17 Pounds Of Plastic Kills Whale, Highlighting Ocean Pollution

Some 80 plastic bags extracted from within a whale are being laid out in Songkhla, Thailand, in this still image captured from video footage.

Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources/Social Media/via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS

Around 80 sopping wet, black plastic bags lined the floor of an operating room in Thailand last week after they were pulled from the stomach of a whale found stranded on a beach.

The pilot whale, which washed ashore in the southern province of Songkhla, later died after veterinarians tried for five days to save its life, according to the country's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources. An autopsy found nearly 17 pounds of plastic inside the whale's belly, a marine official told Reuters.

The whale's death and photos released by the department serve as a reminder of a growing global problem: plastic debris flowing into the ocean and killing wildlife.

"We are creating the horrible dystopian future that nobody wanted," Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and marine ecologist with National Geographic, tells Here & Now's Robin Young.

NPR

the shoe that grows

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microplastics in your shellfish

the human microbiome

mommy pooch

During pregnancy, the abdominal muscles responsible for a "six pack" stretch apart (left) 

to accommodate a growing fetus. After birth, the muscles don't always bounce back, 

leaving a gap known as the mommy pooch.

A comprehensive noise map created by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the interactive U.S. map on noise produced primarily by airports and interstate highways.

Chicago

Los Angeles

New York

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WATCH: Raindrops Catapult Bacteria Into The Air, And It's Beautiful

When you step outside after a big rainstorm and take a deep whiff of that fresh, earthy smell, you're mostly smelling a chemical called geosmin.

It's a byproduct of bacteria and fungi. And something about rain lofts the chemical — and sometimes the organisms themselves — into the air, a process that not only helps release that earthy smell but may, in very rare conditions, spread diseases.

Somehow raindrops launch tiny living things off the ground.

Wind can pick bacteria up from the ground and bring into the sky, sometimes settling in clouds thousands of feet above us. Sea spray can also send bacteria flying. The mystery has been, how does rain do it?

Now, mechanical engineers writing Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications say they've figured it out. It has to do with tiny bubbles.

Using high-speed cameras and fluorescent dye, the researchers filmed drops of water as they fell on different types of soil infused with bacteria. They watched as the drops delicately catapulted the microbes into the air. WATCH!

vitamin D and fruit for health!

who benefits under trump and the republicans health care plan

Both Obamacare and the recent Republican replacement proposal use refundable tax credits to help people buy their health insurance. That is part of the reason the new G.O.P. bill is under fire from conservatives, who see it as a new entitlement program.

But the structure of the tax credits is really different. Obamacare calculated the credits based on the cost of insurance in a given area and how much the purchaser could afford to pay. The Republican plan hands out tax credits on a flat basis, according to age. (Both plans cut off subsidies at a certain income level, on the assumption that high earners can pay their own way.) That means that the government subsidy you might get under the different plans would depend on a number of factors – age, income, address.

Analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated these subsidies for every county in the United States across these three variables. The result, shown in the maps above, reveals stark contrasts in federal support, particularly for lower-income Americans.

The biggest losers under the change would be older Americans with low incomes who live in high-cost areas. Those are the people who benefitedmost from Obamacare.

For some people, the new tax credit system will be more generous. The winners are likely to be younger, earn higher incomes and live in areas where the cost of health insurance is low.

Obamacare's subsidies were structured to limit how much low- and middle-income Americans could be asked to pay for health insurance. Under the G.O.P. proposal, many of the people whose tax credits would fall sharply would be likely to end up uninsured. For people with few resources, a gap of several thousands of dollars between their tax credit and the cost of coverage would be impossible to make up.

That's why many policy experts believe that the new system would result in fewer Americans having health insurance.

But if you put Obamacare out of your mind, this program still represents a very large outlay of federal money to help Americans buy health insurance. Before Obamacare passed, those buying their own insurance did not receive government subsidies. And the tax credits in the Republican bill would go to people regardless of whether they even paid taxes -- another reason conservatives oppose it.

nytimes

black lung

A display case at NIOSH shows a normal lung and a diseased black lung from inhaling coal dust and other harmful particles while coal mining.

Howard Berkes/NPR npr

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged

Most of the world didn't know anyone lived in the highlands of Papua New Guinea until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors surveying the area realized there were about a million people there.

When researchers made their way to those villages in the 1950s, they found something disturbing. Among a tribe of about 11,000 people called the Fore, up to 200 people a year had been dying of an inexplicable illness. They called the disease kuru, which means "shivering" or "trembling."

Once symptoms set in, it was a swift demise. First, they'd have trouble walking, a sign that they were about to lose control over their limbs. They'd also lose control over their emotions, which is why people called it the "laughing death." Within a year, they couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves or control their bodily functions.

Many locals were convinced it was the result of sorcery. The disease primarily hit adult women and children younger than 8 years old. In some villages, there were almost no young women left.

"They were obsessed with trying to save themselves because they knew demographically that they were on the brink of extinction," says Shirley Lindenbaum, a medical anthropologist with the City University of New York.

But what was causing it? That answer eluded researchers for years. After ruling out an exhaustive list of contaminants, they thought it must be genetic. So in 1961, Lindenbaum traveled from village to village mapping family trees so researchers could settle the issue.

But Lindenbaum, who continues to write about the epidemic, knew it couldn't be genetic, because it affected women and children in the same social groups, but not in the same genetic groups. She also knew that it had started in villages in the north around the turn of the century, and then moved south over the decades.

Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on, and she turned out to be right. It had to do with funerals. Specifically, it had to do with eating dead bodies at funerals.

In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief.

As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects."

Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.

"So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body — taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.

But women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. "Snacks," says Lindenbaum. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain age and went off to live with the men. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."

Finally, after urging from researchers like Lindenbaum, biologists came around to the idea that the strange disease stemmed from eating dead people. The case was closed after a group at the U.S. National Institutes of Health injected infected human brain into chimpanzees, and watched symptoms of kuru develop in the animals months later. The group, which won a Nobel Prize for the findings, dubbed it a "slow virus."

But it wasn't a virus — or a bacterium, fungus, or parasite. It was an entirely new infectious agent, one that had no genetic material, could survive being boiled, and wasn't even alive.

As another group would find years later, it was just a twisted protein, capable of performing the microscopic equivalent of a Jedi mind trick, compelling normal proteins on the surface of nerve cells in the brain to contort just like them. The so-called "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles," would eventually misfold enough proteins to kill pockets of nerve cells in the brain, leaving the cerebellum riddled with holes, like a sponge.

The process was so odd that some compared it to Dr. Jekyll's transformation to Mr. Hyde: "the same entity but in two manifestations — a 'kind', innocuous one and a 'vicious', lethal one." npr

On the Seasonal Occurrence and Abundance of the Zika Virus Vector Mosquito Aedes Aegypti in the Contiguous United States

effectiveness of mosquito repellents

Coffee is no longer classified as a possible carcinogen

There isn't enough proof to show a link between coffee and cancer, and coffee is no longer classified as a possible carcinogen, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says.

"I'm not really sure why coffee was in a higher category in the first place," Owen Yang, an epidemiologist at Oxford University who has examined the possible link between coffee and cancer, told the Associated Press.

"The best evidence available suggests that coffee does not raise the cancer risk," said Yang, who was not part of the IARC expert panel that reexamined the link between coffee and cancer and outlined its conclusions in a letter published in The Lancet Oncology journal.

However, IARC also said that drinking "very hot" beverages of any kind could possibly boost cancer risk and classified them as "probably carcinogenic" to people, the APreported.

how well do you know your shit?

California To Permit Medically Assisted Suicide As Of June 9

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed landmark legislation last October that would allow terminally ill people to request life-ending medication from their physicians.

But no one knew when the law would take effect, because of the unusual way in which the law was passed — in a legislative "extraordinary session" called by Brown. The bill could not go into effect until 90 days after that session adjourned.

The session closed Thursday, which means the End of Life Option Act will go into effect June 9.

"We're glad to finally have arrived at this day where we have a date certain," says Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel.

"It's a historic achievement for California, and for a limited universe of people dealing with a terminal illness," Monning says. "It could indeed be a transformative way of giving them the option of a compassionate end-of-life process."

Disability-rights advocates fought hard last year against passage of the legislative act, and they continue to voice concern.

Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, says it would be impossible to know, for example, if a depressed patient went to many doctors — who all denied the request for lethal medication — before finding one who agreed to write the prescription.

"We are looking ahead at measures to protect people from abuse," Golden says, "and to explore and inform doctors, nurses and pharmacists that they don't have to participate."

As written, the law requires two doctors to agree, before prescribing the drugs, that a patient has six months or less to live. Patients must be able to swallow the medication themselves and must affirm in writing, 48 hours before taking the medication, that they will do so.

California is the fifth state to permit this option at the end of life. It joins Vermont, Oregon, Washington and Montana.

Across the state, some patients with advanced cancer welcomed the news.

"It gives me a great peace of mind to know that I will not be forced to die slowly and painfully," says Elizabeth Wallner, in a release from Compassion & Choices, an aid-in-dying advocacy group. Wallner, 52, of Sacramento, is a single mother with stage 4 colon cancer that has spread to her liver and lungs.

"It gives great comfort to know that the agonizingly traumatic image of me suffering will not be my family's last memory of me," she says.

Monning says he's grateful to people who worked for passage of the law, some in their final days:

• Brittany Maynard, an Orange County, Calif., woman with brain cancer, moved to Oregon to take advantage of laws there that allowed her to get lethal medication. Before she died in 2014, she recorded a video that was shown during hearings on the End of Life Option Act in Sacramento.
• Jennifer Glass, of San Mateo, Calif., helped to launch the campaign in 2014, then died of lung cancer last year.
• Christy O'Donnell, 47, of Los Angeles, died of lung cancer last month.

"I really believe," Monning says, "we use today to mark and dedicate the memory of some true champions." npr

Study Finds Multiple Problems In Fetuses Exposed To Zika Virus

The Zika virus has sparked international alarm largely because of fears that the pathogen is causing microcephaly, a condition in which babies are born with unusually small heads and damaged brains.

But the preliminary results of a study released Friday suggest Zika can also cause other potentially grave complications for fetuses carried by women who get infected while they are pregnant.

"There seems to be a whole spectrum of conditions that are related to this — not only microcephaly," says Karin Nielsen-Saines, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who led the study.

The analysis, based on the first 42 women in a larger ongoing study, found that Zika appears to increase the risk for miscarriages, poorly developed placentas, low or no amniotic fluid, severe growth problems, other kinds of brain damage, blindness and deafness, according to a preliminary report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The results "make a very strong case for Zika virus being the cause of all these pregnancy outcomes that are not very good," Nielsen-Saines says.

She cautions, however, that the study is still small and needs to be confirmed by following many more women for longer periods of time.

The link between Zika and microcephaly remains largely circumstantial. It's based on the observation that the number of cases of microcephaly appear to have increased in Brazil since the virus became epidemic in that country. Researchers have also found evidence of Zika in the brains of a handful of babies with microcephaly who died shortly after birth.

Concern about a possible link sparked a rush of studies to test the possibility, as well as explore whether the virus is causing other problems.

The new results mark the first from a prospective study, which involves tracking the health of women who are infected with Zika and comparing them to very similar people who are not infected.

"The take-home message is that this is another important addition to the growing evidence that seems to now be quite compelling of the relationship between infection of pregnant women and the development of congenital abnormalities," says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

For the study, Nielsen-Saines and colleagues from Brazil identified 88 women in the Rio de Janeiro area who had symptoms of Zika when they were pregnant. Seventy-two of the women had their Zika infection confirmed by polymerase-chain reaction (PCR) testing, which can identify genetic material from the virus.

Forty-two of those women, as well as 16 women who did not test positive for Zika, underwent ultrasounds to examine their fetuses. The ultrasounds of 12 of the infected women — 29 percent — found abnormalities. None of the Zika-negative women's ultrasounds found any problems.

Five of the fetuses being carried by the Zika-infected women were not growing normally; seven had central nervous system abnormalities; and seven had abnormalities in amniotic fluid volume or blood flow. In some cases, placentas didn't seem to be developing normally.

The problems observed on the ultrasounds are being explored and confirmed as the babies are being born. For example, two of the infants have lesions in their retinas, Nielsen-Saines says, which means they might be blind. And she said that some may be deaf. Two were born extremely small, which means they could experience complications of low birth weight. One baby was born with microcephaly.

And some of the fetuses are not making it to birth. There were two miscarriages early in the pregnancies, and two stillbirths just a few weeks before the babies were due, Nielsen-Saines says.

Other experts say the results are alarming, given the scope of the Zika outbreak.

"Millions are being affected as the epidemic has spread throughout the Americas," says Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, who is studying Zika in Brazil. So, yes, I think this is very disturbing." npr

effectiveness of mosquito repellents

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Lack Of Deep Sleep May Set The Stage For Alzheimer's

There's growing evidence that a lack of sleep can leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.

"Changes in sleep habits may actually be setting the stage" for dementia, says Jeffrey Iliff, a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

The brain appears to clear out toxins linked to Alzheimer's during sleep, Iliff explains. And, at least among research animals that don't get enough solid shut-eye, those toxins can build up and damage the brain.

Iliff and other scientists at OHSU are about to launch a study of people that should clarify the link between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease in humans.

It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease.

For a long time, researchers thought this was simply because the disease was "taking out the centers of the brain that are responsible for regulating sleep," Iliff says. But two recent discoveries have suggested the relationship may be more complicated.

The first finding emerged in 2009, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis showed that the sticky amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's develop more quickly in the brains of sleep-deprived mice.

Then, in 2013, Iliff was a member of a team that discovered how a lack of sleep could be speeding the development of those Alzheimer's plaques: A remarkable cleansing process takes place in the brain during deep sleep, at least in animals.

What happens, Iliff says, is "the fluid that's normally on the outside of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid — it's a clean, clear fluid — it actually begins to recirculate back into and through the brain along the outsides of blood vessels."

This process, via what's known as the glymphatic system, allows the brain to clear out toxins, including the toxins that form Alzheimer's plaques, Iliff says.

"That suggests at least one possible way that disruption in sleep may predispose toward Alzheimer's disease," he says.

To know for sure, though, researchers will have to study this cleansing process in people, which won't be easy.

Iliff studied the glymphatic system in living mice by looking through a window created in the skull. The system also involved a powerful laser and state-of-the-art microscope.

With people, "we have to find a way to see the same sort of function, but in a way that is going to be reasonably noninvasive and safe," he says.

The solution may involve one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machines, which sits in a basement at OHSU. The MRI unit is so sensitive, it should be able to detect changes that indicate preciselywhen the glymphatic system gets switched on in a person's brain, says Bill Rooney, who directs the university's Advanced Imaging Research Center.

When humans enter deep sleep, and toxin removal begins, there should be a particular change in the signal coming from certain salt molecules. That would indicate that fluid has begun moving freely through the brain.

In young, healthy brains, the signal should be "robust," Rooney says, indicating that the toxin removal system is working well. In the brains of older people, and those who are likely to develop Alzheimer's, the signal should be weaker.

Rooney and Iliff have received funding from the Paul G. Allen Foundation to test their approach. They hope to begin scanning the brains of participants within a year.

One challenge, though, will be finding people able to fall asleep in the cramped and noisy tunnel of the magnetic resonance machine.

"It's a tricky thing because it's a small space," Rooney says. "But we'll make people as comfortable as possible, and we'll just follow them as they go through these natural stages of sleep."

If Rooney and Iliff are right, the experiment will greatly strengthen the argument that a lack of sleep can lead to Alzheimer's disease. It might also provide a way to identify people whose health is at risk because they aren't getting enough deep sleep, and it could pave the way to new treatments.

"It could be anything from having people exercise more regularly, or new drugs," Rooney says. "A lot of the sleep aids don't particularly focus on driving people to deep sleep stages." npr

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