FIRST OPINION

Monkeypox public health response 

is lagging for LGBTQ+ community

By David SteinAug. 26, 2022

• +

KENA BETANCUR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

I’m a 29-year-old gay man living in New York City during the first major wave of monkeypox infections in the United States. As the CEO and co-founder of a health care startup, I am very connected to the world of public health — especially public health that impacts LGBTQ+ people.

So I assumed I could get vaccinated against monkeypox fairly easily. But it took me weeks to do that. It’s even more difficult for people in my community with less time and fewer resources. What can be done to fix this?

Istepped off the 4 train into a huge crowd of masked strangers at the Bedford Park Boulevard subway station in the Bronx. Old men, young men, trans people, able-bodied and disabled people: all of us were on our way to get vaccinated at the Bronx High School of Science.

To get to that point, I had to identify my own health risk. Some of the questions — Was I having enough promiscuous sex to qualify for vaccination? Had I had anonymous sex? Was it unprotected? With multiple partners? Where did you meet? In the last two weeks? — I wouldn’t want to answer in front of my closest friends. Not to mention, who gets to decide what “promiscuous sex” is anyways?! It’s not a factual term, but one full of judgment.

Next, I had to seek out appointments online and get one before they ran out, a time-consuming task

In the crowd headed to the Bronx High School of Science, it felt surreal to see people who had survived AIDS in the 1980s next to my generation of LGBTQ+ people. While HIV is no longer a death sentence with access to the right preventive measures (PrEP) and treatment (antiretroviral therapy), the community trauma remains. We were coming from every part of New York City to protect ourselves, our communities, and the public at large.

When I opened my Grindr app (a location-based social networking and online dating application for gay, bi, trans, and queer people), I was shocked to see hundreds of people online in my immediate vicinity. The Bronx High School of Science is not a typical stop for the LGBTQ+ community on Sundays — it’s not brunch in Manhattan’s West Village — but we were moved to travel outside our neighborhoods and boroughs for a common purpose. My friends and I have noticed that people who use Grindr have started not only flagging their Covid vaccination status but their monkeypox vaccination status as well. Grindr is even encouraging users to get a vaccine. (You know that public health has dropped the ball when a gay hookup app is promoting vaccination before local or national public health agencies.)

It’s obvious to me — and should be clear to anyone — that the LGBTQ+ community wants to do its part to stop the spread of monkeypox. But just as PrEP is a necessary tool to limit the spread of HIV, other public health tools are also needed to combat monkeypox.

One of the older guys in line, probably in his mid-60s, was wearing a shirt bearing the iconic ACT UP slogan “SILENCE = DEATH” underscoring the connection between the AIDS epidemic and this monkeypox outbreak. While self-identification unfairly puts the onus on LGBTQ+ people to access health care services, what other groups boast this level of health awareness? With Covid-19, individuals were expected to protect themselves, but there was a larger expectation for public health to provide additional tools like remote diagnostic testing, realistic protocols and guidelines, and, eventually, easily accessible vaccines. With monkeypox, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have asked men who have sex with men to decrease or halt sexual activity with new partners and get vaccinated, despite offering little information on how to do either.

Related: With support on monkeypox hard to come by, queer communities

 turn to one another

There is a limit to what the LGBTQ+ community can accomplish without greater institutional support. (Hello, federal government! What have you been doing? Robert Fenton was appointed as the White House monkeypox coordinator, but not until three states had already declared state of emergencies.)

The first clinic in New York City, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, to offer 1,000 doses of monkeypox vaccine had to close its line after about 90 minutes. The San Francisco Department of Health confirmed that city clinics ran out of monkeypox vaccines in less than a day in early August. Georgia emerged as a monkeypox hotspot, but health department websites routinely crash when vaccination appointment links go live due to overwhelming demand, leaving many citizens no closer to a vaccine than before.

When I got in to see a nurse at the Bronx High School of Science, there was some confusion over whether I’d be able to get a second vaccine dose. At the time, public health officials were trying to decide if they should stretch the vaccine supply by vaccinating more people with one dose rather than fully vaccinating fewer people with two doses, resulting in protection for the immediate future but less long-term durability.

After my first vaccination, the Biden administration authorized use of one-fifth doses of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine. While this seems like a good idea, health care workers are having difficulty learning how to administer the vaccine intradermally as required, routinely resulting in wasted doses. Why was this plan authorized before health departments could operationalize the fractional dosing plan effectively?

Lack of vaccines isn’t the only problem. Monkeypox testing is limited and the WHO and CDC are encouraging people to limit sexual partners, which is not an effective long-term solution. Note the enormous spike in sexually transmitted infections during Covid-19, including a 24% increase in the rate of primary and secondary syphilis among reproductive-aged women at a time when people were supposed to be social distancing. (Also, imagine straight people being singled out to stop having sex as a public health measure!)

Related: History doesn’t have to repeat itself with stigma and monkeypox

Testing also needs to be more accessible. Health departments across the nation should consider enabling at-home diagnostics for monkeypox to help the LGBTQ+ community at large fight the spread. This would allow at-risk members of this community to access care without public self-identification, as well as reach parents, shift workers, individuals with disabilities and others who might not have resources to seek care outside the home. The Center for American Progress reported that 31% of LGBTQ+ people living outside of metropolitan areas would find it very difficult or impossible to access more than one community health center or clinic.

Some hospitals, clinics, and public health initiatives have built on the popularity of telehealth, use of which increased more than 150% during the Covid-19 pandemic, to improve access to health care with ongoing telemedicine options and at-home diagnostic testing. Home diagnostics are currently used in STI testing, fertility screening, primary care, medication management, chronic care, and more. Why not use this option to increase access to monkeypox testing and remote care, especially when multiple studies (Kaiser Family Foundation, Rutgers University, and others) show telehealth is an effective way to reach the LGBTQ+ community? An FDA-approved monkeypox test can detect monkeypox from a lesion sample, which is not dissimilar to a test for herpes.

The larger public health community needs to take action to stop monkeypox as it did with Covid-19 — free vaccines for all, improving access through telehealth, enabling an Operation Warp Speed to speed up development of monkeypox vaccines and therapies, and major information campaigns to spread awareness about the disease. The LGBTQ+ community has largely had to advocate for itself, as it continues to do with the AIDS epidemic. It’s time for greater institutional support to keep the virus contained.

David Stein is the CEO and co-founder of Ash Wellness, a New York City-based company that works with partners to enable at-home testing programs.

About the Author

David Stein

 david@poweredbyash.com

 linkedin.com/in/davidstein100/

 OPINIONS

Role of Australia in Indo-Pacific Strategy

Source

China Military Online

Editor

Li Jiayao

Time

2022-08-26 

By Wu Minwe

On August 19, a multinational military exercise code-named “Pitch Black 2022” led by Australia kicked off, with armed forces from 17 countries in North America, Europe, Oceania and Asia involved. The exercise is a three-week multi-national exercise conducted primarily from RAAF Base Darwin, RAAF Base Tindal, and surrounding areas.

The 17 participating countries in Exercise Pitch Black 2022 include Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, ROK, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, marking the largest number of participating countries, with over 100 military aircraft and about 2,500 military personnel involved. In particular, Japan and ROK in East Asia attended the event for the first time.

Although the Australian military acts as the main organizer of the exercise, the US and NATO have instigated the event from behind, with the core purpose of implementing the US-led Indo-Pacific Strategy focusing on containing China. Its specific impact may roughly be summarized into three points as follows.

First, Exercise Pitch Black, a biennial one, is in concert with the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Exercise from south to north. The US-led RIMPAC 2022 was held in waters around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California region from June 29 to August 4. The participating countries of RIMPAC 2022 have basically been those participating in the Exercise Pitch Black 2022. RIMPAC 2022 has mainly been a joint maritime military exercise in the northern Pacific Ocean, and Exercise Pitch Black 2022 is mainly an aerial military exercise in the southern Pacific Ocean. Besides, the two have been launched in succession, the concertation is clearly visible.

The US, long having the distinction of being the “world police”, has obviously declined in strength inrecent years, though its ever-intensive implementation of the Indo-Pacific Strategy. This means that the US interest in becoming the “police of the Pacific Ocean” is undiminished; meanwhile, Australia has often called itself “deputy sheriff” of the Pacific Ocean, which makes the Exercise Pitch Black 2022 seem to be a way of fulfilling Australia’s “duty” as the so-called deputy sheriff in the region.

Second, the US may consider Australia as a rear base for its Indo-Pacific Strategy. As for the countries engaged in the Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) mechanism led by the US, India is quite limited in projecting sea and air forces to the Pacific region. Japan and the ROK are too close to China in geography, and the forces and military bases they have deployed may not be so capable and mighty to survive in wartime. In modern warfare, there is a huge demand for fuel, equipment and weapon parts, as well as medical support such as treatment and recuperation of the wounded and sick. It thus can be seen clearly, the role of Australia, which is relatively far away from China, as a rear base of the Indo-Pacific Strategy.

Third, Australia may serve as an “air combat command and dispatch center” in implementing the Indo-Pacific Strategy. As the Indo-Pacific Strategy is in a confrontation environment of high intensity, it is indispensable to resort to precision strikes, long-range strikes, and decapitation operations. In the confrontation of the type, the army, naval, and air force bases that are relatively close will all turn out to be possible targets of opponent, in particular command posts of diverse variety. In this regard, the US military intends to deploy land, sea, and air combat forces in a decentralized manner, and achieve combat formation during the process of combat preparation and long-range raid, so as to avoid being annihilated by the opponent’s long-range precision fires in the process of combat preparation and force formation.

In this regard, Australia still has a greater probability of survival and remaining safe given its distance. If the “air combat command and dispatch center” is set in Australia, it the US can realize command and dispatch of the air force stationed in Australia with high flexibility, and have the ability to command, dispatch, group for combat and assign combat missions to the combat aircraft dispersed in the US bases in Japan, the ROK, Guam and other areas. And the Exercise Pitch Black 2022 provides a good oppotunity for an air combat exercise.

(The author is from College of Information and Communication, National University of Defense Technology)

Editor's note: This article is originally published on news.youth.cn, and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.

Inflation Reduction Act Was Made Possible Thanks to Young People

“It shows that organizing works and activism works.”


BY AUGUST 26, 2022

KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES

President Biden has signed into law a historic bill addressing climate change and health care, among other issues — thanks, in no small part, to the young congressional staffers and activists who kept the bill alive. Throughout the summer, as the country experienced some of its hottest months ever, the legislation was repeatedly declared dead after negotiations that seemed to lead nowhere. Still, young aides and climate activists stayed focused on Democrats’ possibly last best chance of passing major climate legislation while they still hold narrow control of Congress.

Lauren Manus, the 21-year-old advocacy director of Sunrise Movement said there was no choice but to press on, given the looming thread of worst-case climate scenarios. “Young people [are] rising up and saying this is a matter of our survival,” Manus said. “We’re not going to take a backseat.”



After working to help Democrats secure Congress and the Presidency in the 2020 election through record youth voter turnout, Manus said it was clear that was the moment to act. “We knew that we could not pause,” she said. “That was our moment to demand that our generation had a major role to play in shaping the priorities of this administration.” In June 2021, months after Biden took office, Manus and her Sunrise colleagues shut down the entrance to the White House. Dozens of youth activists were arrested. Sunrise activists went on to campaign for a robust response to climate change: from launching a hunger strike outside the White House to starting the Good Jobs for All Campaign. When Manus looks into the future, she wants to know she worked for a brighter future than one consumed by wildfires, droughts, and climate disaster after climate disaster. “We didn’t cause this problem, but we don’t want to live in the fallout of it,” Manus said. “We want to reverse it so that our children and our children’s children can have a greater future.”


The final legislation falls far short of what progressive activists hoped for, lacking provisions for free universal pre-K, food assistance, and a civilian climate corps. But it does provide for a historic investment in clean energy, aim to reduce carbon emissions, and bring health care costs down.

One Democratic staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, said they see the 2018 sit-in in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and the 2022 sit-in in Senator Chuck Schumer’s office as the bookends to the success of the Inflation Reduction Act. “Lots of folks deserve credit for what’s good in the IRA,” they said. “But the frontline communities and young people who are most affected both created the conditions [to pass the bill] and refused to give up during this process.”


Aria Kovalovich, a 26-year-old staff member for the House Oversight Committee, told Teen Vogue that young staffers were working behind the scenes to push the legislation through, even as the national media conversation largely focuses on Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) as dealmakers and what the act means for Biden. Kovalovich said “historic coalitions,” including “frontline voices,” other activists, and congressional staffers came together over the past 18 months to work on the legislation that ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act. They worked both inside and outside of Capitol Hill to keep up the pressure on Democratic politicians. “A lot of people…think activism does nothing, that it’s like screaming into the void,” Kovalovich said. “But working for politicians, I know they pay attention when people are sitting in their offices or rallying just outside them. It’s really important for young people, especially, and frontline communities to hold the powerful to account and let them quite literally feel and hear your frustrations.”

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Kovalovich was one of six staffers arrested in June after a sit-in in Schumer’s office. “At the point of the sit-in, climate wasn’t in the news anymore,” she said. “We were really trying to keep up the pressure and let Mr. Schumer know we haven’t forgotten.”

Kovalovich says the political world of Washington, DC, “incentivizes people keeping their mouth shut,” but that she didn’t move to the nation’s capital to stay quiet. Though she knew that her reputation as a staffer could take a hit over repeated arrests, she called the sit-in “the last tool” at her disposal. “I came to Congress to work on climate policy. For me, this was our last chance. It could be 10 years before we have enough seats to pass climate policy again.”

And though the Inflation Reduction Act has been called a “pared-down version of [Biden’s 2021 legislation] Build Back Better,” Kovalovich says she feels an amazing sense of relief. “It’s such a win for young people,” she said. “It shows that organizing works and activism works. I hope it’ll help people who are frustrated by things in their workplace and by a lack of transparency or leadership to stand up and to use these tools because they are effective.”

It wasn’t only people in Washington, DC, who kept up the pressure. Elise Joshi, the director of strategy for Gen-Z for Change talks about the climate crisis every day to her nearly 119,000 TikTok followers. She says the lowest moments of the recent legislative effort — like when Senator Manchin appeared poised to kill the bill or when it wasn’t clear if Senator Sinema (D-AZ) would support the final legislation — were learning opportunities, even though she sometimes felt defeated. “I felt hopeless all the time,” Joshi said. “[What helps is] surrounding myself with climate activists online and in person that feel the grief I feel every time a pundit says it’s not going to pass or Manchin refuses negotiations. It’s like you’re grieving every time.”

While Joshi is glad to celebrate the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been called the biggest win yet for climate activists, she wants people to know they can’t be complacent just because this bill has passed. She knows what she wants to keep the focus on: phasing out fossil fuels and building up renewable energies while keeping the needs and jobs of working-class people top of mind. Joshi rattles off statistics and goals before sighing. “Was I rambling?” she asked. “It’s just, we can make this an even better country.”

 Teen Vogue 

“Thanks, and God bless you”: Asylum-seekers allowed to enter US after “remain in Mexico” ends

Uriel J. García, Texas Tribune
August 26, 2022

A US border agent transports a child who is seeking asylum to a bus station in Brownsville, Texas, on February 26, 2021(AFP)

By Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune
Aug. 26, 2022

EL PASO — Willian woke up before dawn on a recent Tuesday, packed his legal documents into a blue folder and got in a van with other migrants to one of the international bridges that connect El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

At the port of entry, the 46-year-old asylum-seeker from Ecuador was disenrolled from the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled the Biden administration had the right to formally end the Trump-era policy. The program, also known as “remain in Mexico,” forced thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases made their way through U.S. courts.

Immigration officials transported Willian and at least eight other migrants to El Paso’s immigration court, where judges gave them all permission to stay in the U.S. They can continue their asylum cases in courts closest to wherever they settle.

After his hearing, Willian — who asked to be identified by his first name out of fear that criminals in Ecuador may target his family — walked out of the courthouse and felt a sense of relief wash over him. At a migrant shelter a few blocks away, he waited for his niece to pick him up before he caught a flight to New York City. He plans to stay with his sister-in-law there until his asylum case is decided.

It was his first time stepping on American soil as a free person after waiting a month in a Ciudad Juárez shelter.

“I think I’m finally going to be able to get a good night’s sleep. In Juárez, I couldn’t sleep very well,” Willian said as he stood outside Annunciation House, where a volunteer was administering rapid COVID-19 tests to migrants before they entered.

Willian is among the 7,112 who were enrolled in “remain in Mexico” and were returned to Mexico following initial enrollment under the Biden administration after Amarillo-based U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk ordered it to restart the program in December. Immigrant rights advocates said the program had put vulnerable asylum-seekers in dangerous situations in Mexican border cities.

Not every migrant seeking asylum was enrolled in MPP. Immigration agents also have the discretion to let a migrant enter the country to make an asylum claim or send them back to Mexico under Title 42, the emergency health order that immigration officials have used 2.1 million times since March 2020 to quickly expel people seeking to enter the U.S.

During the Trump administration, 70,000 asylum-seekers were sent across the border under the program, which was launched in January 2019. The Biden administration canceled it in June 2021, sparking a lawsuit by Texas and Missouri that argued the decision violated administrative and immigration laws and forced the states to expend resources on migrants for necessities such as driver’s licenses, education for migrant children and hospital care.



Migrants from Venezuela looking for a place to stay for the night on Tuesday spoke to a volunteer at Annunciation House, a local migrant shelter in El Paso. Credit: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Texas Tribune

In a rare win for the Biden administration on immigration policy, the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled the administration had the legal right to end the program. Kacsmaryk, the federal judge, then rescinded his order.

Some immigrant rights advocates criticized President Joe Biden for not immediately ending the program after the Supreme Court ruling. On Aug. 8, five weeks later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said migrants placed in the program would be disenrolled at their next scheduled court date in the U.S.

“As Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas has said, MPP has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs, and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border,” DHS said in a statement earlier this month.
A bumpy ending

Since that announcement, the actual ending of MPP has been bumpy.

Marysol Castro, a managing attorney with the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, which provides pro bono and low-cost legal representation to migrants, said in the first week after MPP ended that a judge denied her client’s request to continue their case in a different Texas court because it wasn’t clear whether migrants released from the program would be allowed to enter the U.S.

In another case, she said a couple and their son from Honduras who had been placed in MPP didn’t have a court date until 2023, which meant they would have to stay in Mexico for at least another year. She filed a motion to move up their court hearing, and last week they were disenrolled, released directly from the court and moved to Tyler.

Castro also said some people enrolled in MPP arrived at their court hearings in El Paso unaware that they were going to be immediately released into the U.S. — and not allowed to cross the border again — so some of them had to leave behind their personal belongings.

Being removed from MPP and allowed to enter the U.S. greatly increases migrants’ chances of being granted asylum, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Only 2.4% of people placed in MPP under the Biden administration have been granted asylum. By comparison, 50% of asylum-seekers who have been allowed into the U.S. while their cases were pending have won the legal protection during the same period.

Castro said a government lawyer recently told her in court that her client was going to be deported now that MPP was over. She said she explained to the lawyer and judge that the end of MPP doesn’t mean asylum-seekers’ cases are over, but instead allows them to enter the U.S. until a decision is made in their cases.

“I think a lot of people just don’t know what’s going on or don’t know what MPP is,” she said. “They’re clueless about it.”

“I feel relieved”

On Tuesday, in Judge Nathan Herbert’s courtroom, three Venezuelan men and a Colombian man sat on wooden benches as Herbert explained their rights — including their right to continue their asylum requests in other U.S. cities.

“Señores, buena suerte y buen viaje” — good luck and have a good trip — Herbert told the men as they walked out of his courtroom at the end of the 45-minute court hearing. “Gracias y Dios le bendiga,” one of the men responded. Thanks, and God bless you.


Annunciation House volunteer Kyung Ju Lee gives an orientation to 25-year-old asylum-seeker Arias of the Dominican Republic after arriving to the migrant shelter on Tuesday in El Paso. Credit: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Texas Tribune

Asylum-seekers walk to a local migrant shelter moments after leaving immigration court. Credit: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Texas Tribune

Migrants wait inside a local migrant shelter, Annunciation House, after leaving immigration court on Tuesday in El Paso, Texas. Credit: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Texas Tribune

First: Asylum-seekers walk to Annunciation House after leaving immigration court. Last: Migrants wait inside Annunciation House. Credit: Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The Texas Tribune

One of the Venezuelan men walked out of the federal building with a father and son from the Dominican Republic who had emerged from a different courtroom. He fist-bumped the Dominican father to celebrate their release from the program.

“I’m happy,” said the younger Dominican man, a 25-year-old who asked to be identified only by his last name, Arias. “I feel relieved.”

As they walked to Annunciation House, Willian joined them just outside the shelter.

Willian explained he left Ecuador because criminals attempted to extort him for $200 a month — one-third of his $600 monthly salary.

He said he was driving from his administrative job at the country’s health department to his home in September when a man on a motorcycle cut him off, approached his window and showed him a recent photo of his 18-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter at a park. The man, who was wearing a ski mask, told him the $200 monthly payment would guarantee the safety of his family, Willian said.

He declined.

Two days later, two men in ski masks approached him again, demanding money. He said he tried to report the incident to the police, who told him that if he couldn’t identify or describe the men, they wouldn’t make a report.

“They were very discouraging,” he said.

Willian said the threats and demands for money continued until he resigned from his job in January and moved his family into his mother-in-law’s house, while he moved to a different city. But he said he couldn’t find a steady job and decided to leave Ecuador for the U.S. in June.

He arrived at the El Paso port of entry in July and requested asylum. He said he thought he was going to get deported to Ecuador. Instead, immigration agents enrolled him into MPP.

For the past month, he said he didn’t leave the Juárez shelter out of fear. Nearly two weeks ago, a wave of violence — sparked by the killings of two prison inmates by a rival gang — spilled out of the prison and into the city’s streets. One of the gangs killed 11 civilians in retaliation.

“When I heard the gunshots, I didn’t leave the shelter for anything,” Willian said, glancing at his phone to make sure he didn’t miss a call or a message from his niece.

He said he hopes he can win his asylum case, then bring his wife and two children legally to the U.S.

After the rest of the migrants received negative COVID-19 test results, they walked into the shelter. Willian sat alone on a bench outside the brown brick building until his ride showed up. He could now begin his journey to New York.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/26/texas-migrants-asylum-mpp-remain-in-mexico-ends/.

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Rare 'Red Sprites' Seen above Desert

BY JESS THOMSON 

ON 8/25/22 

What Is A Red Sprite? Rare Phenomenon Photographed In Chile Explained

A rarely seen aerial phenomenon involving bright red streaks floating in the sky was photographed above the Atacama Desert in Chile on August 22.

The mysterious lights, known as "red sprites," were snapped at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory, in the middle of the desert around 100 miles northeast of the city of Coquimbo.

Red sprites are so rare that they were only photographed for the first time in 1989, although legends of the scarlet lights have been reported anecdotally for centuries.

According to ESO, red sprites are a rare form of lightning very high in the Earth's atmosphere. Occurring between 30 and 55 miles high, in the troposphere layer of the atmosphere, the red lights are caused by large-scale, low-temperature electrical discharges above thunderclouds.

The European Southern Observatory's picture of the red sprites over the Atacama Desert in Chile, taken from the La Silla Observatory.

ZDENEK BARDON/ESO

Red sprites can take several forms: very large Jellyfish sprites that can have areas measuring up to 30 square miles, Column sprites, and Carrot sprites, which are similar to column sprites except they also have long tendrils. These lower tendrils tend to be blue in color, while the higher parts of the sprite will appear red.

According to the University of Washington's Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the red color of the sprites comes from the excitation of molecular nitrogen in the atmosphere caused by the discharge from thunderclouds.

The reason that they are so rare is that the type of lightning discharge that causes them is also rare: sprites are directly correlated with positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes from large thunderclouds, which comprise only 10% of all lightning. Usually, lightning strikes transfer a negative charge from the cloud to the ground.

High-speed videos taken of red sprites using a 10,000 frame-per-second camera showed that they are made of clusters of ionization balls, measuring between 33 and 328 ft across.

A picture taken at La Silla shows the red sprites hovering near the horizon over the Atacama, surrounded by another, larger greenish glow. According to the ESO, this is known as airglow, which can only be seen clearly when there is no light pollution. It's caused by nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the Earth's atmosphere, that have electrons knocked away by sunlight during the daytime, slowly recombining with their electrons, a process that causes them to glow.

Red sprites have been thought to have caused the crash of a weather balloon in 1989, which fell from a height of 120,000 feet after it passed over a thundercloud, crash-landing near Graham, Texas.

Conserving and celebrating an ancient fish

Tribes come together at Willamette Falls to celebrate the annual harvest of Pacific lamprey, a first food of Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest, in the midst of ongoing tribal conservation efforts

Jenny Jackson, Temi Meninick and Tatyana Walsey from the “Lil Swans Dance Group” share a traditional dance with the crowd during the Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration on July 30, 2022. (Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore News)

McKayla Lee
Underscore News

An ancient fish has been swimming in the waters of the Pacific Northwest since before trees existed. After surviving for hundreds of millions of years, Pacific lamprey were decimated by dams and other human-caused habitat disruptions, as well as lack of government protections. Tribes are leading conservation efforts, with the goal of getting their numbers back to levels that ensure a reliable harvest.

On a hot afternoon in July, citizens of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs celebrated their first foods with a feast. The tribes held the event near Willamette Falls, where, that morning, tribal citizens had gathered the lamprey they served. The celebration was open to the public and featured a full day of drumming, dancing and feasting.

“We organized this event to honor and celebrate our annual lamprey harvest,” said Donella Miller, Yakama Nation Fisheries biologist and program manager. “We normally have feasts to honor the foods back at our longhouses at home, but we haven’t had anything down here on our ancestral lands since the 1990s. It was important to us to come back and share these teachings with our young ones, to pass on traditions.”


A Pacific lamprey taken from the Eel River at the Van Arsdale Fisheries Station in Potter Valley, Calif. on April 26, 2017. (Photo by Steve Martarano/USFWS)

Pacific lamprey play key roles in tribal culture and ecology. Among the oldest fish in the world, they have been around for over 450 million years and even predate dinosaurs. The eel-like fish are anadromous and have unique physical characteristics, including having no jaws or bones, although they have a mouth full of teeth.

Lamprey spend their early years nestled in the sediment of creek beds as blind filter feeders. They transform into parasitic adults when they’re between three and seven years old, then migrate to the ocean to feed on bigger fish and grow for years before returning to spawn in the freshwater of rivers and creeks, to which they are drawn by the pheromones of other lamprey.

The fish are a traditional food source for the Columbia River Basin’s Indigenous people, as well as a culturally important species for medicine and ceremony.

“Lamprey are kind of like river gold, their oil content is so high, which makes them a high-nutrient food,” Miller said. “And their oils also have medicinal purposes. You can use that for earaches and even for your skin.”



Donella Miller, Yakama Nation Fisheries program manager and event coordinator, stops for a quick photo before returning to help serve food and begin the dance presentations at the Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration on July 30, 2022. (Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore News)

Over time, once-abundant lamprey populations declined. Populations above dams and in the rivers and streams that flow into the Columbia River are functionally extinct, meaning that so few make it to those places that they can no longer play their ecological role there. Passages at dams designed for salmon were nearly impossible for lamprey to navigate, while their spawning beds were spoiled by poor water quality. And their high fat volume made them the perfect prey for birds. Lamprey have always fed many species, and their former abundance took predation pressure off salmon and steelhead. Now, that same longstanding predator-prey relationship is much more harmful to today’s tiny populations of lamprey.

For decades, the government treated Pacific lamprey as unworthy of protection or restoration. But the tribes never stopped pushing for their recovery. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) created the Tribal Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan in 2001. This tribal-led initiative is the most comprehensive plan to reestablish the lamprey population. CRITFC has been committed to protecting tribal treaty fishing rights and conserving and sharing fish culture since its founding in 1977. The organization helps coordinate fish restoration for the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes.

CRITFC Lamprey Biologist Laurie Porter said that one of the biggest issues lamprey face is passage at the dams, which nearly wipes out returning adults by the time they reach the Lower Snake River. Too few lamprey make it past the final Snake River dam to sustain that watershed’s population.

“On average, only a few hundred pass through Lower Granite Dam — and that’s basically extirpated, there’s no other way to say it,” Porter said.

Davey Lumley, a Yakama Nation Pacific lamprey biologist, holds a tube full of lamprey eggs. (Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore New)

In 2008, the Yakama Nation launched its Pacific Lamprey Project to restore lamprey in the nation’s ceded lands and in the tribe’s usual and accustomed areas. The plan is intended to complement CRITFC efforts.

“We harvested lamprey in a sustainable manner, taking only what we needed for subsistence,” said Davey Lumley, a biologist with Yakama Nation Fisheries. “We depended on them for food and medicine back when lamprey were plentiful, but due to various factors this is no longer the case. Our goal now is to restore natural production of lamprey to a level that will once again provide abundance.”

The Pacific Lamprey Project installed “lamprey slides'' to help the fish get past the dams in the Columbia River Basin. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed the original fish ladders so that salmon and steelhead could jump up to the reservoirs behind the dams through successive small pools, like a series of waterfalls.

But lamprey are weak swimmers and are unable to jump, so they need a vertical surface they can suction onto in order to climb their way through.

“It's difficult enough for salmon to get through but for lamprey it's nearly impossible,” Miller said.

Evans Lewis, Yakama tribal citizen and foreman at the tribe’s sturgeon hatchery, grills freshly caught lamprey for the feast at the Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration on July 30, 2022. 

(Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore News)

A Yakama tribal elder demonstrates how to filet a Pacific lamprey during the Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration on July 30, 2022. (Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore News)

Lumley said the project started by installing the slides at Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River. Now, tribal biologists are adding slides to help lamprey pass dams on smaller tributaries, so the fish can get back to more of the places where Native people once collected them.

The project is guided by traditional ecological knowledge.

“We want to work with elders to compare where lamprey were historically found versus where they are now,” Lumley said.

Once they have identified those spots, the project can reintroduce them. The fish themselves will help out, too.

“Pacific lamprey are not like salmon,” Lumley said. “Lamprey are attracted to pheromones of other lamprey, so by us putting lamprey into streams of low population it attracts more wild lamprey to go there.”

In addition to traditional ecological knowledge, new technology will help support elders’ knowledge of lamprey migration. Tiny tracking devices will provide new insights to help guide conservation efforts.

Hundreds of Pacific lamprey at Willamette Falls in 1913. This scene was often referred to as “Mermaid’s Hair” because the lamprey flowed up and down the falls like hair. (Historical photo)

The Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration is undergoing its own restoration. The July 30 event was the first celebration held in this spot by the Yakama and Warm Springs nations for over 30 years, offering a time for the community to gather and commemorate the natural and cultural resources they have protected since time immemorial.

Tribal leaders and community members made it clear that the tribes will continue to work together to engage, protect and restore their rights and resources for current and future generations of their people.

“Tribes have always been at the forefront of ensuring that these resources persist for future generations,” Miller said.

She added that the celebration will continue, too.

“Carrying on this way of life and our teachings for the people has been an honor,” Miller said. “We opened this event to the public to welcome and share these good feelings. The land and the foods were good medicine for everyone who was in attendance.”

To close the Willamette Falls Lamprey Celebration on July 30, 2022, participants from the crowd were encouraged to dance together to the beat of the drum in a social dance called the “eel dance” that honored the lamprey eaten that day. (Photo by McKayla Lee/Underscore News)

McKayla Lee attends the University of Montana and is the inaugural recipient of the Underscore Indigenous Journalism Fellowship.

Ancient, Violent Sea Monster Discovered Alongside Its Victims

BY JESS THOMSON ON 8/25/22

A brand new species of enormous sea creature from the Cretaceous era has been discovered in Morocco, lying fossilized next to remains of its last supper.

Named Thalassotitan atrox, this giant sea reptile was a mosasaur, and lived around 66 million years ago, near to the explosive asteroid-triggered end to the Cretaceous period.

According to the authors of the study announcing the discovery of the fossil published on August 24 in the journal Cretaceous Research, Thalassotitans were apex predators in the oceans, growing up to 40 feet in length and hunting a variety of other marine-dwellers.

Scientists discover fossils of giant sea lizard that ruled the oceans 66 million years ago. In this combination image, a head fossil of Thalassotitan atrox grew up to 12 meters (40 feet) and was at the top of the food chain and an inset illustration of a Thalassotitan.

UNIVERSITY OF BATH/ANDREY ATUCHIN

"Thalassotitan was an amazing, terrifying animal," said Dr. Nick Longrich, senior lecturer from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath and lead author of the study, in a statement. "Imagine a komodo dragon crossed with a great white shark crossed with a T. rex crossed with a killer whale."

Mosasaurs weren't dinosaurs, instead were huge lizards, distantly related to modern-day iguanas. They were apex predators in the oceans, growing up to 40 feet in length and hunting a variety of other marine-dwellers.

"They ate a lot of stuff. Mostly they're probably eating stuff like fish and squid. Some of them have crushing teeth, so probably stuff like clams, sea urchins, crustaceans and ammonites. This one ate other marine reptiles," Longrich told Newsweek.

This particular fossil, found in the Oulad Abdoun Basin of Khouribga Province, Morocco, was also surrounded by what may have been its victims. Nearby fossils, including large predatory fish, a sea turtle, a half-meter-long plesiosaur head, and jaws and skulls of at least three different mosasaur species, show damage from acids, with their teeth and bone eaten away. This gives credence to the researcher's theory that they had been eaten by the Thalassotitan, digested in its stomach, and spat out as mere bones.

"It's circumstantial evidence," said Longrich in the statement. "We can't say for certain which species of animal ate all these other mosasaurs. But we have the bones of marine reptiles killed and eaten by a large predator. And in the same location, we find Thalassotitan, a species that fits the profile of the killer – it's a mosasaur specialized to prey on other marine reptiles. That's probably not a coincidence."

It's thought that Thalassotitan, just like countless other species living in the late Cretaceous period—including T. rex and triceratops—were decimated to extinction by the after-effects of the asteroid strike 66 million years ago.

"They were wiped out by the asteroid impact, just like the dinosaurs," Longrich told Newsweek. "They seem to have been active, even warm-blooded animals, and this and their large size meant they needed a lot of food. When the debris from the asteroid blocked out the sun, photosynthesis shut down, plankton stopped growing, and the food chain just sort of fell apart. The marine ecosystem was hit extremely hard; a few sea turtles survived and sharks survived pretty well; most marine reptiles and big fish went extinct."

Scientists discover fossils of giant sea lizard that ruled the oceans 66 million years ago. In this combination image, skeleton fossil (Top Left)), a sketch of the Thalassotitan (Top right), Thalassotitan size scale (Bottom Left), a Thalassotitan tail (bottom Right) and inset image of Nick Longrich with Mosasaur.

UNIVERSITY OF BATH/MAGDALENA CYGAN/NICK LONGRICH

Giant Dinosaur Not Seen for 70 Million Years Discovered in New Mexico

BY JESS THOMSON 

ON 8/23/22 

A new species of horned dinosaur has been discovered in New Mexico, called Bisticeratops froeseorum.

The specimen was first discovered in 1975 in the Upper Cretaceous rocks of the San Juan Basin in New Mexico. When researchers came across bone sticking out of the ground, it was attached to an entire skull, nearly complete. After decades of cleaning and research at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, the skull was named as that of a new species yet unknown to science.

"Further investigation into specimens already in museum collections, combined with the collection and research into new specimens being collected, will allow us to understand these dinosaurs to an even greater degree," said Dr. Steven Jasinski, a professor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, in a statement.

Bisticeratops froeseorum was thought to live around 74 million years ago, in the Cretaceous Era that was ended by the asteroid that killed the majority of the dinosaurs. The new species is a member of the ceratopsid dinosaurs, of which the triceratops is a member. These large, four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs are best known for having long horns, beaks and a large shelf-like forehead.

The newly discovered species Bisticeratops froeseorum is also

 a ceratopsid dinosaur and is therefore a cousin of the triceratops

The gentle giants were mainly predated upon by tyrannosaurids including the Tyrannosaurus rex. Evidence backing up this theory can be found on the Bisticeratops's skull. Several bite marks were seen across various parts of the skull, including on the upper jaws, cheek, and frill, which due to their placement and size, are thought to have been caused by a tyrannosaurid.

However, it's unclear if the predator hunted and killed the Bisticeratops, or if it came across the dinosaur's already dead body.

Their huge horns are thought to have served as both a defense mechanism against attacks, as well as a sexual characteristic used for display and mate choice.

Bisticeratops would have been around 16–20 feet long and weighed between 2.5 and 4 tons, and lived around 8 million years before its Triceratops cousins, according to the researchers at Harrisburg University.

The discovery helps to flesh out the family tree of dinosaur evolution, allowing scientists to get a better idea of how the ecosystems worked together millions of years ago.

"While only the skull of Bisticeratops was recovered, this fossil gives us a lot of information about horned dinosaurs at a time and place that was unique" Jasinski said in the statement. "While other ceratopsids are known from older strata in this region, Bisticeratops potentially shows us the next step in the evolution of these horned dinosaurs in this region and fills in a gap leading to the last ceratopsid dinosaurs in this region before their extinction at the end-Cretaceous mass extinction."