Since the 1990s, annual numbers of U.S. coal miners with new, confirmed cases of an advanced form of so-called black lung disease known as progressive massive fibrosis have been steadily rising, according to a new study.

The resurgence is particularly strong among central Appalachian miners in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, the study authors note.

“It’s an entirely preventable disease, and every case is an important representation of a failure to prevent this disease,” said lead study author Kirsten Almberg of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Progressive massive fibrosis is the most severe form of pneumoconiosis, which is also known as black lung disease and is caused by overexposure to coal mine dust. The symptoms are debilitating and can lead to respiratory distress.

“Many people think black lung is a relic of the past,” she told Reuters Health in a phone interview. “But it shouldn’t fade from our attention.”

Almberg and colleagues looked at the number of progressive massive fibrosis cases among former U.S. coal miners applying for Federal Black Lung Program benefits between 1970 and 2016.Miners can apply for financial help and medical coverage if facing disabling lung impairment, and claims are accepted when medical tests and imaging verify the presence of disabling pulmonary impairment.

Progressive massive fibrosis is “by definition” considered totally disabling, the authors note in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

Among 314,000 miners who applied for benefits during the 46-year period, the research team found 4,679 cases of confirmed progressive massive fibrosis, with 2,474 of these representing claims filed since 1996.

The yearly number of cases fell from 404 in 1978 to 18 in 1988 but then began increasing each year, with 383 confirmed cases in 2014, the study found. At the same time, employment has declined from 250,000 miners in 1979 to 81,000 in 2016, the authors note.

“It’s pretty staggering that more than half of the cases were in the more recent period since 1996,” Almberg said. “These are our first snapshots of how big this problem really is.”

The increase has most dramatically impacted the Appalachian region. About 84 percent of miners with confirmed cases of progressive massive fibrosis last mined in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, although only 62 percent of claims originated in these states.

“Put simply, we still do not know exactly why severe disease has increased so much among miners in central Appalachia or when this trend may reverse,” said Emily Sarver, a mining and minerals engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Future research should look at the different factors that may affect this ongoing increase in diagnoses, such as changes in the types of dust in mining environments, said Sarver, who works with mine partners to sample dust in active operations and characterize what’s in it and the size of particles.

“This is a real and very complex problem. Unlike safety issues, which are oftentimes apparent or can be identified and mitigated quickly, the exposure-response time with many health issues is quite long,” she said. “If I am exposed to hazardous dust today, for example, it may not impact my lungs for a decade or more, and I may experience a different outcome than another person exposed to the same dust.”

Similarly, Almberg and study co-author Robert Cohen of NIOSH and National Jewish Health and University of Colorado in Denver are working with mining engineers and pathologists to study coal mine dust in lung tissue samples to understand what causes progressive massive fibrosis to develop.

They’re comparing lung tissue samples from current cases to samples collected from autopsies of former miners, and want to understand whether new mining techniques may create smaller dust particles that drive the disease deeper into the lungs or whether more toxic carbon or coal dust is being expelled from mines.

“Like any person, you should expect to be able to work for a full career and leave the workforce and still have your health and life ahead of you,” Almberg said. “Coal miners aren’t the only ones exposed to hazardous materials on the job, and we should be able to catch this early and prevent it from progressing to the severe stages of the disease.”
…

Vice President Mike Pence is in Houston, Texas, to reaffirm the Trump administration’s plans to establish an American Space Force by 2020, return Americans to the moon, and set its sight on Mars and beyond.

During a speech Thursday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Pence said that recent Pentagon reports have shown that China is “aggressively weaponizing space” and that Russia is developing weapons to “counter America’s space capabilities.”

Pence said the Department of Defense is moving forward to “strengthen American security in space” and that the administration will work with Congress to secure funding and authorization to establish Space Force as a new and separate branch of the armed forces.

Pence also highlighted efforts to move the Lunar Orbital Platform, formerly known as the Deep Space Gateway, from proposal phase to production. NASA, the main U.S. agency for space exploration, and several of its partners, have been developing plans for this lunar-orbit space station that would be used as a staging point for lunar exploration and would have several gateway-to-space features, including a propulsion system, a habitat for the crew, and docking capability.

In its 2019 budget, NASA has requested $504 million in funding for this project, which has yet to be approved by Congress.

There was little new detail in Pence’s speech other than reiterating the administration’s vision for “American dominance in space.” Space Force has been mentioned by Pence on several occasions, and a theme that President Donald Trump often returns to, including during his rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on Tuesday.

Trump first announced the creation of Space Force at the White House in June. He pledged to reclaim U.S. leadership in space, framing it as a national security issue, and saying he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.”

Trump’s Space Force has triggered debate in military space exploration, as well as legal circles, including whether it may violate international law. The U.S. is a signatory and ratifier of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

The treaty prevents any nation from declaring sovereignty over space or heavenly bodies, and prohibits space-faring countries from blocking other nations from exploring space. There are further restrictions over military presence on heavenly bodies such as the moon, which according to the treaty “shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

Last December, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, a national space policy directing a government-private partnership with the goal of returning Americans to the moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond.

The policy calls for the NASA administrator to “lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.”

Pence has been the leading spokesperson for the U.S. space program, delivering remarks about the country’s space ambitions on behalf of the president.
…

Russian scientists have found the carcass of an ancient foal perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost.

The fossil discovered in the region of Yakutia has its skin, hair, hooves and tail preserved. Yakutia is also famous having wooly mammoth fossils found in the permafrost.  

Scientists from Russia’s Northeast Federal University who presented the discovery Thursday said the foal is estimated to be 30,000 to 40,000 years old. They believe it was about two months old when it died.

Semyon Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in the regional capital of Yakutsk, was surprised to see the perfect state of the find. He noted it’s the best-preserved ancient foal found to date.

The foal was discovered in the Batagaika crater, a huge 100-meter (328-foot) deep depression in the East Siberian taiga.
…

For the millions of sun seekers who head to Thailand’s resort island of Phuket each year in search of stunning beaches and clear waters, cutting down on waste may not be a top priority.

But the island’s hotel association is hoping to change that with a series of initiatives aimed at reducing the use of plastic, tackling the garbage that washes up on its shores, and educating staff, local communities and tourists alike.

“Hotels unchecked are huge consumers and users of single-use plastics,” said Anthony Lark, president of the Phuket Hotels Association and managing director of the Trisara resort.

“Every resort in Southeast Asia has a plastic problem. Until we all make a change, it’s going to get worse and worse,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Established in 2016 and with about 70 members – including all Phuket’s five-star hotels – the association has put tackling environmental issues high on its to-do list.

Last year the group surveyed members’ plastics use and then began looking at ways to shrink their plastics footprint.

As part of this, three months ago the association’s hotels committed to phase out, or put plans in place to stop using plastic water bottles and plastic drinking straws by 2019.

About five years ago, Lark’s own resort with about 40 villas used to dump into landfill about 250,000 plastic water bottles annually. It has now switched to reusable glass bottles.

The hotel association also teamed up with the documentary makers of “A Plastic Ocean”, and now show an edited version with Thai subtitles for staff training.

Meanwhile hotel employees and local school children take part in regular beach clean-ups.

“The association is involved in good and inclusive community-based action, rather than just hotel general managers getting together for a drink,” Lark said.

Creator and Victims

Phuket, like Bali in Indonesia and Boracay in the Philippines, has become a top holiday destination in Southeast Asia – and faces similar challenges.

Of a similar size to Singapore and at the geographical heart of Southeast Asia, Phuket is easily accessible to tourists from China, India, Malaysia and Australia.

With its white sandy beaches and infamous nightlife, Phuket attracts about 10 million visitors each year, media reports say, helping make the Thai tourism industry one of the few bright spots in an otherwise lackluster economy.

Popular with holiday makers and retirees, Phuket – like many other Southeast Asian resorts – must contend with traffic congestion, poor water management and patchy waste collection services.

Despite these persistent problems, hotels in the region need to follow Phuket’s lead and step up action to cut their dependence on plastics, said Susan Ruffo, a managing director at the U.S.-based non-profit group Ocean Conservancy.

Worldwide, between 8 million and 15 million tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean every year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain, UN Environment says.

Five Asian countries – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand – account for up to 60 percent of plastic waste leaking into the seas, an Ocean Conservancy study found.

“As both creators and ‘victims’ of waste, the hotel industry has a lot to gain by making efforts to control their own waste and helping their guests do the same,” Ruffo said.

“We are seeing more and more resorts and chains start to take action, but there is a lot more to be done, particularly in the area of ensuring that hotel waste is properly collected and recycled,” she added.

Changing Minds, Cutting Costs

Data on how much plastic is used by hotels and the hospitality industry is hard to find. But packaging accounts for up to 40 percent of an establishment’s waste stream, according to a 2011 study by The Travel Foundation, a U.K.-based charity.

Water bottles, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes and even food delivered by room service all tend to use throw-away plastics.

In the past, the hospitality industry has looked at how to use less water and energy, said Von Hernandez, global coordinator at the “Break Free From Plastic” movement in Manila.

Now hotels are turning their attention to single-use plastics amid growing public awareness about damage to oceans.

“A lot of hotels are doing good work around plastics,” adopting measures to eliminate or shrink their footprint, said Hernandez.

But hotels in Southeast Asia often have to contend with poor waste management and crumbling infrastructure.

“I’ve seen resorts in Bali that pay staff to rake the beach every morning to get rid of plastic, but then they either dig a hole, and bury it or burn it on the beach,” said Ruffo. “Those are not effective solutions, and can lead to other issues.”

Hotels should look at providing reusable water containers and refill stations, giving guests metal or bamboo drinking straws and bamboo toothbrushes, and replacing single-use soap and shampoo containers with refillable dispensers, experts said.

“Over time, this could actually lower their operational costs – it could give them savings,” said Hernandez. “It could help change mindsets of people, so that when they go back to their usual lives, they have a little bit of education.”

Back in Phuket, the hotel association is exploring ways to cut plastic waste further, and will host its first regional forum on environmental awareness next month.

The hope is that what the group has learned over the last two years can be implemented at other Southeast Asian resorts and across the wider community.

“If the 20,000 staff in our hotels go home and educate mum and dad about recycling or reusing, it’s going to make a big difference,” said Lark.
…

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has a vision for renewed and “sustainable” human exploration of the moon, and he cites the existence of water on the lunar surface as a key to chances for success.

“We know that there’s hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said in a Reuters TV interview in Washington on Tuesday, a day after NASA unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India.

The findings, published on Monday, mark the first time scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the moon’s surface – in hundreds of patches of ice deposited in the darkest and coldest reaches of its polar regions.

The discovery holds tantalizing implications for efforts to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century.

The presence of water offers a potentially valuable resource not only for drinking but for producing more rocket fuel and oxygen to breathe.

Bridenstine, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and Oklahoma congressman tapped by President Donald Trump in April as NASA chief, spoke about “hundreds of billions of tons” of water ice that he said were now known to be available on the lunar surface.

But much remains to be learned.

NASA lunar scientist Sarah Noble told Reuters separately by phone that it is still unknown much ice is actually present on the moon and how easy it would be to extract in sufficient quantities to be of practical use.

“We have lots of models that give us different answers. We can’t know how much water there is,” she said, adding that it will ultimately take surface exploration by robotic landers or rovers, in more than one place, to find out.

Most of the newly confirmed frozen water is concentrated in the shadows of craters at both poles, where the temperature never rises higher than minus-250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Making Moon Exploration Sustainable

Although the moon was long believed to be entirely dry or nearly devoid of moisture, scientists have found increasing evidence in recent years that water exists there.

A NASA rocket sent crashing into a permanently shadowed lunar crater near the moon’s south pole in 2009 kicked up a plume of material from beneath the surface that included water.

A study published the following year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that water is likely widespread within the moon’s rocky interior, in concentrations ranging from 64 parts per billion to five parts per million.

Bridenstine spoke to Reuters about making the next generation of lunar exploration a “sustainable enterprise,” using rockets and other space vehicles that could be used again and again.

“So we want tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit to be reusable. We want a space station around the moon to be there for a very long period of time, and we want landers that go back and forth between the space station around the moon and the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said.

NASA’s previous program of human moon exploration ended with the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Trump last December announced a goal of sending American astronauts back to the moon, with the ultimate goal of establishing “a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars.”

The Trump administration’s $19.9 billion budget proposal for NASA for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes $10.5 billion for human space exploration.

The budget supports development of NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft designed to carry a crew into space. The administration envisioned a SLS/Orion test flight around the moon without a crew in 2020, followed by a fly-around mission with a crew in 2023.

As part of the budget proposal, NASA also is planning to build the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway – a space station in moon orbit – in the 2020s. NASA said the power and propulsion unit, its initial component, is targeted to launch in 2022.

In May, NASA canceled a lunar rover that was under development, a project envisioned as the first mission to conduct mining somewhere other than Earth.
…