Hundreds of previously unreported workplace injuries surface at a space industry titan. Plus, the European Space Agency chief’s warning on climate change, and we say goodbye to a space travel pioneer. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. A caution to our viewers – this report contains graphic images some may find disturbing.
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Day: November 16, 2023
Advances in childhood cancer are a success story in modern medicine. But in the past decade, those strides have stalled for Black and Hispanic youth, opening a gap in death rates, according to a new report published Thursday.
Childhood cancers are rare and treatments have improved drastically in recent decades, saving lives.
Death rates were about the same for Black, Hispanic and white children in 2001, and all went lower during the next decade. But over the next 10 years, only the rate for white children dipped a little lower.
“You can have the most sophisticated scientific advances, but if we can’t deliver them into every community in the same way, then we have not met our goal as a nation,” said Dr. Sharon Castellino, a pediatric cancer specialist at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, who had no role in the new report.
She said the complexity of new cancers treatments such as gene therapy, which can cure some children with leukemia, can burden families and be an impediment to getting care.
“You need at least one parent to quit their job and be there 24/7, and then figure out the situation for the rest of their children,” Castellino said. “It’s not that families don’t want to do that. It’s difficult.”
More social workers are needed to help families file paperwork to get job-protected leave and make sure the child’s health insurance is current and doesn’t lapse.
The overall cancer death rate for children and teenagers in the U.S. declined 24% over the two decades, from 2.75 to 2.10 per 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
The 2021 rate per 10,000 was 2.38 for Black youth, 2.36 for Hispanics and 1.99 for whites.
Nearly incurable 50 years ago, childhood cancer now is survivable for most patients, especially those with leukemia. The leading cause of cancer deaths in kids is now brain cancer, replacing leukemia.
Each year in the U.S. about 15,000 children and teens are diagnosed with cancer. More than 85% live for at least five years.
The improved survival stems from research collaboration among more than 200 hospitals, said Dr. Paula Aristizabal of the University of California, San Diego. At Rady Children’s Hospital, she is trying to include more Hispanic children, who are underrepresented in research.
“Equity means that we provide support that is tailored to each family,” Aristizabal said.
The National Cancer Institute is working to gather data from every childhood cancer patient with the goal of linking each child to state-of-the-art care. The effort could improve equity, said Dr. Emily Tonorezos, who leads the institute’s work on cancer survivorship.
The CDC’s report is “upsetting and discouraging,” she said. “It gives us a roadmap for where we need to go next.”
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How was the air breathed by Caesar, the Prophet Mohammed or Christopher Columbus? A giant freezer in Copenhagen holds the answers, storing blocks of ice with atmospheric tales thousands of years old.
The Ice Core Archive, housing 25 kilometres (15 miles) of ice collected primarily from Greenland, is helping scientists understand changes in the climate.
“What we have in this archive is prehistoric climate change, a record of man’s activities in the last 10,000 years,” glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.
Blocks of ice have been his passion for 43 years — and it was while drilling into Greenland’s ice sheet that he met his wife Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, also a top expert in the field of paleoclimatology.
Steffensen has since 1991 managed the repository, one of the biggest in the world, with 40,000 blocks of ice stacked on long rows of shelves in large boxes.
The frozen samples are unique, made up of compressed snow and not frozen water.
“All the airspace between the snowflakes is trapped as bubbles inside (and) the air inside these bubbles is the same age as the ice,” Steffensen explained.
The repository’s antechamber is similar to a library’s reading room: this is where scientists can examine the ice they have withdrawn from the main “library”, or storage room.
But they must be quick: the temperature in the antechamber is kept at -18 degrees Celsius (-0.4F) — decidedly balmy compared to the -30C (-22F) in the storage room.
Here, Steffensen removes a block of ice from a box. Its air bubbles are visible to the naked eye: it’s snow that fell during the winter of year zero.
“So we have the Christmas stuff, the real Christmas snow,” says Steffensen with a big grin, his head covered in a warm winter bonnet with furry ear flaps.
Bedrock
A team of researchers brought the first ice cores to Denmark in the 1960s from Camp Century, a secret US military base on Greenland.
The most recent ones date from this summer, when scientists hit the bedrock on eastern Greenland at a depth of 2.6 kilometres, gathering the oldest ice possible.
Those samples contain extracts from 120,000 years ago, during the most recent interglacial period when air temperatures in Greenland were 5C higher than today.
“The globe has easily been much warmer than it is today. But that’s before humans were there,” Steffensen said.
This recently acquired ice should help scientists’ understanding of rising sea levels, which can only be partly explained by the shrinking ice cap.
Another part of the explanation comes from ice streams, fast-moving ice on the ice sheet that is melting at an alarming rate.
“If we understand the ice streams better, we can get a better idea of how much the contribution will be (to rising sea levels) from Greenland and Antarctica in the future,” Steffensen said.
He hopes they’ll be able to predict the sea level rise in 100 years with a margin of error of 15 centimetres — a big improvement over today’s 70 centimetres.
‘Treasure’
Ice cores are the only way of determining the state of the atmosphere prior to man-made pollution.
“With ice cores we have mapped out how greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane vary over time,” Steffensen said.
“And we can also see the impact of the burning of fossil fuels in modern times.”
This project is separate from the Ice Memory foundation, which has collected ice cores from 20 sites worldwide to preserve them for future researchers at the French-Italian Concordia research station in Antarctica, before they disappear forever due to climate change.
“Storing Greenland’s ice memory is very good,” said the head of the foundation, Jerome Chappellaz.
But, he noted, the storage of samples in an industrial freezer is susceptible to technical glitches, funding woes, attacks, or even wars.
In 2017, a freezer that broke down at the University of Alberta in Canada exposed 13 percent of its precious samples thousands of years old to undesirably warm temperatures.
At Concordia Station, the average annual temperature is -55C, providing optimal storage conditions for centuries to come.
“They have a treasure,” said Chappellaz, appealing to the Danes to join Concordia’s project.
“We must protect this treasure and, as far as possible, ensure that it joins mankind’s world heritage.”
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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday granted Elon Musk’s SpaceX a license to launch the company’s second test flight of its next-generation Starship and heavy-lift rocket from Texas, the agency said.
SpaceX said it was targeting Friday for a launch, saying a two-hour launch window opens at 7 a.m. Central Time (1300 GMT) and that local residents “may hear a loud noise” during the rocket’s ascent toward space.
“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency, which oversees commercial launch sites, said in a statement.
SpaceX’s first attempt to send Starship to space was in April, when the rocket exploded mid-air four minutes after a liftoff that pulverized the company’s launchpad and flung sand and concrete chunks for miles.
Though Musk, SpaceX’s CEO and founder, hailed the Starship launch attempt as exceeding his expectations, it fell far short of its overall test objectives to reach space, complete nearly a full revolution around Earth, and reenter the atmosphere for a splashdown off a Hawaiian coast.
First the moon, eventually Mars
Starship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120 meters and designed to be fully reusable, represents SpaceX’s next-generation workhorse rocket system capable of ferrying some 150 tons of satellites into space. Plans also call for the rocket system to be used to carry crews of humans to the moon, and eventually Mars.
The rocket is crucial for SpaceX’s increasingly dominant launch business. NASA, under a roughly $4 billion development contract with SpaceX, plans to use Starship around 2026 to land the first crew of humans on the moon’s surface since 1972.
Hundreds of fixes before launch
The upcoming Starship flight will have the same test objectives as the first attempt. SpaceX made hundreds of fixes to the rocket’s design based on the April failure. The FAA required SpaceX to make dozens of fixes before allowing another Starship flight.
SpaceX determined that an onboard fire prevented Starship — the rocket system’s upper stage — from separating from its Super Heavy first stage booster as planned. The rocket’s explosion was the result of an automated destruction command, which triggered some 40 seconds late.
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