “break loose” was the main driver behind the split.

Confusion about the breakup was allowed to fester because their manager asked the band members to keep quiet until he concluded a number of business deals, McCartney said. 

The interview comes ahead of Peter Jackson’s six-hour documentary chronicling the final months of the band. “The Beatles: Get Back,” set for release in November on Disney+, is certain to revisit the breakup of the legendary band. McCartney’s comments were first reported by The Observer.

When asked by interviewer John Wilson about the decision to strike out on his own, McCartney retorted: “Stop right there. I am not the person who instigated the split. Oh no, no, no. John walked into a room one day and said, ‘I am leaving The Beatles.’ Is that instigating the split, or not?”

McCartney expressed sadness over the breakup, saying the group was still making “pretty good stuff.” 

“This was my band, this was my job, this was my life. So, I wanted it to continue,” McCartney said.

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Ethiopia’s Tura, Kenya’s Chepngetich Win at Chicago Marathon

Ethiopia’s Seifu Tura Abdiwak won the Chicago men’s marathon on Sunday and Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich the women’s race.

The 24-year-old Tura completed the 42-kilometer course in 2:06:12, beating out American Galen Rupp, who finished close behind with an official time of 02:06:35.

Chepngetich, 27, finished her race in 02:22:31, with Emma Bates of the United States coming in second at 02:24:20.

One of the best-known long-distance races, the Boston Marathon, is set for Monday in the northeastern U.S. city. The coronavirus pandemic caused the race, normally run in April, to be moved to Monday’s date.

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Report: Moderna Fails to Supply Poor Countries with COVID Vaccines 

A report in The New York Times says that the manufacturers of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine which “appears to be the world’s best defense against COVID-19, has been supplying its shots almost exclusively to wealthy nations, keeping poorer countries waiting and earning billions in profit.”

The newspaper said their report is based on information from Airfinity, a data firm that tracks vaccine shipments. 

According to the Times account, Moderna has shipped approximately a million shots of its vaccines to poor countries. In comparison, Pfizer has shipped 8.4 million shots and Johnson and Johnson has delivered about 25 million doses to low-income countries.

In addition, the Times said government officials in some middle-income countries have reported that their countries have had to pay more for Moderna’s shots than the U.S. and the European Union.

Protests in Rome

Meanwhile, thousands of protesters took the streets of Rome Saturday to protest Italy’s new “Green Pass” vaccine certification that becomes mandatory for public and private workplaces, beginning October 15.

Workers and employees will be fined if they do not comply with the certification requirements. Government workers face suspension, if they come to work five times without the pass that documents that the holder has been inoculated with at least one COVID vaccine or recovered from the coronavirus in the last six months or has tested negative in the last 48 hours.

The pass is already a requirement for many indoor venues, including restaurants, museums and theaters. It is also needed for long-distance train and bus rides and domestic flights.

The chief of Britain’s Health Security Agency says the U.K. is facing an “uncertain” winter with the circulation of the flu and the coronavirus which causes the COVID infection.

“We are likely to see flu, for the first time in any real numbers, co-circulating with COVID,” Dr. Jenny Harries said. “Early evidence suggests that you are twice as likely to die from having two together, than just having COVID alone.” 

Texas politician has COVID

In the U.S., a politician who has not been vaccinated has announced that he has COVID and is being treated with monoclonal antibody injections. Allen West, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the governor of Texas, said on his Twitter account that while he was not inoculated with a COVID vaccine, his wife was, but she has also contracted COVID.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that there are more than 237 million global coronavirus infections and nearly 5 million global deaths. The center said 6.4 billion vaccines have been administered.

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Infrastructure Successes Have Transformed America, Can Biden’s Plan do the Same?

Congress appears poised to pass a bipartisan, $1 trillion plan that would be the largest federal investment in infrastructure in more than a decade. History shows that investing in infrastructure can transform the United States, changing how Americans move, bolstering economic prosperity, and significantly improving the health and quality of life for many. 

 

“When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, we changed the way we moved forever, opening up the entire country and from the way humans had moved previously for thousands of years by animal to machine,” Greg DiLoreto, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), told VOA via email. “[And] I think we all would agree that construction of the interstate highway system changed America in ways that greatly contributed to our economic prosperity.” 

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which authorized the building of 65,000 kilometers (41,000 miles) of interstate highways — the largest American public works program in history at the time. Another earlier transformation occurred in 1936, when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, extending electricity into rural areas for the first time.

And the wave of projects that created modern sewage and water systems in urban areas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a lasting mark, providing reliable, clean water in cities and extracting pollution from sewage.

“American cities in the late 19th, early 20th century were incredibly unhealthy places,” says Richard White, professor emeritus of American history at Stanford University in California. “High child death rates, repeated epidemics, and much of that was waterborne disease that came from both ineffective sewage and impure water. And infrastructure projects changed that dramatically. Probably it’s been the most effective public health effort ever in the history of the United States.”

Dark consequences 

DiLoreto also names the construction of dams across the western United States, which increased America’s ability to farm and feed the world, as infrastructure successes. But he points out that the projects created problems for migrating fish. In fact, many of the so-called successful infrastructure projects, like interstate highways, had dark consequences. 

“They increased racial stratification in the cities. They were built in such a way that they went through poorer neighborhoods, very often minority neighborhoods, walling them off from the city as a whole,” White says. “They set them apart and set in motion a set of social changes which we suffer from still. So, they hurt poorer areas, minority areas, even if they helped middle-class areas.” 

White, who wrote the book “Railroaded,” about the building of the transcontinental railroads, contends the federal government funded too many railroads into areas without the traffic to sustain them. 

“The railroads took government money and then went bankrupt,” White says. “They were very often utterly corrupt. The money was taken off into the private pockets behind some of the great fortunes in American history, and they never really delivered the economic and social benefits that they promised.” 

And Native Americans ended up paying the price, White adds. 

“Many of these railroads ended up costing Indian peoples huge amounts of land for no particular benefit,” he says. “It’s not like white settlement was particularly successful in the land the Indians lost. So, even though it was intended to raise the standard of living for everybody in the West, it didn’t necessarily do so, and the great cost was paid very often by Indian people.” 

Bold enough?

The stripped-down bipartisan version of President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) pours money into transportation, utilities — including high-speed internet for rural communities — and pollution cleanup. What the bill does not appear to contain is a single transformative project. 

“From the information I have, funds will be used to help us repair, replace and make our infrastructure more robust to withstand climate change and seismic risks,” DiLoreto says. “One might consider that transformative in the sense that our quality of life and economic prosperity depend on a functioning infrastructure.” 

White views the bill as backward-looking rather than forward-thinking at a time when the United States needs to transform itself to adjust to a changing world, doing things differently in the future than it has in the past. 

“We have our first great infrastructure bill, which is mostly intended to protect things we built in the past, which, I think, in the long run, that’s going to be seen as a failing,” White says. “And again, I’m not saying that you should allow bridges to fall into rivers, or that the roads don’t need repair. But it’s not transformative.” 

There is one potentially sweeping project that could help revolutionize life in the United States. 

“Broadband has had a tremendous impact on our lives,” DiLoreto says. “Without a broadband system, our ability to economically survive COVID would have been difficult.” 

The current bipartisan plan provides $65 billion for broadband infrastructure. 

“If broadband in this bill works as they intend it … and they bring it into poor areas which now lack broadband, that would be a good thing, that could be transformative,” White says. “That could have the same kind of consequences that rural electrification had in terms of education and lightening people’s workload and allowing them to do the kinds of work they otherwise couldn’t do. … But if they simply make it more effective for those who have it already, it’s not going to be transformative.”

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Record Number of Players Defect From Cuba’s National Baseball Team

One player took off from the airport, while another jumped out of the window of his hotel room. In all, of the 24 members of Cuba’s national baseball team who arrived in Mexico for the under-23 World Cup, only about half came home.

This year, a record number of players have defected from the communist-run island nation, which is enduring its worst economic crisis in 30 years.

The mass defection is “unprecedented in the history of baseball,” Francys Romero, a sports journalist who has written a book on the phenomenon, told AFP.

The player who jumped from his hotel room window? He told Romero that he shimmied down a palm tree to get to a waiting getaway car.

Cuban baseball players leaving their homeland is not new. When professional sports were upended in the wake of the revolution led by Fidel Castro, many sought better opportunities abroad.

After a smattering of defections during the Cold War, the exodus picked up pace after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Since Rene Arocha left the national team at the airport in Miami in 1991 for a career in the United States, about two or three players a year have deserted their country. Nine jumped ship in 1996. Those players are consistently regarded as traitors.

Some have left legally, an option that became possible with immigration reform in 2013, but which was starkly curtailed when flights were reduced because of the coronavirus pandemic.

A who’s who of players who became Major League Baseball stars have made the leap, including Orlando and Livan Hernandez, Jose Abreu, Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig and current Tampa Bay Rays standout Randy Arozarena.

Younger, not always stars

Not only has the number of players seeking careers abroad exploded, but their profiles are different: they are younger and not always destined for major league stardom, according to Romero.

So why are they risking it?

“To change their lives. Sports comes after that,” he said.

Those who have left have faced criticism on social media, but many Cubans have simply wished them well; they are all too aware of how difficult life is in Cuba at the moment, with major shortages of food and medicine.

Earlier this year, when Cuba’s national team came to the United States to play Olympic qualifying games, top talent Cesar Prieto, two other players and the team psychologist defected.

Cuba, a three-time Olympic champion and 25-time Baseball World Cup winner, failed for the first time to qualify for the Summer Games in Tokyo.

For Luis Daniel del Risco, currently the highest-ranking official in the Cuban baseball federation, there is “a war” under way to “destroy Cuban baseball.”

He slammed what he called “a harassment campaign” by foreign recruiters, who attend most games that Cuba plays abroad.

‘Very complicated decision’

“I’ve often heard it said that the state of baseball in Cuba reflects the state of the country,” said Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura, a huge baseball fan who has dedicated a book to interviews with players.

“I think that what happened is a representation of what’s happening in the country, this mass exodus” that has also been seen in an uptick in the number of Cubans trying to reach the United States on rickety boats to Florida.

“It’s really a very complicated decision to make, as they are giving up a lot,” he added.

They leave “without their passports, which are held by the delegation,” Romero said. And all are barred from coming home to Cuba for eight years.

Del Risco says the players “did not fulfill their commitments to their teammates and to the country,” but admits it’s a “personal decision for each of them.”

Major League Baseball and the Cuban baseball federation had reached a deal in late 2018 that would have allowed Cubans to play in the United States without having to first defect, but former President Donald Trump scrapped it in 2019.

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Russians Travel to Serbia for Western-Made COVID-19 Vaccines

When Russian regulators approved the country’s own coronavirus vaccine, it was a moment of national pride, and the Pavlov family was among those who rushed to take the injection. But international health authorities have not yet given their blessing to the Sputnik V shot.

So when the family from Rostov-on-Don wanted to visit the West, they looked for a vaccine that would allow them to travel freely, a quest that brought them to Serbia, where hundreds of Russian citizens have flocked in recent weeks to receive Western-approved COVID-19 shots.

Serbia, which is not a member of the European Union, is a convenient choice for vaccine-seeking Russians because they can enter the allied Balkan nation without visas and because it offers a wide choice of Western-made shots. Organized tours for Russians have soared, and they can be spotted in the capital, Belgrade, at hotels, restaurants, bars and vaccination clinics.

“We took the Pfizer vaccine because we want to travel around the world,” Nadezhda Pavlova, 54, said after receiving the vaccine last weekend at a sprawling Belgrade vaccination center.

Her husband, Vitaly Pavlov, 55, said he wanted “the whole world to be open to us rather than just a few countries.”

Vaccination tours

Vaccination tour packages for Russians seeking shots endorsed by the World Health Organization appeared on the market in mid-September, according to Russia’s Association of Tour Operators.

Maya Lomidze, the group’s executive director, said prices start at $300-$700, depending on what’s included.

Lauded by Russian President Vladimir Putin as world’s first registered COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V emerged in August 2020 and has been approved in some 70 countries, including Serbia. But the WHO has said global approval is still under review after citing issues at a production plant a few months ago.

On Friday, a top World Health Organization official said legal issues holding up the review of Sputnik V were “about to be sorted out,” a step that could relaunch the process toward emergency use authorization.

Other hurdles remain for the Russian application, including a lack of full scientific information and inspections of manufacturing sites, said Dr. Mariangela Simao, a WHO assistant director-general.

Apart from the WHO, Sputnik V is also awaiting approval from the European Medicines Agency before all travel limitations can be lifted for people vaccinated with the Russian formula.

Getting into Europe

The long wait has frustrated many Russians, so when the WHO announced yet another delay in September, they started looking for solutions elsewhere.

“People don’t want to wait; people need to be able to get into Europe for various personal reasons,” explained Anna Filatovskaya, Russky Express tour agency spokeswoman in Moscow. “Some have relatives. Some have business, some study, some work. Some simply want to go to Europe because they miss it.”

Serbia, a fellow-Orthodox Christian and Slavic nation, offers the Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Chinese Sinopharm shots. By popular demand, Russian tourist agencies are now also offering tours to Croatia, where tourists can receive the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, without the need to return for a second dose.

“For Serbia, the demand has been growing like an avalanche,” Filatovskaya said. “It’s as if all our company is doing these days is selling tours for Serbia.”

The Balkan nation introduced vaccination for foreigners in August, when the vaccination drive inside the country slowed after reaching around 50% of the adult population. Official Serbian government data shows that nearly 160,000 foreign citizens so far have been vaccinated in the country, but it is unclear how many are Russians.

In Russia, the country’s vaccination rate has been low. By this week, almost 33% of Russia’s 146 million people have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, and 29% were fully vaccinated. Apart from Sputnik V and a one-dose version known as Sputnik Light, Russia has also used two other domestically designed vaccines that have not been internationally approved.

Amid low vaccination rates and reluctance by the authorities to reimpose restrictive measures, both Russia and Serbia have seen COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations reach record levels in the past weeks.

The daily coronavirus death toll in Russia topped 900 for a second straight day on Thursday, a day after reaching a record 929. In Serbia, the daily death toll of 50 people is the highest in months in the country of 7 million that so far has confirmed nearly 1 million cases of infection.

Pavlova said the “double protection” offered by the Pfizer booster shots would allow the family “to not only travel around the world, but also to see our loved ones without fear.”

Since the vaccine tours exploded in popularity about a month ago, they have provided welcome business for Serbian tour operators devastated by the pandemic in an already weak economy. The owner of BTS Kompas travel agency in Belgrade, Predrag Tesic, said they are booked well in advance.

“It started modestly at first, but day by day numbers have grown nicely,” Tesic said.

He explained that his agency organizes everything, from airport transport to accommodations and translation and other help at vaccination points. When they return for another dose in three weeks, the Russian guests also are offered brief tours to some of popular sites in Serbia. 

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