Category: Silicon Valley

Canberra scientists are researching a mysterious new recreational drug not seen before in Australia. The Australian National University says the substance is a “close cousin” of ketamine, a controlled anesthetic used by doctors and veterinarians.

The new substance is known as “CanKet” — a Canberra ketamine. It was discovered at Australia’s first government-supported pill-testing center that started as a trial in the national capital earlier this year.

The research team says the new drug was handed in at Australia’s first pill-checking center in Canberra. The user thought it was ketamine but said its effects were unusual and wanted it checked by experts at the pill-monitoring service. The drug was presented in a “small plastic bag of crystals and powder.”

Australian National University scientists believe the new drug was probably imported from overseas. It is not known whether CanKet has side effects. It is chemically similar to ketamine but has characteristics that have not been seen previously.

Associate professor Malcolm McLeod of the Australian National University Research School of Chemistry told VOA that ketamine and its derivatives are becoming increasingly popular illicit drugs.

Ketamine is used in medicine and as a horse tranquilizer. It is also a popular recreational drug linked to a phenomenon known as the “k-hole” — a type of out-of-body experience. Common side effects include nightmares, hallucinations, high blood pressure and confusion.

It is typically injected, snorted, or taken orally.

In 2019, an estimated 9 million Australians — or more than 40% of the population aged over 14 — had illicitly used a drug, according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. The survey is a government-funded project that has been collecting data about alcohol, tobacco and drug consumption in Australia every two to three years since 1985.

The most popular illicit drugs were cannabis and cocaine. The survey showed that ketamine use rose from 0.4% of respondents in 2016 to 0.9% in 2019.
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The first Native American woman in space said Wednesday she is overwhelmed by the beauty and delicacy of Mother Earth and is channeling “positive energy” as her five-month mission gets underway.

NASA astronaut Nicole Mann said from the International Space Station that she’s received lots of prayers and blessings from her family and tribal community. She is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California.

Mann showed off the dream catcher she took up with her, a childhood gift from her mother that she’s always held dear. The small traditional webbed hoop with feathers is used to offer protection, and she said it’s given her strength during challenging times. Years before joining NASA in 2013, she flew combat in Iraq for the Marines.

“It’s the strength to know that I have the support of my family and community back home and that when things are difficult or things are getting hard or I’m getting burned out or frustrated, that strength is something that I will draw on to continue toward a successful mission,” Mann told The Associated Press, which gathered questions from members and tribal news outlets across the country.

Mann said she’s always heeded her mother’s advice on the importance of positive energy, especially on launch day.

“It’s difficult for some people maybe to understand because it’s not really tangible,” she said. “But that positive energy is so important, and you can control that energy, and it helps to control your attitude.”

Mann, 45, a Marine colonel and test pilot who was born in Petaluma, California, said it’s important to recognize there are all types of people aboard the space station. It’s currently home to three Americans, three Russians and one Japanese astronaut.

“What that does is it just highlights our diversity and how incredible it is when we come together as a human species, the wonderful things that we can do and that we can accomplish,” she said.

While fascinated with stars and space as a child, Mann said she did not understand who became astronauts or even what they did.

“Unfortunately, in my mind at that time, it was not in the realm of possibilities,” she said.

Now, she’s taking in the sweeping vistas of Earth from 260 miles (420 kilometers) up and hoping to see the constellations as she encourages youngsters to follow their dreams.

As for describing Earth from space, “the emotions are absolutely overwhelming,” she said. “It is an incredible scene of color, of clouds and land, and it’s difficult not to stay in the cupola (lookout) all day and just see our planet Earth and how beautiful she is, and how delicate and fragile she is against the blackest of black that I’ve ever seen — space — in the background.”

Mann rocketed into orbit with SpaceX on October 5. She’ll be up there until March. She and her husband, a retired Navy fighter pilot, have a 10-year-old son back home in Houston.

The first Native American in space, in 2002, was now-retired astronaut John Herrington of the Chickasaw Nation.
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The World Health Organization said Wednesday it is too early to lift the highest-level alert for the COVID-19 crisis, with the pandemic remaining a global health emergency despite recent progress.

The WHO’s emergency committee on COVID-19 met last week and concluded that the pandemic still constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a status it declared back in January 2020.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Wednesday that he agreed with the committee’s advice.

“The committee emphasized the need to strengthen surveillance and expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at risk,” he said, speaking from the UN health agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

The WHO first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a PHEIC on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.

Although declaration of a PHEIC is the internationally agreed mechanism for triggering an international response to such outbreaks, it was only in March, when Tedros described the worsening situation as a pandemic, that many countries woke up to the danger.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 622 million confirmed COVID-19 cases have been reported to WHO and more than 6.5 million deaths, although those numbers are believed to be significant underestimates.

According to WHO’s global dashboard, 263,000 new cases were reported in the previous 24 hours, while 856 new COVID-19 deaths had been reported in the past week.

Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that “the global situation has obviously improved since the pandemic began,” but warned that “the virus continues to change and there remain many risks and uncertainties.”

“The pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again,” he warned.

‘Surveillance has declined’

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, agreed, warning that there were still “millions of cases being reported each week, but our surveillance has declined.”

That decline is making it difficult to get a full overview of the situation and especially of how the virus is mutating. Van Kerkhove stressed that “the more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.”

The omicron variant accounts for basically all virus samples that are sequenced, with more than 300 sublineages of that variant recorded.

“All of the subvariants of omicron are showing increased transmissibility and properties of immune escape,” Van Kerkove said, adding that one new combination of two different subvariants was showing “significant immune evasion.”

“This is a concern for us because we need to ensure that the vaccines that are in use worldwide remain effective at preventing severe disease and death,” she said.

In light of the broad spread of new omicron subvariants, Van Kerkhove stressed that “countries need to be in a position to conduct surveillance to deal with increases in cases and perhaps deal with increases in hospitalizations.”

“We have to remain vigilant.”
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The World Health Organization said on Wednesday it will temporarily suspend the standard two-dose vaccination regimen for cholera, replacing it with a single dose due to vaccine shortages and rising outbreaks worldwide. 

The U.N. agency said “the exceptional decision reflects the grave state of the cholera vaccine stockpile” at a time when countries like Haiti, Syria and Malawi are fighting large outbreaks of the deadly disease, which spreads through contact with contaminated water and food. 

As of October 9, Haiti had confirmed 32 cases and 18 deaths from the disease, while many cases were still awaiting confirmation. 

“The pivot in strategy will allow for the doses to be used in more countries, at a time of unprecedented rise in cholera outbreaks worldwide,” WHO said in a statement on Wednesday. 

The WHO’s emergencies director Mike Ryan told reporters in a briefing that the change in strategy was a sign of the “scale of the crisis” caused by a lack of focus on safe sanitation and immunization for all at risk. 

“It’s a sad day for us to have to go backwards,” he said. 

The one-dose strategy had proved to be effective as a response to cholera outbreaks, the agency said, although the duration of protection is limited and appears to be much lower in children. 

The disease often causes no or mild symptoms, but serious cases cause acute diarrhea and can kill within hours if untreated. 

Cholera cases have surged this year, especially in places of poverty and conflict, with outbreaks reported in 29 countries and fatality rates rising sharply. The WHO also said that climate change means that cholera is a risk in an increasing number of countries, as the bacteria causing the illness multiplies faster in warmer waters. 

A cholera outbreak in Syria has already killed at least 33 people, posing a danger across the frontlines of the country’s 11-year war and stirring fears in crowded camps for the displaced. 

A cholera outbreak in a north Cameroon refugee camp has killed three people and infected at least 36, the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday. 

The first case was confirmed on Saturday in the Minawao refugee camp, which hosts around 75,000 people who fled Boko Haram insurgents in neighboring Nigeria. 

 
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Experts say record-breaking floods in Australia are allowing mosquitoes to thrive, increasing the risk of spreading diseases like Japanese Encephalitis.

Communities across three states have in recent days been hit by flooding, and more torrential rain is forecast this week. Parts of eastern Australia have been repeatedly flooded in the past two-years.

Mosquitoes need stagnant water. Immature insects emerge from eggs and develop underwater until they become pupae, and then adults. Females require blood before laying eggs and can inject saliva and virus into humans when they bite.

Mosquito-borne diseases are a perennial problem in Australia, where thousands of people are infected with the Ross River virus each year.

In 2021, Japanese Encephalitis gained a significant foothold in Australia for the first time.

More than 40 people were infected with the virus, and seven people died, according to government data.

The virus moves between mosquitos and water birds. Pigs, too, can also harbor the virus.

The illness it causes can be mild, but in some cases, patients can suffer seizures.

Experts have said that fewer than one percent of people infected will develop a severe brain condition — called encephalitis — which can be fatal.

Associate Professor Cameron Webb from the New South Wales Health Department told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that recent flooding increases the risk of Japanese encephalitis infection.

“There [are] hundreds of different types of mosquitos in Australia, but there is one mosquito in particular that we are concerned about when it comes to Japanese encephalitis virus,” he said. “It is a mosquito that thrives in freshwater environments, the type of environments that have been created by excessive rainfall and flooding across much of the country.”

Two naturally occurring climatic phenomena — La Niña and the Indian Ocean Dipole — are fueling the flooding. Experts have said that their impact is being intensified by climate change.

Australian troops and residents have been racing to build a two kilometers long levee to stop floodwaters from inundating the town of Echuca, north of Melbourne. Parts of eastern Australia have had their worst flooding in decades.

With heavy rain in the forecast later this week, regions from Queensland to Tasmania in eastern Australia are once again on flood watch.
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As the November 8 elections near in the U.S., both major parties are pushing opposing stances on abortion. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said if his Democratic Party wins a legislative majority, he will codify the right to abortion access into law. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from the White House.
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A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of “viral spillover,” according to research published Wednesday.

Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the Arctic landscape of Lake Hazen.

It is the largest lake in the world entirely north of the Arctic Circle and “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been,” researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at the University of Toronto, told AFP.

The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for melted glacier water in the summer, as well as the lakebed itself — which required clearing snow and drilling through 2 meters of ice, even in May when the research was carried out.

They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediment through almost 300 meters of water, and samples were then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.

“This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.

But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.

“Basically, what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.

Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover. And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.

‘Very unpredictable’

The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.

The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorize is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.

Those, instead, wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as increased water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.

“That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.

The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.

“The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said.

They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.

But they argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

“It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.

“It’s really unpredictable … and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable. It can range from benign to an actual pandemic.”

The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.

“Obviously, we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.
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There are only about 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild and they live in only three countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. To encourage tourists and locals to help protect the endangered gorillas, Rwanda has turned to social media platform Instagram with a project they call GorillaGram. Senanu Tord reports from Kinigi, Rwanda. Videographer: Senanu Tord   
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More and more, people are installing video doorbells and surveillance cameras in and around their homes to protect against unwanted intruders. But while many consumers feel the devices provide some peace of mind, some observers are concerned that they trigger personal biases toward those captured on camera. VOA’s Julie Taboh has this report. Michelle Quinn contributed.
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Who said there is nothing new under the sun? 

One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.

FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.

The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.  

On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.  

Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines. 

Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.

A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power. 

Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast. 

The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine. 

In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”  

A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.

Challenges

There are potential flotovoltaic hazards, however. A plant caught fire in Chiba prefecture in Japan in 2019. Officials blamed a typhoon for shifting panels one atop another, generating intense heat and possibly sparking the fire at the 18-hectare facility containing more than 50,000 floating solar panels at the Yamakura Dam.

The most significant barrier to wider adoption of the technology, at present, is the price. It is more expensive to construct a floating array than a similarly sized installation on land. But with the higher costs there are additional benefits: Due to passive cooling of water bodies, the floating panels can function more effectively than conventional solar panels. They also reduce light exposure and lower the water temperature, minimizing harmful algae growth.

That all sounded promising to officials in the town of Windsor in northern California’s wine country. Nearly 5,000 solar panels, each generating 360 watts of electricity, are now floating on one of Windsor’s wastewater ponds.

“They’re all interlinked. Each panel gets its own float. And they actually move quite well with wave action and wind action,” . You’d be surprised how they can kind of just suck up the waves and ride them out without breaking or coming apart,” said Garrett Broughton, the senior civil engineer for Windsor’s public works department.   

The floating panels are easy on the environment and Windsor’s budget, in which the wastewater plant’s electric bill was the town government’s largest

Town Council member Deborah Fudge pushed for the 1.78-megawatt project over an alternative of putting solar panels atop carports.

“They offset 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. And they also provide 90 percent of the power that we need for all of the operations for treating wastewater, for all the operations of our corporation yard and also for pumping our wastewater to the geysers, which, is a geothermal field, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north,” Fudge told VOA. 

The town leases the floating panels from the company that installed them, which gives it a set price for electricity on a long-term contract, meaning Windsor is paying about 30 percent of what it previously spent for the same amount of power.

“It’s not like we’ve invested in something where we’re not going to get a payback. We’re getting a payback as we speak. And we’ll get a payback for 25 years,” said Windsor’s mayor, Sam Salmon. 

The floating systems are not intended to fully blanket bodies of water, allowing for other activities to continue, such as boating and fishing. 

“We do not assume the floating structure will cover the whole water body, it’s often a very small percentage of that water body,” NREL’s Gadzanku told VOA. “Even just from a visual perspective you don’t want to maybe see PV panels covering an entire reservoir.”

NREL has identified 24,419 man-made bodies of water in the United States as suitable for FPV placement. Floating panels covering little more than one-fourth the area of each these sites would potentially generate nearly 10 percent of America’s energy needs, according to the lab.

Among the sites is the 119-hectare Smith Lake, a man-made reservoir managed by Stafford County in Virginia to produce drinking water. It is also a site for recreational fishing adjacent to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Quantico base.  

“Many of these eligible bodies of water are in water-stressed areas with high land acquisition costs and high electricity prices, suggesting multiple benefits of FP technologies,” wrote the study’s authors. 

“It really is an option with a lot of proven technology behind it,” said Gadzanku.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Silicon Valley this week comes as the Biden administration is promoting more investment in technology but also enacting more restrictions on selling technology to businesses in China. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Long distance runners rely on endurance, determination and the ability to see. Today, steps are being taken to help runners with disabilities, including those who are blind or partially sighted, to compete. Andri Tambunan reports for VOA in this report narrated by Zulfian Bakar. Videographer: Andri Tambunan, Maria Iman-Santoso
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Relentless drought in China, East Africa, the U.S. West and northern Mexico, devastating floods in Pakistan and Kentucky, scorching heat waves in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, destructive cyclones in southern Africa and intense hurricanes in the U.S. and Central America make up just some of the recent extreme weather events that scientists have long predicted would be more intense with a warming climate.

“With just over one degree of warming since pre-industrial times, we are already seeing more extreme weather patterns,” said Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute in London.

Scientists have been tracking precisely how much the climate has already changed due to human activity. Temperatures around the world have been inching upwards.

The average global temperature today, which tends to be compared to estimates for the pre-industrial era that kickstarted the mass burning of fossil fuels, has shot up between 0.9 and 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.6 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850, in large part due to human activity, according to estimates in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most of that warming has happened from 1975 onwards, at a rate of 0.15 Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) to 0.2 Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade.

Most people are living in areas that have heated up more than the global average, “partly that is urbanization — people move into cities, which are urban heat islands — and partly populations growing,” Robinson said. Urban areas, packed with plenty of heat-absorbing infrastructure like roads and buildings and less cooling tree cover, become “islands” of warmer weather.

Sea levels, which have swelled due to both warming, expanding oceans and the melting of ice over land, have also been jumping up more rapidly. In the twentieth century, seas were rising by about 1.4 millimeters (0.06 inches) a year, but that’s doubled to 3.6 millimeters a year (0.14 inches) in the past fifteen years, data suggests. Seas have risen by about 21 to 24 centimeters (8 to 9 inches) so far since 1880 on average, according to estimates, with the IPCC suggesting this will likely be up to 43 to 84 centimeters (17 to 33 inches) by 2100.

While the climate and global temperatures have fluctuated throughout the Earth’s history, it is the rate of change that is most alarming to researchers. Fossil fuels — made up of ancient decomposing plants and animals deep in the earth — have been dug up at extraordinary rates. Scientists are now starting to pinpoint “details about rates and magnitudes and timing of changes” as well as the varying impact on regions, said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb.

With the planet already facing the effects of climate change, adapting to hazards is one major way humans can limit the damage. Weather-related disaster deaths are generally trending lower globally as forecasts, preparedness and resilience improves, scientists say.

“The extent to which people are harmed by an extreme weather event is strongly influenced by government policies,” Robinson said, but added that “there are limits to adaptation.”
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide.

The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The initiative is trying to end the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two endemic countries, the foundation said in a statement Sunday.

The money also will be used to stop outbreaks of new variants of the virus. The announcement was made Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin.

The foundation says in a statement on its website that it has contributed nearly $5 billion to the polio eradication initiative. The initiative is trying to integrate polio campaigns into broader health services, while it scales up use of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2.

The group also is working to make national health systems stronger, so countries are better prepared for future health threats, the statement said.

“The last steps to eradication are by far the toughest. But our foundation remains dedicated to a polio-free future, and we’re optimistic that we will see it soon,” said foundation CEO Mark Suzman.

The eradication initiative is a public-private partnership led by a group of national governments that includes the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Elon Musk said Saturday his rocket company, SpaceX, would continue to fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, citing the need for “good deeds,” a day after he said it could no longer afford to do so.

Musk tweeted: “the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding ukraine govt for free.”

Musk said Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine. The service has helped civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia.

Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk’s change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk “No good deed goes unpunished,” he replied “Even so, we should still do good deeds.”

The billionaire has been in online fights with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine says is too generous to Russia.

He had made his Friday remarks about funding after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.
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Sitting on a 7,000-hectare stretch of land in southwest Florida, Babcock Ranch has made a name for itself as the first solar-powered town in the United States. Its power comes from nearly 700,000 solar panels that supply energy to more than 2,000 homes and other buildings, including a health center and schools.

Syd Kitson, founder of the planned community, envisioned an environmentally friendly energy-efficient city. His dream became a reality in 2018.

“I believe deeply in respecting the environment and wanted to prove that you could build this new city and work hand-in-hand with the environment,” said Kitson, CEO of the real estate firm Kitson & Partners. “Our water management system is based around natural floodways. We also have 7,000 hectares we are preserving.”

The preserve protects natural habitats, scenic landscapes and water resources.

“It was just the kind of community my husband and I were looking for,” Shannon Treece told VOA. “We liked that the town was built for sustainability, including solar energy.”

Today, Babcock Ranch is also known as the town that came out practically unscathed Sept. 28, when Hurricane Ian came roaring through the area bringing record-breaking storm surges and winds over 160 kph.

Nearby Fort Myers by the Gulf of Mexico was devastated.

Babcock Ranch was built on a higher elevation to be above the storm surge. And the buildings were constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds.

Because of that, Shannon Treece and her family are among the 4,600 residents who decided to ride out the storm.

“It was a little scary,” she said of being in a hurricane for the first time. “We couldn’t see anything since we had blocked all the windows with storm shutters, but we could hear debris hitting the house. I am glad our house held up.”

Nancy Chorpenning and her husband also decided to stay put.

“The hurricane sounded like a locomotive coming through. But we never lost our electricity, access to the internet or our water,” she told VOA.

That’s because power lines from Babcock Ranch’s solar array and utility plants are underground, which shields them from high winds and bad weather, Kitson said.

Huge retaining ponds protect the homes from flooding, and the streets are designed to soak up floodwaters.

When building the town, “we spent a lot of time making sure Babcock Ranch was storm ready,” Kitson said. “We had minor damage from Hurricane Ian, like some downed small trees and torn roof shingles, but within a day, we were almost back to normal.”

Chorpenning thinks there are lessons to be learned from Babcock Ranch.

“We can be a model for other communities, showing the importance of water management and using solar energy,” she said. “We’re also showing how neighborhoods can live in concert with nature, partly by requiring that native plant species be planted in the community.”

The blueprint for the town is to grow into a much larger city. The developers have their sights set on constructing thousands more of the environmentally friendly homes, which would increase the population to 50,000 residents.

“I hope we are setting a good example for others to follow as we continue to protect the natural environment at the same time,” Kitson said.  
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In a remote village in India, a siren can be heard from the local temple every night at 7 p.m. — signaling the commencement of a daily “digital detox.” For the next 90 minutes, the population of 3,000 in Sangli district’s Mohityanche Vadgaon lays aside all the electronic gadgets in the vicinity, including mobile phones and television sets.

The second siren goes off at 8:30 p.m., indicating the end of the intermission. Until then, the villagers are encouraged to focus on activities such as reading, studying and engaging in verbal conversation with one another.

Proponents of the initiative carried out at a village in the Maharashtra state of India say it is the solution to the “screen addiction” afflicting residents in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and brings back the value of human connection.

The tactic was devised by Vijay Mohite, “the sarpanch” (Indian head of the village council) at Mohityanche Vadgaon.

Jitender Dudi, the chief administrator of district development in Sangli, brought Mohite’s idea into fruition.

‘Mobile phone addicts’

Jayawant Mohite, who retired from teaching at school in the village two months ago said that the children turned into what he called “mobile phone addicts” after the COVID-lockdowns started and they were made to attend classes online, using mobile phones, in 2020.

“Students were found engrossed in their mobile phones for hours, even after online classes ended for the day. Once regular offline classes began last year, most of them were very inattentive in the classes and were found losing interest in academics,” the former teacher told VOA.

“After interacting with the families of the students, we discovered that they were still spending long hours on their mobile phones before and after school hours. We counselled them and their families, but could not wean the students off their mobile phones. Finally, we approached the ‘sarpanch’ of our village and apprised him of the situation,” Mohite said.

The concerned schoolteachers of the village also told the sarpanch that if the habit of overusing or misusing mobile phones by the students was not controlled swiftly, the future of the students would be doomed.

Dr. J.R. Ram, a clinical psychiatrist in Kolkata, said, “extended screen time can result in several adverse effects, but during the pandemic, the forced incarceration of young people at home has amplified its impact.”

He said that it becomes an obstacle for students’ progress in learning.

“Surfing on the internet—that is, multi-tasking deprives students of their ability to concentrate for longer periods when they need to study,” Ram said. “They get used to scrolling on social media, watching videos and exchanging text messages during classes. Such a situation can have negative consequences on one’s cognition or thinking ability.”

Sarpanch Mohite told VOA that he held meetings with other village leaders and started devising strategies to stop the misuse and overuse of the technology by the students.

“Some leaders said that it was impossible to distance the children from their mobile phones, adding that they had never heard of any community that had succeeded in such an initiative. Some other leaders said that we should try to do something. ‘There’s nothing to lose, in case we fail,’ they said,” Mohite said.

The villagers, however, were won over by the collaborative awareness program orchestrated by the village council employees, retired schoolteachers, anganwadi (rural childcare center) workers and members of Accredited Social Health Activist- a nation-wide community health service network, or ASHA, composed of female community health workers.

The women in the village played a crucial role in the digital detox initiative.

“We gathered the village women, including the mothers of the students, and explained to them how the misuse of mobiles was destroying the future of the children,” Sarpanch Mohite told VOA. “When we proposed the idea of a digital detox, they all agreed with our concerns about the children and supported our idea, too.”

ASHA workers, who were also instrumental in persuading the villagers to embrace the idea of a digital detox, are local women trained to create awareness on health issues in their communities, according to the National Institute of Health and Welfare, India.

‘Mandatory practice’

The daily digital detox is now observed as a mandatory practice by the residents of Mohityanche Vadgaon, with a locality-wise team ensuring that every villager is adhering to the discipline.

“In August, we made a public announcement, requesting the villagers to help implement the ‘No Mobile, No TV, for 1.5 Hours Daily’ proposal. On August 15—observed as Independence Day in India—we introduced Digital Detox at our village in our style.

“Initially, some families were not cooperating. But, in such cases, their neighbors would report the cases to our village leaders, and our volunteers would immediately arrive at the houses of those families to convince them otherwise.

Every family at the village is now complying with our digital detox rule,” Vijay Mohite told VOA.

“After we have got a very good response from the villagers, we are pondering over an idea to extend the ‘No mobile, No TV’ time to two or even 2.5 hours in near future,” the sarpanch added.

Word on the initiative at Mohityanche Vadgaon has traveled fast that five other villages in Sangli district have emulated Mohite’s concept and implemented similar steps.

Rajubhai Mujawar, a resident of a nearby Nerli village, said that a daily ban on mobile and TV for 90 minutes will be introduced where he lives soon.

“The children have become mobile addicts. We have decided to introduce the rule of ‘No mobile, No TV’ for 1.5 hours daily in our village soon, following what Mohityanche Vadgaon village has done,” he said.
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Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole. 

The burst of gamma rays — the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation — was first detected by orbiting telescopes Sunday, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists across the world. 

Astrophysicist Brendan O’Connor told AFP that gamma ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as this one did, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our sun. 

The star explodes in a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then matter forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is spewed out in a jet of energy that travels at 99.99% the speed of light. 

The flash released photons carrying a record 18 teraelectronvolts of energy — that’s 18 with 12 zeros behind it — and it has impacted longwave radio communications in Earth’s ionosphere. 

“It’s really breaking records, both in the amount of photons, and the energy of the photons that are reaching us,” said O’Connor, who used infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile to take fresh observations early Friday. 

“Something this bright, this nearby, is really a once-in-a-century event,” he added. 

“Gamma ray bursts in general release the same amount of energy that our sun produces over its entire lifetime in the span of a few seconds — and this event is the brightest gamma ray burst.” 

The gamma ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first spotted by telescopes including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft Sunday morning Eastern time.  

1.9 billion-year-old movie

It originated from the direction of the constellation Sagitta and traveled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth — less than the current distance of its starting point, because the universe is expanding. 

Observing the event now is like watching a 1.9 billion-year-old recording of those events unfold before us, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to glean new insights into things like black hole formation. 

“That’s what makes this sort of science so addictive — you get this adrenaline rush when these things happen,” said O’Connor, who is affiliated with the University of Maryland and George Washington University. 

He added that though the initial burst may have been visible to lucky amateur astronomers, it has since faded out of their view. 

Over the coming weeks, he and others will continue watching for the signatures of supernovas at optical and infrared wavelengths, to confirm that their hypothesis about the origins of the flash are correct, and that the event conforms to known physics.

Supernova explosions are also predicted to be responsible for producing heavy elements — such as gold, platinum, uranium — and astronomers will also be on the hunt for their signatures. 

Astrophysicists have written in the past that the sheer power of gamma ray bursts could cause extinction-level events here on Earth. 

But O’Connor pointed out that because the jets of energy are very tightly focused, and aren’t likely to arise in our galaxy, this scenario is not something we should worry much about. 
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