Day: July 12, 2022

More than 1.8 billion people worldwide are at risk of severe floods, new research shows. Most reside in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, and four out of 10 live in poverty.

The figures are substantially larger than previous estimates. They show that the risk is concentrated among those least able to withstand and recover from flooding.

“I thought it was a valuable paper, indeed. Because this link between poverty and flood risk is kind of overlooked,” said hydrologist Bruno Merz, of the German Research Center for Geosciences, who was not involved in the study.

Flood risk assessments typically consider risk in monetary terms, which is highest in rich countries where more wealth is at stake. The new study focused on how flood exposure and poverty overlap.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study combined a global flood risk database with information on population density and poverty. The research focused on places where floods 15 centimeters deep or deeper happen at least once every 100 years on average.

The study found that nearly 90% of people at risk of severe flooding live in poor countries, not rich ones. More than 780 million flood-exposed people live on less than $5.50 per day.

The substantial overlap between high flood risk and poverty feeds into a vicious cycle that further concentrates flood protections in rich countries that have more resources to deal with floods in the first place, said flood risk researcher Jeroen Aerts of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Aerts was not involved in the study.

“It’s doing a cost-benefit analysis,” Aerts said. “Less money is going to poorer countries, because, of course, if the country is poorer, there are less dollars exposed.” Aerts said that this also happens within countries, which tend to invest in pricey flood protections for wealthy urban centers rather than for poorer rural areas.

The new estimate for global flood exposure is higher than some earlier ones. For instance, one previous study predicted that 1.3 billion people would be exposed to severe floods by 2050 — 500 million fewer than are exposed today, according to the new estimate. The authors attribute their higher number to their use of better data covering more regions at higher resolution and combining the risks from coastal, river and surface water floods.

The study did not consider protections, such as levees or dikes, in its assessment of flood exposure. This “distorts the picture,” Merz said, since some flood-prone populations are well-protected, such as those in the Netherlands.

Rather than undermining the study’s findings, Merz thought that this could mean that an even greater proportion of the people threatened by floods lives in poor regions.

“In many low-income countries, there is no flood protection, so people will be flooded by a small flood … that occurs on average every five years. On the other hand, in Europe, in North America, many of the areas are protected (from floods that happen once every) 100 years, 200 years or even higher. And so, this is not included,” he said.

Unprotected, poorer regions could thus shoulder an even greater share of the actual risks from flood exposure than the paper suggests.

The new result offers a snapshot of flood risk around the world as it is today, not a projection of how it will develop in the future. Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of floods in much of the world. And although early warning systems have decreased flood fatalities, including in resource-poor regions, population growth in flood-prone areas will also put more people at risk in the future, Aerts said.

“The exposure to natural hazards, exposure to flooding — it’s larger than previously investigated. And the majority of those exposed people live in a vulnerable, poor region,” Aerts said. “I think that’s the takeaway, I think, and maybe one sentence more: This means that investments in … flood adaptation should be targeted at those areas.”
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The U.S. space agency NASA released the set of the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope Tuesday, a day after sharing a full-color picture of stars and galaxies deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before.

Watch here:

U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope offered “a new window into the history of our universe.”

Tuesday’s images took weeks to render using data from the telescope. They show areas of the universe where researchers will focus future scientific inquiries.

The $10 billion telescope, the largest and most powerful ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it.

A peek into the past

Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope.

“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (299,000 meters). And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the furthest humanity has peered into the past.

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.

“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said.

Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.”

Into the cosmos

The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images.

Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide (6.4 meters), a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”

Nelson said future images would peer even further back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past.

Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Citing the fast-spreading omicron BA.5 coronavirus subvariant that now makes up a majority of U.S. cases, the White House on Tuesday said it will ensure the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, boosters, treatments and testing to combat the disease.

“Currently, many Americans are under-vaccinated, meaning they are not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news briefing Tuesday. “Staying up to date on your COVID-19 vaccines provides the best protection against severe outcomes.”

The subvariant, which the CDC says accounts for 65% of the variants circulating in the United States as of last week, reportedly could spread more easily despite vaccination or natural immunity.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at the same briefing, said the subvariant does not cause a more severe illness or hospitalizations compared to other subvariants.

“Variants will continue to emerge. The virus circulates globally and in this country. We should not let it disrupt our lives, but we cannot deny that it is a reality that we need to deal with,” Fauci said.

The White House says it will focus on boosters, at-home testing, making good masks available and supporting people who are immunocompromised.

“We can prevent serious illness; we can keep people out of the hospital and especially out of the ICU. We can save lives, and we can minimize the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Even in the face of BA.5, the tools we have continue to work,” said Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator.

“We are at a point in the pandemic where most COVID-19 deaths are preventable,” he said.

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Grieving Japanese paid their final farewells to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Tuesday. 

Scores of everyday people lined up outside Tokyo’s Zojoji Temple to bring flowers and other tokens of respect for Abe, who was gunned down last Friday in the western city of Nara during a campaign rally. Many of the mourners cried as they bowed in prayer in front of the temple. 

Zojoji Temple was the site of a private ceremony for the 67-year-old Abe that was limited to only his close friends and family. Abe’s casket was then removed from the temple and placed in a hearse for a long processional through downtown Tokyo to Kirigaya Funeral Hall for cremation with thousands of residents lined up along the route to wave their final goodbyes. 

The hearse was slated to drive by several significant venues from Abe’s political career, including the prime minister’s official office, the Parliament building and the headquarters of his Liberal Democratic Party. 

The suspected gunman in Abe’s assassination, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, was immediately seized after he shot the ex-prime minister was taken into custody. 

Japanese news outlets say Yamagani, a former member of the country’s Self-Defense Forces, wanted to kill Abe because he believed him to be part of an unspecified religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial ruin. 

The Unification Church, a global religious movement founded in South Korea in the 1950s by the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, confirmed Monday that Yamagami’s mother was a member, but did not comment on any donations she may have made. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. 
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Chinese authorities on Monday confirmed that a case of cholera had occurred in the central city of Wuhan where the outbreak of COVID-19 began before spreading globally. State media acknowledged that the case has sparked public worries in a society still coping with the COVID outbreak. 

China’s official media Xinhua published the news on the front page of its website Monday evening local time, citing a public announcement issued by Wuchang district government’s center for disease control. Wuchang is a district with a little more than one million residents in the city of Wuhan and is home to Wuhan University where the case was reported. 

The news item is no longer on Xinhua’s front page as of Tuesday morning local time, nor can it be found in the Local News section of the website, a category it fell under previously. 

Wuhan University announced on Monday that a graduate student with gastro disease history was admitted at the university’s hospital on July 8 after experiencing fever, vomiting and diarrhea. The student has since been transferred twice, each time to a higher-level hospital, and is currently in quarantine, the university said. 

The dormitory where the student stayed, as well as the lab where the student worked, had both been locked down beginning the evening of July 9, the university said. Three close contacts, including two roommates, and a third person who had dined with the student prior to the student’s hospitalization, have been quarantined. 

Between the evening of July 9 and early morning the next day, 254 students who lived in the same dormitory building plus three dormitory building managers and 15 vendors have been tested. Potentially affected areas are temporarily locked down, relevant personnel have been quarantined “according to regulation” and have been given preventive medicine, the university said. 

The university has also taken “environmental” samples of public areas of the dormitory building, dormitory rooms, bathrooms, waste disposal channels, and the building where the student worked. The areas have also been disinfected. 

Staff at the hospitals who came into contact with the student have been tested. 

The university reported that its hospital has treated 19 additional cases of diarrhea between July 1 and 10, and that tests for cholera were being performed. 

The university said on Monday that up until July 10 evening local time, no other O1 or O138 strain, which was confirmed in the student, has been detected among 264 closely monitored individuals. 

O1 and O138 are the only two strains of the cholera bacteria that cause outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization. 

Cholera is only the second infectious disease classified by the Chinese government as Type A infectious disease, the other is plague. COVID-19, AIDS, Rabies, bird flu and malaria are among dozens classified as Type B, a less severe category. 

The English-language Global Times, part of China’s state media, reported the Wuhan University case on Monday. The article quoted the university’s report that the patient was symptom-free after being treated and that the more than 200 students who lived in the same dormitory building all tested negative.

The report acknowledged that “While COVID-19 outbreaks are not over in China and the flu has hit provinces in South China, the newly found cholera case has sparked public worries [in China].” The same report also quoted a director at Wuhan University saying, “There’s no need for panic.” 

Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the pathogen biology department at the university, was quoted by Global Times as saying that “with largely improved sanitary conditions and medical treatment, cholera in China has been under control since 2000 and only sporadic cases have been reported in recent years.” 

According to the World Health Organization, cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with cholera bacteria. WHO describes cholera as “an extremely virulent disease that can cause severe acute watery diarrhea.” 

According to the WHO, it takes between 12 hours and 5 days for a person to show symptoms after ingesting contaminated food or water. Cholera affects both children and adults and can kill within hours if untreated. 

Most people infected with cholera bacteria do not develop any symptoms, according to WHO, although the bacteria are present in their feces for 1-10 days after infection and have the potential to affect other people.
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The U.S. space agency is set to release the full set of the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday, a day after sharing a full-color picture showing stars and galaxies from deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before.

During a news briefing at the White House Monday to unveil the first NASA image, U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope was “a new window into the history of our universe.”

The $10 billion telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it.

A peek into the past

Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope.

“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the farthest humanity has peered into the past.

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.

“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said.

Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.”

Into the cosmos

The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images.

Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”

Nelson said future images would peer even farther back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past.

Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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The U.S. space agency has released the first image from its new space telescope — a full color picture showing stars and galaxies from deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before. 

During a news briefing Monday at the White House to unveil the NASA image, U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope was “a new window into the history of our universe.” 

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it. 

Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope. 

“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the farthest humanity has peered into the past. 

A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. 

The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.  

“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said. 

Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.” 

The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images. 

Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.” 

A larger unveiling of photos from the telescope will be released by NASA Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.  

Nelson said future images would peer even farther back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past. 

Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system. 

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 

 
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