April 2023

Scientists at New York University have untangled what they believe is the mystery behind the graying of hair. The discovery offers hope to individuals who spend considerable time and money at hair salons to ward off this evidence of aging, but hair colorists say they don’t think they will be put out of business. Aron Ranen reports from New York City.
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The first thing 11-year-old Mia Rodriguez says she did with her new prosthetic hands was draw a picture of a kitten.

The Uruguayan girl, whose fingers never fully developed, put on the prosthetic hands and demonstrated the grasping movement she can now make.

“Now I can hold the pencil with one hand. Before, I had to do it with both hands because my fist wouldn’t close,” she said, while her mother, Ana Van López, watched excitedly.

Rodriguez received the prostheses from the Uruguayan Manos de Heroes foundation, which designs and prints hands and arms with 3D technology for children and adults across the South American country.

Since 2020, the foundation has provided more than 100 free prostheses, most of them for families in vulnerable situations.

Van Lopez, 28, lives with her partner and their four children in an abandoned factory in Salinas, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Montevideo, and her income comes from informal work such as selling firewood or pineapples. The family has a monthly income of about $200, or 8,000 pesos.

“I am very grateful; I thought my daughter was the only one with this problem. She had never come across someone like her in the hospital or on the street. It’s very difficult for us,” said Lopez, who is trying to obtain a state disability benefit for the girl equivalent to a little more than $380, or 15,000 pesos a month. In addition, they receive a similar amount of state support, she said.

Almost 16% of the Uruguayan population registers some level of disability, the majority mild, according to a 2011 census by the National Statistics Institute.

Rodriguez’s prosthetic hands move with threads that are taut from the motion of her wrists. They are violet with pink, colors she said she chose because they go well together, and are decorated with unicorn decals. Other children prefer the colors of their favorite soccer club or superhero.

The prostheses can be mechanical or electronic. They are placed on the hands, forearm, elbow or shoulder, according to the needs of each person.

Designing a hand, printing it and putting it together takes a couple of weeks, said Andrea Cukerman, an electrical engineer and founder of Manos de Heroes, or Hands of Heroes.

The prostheses are free, and the foundation is financed with contributions from private companies and donations. In Europe, a prosthetic hand with much more advanced technology can cost as much as $100,000, the foundation said.

On one of the walls of the foundation’s office there are photos of children and adults who have received prostheses. The images show children striking poses with hands and arms in vibrant colors — orange, green — or like those of Spider-Man.

“The idea is that they don’t feel alone,” Cukerman said.

The photos of adults are more subdued; most of their prostheses imitate the color and details of the skin.

Cukerman shows the prostheses she is currently printing: the arm of an adult who had an accident.

The day of the test, Rodriguez kept looking at everything in front of her, Cukerman recalled.

“When we showed her her hands, her face lit up, her big eyes, she hardly spoke,” she said.

They explained how the prosthetic hands worked, what movement she had to make to open and close her fist, and warned that some adjustments might have to be made.

Rodriguez put her hands on and began to try movements.

“It took a few seconds; they were perfect,” said her mother.
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Ocean temperatures have spiked well above record levels in the last few weeks, and scientists are trying to figure out what it means and whether it forecasts a surge in atmospheric warming. 

Some researchers think the jump in sea surface temperatures stems from a brewing and possibly strong natural El Nino warming weather condition plus a rebound from three years of a cooling La Nina, all on top of steady global warming that is heating deeper water below. If that’s the case, they said, ocean temperature records being broken this month could be the first of many heat marks to fall. 

From early March to this week, the global average ocean sea surface temperature jumped nearly two-tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degree Fahrenheit), according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a trusted climate science tool. That may sound small, but for the average of the world’s oceans — which is 71% of Earth’s area — to rise so much in that short a time, “that’s huge,” said University of Colorado climate scientist Kris Karnauskas. “That’s an incredible departure from what was already a warm state to begin with.” 

Climate scientists have been talking about the warming on social media and among themselves. Some, like University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann, quickly dismiss concerns by saying it is merely a growing El Nino on top of a steady human-caused warming increase. 

It has warmed especially off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, where before the 1980s most El Ninos began. El Nino is the natural warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures. Until last month, the world has been on the flip side, a cooling called La Nina, that has been unusually strong and long, lasting three years and causing extreme weather. 

‘Unusual pattern’

Other climate scientists, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer Gregory C. Johnson, say it doesn’t appear to be just El Nino. There are several marine heat waves or ocean warming spots that don’t fit an El Nino pattern, such as those in the northern Pacific near Alaska and off the coast of Spain, he said. 

“This is an unusual pattern. This is an extreme event at a global scale” in areas that don’t fit with merely an El Nino, said Princeton University climate scientist Gabe Vecchi. “That is a huge, huge signal. I think it’s going to take some level of effort to understand it.” 

The University of Colorado’s Karnauskas took global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past several weeks and subtracted the average temperature anomalies from earlier in the year to see where the sudden burst of warming is highest. He found a long stretch across the equator from South America to Africa, including both the Pacific and Indian oceans, responsible for much of the global temperature spike. 

That area warmed four-tenths of a degree Celsius in just 10 to 14 days, which is highly unusual, Karnauskas said. 

Part of that area is clearly a brewing El Nino, which scientists may confirm in the next couple months, Karnauskas said. But the area in the Indian Ocean is different and could be a coincidental independent increase or somehow connected to what may be a big El Nino, he said.

It’s been about seven years since the last El Nino, and it was a whopper. The world has warmed in that seven years, especially the deeper ocean, which absorbs by far most of the heat energy from greenhouse gases, said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The ocean heat content, which measures the energy stored by the deep ocean, each year sets new highs regardless of what’s happening on the surface. 

Since that last El Nino, the global heat ocean content has increased .04 degree Celsius (.07 degree Fahrenheit), which may not sound like a lot but “it’s actually a tremendous amount of energy,” Purkey said. It’s about 30 to 40 zettajoules of heat, which is the energy equivalent of hundreds of millions of atomic bombs the size that leveled Hiroshima, she said. 

On top of that warming deep ocean, the world had unusual cooling on the surface from La Nina for three years that sort of acted like a lid on a warming pot, scientists said. That lid is off.
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U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 9 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released Thursday. Meanwhile, electronic cigarette use rose, to about 1 in 17 adults.

The preliminary findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are based on survey responses from more than 27,000 adults.

Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered the leading cause of preventable death.

In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public.

Last year, the percentage of adult smokers dropped to about 11%, down from about 12.5% in 2020 and 2021. The survey findings sometimes are revised after further analysis, and CDC is expected to release final 2021 data soon.

E-cigarette use rose to nearly 6% last year, from about 4.5% the year before, according to survey data.

The rise in e-cigarette use concerns Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. Nicotine addiction has its own health implications, including risk of high blood pressure and a narrowing of the arteries, according to the American Heart Association.

“I think that smoking will continue to ebb downwards, but whether the prevalence of nicotine addiction will drop, given the rise of electronic products, is not clear,” said Samet, who has been a contributing author to U.S. Surgeon General reports on smoking and health for almost four decades.

Smoking and vaping rates are almost reversed for teens. Only about 2% of high school students were smoking traditional cigarettes last year, but about 14% were using e-cigarettes, according to other CDC data.
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Artificial intelligence, or AI, could potentially transform arts and entertainment, from music to movies, but it is also raising concerns. Is AI a creative tool or a threat to creators and artists? VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan examines the question.
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The European Union’s environment agency on Wednesday urged member states to reduce pesticide use over concern that sales of harmful chemicals remain strong despite its effects on human health and biodiversity.

The warning comes amid findings that one or more pesticides were detected above thresholds of concern at 22% of all monitoring sites in rivers and lakes across Europe in 2020, the European Environment Agency said.

“From 2011 to 2020, pesticide sales in the EU-27 remained relatively stable at around 350,000 tonnes (tons) per year,” the EEA said in a new report, citing data from Eurostat.

Pesticides are widely used in the agriculture sector but also in forestry, along roads and railways, and in urban areas such as public parks, playgrounds or gardens.

The insecticide imidacloprid and the herbicide metolachlor showed the highest absolute number of above-threshold levels across Europe, primarily in northern Italy and northeastern Spain.

In groundwater, the herbicide atrazine caused the most above-threshold levels, even though it has been banned since 2007.

Dangers of pesticides

Human exposure to chemical pesticides, primarily through food but also through the air in agriculture-intense regions, is linked to the development of cardiac, respiratory and neurological disease, as well as cancer, the report said.

“Worryingly, all of the pesticides monitored … were detected in higher concentrations in children than in adults,” the EEA said.

In a study conducted in Spain, Latvia, Hungary, Czech Republic and the Netherlands between 2014 and 2021, at least two pesticides were detected in the bodies of 84% of survey participants.

Pesticide pollution is also driving biodiversity loss across the continent, causing significant declines in insect populations and threatening the critical role they play in food production.

A German study cited in the report found a 76% decline in flying insects in protected zones over a period of 27 years.

It identified pesticides as one of the reasons for the decline.

Sales drop in some countries

In 11 EU member states, pesticide sales decreased between 2011 and 2020, with the biggest drops in the Czech Republic, Portugal and Denmark.

Latvia and Austria saw the strongest rates of increase in terms of sales, while the sharpest rises in volumes were registered in Germany and France.

These two latter countries, along with Spain and Italy, the EU’s four biggest agricultural producers, account for the highest volumes sold for most groups of active substances.

Modern food production systems rely on high volumes of chemical pesticides to ensure crop yield stability and quantity, and to maintain food security.

According to the EEA, 83% of agricultural soils tested in a 2019 study contained pesticide residues.

“We could reduce our dependency on chemical pesticides to maintain crop yields and our overall pesticide use volumes by shifting to alternative models of agriculture, such as agroecology,” it said.

A separate report published Wednesday by the European Food Safety Authority showed that in 2021, 96% percent of food samples analyzed were within legal limits for pesticide residue.

Grapefruit imported from outside the EU had the highest level of pesticide residues in 2021 and new controls were therefore introduced, the EFSA said.
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