The Strange Origin of the Hollow Moon Conspiracy Theory

Jessica Coulon
Tue, October 18, 2022 

Smartshots International - Getty Images

The hollow moon conspiracy theory came about during the Apollo missions in 1969.

Conspiracy theorists misinterpreted the results of the astronauts’ seismic experiments, leading them to believe the moon was hollow.

Scientists said the moon rings “like a bell.” That’s because the vibrations from the moon’s seismic events, known as moonquakes, last much longer than those on Earth.

Conspiracy theorists once believed that the moon was hollow. Though that’s more likely than the moon being made out of cheese, it still seems pretty ridiculous by today’s standards. So where did that hollow moon theory—or rather, conspiracy—come from?

Surprisingly, it isn’t based in folklore, and the tale isn’t very old, either. The hollow moon theory first came about in 1969 during the Apollo 12 moon-landing mission.

NASA researchers sought to learn more about the composition of the moon. During the Apollo 12 mission, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean set up a Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE) at the landing site as part of larger set of moon experiments known as the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP).

Once the Apollo 12 astronauts were safely back in the command module, they crashed the lunar module into the moon’s surface. The impact was the equivalent of detonating one ton of TNT and triggered what’s known as a “moonquake”—the first human-made moonquake to take place. The PSE seismometers recorded the resulting vibrations, which were much bigger and lasted much longer than the scientists had anticipated. They were far different from the earthquake vibrations we’re familiar with.

Photo credit: Bettmann - Getty Images

NASA continued its moonquake experiments during the Apollo 13, 14, 15, and 16 missions, with similar results.

At the time, the findings were surprising because they pointed to the moon being much less dense than Earth, and it is: the moon is only 60 percent as dense. That doesn’t mean the moon is hollow, but as with many things—like the moon landing itself—conspiracy theorists perpetuated that misinformation.
What Are Moonquakes?

The Passive Seismic Experiment seismometers placed during the Apollo 12 mission remained active until 1977, recording both natural and human-made moonquakes alike. In fact, moonquakes happen fairly regularly, as space debris like asteroids hit the moon more frequently than Earth, because the moon’s atmosphere is much less dense.

Scientists have pinpointed four types of moonquakes: deep sub-700-kilometer quakes, meteorite-caused quakes, thermal quakes, and shallow quakes occurring only 20 kilometers to 30 kilometers deep. Shallow moonquakes, like those triggered by NASA, last the longest and have the most devastating effects—some even measured up to 5.5 on the Richter scale. Shallow moonquakes do occur naturally on the moon, too, though scientists haven’t pinpointed what causes them yet.
Why Does the Moon “Ring” Like a Bell?

Here’s where things got lost in translation. “The moon was ringing like a bell,” Clive R. Neal, professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, says of the experiment results in a NASA writeup. And that’s true from a scientific standpoint. Similarly, the writeup also compares moonquake vibrations to those of a tuning fork, which is a kind of acoustic resonator. “It just keeps going and going,” Neal says.

However, the moon does not literally sound like a bell ringing, nor is it hollow like one. But conspiracy theorists interpreted it in that manner.

Photo credit: NASA

On Earth, vibrations from earthquakes typically last only 30 seconds or so and no more than two minutes. That’s largely due to the amount of water present on the planet. As Neal explains, “Water weakens stone, expanding the structure of different minerals. When energy propagates across such a compressible structure, it acts like a foam sponge—it deadens the vibrations.”

Meanwhile, the NASA-induced moonquakes all lasted over ten minutes. The Apollo 12 moonquake’s shockwave took close to eight minutes to peak after impact and around an hour to fully cease. But we now know there’s a very good, scientific explanation for it. There isn’t much water on the moon that we know of—it’s mostly in the form of ice; and the moon is drier and a lot more rigid than Earth. So, the moon’s composition allows vibrations to “ring” and continue on for a much longer period of time.

The results were surprising at the time of the Apollo missions, but we now know more about the moon’s composition. Though we’ve ruled out the moon being hollow, we have a lot to learn still.

Terry Hurford, a NASA geophysicist, is working on the new Subsurface Lunar Investigation and Monitoring Experiment (SUBLIME), which would “map the moon’s core” and gather even more data on moonquakes for the Artemis program, for instance. “Our understanding of the moon’s interior remains rudimentary and is limited,” he says in a NASA article.

Our moon has been slowly drifting away from Earth over the past 2.5 billion years

Joshua Davies
Mon, October 17, 2022 at 3:00 PM·6 min read


An illustration of the Earth as seen from the surface of the moon.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Joshua Davies, Professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Margriet Lantink, Postdoctoral research associate, Department of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Looking up at the moon in the night sky, you would never imagine that it is slowly moving away from Earth. But we know otherwise. In 1969, NASA's Apollo missions installed reflective panels on the moon. These have shown that the moon is currently moving 3.8 cm away from the Earth every year.

If we take the moon’s current rate of recession and project it back in time, we end up with a collision between the Earth and moon around 1.5 billion years ago. However, the moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, meaning that the current recession rate is a poor guide for the past.

Along with our fellow researchers from Utrecht University and the University of Geneva, we have been using a combination of techniques to try and gain information on our solar system’s distant past.

We recently discovered the perfect place to uncover the long-term history of our receding moon. And it's not from studying the moon itself, but from reading signals in ancient layers of rock on Earth.

Related: How was the moon formed?

Reading between the layers

In the beautiful Karijini National Park in western Australia, some gorges cut through 2.5 billion year old, rhythmically layered sediments. These sediments are banded iron formations, comprising distinctive layers of iron and silica-rich minerals once widely deposited on the ocean floor and now found on the oldest parts of the Earth’s crust.

Cliff exposures at Joffre Falls show how layers of reddish-brown iron formation just under a meter thick are alternated, at regular intervals, by darker, thinner horizons.

The Joffre Gorge in Karijini National Park in western Australia, showing regular alternations between reddish-brown, harder rock and a softer, clay-rich rock (indicated by the arrows) at an average thickness of 85 cm. These alternations are attributed to past climate changes induced by variations in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit.

The darker intervals are composed of a softer type of rock which is more susceptible to erosion. A closer look at the outcrops reveals the presence of an additionally regular, smaller-scale variation. Rock surfaces, which have been polished by seasonal river water running through the gorge, uncover a pattern of alternating white, reddish and blueish-grey layers.

In 1972, Australian geologist A.F. Trendall raised the question about the origin of the different scales of cyclical, recurrent patterns visible in these ancient rock layers. He suggested that the patterns might be related to past variations in climate induced by the so-called "Milankovitch cycles."
Cyclical climate changes

The Milankovitch cycles describe how small, periodic changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit and the orientation of its axis influence the distribution of sunlight received by Earth over spans of years.

Right now, the dominant Milankovitch cycles change every 400,000 years, 100,000 years, 41,000 years and 21,000 years. These variations exert a strong control on our climate over long time periods.

Key examples of the influence of Milankovitch climate forcing in the past are the occurrence of extreme cold or warm periods, as well as wetter or dryer regional climate conditions.

Rhythmically alternating layers of white, reddish and/or blueish-grey rock at an average thickness of about 10 cm (see arrows). The alternations, interpreted as a signal of Earth’s precession cycle, help us estimate the distance between Earth and the moon 2.46 billion years ago.

These climate changes have significantly altered the conditions at Earth’s surface, such as the size of lakes. They are the explanation for the periodic greening of the Saharan desert and low levels of oxygen in the deep ocean. Milankovitch cycles have also influenced the migration and evolution of flora and fauna including our own species.

And the signatures of these changes can be read through cyclical changes in sedimentary rocks.

Recorded wobbles

The distance between the Earth and the moon is directly related to the frequency of one of the Milankovitch cycles — the climatic precession cycle. This cycle arises from the precessional motion (wobble) or changing orientation of the Earth's spin axis over time. This cycle currently has a duration of ~21,000 years, but this period would have been shorter in the past when the moon was closer to Earth.

This means that if we can first find Milankovitch cycles in old sediments and then find a signal of the Earth’s wobble and establish its period, we can estimate the distance between the Earth and the moon at the time the sediments were deposited.

Our previous research showed that Milankovitch cycles may be preserved in an ancient banded iron formation in South Africa, thus supporting Trendall's theory.

Related stories:

— Massive space rock impact could have 'instantly' created the moon

— NASA's return to the moon excites lunar science

— How big is the moon?

The banded iron formations in Australia were probably deposited in the same ocean as the South African rocks, around 2.5 billion years ago. However, the cyclic variations in the Australian rocks are better exposed, allowing us to study the variations at much higher resolution.

Our analysis of the Australian banded iron formation showed that the rocks contained multiple scales of cyclical variations which approximately repeat at 4 and 33 inch (10 and 85 cm intervals). On combining these thicknesses with the rate at which the sediments were deposited, we found that these cyclical variations occurred approximately every 11,000 years and 100,000 years.

Therefore, our analysis suggested that the 11,000 cycle observed in the rocks is likely related to the climatic precession cycle, having a much shorter period than the current ~21,000 years. We then used this precession signal to calculate the distance between the Earth and the moon 2.46 billion years ago.

We found that the moon was around 37,280 miles (60,000 kilometres) closer to the Earth then (that distance is about 1.5 times the circumference of Earth). This would make the length of a day much shorter than it is now, at roughly 17 hours rather than the current 24 hours.

Understanding solar system dynamics

Research in astronomy has provided models for the formation of our solar system, and observations of current conditions.

Our study and some research by others represents one of the only methods to obtain real data on the evolution of our solar system, and will be crucial for future models of the Earth-moon system.

It's quite amazing that past solar system dynamics can be determined from small variations in ancient sedimentary rocks. However, one important data point doesn’t give us a full understanding of the evolution of the Earth-moon system.

We now need other reliable data and new modelling approaches to trace the evolution of the moon through time. And our research team has already begun the hunt for the next suite of rocks that can help us uncover more clues about the history of the solar system.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

NASA telescope images reveal brightest explosion ever recorded, as a star collapses into a black hole

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Tue, October 18, 2022 

An illustration shows a black hole driving powerful jets of particles traveling near the speed of light.NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde

NASA space telescopes detected the brightest explosion ever recorded.

Astronomers think the bright burst came from a dying star collapsing and forming a new black hole.

Images show the faint object erupting with powerful gamma rays.

NASA telescopes have detected the brightest, most high-energy flood of radiation from space ever recorded.

About 1.9 billion years ago, a dying star collapsed, exploding in a powerful burst of gamma rays that careened toward Earth. Finally, they washed over our planet on October 9. They set off detectors on three telescopes in orbit: the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft.

Swift’s X-Ray Telescope captured the afterglow of GRB 221009A about an hour after it was first detected. The bright rings form as a result of X-rays scattered by otherwise unobservable dust layers within our galaxy that lie in the direction of the burst.NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)

Those telescopes, and other observatories around the world, quickly homed in on the source of the radiation: a distant object now called GRB 221009A, pulsing with the powerful glow of its gamma-ray emissions.


It was the most luminous, powerful event ever detected, NASA announced on Thursday. The telescopes' images show just how dramatic the explosion was.

Images taken in visible light by Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope show how the afterglow of GRB 221009A (circled) faded over the course of about 10 hours.NASA/Swift/B. Cenko

"In our research group, we've been referring to this burst as the 'BOAT', or Brightest Of All Time, because when you look at the thousands of bursts gamma-ray telescopes have been detecting since the 1990s, this one stands apart," Jillian Rastinejad, a PhD student at Northwestern University, said in a statement.

This sequence constructed from 10 hours of Fermi Large Area Telescope data reveals the sky in gamma rays centered on the location of GRB 221009A. Brighter colors indicate a stronger gamma-ray signal.NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

Rastinejad led a group of researchers who conducted follow-up observations on Friday, taking more measurements as the gamma rays continued to flood past Earth.

The radiation probably came from a supernova explosion — a dying star collapsing into a black hole. It could be decades before another gamma-ray burst this bright appears again.

"It's a very unique event," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable, adding that a giant gamma-ray burst in a galaxy so close to us is "incredibly, incredibly rare."

"It's the equivalent of getting front row seats at a fireworks show," she said.

The sheer power and brightness of the ancient explosion allows astronomers to collect lots of data on it, which could reveal new insights about how stars die, how black holes form, and how matter behaves near the speed of light, as it's ejected from a supernova. It helps that the object is relatively close to us, compared to other gamma-ray bursts astronomers have detected.

That proximity "allows us to detect many details that otherwise would be too faint to see," Roberta Pillera, a Fermi LAT Collaboration member who led initial communications about the burst, said in a NASA statement. "But it's also among the most energetic and luminous bursts ever seen regardless of distance, making it doubly exciting."

‘Most powerful explosion ever’ detected by telescopes

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Mon, October 17, 2022 

The gamma ray burst was picked up by multiple telescopes. (NSF's NOIRLab)

Astronomers have spotted a record-breaking gamma ray burst, the most energetic type of electromagnetic explosion in the universe.

The explosion, in a distant galaxy 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, represents the collapse of a star many times the mass of our Sun, scientists believe.

The collapse of the star has launched an extremely powerful supernova and gives birth to a black hole.

Gamma-Ray Burst GRB221009A was first detected on 9 October by orbiting X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes.

Read more: What are fast radio bursts, and why do they look like aliens?

The titanic cosmic explosion triggered a burst of activity from astronomers around the world as they raced to study the aftermath from what is one of the nearest and possibly the most-energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever observed.

Just-released observations by two independent teams using the Gemini South telescope in Chile – one of the twin telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory operated by NSF's NOIRLab – targeted the bright, glowing remains of the explosion.

The GRB, identified as GRB 221009A, occurred in the direction of the constellation Sagitta.

The teams now have access to both datasets for their analyses of this energetic and evolving event.

"The exceptionally long GRB 221009A is the brightest GRB ever recorded and its afterglow is smashing all records at all wavelengths," O'Connor said. "Because this burst is so bright and also nearby, we think this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models."

Read more: Telescope detects 100 mysterious radio signals from billions of light years away

Gemini chief scientist Janice Lee said: "The agility and responsiveness of Gemini's infrastructure and staff are hallmarks of our observatory and have made our telescopes go-to resources for astronomers studying transient events."

Already communications have gone out to fellow astronomers through the Nasa Gamma-Ray Coordinates Network, the archive of which is now filling up with reports from around the world.

"In our research group, we've been referring to this burst as the 'BOAT', or Brightest Of All Time, because when you look at the thousands of bursts gamma-ray telescopes have been detecting since the 1990s, this one stands apart," Rastinejad said.

"Gemini's sensitivity and diverse instrument suite will help us to observe GRB221009A's optical counterparts to much later times than most ground-based telescopes can observe. This will help us understand what made this gamma-ray burst so uniquely bright and energetic."

When black holes form, they drive powerful jets of particles that are accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

These jets then piece through what remains of the progenitor star, emitting X-rays and gamma-rays as they stream into space.

If these jets are pointed in the general direction of Earth, they are observed as bright flashes of X-rays and gamma-rays.

Another gamma-ray burst this bright may not appear for decades or even centuries.

There are also extraordinary reports of disturbances in the Earth's ionosphere affecting long wave radio transmissions from the energetic radiation from the GRB221009A event.

Scientists are also wondering how very-high-energy 18 TeV (tera-electron-volt) photons observed with the Chinese Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory could defy our standard understanding of physics and survive their 2.4 billion year journey to Earth.

"The Gemini observations will allow us to utilise this nearby event to the fullest and seek out the signatures of heavy elements formed and ejected in the massive star collapse," O'Connor said.

U$A; FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE
Insulin prices: Many adults with diabetes ration insulin, study finds



Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
Mon, October 17, 2022 

The cost of insulin remains a barrier for many Americans with diabetes who depend on the drug, research published Monday suggests.

A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that in 2021, nearly 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. with diabetes either skipped, delayed or used less insulin than was needed to save money. That comes out to roughly 1.3 million adults, or 16.5% of those who need insulin.

The findings were based on data from the 2021 National Health Interview Survey, which is conducted annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and which interviews tens of thousands of Americans about their health-related experiences.

It was the first time that the CDC had included questions about insulin use, though concerns about sky-high insulin prices have been reported for years.

“In the ICU, I have cared for patients who have life-threatening complications of diabetes because they couldn’t afford this life-saving drug," said the study's lead author, Dr. Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts.

"Universal access to insulin, without cost barriers, is urgently needed,” he said.

Starting Jan. 1, the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in August, will cap the monthly cost of insulin at $35 for seniors on Medicare. The bill, however, will leave out millions of Americans with private health insurance as well as those who are uninsured.

Those two groups reported the highest rates of insulin rationing, according to the new study. Meanwhile, those with public health coverage, such as Medicaid and Medicare, had the lowest rates of rationing.

Insulin rationing was found to be more common among Black Americans, at 23.2%, compared to white and Hispanic Americans, at 16%, according to the research.

It was also found to be more common among people with type 1 diabetes, at 18.6%, compared to those with type 2 diabetes, at 15.8% — a finding that Gaffney said was particularly alarming, because people with type 1 diabetes who don’t take their insulin as prescribed can suffer from multiple long-term health problems, including diabetic coma or death.
Lowering the cost of insulin

Gaffney said the problem is simply that the list price of insulin is too high.

“We have allowed pharmaceutical companies to set the agenda, and that is coming at the cost to our patients,” he said.

Eric Tichy, who tracks insulin costs as division chair of pharmacy supply solutions for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said that a handful of drugmakers — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi — dominate the market for insulin in the U.S. Without generic competition, he said, they are able to keep prices high.

In addition, insulin products aren't necessarily interchangeable, Tichy said, so if a patient is taking, for example, a product from Eli Lilly, he or she may not be able to easily switch to Sanofi's product.

As it stands, the government is limited in its abilities to rein in drug costs, experts say.

The U.S. needs additional policies that “improve the affordability of insulin for those who may have inadequate insurance coverage or no coverage at all,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.

One approach is for states and other entities to make their own insulin, as California has announced plans to do.

Tichy is a member of the nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx, which announced in March that it planned to make and sell generic versions of insulin to consumers at no more than $30 per vial and no more than $55 for a box of five pen cartridges.

According to the American Diabetes Association, people with type 1 diabetes need, on average, two to three vials per month. For the uninsured and those with poor coverage, a month's worth of insulin can cost, on average, $1,000 or more, Gaffney said.

Lawmakers can create policies that target "evergreening," a process in which drug companies make incremental improvements to their products that can extend the life of their patents, Cubanski said.

Gaffney advocated for changes to policies that would lower the list price of insulin.

He said the "most ambitious" proposal he would like to see in the U.S. is universal health coverage with no copays for consumers. He would also like to see a policy that would allow the U.S. to pay the same lower prices that other nations pay for insulin.

"I think we can realize something like that in the United States," he said. "That's obviously a big project, but at the same time we need to get the prices charged by pharmaceutical companies down."

We're tracking the most important experiments that could turn psychedelics like LSD and ecstasy into approved medicines

Catherine Schuster-Bruce,

Yeji Jesse Lee,

Shayanne Gal,

Annie Fu,

Alex Ford

Mon, October 17, 2022

Companies need to test potential psychedelic medicines in people in several rounds of clinical trials.Shayanne Gal/Insider

• Hundreds of clinical trials are testing psychedelic drugs like LSD and MDMA as medical treatments.

• Insider is tracking the key experiments that will show whether or not psychedelics actually work.

• Our psychedelics clinical trial tracker is available exclusively to Insider subscribers.

In 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a compound he developed in his laboratory. 

In his memoir, published years later, Hoffman said he immediately felt that the substance might hold enormous potential in the branches of "pharmacology, in neurology, and especially in psychiatry."

Yet for decades, the full potential of Hoffman's discovery – lysergic acid diethylamide, more popularly known as "LSD" – was largely lost to medical science. Research on psychedelics stagnated as a result of political opposition to the anti-establishment counterculture associated with the drug in the late 20th century.

Now, almost 80 years after Hoffman's unintentional trip, clinical trials of psychedelics – mind-altering compounds including LSD – are flourishing, as pharmaceutical firms race to make up for years of lost opportunity and explore their potential for tackling conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

In some cases, scientists and patients are saying that these substances bring more hope of treatment for these conditions than anything else currently on the market.

Yet, researchers and clinicians caution that, despite the early promise, treatment remains far from straightforward.

To find out whether psychedelics can really work as treatments for PTSD, depression, and other ailments, researchers are testing them in clinical trials. If these trials succeed, they could pave the way for psychedelics to be prescribed as medicines by doctors.

Insider has identified 19 trials that could shape the future of the psychedelics industry by providing crucial information about whether these compounds work.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LSD 

Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don't Doctors Study It?


Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist, at her clinic in Rockville, Md., Sept. 1, 2022. Rubin said doctors need to better understand the clitoris. (NYT)

Rachel E. Gross
Mon, October 17, 2022

LONG READ

If there was one thing Gillian knew, it was that she did not want a hole punch anywhere near her genitals.

So when, in 2018, a gynecologist recommended a vulval biopsy to check for signs of cancer, she hesitated. The doctor suspected that the whitish speck of skin that Gillian had found next to her clitoris was lichen sclerosus, a skin condition that is usually benign. To Gillian, a registered nurse, taking a chunk out of her most sensitive body part sounded a bit extreme.

But in the end she consented. He was a doctor; she was a nurse. She assumed he was the authority on this part of the body. “I never worked in OB-GYN before,” said Gillian, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her privacy. “I was pretty clueless.”

For the biopsy, she was placed in stirrups and given a spinal epidural to numb the area. Afterward, to stem the bleeding, the doctor put one hand over the other and pressed hard against her vulva — the outer female genitalia, including the inner and outer labia, the opening to the vagina and the clitoris. Even through the anesthesia, she could feel the pressure against her pubic bone. She screamed.

A month later, Gillian was in bed with her boyfriend when she realized that she could no longer reach orgasm. She could become aroused, but at the moment of no return, “it ended into nothing,” she recalled. “And that’s still how it is.”

When she informed her gynecologist, she said, he speculated that she was experiencing numbness caused by scarring and that it would go away in time. It did not. Alarmed, Gillian began seeing one specialist after another in search of an explanation and, hopefully, a solution.

That’s when she discovered that no one wanted to talk about her clitoris.

After hearing about her injury, she said, one urologist compared her to a rape victim and said she must be having a trauma reaction to her biopsy. Next, according to her medical charts, a women’s health specialist diagnosed her with “perimenopause” and prescribed testosterone cream. Another gynecologist recommended an “O shot,” or vaginal rejuvenation procedure.

When she tried to direct the conversation back to her clitoris, she was met with blank stares. “They looked at me like I was completely insane,” Gillian said. “I just kept on saying there’s something wrong with my clitoris, and they were, like — it was like they did everything but acknowledge the clitoris.”

‘A side note at best’

Some urologists compare the vulva to “a small town in the Midwest,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and pioneer in the field of sexual medicine. Doctors tend to pass through it, barely looking up, on their way to their destination, the cervix and uterus. That’s where the real medical action happens: ultrasounds, Pap smears, IUD insertion, childbirth.

If the vulva as a whole is an underappreciated city, the clitoris is a local roadside bar: little known, seldom considered, probably best avoided. “It’s completely ignored by pretty much everyone,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist outside Washington, D.C. “There is no medical community that has taken ownership in the research, in the management, in the diagnosis of vulva-related conditions.”

Asked what she learned in medical school about the clitoris, Rubin replied, “Nothing that sticks out to my memory. If it got any mention, it would be a side note at best.”

Only years later, on a sexual-medicine fellowship with Goldstein, did she learn how to examine the vulva and the visible part of the clitoris, also known as the glans clitoris. The full clitoris, she learned, is a deep structure, made up largely of erectile tissue, that reaches into the pelvis and encircles the vagina.

Today, Rubin has appointed herself Washington’s premier “clitorologist.” The joke, of course, is that few are vying for the title — out of embarrassment, a lack of knowledge or fear of breaching propriety with patients. “Doctors love to focus on what we know,” she said. “And we don’t like to show weakness, that we don’t know something.”

This near-universal avoidance has consequences for patients. In a 2018 study in the journal Sexual Medicine, Rubin, Goldstein and colleagues found that a failure to examine the vulva and clitoris led doctors to regularly overlook sexual health conditions. Among women visiting Goldstein’s clinic, nearly 1 in 4 had clitoral adhesions, which occur when the hood of the clitoris sticks to the glans and can lead to irritation, pain and decreased sexual pleasure.

The authors concluded that all health providers for women should routinely examine the clitoris. But that was easier said than done, they wrote, as most providers “neither know how to examine nor feel comfortable examining the clitoris.”

This oversight has the potential to harm women, as well as trans men and other people with vulvas. There have been documented injuries to the clitoris in procedures including pelvic mesh surgeries, episiotomies during childbirth and even hip surgeries. When performed poorly, a labiaplasty — a procedure to reduce the size of the labia minora, and one of the fastest-growing cosmetic surgeries worldwide — can also damage nerves, leading to genital pain and loss of sexual sensation.

Many of these injuries could be prevented, Rubin said, if doctors just spent more time getting to know the clitoris. In January, she made this point to a roomful of mostly male doctors at the annual convention of military urologists in Palm Springs, California, during a lecture on female sexual health. Practical, animated and unflappable, she was voted as having the best lecture at the conference.

This anatomy, she stresses, isn’t magic, just biology. “It’s not just this strange, mythical area that’s supposed to give you orgasms,” she said in her office in Rockville, Maryland, in early July, surrounded by penile prostheses, pelvis models and a large Hitachi wand. “You should know what is what and where things are coming from.”

A tradition of neglect

So why don’t we know? To Rubin, the reason is simple: The clitoris is intimately bound up in female pleasure and orgasm. And until very recently, those themes have not been high on medicine’s priority list, nor considered appropriate areas of medical pursuit.

Even in fields like urology, where male sexual pleasure and orgasm are considered integral, women’s sexual health “is seen as hysteria, Pandora’s box, all psychosocial, not real medicine,” said Rubin, who is also the education chair of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. “Sexual health and quality of life is not something we focus on for women.” (In contrast, Viagra is one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades, bringing in tens of billions of dollars to Pfizer since being introduced in 1998.)

Gynecology, for its part, is far more focused on fertility and preventing disease. “We don’t do a great job about talking about sex from a pleasure-based perspective,” said Dr. Frances Grimstad, a gynecologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. “We talk about it from a prevention standpoint. We’re trying to prevent STIs,” or sexually transmitted infections. “We’re trying to prevent pregnancy, unless you’re trying to get pregnant. We don’t talk about sexual pleasure.”

Dr. Helen O’Connell, Australia’s first female urologist, recalled that in her own medical training, the clitoris barely made a cameo. In the 1985 edition of the medical textbook “Last’s Anatomy” that she studied, a cross-section of the female pelvis omitted the clitoris entirely, and aspects of the female genitals were described as “poorly developed” and a “failure” of male genital formation. Descriptions of the penis went on for pages. To her, this widespread medical disregard helped explain why her urology peers worked to preserve nerves in the penis during prostate surgeries but not during pelvic surgeries on women.

O’Connell set out to investigate the full anatomy of the clitoris using microdissection and magnetic resonance imaging. In 2005, she published a comprehensive study showing that the outer nub of the clitoris — the part that can be seen and touched — was just the tip of the iceberg, equivalent to the head of the penis. The full organ extended far beneath the surface, comprising two teardrop-shaped bulbs, two arms and a shaft.

By failing to appreciate this anatomy, she warned, surgeons working in this region risked damaging the sensitive nerves responsible for pleasure and orgasm, which run along the top of the shaft. In procedures like pelvic mesh surgeries or urethral surgeries, “things are potentially in the crossfire,” O’Connell said. “You always need to be thinking of what’s underneath, what’s hidden from view that you’re potentially altering.”

Increasingly, women are speaking out about injuries they sustained to this area during routine procedures. One is Julie, a 44-year-old office manager in Essex, east of London, who lost her ability to orgasm in 2012 after a minimally invasive hip operation to address back pain. She shared her story publicly in The Telegraph last year, using only her first name to avoid discrimination by future employers.

During a Zoom call in January, Julie described waking up from anesthesia to a searing pain around her clitoris. Her surgeon told her that it was just bruising and would fade. A few months later, she found that she could no longer orgasm. When she tried, “it was literally like someone had pulled a plug out of the socket,” she said. “Everything went dead.”

It took two years of internet searching for her to realize that a cylindrical post placed between her legs during the operation had likely crushed her clitoral nerves. Use of the device, called a perineal post, is known to cause nerve damage, but this was not mentioned on her consent form.

Julie compared her injury to losing the sense of taste or smell — a pleasure taken for granted but when lost changes everything. “It’s 10 years, and I still can’t believe it,” she said over Zoom. “And I haven’t come to terms with it.”

Gillian is still trying to understand the cause of her own injury. Was it the biopsy? The crushing pressure her gynecologist applied afterward? Four years and 12 specialists later, she has resigned herself to the fact that she may never recover that sensation. “This changed my whole life,” she said. “The devastation from this is something you can never repair. Ever.”

A new medical map

When Dr. Blair Peters, a 33-year-old plastic surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University, first began performing phalloplasties for trans men and nonbinary people, he was surprised to see how large the nerves of the clitoris were — about 3 millimeters in diameter, on average. (By comparison, the sensory nerve of the index finger is about 1 millimeter wide.)

“When I went through medical school, we did not learn anything in particular about the clitoris beyond the fact that it exists, basically,” Peters said. As a result, he said, he developed “this subconscious bias that it’s not going to be this superapparent structure. But it is.”

Peters is among a handful of young, social media-savvy doctors who, like Rubin, are helping expand medicine’s map of this terrain — and, in doing so, ensure that what happened to Julie and Gillian doesn’t happen again. As part of his efforts to improve sexual sensation for phalloplasty patients, Peters recently magnified clitoral nerves and counted up how many nerve fibers they contained. The number he found — embargoed until he presents his findings at a conference later this month — was “significantly more” than 8,000, the figure often cited, which is drawn from an outdated study on cows.

In 2020, Victoria Gordon, a medical student at the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, led a study that sought to define a “danger zone” around the clitoris for plastic surgeons to avoid. During dissections of cadavers, she noticed that clitoral nerves sometimes branch out into fine tendrils, like roots, in ways that might be relevant to surgeons but were not previously described in the literature.

She hoped that others in the plastic surgery field would follow up on this finding, which was published in a plastic surgery journal. “I’m just a fourth-year medical student, I don’t think I should have to tackle this project,” she said in late 2021. “But no one else is.”

Doctors are not the only people urging medicine to recognize the full anatomy of the clitoris. In 2018, Gillian was searching online to make sense of her injury when she came across a Medium post by a woman in Dallas, Jessica Pin, whose situation sounded eerily like hers. Pin, now 36, had lost most of her clitoral sensation after undergoing a labiaplasty at age 18.

After scouring the major obstetrical-gynecologicial textbooks, Pin learned that the nerves of the clitoris were rarely well represented, if at all — a key oversight that she believed left the clitoris at risk in a number of procedures. “This omission appears to be caused by sociocultural discomfort with the clitoris and a pervasive lack of regard for female sexual response,” she wrote on Medium.

Gillian was intrigued. “She was the only one talking about this on the internet,” she said. She sent the woman a Facebook message.

Pin eventually began a social media campaign to get OB-GYN textbooks and training standards updated to cover this anatomy. Gillian quietly helped her build followers, then joined Pin on Instagram, using the handle @nursevulvaadvocate. There, she found herself fielding hundreds of queries from around the world from people who had lost genital sensation as a result of medical procedures on or near the clitoris.

Gillian tried to respond to everyone, she said, but could not offer the medical advice that many of them sought. After six months, she closed her account. Today her efforts are more local: She often drives to doctors’ offices to drop off posters of clitoral anatomy. In her work with older patients, she pays close attention to any genital concerns, from vulvar itching to pain after cancer surgery.

Pin pressed on. In the past few years, she has lobbied several textbooks and anatomical resources to update their diagrams of the clitoris and its nerves. Her efforts have reached the front page of Reddit, racked up more than 160,000 followers on TikTok and landed her a guest spot on the “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” In 2019, she copublished a dissection study with her father, a plastic surgeon, on clitoral nerves.

Yet her tactics are not without controversy. She has been embroiled in numerous social media disputes, and has been accused of harassment for her persistent and sometimes inappropriate efforts to reach gynecologists and anatomy textbook authors.

Now, after four years of advocating, “I want to be done,” she said. “It would be amazing if doctors start picking up the cause and start talking about this.” The fact that a few medical professionals have, including Rubin, is “a really big deal,” she added.

Giving the vulva its due

Every patient who enters Rubin’s office, regardless of age, is taken on a tour of their own vulva. No longer is a sheet draped over a patient’s legs for the pelvic exam — a convention that Rubin believes helps keep women’s “private parts” shameful and hidden. Instead, Rubin starts by handing her patient a long-handled mirror to see the same anatomy that she will be examining.

With a Q-tip, Rubin probes each part of the vulva for pain, pointing out the labia minora, labia majora and vaginal opening as her patient follows along. Then, she checks under the clitoral hood for adhesions or other skin conditions. The entire exam usually takes under five minutes. “We go at your pace,” she said recently in an exam with a 62-year-old woman, who was experiencing pain after sex. “You’re the boss of this show.”

Rubin and her colleagues believe that their field is uniquely positioned to champion the clitoris and female pleasure. After all, said Dr. Barbara Chubak, a urologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, “urologists are all about the phallus” — which the clitoris technically is, as it arises from the same embryological structures and is made up of the same erectile tissues as the penis.

“So by definition, clitoral anatomy could, and should, also be a urologic thing,” Rubin added.

Moreover, urologists are perfectly comfortable waxing poetic about things that other providers are too squeamish to discuss. “Urology is all about peeing and all about sex,” Chubak said. “The stuff that people are embarrassed to talk about, urologists want to talk about. Clitoral medicine belongs with the urologists.”

Still, it will take more than passionate “penis doctors,” Rubin said, to give the vulva its due; there must be a concerted movement, one that transcends medicine’s traditionally siloed specialties, to understand and map this anatomy. And for that to happen, other fields need to recognize female sexual pleasure as essential and worth preserving.

“I truly believe we are just several decades behind on the female side,” Rubin said. “But we have to do the work. And we have to have people interested in doing the work.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

U$A

1st lease sale to be held for offshore wind on West Coast


JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Tue, October 18, 2022 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Biden administration will hold the first-ever lease sale for offshore wind energy on the West Coast, officials said Tuesday.

The Dec. 6 sale will target areas in the Pacific Ocean off central and northern California— the first U.S. auction for commercial-scale floating offshore wind energy development. The administration hailed the upcoming sale at at a conference for offshore wind developers and experts in Providence, Rhode Island.

“We’re not just committed to the country's transition to a clean energy economy, one that combats climate change, creates good-paying jobs and ensures economic opportunities are accessible to all. We’re actually taking action and driving results,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Amanda Lefton told the group.

The final sale notice for the auction will outline the details and lease terms for five areas off California, enough for 4.5 gigawatts of offshore wind to power more than 1.5 million homes and create thousands of new jobs, she said. The notice will include lease stipulations to promote a domestic supply chain and create union jobs.

Hundreds of offshore wind developers and experts gathered in Rhode Island to talk about the future of clean energy— how to grow the offshore wind industry and address shared challenges. The nation's first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Rhode Island in late 2016. But with five turbines, it’s not commercial scale.

JC Sandberg, the American Clean Power Association's interim CEO, said Lefton's “historic announcement” marks a significant milestone for offshore wind in the United States and on the West Coast.

President Joe Biden set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 using traditional technology that secures wind turbines to the ocean floor, enough to power 10 million homes. The administration announced plans last month to develop floating platforms in the deep ocean for wind towers that could vastly expand offshore wind in the United States.

Biden hopes to deploy up to 15 gigawatts of electricity through floating sites by 2035, enough to power 5 million homes. The plan targets sites in the Pacific Ocean off the California and Oregon coasts, as well as in the Atlantic in the Gulf of Maine.

More than half of the nation's offshore wind resources are in waters too deep for bottom-fixed turbines, Lefton said. To date, BOEM has held 10 competitive lease sales and two commercial wind farms have been approved in the Atlantic Ocean.

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee told conference attendees that ramping up offshore wind is good for the environment but also good for the economy and “we’re going to make the most of it here in Rhode Island.” With the offshore wind power Rhode Island plans to add to the grid, the state could meet over 70% of its estimated electricity demand in 2030 with carbon-free energy, McKee said.

Molly Morris, the incoming president of Equinor Wind US, said the industry is at a critical point and she hopes developers and regulators will come together at the conference to figure out how to make the permitting process faster and more transparent, build up the supply chain and bolster the grid.

Equinor, based in Norway, is one of the few developers worldwide with experience in floating offshore wind. Morris said she's “extremely enthusiastic” about the administration's support for floating offshore wind since 15 gigawatts by 2035 is “quite an aggressive number in a relatively short period of time.” She said she'll be closely evaluating the California opportunities.

 
 


 
  
The five turbines of America's first offshore wind farm, owned by the Danish company, Orsted, are seen from a tour boat off the coast of Block Island, R.I., Monday, Oct. 17, 2022. Hundreds of offshore wind developers and experts gathered in Rhode Island to talk about the future of clean energy— how to grow the offshore wind industry and address shared challenges. (AP Photo/David Goldman)More

Warming climate may boost Arctic 

"virus spillover" risk, research shows

CBSNews

Wed, October 19, 2022 

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 University of Toronto, told AFP.

This handout picture taken on May 29, 2017 and made available by Graham Colby on October 17, 2022 shows researchers drilling holes to collect sediment at the Lake Hazen in Nunavut, to investigate how climate change might increase the risk of

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 two 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.

"Should climate change also shift species range of potential viral vectors and reservoirs northwards, the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics," the researchers wrote in Proceedings B, the Royal Society's biological research journal.

Scientists Wake Up Ancient Viruses Unknown to Medicine

Feb 24, 2020

The Infographics Show

Scientists uncover ancient prehistoric viruses hidden for centuries inside Tibetan glaciers that could be potentially life threatening for all humanity. These viruses laid dormant inside the ice but scientists were able to wake them up and they are unlike any virus humanity has ever seen. 

"It's really 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.

"Disentangling this risk from actual spillovers and pandemics will be a critical endeavour to pursue in parallel with surveillance activities, in order to mitigate the impact of spillovers on economy and health-related aspects of human life, or on other species," the researchers wrote.

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.

There’s lithium in them thar hills – but fears grow over US ‘white gold’ boom

“The clean energy transition cannot be built on dirty mining”.

Oliver Milman in Silver Peak, Nevada
Tue, October 18, 2022 

Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

Deep in the parched landscapes of Nevada, there is a stirring boom. The mining of lithium holds the promise of a treasured resource that can help slow disastrous global heating.

Spurred by a growing demand for battery parts essential for electric vehicles, the US’s only major lithium mine, in Silver Peak, a remote outpost situated in desert scrub and nascent Joshua trees a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas, is doubling its production.

Across Nevada, there are more than 17,000 prospecting claims for lithium, a soft metal dubbed “white gold” by investors due to its scarcity and increasing value as clean energy components, with several new major projects now planned. Nevada can be to lithium “what Wall Street is to finance, or what Silicon Valley is to technology”, Steve Sisolak, the state’s governor, has envisioned.

This surge is a critical step in tackling the climate crisis according to Joe Biden’s administration, which has used cold war-era emergency powers to force a ramp up in the domestic mining of lithium and other materials needed for electric cars, heat pumps and other clean energy technology.

But the prospect of this new era of mining has unnerved some environmentalists and native American groups. Three-quarters of all known deposits of lithium in America are found near tribal land, igniting fears that a decline in destructive fossil-fuel mining could simply be replaced by a new form of harmful extraction.

Plans for a major, controversial new lithium mine in northern Nevada – a 1,000-acre site called Thacker Pass – will “will turn what is left of my ancestral homelands into a sacrifice zone for electric car batteries”, Shelley Harjo, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, has warned, all still without meeting the burgeoning thirst for lithium.

Silver Peak has operated as a lithium mine since 1966, its sprawling 21 sq mile site situated in the Clayton valley, an arid area comprised of former lake beds and fringed by mountains. A single, bumpy road leads in and out of a place so remote that any aliens in the nearby Area 51 would significantly add to the region’s sparse population.

The mine draws its lithium via a network of 22 enormous ponds that hold briny liquid that has been pumped in from underground. The brine evaporates out vast expanses of salt as it bakes under the piercing Nevada sunshine, eventually separating the lithium within.The salt accretes to 10ft deep in places as the brine is cycled around through the ponds, becoming denser the further it goes.

It can take up to two years for the brine to be “heavy” enough for processing, at which point it is a brilliant azure, as if an idyllic Caribbean beach scene has been transplanted to the Nevada desert. The brine is taken to an on-site plant, where lime and soda ash is added to further the transformation; it is then filtered, pressed and dried into lithium carbonate, a powdery substance that looks a little like flour, or cocaine.

Silver Peak produces 30 large sacks of this lithium, each weighing a ton, to be sent directly to EV makers such as Tesla or for further processing for ceramics or cellphone batteries. Around 5,000 tons are produced a year and Albemarle, operator of the site, aims to double this to 10,000 tons within a few years to help quench the increasingly voracious appetite for a substance not found in pure form on Earth but prized for its light weight and ability to help batteries charge faster, last longer and have more power density than ever before.

“Demand for lithium is tremendous; right now, I think it’s safe to say that certainly demand exceeds supply,” said Karen Narwold, executive vice-president at Albemarle.

The 5,000 tons of lithium coming from Silver Peak is enough to make batteries for 80,000 electric cars. Even doubling this output will make a relatively small dent in the amount of lithium required – half of all cars sold in the US will be electric by 2030, according to some forecasts, with about 26m EVs on the road by this time.

“Our customers are demanding this,” Narwold said. “I think the infrastructure bill as well as the inflation reduction act are really tremendous opportunities for the US to develop a domestic supply chain for EVs.”

The legislation passed by Democrats aims to wrest the production of clean energy parts back from China, handing out more than $370bn in tax credits for renewable projects such as solar and wind, as well as incentives for domestic battery manufacturing and electric vehicle construction.

“We need to end our long-term reliance on China and other countries for inputs that will power the future,’’ Biden said in April as he announced a measure under the Defense Production Act, usually used in wartime, to mandate an increased American production of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other materials used in clean energy technology. “I will use every tool I have to make that happen,” the president vowed.

Lithium evaporation ponds at the Albemarle facility. 

Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

The push for cleaner energy is causing demand for lithium to spiral – the International Energy Agency has projected that global demand will grow by over 40 times by 2040 if countries stick to their Paris agreement targets to reduce planet-heating emissions – and will likely spark several new mining operations across the US.

America is starting from a low base, however. The country produces just 1% of the world’s lithium, almost all of it coming from Silver Peak. Albemarle’s expansion of production here, along with a restarting of mining at a site in North Carolina that once produced lithium for the Manhattan project, will barely shift this equation.

The bulk of production happens in Australia and Chile, both countries where Albemarle has mines, and involves both brine extraction and rock extraction, where an ore called spodumene, that contains high levels of lithium, is dug up in open pits. Some farmers in Australia have complained of possible pollution of waterways from the runoff from this sort of mining.

If demand for electric cars takes off as expected – California and New York, for example, have both mandated no new diesel or gasoline cars can be sold after 2035 – then the likes of Ford, Tesla and General Motors will need around 900,000 tons of lithium from the US and Canada to if production is to be fulfilled domestically, according to Rystad Energy. Production in north America is only likely to reach 600,000 tons by 2030, the research firm estimates.

“There is already a deficit of lithium and we don’t see any surplus situation coming from local operations,” said James Ley, an expert in the global energy metals market at Rystad. “The investment is going to increase and lots of new mining projects will kick off, but it’s not coming quickly. It can take years for a new mine to come to fruition.”

The industry also faces scrutiny of its environmental impact, such as potential harm to local biodiversity and its use of water in places, such as Nevada, that are facing increasingly severe droughts as the world heats up.

In northern Nevada, a place called Peehee Mu’huh – or Thacker Pass – is sacred indigenous land and also potentially the largest deposit of lithium in the US. A company called Lithium Americas aims to mine this lithium, despite the fact that tribal members say that a massacre of at least 31 members of the Paiute tribe took place here in 1865. The project is “like putting a lithium mine on Arlington cemetery”, according to Daranda Hinkey, organizer with People of Red Mountain, which opposes the new mine and is involved in a court battle to halt it.

“The clean energy transition cannot be built on dirty mining,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director of Earthworks, an environmental group. Pagel said that more resources should be put into recycling lithium rather than adding to “the generational trauma experienced by mining-affected communities, particularly indigenous communities”.

Narwold stressed that Albemarle will fully involve local people in its own environmentally sensitive expansion plan, but conceded that some companies in the industry are “further along the curve of acknowledging their responsibility” than others.

“If you think about traditional hard rock there’s a lot of bad examples in history of what people have done,” she said. “I can only speak for Albemarle, but it is very top of mind for us for us. We look very seriously at all aspects of that environmental stewardship and community engagement. We’re kind of at the infancy of the lithium revolution but we all know what’s expected of us from a sustainability standpoint.”

Cholera cases on the rise in Haiti


AFP
Tue, October 18, 2022 


Cholera cases are rising in Haiti, according to Health Ministry figures obtained by AFP on Tuesday, fueling fears of a new disaster in a country already deep in a humanitarian and security crisis.

As of Monday, 606 suspected cases and 66 confirmed cases had been identified, according to a ministry report.

That constitutes an increase of 222 new suspected cases between October 13 and 17. In addition, 22 deaths were recorded in medical facilities.

Suspected cases have also been recorded in new regions of the impoverished Caribbean country, in particular in the central region.

One of the epicenters of the disease is the civilian prison in Port-au-Prince, with 271 suspected cases, 12 confirmed and 14 people dead, the ministry report said.

The new assessment came a day after a meeting at the United Nations where the Security Council discussed deploying a special international force to Haiti to deal with the humanitarian and security crisis.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation as "absolutely nightmarish," with criminal gangs blockading the country's main oil terminal.

Speaking at the United Nations, Haitian Foreign Minister Jean Victor Geneus said he had "the delicate mission of bringing before the Security Council the cry of distress of an entire suffering people and of saying loudly and intelligibly that the Haitians don't live, they survive."

While the number of cholera cases continues to rise, protests have resumed in Port-au-Prince and around the country to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

A demonstration of several hundred people was dispersed on Monday with tear gas not far from the US embassy.

Haiti suffered a cholera epidemic between 2010 and 2019 that was accidentally introduced by UN peacekeeping troops and killed more than 10,000 people.

str/rle/vgr/jh/md