A Russian film crew blasts into space on a moviemaking history mission, an American actor known for playing a space explorer gets the chance to see the real deal, and more. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more on the Week in Space.
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German officials unveiled this week what they said is the world’s first commercial plant for making synthetic kerosene. It’s seen as a climate-friendly way to produce jet fuel and could potentially be game-changing. More with VOA’s Mariama Diallo.
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U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Chicago on Thursday, making another push for companies to require their workers to get vaccinated, following the vaccine mandate for businesses he announced last month. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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More than 260,000 African children under the age of five die from malaria each year, including more than 10,000 in Kenya, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO’s backing of a malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, for children in sub-Saharan Africa has raised hopes of preventing those deaths. The vaccine proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization gave the green light for the use of the vaccine for children between five and 24 months of age in Africa and other regions prone to a high level of malaria transmission.

This follows trials of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The four-dose shot was administered to 800,000 African children.

Thirty-year-old Salome Awuor allowed her son, now three years old, to take part in the malaria vaccine trials in Kisumu County, western Kenya.

The mother of four said previously she would visit her nearest clinic four times a month to get malaria treatment for him. At the time, he was 12 months old.

“My son was given three jabs, and malaria went down. I never went back to the clinic seeking malaria treatment. I feel so good my children no longer get sick most of the time. That’s why whenever I hear about vaccines, I run to get them because it helps a lot,” she said.

WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus described the malaria vaccine breakthrough as historic and one that could save the lives of tens of thousands of young people each year.

According to the WHO, malaria affects more than 229 million people each year and kills more than 400,000.

In Africa, more than a quarter of a million children die from the mosquito-borne disease.

Earlier trials in 2015 showed the vaccine could prevent 40 percent of malaria cases and about 30 percent of severe cases.

Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He said Kenya’s participation in the study proves the vaccine will work on the country’s population.

“If it’s safe you know it was done in your population and you know it’s good for you. You are not relying on data from another population but from your own population. So that you can confidently advise the government this is safe for us, it works and its approved and it was done by us and we contributed to this development,” he said.

The first three vaccine doses are given a month apart when children are babies, and a final booster is given when the child is one-and-a-half years old.

Ogutu has voiced confidence that Kenyan parents will vaccinate their children from malaria.

“People have been asking where it is now that we have been given the go ahead, we can now go for the rollout. I think it’s time to get to our people and tell them now it’s available and now it’s a matter of procuring the vaccine and ensuring it’s available and start getting it to those who need it,” said Ogutu.

So far, there is no word on when the vaccine will become available to the general public.
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German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday the nation has vaccinated millions more people than previously thought, thanks to some unreported vaccination numbers discovered by the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control.

The institute says nearly 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated, and about 84% have received at least one shot. Previous official reports were about 5% lower — meaning there are about 3.5 million more people vaccinated than had been reported. 

Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Spahn said the discrepancy was discovered in surveys conducted by the RKI that revealed additional vaccinations. He believes some big companies’ employee vaccination programs and mobile vaccination teams in nursing centers and elsewhere may account for those initially unreported.

The new RKI figures are based on surveys and do not include people under the age of 18, which is why the agency has yet to give a new overall number of vaccinated people in Germany.

Spahn said these new numbers are good news in terms of any new COVID-19 restrictions that might be contemplated in the coming months, barring any unforeseen new variants or surges of cases.  

“From today’s perspective, we will not need any further restrictions in autumn and winter to get through this time well without overburdening the health system,” he said.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
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The U.N. secretary-general and the head of the World Health Organization launched an ambitious strategy Thursday to have 40% of the world’s population vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of this year, and 70% by mid-2022.

“With vaccine production now at nearly 1.5 billion doses per month, we can reach 40% of people in all countries by year’s end — if we can mobilize some $8 billion to ensure that distribution is equitable,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres told a news conference.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 6.5 billion doses have already been administered worldwide. Another 5 billion are needed to meet the 70% benchmark, which Tedros said current vaccine manufacturing rates can handle.

“This is not a supply problem, it is an allocation problem,” he said, adding it is critical that the elderly, health care workers and other at-risk groups are prioritized.

An earlier goal to vaccinate 10% of every country’s population by the end of September fell short, with 56 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, unable to meet the target. WHO said 200 million doses are needed to get those countries to meet the 10% target.

“That’s a week’s worth of the global supply,” said Katherine O’Brien, WHO’s director of immunization vaccines and biologicals. “If that can’t be achieved, there really needs to be a fine point put on that.”

To get to the 40% benchmark, Tedros urged countries which have already achieved high coverage to swap their place in the vaccine distribution line with countries that have had less access.

“We can only achieve our targets if countries and companies put contracts for COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT) first for deliveries and donated doses,” Tedros said. “We have the tools to bring the pandemic under control if we use them properly and share them fairly.”

WHO officials said that achieving the 40% vaccination target would essentially end the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic, but if the targets can’t be reached, the risk continues of new variants emerging that may be vaccine resistant.

“It is ambitious, but it is very doable,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to Tedros. He said the doses are paid for, but that the issue is getting them prioritized for distribution through the COVAX facility and AVAT, so they reach the countries that are lagging.

The strategy also urges vaccine-producing countries to share technology and licensing to help other nations scale up production of doses. It also calls on vaccine manufacturers to prioritize fulfilling contracts with COVAX and AVAT, so doses go to the neediest countries. There is a role for international financial institutions, as well, in assisting countries in accessing the funding needed for domestic delivery of doses.

WHO said a three-step approach to vaccination should be taken, targeting the elderly, health care workers and high-risk groups first, followed by all adults and lastly, adolescents.

There have been more than 236.67 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 4.8 million deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which tracks global data on the infection. 
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Americans are being warned to beware of potentially deadly fake prescription pills that are laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl and the highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine. The counterfeit tablets are linked to a wave of drug overdoses killing unsuspecting users.

In its first warning in six years, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said international and domestic criminal networks were mass-producing fake pills and falsely marketing them as legitimate prescription medication.

“Counterfeit pills that contain these dangerous and extremely addictive drugs are more lethal and more accessible than ever before,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram at a news conference in Washington.

The notification was issued last week after the DEA announced it had seized more than 1.8 million fake pills during a two-month undercover operation and had arrested more than 810 people. In a statement, the agency said it had confiscated more than 9.5 million potentially lethal pills in the last year.

“Illicit fentanyl was responsible for nearly three-quarters of the more than 93,000 fatal drug overdoses in the United States in 2020,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Health officials report fentanyl was responsible for nearly 70,000 of the overdose deaths.

Powerful pills

U.S. law enforcement investigators say the majority of counterfeit medication found in America is being made in labs in Mexico using chemicals imported from China. The DEA believes Chinese traffickers have switched from primarily manufacturing finished fentanyl to exporting precursors of the synthetic opioid to Mexican cartels, which then manufacture illicit fentanyl. U.S. officials are now seeking greater cooperation from Mexican law enforcement agencies to disrupt trafficking in the country.

DEA laboratory testing revealed that two out of five fentanyl-laced fake pills seized contained a potentially deadly dose of just 2 milligrams. Fentanyl can be 100 times more powerful than morphine. Drug researchers say a deadly dose of fentanyl is small enough to fit on the tip of a pencil.

“The fake pills seized were capable of killing more than 700,000 people,” Milgram noted, adding that law enforcement agencies have sought to shut down criminal distribution networks selling tablets that look exactly like name-brand prescription medications. “We are alerting the public to this danger so that people have the information they need to protect themselves and their children.”

The DEA alert said medications prescribed by doctors and dispensed by licensed pharmacists were safe, but pills acquired by other avenues were potentially deadly.

Decades of death 

Since 1999, more than 500,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses, both prescription and nonprescription. Deaths rose in nearly all states, with the highest increases in California, Kentucky, Vermont, South Carolina and West Virginia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The more than 9.5 million fake tablets seized this year represented 430% more than the number seized in 2019. The DEA also confiscated ingredients used to make tens of millions of pills, including more than 4,000 kilograms of methamphetamine.

“The pervasiveness of these illicit drugs, and the fatal overdoses that too often result, is a problem that cuts across America from small towns to big cities and everything in between,” said Monaco.

The most common counterfeit pills are being made to look identical to prescription medications such as Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin or stimulants like amphetamines. Investigators say the fake medications are widely available and sold on social media platforms as well as on the streets.

“The illicit drug supply introduces even greater uncertainty about what people are taking, and that contributes to overdoses.” Dr. Caleb Alexander, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told VOA. “If someone combines fentanyl with heroin or methamphetamine or another illicit product, it can be deadly.”
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The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions on the continent with moderate-to-high malaria transmission receive a malaria vaccine.

The vaccine, known as Mosquirix, proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019. 

The WHO said malaria is a top killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, causing the deaths of more than 260,000 children under age 5 every year. 

The vaccine, which requires four doses, counters P. falciparum, “the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa,” WHO said in a press release. 

“For centuries, malaria has stalked sub-Saharan Africa, causing immense personal suffering,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. “We have long hoped for an effective malaria vaccine and now for the first time ever, we have such a vaccine recommended for widespread use. Today’s recommendation offers a glimmer of hope for the continent which shoulders the heaviest burden of the disease and we expect many more African children to be protected from malaria and grow into healthy adults.” 

Substantial benefit

According to WHO, pilot program data showed that more than two-thirds of children who were not sleeping under bed nets were benefiting from the vaccine, and that there was a 30% reduction in “deadly severe malaria, even when introduced in areas where insecticide-treated nets are widely used and there is good access to diagnosis and treatment.”

The pilot program also found that the vaccine had a “favorable safety profile” and was “cost effective.” 

According to The Wall Street Journal, it could still be years until the vaccine is widely available. 

The vaccine has been under development for 30 years by GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical company; PATH, a global nonprofit focused on health issues; and some African research organizations, WHO said. 

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation provided late-stage development funding for the vaccine, WHO said. 
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Wednesday awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to two scientists for their work – independently – in developing a new way of building molecules, a process with applications throughout industry.

Speaking in Stockholm, academy Secretary General Goran Hansson said chemists Benjamin List of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and David MacMillan of Princeton University will split this year’s prize.

In presenting the award, the academy explained the two chemists developed new, organic catalysts to help build molecules.

Catalysts are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product, and are essential to constructing molecules for research and industry.

The academy said previously, it was believed there were just two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes. But over the last 20 years, List and MacMillan, working independently of each other, have developed a third type of catalyst, known as asymmetric organocatalysis.

In the words of the academy, “Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can attach. These often contain common elements such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur or phosphorus. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and cheap to produce.”

Using these reactions, researchers can build molecules that can form elastic and durable materials, store energy in batteries or inhibit the progression of disease.

The Nobel Prizes for medicine and physics were awarded earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics to be awarded over the next week.

Some information for this report comes from AP. 
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Tuesday announced the Nobel prize in physics goes to three scientists for their work in helping to understand complex physical systems, work that has proved valuable in quantifying and predicting climate.  

At a Stockholm news conference, the academy’s Secretary General Goran K. Hansson and a panel of Nobel jurors presented one half of the physics prize to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”

Hansson said the other half of the prize has been awarded to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” 

The panel said the work of Manabe and Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it.”

Born in Japan and now a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, Manabe pioneered studies in how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. 

A professor of meteorology at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, Germany, Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic.

And Sapienza University of Rome physicist Parisi, over the course of his career, discovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials, making it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena in all areas of science and mathematics.

The three scientists will split the $1.1 million cash prize.  The Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded Monday, with prizes for chemistry, literature, peace and economics to be awarded later this week and early next week.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse.
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The pandemic is changing how many of us access health care. In the United States and elsewhere, studies show that virtual medical appointments are effective, help patients manage their care and keep people out of hospitals. More from VOA’s Carol Pearson.
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The crew of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was welcomed aboard the International Space Station Tuesday, though a communications glitch during their final approach delayed their eventual boarding.

The Soyuz spacecraft was launched Tuesday from the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The ship was carrying a history-making crew, as it included film director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild, who will be filming a feature film during their stay at the station.

After the spacecraft orbited the earth twice and made a final approach to the ISS, mission control reported the Soyuz craft experienced some communication issues. Those issues resulted in the crew abandoning automated docking procedures. Veteran Cosmonaut Shkaplerov, the other crew member on the Soyuz craft, manually guided the spacecraft into place without a problem.

The manual docking set back the scheduled opening of the hatch between the spacecraft and the station by an hour.

Once they were welcomed on board the ISS, Shipenko and Peresild will spend the next 12 days filming segments of a new feature film called “Challenge” — the first to actually be shot in outer space.  

NASA says filming will begin almost immediately. Pereslid will play a doctor who is launched to the orbital outpost to save an ailing cosmonaut. Shkaplerov and two fellow cosmonauts already on board the ISS, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, will all have speaking roles in the film.

Shipenko and Pereslid will return to Earth on October 17 with Novitskiy.

The historic mission beats out a similar plan announced last year by Hollywood superstar actor Tom Cruise, the U.S. space agency NASA and Elon Musk’s privately-owned SpaceX company, which ferries crews and cargo to the ISS.  

Russian space officials are hoping the film will restore some luster to the program, which has fallen from its glory days of the 1950s and `60s, when it launched the first man-made satellite as well as the first man and woman, into orbit, but has been plagued by delays, accidents and corruption scandals in recent years.

Tuesday’s launch comes nearly a month after four Americans became the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth, spending three days in space aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press.
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Researchers in Australia have shown a bacteria can sterilize and eradicate a disease-carrying mosquito that is responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever and Zika.

Three million male Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever mosquitoes, were released in the trial at three sites in Northern Queensland state. They were reared at James Cook University in Cairns and sterilized with a naturally-occurring bacteria called Wolbachia. 

Researchers say the bacteria appears to have changed part of the male insects’ reproductive biology, so that female mosquitoes that mate with them lay eggs that do not hatch. 

The flying insects were released over a 20-week period in 2018. Mosquito numbers subsequently fell by more than 80%. When scientists returned the following year, they found one of the trial areas had almost no mosquitoes.

Nigel Beebe is an associate professor at the University of Queensland and research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. He hopes the sterilization method will eventually be used in developing countries. 

“We wanted to show in a developed country that the technology was robust, we could mass rear mosquitoes. It is not very expensive to mass rear mosquitoes and it is really the separation of the males from the females,” he said. 

The Australian team plans to use a similar technique to suppress the virus-spreading Asian Tiger mosquito that has become established in the Torres Strait in northern Australia.

“At the moment we have to use relatively sophisticated technology to do that. But we are now trying to build something that is much more robust and can be used in tropical countries and will be relatively cheap to actually be able separate the males from the females. The mass rearing of the mosquitoes is actually pretty cheap to do. So, I think, absolutely we will have application in developing countries,” saId Beebe. 

Researchers elsewhere are looking at ways to use sterile male mosquitos to curb the spread of malaria, but associate professor Beebe has said it was a “complicated” challenge. 

More than 40% of people worldwide suffer from mosquito-borne diseases. The Australian team hopes its “environmentally-friendly mosquito control” method will help tackle current and future outbreaks of dengue and other debilitating diseases. 

 
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A new study reveals the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 90% effective at keeping someone from being hospitalized from the virus up to six months after receiving the second dose.   

Researchers from Pfizer and U.S.-based health care consortium Kaiser Permanente observed the records of about 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser’s Southern California health insurer and provider program between December 2020 and August of this year.   

The study, published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, also revealed the vaccine was 93% effective against the highly contagious Delta variant for at least six months after the second shot.   

But the researchers also found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection dropped from 88% one month after completing the regimen to 47% after six months.   

The new study was published on the same day the European Union’s drug regulator  approved the use of booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 18 years and older, but left it to individual countries to decide whether or not to recommend the shots for widespread use.      

The European Medicines Agency said in a statement Monday that a booster dose of the Pfizer vaccine “may be considered at least 6 months after the second dose for people aged 18 years and older.”

The agency said people with a severely weakened immune system should be given a third dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine at least 28 days after they have received their second shot.  

The guidance comes as some EU member states have already begun administering booster shots, while others are still debating how broadly to use boosters in their populations.   

Meanwhile, the New York Times newspaper said Monday that Johnson & Johnson will ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve a booster shot of its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine.   

The U.S. drugmaker announced last month that clinical trials show a second shot of its vaccine increased its effectiveness against the virus to 94% about two months after the first dose, which provided about 70% effectiveness.   

Johnson & Johnson said the company is submitting the results of its studies to the FDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Medicines Agency  and other health authorities for potential use of the vaccine as a booster eight months or later after the primary single-dose vaccination. 

Johnson & Johnson’s request comes less than two weeks after the FDA authorized a third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech two-dose COVID-19 vaccine for Americans 65 years old and above and adults at high risk of severe illness. The FDA is currently considering whether to approve a third shot of the two-dose Moderna vaccine.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Workers continue to clean up a massive oil spill off the coast of California as divers try to learn why an underwater pipeline started leaking late last week. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles. 
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The U.N. Children’s Fund says children are likely to suffer most from the monthslong COVID-related restrictions, school closures, and separation from family and friends.

The latest estimates show more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 suffer from mental health disorders globally, while nearly 46,000 adolescents commit suicide every year.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder told VOA most of these conditions are not being addressed because of the stigma attached to mental illness and the lack of government investment. Only about two percent of government health budgets are allocated to mental health spending globally, he said. 

“Twenty percent … of young people are saying that they are feeling depressed and have very little interest in things,” he said. “That again is a clear indication of the impact COVID’s been having. … There is a whole range of mental disorders — anxiety and depression and bipolar — that young people are suffering from.”

UNICEF reports more than 1.6 billion children have suffered some loss of education because of pandemic lockdowns. Elder said children’s mental health often deteriorates when there is a disruption to their daily routines, such as not attending school, not engaging in recreational activities, and not socializing with friends. These problems, he said, affect children all over the world, in rich and poor countries alike. 

“Of course, if you are from a country where you do not have connectivity, you do not have a laptop or one of your parents is on $200 a month, then, of course, those stresses, that anxiety, that risk of slipping into a mental health disorder is much greater,” he said. “And in some of the world’s poorest countries, governments are spending less than a dollar per person treating mental health conditions.”

The cost of ignoring mental disorders is enormous, UNICEF warned. It cited a new analysis by the London School of Economics, which indicates nearly $390 billion in human capital is lost every year due to mental disorders among young people.

 
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Officials investigating one of California’s biggest oil spills were trying to determine whether the undersea pipeline that spewed 572,807 liters (126,000 gallons) of heavy crude into the Pacific Ocean had been damaged by a ship’s anchor. 

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the two busiest container ports in the United States, according to their websites. Together, they see more than 100 cargo ships a day, and those ships pass through and anchor in the area where the pipeline runs. 

“We’re looking into if it could have been an anchor from a ship, but that’s in the assessment phase right now,” said Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Jeannie Shaye.

Meanwhile, residents of Huntington Beach, California, said authorities were slow to react to the large oil spill off the coast.

The spill, which has sullied the beaches and poses a threat to wildlife, is believed to come from a leak in an underwater pipeline.

Residents said that they noticed oil and the smell of petroleum Friday evening, but that there was no response until Saturday afternoon. They said it wasn’t until Saturday night that Amplify Energy Corp., the oil company that owns the pipeline, shut it down.

In a press release Monday, Amplify Energy said that it spotted the oil spill Saturday and immediately notified the U.S. Coast Guard and initiated its oil spill response. The company shut down the pipeline and sent a remotely operated vehicle to help find the source.

Garry Brown, president of the environmental group Orange County Coastkeeper and a Huntington Beach resident, said, “By the time (the oil) comes to the beach, it’s done tremendous damage. Our frustration is, it could have been averted if there was a quick response.”

More than 572,000 liters of crude have reportedly leaked, some of it washing up in coastal Orange County. Several beaches in the area are closed and could remain so for weeks or months, according to Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr.

In response to the spill, crews led by the U.S. Coast Guard have deployed skimmers and booms to try to contain the damage. Of particular concern is the Talbert Marsh, a 10-hectare wetland.

U.S. Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican representing the affected area, has asked President Joe Biden to declare the spill a disaster so that federal money can be allocated toward the cleanup.

“This is a really serious disaster,” she told CNN.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded to a reporter’s question Monday about the spill. 

“We’re working collaboratively with state and local partners to address efforts to find the leak, contain the spill and assess impact, and address potential causes,” she said.

Amplify Energy operates the pipeline and three offshore oil platforms, all installed in the early 1980s. The 16-inch pipeline carries crude oil to a storage facility in Long Beach. 

Beta Operating Company, the Amplify subsidiary that operates the field, has been cited 125 times for safety and environmental violations since 1980, according to a database from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the federal agency that regulates the offshore oil and gas industry, The Associated Press reported. 

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

 
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US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch, the jury said.

“The groundbreaking discoveries… by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world,” the Nobel jury said.

“In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived? This question has been solved by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates.”

Julius, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco and Patapoutian, a professor at Scripps Research in California, will share the Nobel Prize cheque for 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million, one million euros).

Last year, the award went to three virologists for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus.

While the 2020 award was handed out as the pandemic raged, this is the first time the entire selection process has taken place under the shadow of Covid-19.

Nominations close each year at the end of January, and at that time last year the novel coronavirus was still largely confined to China. 

The Nobel season continues on Tuesday with the award for physics and Wednesday with chemistry, followed by the much-anticipated prizes for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.
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Actor William Shatner, best known for his portrayal of space explorer Captain James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” television series, announced he will travel to space later this month.

Shatner, 90, will blast off October 12 aboard a Blue Origin rocket. Blue Origin is the space travel company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

If successful, Shatner would be the oldest person ever to travel to space. He will be joined by three other passengers on Blue Origin’s second space venture.

Bezos was among the first Blue Origin passengers in July.

The flight is expected to last about 10 minutes and reach an altitude of 106 kilometers.

“I’ve heard about space for a long time now. I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle,” Shatner said in a statement.

In a tweet, the actor wrote, “So now I can say something. Yes, it’s true; I’m going to be a ‘rocket man!’ a referral to his spoken-word cover version of singer-songwriter Elton John’s famous song.

 

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press.
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Pope Francis and other religious leaders made a joint appeal on Monday for next month’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) to offer concrete solutions to save the planet from “an unprecedented ecological crisis”.

The “Faith and Science: Towards COP26” meeting brought together Christian leaders including Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, as well as representatives of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism.

“COP26 in Glasgow represents an urgent summons to provide effective responses to the unprecedented ecological crisis and the crisis of values that we are presently experiencing, and in this way to offer concrete hope to future generations,” the pope said.

“We want to accompany it with our commitment and our spiritual closeness,” he said in an address which he gave to participants instead of reading out in the Vatican’s frescoed Hall of Benedictions so that others had more time to speak.

The appeal, which described climate change as a “grave threat”, was handed to Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio and Britain’s Alok Sharma, president of COP26 in Glasgow.

“The faith leaders who have come here today represent around 3/4 of the world’s population. That is by any measure a significant percentage of people across the globe and that’s why their voice matters so much,” Sharma said after the meeting, which was organised by the Vatican, Britain and Italy.

‘War on Creation’

Welby, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, called for a “global financial architecture which repents of its past sins”, including changes in tax rules to promote green activity.

“We have in the past 100 years declared war on creation… Our war against the climate affects the poorest among us,” Welby said.

The appeal urges all governments to adopt plans to help limit the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions as soon as possible.

Wealthier countries must take the lead in reducing their own emissions and in financing poorer nations’ emission reductions, it said.

“We plead with the international community, gathered at COP26, to take speedy, responsible and shared action to safeguard, restore and heal our wounded humanity and the home entrusted to our stewardship,” said the appeal, which followed months of online meetings among the 40 or so religious leaders.

Several participants stressed that no nation could go it alone.

“If one nation sinks, we all sink,” said Rajwant Singh, a Sikh leader from the United States, who sang a poem for the participants.

In his written address, Francis said cultural and religious differences should be seen as a strength, not a weakness, in defending the environment.

“Each of us has his or her religious beliefs and spiritual traditions, but no cultural, political or social borders or barriers prevent us from standing together,” he said.

The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, told Reuters on Sunday he hoped Monday’s meeting could “raise ambitions” on what can be achieved at Glasgow.

Scotland’s bishops said in July that the pope would attend the opening of COP26, health permitting. A decision is expected in the next few days.

Francis, 84, strongly supports the goals of the 2015 U.N. Paris accord to reduce global warming. He told young people at the weekend that theirs was “perhaps the last generation” to save the planet.

U.S. President Joe Biden returned the United States to the Paris accords after his predecessor Donald Trump pulled it out. Biden and the pope are expected to meet at the Vatican at the end of October.
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 A British company says it has developed an easy-to-administer, saliva-based test that can detect whether a person is infectious enough to pass along the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The company, Vatic, said in a statement that its test is “extremely accurate” and has not returned a single false positive result in its test group. “This is so important for getting life back to normal,” the company said.

Vatic said its “mission was to design a test that people won’t mind using multiple times a week.” 

Tests results are available in 15 minutes, the company said.

The test is not available to the public yet as it undergoes more trials but Vatic is seeking approval for its sale directly to the public.

A report in The Economist says COVID in 2020 has brought an abrupt halt to the steady rise of the rate of lIfe expectancy.

Impact on life expectancy

Researchers in Britain, Denmark and Germany said that between 2019 and 2020 life expectancy dropped in all but two of the 28 countries surveyed.

Life expectancy rose in Denmark and Norway and for women in Finland. Meanwhile, male life expectancy fell by more than a year in Italy, Poland and Spain and fell by more than two years in the United States. 

Another report in The Economist says that the death rate from COVID in the U.S. “is about eight times higher in America than in the rest of the rich world” due to vaccine hesitancy and other factors.

The report said, “America’s antipathy to vaccines and continued resistance to other interventions, particularly among Republicans, is worrying. YouGov’s poll indicates that, among those who voted for [former U.S. President] Donald Trump in 2020, 31% say they will not get vaccinated, 71% strongly disapprove of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate and nearly 40% never wear a face mask. That remains a deadly combination.” 

“The pandemic has destabilized societies, economies, and governments. It has shown that there is no global security without global health security,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said about COVID-19 in a recent address to ambassadors and representatives to the European Union’s political and security committee.

“The fastest and best way to end this pandemic is with genuine global cooperation on vaccine supply and access,” Tedros said. “The longer vaccine inequity persists, the longer the social and economic turmoil will continue, and the more opportunity the virus has to circulate and change into more dangerous variants. We need a global realization that no country can vaccinate its way out of this pandemic in isolation from the rest of the world.” 

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported Sunday it had recorded 234.6 million global COVID infections and nearly 5 million deaths.

Protests in Romania

Thousands marched Saturday in Bucharest, Romania, to protest restrictions that begin Sunday to combat a jump in coronavirus infections.

The European nation of 19 million is seeing a shocking rise in the daily number of coronavirus cases. A month ago, the number was about 1,000 new cases a day. On Saturday, Romania reported more than 12,500 new cases, its highest number since the pandemic began in March of last year. 

Protesters, mostly maskless, gathered outside government offices, shouting “Freedom, freedom without certificates,” and “Down with the government,” according to Reuters. One sign read: “Green certificates = dictatorship,” The Associated Press reported. 

The demonstration was organized by Romania’s far-right AUR party, the AP said. 

The rising cases have strained the nation’s hospitals — intensive care beds are nearly full — and the protests angered some medical workers. 

“The situation in hospitals is serious,” Beatrice Mahler, hospital manager of Bucharest’s Marius Nasta Institute of Pneumology, told The Associated Press. “We have patients hospitalized in beds in the hallway — all with extremely severe forms of COVID-19.” 

The restrictions scheduled to take effect Sunday include requiring masks be worn in public, and that shops close at 10 p.m. local time.

Public spaces such as restaurants, theaters and gyms, can remain open — some at only partial capacity — for customers who have COVID-19 passes, meaning they are fully vaccinated, or show proof they have had the illness caused by the coronavirus. 

Romania has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the European Union, 33.5% of all adults are fully vaccinated, second only to Bulgaria. 

There is a weekend curfew in effect for unvaccinated Romanians, and there are plans to make vaccinations mandatory for health care workers, Reuters said. 

Since the pandemic began, Romania has recorded nearly 1.25 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 37,000 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. 

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

“The pandemic has destabilized societies, economies, and governments. It has shown that there is no global security without global health security,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a recent address to ambassadors and representatives to the European Union’s political and security committee.

“The fastest and best way to end this pandemic is with genuine global cooperation on vaccine supply and access,” Tedros said. “The longer vaccine inequity persists, the longer the social and economic turmoil will continue, and the more opportunity the virus has to circulate and change into more dangerous variants. We need a global realization that no country can vaccinate its way out of this pandemic in isolation from the rest of the world.”

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported Sunday it had recorded 234.6 million global COVID infections and nearly 5 million deaths.

Thousands marched Saturday in Bucharest, Romania, to protest restrictions that begin Sunday to combat a jump in coronavirus infections.

The European nation of 19 million is seeing a shocking rise in the daily number of coronavirus cases. A month ago, the number was about 1,000 new cases a day. On Saturday, Romania reported more than 12,500 new cases, its highest number since the pandemic began in March of last year.

Protesters, mostly maskless, gathered outside government offices, shouting “Freedom, freedom without certificates,” and “Down with the government,” according to Reuters. One sign read: “Green certificates = dictatorship,” The Associated Press reported.

The demonstration was organized by Romania’s far-right AUR party, the AP said.

The rising cases have strained the nation’s hospitals — intensive care beds are nearly full — and the protests angered some medical workers.

“The situation in hospitals is serious,” Beatrice Mahler, hospital manager of Bucharest’s Marius Nasta Institute of Pneumology, told The Associated Press. “We have patients hospitalized in beds in the hallway — all with extremely severe forms of COVID-19.”

The restrictions scheduled to take effect Sunday include requiring masks be worn in public, and that shops close at 10 p.m. local time.

Public spaces such as restaurants, theaters and gyms, can remain open — some at only partial capacity — for customers who have COVID-19 passes, meaning they are fully vaccinated, or show proof they have had the illness caused by the coronavirus.

Romania has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the European Union, 33.5% of all adults are fully vaccinated, second only to Bulgaria.

There is a weekend curfew in effect for unvaccinated Romanians, and there are plans to make vaccinations mandatory for health care workers, Reuters said.

Since the pandemic began, Romania has recorded nearly 1.25 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 37,000 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Russia’s vaccine

Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, said Saturday that just some paperwork needs to be finished before its Sputnik V vaccine can be registered with the World Health Organization.

The shot has been approved in more than 70 countries and is used widely in Russia. If it wins approval from the WHO and the European Medicines Agency, that could make it available to other markets, Reuters said.

The WHO could not be immediately reached for comment, Reuters added.

Nicaragua shots

Nicaragua has OK’d two Cuban-made vaccines for use in the Central American nation, the Cuban manufacturer, BioCubaFarma, said Saturday.

Cuba developed three coronavirus vaccines, all of which are awaiting official recognition by the WHO, Reuters reported. Nicaragua authorized Abdala and Soberana for emergency use.

Iran, Vietnam and Venezuela have also OK’d the Cuban vaccines for emergency use in their countries.

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

 

 
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A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025. 

The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT Friday, using the planet’s gravity to slow the spacecraft down. 

After swooping past Mercury at altitudes of under 200 kilometers (125 miles), the spacecraft took a low-resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before zipping off again. 

The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the Northern Hemisphere and Mercury’s characteristic pock-marked features, among them the 166-kilometer-wide (103-mile-wide) Lermontov crater. 

The joint mission by the European agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice past Venus on its journey to the solar system’s smallest planet. 

Five further flybys are needed before BepiColombo is sufficiently slowed down to release ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. The two probes will study Mercury’s core and processes on its surface, as well as its magnetic sphere. 

The mission is named after Italian scientist Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, who is credited with helping develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA’s Mariner 10 first used when it flew to Mercury in 1974. 
…

In a normal year, the smokehouses and drying racks that Alaska Natives use to prepare salmon to tide them through the winter would be heavy with fish meat, the fruits of a summer spent fishing on the Yukon River like generations before them. 

This year, there are no fish. For the first time in memory, both king and chum salmon have dwindled to almost nothing and the state has banned salmon fishing on the Yukon, even the subsistence harvests that Alaska Natives rely on to fill their freezers and pantries for winter. The remote communities that dot the river and live off its bounty — far from road systems and easy, affordable shopping — are desperate and doubling down on moose and caribou hunts in the waning days of fall. 

“Nobody has fish in their freezer right now. Nobody,” said Giovanna Stevens, 38, a member of the Stevens Village tribe who grew up harvesting salmon at her family’s fish camp. “We have to fill that void quickly before winter gets here.” 

Opinions on what led to the catastrophe vary, but those studying it generally agree human-caused climate change is playing a role as the river and the Bering Sea warm, altering the food chain in ways that aren’t yet fully understood. Many believe commercial trawling operations that scoop up wild salmon along with their intended catch, as well as competition from hatchery-raised salmon in the ocean, have compounded global warming’s effects on one of North America’s longest rivers. 

The assumption that salmon that aren’t fished make it back to their native river to lay eggs may no longer hold up because of changes in both the ocean and river environments, said Stephanie Quinn-Davidson, who has worked on Yukon River salmon issues for a decade and is the Alaska Venture Fund’s program director for fisheries and communities. 

Looking for ‘smoking gun’

King, or chinook, salmon have been in decline for more than a decade, but chum salmon were more plentiful until last year. This year, summer chum numbers plummeted and numbers of fall chum — which travel farther upriver — are dangerously low. 

“Everyone wants to know, ‘What is the one smoking gun? What is the one thing we can point to and stop?’ ” she said of the collapse. “People are reluctant to point to climate change because there isn’t a clear solution … but it’s probably the biggest factor here.” 

Many Alaska Native communities are outraged they are paying the price for generations of practices beyond their control that have caused climate change — and many feel state and federal authorities aren’t doing enough to bring Indigenous voices to the table. The scarcity has made raw strong emotions about who should have the right to fish in a state that supplies the world with salmon, and it underscores the powerlessness many Alaska Natives feel as traditional resources dwindle. 

The nearly 3,200-kilometer (2,000-mile) Yukon River starts in British Columbia and drains an area larger than Texas in both Canada and Alaska as it cuts through the lands of Athabascan, Yup’ik and other tribes. 

The crisis is affecting both subsistence fishing in far-flung outposts and fish processing operations that employ tribal members in communities along the lower Yukon and its tributaries. 

“In the tribal villages, our people are livid. They’re extremely angry that we are getting penalized for what others are doing,” said P.J. Simon, chairman and chief of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of 42 tribal villages in the Alaska interior. “As Alaska Natives, we have a right to this resource. We have a right to have a say in how things are drawn up and divvied up.” 

More than a half-dozen Alaska Native groups have petitioned for federal aid, and they want the state’s federal delegation to hold a hearing in Alaska on the salmon crisis. The groups also seek federal funding for more collaborative research on the effects that ocean changes are having on returning salmon. 

Citing the warming ocean, Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy requested a federal disaster declaration for the salmon fishery this month and has helped coordinate airlifts of about 41,000 kilograms (90,000 pounds) of fish to needy villages. The salmon crisis is one of the governor’s top priorities, said Rex Rock Jr., Dunleavy’s adviser for rural affairs and Alaska Native economic development. 

A vital tradition

That’s done little to appease remote villages that are dependent on salmon to get through winter, when snow paralyzes the landscape and temperatures can dip to minus 29 C (minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit) or lower. 

Families traditionally spend the summer at fish camps using nets and fish wheels to snag adult salmon as they migrate inland from the ocean to the place where they hatched so they can spawn. The salmon is prepared for storage in a variety of ways: dried for jerky, cut into fillets that are frozen, canned in half-pint jars or preserved in wooden barrels with salt. 

Without salmon, communities are under intense pressure to find other protein sources. In the Alaska interior, the nearest road system is often dozens of miles away, and it can take hours by boat, snowmachine or airplane to reach a grocery store.

Store-bought food is prohibitively expensive for many: 3.8 liters (1 gallon) of milk can cost nearly $10, and a pound of steak was recently $34 in Kaltag, an interior village about 528 kilometers (328 air miles) from Fairbanks. A surge in COVID-19 cases that has disproportionately hit Alaska Natives has also made many hesitant to venture far from home. 

Instead, villages sent out extra hunting parties during the fall moose season and are looking to the upcoming caribou season to meet their needs. Those who can’t hunt themselves rely on others to share their meat. 

“We have to watch our people because there will be some who will have no food about midyear,” said Christina Semaken, 63, a grandmother who lives in Kaltag, an Alaska interior town of fewer than 100 people. “We can’t afford to buy that beef or chicken.” 

Semaken hopes to fish next year, but whether the salmon will come back remains unknown. 

Tribal advocates want more genetic testing on salmon harvested from fishing grounds in Alaska waters to make sure that commercial fisheries aren’t intercepting wild Yukon River salmon. They also want more fish-tracking sonar on the river to ensure an accurate count of the salmon that escape harvest and make it back to the river’s Canadian headwaters.

Loss of sea ice

Yet changes in the ocean itself might ultimately determine the salmon’s fate.

The Bering Sea, where the river meets the ocean, has had unprecedented ice loss in recent years, and its water temperatures are rising. Those shifts are throwing off the timing of the plankton bloom and the distribution of small invertebrates that the fish eat, creating potential chaos in the food chain that’s still being studied, said Kate Howard, a fisheries scientist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Researchers have also documented warming temperatures in the river that are unhealthy for salmon, she said. 

Because salmon spend time in both rivers and the ocean during their unique life cycle, it’s hard to pin down exactly where these rapid environmental changes are most affecting them, but it’s increasingly clear that overfishing is not the only culprit, Howard said. 

“When you dig into all the available data for Yukon River salmon,” she said, “it’s hard to explain it all unless you consider climate change.” 

Alaska Natives, meanwhile, are left scrambling to fill a hole in their diet — and in centuries of tradition built around salmon. 

On a recent fall day, a small hunting party zoomed along the Yukon River by motorboat, scanning the shoreline for signs of moose. After three days, the group had killed two moose, enough to provide meat for seven families, or about 50 people, for roughly a month in their small community of Stevens Village. 

At the end of a long day, they butchered the animals as the Northern Lights blazed a vibrant green across the sky, their headlamps piercing the inky darkness. 

The makeshift camp, miles from any road, would normally host several dozen families harvesting salmon, sharing meals and teaching children how to fish. On this day, it was eerily quiet. 

“I don’t really think that there is any kind of bell out there that you can ring loud enough to try to explain that type of connection,” said Ben Stevens, whose ancestors founded Stevens Village. “Salmon, to us, is life. Where can you go beyond that?” 
…

Delegates heading to the COP26 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow agreed they must deliver on the $100 billion per year pledge to help most vulnerable nations tackle climate change, COP26 president Alok Sharma said on Saturday.

 

Speaking after days of meetings at the pre-COP26 climate event in Italy, Sharma said there was a consensus to do more to keep the 1.5 degrees Celsius target within reach, adding more needed to be done collectively in terms of national climate plans.

 

The COP26 conference in Glasgow aims to secure more ambitious climate action from the nearly 200 countries that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius – and preferably to 1.5 degrees – above pre-industrial levels.
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