Beijing workers unconvinced of economic recovery

Agence France-Presse
October 18, 2024 

Beijing has said it has 'full confidence' in achieving its annual growth goal of five percent, but economists say more direct fiscal stimulus is needed to revive activity (GREG BAKER/AFP)

Workers in China's capital voiced worries about their economic prospects on Friday, after Beijing posted its worst quarterly growth in over a year that it's hoping to correct with a slew of stimulus measures.

The 4.6 percent expansion in July-September is the latest evidence that the country's post-pandemic recovery continues to sputter, as it suffers from sluggish consumption and a prolonged property sector crisis.

While officials have launched a string of policies over the past two years to reignite economic activity, they have had little effect.

"The economic situation is that it's very difficult to make money now," said 52-year-old coach driver Wang Youlong, who was taking a break before picking up a group of overseas tourists.

"My salary is too low, and sometimes (the company) doesn't send it on time."

There are hopes that a raft of stimulus unveiled since late last month will finally put the country back on track, but there is a worry that authorities are still not doing enough.

Wang said he thought every job was "difficult" at the moment.

His son had recently been forced to take a 3,000-yuan ($422) monthly pay cut, he told AFP, but still feared he might be let go in the future.

"You work today and don't know whether they'll want you to work tomorrow... employment is a big problem," he sighed.


In its announcement on Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics acknowledged a "complicated and severe external environment... as well as new problems of domestic economic development".

- Hoping for the 'bazooka' -

The measures unveiled last month were aimed at kickstarting consumption and addressing a painful debt crisis in the real estate sector.

The announcements -- the most far-reaching in years -- set off a blistering market rally fueled by hopes for a long-awaited "bazooka" stimulus, but optimism has since tapered as a series of briefings left investors wanting.

Coach driver Wang said he hadn't noticed any benefits to his own life.

"It's not worth mentioning buying a house in Beijing, even in my hometown we can't afford it," he said.


In Beijing, people told AFP they remained cautious about spending.

A 25-year-old sales worker, also surnamed Wang, said she bought luxury items "less frequently than before".

"I don't have many sources of income and I hope to save some money," she told AFP.


"(Beijing) isn't particularly affordable for regular wage workers."

Others were more sanguine.

"People may be pessimistic about the situation... but for me, I actually feel quite normal," Shiyi, a short-video industry worker, told AFP.


"The industry I work in is still in quite a trending state, so for now it will be affected but not too much."

Even so, Shiyi is holding off on large purchases.

"Property prices are quite tempting right now, but I still want to earn more first (before buying)."


Liu, a 55-year-old pharmaceutical worker who asked to only use his surname, said he thought "the economy isn't the same as five or even 10 years ago".

"But I think for Beijingers the level of the economy is quite developed," he said.

"I hope the economy will improve, but I can't judge if it will."

Women priests secretly ordained in the shadow of the Vatican

Agence France-Presse
October 18, 2024 

Six women were ordained in a secret ceremony on a river barge in Rome this month (Filippo MONTEFORTE/AFP)

On a barge on Rome's River Tiber, a stone's throw from the Vatican, Loan Rocher was "ordained" in a secret ceremony in defiance of the Catholic Church's ban on women deacons and priests.

Dressed in a white robe with a rainbow stole, the 68-year-old Frenchwoman acknowledged her ordination was unauthorized by the Vatican, where a month-long summit on the future of the Church concludes next week.

No matter, said Rocher, who is transgender.

"They've been repeating the same message for 2,000 years -- women are inferior, subordinate, invisible. It's okay. We've waited long enough, so I'm doing it now," Rocher told AFP.

Thursday's ceremony in three languages, organised with the utmost discretion in the presence of around 50 faithful from several countries, followed the same liturgy as an official mass, with readings from the Bible, singing and Communion.

Yet it was illegal in the eyes of the Church.

Even more, canonical law says the six ordinands -- three priests and three deacons, including Rocher and another transgender person -- should all be excluded from the Catholic community, along with the ceremony's other participants.

Such excommunication would be an unjustified sanction according to US "bishop" Bridget Mary Meehan.

She belongs to the group organizing the event, which says it has performed 270 ordinations of women in 14 countries since its creation in 2002.


"For 22 years, we have worked hard to create a more inclusive, loving church where LGBTQ, divorced and remarried (people) -- everyone -- is welcome at the table. No-one is excluded," said Meehan, 76.

On the upper deck of the barge, the six candidates committed to "serving the people of God" before an altar decorated with candles and two crowns of flowers.

Then one by one, the members of the congregation laid their hands on the heads of the newly ordained to bless them.


- 'Cold shower' -

In recent weeks, feminist associations have multiplied initiatives to put pressure on the ongoing Synod, which began in 2021 and is due to end this month.

The groups -- occasionally supported by theologians -- condemn the way women are marginalized by the patriarchal system, despite their central role in parishes around the world.


Unlike other Christian denominations like Protestantism, the Catholic Church remains firmly opposed to the ordination of women.

They are relegated instead to support roles, whether in catechism or education, as nuns or lay people.

The agenda of the Synod summit in October 2023 included a proposal to admit women as deacons -- ministers who can celebrate baptisms, marriages and funerals but not mass.


But that idea has now been ruled out.

The pope, 87, himself excluded it during a CBS television interview in May, to the astonishment of activists.

"It was a cold shower," said Adeline Fermanian from the Comite de la Jupe, a French Catholic feminist group that has been campaigning on the issue since 2008.


Fermanian told AFP the Church's "authoritarian" response and the decision to remove women's ordination from the Synod agenda was "totally out of step" with the philosophy of the summit, which is based on consulting the faithful, including women, around the world.

- 'The hierarchy is afraid' -

Some participants at the Synod say the appeals for more inclusion of women is too Western a concept and certain regions of the world, such as Africa, are not yet ready for women deacons for cultural reasons.


Since becoming pontiff in 2013, Pope Francis has repeatedly stressed the merits of women, including in September, when he declared: "The Church is a woman!"

The Argentine pontiff has also appointed women to important roles within the government of the Holy See.

But he does not see women's central role within the Church as including ministry -- a vision the feminist groups view as misogynistic and retrograde.


"They overpraise our qualities. They make women practically into goddesses... and they tell them 'You're serving. It's the most beautiful vocation'", said Fermanian.

"In fact, it's a strategy to sideline and discriminate."

Sixty years after the Second Vatican Council, which sought to equip the Church for the modern world, the institution is fighting for its survival, according to these activists.


But the women ordained in Rome are not losing hope.

"I prefer to be someone who moves forward, rather than one who complains," said Loan.

Meehan summed up the mood: "The hierarchy is afraid but the people are not afraid.

"And they love women priests."

Age of Electricity' coming as fossil fuels set to peak: IEA

Agence France-Presse
October 16, 2024 


Solar Panels (Justin TALLIS/AFP)

More than half of the world's electricity will be generated by low-emission sources before 2030 but the deployment of clean energy is "far from uniform" across the globe, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.

Demand for oil, gas and coal is still projected to peak by the end of the decade, possibly creating a surplus of fossil fuels, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook.

"In energy history, we've witnessed the Age of Coal and the Age of Oil," said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

"We're now moving at speed into the Age of Electricity, which will define the global energy system going forward and increasingly be based on clean sources of electricity," he said.

The report said clean energy "is entering the energy system at an unprecedented rate" with 560 gigawatts (GW) of renewables capacity added in 2023.

Almost $2 trillion in investments are flowing into clean energy projects each year, nearly double the amount spent on fossil fuel supplies, according to the Paris-based agency.
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"Together with nuclear power, which is the subject of renewed interest in many countries, low-emissions sources are set to generate more than half of the world's electricity before 2030," it said.

- 'Growing momentum' -

But the IEA noted that the deployment of clean energy "is far from uniform across technologies and countries".


The growing thirst for electricity is driven by industry, electric vehicles, air conditioning and data centers linked to the surge of artificial intelligence.

Despite the "growing momentum behind clean energy transitions", the IEA said the world was "still a long way from a trajectory aligned" with its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050.

The net-zero emissions target is crucial to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.


The IEA report comes a month before Azerbaijan hosts the UN's annual climate conference, COP29, in Baku, from November 11 to November 22.

At COP28 in Dubai last year, nations pledged to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. They also vowed to transition away from fossil fuels.

The IEA said renewable power generation capacity is set to rise from 4,250 GW today to nearly 10,000 GW in 2030 as costs for most clean technologies are falling.


While it falls short of the COP28 tripling target, it is "more than enough" to cover the growth in global electricity demand and "push coal-fired generation into decline".

China accounted for 60 percent of the new renewable capacity added in the world last year.

By the early 2030s, the country's solar power generation will exceed the total electricity demand of the United States today, the report found.


In many developing countries, however, "policy uncertainty and a high cost of capital are holding back clean energy projects".

- 'Insatiable' demand -

Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to peak "imminently" but today's policies still leave the world on a path towards having a rise of 2.4C in average temperatures by 2100, the IEA warned.


"2024 showed that electricity demand is insatiable," said Dave Jones, global insights program director at Ember, an energy think tank.

"That means global coal generation would fall less quickly than previously expected. This means the world is not yet transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing CO2 emissions in the energy sector," he added.

Despite a record deployment of clean energy, two-thirds of the increase in global energy demand was met by fossil fuels last year, the IEA said.


Energy-related CO2 emissions hit another record high last year.

"Renewable growth is creating an energy abundance, but this will only translate into a substantive fall in CO2 emissions if there is simultaneously a strong focus on using energy as wastelessly as possible," Jones said.

Climate change solutions not always good for biodiversity

Agence France-Presse
October 16, 2024 

Studies suggest that rising global temperatures linked to climate change are causing glaciers globally to melt (Patrick T. FALLON/AFP)

Some approaches to tackling global warming can have unintended knock-on consequences for nature and the protection of biodiversity, say scientists urging a more coordinated effort on these challenges.

"Sometimes by trying to find a solution to a problem, we risk creating damage elsewhere," Anne Larigauderie at the Intergovernmental Scientific and Political Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES), an expert independent body, told AFP.

The IPBES will publish a report in December on how different crises -- including climate change and biodiversity loss -- are closely related and should be addressed together, not in isolation.

The IPBES and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in 2021 that a siloed approach risked "actions which, inadvertently, prevent the resolution of one or the other problem, or even both."

In Britain, for example, an ostensibly sound policy of planting trees on wetlands backfired when in turn these carbon-rich landscapes dried up, releasing the planet-heating emissions stored in their roots and soil.

- Negative effects -

Climate Action Network, a collective of non-government organizations, has warned against "false solutions" which promise a healthier planet but with a cost to people or ecosystems attached.

Intentionally injecting iron into the oceans, for example, to boost microplankton growth may seem promising but "geoengineering" techniques have raised concerns about potential repercussions.

Alison Smith, a researcher at the University of Oxford, said iron fertilization was "likely to cause massive environmental damage for uncertain climate gain."


"Measures taken to mitigate climate change must be evaluated according to their overall benefits and risks and not only according to their carbon footprint," said the Foundation for Biodiversity Research in 2022.

Wind turbines produce clean power and reduce the dependence of energy systems on fossil fuels, but can pose a risk to migratory birds or bats in some locations.

And building dams for hydroelectricity can block the passage of fish along waterways, reducing their populations.


- 'Breaking down silos' -

"With crises as vast, complex and interconnected as climate change and biodiversity loss, focusing on one aspect of the problem will never be enough," said Tom Oliver at the University of Reading.

It is "important to look beyond 'sticking plaster fixes'" such as geoengineering, he said, which "can have huge anticipated side effects."


Installing "underwater curtains" to protect glaciers in Antarctica from warming waters -- an idea floated at last year's UN climate summit -- could impede nutrient flow, Lars Smedsrud, from the University of Bergen, wrote in the journal Nature this year.

In the quest for solutions to our biggest and most daunting challenges it is "important to look at the big picture -- not just focus narrowly on climate change," said Smith.

She is one of many experts pushing for nature-based solutions that have "combined benefits for biodiversity, the climate and populations".


A 2020 study in the journal Global Change Biology concluded that "nature-based interventions were most often shown to be as effective or more so than alternative interventions for addressing climate impacts."

And it is in preserving existing ecosystems, rather than trying to recreate new ones, that the potential is greatest.

A 2023 study in Nature found that simply protecting existing forests and leaving them alone to regenerate would deliver considerable carbon removal benefits.


"There is no one single silver bullet -- we need to do everything we can, across all sectors, countries and methods," said Smith.

"Breaking down silos is the only way forward that won't cause more problems than it solves."

MicroRNA − new Nobel laureate describes scientific process of finding these tiny molecules

The Conversation
October 17, 2024 

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel for medicine for their discovery of microRNA © Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFPn/liVictor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel for medicine for their discovery of microRNA © Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine goes to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny biological molecules that tell the cells in your body what kind of cell to be by turning on and off certain genes.

The Conversation Weekly podcast caught up with Victor Ambros from his lab at the UMass Chan Medical School to learn more about the Nobel-winning research and what comes next. Below are edited excerpts from the podcast.

How did you start thinking about this fundamental question at the heart of the discovery of microRNA, about how cells get the instructions to do what they do?

The paper that described this discovery was published in 1993. In the late 1980s, we were working in the field of developmental biology, studying C. elegans as a model organism for animal development. We were using genetic approaches, where mutations that caused developmental abnormalities were then followed up to try to understand what the gene was that was mutated and what the gene product was.

It was well understood that proteins could mediate changes in gene expression as cells differentiate, divide.

We were not looking for the involvement of any sort of unexpected kind of molecular mechanisms. The fact that the microRNA was the product of this gene that was regulating this other gene in this context was a complete surprise.
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There was no reason to postulate that there should be such regulators of gene expression. This is one of those examples where the expectations are that you’re going to find out about more complexity and nuance about mechanisms that we already know about.

But sometimes surprises emerge, and in fact, surprises emerge perhaps surprisingly often.




Colorized scanning electron microscope image of a C. elegans nematode worm – one of the most studied animals in biological research. Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

These C. elegans worms, nematodes, is there something about them that allows you to work with their genetic material more easily? Why are they so key to this type of science?

C. elegans was developed as an experimental organism that people could use easily to, first, identify mutants and then study the development.


It only has about a thousand cells, and all those cells can be seen easily through a microscope in the living animal. But still it has all the various parts that are important to all animals: intestine, skin, muscles, a brain, sensory systems and complex behavior. So it’s quite an amazing system to study developmental processes and mechanisms really on the level of individual cells and what those cells do as they divide and differentiate during development.

Listen to Victor Ambros on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

You were looking at this lin-4 gene. What was your surprising discovery that led to this Nobel Prize?

In our lab, Rosalind Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum were working on this project for several years. This is a very labor intensive process, trying to track down a gene.

And all we had to go by was a mutation to guide us as we gradually homed in on the DNA sequence that contained the gene. The surprises started to emerge when we found that the pieces of DNA that were sufficient to confer the function of this gene and rescue a mutant were really small, only 800 base pairs.


And so that suggested, well, the gene is small, so the product of this gene is going to be pretty small. And then Rosalind worked to pare down the sequence more and to mutate potential protein coding sequences in that little piece of DNA. By a process of elimination, she finally showed that there was no protein that could be expressed from this gene.

And at the same time, we identified this very, very small transcript of only 22 nucleotides. So I would say there was probably a period of a week or two there where these realizations came to the fore and we knew we had something new.

You mentioned Rosalind, she’s your wife.


Yeah, we’ve been together since 1976. And we started to work together in the mid-’80s. And so we’re still working together today.

And she was the first author on that paper.

That’s right. It’s hard to express how wonderful it is to receive such validation of this work that we did together. That is just priceless.


Victor Ambros and Rosalind Lee toast the Nobel news on the day of the announcement. UMass Chan Medical School

Like it’s a Nobel Prize for her too?

Yes, every Nobel Prize has this obvious limitation of the number of people that they give it to. But, of course, behind that are the folks who worked in the lab – the teams that are actually behind the discoveries are surprisingly large sometimes. In this case, two people in my lab and several people in Gary Ruvkun’s lab.

In a way they’re really the heroes behind this. Our job – mine and Gary’s – is to stand in as representatives of this whole enterprise of science, which is so, so dependent upon teams, collaborations, brainstorming amongst multiple people, communications of ideas and crucial data, you know, all this is part of the process that underlies successful science.

That first week of the discoveries, did you anticipate at that point that this could be such a huge step for our understanding of genes?


Until other examples are found of something new, it’s very hard to know how peculiar that particular phenomenon might be.

We’re always mindful that evolution is amazingly innovative. And so it could have been that this particular small RNA base-pairing to this mRNA of lin-14 gene and turning off production of the protein from lin-14 messenger RNA, that could be a peculiar evolutionary innovation.

The second microRNA was identified in Gary Ruvkun’s lab in 1999, so it was a good six years before the second one was found, also in C. elegans. Really, the watershed discovery was when Ruvkun showed that let-7, the other microRNA, was actually conserved perfectly in sequence amongst all the bilaterian animals. So that meant that let-7 microRNA had been around for, what, 500 million years?

And so it was immediately obvious to the field that there had to be other microRNAs – this was not just a C. elegans thing. There must be others, and that quickly emerged to be the case.



Ambros discovered that the lin-4 gene encoded a microRNA that did not code for a protein. Ruvkun cloned the lin-14 gene, and the two scientists realized that the lin-4 microRNA sequence matched a complementary sequence in the lin-14 mRNA. © The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. Ill. Mattias Karlén

You and Gary Ruvkun had been postdoctoral fellows at the same time at MIT, but by the time you made your respective discoveries, you’d both set up your own labs. Would you call them rival labs, in the same town?

No, I would certainly not call it rival labs. We were working together as postdocs basically on this problem of developmental timing in Bob Horvitz’s lab.

We just basically informally divided up the work. The understanding was, OK, Ambros lab will focus on lin-4 gene, and Ruvkun lab will focus on lin-14, and we anticipated that there would be a point that we would get together and share information about what we’ve learned and see if we could come to a synthesis.

That was the informal plan. It was not really a collaboration. It was certainly not a rivalry. The expectation was that we would divide up the work and then communicate when the time came. There was an expectation in this community of C. elegans researchers that you should share data freely.

Your lab still works on microRNA. What are you investigating? What questions do you still have?

One I find very interesting is a project where we collaborated with a clinician, a geneticist who studies intellectual disability. She had discovered that her patients, children with intellectual disabilities, in certain families carried a mutation that neither of their parents had – a spontaneous mutation – in the protein that is associated with microRNAs in humans called the Argonaute protein.

Each of our genomes contains four genes for Argonautes that are the partners of microRNAs. In fact, this is the effector protein that is guided by the microRNA to its target messenger RNAs. This Argonaute is what carries out the regulatory processes that happen once it finds its target.

These so-called Argonaute syndromes were discovered, where there are mutations in Argonautes, point mutations where only one amino acid changes to another amino acid. They have this very profound and extensive effect on the development of the individual.

And so working with these geneticists, our lab and other labs took those mutations, that were essentially gifted to us by the patient. And then we put those mutations into our system, in our case into C. elegans‘ Argonaute.

I’m excited by the very organized, active partnership between the Argonaute Alliance of families with Argonaute syndromes and the basic scientists studying Argonaute.

How does this collaboration potentially help those patients?

What we’ve learned is that the mutant protein is sort of a rogue Argonaute. It’s basically screwing up the normal process that these four Argonautes usually do in the body. And so this rogue Argonaute, in principle, could be removed from the system by trying to employ some of the technology that folks are developing for gene knockout or RNA interference of genes.

This is promising, and I’m hopeful that the payoff for the patients will come in the years ahead.

Victor Ambros, Professor of Molecular Medicine, UMass Chan Medical School

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

ZOONOSIS

US Officials raise alarm over spreading mosquito-borne ‘triple E’ virus

Nada Hassanein, Stateline
October 16, 2024 

Mosquito On Human Skin (Shutterstock)

Mosquito-borne illnesses are a growing concern in Northeastern states, with health officials monitoring cases and advising residents to avoid outdoor activities near standing water and other environments prone to mosquito spread.

Of particular concern is eastern equine encephalitis, a rare disease that can lead to serious and fatal illness, caused by mosquitoes carrying the virus.

Known as EEE or “triple E,” the virus can cause disease in humans and animals such as horses and birds. It doesn’t spread from human to human, but is transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito.

While most people don’t develop symptoms or serious illness, 1 in 3 people who become seriously ill from the virus die, and about half of those who recover from severe cases will still experience long-term physical and cognitive effects, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms can include fever, headache, vomiting and drowsiness. Encephalitis is a rare and serious complication in which the infection causes inflammation in the brain.

Eight states — Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin — have reported human cases of the virus this year, for a total of 16 cases, according to the latest CDC data. Other states have seen cases in animals only. In Maine this year, triple E was found in two emus and one wild bird.
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In August, Massachusetts officials said they would begin spraying for mosquitoes in two counties after a man in his 80s contracted the virus, four years after the state last saw an outbreak that led to 17 confirmed cases and seven deaths.

Also in August, New Hampshire confirmed its first EEE death this year; it was the first infection the state had seen in a decade, according to state health officials. So far this year, the state has confirmed five total cases in humans, and the disease has been detected in one horse and seven mosquito batches. The state last saw infections in 2014, when three people were infected and two of them died.

Preventive steps

In recent weeks, New York confirmed its first case and death since 2015. The death in Ulster County, about 100 miles north of New York City, prompted Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to issue a declaration of imminent threat to public health, and to provide state resources to local health agencies to take preventive action, including mosquito spraying.

The state also is making insect repellent available at state parks and campgrounds; posting signs to raise awareness of EEE; consulting with local health officials about limiting park hours and camping availability during dawn and dusk, the hours of peak mosquito activity; and using social media to educate New Yorkers on how to avoid mosquito bites.

State officials said the person who died in Ulster County was an older adult, but wouldn’t share details as they investigate factors around the case.


Bryon Backenson, epidemiologist and director of the New York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control, said about a dozen counties throughout the state take part in mosquito surveillance, but rural Ulster County wasn’t one of them.

While the virus doesn’t spread from horses to humans, researchers keep track of EEE cases in horses to determine how prevalent the virus is in a particular area.


Horses, in many ways, can act as sentinels for us. We can oftentimes use horses as an indication that triple E may be in a particular area at a particular time.


– Bryon Backenson, epidemiologist and director of the New York State Department of Health’s Bureau of Communicable Disease Control


This year, there were 20 cases of EEE reported in horses across about a dozen New York counties. The state has never had so many cases, nor in so many counties, in a single year, Backenson said.

“Horses, in many ways, can act as sentinels for us,” Backenson said. “We can oftentimes use horses as an indication that triple E may be in a particular area at a particular time. If a horse tests positive, we know that there are mammal-biting mosquitoes that are out there and active.”

Ulster County did have a horse case that preceded the human case, but that horse wasn’t in close proximity to where the individual lived, Backenson noted.

As bird flu spreads on dairy farms, an ‘abysmal’ few workers are tested

Philip Armstrong, chief scientist at the Center for Vector Biology & Zoonotic Diseases at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, said while his state hasn’t seen cases, the regional clusters are cause for vigilance.

“This is definitely one of the more active years,” he said. “I would say, about every four or five years, we see these sort of regional outbreaks that occur.”

Armstrong said his team is still collecting and testing mosquitoes.

“So far, we are lucky in Connecticut in that we have not had a human case,” he said. “But sometimes these things come out of the woodwork later in the season — you just don’t know. I’m not ready to declare victory yet.”
Climate change’s impact


There is no human vaccine or medicine for triple E. Experts say residents can protect themselves by using insect repellent and wearing long sleeves and pants when going outside; avoiding the outdoors at dusk and dawn when mosquitoes are most active or taking extra precautions when outside at those times; and draining sources of standing water, such as bird baths and wheelbarrows, a prime environment for mosquito egg-laying.

Dr. Erin Staples, a physician and medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado, told Stateline the U.S. typically sees an average of seven cases annually. In 2019, the nation saw 38 cases — the highest number of cases ever reported in a year.

Climate change poses health risks. But it’s hard to fight when state policy ignores it.


Climate change can increase risk of vector-borne diseases, including those from mosquitoes, as increased rainfall and warmer temperatures create favorable conditions that can boost their populations.

While it’s not unusual to see sporadic infections of triple E or West Nile virus from year to year, Staples said, changes in bird and mosquito populations and weather patterns can affect the number of cases.

“Climate is one of many factors that can impact vector-borne diseases. Changes in climate lead to changes in the environment, which can change where and how often vector-borne diseases, like EEE and West Nile, occur,” Staples wrote in an email, noting that flooding can also change where cases are seen.


Sen Pei, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said along with rising temperatures that can cause expansion of mosquito habitats, climate change-related disasters such as hurricanes can alter how and where people live. Officials should monitor for vector-borne diseases after disasters.

“It’s a systematic impact. Vector-borne disease is such a complicated ecosystem,” he said.



Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

Canada marine protection plan aims to serve as global model

Agence France-Presse
October 16, 2024

An aerial image shows fish farming in the waterways of the Great Bear Sea north of Vancouver Island (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP)

Viewed from above, Canada's newest Marine Protected Area (MPA) is deceptively simple: stretches of blue Pacific Ocean waters and a few patches of green forest.

But beneath the surface of the area known as the Great Bear Sea, off Vancouver Island, lies an area so rich in biodiversity it has been dubbed the "Galapagos of the North." It may also serve as a model for how to protect marine life elsewhere.

In July, the federal government took an unprecedented step, designating an area roughly as large as Greece an MPA. Previously, protected areas were significantly smaller in size.

The step followed years of consultation and aimed to pioneer a new model of holistic protection, which would see marine populations shielded from a variety of harmful activities across an enormous stretch of ocean, hopefully allowing them to replenish and thrive.

Crucially, the talks also involved a new approach to collaboration.

In addition to the government, fishing industry representatives and the indigenous communities who rely on the area's resources for their livelihoods worked together to develop a protection scheme that balances various interests.
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"I am optimistic that we are going to be able to be a model for any future initiatives" on marine protection, said Danielle Shaw, chief of the Wuikinuxv nation, one of the indigenous communities in the area.

The UN COP Biodiversity Conference known as COP-16 opens in Cali, Colombia next week.

At the last conference, COP-15 held in Montreal in 2022, nations agreed to protect 30 percent of the seas by 2030, but there was no clear definition of what amounts to a protected area -- an uncertainty the Canadian model aims to help address.


- 'Species at risk' -

Around the Great Bear Sea, overfishing, pollution and warming waters caused by climate change have altered the area substantially.

Shaw told AFP that "recently there's been some years where we've had to close (fishing) all together for our own people," in order to protect vulnerable fish populations.


That is devastating for the remote community as it means "people haven't been able to stock up their shelves and their freezers for the winter," she said.

The area newly designated for official protection includes 64 species of fish, 70 seabird species, as well as whales, bears, wolves and ancient cedar forest. The seafloor also counts more than 47 underwater mountains, or seamounts.

"It's home to really unique ecosystems and species, but also there are species that are at risk," said Kate MacMillan, conservation director for the ocean program at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society - British Columbia.


Federal MPA guidelines aim to put a variety of new restrictions on the activities allowed across a vast marine area, including prohibitions on oil and gas exploration, mineral exploitation, waste disposal and the use of dredging gear, among others.

MacMillan described the MPA model as "an important tool," but warned it is not "a silver bullet."

"They don't stop everything. They won't solve every threat," she said.


Those threats are set to persist, especially with the region of British Columbia surrounding the MPA seeing an increase of maritime traffic, including shipments of liquefied natural gas.

Enforcement remains a challenge and the Canadian model aims to involve First Nations in monitoring potential violations, even if they won't have enforcement power.

- 'We have no choice' -


Bo Owadi, a member of the Wuikinuxv nation, said she spends most of her days on the water and is among those who will be working with police and researchers to document misconduct to assess the health of marine life.

She said her generation has "an ingrained sense of responsibility to take care of the land," and that joining forces with the government and others was inevitable.

"We have to come together," she told AFP. "We have no choice."


Chief Shaw agreed that collaborating on protection efforts, including by weighing the economic considerations of the fishing industry, could help foster more durable support.

"The hope is, in the long term, a stronger ecosystem means more food sources for humans and also the stronger economy," she said.

Portrait by humanoid robot to sell at auction in art world first

Agence France-Presse
October 16, 2024 

AI robot Ai-Da will make history by having a painting auctioned (Ben Stansall/AFP)

The robot artist Ai-Da, a humanoid powered by artificial intelligence, will be the first of its kind to have a painting sold at a major auction house, organisers said Wednesday.

The work, due to go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London next month, is described as a "haunting" portrait of the English mathematician Alan Turing, considered one of the fathers of modern computing.

Entitled "AI God", the 2.2 metre (7.5 ft) high portrait is expected to fetch between £100,000 and £150,000 ($130,000 and $196,000).

The online sale, featuring a range of digital art forms, would explore the intersection between art and technology, according to Sotheby's.

The ultra-realistic robot is designed to resemble a human female with a face, large eyes and a brown wig and is one of the most advanced in the world.

It works by using AI algorithms and has cameras in its eyes and bionic hands.

Aidan Meller, gallery owner and founder of Ai-Da Robot studio, led the team that created it with artificial intelligence specialists at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham in England.

Meller said Turing, who made his name as a World War II codebreaker, mathematician and early computer scientist, had raised concerns about the use of AI in the 1950s.

The artwork's "muted tones and broken facial planes" seemingly suggested "the struggles Turing warned we will face when it comes to managing AI", he said.

Ai-Da's works were "ethereal and haunting" and "continue to question where the power of AI will take us, and the global race to harness its power", he added.

In 2022, Ai-Da painted portraits of the acts headlining Glastonbury Festival including Billie Eilish, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney.

Sotheby's Digital Art Sale runs from October 31 to November 7.

China's underground lab seeks answer to deep scientific riddle

Agence France-Presse
October 17, 2024

China has emerged as a science powerhouse in recent years, with the country's Communist leadership ploughing billions of dollars into advanced research (Jade GAO/AFP)

Far beneath the lush landscape of southern China, a sprawling subterranean laboratory aims to be the world's first to crack a deep scientific enigma.

China has emerged as a science powerhouse in recent years, with the country's Communist leadership ploughing billions of dollars into advanced research to contend with the United States and other rivals.

Its latest showpiece is the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (Juno), a state-of-the-art facility for studying the minuscule subatomic particles.

The project is an "exciting" opportunity to delve into some of the universe's most fundamental -- but elusive -- building blocks, according to Patrick Huber, director of the Center for Neutrino Physics at the American university Virginia Tech, who is not involved in the facility's research.

AFP recently joined an international media tour of the observatory in Kaiping, Guangdong province, organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's national science agency.

The lab is reached by a funicular train that travels down a tunnel to a cavern built 700 meters (2,300 feet) underground to limit radiation emissions.

Inside stands the neutrino detector, a stainless steel and acrylic sphere around 35 meters in diameter, crisscrossed by cables.

"No one has built such a detector before," Wang Yifang, Juno's project manager and director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, said as workers in hard hats applied the finishing touches to the gleaming orb.

"You can see from the scale, it was technologically complicated," Wang said as he waved a laser pen over different parts of the installation.


Started in 2014, Juno has cost around 2.2 billion yuan ($311 million) to build and is due for completion next year.

It aims to solve a fundamental physics puzzle about the particles' nature faster than scientists in the United States, a world leader in the field.

Its research could also help us better understand planet Earth, the Sun, and other stars and supernovas.


- 'Second means nothing' -

Neutrinos are elementary particles that exist all around us and move close to the speed of light.

Physicists have known about them for decades but still lack in-depth knowledge of how they work.


Researchers will use Juno to detect neutrinos emitted by two Chinese nuclear power plants, each located 53 kilometers (33 miles) away.

They will then use the data to tackle something called the "mass hierarchy" problem, believed to be crucial for improving theories of particle physics.

Scientists already know that neutrinos come in three different mass states, but they don't know which is the heaviest and which is the lightest.


Solving that problem could help them better understand the standard model of particle physics, allowing them in turn to learn more about the past and future of the universe.

"(The project) will deeply test our understanding of neutrino oscillation and quantum mechanics," said Huber of Virginia Tech.

"If it turns out that Juno shows our (current) understanding is wrong, then that would be a revolution."


Wang, the project manager, said researchers were confident they would "get the result of mass hierarchy ahead of everybody".

In fundamental science, he said with a smile, being "the first means everything, and the second means nothing".

- Superpower tensions -


Scientists estimate that six years of data will be needed to crack the mass hierarchy question.

And although similar experiments will take place in the US and Japan in the coming years, Juno is "ahead in the race", said Jennifer Thomas, a physicist at University College London who also sits on the project's International Scientific Committee.

Around 750 scientists from 17 countries are taking part in the collaboration, including "two American groups", according to Wang.


More are interested in joining, he added, "but unfortunately, because of the many well known reasons... they are not allowed to".

As US-China competition over science and technology heats up, Washington has investigated US-based academics of Chinese origin for spying or stealing intellectual property, and it has encouraged domestic institutions to loosen ties with Chinese counterparts.

Beijing, for its part, has been accused by Western governments and international organizations of restricting access to certain data and hindering enquiries into sensitive topics, like the origins of Covid-19.


But one American scholar and member of Juno said he was looking forward to working on the "unique" project.

"We're not completely numb to the political situation, because there can sometimes be difficulties (for researchers) in obtaining visas" and navigating stricter bureaucratic hurdles, Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux, an experimental physicist at the University of California, Irvine, told AFP.

He said such problems "affect both sides, perhaps our Chinese colleagues even more than us in the US".

But, he said, "by working together, we also show how science can and must be apolitical".

Socially distanced layout of world’s oldest cities let early civilizations evade diseases

The Conversation
October 17, 2024 

Excavations at Çatalhöyük show how closely people lived before the settlement collapsed. Mark Nesbitt/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

In my research focused on early farmers of Europe, I have often wondered about a curious pattern through time: Farmers lived in large dense villages, then dispersed for centuries, then later formed cities again, only to abandon those as well. Why?

Archaeologists often explain what we call urban collapse in terms of climate change, overpopulation, social pressures or some combination of these. Each likely has been true at different points in time.

But scientists have added a new hypothesis to the mix: disease. Living closely with animals led to zoonotic diseases that came to also infect humans. Outbreaks could have led dense settlements to be abandoned, at least until later generations found a way to organize their settlement layout to be more resilient to disease. In a new study, my colleagues and I analyzed the intriguing layouts of later settlements to see how they might have interacted with disease transmission.


Modern excavations at what was once Çatalhöyük, where inhabitants lived in mud-brick houses that weren’t separated by paths or streets. Murat Özsoy 1958/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Earliest cities: Dense with people and animals

Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, is the world’s oldest farming village, from over 9,000 years ago. Many thousands of people lived in mud-brick houses jammed so tightly together that residents entered via a ladder through a trapdoor on the roof. They even buried selected ancestors underneath the house floor. Despite plenty of space out there on the Anatolian Plateau, people packed in closely.



Homes at Çatalhöyük were so tightly packed that people entered through the roof and even buried some ancestors beneath the floor. Illustration by Kathryn Killackey and The Çatalhöyük Research Project


For centuries, people at Çatalhöyük herded sheep and cattle, cultivated barley and made cheese. Evocative paintings of bulls, dancing figures and a volcanic eruption suggest their folk traditions. They kept their well-organized houses tidy, sweeping floors and maintaining storage bins near the kitchen, located under the trapdoor to allow oven smoke to escape. Keeping clean meant they even replastered their interior house walls several times a year.

These rich traditions ended by 6000 BCE, when Çatalhöyük was mysteriously abandoned. The population dispersed into smaller settlements out in the surrounding flood plain and beyond. Other large farming populations of the region had also dispersed, and nomadic livestock herding became more widespread. For those populations that persisted, the mud-brick houses were now separate, in contrast with the agglomerated houses of Çatalhöyük.

Was disease a factor in the abandonment of dense settlements by 6000 BCE?

At Çatalhöyük, archaeologists have found human bones intermingled with cattle bones in burials and refuse heaps. Crowding of people and animals likely bred zoonotic diseases at Çatalhöyük. Ancient DNA identifies tuberculosis from cattle in the region as far back as 8500 BCE and TB in human infant bones not long after. DNA in ancient human remains dates salmonella to as early as 4500 BCE. Assuming the contagiousness and virulence of Neolithic diseases increased through time, dense settlements such as Çatalhöyük may have reached a tipping point where the effects of disease outweighed the benefits of living closely together.

A new layout 2,000 years later

By about 4000 BCE, large urban populations had reappeared, at the mega-settlements of the ancient Trypillia culture, west of the Black Sea. Thousands of people lived at Trypillia mega-settlements such as Nebelivka and Maidanetske in what’s now Ukraine.

If disease was a factor in dispersal millennia before, how were these mega-settlements possible?



Geophysical plot of Nebelivka settlement shows its circular layout, divided into neighborhoods. Duncan Hale and Nebelivka Project, CC BY-NC

This time, the layout was different than at jam-packed Çatalhöyük: The hundreds of wooden, two-story houses were regularly spaced in concentric ovals. They were also clustered in pie-shaped neighborhoods, each with its own large assembly house. The pottery excavated in the neighborhood assembly houses has many different compositions, suggesting these pots were brought there by different families coming together to share food.

This layout suggests a theory. Whether the people of Nebelivka knew it or not, this lower-density, clustered layout could have helped prevent any disease outbreaks from consuming the entire settlement.

Archaeologist Simon Carrignon and I set out to test this possibility by adapting computer models from a previous epidemiology project that modeled how social-distancing behaviors affect the spread of pandemics. To study how a Trypillian settlement layout would disrupt disease spread, we teamed up with cultural evolution scholar Mike O’Brien and with the archaeologists of Nebelivka: John Chapman, Bisserka Gaydarska and Brian Buchanan.

Simulating socially distanced neighborhoods

To simulate disease spread at Nebelivka, we had to make a few assumptions. First, we assumed that early diseases were spread through foods, such as milk or meat. Second, we assumed people visited other houses within their neighborhood more often than those outside of it.

Would this neighborhood clustering be enough to suppress disease outbreaks? To test the effects of different possible rates of interaction, we ran millions of simulations, first on a network to represent clustered neighborhoods. We then ran the simulations again, this time on a virtual layout modeled after actual site plans, where houses in each neighborhood were given a higher chance of making contact with each other.

Based on our simulations, we found that if people visited other neighborhoods infrequently – like a fifth to a tenth as often as visiting other houses within their own neighborhood – then the clustering layout of houses at Nebelivka would have significantly reduced outbreaks of early foodborne diseases. This is reasonable given that each neighborhood had its own assembly house. Overall, the results show how the Trypillian layout could help early farmers live together in low-density urban populations, at a time when zoonotic diseases were increasing.

The residents of Nebilevka didn’t need to have consciously planned for their neighborhood layout to help their population survive. But they may well have, as human instinct is to avoid signs of contagious disease. Like at Çatalhöyük, residents kept their houses clean. And about two-thirds of the houses at Nebelivka were deliberately burned at different times. These intentional periodic burns may have been a pest extermination tactic.


Re-creation of a Trypillian house-burning, with additional straw and wood necessary to burn hot enough to match archaeological evidence. Arheoinvest/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

New cities and innovations

Some of the early diseases eventually evolved to spread by means other than bad foods. Tuberculosis, for instance, became airborne at some point. When the bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, became adapted to fleas, it could be spread by rats, which would not care about neighborhood boundaries.

Were new disease vectors too much for these ancient cities? The mega-settlements of Trypillia were abandoned by 3000 BCE. As at Çatalhöyük thousands of years before, people dispersed into smaller settlements. Some geneticists speculate that Trypillia settlements were abandoned due to the origins of plague in the region, about 5,000 years ago.

The first cities in Mesopotamia developed around 3500 BCE, with others soon developing in Egypt, the Indus Valley and China. These cities of tens of thousands were filled with specialized craftspeople in distinct neighborhoods.

This time around, people in the city centers weren’t living cheek by jowl with cattle or sheep. Cities were the centers of regional trade. Food was imported into the city and stored in large grain silos like the one at the Hittite capital of Hattusa, which could hold enough cereal grain to feed 20,000 people for a year. Sanitation was helped by public water works, such as canals in Uruk or water wells and a large public bath at the Indus city of Mohenjo Daro.

These early cities, along with those in China, Africa and the Americas, were the foundations of civilization. Arguably, their form and function were shaped by millennia of diseases and human responses to them, all the way back to the world’s earliest farming villages.

R. Alexander Bentley, Professor of Anthropology, University of Tennessee

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