27 Apr, 2020
Coronavirus impact: Meat processing plants weigh risks of prosecution if they’re blamed for spreading infection
Tyson Foods recently suspended production at its Waterloo, Iowa, pork processing plant due to a growing coronavirus outbreak among employees. The plant was Tyson’s largest, employing some 2,800 workers and processing 19,500 pigs a day. At least 180 confirmed infections originated from the plant, about half of all cases in the county. …
15 Apr, 2020
Trump Administration Officials Warned Against Halting Funding to WHO, Leaked Memo Shows
An internal memorandum written by U.S. officials and addressed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warns that cutting funding to the World Health Organization, as President Donald Trump said he would do Tuesday, would erode America’s global standing, threaten U.S. lives and hobble global efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic. …
01 Apr, 2020
Satellites to protect the world, if data is open to all
Satellite technologies are a new frontier in global development. Once a luxury of governments alone, from the late 1990s satellites began to be privatised and now satellites of all sizes are shooting into orbit. The benefits for the world’s poorest, and for the planet, could be boundless, as long as their data is open to all. …
30 Mar, 2020
How Germany is managing its coronavirus epidemic, and reacting with disdain to Trump’s policies
A recent work visit to Germany, where I grew up, stretched from one week to three. Those weeks coincided with the spread of the coronavirus in Germany as well as across Europe. What I saw while there is that Germany’s population is in a state of shock and still can’t quite grasp how this sudden turnaround of their lives happened. …
19 Mar, 2020
What Coronavirus Means for Pregnancy, and Other Things New and Expecting Mothers Should Know
Over the next three months, nearly a million women in the United States will give birth to nearly a million babies — a huge influx of mostly healthy, highly vulnerable patients into a hospital system that’s about to come under unprecedented strain. Pregnant women, not surprisingly, are anxious. Those in their third trimester, looking to deliver during an epidemic, are close to frantic. …
04 Mar, 2020
Coronavirus mutations ‘no cause for alarm’
Mutations discovered in the first Brazilian case of coronavirus are no cause for alarm, a leading virologist says, as the virus seems to be remaining stable enough for a single vaccine to work. “Nothing has occurred that is major and this virus appears to be stable,” David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells SciDev.Net.“Small mutations are normal, especially with RNA [Ribonucleic acid] viruses.” …
26 Feb, 2020
Airplanes spread diseases quickly – so maybe unvaccinated people shouldn’t be allowed to fly
As the coronavirus spreads, the nation’s leading health official told a Senate committee on Feb. 25 that “we cannot hermetically seal off the United States to a virus.” The comments from Alex Azar II, head of Health and Human Services, heightened concerns about the effects of the coronavirus in the U.S., which so far has sickened a relatively small number – 57 – of people in the U.S. …
04 Feb, 2020
Reporting Recipe: How to Identify Suspicious Campaign Finance Records
This week we trace the story of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two men who’ve emerged as central characters in the Ukraine pressure campaign that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment. But it was their activities in America — making a flurry of big political donations — that ultimately got them arrested. Parnas and Fruman now face federal criminal charges for, among other things, allegedly funneling foreign money into U.S. elections and trying to hide its source. …
22 Jan, 2020
Why Sentiment on CAA Should be About the Ones Receiving Benefits
While disagreements, discussions, and deliberations uphold democratic processes, opposition and deep-rooted apathy based on incorrect facts, misconstrued notions, and a sheer lack of information, impede the same.One of the main reasons for these protests is because Islam was left out of the six religions mentioned in the CAA. …
27 Nov, 2019
From dealing drugs to selling tortillas: the surprising future of former gang members
Becoming a gang member is often assumed to imply few long-term life opportunities beyond dying or being imprisoned. In most of the world, however, this only concerns a minority of gang members, with the majority tending to “mature out” out of their gang, and becoming (more or less) upstanding members of society. …
16 Nov, 2019
Parenting practices around the world are diverse and not all about attachment
Most parents would agree that parenting is extremely complex and challenging. What works for one child, might not work for another – even within the same family. …
15 Oct, 2019
Why do astronomers believe in dark matter?
Dark matter, by its very nature, is unseen. We cannot observe it with telescopes, and nor have particle physicists had any luck detecting it via experiments. So why do I and thousands of my colleagues believe most of the universe’s mass is made up of dark matter, rather than the conventional matter that comprises stars, planets, and all the other visible objects in our skies? …
03 Oct, 2019
Pediatrician Who Treated Immigrant Children Describes Pattern of Lapses in Medical Care in Shelters
Inside a weathered green group home in southern New Jersey, Yosary grew weaker and weaker. She felt tired all the time, and when she got out of bed in the morning, she sometimes became so dizzy she needed to lie back down. Bruises started appearing all over her body. She craved ice, chewing cups of it whenever she could. …
23 Sep, 2019
A newly designed vaccine may help stamp out remaining polio cases worldwide
Public health organizations around the world have been fighting for global eradication of polio since 1988. Through massive vaccination efforts, the incidence of polio has gone down 99% since then, with the virus eradicated from most of the countries on Earth. …
09 Sep, 2019
3 ways insecticides can be counterproductive in agriculture
Pesticides are not new and are definitely not a human invention. Plants and other microorganisms have used chemicals to defend themselves from other organisms for hundred thousands of years. Take, for example, walnut trees. Their roots produce a chemical called juglone that is secreted into the soil and inhibits nearby plant growth. This ensures the walnut tree has all the nearby nutrients and water for itself. …
28 Aug, 2019
Designing new ways to make use of ocean plastic
Beachcombing has long been a part of life for island communities. On the southwestern edge of Scarp, a small, treeless island off the coast of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the Mol Mòr (“big beach”) was where locals went to collect driftwood for repairing buildings and making furniture and coffins. Today there is still much driftwood, but as much or more plastic. …
12 Aug, 2019
High cost of healthy food to blame for malnutrition
Variations in food prices around the world may help explain regional differences in malnutrition and obesity, with poorer populations missing out on healthy foods including eggs and dairy products because of their high cost, a study says. …
08 Aug, 2019
El Departamento de Educación Federal Quiere Frenar la “Trama Fraudulenta de Ayuda Estudiantil” en que Padres Ceden La Custodia a Través de Tutelas Dudosas
Actualización del 31 de julio, 2019: El gobernador de Illinois J. B. Pritzker dijo el miércoles que ha ordenado a sus funcionarios que investigaran el agujero legal que permite a familias acomodadas ceder la tutela de sus hijos para intentar conseguir ayuda financiera para gente necesitada. …
05 Aug, 2019
Apartment life for families means living at close quarters, but often feeling isolated too
Newer high-rise developments in Australia’s inner-city areas are increasingly home to parents raising young children. In the 2016 Census, family households represented nearly half of apartment residents. Close to one in ten children aged 0-4 live in apartments in Australia. …
01 Aug, 2019