At the heart of the development of AI appears to be a search for perfection. And it could be just as dangerous to humanity as the one that came from philosophical and pseudoscientific ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries and led to the horrors of colonialism, world war and the Holocaust. Instead of a human ruling master race, we could end up with a machine one.

If this seems extreme, consider the anti-human perfectionism that is already central to the labour market. Here, AI technology is the next step in the premise of maximum productivity that replaced individual craftmanship with the factory production line. These massive changes in productivity and the way we work created opportunities and threats that are now set to be compounded by a fourth industrial revolution in which AI further replaces human workers.

Several recent research papers predict that, within a decade, automation will replace half of the current jobs. So, at least in this transition to a new digitised economy, many people will lose their livelihoods. Even if we assume that this new industrial revolution will engender a new workforce that is able to navigate and command this data-dominated world, we will still have to face major socioeconomic problems. The disruptions will be immense and need to be scrutinised.

The ultimate aim of AI, even narrow AI which handles very specific tasks, is to outdo and perfect every human cognitive function. Eventually, machine-learning systems may well be programmed to be better than humans at everything.

What they may never develop, however, is the human touch empathy, love, hate or any of the other self-conscious emotions that make us human. Thats unless we ascribe these sentiments to them, which is what some of us are already doing with our Alexas and Siris.

The obsession with perfection and hyper-efficiency has had a profound impact on human relations, even human reproduction, as people live their lives in cloistered, virtual realities of their own making. For instance, several US and China-based companies have produced robotic dolls that are selling out fast as substitute partners.

One man in China even married his cyber-doll, while a woman in France married a robo-man, advertising her love story as a form of robo-sexuality and campaigning to legalise her marriage. Im really and totally happy, she said. Our relationship will get better and better as technology evolves. There seems to be high demand for robot wives and husbands all over the world.

In the perfectly productive world, humans would be accounted as worthless, certainly in terms of productivity but also in terms of our feeble humanity. Unless we jettison this perfectionist attitude towards life that positions productivity and material growth above sustainability and individual happiness, AI research could be another chain in the history of self-defeating human inventions.

Already we are witnessing discrimination in algorithmic calculations. Recently, a popular South Korean chatbot named Lee Luda was taken offline. She was modelled after the persona of a 20-year-old female university student and was removed from Facebook messenger after using hate speech towards LGBT people.

Meanwhile, automated weapons programmed to kill are carrying maxims such as productivity and efficiency into battle. As a result, war has become more sustainable. The proliferation of drone warfare is a very vivid example of these new forms of conflict. They create a virtual reality that is almost absent from our grasp.

But it would be comical to depict AI as an inevitable Orwellian nightmare of an army of super-intelligent Terminators whose mission is to erase the human race. Such dystopian predictions are too crude to capture the nitty gritty of artificial intelligence, and its impact on our everyday existence.

Societies can benefit from AI if it is developed with sustainable economic development and human security in mind. The confluence of power and AI which is pursuing, for example, systems of control and surveillance, should not substitute for the promise of a humanised AI that puts machine learning technology in the service of humans and not the other way around.

To that end, the AI-human interfaces that are quickly opening up in prisons, healthcare, government, social security and border control, for example, must be regulated to favour ethics and human security over institutional efficiency. The social sciences and humanities have a lot to say about such issues.

One thing to be cheerful about is the likelihood that AI will never be a substitute for human philosophy and intellectuality. To be a philosopher, after all, requires empathy, an understanding of humanity, and our innate emotions and motives. If we can programme our machines to understand such ethical standards, then AI research has the capacity to improve our lives which should be the ultimate aim of any technological advance.

But if AI research yields a new ideology centred around the notion of perfectionism and maximum productivity, then it will be a destructive force that will lead to more wars, more famines and more social and economic distress, especially for the poor. At this juncture of global history, this choice is still ours.

More here:
Artificial intelligence must not be allowed to replace the imperfection of human empathy - The Conversation UK

By Barry C. Fox, M.D., University of WisconsinBacteria are single-cell organisms that contain the most essential components to survive and reproduce. (Image: kridipol poolket/Shutterstock)What Is Bacterium?

The term bacterium was invented in the 19th century by a German biologist, Ferdinand Cohn, based on the Greek word bakterion, meaning small rod. However, there are three shapes of bacteriarods, spirals, and spheres.

Bacteria are extremely small, usually less than two microns in size, and are found everywhere. Bacteria are single-celled organisms that contain the barest essential components for staying alive and reproducing chromosome, ribosomes, cytoplasm, and an outer membrane.

Bacteria are a simple form of life known as prokaryotes. In the center is a genetic code material known as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which is bundled into a central structure known as a chromosome.

The DNA encodes for a specific sequence of building blocks known as amino acids, and these amino acids are combined into proteins at the ribosomal structure. Proteins are subsequently used to control cellular function. The internal fluid, otherwise known as cytoplasm, is surrounded by an outer membrane, and prokaryotic bacteria hence resemble a water balloon filled with bacteria.

Microorganisms that are more complex than the prokaryotic bacteria contain eukaryotic cells that have a nucleus that contains multiple strands of DNA organized into multiple chromosomes. They also have more complex internal structures such as mitochondria, which produce internal energy.

Eukaryotic cells utilize more formal membrane structures, such as a nucleolar membrane, to contain DNA. The simplest one-cell eukaryote is a protozoan called a paramecium. Other examples of multicellular eukaryotes are fungi, plants, and animals.

This is a transcript from the video series An Introduction to Infectious Diseases. Watch it now on The Great Courses Plus.

Prokaryotic bacterial reproduction is under the control of the DNA in the chromosome. Bacteria multiply rapidly by a process known as binary fission, but the repeat replication of DNA is prone to errors.

As a result, it can result in genetic mutations that can either lead to a survival advantage or disadvantage. For example, a germ might develop resistance to an antibiotic that is trying to kill it, or the mutation can be unfavorable and lead to the destruction and death of the germ.

DNA replication is controlled by an important enzyme known as DNA polymerase. DNA polymerase is a prime antibiotic target since the goal is to halt DNA replication.

Some DNA may not be in the center of the cell, but located in the cytoplasm, forming circles of DNA known as plasmids. Plasmid DNA may also be transferred from one bacterium to another through various mechanisms when bacteria touch one another.

Conjugation is one of these means. When this happens, genetic characteristics among bacteria are shared. This is important in the development of bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics, or for other evolutionary traits that support their survival.

Learn more about notorious diseases like bubonic plague, malaria, and polio.

The synthesis of cellular proteins such as enzymes or toxins is under the control of DNA. It acts through the ribosomes, which combine amino acid building blocks in the cytoplasm. The ribosome is also an excellent target for antibiotics because it can interfere with protein synthesis.

Enzymes play a vital role and are responsible for controlling all the ongoing work in a cell. They are chemical reaction machines, which either break molecules apart or put them together.

Another function of an enzyme is to link amino acid building blocks together to form a protein. A bacterium may have over 1000 different types of enzymes floating around in its cytoplasm at any time.

For bacteria to interact, there are special structures called fimbriae and pili on the surface that can help them attach to other bacteria or even to human cells.

These interactions can be divided into three general categories. First, some germs are good bacteria and help humans directly, such as assisting in food digestion. There are some germs that are known as commensal bacteria. They coexist with other bacteria without causing any harm to humans. And finally, some bacteria are harmful and are known as pathogenic.

Learn more about respiratory and brain infections.

Bacteria can be beneficial as well as harmful for human beings. However, there are some good bacteria that help humans directly.

One of the main jobs of the bacteria in the intestines is to break down nutrients, such as sugars and fats, which humans otherwise cannot digest. Most of these gut bacteria do not like the oxygen in the air and are known as anaerobes.

Besides aiding in digestion, gut bacteria also synthesize certain vitamins and aid the immune system. Specifically, Escherichia coli or E. coli is a common bacterium in the intestine. Unlike others, this germ happens to like oxygen, so its known as an aerobic bacterium. It synthesizes vitamin K, which is essential for normal blood clotting. W

hen patients receive antibiotics, the antibiotics can kill the good E. coli as innocent bystanders and alter clotting function.

Bacteria are a simple form of life known as prokaryotes. The term bacterium was invented in the 19th century by a German biologist, Ferdinand Cohn, based on the Greek word bakterion, meaning small rod.

Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA is a genetic code material that is present in the center of prokaryotic bacteria, which is bundled into a central structure known as a chromosome.

One of the main jobs of the bacteria in the intestines is to break down nutrients, such as sugars and fats, which humans otherwise cannot digest.

Follow this link:
Bacteria: Anatomy and Functioning - The Great Courses Daily News

A landowner has called for limits on childbirth to help save the planet.

Paul Lister, who inherited 50million when his family sold the MFI furniture chain and owns 23,000 acre Alladale Wilderness Reserve in Sutherland, wants women limited to just one child.

In an end-of-year message to supporters, Lister said: For all generations to continue living in a secure and healthy environment we must re-evaluate our choices and challenge long-held historical traditions and habits.

Less meat consumption, less carbon emissions, less waste, and last but not least the source of all excessive extraction and pollution, less human reproduction.

For the prosperity of all life on earth we simply must put nature preservation and landscape regeneration first, to not do so will be at our peril.

In a previous message to supporters from the European Nature Trust he established, Lister wrote: Against our emotional instincts, we need to consider a one-woman, one-child policy (with adoption as an option for a second child) and accept the short/medium-term issues that might prevail.

Highland councillor Bill Lobban has called his one-child suggestions disgraceful.

He added: Its the fundamental right of every woman to decide what she wants to do with her body.

Read the rest here:
Millionaire landowner triggers outrage after he calls for limits on childbirth to save the planet - Daily Record

Researchers in the Florida Keys have determined that coral reefs can be saved from invasive seaweed with the help of a particular species of crab lovingly called the reef goat.

The new study from Florida International University determined that not only can the Caribbean king crab munch the corals free of seaweed faster than all methods involving human hands, but that the increase of coral reproduction spawned a boom in reef fish numbers as well.

All types of marine habitat are important. Seaweed meadows and coral reefs both play vital roles in the health of the ocean and the health of our communities.

However in the same way that a mountain lion, which provides a valuable service by preying on diseased or elderly deer, wouldnt be helping anyone if it took up residence in an office building, seaweed largely prevents coral from their key function in the ecosystem, just like the lion would prevent any of the terrified office workers from doing their work.

The researchers comment in their paper on the evidence of long-standing competition between seaweeds and corals.

This competition has been influenced heavily for over a century now by overfishing, climate change, and coral diseases, which resulted in many reefs being now too weak or too depleted to compete with seaweed.

RELATED: After Decades of Federal Protection, Hawaiian Coral Reefs Are Returning to Their Former Glory

Seaweeds too often are blocking sunlight from reaching the baby corals, while simultaneously releasing chemicals that prevent the corals from reproducingas well as making them more susceptible to disease.

The researchers hypothesized that if sufficiently distributed, the Caribbean king crab, the largest herbivore crustacean in the region, could clean corals free of clinging seaweed faster than human scrubbing, so they conducted a case-control study where they released reef goats on some reefs and let some others remain crab-less.

Weve had a lot of experience raising these crabs for human consumption, but I started looking at what their ecological role was on coral reefs. And they are like reef cows, or better yet, reef goats, because they will eat almost any type of algae, and they eat a lot of it, Mark Butler from Florida International University, a co-author on the study, toldFlorida Keys News.

POPULAR: Man Postpones Retirement to Save Reefs After He Accidentally Discovers How to Make Coral Grow 40 Times Faster

Butler, who worked on the research with Angelo Jason Spadaro, a professor at the College of the Florida Keys, said the voracious Caribbean king crabs (Maguimithrax spinosissimus) are prolific coral reef grazers.

Eating algae at a rate higher than any other grazer, including some species that can protect themselves from predation with chemicals or other defense strategies, the crabs were able to reduce seaweed cover by 80% compared to some reefs, while a 3 to 5 fold increase of both baby corals and fish species added to the successful outcome.

The study also boasts something becoming rare in many scientific fields of study reproducibility.

The generality of our results was validated by nearly identical results in two separate field experiments conducted at different locations and in different years, write the authors.

MORE: Family Sells Home to Move to the Smallest African Country and Save Its Coral Reefs

On dry land, goats have been used as ground clearers for thousands of years, as they eat everything from clover and grasses to poison oak and invasive blackberry thorns.

Hopefully, the brilliant results from Butler and his team can solidify Caribbean king crabs as their benthic equivalent at the bottom of the sea.

SHARE This Claw-some News With Coral Lovers on Social Media

Visit link:
Seaweed-Eating Giant Crabs Could Help Save Florida Coral Reefs And They're Lovingly Named 'The Reef Goats' - Good News Network

Michelle Bachelet, United Nation High Commissioner for Human Rights, has appointed a Special ... [+] Rapporteur to look into human rights abuses linked to shipping and exposure to toxins

The U.N.s Human Rights Agency (UNOHCR) has begun an investigation into human rights abuses associated with the global shipping industry and exposure to toxic chemicals without prior consent.

ADVERTISEMENT

It has appointed a Special Rapporteur to look into these issues and report back.

Earlier this week, a special investigation in Forbes revealed a growing scandal behind this years hasty introduction of a highly hazardous and experimental type of oil in ships.

The ship fuel is called Very Low Sulfur Fuel Oil or VLSFO. It contains a wide variety of undefined toxic chemicals, is now in 70% of all ships, and is likely to be an important focus for the inquiry. This fuel - which NGOs have referred to as a super-pollutant Frankenstein Fuel - is already suspected as a leading root cause of many shipping disasters around the world, putting the lives of sailors and coastal communities at risk, due to the use of unknown and highly volatile chemicals.

Senior Officials at the IMO were interviewed in December by the Special Rapporteur

The lead investigator for the UN Human Rights Agency has already begun interviewing officials at the global shipping regulator, the International Maritime Organization. The inquiry will continue collecting evidence through to 31 January 2021.

The investigation will cover both the human rights implications for seafarers on vessels who would have been exposed to the effects of toxic chemicals, as well as to those impacted by oil spills, such as islanders in Mauritius this year and Solomon Islands last year.

Thousands of Mauritians have been exposed to the effects of a harmful experimental ship fuel since ... [+] August, without any transparency on the chemicals contained within it.

ADVERTISEMENT

The U.N. has called the exposure of people to harmful substances without their prior informed consent a Human Rights abuse. It has also said that it is a human rights issue for which solutions exist. The question the Special Rapporteur will focus on is why known solutions had not been applied in the shipping industry.

The U.N. has been looking at Human Rights abuses linked to hazardous substances since a formal mandate was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council 25 years ago in 1995. On 6 October 2020, the U.N. Human Rights Council passed a resolution to look deeper into several issues associated with exposure to harmful substances without prior consent.

UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights, Dr. Marcos Orellana

ADVERTISEMENT

The Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights is Dr. Marcos Orellanawho was appointed earlier this year by the UN Human Rights body.

Orellana teaches Environmental Law at George Washington University School of Law in the United States, and had been involved in several high profile environmental justice cases. These have covered international human rights law and the environment including presenting at the U.N. Human Rights Council, International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, and in participating in international negotiations on Climate Change. He was worked extensively with Governments and NGOs around the world.

Michelle Bachelet addressing the United Nations General Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York City ... [+] in 2017.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Head of the UN Human Rights Commission - former two term President of Chile Michelle Bachelet - has been a strong advocate for protecting Human Rights of what she describes as the planets Environmental Defenders.

In 2019, Bachelet brought up these human rights issues against environmentalists at the U.N. Human Rights Council, specifically highlighting the verbal attacks against the then 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg.

9 Oct 2020: Verbal attacks against Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg were highlighted by the ... [+] U.N. Human Rights head at the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2019.

ADVERTISEMENT

In August last year, the UN Humans Right Office signed a formal agreement with the UNs Environment Protection Program (UNEP) to strengthen human rights and the planet.

At the time, UN Human Rights Chief, Michelle Bachelet said, Our planet is being recklessly destroyed, and we urgently need stronger global partnerships to take action to save it. We call on leaders and governments to recognize that climate change and environmental degradation severely undermine the human rights of their people, particularly those in vulnerable situations including the generations of tomorrow.

Environmental protestors have been subject to a massive human rights crack down in Mauritius since ... [+] the large oil spill protests in August and September

ADVERTISEMENT

We encourage every State to develop and enforce national legal frameworks which uphold the clear linkages between a healthy environment and the ability to enjoy all other human rights, including the rights to health, water, food and even the right to life, she added. We also strongly encourage greater recognition that the actions and advocacy of environmental human rights defenders are deeply beneficial to all societies. They must be better protected against the threat of violence and intimidation.

Reports suggest that more than four environmental defenders were killed across the world every week in 2019. This rate has doubled in the last 15 years. The latest death toll highlights the ongoing dangers facing those who are defending their environmental and human rights.

The giant Japanese bulk carrier, the Wakashio, spilled an undisclosed amount of oil along the coast ... [+] of Mauritius in August, having run aground in July in as yet unexplained circumstances.

ADVERTISEMENT

This is the first time the global shipping industry has been subject to such a wide ranging Human Rights inquiry over exposure to toxins without consent.

The inquiry will also look into many of the root causes for how the industry has allowed such a situation to develop in shipping, such as poorly drafted laws, little oversight and monitoring of these laws, deliberately weak enforcement, pressure on poorer nations and communities to be responsible for cleaning up the risks caused by large shipping firms.

There has been a growing spate of maritime incidents that many local communities around the world have been calling for justice on. These include communities in Trinidad, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, around the coast of the Red Sea, Mauritius and Lebanon just this year alone.

ADVERTISEMENT

There are three themes that are likely to be particularly important for the investigation into shipping, human rights and toxins.

The Special Rapporteur has highlighted that he will look at both toxins spilled from ships, as well as air pollution released from ships that are adding to the climate crisis.

Indigenous communities in the Arctic are having their human rights impacted by toxic emissions from ... [+] ship fuels. Seen here Inuit Fishing in Canada.

Indigenous communities in the Arctic are having their human rights impacted by toxic emissions from ... [+] ship fuels. Seen here Inuit Fishing in Canada.

ADVERTISEMENT

Climate crisis: Indigenous communities in Arctic nations, and coastal communities on low lying island nations are particularly impacted by melting ice caps, rising sea levels and more acidifying oceans impacting coral reef protection. This year, the global shipping industry not only decided to break with Paris Climate Agreement pledges, but the Secretary General of the IMO actively tried to undermine the EUs own carbon emission regulations for shipping. This is in addition to the U.K. Parliament already calling the IMO no longer fit for purpose, for its stance on climate issues. Global shipping has been particularly criticized for using toxic chemicals in ship fuels across the Arctic that could accelerate climate change.

The Wakashio had a risky ship design that meant it was more prone to break if it grounded on a reef. ... [+] As ships have become larger, they carry more oil and have a higher risk of structural failure.

Toxins in ship oil (especially the VLSFO Frankenstein Fuel): The Special Rapporteur will also be looking at the risk of oil pollution, which has been increasing as ships have become larger, and yet ship designs and protection have not kept pace, a sign of major regulatory failure. The fuel now used by 70% of ships, called VLSFO and which was introduced this year, is likely to be a major focus for the Special Rapporteur.

ADVERTISEMENT

A controversial blend of chemicals, called VLSFO, is now the fuel for 70% of global shipping, ... [+] without having any independent regulatory oversight

Tens of thousands in Mauritius were exposed to VLSFO in the summer, and the shipping companies responsible have not provided a full chemical analysis breakdown of the toxins that the population was exposed to, including what the health risks are. This represents a major human rights abuse, as many in South East Mauritius who were exposed have been reporting serious health conditions (e.g., skin infections, breathing difficulties and mental illness), that have not been taken seriously by the companies responsible for bringing the pollution to Mauritius. Other communities impacted by ship fuel spills like Solomon Islands last year have seen similar experiences.

There are clear gender impacts from the oil spill, that the international consultants in Mauritius ... [+] ignored or dismissed.

ADVERTISEMENT

Gender impact of oil spills: Oil spills have a disproportionate impact on women. The chemicals have a much more significant on female reproductive organs and health, affecting the health of unborn children. Many women faced greater social and financial pressures following the oil spill as they had been employed in the informal sector (e.g., supporting husbands in the fishing business or making tourist products to be sold on informal beach stands), and so were not eligible for any compensation from funds allocated to the response. The gender dimension was completely dismissed by the companies and countries responding to the oil spill disaster in Mauritius, where in over 100 international consultants, not one was female. This created additional conflict in a country like Mauritius, where it was actually many of the female leaders who had led the response to the oil spill and the fight for environmental and social justice.

Sep 2020: the clean up operation was conducted in a highly secretive manner with no independent ... [+] scientific oversight. Media statements were not accompanied by allowing scientists to understand and verify the methods used.

Human rights abuses in the response to the oil spill: In what is likely to be a damning assessment of the corporate response to the oil spill in Mauritius, the Special Rapporteurs scope includes evaluating potential human rights abuses in how the oil spill was responded to. In Mauritius, the response by companies responsible saw a massive disruption of the social cohesion of Mauritius. The grassroots led movement that built the artisanal oil protection booms were sidelined by over 100 unaccountable international consultants who never once held a joint press conference to explain what was going on nor allowed any independent oversight of the cleanup techniques they were deploying.

ADVERTISEMENT

The IMO (seen on right) only met with Government of Mauritius representatives such as the Prime ... [+] Minister (seen left), and ignored calls by the opposition and independent scientists, despite Mauritius being in the middle of an electoral review.

Instead, these companies engaged in secretive talks with a Government who was already under pressure following a disputed election that is still undergoing a Law Court review. As a result, Mauritius experienced a massive clamp down on human rights, specifically targeted at Environmental Youth Activists, Journalists and community organizers. The reported abuses included strong-armed use of the police and judicial system, suspension of parliament as well as targeted digital interventions on platforms like Facebook, Google GOOG , YouTube and Whatsapp in the months following the Wakashio oil spill. The inquiry is also likely to look closely into how the lawyers of the captain of the Wakashio was controversially dismissed and replaced by lawyers engaged by the shipowner and insurer, a human rights abuse practice seen often in the shipping industry.

The U.N. will also look at the working conditions on ships. The introduction of VLSFO has made working conditions much harder for seafarers around the world (especially given COVID-19), impacting their human rights.

ADVERTISEMENT

It has had three effects on the human rights of seafarers.

Were crews of ships explained the health risks of the new type of VLSFO ship fuel, and were they ... [+] given options to work elsewhere if they did not wish to be exposed to the unknown, harmful chemicals?

Unknown chemical impacts of VLSFO on seafarers: First, there is the question whether seafarers were made aware of the chemical contents they were being exposed to with VLSFO, and the potential toxic effects? Many seafarers would have needed to be in direct contact with these chemicals in the engine rooms, and may be experiencing the side effects of exposure (breathing and by touch) of these chemicals.

VLSFO ship fuel has increased the risk of fire and major engine failure on board. Seen here the MT ... [+] New Diamond oil supertanker that caught fire in September 2020 with the loss of life of one crew. Was VLSFO a cause of the explosion?

ADVERTISEMENT

Increasing workload without additional support: Second, the engine issues caused by VLSFO has made working conditions much harder on board vessels. Workload would have increased as a series of mechanical and engine failure on ships put more pressure on crews. It is unclear that this additional workload has been discussed openly with labor unions and workers. Had crew sizes been amended appropriately to take into account this additional workload (which may have required 1 or 2 additional crew on board a 20-person vessel just to handle the complications caused by VLSFO fuel). This would have placed much more significant pressures on ship crews forced to stay in cramped conditions for over a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. It would also look at shipowners practice of attempting to blame human error for most shipping incidents, rather than address the underlying systemic risks caused by how poorly the industry is regulated. This was made more complicated this year with COVID-19 restrictions on crew changes, creating a humanitarian crisis on the seas.

Discarding toxic waste overboard: Third, questions are likely to be asked about how ship crews, captains and owners of vessels were handling these toxins. VLSFO has been shown to create excessive toxic sludge than previous types of ship fuel. Shipowners like Carnival Cruises CCL.U were fined $40 million for dumping excess sludge overboard using hose pipes attached to the engine (the famous magic pipes incidents), when a whistleblower exposed this practice. Why is there not more effective monitoring in place on vessels around the world? Are there human rights abuses against crews who are then forced to dump these chemicals overboard or face even stronger penalties from shipowners on shore? Just as police cameras have become accepted tools to ensure compliance by law officers, why isnt the equivalent being applied to vessels around the world with ships? This includes cameras, that artificial intelligence can use detect pollution violations, as well as sensors, where severe fines would be imposed for any tampering with these sensors. Countries like Venezuela have experienced ships dumping oil around its coasts, and there are reports all around the world of this taking place, without sufficient oversight.

ADVERTISEMENT

At the heart of the Human Rights inquiry has to be the regulation of the industry. The real question is whether the IMO the most effective body through which the regulate global shipping? Many are starting to call for more effective regional governance models, similar to how global fisheries are governed.

The Wakashio epitomizes all that is wrong with the global shipping industry, linked to how insurance, inspections, and management oversight works in shipping.

For example, some of the key questions that the Wakashio reveals are:

The sinking of the Wakashio on 24 August in calm weather was highly controversial and the IMO have ... [+] refused to answer questions about their role in this decision or what they knew about it

ADVERTISEMENT

The shipping industry has created a governance system under the IMO that means laws are ... [+] ineffectively drafted, monitored and implemented. Would a move to regional shipping organizations be more effective?

ADVERTISEMENT

Local communities who are most impacted by toxins carried by ships, do not have any official say in ... [+] how IMO policies are drafted and voted upon

The large grassroots, boom making effort was the birth of a large social movement in Mauritius that ... [+] was crushed by large corporate interests that conducted a more secretive clean up operation, undermining local community rights

ADVERTISEMENT

Secretary General of the IMO, Kitack Lim, has remained tight lipped about the IMO's involvement with ... [+] the Wakashio oil spill, the first involving VLSFO

The Special Rapporteur appears to be particularly focused on abuses linked to how global shipping is regulated by the IMO.

Several key international marine anti-pollution conventions were specifically highlighted, such as Maritime Pollution MARPOL Laws, Safety of Life at Sea SOLAS laws, Hong Kong Ship Disposal Convention, the Anti-Fouling Convention, Ballast Water Conventions, Civil Liability and Fund Conventions for Oil Pollution, the Dumping Convention.

ADVERTISEMENT

The nature of a major VLSFO spill and the deliberate scuttling of the front section of the Wakashio would fall into this category, and epitomizes why major change is needed in the industry.

Global shipping needs to be urgently restructured to avoid more environmental and human rights ... [+] catastrophes occurring. Seen here, the Golden Ray cargo ship lies on its side in Georgia, USA as salvors remove it section by section.

Another key question that the Special Rapporteur may need to grapple with is the scope of how the shipping industry is defined.

Part of the risk lies with the IMO and ship operating companies. However, the reason why much of the Human Rights abuses linked to toxin exposure continues to exist, is also due to how shipping insurance, ship owners and financing companies, salvage companies, the inspection regime (called Classification Societies) and Flags of Convenience ship registration jurisdictions like Panama, have been allowed to operate.

ADVERTISEMENT

8 Aug: local photographer Daphney Dupre captures how exposed local fishermen became to the oil while ... [+] trying to protect their coral lagoon that they depend on for their livlihood

Only by interviewing all participants in the shipping industry value chain, will the Special Rapporteur build a picture for how the industry came to end up where it did by the end of 2020 - the worlds most dangerous and unregulated industry in the world.

The Wakashio disaster was a needless tragedy for the local community and the environment of Mauritius. However, the ongoing response by the industry to not address root cause issues within shipping is what allows the industry to continue lurching from one catastrophe to the next.

ADVERTISEMENT

With other U.N. bodies now taking a closer interest in the events of last summer, it is hoped that more systematic risks in the shipping industry can finally be addressed.

Read more:
UN Opens Human Rights Investigation Into Global Shipping Over Use Of Toxic Fuels - Forbes

Joe Mathews, Zcalo Public Square Published 12:35 p.m. PT Nov. 20, 2020

If youre having a hard time processing the scale of death produced by the COVID-19 pandemic,heres a California alternative for wrapping your mind around the carnage:

Visit the largest, prettiestcemeteryyou can find. Irecommendthe original Forest Lawn, in Glendale, the most Californian of cemeteries.

I recentlywalked the290acresof this memorial park, the first of six Forest Lawn parks in Southern California,and found that itclarified my thinkingandimproved my mood.

Italso helped me to putin perspectivethe full human toll of COVID-19. Since Forest Lawn openedhere114 years ago, in 1906, it has interred 340,000 souls on this property.Under current projections, theU.S.willreach340,000 COVID deaths in January.

If youre looking for global perspective, try Colma, the Bay Areas city of cemeteries, the final resting place for 1.5 million people; the world should surpass 1.5 million COVID deaths before Christmas.

Such statistics are tragic andreflect a fundamental human failure: Weexperienceindividualdeath intensely(be it a friends death or the killing of George Floyd), but struggle to recognize death inthe aggregate.Thismyopia is whywe need cemeteries right now.

Cemeteries are not just a place to reflect on the past,wrotelongtimeForest Lawn chief executive John Llewelyn, inA Cemetery Should Be Forever. They remind us to keep the present in perspective.

Especially when the present is so frightening.

Forest Lawns missionwasabout putting a sunny California spin on death.

I believe in a happy eternal life, Forest Lawns first real leader Hubert Eaton wrote in 1917. I therefore know the cemeteries of today are wrong, because they depict an end, not a beginning I shall try to build at Forest Lawn a Great Park filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color, and redolent of the worlds best history and romances.

The resulting memorial-park has beencritiquedasaDisneyland of Death. But at thismoment, I found visiting the happiest cemetery onEarthsoothing, and thought-provoking.

I encountered joggers, bikers, painters, and babies in strollers.Iheard birds sing as I enjoyed360-degree L.A.views from the esplanade.A half-dozen people chatted amiably while admiringThe Mystery of Life,asculpture groupof18 human figuresgathered atstream that flows toward an unknown destination.

By its usual standards, Forest Lawn was pretty quiet.Itsart museum which housesan important collection ofstained glassand William Bouguereaus 1881 paintingSong of the Angels was closed.Therewere noschool field trips on the grounds. Tens of thousands of people, including Ronald Reagan, have been marriedat Forest Lawn, but during my visit there werenoweddings in the cemeterys three churches, which were locked.

Still,I enjoyed the way the place resemblesSouthern California in miniature, with itsvariedtopographies(windswept hills, cool valleys, a sprawling basin),andobsession with being big (Forest Lawnswrought-iron gates aretwice as wideas those at Buckingham Palace, and the Hall of Crucifixion houses the worlds largestpermanently mountedreligious painting).

In an older, flatter cemetery sectionIwalked amidstthe century-old graves of people who died in their 20s of Spanish flu.In theCourt of Freedom,I admired agiant outdoorreproduction ofof John Trumbulls Signing of the Declaration of Independenceand reflected on Jeffersonswisdom in putting life before liberty and pursuit of happiness.

This pandemic is killing so fast that were not stopping to appreciate the lives lost.Wewillneed to rememberthe plagueslessons, to honor its sacrifices, so we might see its afterlife as a beginning, not an end.

Here in California,we shouldmemorializeevery last one of our pandemicdead,witha monument that isbeautiful and big, and makes people happy when they visit it.

Joe Mathews(Photo: Courtesy)

Joe Mathews,joe@zocalopublicsquare.org, writes the Connecting California column forZcalo Public Square.

Read or Share this story: https://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/11/20/finding-solace-during-covid-19-at-the-happiest-cemetery-on-earth-joe-mathews-connecting-california/6342554002/

Originally posted here:
Connecting California: Finding solace during COVID-19 at 'the happiest cemetery on Earth' - VC Star

Regulation 174 Information for UK healthcare professionals

This medicinal product does not have a UK marketing authorisation but has been given authorisation for temporary supply by the UK Department of Health and Social Care and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus in individuals aged 16 years of age and over.

As with any new medicine in the UK, this product will be closely monitored to allow quick identification of new safety information. Healthcare professionals are asked to report any suspected adverse reactions. See section 4.8 for how to report adverse reactions.

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 concentrate for solution for injection

This is a multidose vial and must be diluted before use. 1 vial (0.45 mL) contains 5 doses of 30 micrograms of BNT162b2 RNA (embedded in lipid nanoparticles).

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is highly purified single-stranded, 5-capped messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by cell-free in vitro transcription from the corresponding DNA templates, encoding the viral spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2.

Excipients with known effect: For the full list of excipients, see section 6.1.

Concentrate for solution for injection.

The vaccine is a white to off-white frozen solution.

Active immunisation to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus, in individuals 16 years of age and older.

The use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should be in accordance with official guidance.

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is administered intramuscularly after dilution as a series of two doses (0.3 mL each) 21 days apart (see section 5.1).

There are no data available on the interchangeability of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 with other COVID-19 vaccines to complete the vaccination series. Individuals who have received one dose of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should receive a second dose of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 to complete the vaccination series.

Individuals may not be protected until at least 7 days after their second dose of the vaccine.

For further information on efficacy, see section 5.1.

The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in children under 16 years of age have not yet been established.

Administer the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 vaccine intramuscularly in the deltoid muscle after dilution.

Do not inject the vaccine intravascularly, subcutaneously or intradermally.

Preparation: The multidose vial is stored frozen and must be thawed prior to dilution

Frozen vials should be transferred to 2 C to 8 C to thaw. Alternatively, frozen vials may also be thawed and kept at temperatures up to 25 C for a maximum of two hours in preparation for dilution for use.

When removed from the freezer, the undiluted vaccine has a maximum shelf life of up to 5 days (120 hours) at 2 C to 8 C, and and additional 2 hours at temperatures up to 25 C in preparation for dilution.

When the thawed vial is at room temperature gently invert 10 times prior to dilution. Do not shake. Prior to dilution the vaccine should present as an off-white solution with no particulates visible. Discard the vaccine if particulates or discolouration are present.

The thawed vaccine must be diluted in its original vial with 1.8 mL sodium chloride 9 mg/mL (0.9%) solution for injection, using a 21 gauge or narrower needle and aseptic techniques.

Warning: Unpreserved sodium chloride 9 mg/mL (0.9%) solution for injection is the only diluent that should be used. This diluent is not provided in the vaccine carton.

Equalise vial pressure before removing the needle from the vial by withdrawing 1.8 mL air into the empty diluent syringe.

Gently invert the diluted solution 10 times. Do not shake.

The diluted vaccine should present as an offwhite solution with no particulates visible. Discard the diluted vaccine if particulates or discolouration are present.

The diluted vials should be marked with the dilution date and time and stored between 2 C to 25 C.

Use as soon as practically possible, and within 6 hours after dilution.

After dilution, the vial contains 5 doses of 0.3 mL. Withdraw the required 0.3 mL dose of diluted vaccine using a sterile needle and syringe and administer. Any unused vaccine should be discarded 6 hours after dilution.

After dilution, the vaccine should not be shipped (transported) by motor vehicle away from the site of dilution. Any shipping (transportation) by motor vehicle after dilution of the vial is at the risk of the Health Care Professional.

For instructions on disposal see section 6.6.

Hypersensitivity to the active substance or to any of the excipients listed in section 6.1.

Any person with a history of immediate-onset anaphylaxis to a vaccine, medicine or food should not receive the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2. A second dose of the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should not be given to those who have experienced anaphylaxis to the first dose of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2.

As with all injectable vaccines, appropriate medical treatment and supervision should always be readily available in case of a rare anaphylactic event following the administration of the vaccine.

In order to improve the traceability of biological medicinal products, the name and the batch number of the administered product should be clearly recorded.

As with all injectable vaccines, appropriate medical treatment and supervision should always be readily available in case of a rare anaphylactic event following the administration of the vaccine. The administration of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should be postponed in individuals suffering from acute severe febrile illness.

Individuals receiving anticoagulant therapy or those with a bleeding disorder that would contraindicate intramuscular injection, should not be given the vaccine unless the potential benefit clearly outweighs the risk of administration.

Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the vaccine. No data are available about concomitant use of immunosuppressants.

As with any vaccine, vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 may not protect all vaccine recipients.

No data are available on the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in persons that have previously received a full or partial vaccine series with another COVID-19 vaccine.

This vaccine contains potassium, less than 1 mmol (39 mg) per dose, i.e. essentially potassium-free.

This vaccine contains less than 1 mmol sodium (23 mg) per dose, i.e. essentially sodiumfree.

No interaction studies have been performed.

Concomitant administration of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 with other vaccines has not been studied (see section 5.1).

Do not mix COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 with other vaccines/products in the same syringe.

There are no or limited amount of data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2. Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy.

For women of childbearing age, pregnancy should be excluded before vaccination. In addition, women of childbearing age should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose.

It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk. A risk to the newborns/infants cannot be excluded. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should not be used during breast-feeding.

It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has no or negligible influence on the ability to drive and use machines. However, some of the adverse reactions mentioned under section 4.8 may temporarily affect the ability to drive or use machines.

The safety of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 was evaluated in participants 16 years of age and older in two clinical studies conducted in the United States, Europe, Turkey, South Africa, and South America. Study BNT162-01 (Study 1) enrolled 60 participants, 18 through 55 years of age. Study C4591001 (Study 2) enrolled approximately 44,000 participants, 12 years of age or older. In Study 2, a total of 21,720 participants 16 years of age or older received at least one dose of COVID19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b and 21,728 participants 16 years of age or older received placebo. Out of these, at the time of the analysis, 19,067 (9531 COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 and 9536 placebo) were evaluated for safety 2 months after the second dose of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2.

Demographic characteristics were generally similar with regard to age, gender, race and ethnicity among participants who received COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine and those who received placebo. Overall, among the participants who received COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2, 51.5% were male and 48.5% were female, 82.1% were White, 9.6% were Black or African American, 26.1% were Hispanic/Latino, 4.3% were Asian and 0.7% were Native American/Alaskan native.

The most frequent adverse reactions in participants 16 years of age and older were pain at the injection site (> 80%), fatigue (> 60%), headache (> 50%), myalgia (> 30%), chills (> 30%), arthralgia (> 20%) and pyrexia (> 10%) and were usually mild or moderate in intensity and resolved within a few days after vaccination. If required, symptomatic treatment with analgesic and/or anti-pyretic medicinal products (e.g. paracetamol-containing products) may be used.

Adverse reactions reported in clinical studies are listed in this section per MedDRA system organ class, in decreasing order of frequency and seriousness. The frequency is defined as follows: very common ( 1/10), common ( 1/100 to < 1/10), uncommon ( 1/1,000 to < 1/100), rare ( 1/10,000 to < 1/1,000), very rare (< 1/10,000), not known (cannot be estimated from available data).

Blood and lymphatic system disorders

Nervous system disorders

Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders

General disorders and administration site conditions

Gastrointestinal disorders

Reporting suspected adverse reactions after authorisation of the medicinal product is important. It allows continued monitoring of the benefit/risk balance of the medicinal product. Healthcare professionals are asked to report any suspected adverse reactions via the Coronavirus Yellow Card reporting site or search for MHRA Yellow Card in the Google Play or Apple App Store and include the vaccine brand and batch/Lot number if available.

Participants who received 58 micrograms of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in clinical trials did not report an increase in reactogenicity or adverse events.

In the event of overdose, monitoring of vital functions and possible symptomatic treatment is recommended.

Pharmacotherapeutic group: group, ATC code: not yet assigned

The nucleoside-modified messenger RNA in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is formulated in lipid nanoparticles, which enable delivery of the RNA into host cells to allow expression of the SARSCoV-2 S antigen. The vaccine elicits both neutralizing antibody and cellular immune responses to the spike (S) antigen, which may contribute to protection against COVID-19 disease.

The efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 was evaluated in participants 16 years of age and older in two clinical studies conducted in the United States, Europe, Turkey, South Africa and South America. Study 1 enrolled 60 participants, 18 through 55 years of age. Study 2 is a multicentre, placebo-controlled efficacy study in participants 12 years of age and older. Randomisation was stratified by age: 12 through 15 years of age, 16 through 55 years of age, or 56 years of age and older, with a minimum of 40% of participants in the 56-year stratum. The study excluded participants who were immunocompromised and those who had previous clinical or microbiological diagnosis of COVID-19 disease. Participants with pre-existing stable disease, defined as disease not requiring significant change in therapy or hospitalization for worsening disease during the 6 weeks before enrolment, were included as were participants with known stable infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV) or hepatitis B virus (HBV). There was no requirement for prophylactic use of paracetamol or analgesics. Influenza vaccines could be administered outside a window 14 days of the vaccine doses.

In Study 2, approximately 44,000 participants 12 years of age and older were randomised equally and received 2 doses of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine or placebo with a planned interval of 21 days. The efficacy analyses included participants that received their second vaccination within 19 to 42 days after their first vaccination. Participants are planned to be followed for up to 24 months, for assessments of safety and efficacy against COVID-19 disease.

The population for the analysis of the primary efficacy endpoint included, 36,621 participants 12 years of age and older (18,242 in the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine group and 18,379 in the placebo group) who did not have evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 through 7 days after the second dose. Demographic characteristics were generally similar with regard to age, gender, race and ethnicity among participants who received COVID-19 mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine and those who received placebo. Overall, among the participants who received COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, 51.1% were male and 48.9% were female, 82.8% were White, 8.9% were Black or African American, 26.8% were Hispanic/Latino, 4.5% were Asian and 0.6% were Native American/Alaskan native. 57.2% were aged 16-55 years, 42.6% were aged > 55 years and 21.8% were 65 years.

At the time of the analysis of Study 2, information presented is based on participants 16 years and older. Participants had been followed for symptomatic COVID-19 disease for at least 2,214 person-years for the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine and at least 2,222 person-years in the placebo group. There were 8 confirmed COVID-19 cases identified in the COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine group and 162 cases in the placebo group, respectively. In this analysis, compared to placebo, efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 from first COVID-19 occurrence from 7 days after Dose 2 in participants without evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 was 95.0% (95% credible interval of 90.3% to 97.6%). In participants 65 years of age and older and 75 years of age and older without evidence of prior infections with SARS-CoV-2, efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 was 94.7% (two-sided 95% confidence interval of 66.7% to 99.9%) and 100% (two-sided 95% confidence interval of -13.1% to 100.0%) respectively.

In a separate analysis, compared to placebo, efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine from first COVID-19 occurrence from 7 days after Dose 2 in participants with or without evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 was 94.6% (95% credible interval of 89.9% to 97.3%).

There were no meaningful clinical differences in overall vaccine efficacy in participants who were at risk of severe COVID-19 disease including those with one or more comorbidities that increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease (e.g. asthma, BMI 30 kg/m2, chronic pulmonary disease, diabetes mellitus, hypertension).

Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 disease.

Not applicable.

Non-clinical data reveal no special hazard for humans based on a conventional study of repeat dose toxicity. Animal studies into potential toxicity to reproduction and development have not been completed.

This vaccine contains polyethylene glycol/macrogol (PEG) as part of ALC-0159.

In the absence of compatibility studies, this medicinal product must not be mixed with other medicinal products.

6 months at -80 C to -60 C.

Store in a freezer at -80 C to -60 C.

Store in the thermal container at -90 C to -60 C.

Store in the original package in order to protect from light.

Once removed from the freezer, the undiluted vaccine can be stored for up to 5 days at 2 C to 8 C, and up to 2 hours at temperatures up to 25 C, prior to use. During storage, minimise exposure to room light, and avoid exposure to direct sunlight and ultraviolet light. Thawed vials can be handled in room light conditions.

After dilution, store the vaccine at 2 C to 25 C and use as soon as practically possible and within 6 hours. The vaccine does not contain a preservative. Discard any unused vaccine.

Once diluted, the vials should be marked with the dilution time and discarded within 6 hours of dilution.

Once thawed, the vaccine cannot be re-frozen.

Concentrate for solution for injection for 5 doses in a 2 mL clear vial (type I glass) with a stopper (bromobutyl) and a flip-off plastic cap with aluminium seal.

Pack size: 195 vials

When removed from the freezer, the vaccine has a maximum possible shelf life of up to 5 days when stored at 2-8 C (label to be added once box removed from freezer). A 195 vial pack may take 3 hours to thaw at 2-8oC.

The product can alternatively be defrosted and kept for up to 2 hours at up to 25 C before being diluted for use. This facilitates immediate thaw and use when removed directly from the freezer to 25 C. In this instance the product is to be diluted within 2 hours of removing from the freezer.

Once thawed, the vaccine cannot be refrozen.

After dilution the vaccine should be used as soon as is practically possible and within 6 hours of dilution; it can be stored at 2-25 C during this period. From a microbiological point of view, it would not normally be considered good practice to store diluted product for 6 hours at 25C before being administered. The product would ideally be used as soon as practically possible after dilution.

The vaccine does not contain a preservative. Discard any unused vaccine

Any unused medicinal product or waste material should be disposed of in accordance with local requirements.

For instructions on dose preparation of the medicinal product before administration, see section 4.2.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Link:
Information for Healthcare Professionals on Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine - GOV.UK

British American Tobacco has moved a step closer to producing a vaccine for coronavirus using tobacco plants, as it won approval in the US to begin testing on humans.

The company behind cigarette brands including Lucky Strike, Rothmans and Benson & Hedges said the US Food & Drug Administration had given it clearance to begin a clinical study with adult volunteers.

While large pharmaceutical companies are already producing vaccines, BAT believes its own can be produced in six weeks, compared with the several months it takes using conventional methods.

This, the company claims, is because of proprietary technology that allows elements of the vaccine to gather quickly on tobacco plants.

BAT also says its vaccine is stable at room temperature, unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech jab being administered in the UK, which must be stored and transported at about -70C.

The vaccine has been developed by BATs biotechnology division, Kentucky BioProcessing (KBP), which has previously worked on a treatment for Ebola and is also developing a seasonal flu vaccine.

BAT said KBP had cloned a portion of the genetic sequence of coronavirus and developed a potential antigen, which is then inserted into tobacco plants for reproduction.

KBP, which is based in Owensboro, Kentucky, says it can turn tobacco plants into bio-manufacturing factories capable of producing proteins they would not otherwise produce.

Up to 3m can be grown, harvested and processed within six weeks, meaning the relevant proteins are produced faster than traditional methods, which KBP said could take months.

The company, which was bought by BAT in 2014, says it can also temporarily encode tobacco plants with the genetic instructions to produce specific target proteins.

Dr David OReilly, BATs director of scientific research, said: Moving into human trials with both our Covid-19 and seasonal flu vaccine candidates is a significant milestone and reflects our considerable efforts to accelerate the development of our emerging biologicals portfolio.

It is our unique plant-based vaccine technology, which acts as a fast, efficient host for the production of antigens for a variety of diseases, that has enabled us to make this progress and respond to the urgent global need for safe and effective treatments and vaccines.

BATs vaccine remains some way behind those being produced by large drug companies such as Pfizer, which is administering doses in the UK and US, with AstraZeneca and Moderna not far behind.

But if it can produce doses quickly and in a stable format, it could aid a global vaccination process likely to last years, as well as burnishing the reputation of a company more used to fielding criticism for damaging peoples health.

Read the original here:
British American Tobacco wins approval to test Covid vaccine on humans - The Guardian

Birds affinity for sound has its upsides and downsides, it seems.

On the one hand, scientists have found that zebra finches have a surprisingly good memory for dozens of different bird songs. Birds that live in forests, on the other hand, can be disrupted by human-made sounds as well as light pollution.

In the first study, published in the journal Science Advances, researchers investigated how many individual bird calls zebra finches could learn to distinguish.

Songbird vocalisations convey different messages sounding an alarm or recognising intruders, for instance as well as unique information about the identity of the vocaliser, like voice recognition in humans.

To make sense of these and identify individuals to form social bonds, its necessary to remember the different sounds. Humans can do that rapidly and retain the auditory memories for long periods of time a process known as fast mapping.

A group from the University of California, US, found that zebra finches can do it as well.

Previously they showed that every call type in the songbirds repertoire is distinctly unique, and that other finches can recognise different individuals. Because the birds are highly social, the team was curious to know how many vocalisers they could tell apart.

We believe that this is an important question because it requires auditory memories for not just particular sounds but for features of sounds that carry information, says senior author Frederic Theunissen, from the University of California.

This is the type of memory that animals and humans need to make for voice recognition and in humans to map sounds to word meanings.

Because they couldnt just ask the birds to identify callers, the team set up an experiment.

They trained 19 adult zebra finches to differentiate calls from unfamiliar vocalisers that were rewarded with food from calls from unrewarded vocalisers. In each trial a different call rendition from each vocaliser was used to make sure the birds could really discriminate between individuals rather than just the different sounds.

Starting with one vocaliser versus another, the team tested them until they used their entire repertoire of 56 vocalisers, finding that the birds could still tell individuals apart 42 on average. The finches were able to make the representations very quickly, after hearing less than 10 call renditions from a new individual, and retain the memories for up to a month.

We found that the memory capacity for vocaliser identity is very high we did not expect this result, says Theunissen. In retrospect, it makes ecological sense because the zebra finch is a gregarious species with strong social bonds with partners and other birds in their group.

Birds are really phenomenal in terms of their skills for vocal communication this study is just one from a long list of studies that have shown these skills.

There is a downside to birds reliance on sounds, though.

Thanks to citizen scientists and the NestWatch program, another team collated a massive amount of data covering 142 bird species from nearly 60,000 nests across North America to clarify how the worlds accelerating noise and light pollution affects them.

After controlling for the impact of other human activities and natural environmental variation, they found that noise and light can profoundly alter reproduction of birds, according to senior author Clinton Francis from California Polytechnic State University.

Anthropogenic noise impairs the perception of auditory signals, altering communication, orientation, foraging and vigilance behaviours, the team writes in the journal Nature.

Similarly, they say, night lighting changes bird activities, circadian rhythms and interactions that rely on vision.

The study showed complex effects depending on where the birds live and how they interact with the environment.

Forest-dwelling birds were most responsive to both stimuli. Noise exposure was associated with fewer eggs and declining nest success and light exposure with earlier nesting and tendency to lay more eggs.

Nesting delays due to noise were strongest in birds with low frequency vocalisations, such as the white-breasted nuthatch songbird, which had lower reproductive success. Human noise has a similar frequency, likely making it harder for them to hear each others breeding cues.

Birds that responded most strongly to light pollution were those that can see well in dim light. They showed advanced breeding with light exposure, and, unexpectedly says Francis says, had greater nest success. The light might have helped them align with plants and insects that emerge earlier as a result of warming temperatures.

The study adds an important perspective to current understanding of climate change impacts on birds, Francis says, which hasnt factored in noise and light pollution and may therefore be inaccurate.

It has strong implications for proposed developments and conservation efforts, he adds.

We should do as much as we can to restore natural sound levels and lighting at night. Unnecessary noise and light should be eliminated or minimised.

Initiatives could include smarter lighting technologies, for instance, to turn lights on only when theyre needed. Noise pollution could be drastically lowered with quiet road surfaces, electric vehicles and increased vegetation near roads.

View original post here:
Songs, sounds and the life of birds - Cosmos

The Greek island of Alonissos has been honoured by National Geographic on its renowned Best of the World list of destinations for 2021.

National Geographics Best of the World 2021 list showcases 25 destinations selected by its Global Editors of International Travel.

The list tells stories of conservation successes, preservation achievements, cultural resilience, and tales of communities overcoming daunting obstacles to thrive despite the pandemic, says National Geographic in a recent release.

Sustainability, Family, Nature, Adventure and Culture have been chosen by National Geographic as the five categories for its 2021 list which is intended to serve as inspiration for future adventures.

With the new underwater museum where visitors can explore the remains of a 2500-year-old shipwreck and boasting the largest Marine Park in the World, Alonissos adorns the list in the Sustainability category which celebrates six superlative destinations across Europe, Africa and the United States.

Destinations in the Sustainability category also include New Caledonia in France, with its 1.3-million square kilometre marine park; the African country of Gabon, with more than 11 percent of the country being national parkland; Copenhagen, the sustainable solution creating cosmopolitan capital of Denmark; the university town of Freiburg in Germany that is schooling the world on the best green practices; and green giant of a city, Denver, Colorado with its goal of achieving 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030.

Alonissos, its surrounding waters and minor islands, including Peristera, Kyra Panagia, Gioura, Psathoura, Skantzoura and Piperi, form the Alonissos Marine Park, the largest of its kind in Europe.

Each of the seven main islands within the park possesses its own unique characteristics, charm and history.

Officially established by Presidential Decree in 1992, the National Marine Park of Alonissos spans an estimated 2,250 square kilometres of the Aegean Sea, making it the largest reserve of its kind in the Mediterranean.

From both a cultural and scientific point of view the Alonissos Marine Park is an area of great interest given the archaeological finds (shipwrecks, old monasteries and churches) dating back to the prehistoric era, the classical period or the Byzantine Empire.

In addition to its archaeological ruins, the Alonissos Marine Park is a place of unspoilt natural beauty that is also home to a fascinating variety of flora, fauna and marine life including the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal.

Alonissos

Alonissos is the largest and only inhabited island in the group, offering several lovely villages to explore, great walking tracks and numerous beaches.

The beautiful Chora Village of Alonissos was the old capital before a major earthquake in 1965 destroyed the entire settlement. At that time all the inhabitants deserted the village and moved near the coast where they built Patitiri, the new capital of Alonissos.

Since that time, some parts of the old Byzantine wallshave been restored, as well as some houses that can today be seen as cafes, guest houses and local shops.

At just 14 kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide, Alonissos provides a wealth of riches when it comes to beautiful beaches, many of which are accessible only by sea along the more secluded east coast and around the southern tip.

The scientific and administrative centre of the National Marine Park is based on Alonissos as a rescue centre for the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal.

Peristera

The island of Peristera, is separated from its nearest neighbour Alonissos by a narrow channel of water.

In these waters lies the remarkable ancient Peristera shipwreck. The Peristera shipwreck has only recently opened as the first underwater museum in Greece, becoming accessible to recreational divers only as of April 2019.

Believed to have sunk because of bad weather around 425 BC, the big merchant ship was laden with an estimated four thousand vases and amphorae of wine from Chalkidiki in Northern Greece and the island of Skopelos, Pari Kalamara, director of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities has said.

An amphora (Greek: amphoreus) is a jar with two vertical handles used in antiquity for the storage and transportation of foodstuffs such as wine and olive oil.

Called the Parthenon of shipwrecks, the eerie remains of the large Athenian cargo ship that sank in the fifth century B.C. is of major significance to historians.

The Peristera wreck is the largest ship of its time ever found and its discovery has changed archaeologists understanding of shipbuilding in antiquity.

Up to then, we thought that large ships that were carrying 1,500 amphoras and were up to 70 tons, they were built by the Romans in the 1st century B.C., explained Elpida Hadjidaki, the first archaeologist to excavate the site. Well, now we have a ship that was not built in the 1st century B.C., it was built in the 5th century B.C., it carried 4,000 amphoras and God knows what else and its 126 tonnes.

Kyra Panagia

Kyra Panagia, sitting just 7 kilometres off Alonissoss northern tip, is a small uninhabited island and the site of a 17th century monastery.

Like several minor islands in the Sporades, Kyra Panagia has remained the property of the Monastery of Megisti Lavra, since it was granted the island by the Byzantine emperorNikephoros II Phokasin 963.

The monks of Monastery of Megisti Lavra used Kyra Panagia as a place where they could grow food and make wine for their community and those of other monasteries on the flanks of Mount Athos.

In the bay of Agios Petros, one of the islands two natural harbours, an even older civilization has been found including the remains of an 11th century Byzantine shipwreck.

Excavations revealing ceramics, small statues, tools, and animal bones have found that this civilization dates from the Neolithic times, in about 6,000 B.C.

Gioura

Gioura, whose treeless hills and rugged cliffs make it appear unwelcoming, is uninhabited save for a freely roaming, autochthonous (native) species of rare wild goat known as Homers Cyclops and one or two guards that remain permanently on the island in order to protect the wildlife and the archeological sites.

The island is famous for a stalactite cave that sheltered Homers Cyclops known as Cyclops Cave, a Middle Neolithic settlement that was discovered in 1992 providing evidence that Gioura had been inhabited on and off for millennia.

Archaeologists have found decorated vessels, flint blades, stone artefacts, animal bones, primitive jewellery, bone hooks and part of a human skull thought to date back to the Mesolithic Era (9th-7th century BC).

Pottery from the Bronze Age has also been found.

Roman-era lamps found in remains on top of the cave have shown that the cave served as a sanctuary around the 2nd and 3rd century A.D.

Remains from the Hellenistic period have also been found deep inside the cave.

Not just a treasure trove for archaeologists, Cyclops Cave also provides wonder to geologists because of its numerous stalactites and stalagmites.

Psathoura

Isolated and uninhabited, Psathoura island was formed from a volcano that was active in the Pleistocene era.

The earthy, fertile and almost totally flat surface of Psathoura is home to a very unique range of plants, many of which, such as sea daffodils, heather and sand lilies, are not found on the other islands.

The shallow waters that surround the island barely cover the archaeological remains of a ruined city.

The village, presumably submerged by rising sea levels, was discovered in by divers from Kalymnos off the southern coast of Psathoura at a depth of 10 to 17 metres.

Standing at 28.9 metres tall, the Psathoura lighthouse, built in 1895, is one of the tallest in the Aegean.

Landmarks of Psathoura also include the idyllic, sandy Mandrako Beach with its exotic turquoise waters.

Skantzoura

Skantzoura is an 8 kilometre square island with large sections of its shores made of white marble.

The cliffs of Skantzoura provide one of the most important breeding habitats in the Aegean for rare species of birds including Audouins gull and Eleanoras falcon.

The island of Skantzoura is home to the remains of the 17th century Monastery of Evangelistria.

A diary belonging to a monk was discovered which tells the tale of a war between the native tribes of the island and the monastery, resulting in the abandonment of the monastery and the monks sailing back to their homeland.

The entity of monastic buildings includes the church, a vaulted room with a well in the floor plus several more stone-built storage rooms and stables.

Behind the monastery are wide terraces of former vineyards from which one can capture a view over the entire island of Skantzoura, the nearer and distant islands of the Marine Park of Alonissos.

Not far from the Monastery of Evangelistria lie the ruins of an even older, ancient monastery.

Piperi

Piperi island is the core of the National Marine Park of Alonissos and the most protected island in the archipelago.

It is completely off limits to visitors and boats may not sail within a 5 kilometre radius of its coast.

This is due to the fact that the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seals (Monachus monachus) live and breed in the caves and along the beached of Piperi.

Conservationists estimate that there are probably less than 500 pairs of monk seals existing in the world today.

Traditionally hunted for their skins, oil and killed by fishermen who considered them competition for fish, numbers of monk seals have dwindled even further of late as a result of disturbance and pollution by humans along the coasts they inhabit.

Female monk seals have a slow reproduction cycle and they are also extremely vulnerable when gestating. If unnaturally disturbed through the gestational process, a female monk seal can easily abort her young.

A 1st century grave discovered in excavations in Rhodes Harbour in 1999, contained the skeleton of a monk seal, buried with funerary honours in a family burial, together with the remains of humans and a dog, suggesting that the seal had been considered a family member.

These incredible finds displayed in the Rhodes Aquarium provide an amazing insight into not only the attitudes towards animals in ancient times but also the social and trusting nature of the seal.

Ironically however, it seems that this very sociability of the seal has led to it becoming one of the rarest mammals barely surviving in the world today.

Traveling by ferry to the beautiful, lush, island of Alonissos is now easier with Ferryhopper. Book your ferry tickets from Volos, Mantoudi, Skiathos or Skopelos to Alonissos in just 4 clicks and start planning your ideal holidays in Sporades islands.

The world isfull of wonderseven if theyre hard to reach, says National Geographic.

While the pandemic has brought our journeys to a standstill, it has not quieted our curiosity.

Ahead of a new yearwith the promise of a return to travelwe are eager to share these 25 timely tales of timeless places that will define our future itineraries.

Sustainability

Alonissos, Greece

Copenhagen, Denmark

New Caledonia, France

Freiburg, Germany

Gabon, Central Africa

Denver, Colorado

Family

England Coastal Path

Transylvania, Romania

Space Coast, Florida

Hortobagy, Hungary

Indigenous British Columbia, Canada

Adventure

Dominica

Svaneti, Georgia

Read this article:
Alonissos Honoured By National Geographics Best Of The World List 2021 - Greek City Times - Greek City Times

In the Middle Ages, the summer solstice was a big event for Europeans. Weddings were planned for that day, and many communities held large parties with plenty of adult beverages. As a result, nine months after that day, quite a lot of babies would be born. Coincidentally, white storks returned from their migratory travels exactly nine months after the summer solstice as well, and it's believed that storks gained their reputation for bringing babies to mothers because of this scheduling sync-up [source: Adams].

Many adults may still turn to the story of the stork when they want to avoid an awkward conversation of how babies are made, but here at HowStuffWorks.com, we don't shy away from any of the tough questions. In this article, we'll explore the biology of sex -- otherwise known as human sexual reproduction. We'll examine the body's sexual organs, the biological cycles of sex and the process of fertilization. If you need a refresher on the birds and the bees, this is the article for you.

Advertisement

There are many reasons why people have sexual intercourse -- it improves intimacy between a couple by releasing hormones that help them bond, and studies have shown that sexual activity relieves stress, boosts immunity, reduces pain and burns calories [source: Doheny]. Those are benefits that anyone can reap from sex, no matter their gender or their sexuality. But for the subject at hand -- making a baby -- a man and a woman and their unique genetic information is required. On the next few pages, we'll discuss the reproductive systems of men and women.

Read more:
How Human Reproduction Works

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Are eggs healthy?

According to plant-based non-profit, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the fat and cholesterol found in eggs canharmheart health andlead toprostate cancer, colorectal cancer and more.

In addition, according to the FDA, eggs may contain bacteria calledSalmonellathat can causefood poisoning.

Many people believe eggs are healthy and that free-range eggs are ethical. The average American consumes about 279 every year, and the average Brit almost 200.

So are eggs healthy? Lets look at more details.

Egg yolks are loaded with cholesterol. A medium-sized egg contains186 mgof cholesterol, which is 62 percent of the recommended intake.

This increases your risk of cardiovascular disease.

In fact, Nutritionfacts.org says some experts suggest that eating just one a day may exceed the safe upper limit forcholesterol intake in terms ofcardiovascular diseaserisk.

Can eating dietary cholesterol which is found in eggs among other animal products increase cancer risk?

According to nutritionfacts.org: The largest nationwide population-based casecontrol study [to date] to assess the association between cholesterol intake and several types of cancer.

And, they found dietary cholesterol intake wasassociated with increased risk of cancers of the stomach, colon, rectum, pancreas, lung, breast, kidney, bladder and bone marrownon-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Viva! adds: Theres a strong link between egg consumption and ovarian cancer one or two eggs a week increase the risk by 70 percent, more than two and it rises to 80 percent.

In addition, Viva! says, they also contain choline.They are by far the richest dietary source.Too much choline has been linked to ovarian and prostate cancer and heart disease.

According to plant-based physician Dr. Greger, men who eat even less than one egg a day appear to have twice the risk ofprostate progression compared to men who rarely eat them.

He adds: And, men who consume two and a half or more eggs per weekbasically an egg every three daysmay have an 81 percent increased risk of dying from prostate cancer.

Dr. Greger also cites choline as the potential culprit behind this increased risk factor.

Eggs pose the risk of salmonella poisoning. And salmonella bacteria can survive cooking if the eggs are still runny. In fact, the FDA recommends using eggs that have been treated to destroy salmonella through pasteurization if recipes that require undercooking.

But why put yourself at risk?

This bacteria is a leading cause of food poisoning-related hospitalizations and the top cause of food poisoning-related death, says Dr. Greger.

And health isnt the only issue. Many consumers are unaware of the cruelty rife in the industry including chick culling

The industry kills newly-hatched male chicks for which the hatcheries have no use. Male chicks are redundant to the laying industries because they dont lay.

This is the case for all industrialized egg production in both the U.S and U.K. This is regardless of whether the eggs are free-range, organic, or battery cage.

The majority of culling methods dont involve anaesthetic. However, they do include cervical dislocation and asphyxiation by carbon dioxide. And in addition, the American industrys favorite: maceration using a high speed grinder.

A spokesman for the British Egg Information Service has saidthe practice of culling male chicks has been in place as long as the industry has been there.

U.S egg hatcheries grind up as many as 200 million male chicks every year.

Female chicks survive being minced alive. However, instead, they will have theirbeaks cut off(or burnt off) without anaesthesia or pain relief. Producers do this to try and prevent hens from injuring themselves or each other while living in such cramped conditions.

Chickens in battery cages live in suchsmall areas that they are unable to spread their wings ever.

Even in the best-case scenario, a hen spends her life crowded in a space aboutthe size of a file drawerwith several others. She will be unable to lift a single wing.

Disease also runs rampant in the cramped sheds partly because egg-laying hens are forced to urinate and defecate on each other.

After two years of living in these conditions,the birds have sufferedfrom severe bone loss. In addition, as theyre ripped from their cages, tens of millions suffer new broken bones.

After laying, hens bodies become exhausted, farmers then ship them off to the slaughterhouse.

Consumers should be aware that this is what they are paying for when they buy eggs, says says Animal Aid. Regardless of whether they are from caged or free-range hens.

According to research, chickens outperform both dogs and cats on some tests of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral complexity.

Dr. Jane Goodall explains: Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear, and pain.

They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined they are individuals in their own right.

Research from the University of Bristol has also demostrated how intelligent chickens are.

It says: Chickens do not just live in the present but can anticipate the future and demonstrate self-control. [This is] something previously attributed only to humans and other primates.

Many people are probably not aware that they are eating an animals period.

Female chickens have amenstrual cycle, during which a hens ovary sends a yolk on its path.

As it moves though the reproductive tract and into the shell gland, then yolk then forms into an egg white.The shell takes about 20 hours to form.

Many people believe that most eggs are free-range, but in fact, around 95 percent of U.S. eggs come from caged hens.

So eggs are demonstrably cruel. Are eggs healthy? Lots of evidence suggests not.

All things considered, you dont need eggs.

There are many substitutes you can try from grocery stores like JUST Egg for example.

View post:
Are Eggs Healthy? The Truth - Plant Based News

President Kristina M. Johnson sent the following email to The Ohio State University community today (Oct. 27).

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

My college visits are a highlight of my first-year Buckeye experience. Learning from you where you study, teach, perform and practice is enlightening. I am particularly interested to see our universitys founding land-grant mission in action whether through teaching and learning, convergent research and scholarship, or outreach and engagement efforts.

I recently visited Moritz College of Law, where students, faculty and staff talked passionately about their commitment to building bridges that connect Ohio States expertise and experience with initiatives and programs that positively impact our communities. It was inspiring learning from students and faculty about their passion for public interest law. The college recently adopted a new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice strategic plan.

Additionally, Moritz has partnered with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and others on an expedited pardon project.

University Task Force on Community Safety and Well-Being

Our new standing University Task Force on Community Safety and Well- Being held its first meetings last week with a charge to deliver an initial report by mid-November. A full list of task force members is now available on the just-launched task force webpage. The webpage provides a form for sharing ideas and suggestions to improve the safety and well-being of our community. I encourage you to participate.

As we are focused on safety, here are some updates on resources offered through the university:

Return to fall sports

It was so great to see our football team in the Shoe on Saturday in their big win against Nebraska, 52-14. I was honored to accept the Game Ball from our outstanding student-athletes and coaches after the game!

We look forward to the day soon when all of our student-athletes will return safely to competition. Thank you to all of our students, faculty, staff and fans who wore masks, practiced physical distancing and celebrated from home.

While this Saturdays football game is at Penn State, we all need to remember that Every Game is a Home Game.

This weekend, we will be hosting a range of Buckeye Bash opportunities for students to watch the Ohio State vs. Penn State game (masked and physically distanced) at spaces on campus. Living in a residence hall means the entire campus is your home, and we want you to continue to homegate safely and responsibly.

The Ohio Union, for example, will show the game on all screens in the building. Food, special giveaways and cant-miss prizes (including passes for Ohio Stadium tours, football jerseys and more) will be highlights of the day. Details on these and additional programs will be shared throughout the week. Additionally, all members of Buckeye Nation will be able to play along virtually, wherever they are in the world.

Stay safe. Have fun. Go Buckeyes!

COVID-19 updates

The seven-day average positivity rate for all students is at .88%. On campus, the seven-day average rate is .64% while the off-campus rate is 1.25%. We have expanded our testing efforts to approximately 18,000 each week, and have conducted more than 165,000 tests overall.

Last week, Ohio States Comprehensive Monitoring Team issued its initial report on ongoing data analysis designed to stem the spread of infection. The report observed that the reproduction number (Rt) has remained stable, primarily below 1, which is an indicator that the epidemic may be slowing.

Also, two key measures declined and then remained stable since mid- September:

1) Trends in infection rates among asymptomatic students, and 2)Positive rates among students who get tested because they are experiencing symptoms or have come into close contact with someone who is infected.

The team, led by Dr. Amy Fairchild, dean of our College of Public Health, has urged caution as the weather turns colder and stressed the importance of remaining vigilant by wearing masks, staying 6 feet apart and following all of our Safe and Healthy Buckeyes requirements.

Racial justice, diversity and inclusion

As the work of our Task Force on Racism and Racial Inequities progresses, I joined co-chairs Dr. James L. Moore III and Dr. Tom Gregoire, as well as Alumni Association President and CEO Molly Ranz Calhoun, for the first in the four-part webinar series Ripe for Change: Conversations on Race in America. You can watch the full discussion here. Over 700 people registered for the virtual event, and I continue to be impressed by the depth of commitment in our community to addressing this critical challenge. One of the topics we discussed is how to leverage and scale up high-impact mentorship programs such as Young Scholars, LASER and others. To register for future webinars, visit the Office of Diversity and Inclusion webpage.

The task force continues to collect data from members of the university community for its report, and I look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks.

Voting reminder

The November 3 general election is next week, and we encourage all Buckeyes to exercise their right to vote. Early voting in Ohio continuesthrough November 2. You can find your countys early voting center location and hours at voteohio.gov. For more voting resources, visit OSU Votes.

Discovery, learning and impact

Each week brings incredible examples of your impact on our campuses and in our communities.

The Master of Sport Management Degree in the College of Education and Human Ecology is one of only two such academic programs in the nation that has closed the gender gap, with 50% or more of its enrolled students and faculty being female.

Dr. Rattan Lal, on the same day he received the 50th annual World Food Prize, was honored by the university and our College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences with the naming of the CFAES Rattan Lal Center for Carbon Management and Sequestration.

Leaders from our College of Optometry have been named American Academy of Optometry 2020 Award recipients.

Dr. Melissa Shivers, vice president for student life, has been elected to a two- year term on the national board of the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, beginning in 2021.

Ohio States University Hospital, Ross Heart Hospital, Brain and Spine Hospital and Dodd Rehabilitation Hospital each earned a fourth consecutive Magnet designation by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute also has Magnet status, which is the highest recognition a hospital can receive for outstanding nursing performance.

Graduate student stipends

We were pleased to share last week that the university will increase the minimum stipend for teaching, research and other graduate associates by$4,000 over the next two years. With these increases, Ohio States minimum stipend is projected to rise from the bottom half of the Big Ten to among thetop third.

Based on current figures, the universitys 2021-22 ranking would be fourth in the Big Ten. This represents an investment both in our graduate students and in Ohio States academic mission. As many of you know, graduate associates teach classes, pursue important research and scholarship, and support the university while working to earn advanced degrees. Their contributions to and roles in our university community are vital.

Thank you for all that you do, Buckeyes. Sincerely yours,

Kristina M. Johnson, PhD

President

Read the original here:
Reflections of a First-Year Buckeye: College visits, community safety, football plans, graduate student stipends - The Ohio State University News

Immersive sound is the siren song of car audio makers, luring customers not to their deaths but to the options list. Audi offers Bang & Olufsen's 3D Premium Sound System, Mercedes rocks Burmester's high-end 3D surround-sound system, Range Rover's Meridien promises 3D in-car surround sound. Bose has been pitching surround sound since 1996, after making its first factory-installed audio system for the 1983 Cadillac Seville.

Recreating the preternatural, submersing acoustics of a medieval cathedral these days requires a bouquet of speakers and a lot of power. The Bowers & Wilkins system in the Maserati Levante can put out 1280 watts through 17 speakers. The NAIM unit in a Bentley Flying Spur dishes out 2200 watts through 21 speakers. The Revel Ultima 3D system puts 28 speakers and 1200 watts inside the Lincoln Aviator. The 2021 Cadillac Escalade's Platinum trim comes with a 36-speaker AKG Studio Reference system.

Manufacturers could keep adding speakers until there's no room left in the vehicle, or maybe the next step is the approach Continental Automotive is taking. With its Ac2ated technology, the German supplier best known for tires turns the vehicle into a speaker, a process that could save weight, energy, space, and change the way designers approach the vehicle's cockpit.

Ac2ated uses what are called actuators (hence the name) or exciters. An actuator is a small, puck-like cylinder that has an active surface capable of high-frequency vibrations. "We are putting an exciter on a surface in a vehicle," Continental's innovation and Human Machine Interface expert, Susan Drescher, said, "and giving it a very slight vibration to create a sound from that surface so that your car's pieces become the speaker, as opposed to having speakers installed in the car."

The principle is the same one employed by violins or acoustic guitars, where strings send vibrations resonating through the instrument. The science works on glass and plastic, too. The result, according to Continental, makes vehicle occupants "feel as if they are sitting in a concert hall surrounded by sound."

The technology isn't rare. Amazon sells Dayton Audio exciters for $20, and companies like Solid Drive make systems for home and office use. The tech isn't new, either. Freedom Drivers hit the market in 2007, and in 2013 United States auto industry supplier Johnson Controls produced an excellent behind-the-scenes video of its Lightweight Overhead Audio System with help from studio engineer Tony Bongiovi (Jon Bon Jovi's second cousin).

Continental first showed Ac2ated at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2018. At CES 2020, Continental announced a partnership with Sennheiser that paired Ac2ated with Sennheiser's AMBEO 3D technology. AMBEO provides algorithms that enhance the digital source signals, spreading sound throughout the vehicle with improved spatial reproduction and fidelity.

Because the actuators live in the vehicle's structure like traditional speakers, implementing Ac2ated properly requires working with an automaker as the vehicle is being designed, a relationship like the collaboration between Rolls-Royce and its Bespoke Audio producer for the Phantom II.

Continental says that A-pillars are generally a good place for exciters to produce high frequencies, the door panels are suitable for midrange, and the headliner and rear shelf work best for bass. However, an actuator can be placed almost anywhere, with stiffer materials working better than softer materials. "We work very early on [asking an OEM]," Drescher said, "what are you covering the surfaces in, how much air space is in that surface because you need some air space, so you're not going to pack padding around it."

After the actuators are placed, Continental and Sennheiser fine tune the system. Ac2ated's dynamic range covers the spectrum of human hearing, from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and beyond. The system can be programmed with the same noise-cancellation features as today's systems. And audiophiles retain control of bass, treble, balance, and fadereverything they're used to controlling.

Ac2ated's primary benefit isn't in replacing traditional sound reproduction, however. The most important advantages are saving weight and space, freeing up design, and conserving energy.

According to Continental, a conventional high-end audio system uses between 10 and 20 speakerseven the Dodge Charger can be optioned with 19 speakersand weighs up to 33 pounds, taking up a total volume from 0.4 to 1 cubic foot. Drescher said Ac2ated's tweeters and midrange units aren't much smaller than traditional speakers, but the bass unit is substantially smaller, and the subwoofer doesn't require an enclosure "because your car is the box." The Ac2ated system requires fewer pieces, she said, "maybe 13 as opposed to 20 speakers" producing 12-channel audio. Compared to the traditional speaker array, a high-end Ac2ated system might weigh about two pounds and takes up 0.04 cubic feet. The weight savings help all cars but electric cars especially. That Ac2ated draws less energy and that the system is less expensive than traditional speakers doesn't hurt, either. And Continental is working on exterior sounds for electric vehicles where the sheetmetal would become the instrument.

Since we've all pulled up next to that car with the 22-inch subwoofer that rocks the neighborhood, we wondered: How does Ac2ated keep from vibrating a car to death? "It's not that kind of shake," Drescher said. The vibrations are barely detectable.

How soon will this future arrive? Drescher told us Continental is currently working with an OEM. Which one? She wouldn't say. It's a big secret. But by tweaking how we listen, Continental could help revolutionize the look and feel of the cockpit. Without the need for speaker grilles scattered about, designers get more freedom. "It's a huge change for future interiors," Dresher said. "We see these more clean, simple, minimal types of interiors coming."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

More here:
Continental Plays with the Future of Car Audio - Car and Driver

In late 2018, UC Berkeley bioethics professor Osagie K. Obasogie received a campus email about a research fund available to faculty members in the School of Public Health.

He was stunned by what he read.

The Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund, the email said, supports research and education in eugenics a field discredited after World War II as a horrifying ideology that sought to use science to improve the human race by promoting traits deemed superior and breeding out those judged undesirable. The judgments aligned strongly with social biases that favored white, able-bodied and financially stable people.

Eugenics was used as a justification for Hitlers Nazi Germany to kill 6 million Jewish people, and U.S. authorities to forcibly sterilize more than 60,000 people in California and more than 30 other states largely in the early 20th century.

But Berkeleys eugenic research fund has been very much active.

The $2.4-million fund was offering an annual payout of about $70,000 in fiscal year 2020 to support research and education on policies, practices and technologies that could affect the distribution of traits in the human race, including those related to family planning, infertility, assisted reproduction technologies, prenatal screening, abortion, gene editing and gene modification, the email said. That modern definition of eugenics included perspectives that shed light on not only the benefits but also the limitations and the ethics of these alternative approaches to improving the human race.

I was shocked and dismayed, Obasogie told the Los Angeles Times. He, along with a small group of faculty, raised their concerns with the emails author, a former senior administrator.

Those alarm bells prompted the school to freeze the fund and launch a review into how the university could have accepted such a gift in its modern past it came from a family trust to the University of California Board of Regents in 1975 for research under the banner of a now-reviled ideology.

....

But Berkeleys eugenic research fund highlights a reality that Obasogie and other ethicists say is insufficiently discussed: Eugenic thinking did not disappear after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. In some ways, it remains embedded in medicine and public health today.

In the United States, government and medical authorities no longer promote eugenics through laws allowing forced sterilization, for instance, or barring marriages with the feeble-minded or between races. About 20,000 people disproportionately nonwhite and poor in California institutions were sterilized under the state eugenic law, which was enacted in 1909 and repealed in 1979.

But the development of reproductive and genetic technologies today allows individuals to make some limited choices about what kinds of humans they deem most desirable and should be selected to live, said Alexandra Minna Stern, a University of Michigan expert on eugenics.

Original post:
UC Berkeley is Disavowing its Eugenic Research Fund after Bioethicist and Other Faculty Call it Out - History News Network (HNN)

The ongoing pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has severely impacted global health, economy and politics in different patterns in various continents. The disease which is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was declared a public health event of international concern on 30th January 2020 [1] and a pandemic on 11th March 2020 [2]. As of 10th August 2020, 19462112 confirmed cases and 722285 deaths of the disease had been reported from all countries, areas and territories of the world [3]. Africa reported its first case in Egypt on 14th February 2020 through an importation and by 10th August 2020, all 54 African countries had reported 1035932 confirmed cases and 22920 deaths [4, 5]. Local community transmission has been established in most of these African countries. While Africa remains oneof the least affected regions, recent developments and data from within the continent and other regions particularly Europe and America show that the numbers of cases and deaths can grow exponentially and overwhelm even the best of systems in a relatively short time if effective prevention and control measures are not instituted on time [6, 7].

The fear, anxiety and panic induced by the rapid spread of the pandemic prompted several African countries to take drastic actions some of which are not necessarily based on scientific evidence. Some countries closed their air, sea and land borders and imposed total national or partial sub-national lockdowns in a bid to prevent importation and minimize local transmission. Given the weak health system in most African countries, mounting timely and robust responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will be a big challenge hence the need to focus on targeted and high impact prevention and control interventions that could break the chain of transmission quickly. This becomes more pertinent given the African context where inadequate access to water, sanitation and the extended family system renders the implementation of critical preventive measures such as hand washing and social distancing challenging. This is further compounded by the global shortage of required human and material resources, which is more glaring in Africa.

Due to the rapid spread and impact of the disease on human health, trade and travel, several research (mostly preliminary) have been conducted and published to characterize the virus and the dynamics of its transmission, prevention and control. While some of these publications have shown varying findings, conclusions and recommendations, many key and consistent evidences on the characteristics of the virus, its transmission, prevention and control are now emerging. This body of knowledge is critical to inform the development of timely, effective and context-specific prevention and control strategies in Africa. In this article, we review the relevant scientific literatures on the COVID-19 pandemic, and synthesize the relevant evidence that could potentially change the game in Africas fight against the disease; finally we propose strategic recommendations for prevention and control of COVID-19 transmission in the Africa continent specifically.

The initial characteristics of COVID-19 cases suggest that the disease is zoonotic [8]. However, recent scientific evidence demonstrates that the current transmission pattern globally is from human-to-human. The virus is similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS) viruses with susceptibility and severity associated with older age group [9, 10], male gender [11, 12] and underlying medical conditions such as poor immune functions, chronic diseases and surgery [13]. With a basic reproduction rate ranging from 2.6 to 4.71 [14, 15] and fatality rate from 2.3 to 11% [9, 16] it is more transmissible but less fatal compared to SARS and MERS [17, 18]. As is the case with most Influenza viruses, the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 significantly reduces with an increase in temperature and humidity [19, 20], however, this advantage may be offset by the high transmissibility of the virus.

Three main routes of transmission have been identified among humans namely ingestion or inhalation of contaminated droplets released into the air when a patient sneezes, coughs or talks, contact with surfaces which have been contaminated by infected persons and the inhalation of aerosols generated during some medical procedures [21, 22]. A few studies have also suggested faeco-oral transmission of the virus [23, 24]. A recent study concluded that the virus remains viable and infectious in aerosols for a few hours and up to a few days on surfaces, particularly on stainless steel and plastics [25]. While distinct signs and symptoms such as fever, dry cough, runny nose, difficulty in breathing, etc. have been associated with the disease, recent evidence suggests a high proportion of COVID-19 cases are infectious but undocumented either because they have mild or no symptoms but yet continue to transmit the disease [26]. This could contribute to the high transmissibility and rapid geographic spread of the virus.

Based on the lessons learnt from responding to the outbreak in China, prevention and control strategies have been proposed and are in use at various levels. In the absence of a vaccine, infection prevention and control measures that include measures to reduce or prevent exposure to the virus such as identification of suspected cases through syndromic screening at points of entry into countries, public places, health facilities, prevention of shedding of virus into the environment through respiratory hygiene have been recommended as prevention and control strategies in the general population [21]. Others include proper sanitation and waste management, social distancing to prevent contact with infected persons, avoidance of touching potentially contaminated surfaces, eyes, nose and mouth with contaminated hands and hand washing with soap and water or hand sanitizers which contain at least 60% alcohol [21]. Available evidence suggests that social distancing may have a dramatic effect on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory infections, [27] but there may be renewed virus transmission following relaxation of such measures due to the large proportion of susceptible people that would still be in the population [28]. There is a convergent view on the important role of face masks in reducing the transmission of COVID-19 by protecting healthy persons who come into contact with an infected individual and by preventing infected persons from shedding the droplets into the environment [29, 30]. The use of face masks has also been associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression among the general population and health care workers which further supports its importance in prevention and control of the disease [31,32,33].

At the individual case level, timely diagnosis, isolation and supportive management of confirmed cases, identification and follow-up of their contacts, prevention of nosocomial transmission through strong infection prevention and control methods and use of personal protective equipment are recommended [34]. There is no known cure for the disease currently but several clinical trials involving various therapies are ongoing. WHO recommends that all laboratory confirmed cases should be isolated and managed in health facility settings but where this is not possible priority should be given to cases with the probability of poor outcomes such as those aged above 60years and with underlying medical conditions which put them at higher risk [35].

Putting the above scientific evidences on the characteristics and dynamics of COVID-19 transmission, prevention and control into perspective against the backdrop of the social, cultural and economic context in Africa, we deduce several lessons which could guide African countries to better prepare for and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent.

While the mostly hot and humid African weather and largely younger population may be deterrent factors for wide transmission of the disease, any advantage conferred by this is offset by the high transmissibility of the disease. This is more so given the high population density, larger families and large vulnerable populations such as refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malnutrition thus emphasis in African countries should be on prevention of the spread of infection, especially to these vulnerable groups. In this regard, African countries should invest in identifying, developing and implementing tailor-made prevention strategies to protect at risk populations from infection [36].

Given the high proportion of undocumented and asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, the use of syndromic surveillance for disease detection at points of entry may not be very effective [37]. While syndromic surveillance may offer some level of reassurance to governments and the general population, the cost in terms of the human and financial resources associated with conducting it may offset its benefits. African countries should rather invest in active search for cases and their contacts at the community and household levels particularly the asymptomatic contacts and transmitters through scaling up testing of all persons who may have been exposed to the virus but remain asymptomatic. To achieve this, COVID-19 testing strategies which prioritize massive testing of various categories of persons based on the transmission scenario should be developed. Additionally, efforts should be made to increase testing capacity and timeliness by decentralizing testing to the sub-national levels.

The evidence that the virus survives much longer on surfaces such as stainless steel and plastic as compared to respiratory droplets have far reaching implications for prevention and control of the virus at the population level. First, risk communication messages should emphasize the high risk constituted by surfaces such as doorknobs, stainless steel handrails, disposable plastics etc. and encourage people to refrain from unnecessary touching of such surfaces. Second, regular disinfection of such surfaces at the household and community level is advised and should be included in risk communication messages and during community engagement sessions [23]. Third, in the light of new findings on asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 and recommendations on the usage of face masks by healthy individuals, African countries should define clear policies on the use of face masks. Such policies should ensure that face masks are available to those who need them particularly the frontline healthcare workers, caregivers and vulnerable groups, address the issue of shortage of masks and other supplies which is already a challenge in many African countries and importantly provide clear guidance to the general population on the pros and cons, safe use, donning and doffing of face masks. Furthermore, African scientists should pursue urgent researches into the use of locally available material for the production of face masks which are suitable to the African context [29, 30].

While available scientific evidence shows that the social distancing which is the ultimate aim of the current lockdowns and population movement restriction measures instituted by several African countries may reduce transmission of the virus in the short term, this strategy alone may not be enough to break the chain of transmission [28]. Since there is already widespread community transmission in many of these countries, population confinement may result in a change in the transmission pattern from the community to the household level [38]. Furthermore, African countries may not be able to sustain such lockdowns for a long time given their socioeconomic context thus they should focus on making the best use of the small window of opportunity that they offer. First, clear objectives should be set for lockdowns which should be to reduce transmission through the scale up of preparedness and response interventions and to control the outbreak in areas of transmission. These objectives should be communicated clearly to the general population to forestall community resistance to lockdowns which is being experienced in some of the African countries. Second, the definition of areas where to impose confinement should be guided by the epidemiology and pattern of transmission of the disease. Third, the lockdowns should be accompanied by intensive risk communication, active case search at the community and household levels, massive testing, contact tracing and isolation. Fourth, adequate preparation should be made to ensure that confined populations have access to basic services such as food, water, healthcare etc. during lockdowns in order to reduce community resistance andensure adherence. Fifth, appropriate strategies to prevent a second wave of the pandemic following the lifting of the lockdown measures should be developed and implemented [39].

Given the weak health systems in most of the infected African countries, institutional management of all laboratory confirmed cases may not be a feasible option. On the other hand, home management of such cases is constrained by several challenges due to the large household size, poor housing and high population density in many African countries. Countries should therefore develop context-specific case management strategies which should classify cases according to their risk and health needs, identify places such as health facilities and non-health facilities such as repurposed hostels, schools, hotels or stadia where the various categories of cases will be isolated, define and identify the minimum package of resources such as health workers, medicines, medical equipment and other logistics which are needed to effectively manage the anticipated caseloads. Such strategies should be based on the prevailing transmission scenario in the country.

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed even strong health systems in Europe and America. A review and analysis of the impact of the 20142015 Ebola outbreaks in West Africa on health systems revealed that there was a significant reduction in access to routine health services and this led to substantially increased mortality from preventable diseases such as malaria, measles, HIV, AIDS and TB. African countries should learn from this experience and implement available guidance from WHO to ensure that essential health services are maintained during the COVID-19 pandemic particularly during lockdowns to reduce excess mortality from other preventable diseases [40,41,42]. Key to maintenance of essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic is the protection of health care workers from acquiring COVID-19 infection; this can be achieved by providing African health workers with the necessary equipment, information and training on how to protect themselves [43].

Management of COVID-19 outbreaks in the situation of population displacement such as refugee and IDPs camps and in prisons and urban slums which are common in Africa is a major challenge. Other high-risk situations include in large-scale industries which employ a large number of semi-skilled workers [44]. The high transmissibility of the virus, overcrowding and inadequate access to social services such as water and sanitation will rapidly facilitate transmission of the virus and constrain implementation of preventive measures such as social distancing in such situations. African countries should, therefore, invest in the development of special public health strategies for prevention and control of outbreaks in such settings [36]. Establishment of COVID-19 information and testing centres near such areas is recommended to improve rapid access of the high-risk populations to COVID-19 prevention and control services [44].

Importantly, the lessons from the rapid spread of the virus in China, Italy, Iran, Republic of Korea and America should be a wake-up call for African countries to rapidly scale up risk communication, community engagement, and participation. The scientific evidence described above and outcomes of anthropological studies on COVID-19 should be used as the basis for development of evidence-based and context specific risk communication messages. Such risk communication messages should be focused on achieving behavioural change and tailor-made to address the several socio-cultural myths, stigma, misconceptions and rumours associated with the virus, its transmission, prevention and control.

See the rest here:
Moving from rhetoric to action: how Africa can use scientific evidence to halt the COVID-19 pandemic - Infectious Diseases of Poverty - BioMed Central

She grew in a glass jar as an embryo and was later placed in her mothers womb.

Louise Brown, the worlds first baby conceived outside of the human body, celebrated her 43rd birthday this July 25. I was subjected to more than 100 tests after my birth to ensure I was a normal child, she told THE WEEK.

Louise was a child of perseverance and relentless hope. Her parentsGilbert John Brown, a truck driver, and Lesleydesperately wanted a baby. The couple, who lived in Whitchurch, England, tried to conceive for nine years without success. Lesley had fallopian tube blockages that made natural conception impossible. She had undergone failed operations in the past to clear her blocked tubes and was prepared to put up with anything to have a baby.

On November 10, 1978, the couple underwent a procedure, wherein a mature egg extracted from one of Lesleys ovaries was fused with Johns sperm in a laboratory under the direction of physiologist Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards and gynaecologist Patrick Christopher Steptoe. Lesley was warned that there was only a one in a million chance of having a baby, but she clung to hope.

The egg was fertilised and divided into two, four and then eight cells. Lesley got pregnant after the eight-celled embryo was implanted in her womb. Being the first woman to have conceived via in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and have a pregnancy that went beyond a few weeks, Lesley attracted a lot of media attention. Edwards and Steptoe found it hard to shield her from the media frenzy. She was hounded by the press so much that Steptoe hid her in his car and drove her to his mothers place in Lincoln. Later, when Lesley was admitted to Oldham hospital for delivery, reporters entered her room posing as housekeeping staff.

Louise Joy Brown, weighing five pounds 12 ounces, was born by C-section at 11.47pm on July 25, 1978. The Joy in her name was a suggestion from the two doctors. Her birth marked a milestone in modern medical science. It was described by TIME as the most awaited birth in perhaps 2,000 years. The baby offered a ray of hope to millions of childless couples across the world. Until then, for women with damaged fallopian tubes, it was impossible to conceive. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for the development of IVF therapy, considered one of the most remarkable medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. Around eight million babies have been born in the last four decades through assisted reproduction technologies, including IVF.

Louise realised she was an IVF baby only when she started going to school. Lesley showed her a video footage of her birth. IVF was unheard of in those days and people were curious about her unique birth. She had always been big-bodied and some would ask her how she managed to fit in the test tube.

The Browns were in the spotlight for many years after Louises birth. They were criticised for allowing the doctors to film the birth. Soon after Louises birth, Lesley received a post bag full of letters splattered in red. Once, she received a box from the US that contained a broken test tube and a plastic foetus. Louise defended her mother, saying that letting the doctors film the birth was an act of gratitude for her.

Things were no different for Edwards and Steptoe. They had a hard time breaking the taboo and stereotypes around IVF. The idea of fertilising an egg outside the body has always been controversial. The first such successful experiment was done at Boston in 1944 by Miriam Menkin, essentially a scientist at heart and mind but often relegated to a lab technician or research assistant to the better-known fertility specialist and contraceptive pill co-developer John Rock. The research got derailed with Menkins move to North Carolina, where IVF was considered scandalous, following her husbands job loss. But it was Menkins initial research that eventually led to Louises birth through IVF.

Edwards, Steptoe and nurse Jean Purdy, whose contribution was forgotten till recently, feared criticism from the church and the public and they kept their work under wraps. Only five of the 282 women who underwent IVF could get clinically pregnant and none of them had delivered a live baby. Many embryos died during the process. Unsurprisingly, the medical community refused them support for research. The UK Medical Research Council feared children born through IVF would run a risk of fatal abnormalities. IVF children, Louise said, are no different from normal children. The only difference is the process of conception, she said. It is impossible to distinguish between an IVF baby and other children born naturally.

John and Lesley went for IVF again and had a second childNatalie. The couple wanted a third child, but their attempts failed. Natalie was the 40th child to be born through IVF. She became the first IVF child to conceive naturally, easing concerns that women born through IVF cannot conceive naturally. Natalie now has five children.For the Browns, IVF changed their life in more ways than one. Lesley was Johns second wife; he had two daughters from a previous marriage. John and Lesley, who stayed in an abandoned railway carriage on the first night of their elopement, had a hard life. Homeless, penniless and unemployed, they struggled a lot until John got a job as a bus conductor.

Infertility was an extremely frustrating experience for Lesley. In an interview to Daily Mail later, she said, You feel you are not the same as ordinary wives. You dont feel normal. You feel you are not a real woman. I said to John, Go and find a proper wife.

The couple couldnt afford IVF until 1977, when John won 750, by betting on the outcome of a football match. That helped him pay for the IVF treatment.After Louise was born, the Browns earned money by doing exclusives. Louises birth was reported exclusively by Daily Mail. Associated Newspapers Ltd, the parent company of Daily Mail, secured exclusive rights to the story and pictures reportedly by paying $600,000. Lesley and John stayed positive amid the negativity that was directed at them. They went on speaking assignments around the world as advocates for IVF.

Louise now lives in Oldham with her husband Wesley Mullinder, a nightclub bouncer. Interestingly, Mullinder first met Louise when she was just a few days old. Eight-year-old Mullinder lived across the street from the Browns and was among the crowd gathered to see the extraordinary baby. The duo later met when Louise was 24. Two years later, they were married. They have two boysCameron and Aiden. Cameron is 14 and has just begun with his General Certificate of Secondary Education exams; he will be applying for college in another two years. Aiden turned eight this August.

All her life, Louise received media attention. And now she is consciously using the media glare on her to break the stigma associated with infertility and IVF treatments. Couples suffer through a lot of emotional and psychological stress. I think no couple should be deprived of parenthood, said Louise, who has shared the story of her extraordinary birth and its impact on her life in her memoir My Life As The Worlds First Test Tube Baby. Through my association with ART Fertility Clinics India, I will be working towards the mission of making IVF the wise choice of treatment, enabling couples to realise the dream of parenthood. Another purpose is to assert that all those who need IVF should have access to it.

IVF has come a long way. Scientists now pin their hopes on IVG (in vitro gametogenesis), which could make it possible to produce babies from skin cells. IVG seemed promising when tested in mice. In 2016, a group of researchers in Japan created embryos using skin cells from mice. The embryos wereimplanted, and eight healthy mice were born.

Scientists are now exploring the possibility of making human babies in the lab using skin cells. Imagine a couple wanting to have a baby walking in to a lab to give their skin biopsy samples. The cells from these samples will be transformed into stem cells, which, in turn, will be reprogrammed into sperms and eggs. The process involves creating embryos outside the womb and then transferring them into the womans womb for implantation, as in IVF. IVG holds much promise for people who cannot conceive naturally, especially menopausal women, gay and lesbian couples and men with abnormal sperm function or low sperm production.

Dr Henry T. Greely, author of The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, said that in future, sex will no longer be a popular means of reproduction for people in developed countries. People will continue to have sex. But those who want to have a baby would prefer to go to a lab, said the Stanford professor of law and genetics. IVG for humans will be a reality within our lifetime, said Greely.

Every woman has the right to have a child, said Louise. Treatment for fertility problems is a right that should be made available to all women, she said. IVF not only creates a child, but a family, she added. Despite her extraordinary birth, Louise lives an ordinary life. She worked in a nursery in her early 20s. Currently, she works for a freight company in Bristol. Her days begin with planning meetings with her team at National Fertility Society; her evenings are dedicated to her family. Home means a lot to Louise, who was a much loved and much longed for child. Her mother had carefully kept everything concerned with her birth, from hospital appointment cards and correspondence to letters from journalists and well-wishers and even a movie script by Carl Foreman, Oscar-winning Hollywood film producer. Louise donated them to the Bristol Archives. Among them is a letter from Edwards to Lesley, dated December 6, 1977, which reads:

Dear Mrs Brown,

Just a short note to let you know that the early results on your blood and urine samples are very encouraging, and indicate that you might be in early pregnancy.

So please take things quietlyno skiing, climbing, or anything too strenuous including Xmas shopping!

If you should wish to get in touch with me for any reason before seeing Mr Steptoe next week, my laboratory number is 0223 65069, and my home number is 0223 54019. Best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

Dr R.G. Edwards

All these mementos were found in Lesleys wardrobe following her death. She died due to complications of a gallbladder infection on June 6, 2012. She never regretted her choices.

View original post here:
What it means to be the worlds first IVF baby - THE WEEK

Recently, controversy erupted over a P.E.I. radiopersonality's reposting of a social media meme that drew criticism from the local LGBTQ community.

Ocean 100 morning show co-host Kerri Wynne MacLeod and Stingray Radio apologized for the post, and in the social media furor that ensued, Pride P.E.I. issued a joint statement with the station supporting her.

The post was a meme that talked about the challenges of parenting and howdifficult it must be for parents these days to have the "birds and the bees" talk with their kids, since there seem to be more genders and sexual preferences than in the past.

But is it really more challenging to talk to kids about sexuality and gender now, as more people openly identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, non-binary or any other shade of the rainbow?

"No, I don't feel that," said Andrea MacPherson, corporate secretary with the LGBTQ advocacy group Pride P.E.I.,who came out as transgender about five years ago. She went from being "dad" to being "mom" to her now 11-year-old twins. She said it was not difficult, and her kids accepted it right away.

"It's a parent's responsibility to explain to the kid, what's going on in the world, and really, kids are sponges," she said.

MacPherson said she simply told her kids transgender people exist. "And they were like, 'OK!'" she said.

"Telling them that some people are boys, some people are girls, some people are both, some people are neither they accepted that," MacPherson said. "Kids don't care about things more complicated than that."

Angele DesRoches with PEERS Alliance, a group that promotes sexual health and drug-use harm reduction on P.E.I., doesn't have children but is an active aunt to seven kids and has been an early childhood educator in the past.

"There's lots of reasons why I feel bad for parents today COVID, climate change. If acknowledging the diversity around human sexuality and gender throws off your quote-unquote 'birds and the bees'talk, then my concern is really how woefully inadequate that talk probably was," DesRoches said.

"The real issue is we still have parents who think of a sex talk as focusing on penis-vagina penetration, and a one-off conversation."

Talking to kids about human reproduction, preventing sexually transmitted infections or unplanned pregnancies, and communication and boundary-setting in personal relationships are worthwhile conversations, Desroches said.

"When we focus on penis-vagina penetration as the definition of sex, we're missing all kinds of sex that young people are having, that also have risks associated," she said, promoting conversations that can introduce strategies to reduce harm, such as condom use.

Adults who find it challenging to talk to young people about gender and sexual diversity may want to examine where that discomfort and fear comes from, she suggests.

"Sex is absolutely everywhere in our society, but we're still a very sex-negative culture. Sex is sinful, it's still dirty, it's something tobe hidden," she said. "Really, that's grownup baggage."

Some work is being done to educate Island students.The P.E.I. Public Schools Branch, withhelp fromPEERS Alliance and the P.E.I. Transgender Network,is developinggender diversity guidelines for Island schools, following many other provinces across the country thatalready have suchguidelines. The aim is tocreate more inclusive and safelearning environments for students while demonstrating respect for diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

For children in kindergarten to Grade 4, DesRoches said, "what we really are focusing on is celebrating our uniqueness and identifying gender stereotypes where they exist, and giving students the tools needed to recognize and resist those stereotypes," she said.

For older kids, it's important to ditch the narrative that being transgender means transitioning wholly from one gender binary (man or woman) to another.

"We're at a pointnow where we just know that that isn't true ... gender diversity is much more nuanced, beautiful and complicated than that. And so we're really talking about an entire spectrum of diversity that ranges from cisgender to transgender to non-binary to gender-fluid to gender-queer. Gender can be exciting! Folks should play, and folks should have room to be who they are."

What children and youth need to know about just as much, or more, than gender or sexual preference are things like consent, DesRoches believes.

Historically traditional "scripts" around sexuality can be unhealthy, she said, including notions that men should pursue women and sex and "win" them, or that sex is a "prize" to be taken by men.

"One of the things I've been very keen on doing in my transition is involving my kids along theway," MacPherson said. "Setting expectations is the biggest key in making sure it's as stress-free as possible."

MacPherson's kids already knew about Jazz Jennings, a celebrity who came out as transgender at just six years old, when Barbara Walters interviewed her for the TV show 20/20. Jennings wrote a children's book calledI Am Jazz, which MacPherson's children had read and loved.

"I explained some people are like Jazz, but don't realize it till they're a lot older, and that's what I'm like," she said.

Her own children sometimes mix up her pronouns, referring to her as "him," or calling her "dad," but she said that's fine.

She also sat down with the kids' teachers and school administration to tell them about her transition, so the kids wouldn't have to faceuncomfortable questions, and they were "super supportive," MacPherson said.

And itdidn't take long for kidsand their parents to switch to using "her" and "Andrea."

"A few of their friends' parents have asked how they should refer to me, and I say I'm still their parent, my name is this now," she said.

"Some people might make mistakes and that's fine. Mistakes will be made, you don't make a big deal out of it."

MacPherson said kids especially are remarkably quick to correct themselves if they get it wrong, and just move on quickly with an "OK!"

When is it appropriate to introduce kids to the idea of different genders and sexual preferences? CBC Kidsproduced an animated primerabout this that parents can watch with their kids.

"I'm of the firm belief that there is no age that's too young to really explain to them," MacPherson said.

"As soon as my kids noticed that some things looked like 'boy' stuff and some things looked like 'girl' stuff, I made a point of saying 'some things are neither,'" sheexplains.

"Some people are boys, some people are girls, some people are both, some people are neither ... there's ways to talk about it at all ages that's age-appropriate."

DesRoches directs parents who seek information from PEERS about gender diversity and human sexuality to resources including Cory Silverberg'sSex is a Funny WordandWhat Makes a Baby,both books that explain sexuality while removing gendered assumptions. Use Google, she said, and find lots of good first-person stories from gender-diverse people on YouTube.

Don't wait until you are personally affected to get educated, either: sooner rather than later, you will likely meet someone who is transgender, MacPherson said.

"Even if kids aren't struggling with their own gender, just being able to explain it," she said. "So many people now just simply know a trans or non-binary person ... it's a good thing for everyone to know."

Knowledge can help make people more comfortable and reduce stigma, she said.

If you're a parent or caregiver of a transgender person of any age, PEERS has a program called Roots and Shoots parents can come together to "unlearn myths about gender identity and replace those myths with knowledge and support around issues of gender diversity," the PEERS website says. At the same time, their trans or gender-creative children aged five to 13 can participate in Sierra Club Wild Child programming and meet like-minded peers and play in nature "while being their awesomely unique and authentic selves."

PEERS also recommends those raising gender diverse young children check out a free online course offered by StanfordSchool of Medicine, Health Across the Gender Spectrum.

Want a short primer on terms you might want to use when discussing these issues with your kids? They might already know them, but they might be impressed you know them too!

asexual: someone who is not sexually attracted to anyone.

bisexual: someone who isattracted to their own gender and another gender. Often shortened to "bi."

dead name: a transgender person's former name, usually their birth name.Use that person's new name, as hearing their former name or pronouns can negatively affect many trans people.

gender-fluid: a person whose gender is fluid sometimes they may identify as and express themselves more as female, other times more as male.

gender non-conforming: people whodon't conform outwardly to the societal norms expected of their gender. For example, currently a boy who wears a dress could be seen as gender-non-conforming.

non-binary:someone whose identity doesn't fit into a strictly male/female binary, and usually uses they/them pronouns.Celebrity Demi Lovato recently came out as non-binary.

polyamory: love relationships involving more than a couple. Polyamorous relationships can take many shapes and sizes.

pronouns: he/him, she/her or they/them are pronouns. More people are introducing themselves and stating their pronouns, depending on how they identify. These are often seen on email signatures or social media profiles.

straight: straight people are attracted to those of the opposite gender.

top surgery: removal of breasts. Many trans and non-binary people get top surgery.

transgender: a person who changes their gender from that which they were assigned at birth. For instance male-to-female, female-to-male, female-to-non-binary, etc. Sometimes shortened to "trans."That change can be social (the way people appear and dress) and also medical (involving gender reassignment surgery). Halifax-born actor Elliot Page recently came out as transgender, transitioning from female to male.

trans man:a man who was assigned female at birth.

trans woman: a woman who was assigned male at birth.

queer:The LGBTQcommunity hasbegun to reclaimthe word queer, taking away past negativity and using it as a term to encompass anyone who is not straight or transgender.

Original post:
Talking to kids about gender and sexuality is harder these days or is it? - CBC.ca

Ive been writing about why I think the Churchs teaching on sexuality particularly homosexuality and contraception is evil. Mostly Ive been talking about history, and the question of how the teaching came to be what it is in the first place. I want to put that aside for the moment and talk about the present: how do these teachings cause grave and demonstrable harm to real human beings living in the world right now?

Im going to start with contraception.

In theory, the Catholic Church recognizes two essential (and essentially correct) principles regarding reproductive choice:1. That people should practice responsible parenthood, seeking to have children only when it is responsible and reasonable to do so, and 2. That the decision to seek or avoid pregnancy is private, that only the parents can determine whether they are financially, emotionally, physically and spiritually able to care for a child.What this means, actually, is that certain people within the hierarchy made good arguments in committee meetings showing that providentialism (the belief that you should just have as many children as you can because God will provide) is a terrible idea. One suspects that these individuals expected the Church to arrive at the obvious conclusion: that the teaching prohibiting contraception needs to be overturned because it is opposed to reason, common-sense, and the actual good of human beings. In practice, however, these obviously sane observations were incorporated into the documents in principle, but undermined in practice.

The problem is that responsible parenthood and parental discernment only become possible when people have access to reliable means of avoiding pregnancy. But thousands of years ago men who did not understand how human reproduction and sexuality actually work came to the conclusion that sex is fundamentally problematic and can only be grudgingly justified when it is necessary for procreation.

Overturning the flawed reasoning of these men would involve admitting that celibate guys might not have infallible insight into human sexuality and if that were admitted, the entire house of cards might start to collapse. People might see that priests, bishops, canonized theologians and even popes are just ordinary, fallible human beings and not specially selected ambassadors of the Holy Spirit with magical powers to know the truth about things they have no experience of.

So the Church came up with a compromise that provides the worst of both worlds: you are obligated to think carefully about whether having a child is a good idea and to choose responsibly and then you are supposed to effect those decisions using hideously unreliable means.

The Tree By Its Fruits

NFP allows the Church to maintain that they have been right for all of those centuries while acknowledging that choice and responsibility are necessary elements of any reasonable sexual ethic. Its a perfect solution with only one niggling drawback: it doesnt work. Of course, if youre an unmarried man who is only accountable to other unmarried men, this minor difficulty can be overlooked for the sake of the obvious institutional advantage of being able to claim infallible insight, prescient wisdom, and pastoral understanding while also shoring up the putative moral superiority of the celibate class.

This is why I call Humanae Vitae evil. It is a document whose fundamental purpose is to maintain the power and authority of the Catholic hierarchy regardless of the harm that this does to the people who have to practice it. Some of those responsible for formulating the doctrine, like Ottaviani, almost certainly knew this. I suspect that most of its supporters, however, have convinced themselves that there is no real conflict of interests, that on some deeper level the good of humanity is best served by upholding the power of the Church or that the doctrine really is about the truth and dignity of human sexuality and not about the need to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that over a thousand years of teaching had been wrong. Few people are genuine Machievellians, and theres been a lot of ink spilled trying to show that NFP is better for women, better for children, better for society If you and your colleagues dont have to actually live with the consequences of the teaching, its not that hard to assume that the rosier portrayals are probably the most accurate.

In reality, though, Humanae Vitae was not prescient, wise or merciful. Widespread access to contraception has not resulted in increased government interference in peoples reproductive lives: the forced sterilization campaigns and coercive birth-limiting policies that Paul VI predicted have not materialized. On the contrary, in the years since the publication of HV such policies have become increasingly unacceptable to individuals and to the international community. Why? Because it turns out that when you give people access to reproductive choice, they will generally make reasonable and responsible decisions. In areas with stifling population densities, like Japan, birth-rates fall. In times of traumatic population loss, like World War II, there are baby booms. Its almost as if our species has evolved to survive without the reproductive management of the Vatican.

The Churchs teaching on contraception is, however, deeply harmful to the minority of Catholics who sincerely believe that the Vatican has the right to regulate their sexual behaviour. It is coercive, misogynistic and harmful to children.

No Exit

For those who have never been a devout believer in an authoritarian religion, it can be difficult to relate to the way in which religious authorities are able to exercise control over adherents. Even now, as someone who had that experience, when I look in from the outside Im perplexed. It seems so obvious that there is no being outside of time and space who will torture people for eternity if they use a condom. That this has never happened. Could never happen. That even if God existed, it would still be a preposterous belief.

When youre in that world, though, it somehow seems real. And in the case of contraception, its particularly insidious.

With most sins, Catholicism offers an escape clause. In some cases, this takes the form of straightforward justification: stealing isnt stealing if its the only way to feed your children, killing isnt killing if you do it in self-defense or in war, missing Mass doesnt count if youre sick, etc. With contraception, however, there is no justification for married couples. It doesnt matter if youre trying to prevent the transmission of HIV, or if your children are literally starving to death, or if another pregnancy would put the mothers life at risk. Contraception, unlike driving a bayonet through someones innards, is intrinsically evil. This means it can never be morally acceptable.

The other escape clause in Catholicism is forgiveness: sure, youre not going to live a perfect life, God understands that. You will sometimes be overcome by temptation. Youll drink more than you intended, youll break down in a moment of weakness and watch porn, hell, you might even lose control of yourself and kill your spouse in a fit of rage. God understands. If you are sorry for what you have done, you can confess your sins confident in Gods forgiveness.

What you cant do is presume on Gods forgiveness. You cant set out to commit a sin thinking Meh, Ill do this now and go to confession later and itll all be good. This is actually an important idea: in the case of evils that are, you know, evil, its an essential safeguard. You cant be a serial rapist who scrupulously schedules your predations around the confession schedule at your local parish, and you cant be a gangster who plans to make it all good in the end with a deathbed confession and a hefty donation to Mother Church. You cant treat the confessional as a loophole that relieves you of your moral obligations to other people.

For most sins, this means that you can both believe in hell and exist as a human being without being in a state of constant, paralyzing terror. You try your hardest, sometimes you fail, God is merciful. But with contraception, if you are trying your hardest to avoid contracepting, you will in fact not succeed in avoiding pregnancy. You cant get your tubes tied or go get the shot with the intent of confessing it later thats presumption. If you go to confession and seek forgiveness for using a condom or taking the Pill, youre not really contrite (and therefore cannot receive absolution) unless you intend to throw away the rest of your contraceptives when you get home.

Effective contraception involves a committed, deliberate, long-term, rational choice. You have to think ahead, discuss it with your partner, and take responsibility for your reproductive life. Its not something that you do on the spur of the moment, in a fit of weakness, because your flesh got the better of you. Weakness, lust and irresponsibility are much more likely to result in failure to use contraception, and possibly in unplanned pregnancy. People dont get vasectomies because they are overcome by temptation they get vasectomies because theyve concluded that it is the rational, moral, responsible thing to do.

It is exactly this kind of deliberate, conscientious, rational discernment that the Church cannot tolerate if it leads to the conclusion that the Church is wrong.

The Existential Smoking Gun

This is why the teaching on contraception becomes so burdensome, so coercive. You are quite literally being told that if you make a responsible decision the right decision for yourself and for your family you risk eternal torture. Good Catholics are encouraged to meditate on the Last Things, and there is a great deal of spiritual art and writing that describes in vivid, lurid detail the horrors that await the damned. Also, even if you are reasonably confident that God will be merciful and you wont suffer forever, the Church assures you that you will face the pains of purgatory: hundreds of years of horrific misery and torment where you receive a temporal punishment for your sins that vastly exceeds any actual harm and suffering that you might have brought about by, say, masturbating in the shower or sleeping in instead of going to Church on Sunday.

In the case of contraception, you will have to suffer for the harm that you have caused to the Church by selfishly refusing to be open to life.

Heres where the snake starts to eat its tail. On the one hand, you are supposed to practice responsible parenthood. On the other, you are always supposed to be open to life. Even if you have carefully discerned that it would be an absolutely terrible idea to have a child right now, you are still supposed to be open to the possibility that God wants you to have a child. How do you know God wants you to have a child even though it seems like a bad idea? Well, you will know if you find yourself facing an unplanned pregnancy. So if, for example, you use a highly ineffective method of family planning because its the only one you are permitted to use, and it fails, thats not evidence that the method is hideously flawed and unreliable its evidence that God really wanted you to have a child right now. It is therefore very selfish of you to practice responsible parenthood in a way that has a reasonable chance of succeeding.

A woman in this position feels as if she has a massive existential gun to her head. The threat of hell has been reinforced and magnified by repeated graphic depiction and internalized through meditation practices designed to instill intense fear in the believer. Authorities that you trust have told you that you will be punished with pain so severe that it exceeds your most horrific imaginings, and that this pain will go on for periods of time that you cant even begin to wrap your head around. If you selfishly withhold your reproductive labour from your husband and from the church, you are not only doing evil, you are turning yourself into garbage that deserves to be burned in eternal fire.

But if you just give up control of your life and your body and endure the finite and measurable sufferings that you face in the present, then you will be redeemed. So which is it gonna be, doll?

This kind of coercion is traumatic. You are psychologically held down by the weight of hundreds of years of tradition and the authority of thousands of powerful men, selected by God to enforce his commandments. You are terrified to struggle free or to try to run because you sincerely believe that there is an all-powerful, all-seeing deity who has your body and your soul in his crosshairs. You are also terribly confused because youve been told that this psychological violence is the only true kind of love and that this is being done to you because its the only way to make you into a worthwhile person.

Women and Children Last

So you submit. You obey. You hope and pray and plead with God and try different kinds of NFP and every time it fails, you blame yourself for having failed yet again. Youre told that NFP is as effective as the Pill. Youre told that the problem is you. And you dont find that hard to believe. After all, even if youve only just done one year of praying the rosary every day, you will have repeated to yourself that you are a sinner over 20 000 times and pleaded to be saved from the fires of hell 1825 times. Thats only one year, one type of prayer Catholicism is very good at imprinting the idea that if there seems to be a problem, its probably you.

The second worst thing about it is that NFP fails the most spectacularly for the people who need it the most. It doesnt work for the poor because its success rate plummets without consistent support from a qualified NFP instructor and access to good, free, support is spotty at best. It doesnt work for women in abusive marriages because its success is completely dependent on the idea that the couple is a unit, that they are working together in a mutually supporting way to make the method work. It doesnt work for women who are overworked or have complicated schedules like, say, mothers with lots of children because the success rates plummet if you arent able to take measurements and record symptoms consistently at the exact same time each day. It doesnt work for women who are stressed and sick nobody has even gathered statistics on whether the method is successful at all for women with irregular menstrual cycles. It doesnt work for women struggling with addiction or mental illness because it relies on a womans consistency and control over her actions.

In other words, many of the more serious reasons for avoiding pregnancy reduce the likelihood of being able to effectively use NFP.

The worst thing about it, though, is that when you force women, especially women in poverty, in abusive situations, in crisis, to rely on a method of family planning that does not work, the result is that children are born into poverty, abuse and crisis. Its not just that the hierarchy is shoring up its own infallible authority at the expense of women. It is also doing it at the expense of children. In almost every case where a woman does not think it is a good idea for her to have a child, it is not a good idea for her to have a child. Having more children than you can handle is not good for the children. Having children in an abusive marriage is not good for the children. Having children because you are afraid of hell is an absolutely terrible reason to have children.

Using coercive threats to force women to risk pregnancy against our better judgement is an act of violence against women and children. The Church engages in this violence because the hierarchy is too arrogant and stubborn to be able to say You know, we have learned a lot in the past centuries and we got some things wrong.

This is evil.

Next time, well look at how the same kinds of misogyny and power-lust are at the heart of the Churchs teachings on homosexuality.

Read the rest here:
The Hate that Calls Itself Love pt 3: Reproductive Coercion - Patheos

The Nebraska Department of Education released a second draft of the state health education standards on Thursday after months of public criticism regarding sex education topics in the original proposal.

The standards human growth and development section was heavily revised to eliminate many of the previous guidelines around sex education, gender identity, sexual orientation, stereotypes and more, but some still remain.

The first draft included several in-depth standards such as teaching students, starting in elementary school, about genitalia differences, human reproduction, sexual health and pregnancy.

The new proposed standards dont contain the majority of these topics, and if they do, they are more brief and generic, which is based on reading through both sets of standards. More complex standards, which some parents deemed inappropriate for younger students, are also introduced more at the high school level rather than in elementary school.

Students would still learn about consent and sexual harassment. When it comes to human reproduction, students would now only learn how puberty prepares human bodies for the potential to reproduce in fifth grade and other levels.

Fertilization, fetal development and the birth process are standards included at the high school level. High school students would briefly learn about sexual health when it relates to preventative exams, STDs and the different stages of pregnancy.

The first draft also proposed students would learn about gender expression; different kinds of family structures such as same-gender families; and sexual identities such as heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay and more.

But the second draft is mostly devoid of these standards. The only standard that is similar is when students would recognize that biological sex and gender identity may or may not differ in seventh grade.

Gender identity is also listed as a term in the new drafts glossary, defining it as Internal deeply held thoughts and feelings about gender.

Gender roles are defined as attitudes and behaviors that a society considers appropriate for males and females.

The department of education faced heavy backlash from Nebraska communities since the first draft was released in March. Many families argued that sex education topics dont have a place in schools.

Groups of school officials, including the Norfolk Public Schools Board of Education, also objected to the standards, saying it should be the parents responsibility to bring up such topics with their children.

In the new draft, the Nebraska Department of Education asks school districts to consider sex education in their curriculum so students have the essential knowledge and critical skills needed to decrease sexual risk behaviors.

The department encourages districts to make decisions about these topics with the consultation of parents, school boards, teachers and community members.

The 53-page second draft still contains seven other sections besides human growth and development, including topics like nutrition, disease prevention, mental health and substance abuse prevention.

Matthew Blomstedt, the states education commissioner, was expected to announce more details about the new draft and next steps in the process during a press conference on Thursday at 11 a.m.

This second draft was also expected to be posted Thursday morning to the Nebraska Department of Educations website and is open to public comment.

The State Board of Education estimated it will vote on a final draft this fall, but the number of drafts before that decision is still unknown. If passed, the standards will be optional, and school districts could choose not to adopt them.

The rest is here:
Nebraska eliminates the majority of sex education topics from proposed health standards - Norfolk Daily News