Month: October 2021

“Coral reefs are amazing and beautiful, and we must conserve them,” Sam Purkis, chair of the department of marine geosciences at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, told VOA.

Although coral reefs only cover 0.1% of the ocean floor, they are a lifeline for the planet. With the most biodiverse marine ecosystem on earth, they contain 25% of all marine life, including more than 4,000 fish species.

Besides food, “corals provide economic, ecological and even cultural value,” where local communities living near the reefs bond over fishing activities, explained Robert Richmond, director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaii.

“Corals also hold potential drugs from the sea, the vast majority of which we haven’t discovered yet,” Nancy Knowlton, scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said during an interview with VOA.

However, coral experts have sounded the alarm that the reefs could disappear, threatened by a number of factors, including pollution, overfishing and especially climate change.

The latest study on the status of coral reefs, released earlier this month by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, blamed climate change for killing 14% of coral reefs in just one decade.

“Large-scale bleaching events caused by elevated sea surface temperatures are the greatest disturbance to the world’s coral reefs,” the report said.

Despite the gloomy picture, coral reef experts say there is hope, despite significant coral losses worldwide.

“We still have corals that are healthy, but it requires a massive global effort to protect them,” said Elizabeth Mcleod, leader of The Nature Conservancy’s global reef work in Arlington, Virginia.

Richmond is also optimistic.

“Although coral reefs are severely threatened, they are not doomed,” he said. If we take “aggressive action against climate change, then we will have coral reefs as a legacy for the future.”

“We’re not going to be able to restore them back to pristine condition like they were 50 years ago,” added Jennifer Koss, director of the coral reef conservation program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But through restoration, and by curtailing climate change, coral ecosystems have a chance to flourish again.”

The experts agree that curbing carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming is key.

“We need to significantly lower our emissions, so there is actually hope for coral reefs,” Madhavi Colton, executive director of the Coral Reef Alliance, in Oakland, California, told VOA.

The most striking impact of warmer ocean temperatures is bleaching, when corals turn eerily white.

“We’re seeing this drastic decline in coral cover,” said Purkis. “Unless conditions improve, many corals will die from bleaching because the organisms are weakened and usually catch a disease.”

Eliminating other stressors may help the reefs better withstand bleaching.

“If we combat stressors like overfishing and improve water quality, the reefs can better tolerate global changes and are more likely to survive and reproduce,” Colton said.

Discovering heat resistant corals may also be a game-changer.

“In the Red Sea, you find corals that have adapted and are resilient and responsive to the heat. So, these ‘super reefs’ have solved the problem, and we should figure out how they’ve done that and use them for restoration efforts,” said Stephen Palumbi, a marine biology professor at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

Local involvement can make a difference in protecting coral reefs.

In America Samoa, the local population is working on watershed projects that help preserve coral reefs, Koss said. Rain gardens were installed on land to hold back sediment that can smother the corals.

Various methods are being used in Indonesia to safeguard the reefs.

“The locals are watching for illegal fishing, and some communities are partnering with ecotourism groups to raise awareness about the importance of the reefs,” Mcleod said.

A reef restoration program has been particularly successful in the Pacific island nation of Palau.

Citizen scientists are using readily available materials like rebar and cable ties to make frames for heat-resistant coral nurseries, Palumbi said.

“We’ve been teaching community college students through peer mentoring and on Zoom how to do these experiments and get the results on Instagram. The young people are taking steps to secure their own future.”

Source: Voice of America

The director-general of the World Health Organization said Sunday that unless countries use existing tools in the fight against the pandemic effectively, there will be no end in sight. “The pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it,” Tedros said addressing World Health Summit, a global forum held in Germany.

“We have all the tools we need — effective public health tools and effective medical tools. But the world has not used those tools well,” Tedros said, addressing participants drawn from 100 countries online.

The barriers to fulfilling WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40% of every country’s population against the coronavirus are “politics and profit,” the WHO chief said, “not production.”

“The countries that have already reached the 40% target, including all G-20 countries, must give their place in the vaccine delivery queue to COVAX and the African Vaccines Acquisition Trust,” Tedros said. COVAX is the international collaboration established for the equitable distribution of the COVID vaccine.

The WHO official also urged vaccine producers to “prioritize and fulfil their contracts with COVAX and AVAT [the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust]” and become “far more transparent about what is going where.” AVAT is an African Union initiative focusing on providing access to COVID-19 vaccines across Africa.

He urged vaccine manufacturers to “share know-how, technology and licenses, and waive intellectual property rights.”

“We’re not asking for charity,” Tedros said,” we’re calling for a common-sense investment in the global recovery.”

A report in The Washington Post says Americans living abroad are struggling to receive COVID vaccines, while many of their U.S. counterparts are starting to receive booster shots after receiving their first two vaccine doses.

Marylouise Serrato, executive director of American Citizens Abroad, told the Post, “You have Americans who are filing and paying taxes, and a promise by the administration that all Americans will get vaccinated, and yet that whole community has been left out of the equation.”

The White House “has insisted that it has no special responsibility to vaccinate Americans abroad,” the Post reported. At least 9 million Americans are living overseas, the report added.

A surge of British COVID cases has Dr. Edward Morris, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, concerned the National Health Service may not be able to provide “the care it needs to” for women giving birth, according to a report in The Guardian.

Morris also said the COVID surge has also resulted in the creation of an enormous backlog of cases of women who have had to postpone gynecological treatments.

The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Monday that it has recorded 243.7 million global COVID infections and nearly 5 million global deaths. Almost 7 billion vaccines have been administered, according to the university’s data.

Source: Voice of America

Very few companies can boast of having their name also used as a verb. Zoom is one of them. The popularity of the videoconferencing platform continues to grow around the world despite continued questions about whether Chinese authorities are monitoring the calls.

Since Zoom became a household word last year during the pandemic, internet users including companies and government agencies have asked whether the app’s data centers and staff in China are passing call logs to Chinese authorities.

“Some of the more informed know about that, but the vast majority, they don’t know about that, or even if they do, they really don’t give much thought about it,” said Jack Nguyen, partner at the business advisory firm Mazars in Ho Chi Minh City.

He said in Vietnam, for example, many people resent China over territorial spats, but Vietnamese tend to Zoom as willingly as they sign on to rivals such as Microsoft Teams. They like Zoom’s free 40 minutes per call, said Nguyen.

Whether to use the Silicon Valley-headquartered Zoom, now as before, comes down to a user-by-user calculation of the service’s benefits versus the possibility that call logs are being viewed in China, analysts say. China hopes to identify and stop internet content that flouts Communist Party interests.

The 10-year-old listed company officially named Zoom Video Communications reported over $1 billion in revenue in the April-June quarter this year, up 54% over the same quarter of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic drove face-to-face meetings online. In the same quarter, the most recent one detailed by the company, Zoom had 504,900 customers of more than 10 employees, up about 36% year on year.

Zoom commanded a 42.8% U.S. market share, leading competitors, as of May 2020, the news website LearnBonds reported. Its U.S. share was up to 55% by March this year, according to ToolTester Network data.

Tech media cite Zoom’s free 40 minutes and capacity for up to 100 call participants as major reasons for its popularity.

Links to China?

Keys that Zoom uses to encrypt and decrypt meetings may be sent to servers in China, Wired Business Media’s website Security Week has reported. Some encryption keys were issued by servers in China, news website WCCF Tech said.

Zoom did not answer VOA’s requests this month for comment.

Zoom has acknowledged keeping at least one data center and a staff employee in China, where the communist government requires resident tech firms to provide user data on request. In September 2019, the Chinese government turned off Zoom in China, and in April last year Zoom said international calls were routed in error through a China-based data center.

“Odds are high” of China getting records of Zoom calls, said Jacob Helberg, a senior adviser at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology.

“If you have Zoom engineers in China who have access to the actual servers, from an engineering standpoint those engineers can absolutely have access to content of potential communications in China,” he said.

Zoom said in a statement in early April 2020 that certain meetings held by its non-Chinese users might have been “allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect,” SmarterAnalyst.com reported.

Excitement and caution

Zoom said in 2019 it had put in place “strict geo-fencing procedures around our mainland China data center.”

“No meeting content will ever be routed through our mainland China data center unless the meeting includes a participant from China,” it said in a blog post.

Among the bigger users of Zoom is the University of California, a 10-campus system that switched to online learning in early 2020. Zoom was selected following a request for proposals “years” before the pandemic, a UC-Berkeley spokesperson told VOA on Thursday.

Elsewhere in the United States, NASA has banned employees from using Zoom, and the Senate has urged its members to avoid it because of security concerns. The German Foreign Ministry and Australian Defense Force restrict use as well, while Taiwan barred Zoom for government business last year. China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan, which has caused decades of political hostility.

“For Taiwan, there’s still some doubt,” said Brady Wang, a Taipei analyst with the market intelligence firm Counterpoint Research, referring particularly to Zoom’s encryption software. “And in the final analysis, these kinds of [video app] choices are numerous, so it’s not like you must rely on Zoom.”

LinkedIn’s withdrawal from China announced this month may spark new scrutiny over Zoom, said Zennon Kapron, founder and director of Kapronasia, a Shanghai financial industry research firm.

“I think when you look at the other technology players that are currently in China or that have relations to China such as Zoom, there will be a renewed push probably by consumers, businesses and even regulators in some jurisdictions to really try to understand and pry apart what the roles of Chinese suppliers or development houses are in developing some of these platforms and the potential security risks that go with them,” Kapron said.

Source: Voice of America

A Financial Times report says COVAX, the global collaboration established to ensure that poor countries have access to the COVID-19 vaccine, has “largely failed.”

“Wealthy countries have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than poorer nations that rely on the COVAX program backed by the World Health Organization,” the newspaper reported.

Millions of people in the world’s poorest countries have not yet received their first shots of the vaccine, while people in the wealthiest countries have access to booster shots, following their initial inoculations.

The disparity, The Financial Times warned, “could lead to a rise in cases and the emergence of more virulent strains, and hold back the global economic recovery.”

The World Health Organization’s director-general said Friday 82 countries are at risk of not meeting WHO’s goal of having 40% of every country’s population vaccinated against COVID by the end of the year. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “For most of those countries, it’s simply a problem of insufficient and unpredictable supply.”

Earlier this month, Britain reported its highest daily number of COVID-19 related deaths since March 9. A government advisor told a BBC television show Saturday that people should not wait for government mandates to begin initiating measures to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus.

Peter Openshaw, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, told BBC Breakfast, “I think hospitals in many parts of the country are barely coping actually” under the weight of COVID cases.

“The sooner we all act,” Openshaw said, “the sooner we can get this transmission rate down and the greater the prospect of having a Christmas with our families.”

British Prime Minister Boris continues to dismiss calls for renewed COVID-19 restrictions, saying there is nothing to indicate those moves will be necessary in the coming months, despite the fact Britain is experiencing a dramatic surge in COVID-19 infections.

Russia is preparing for or a weeklong workplace shutdown and the reimposition of a partial lockdown because of a surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths.

Daily coronavirus deaths in Russia have been rising for weeks because of sluggish vaccination rates, casual attitudes toward precautionary measures and the government’s hesitance toward tightening restrictions. The country’s national task force on COVID-19 said only about one-third of Russia's 146 million people have been vaccinated, straining the country's health system.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that employees would observe “non-working days” from October 30 to November 7, during which they would still receive salaries. He said the period, in which four of the seven days are state holidays, could start earlier or be extended in certain regions.

The rollout of Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine in Namibia was postponed Saturday by the country’s health ministry after the vaccine’s regulator in neighboring South Africa raised concerns about its safety for people at risk of HIV.

The regulator said it would not approve an emergency-use application for the vaccine at this time because some studies suggest that the delivery system, known as a vector, used to inoculate people with the Sputnik V vaccine can cause men to be more susceptible to HIV.

The vaccine’s manufacturer, Gamaleya Research Institute, said Namibia's postponement was not based on scientific evidence.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday a global count of 243.3 million COVID cases and almost 5 million COVID deaths. The center said 6.7 billion vaccines have been administered.

Source: Voice of America

U.N. agencies are preparing to launch a polio vaccination campaign for all children under 5 in Afghanistan, a country where the potentially crippling disease persists despite a more than three-decade-long campaign that has nearly eradicated it worldwide.

Vaccine doses will begin to be administered in Afghanistan on November 8 for the first time in three years, now that the country’s new Taliban government has granted approval.

“This is a huge development that now we can go all across Afghanistan and deliver the vaccine house to house,” Dr. Hamid Jafari, the World Health Organization’s director of polio eradication for the Eastern Mediterranean region, told VOA.

Jafari described the upcoming campaign as “a real combination of excitement and extreme fear — excitement because it looks like a real opportunity to eradicate wild polio virus finally.”

Warning that the virus might still be “lurking in some hard-to-reach populations,” he said it’s critical that the WHO “maintain this momentum to vaccinate our children so that the virus has nowhere to go.”

“Both Afghanistan and Pakistan really actually need to switch gears,” Jafari declared.

Polio’s presence in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan, where a U.N. polio vaccination effort begins in December, means the disease can still spread globally. Rotary International, which coordinates a global polio eradication program, predicts “hundreds of thousands of children could be paralyzed” if polio is not eliminated within 10 years.

The WHO announced the vaccination campaign on Tuesday, five days before the observance of World Polio Day, part of Rotary International’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).

Since the GPEI began in 1988, when there were 350,000 cases in 125 countries every year, polio cases have been cut by 99.9%, according to Rotary International.

The Taliban prohibited teams organized by the U.N. from conducting door-to-door vaccinations in parts of Afghanistan under their control over the past three years.

The ban and the recently ended war in Afghanistan prevented vaccines from being administered to 3.3 million of the country’s 10 million children over that period.

Taliban support

The Taliban did not comment on the agreement, but Jafari said, “The Taliban have always been supportive of polio eradication. ... In fact, the polio education program started in Afghanistan when they were in government” previously from 1996 to 2001.

Jafari said the Taliban vaccination restriction “was imposed purely for considerations of security and the nature of conflict at the time, and that has now obviously changed drastically. So their commitment to support polio education remains, and this is an expression of that.”

He said the WHO has always “maintained dialogue” with the Taliban, in keeping with its “very neutral and impartial program” that enables children to be vaccinated “wherever they are.”

Carol Pandak, head of the PolioPlus program at Rotary International, said in an interview with VOA that GPEI continues to be successful, noting only two cases of polio have been detected in the recent past, one in Afghanistan and the other in Pakistan.

“We have gone the longest time ever since detecting a case of the wild poliovirus. We’ve reached almost nine months, but now is not the time to be complacent,” she cautioned. “We need to build on this progress. We need to continue immunizing children against polio, and we need to intensify our disease detection systems so that with so few cases we’ll be able to tell and prove that there is no polio circulating.”

Pandak said that while Rotary International was “cautiously optimistic” about the progress made this year, “we need to also focus on other diseases, especially for children, because some of their immunization campaigns have been canceled due to COVID. So we really need to be able to protect children from diseases such as polio, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Earlier this month, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus celebrated Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cervical cells were used to develop the polio vaccine, by acknowledging her “contribution to revolutionary advancements in medical science.”

The “HeLa cells” from Lacks, an African American, are the oldest and most used human cell line in existence. They were taken from her without permission at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 before her death, and their use has resulted in many other medical breakthroughs and research involving maladies such as AIDS and cancer.

Source: Voice of America

There will be cars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Saturday but no drivers in sight as racing teams mark a milestone in autonomous vehicle development.

Nine single-seaters will take part in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), a competition with a $1 million prize that aims to prove "autonomous technology can work at extreme conditions," said Paul Mitchell, CEO of co-organizer Energy Systems Network (ESN).

Cars will not race on the "Brickyard" track at the same time but will start one after the other -- with the winner being the fastest over two full-speed laps.

Teams are made up of students from around the world. Each group was given the same Dallara IL-15 car, which looks like a small Formula One vehicle, and the same equipment, which includes sensors, cameras, GPS and radars.

On race day, it is not drivers that will make the difference -- but about 40,000 lines of code programmed by each team.

The software kickstarts the engine and a powerful computer wedged in the bucket where the driver usually sits.

The MIT-PITT-RW team, the only one made up entirely of students without supervision, got their car only six weeks ago.

Engineering student Nayana Suvarna, 22, does not yet have a driving license but was nonetheless reluctantly designated as team manager.

"I didn't know anything about car racing," she said with a smile, "but I'm becoming a fan."

The MIT-PITT-RW's car hit 130 km/h in testing, but Suvarna believes it capable of overtaking 160 on Saturday.

'Generation of talent'

Other teams have gone much faster.

The car belonging to the PoliMOVE team, a partnership between the universities of Alabama and Politecnico in Milan, drove past the pits at around 250 km/h on Thursday.

But the car skidded at the next turn, spinning 360 degrees before coming to a stop on the inside lawn.

"It was a miracle we didn't crash," said Sergio Matteo Savaresi, professor at Politecnico.

There was no glitch to blame: only cold tires and a slight oversteer.

"We actually reached the very limit of the car," said Savaresi, who oversees the PoliMOVE team.

"A professional driver at that speed with tires like these would have done exactly the same."

The Robocar, made by manufacturer Roborace, has held the speed record for an autonomous car since 2019, clocking in at 282 km/h -- but on a straight course, not a circuit.

The concept of self-driving cars has captured imaginations since the 1950s, but the tech needed to make them a reality has been boosted over the past five years.

Most big car manufacturers are working on autonomous driving projects, often in collaboration with tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft or Cisco.

IAC participants do not see speed as the primary goal.

"If people get used to seeing cars like these going 300 kilometers per hour... and they don't crash," said Savaresi, they may eventually think that such cars are safe "at 50 kilometers per hour."

According to a Morning Consult survey published in September, 47 percent of Americans considered autonomous vehicles less safe than those driven by humans.

The race's other goal is to enable tech sharing.

Mitchell said several teams plan to make their code publicly available and open source after the competition.

"So, you're going to take some of the most advanced AI algorithms ever developed for autonomous vehicles, and put it out there for industry, for startups, for other universities to build on."

The project also aims to "develop a generation of talent," Savaresi said.

"The people who are competing in this challenge are going to go and start companies, they're going to go work for companies. And so I think the innovations from this competition will live on for many years."

Source: Voice of America