American foulbrood is an infectious disease that devastates honeybee hives. Scientists say they've created a vaccine for it, despite a big hurdle: Bees don't have antibodies.
(Source: NPR)
Friedberg, where the American rock legend served in the U.S. Army, has installed traffic lights that honor Presley.
(Source: NPR)
The world’s oldest known wild bird, a Laysan albatross that is at least 68 years old, has laid another egg.
Wisdom, who returns each year to Midway Atoll to nest, was sighted back at her favorite nest site in late November, and biologists at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge have now confirmed she’s brooding.
The remarkable albatross is believed to have laid nearly 40 eggs over the course of her life, although it’s impossible to know the precise number.
She has single-wingedly transformed scientists’ understanding of albatross lifespans and the age limits on avian reproduction. The bird is “a world renowned symbol of hope for all species that depend upon the health of the ocean to survive,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Wisdom is not just continuing to procreate — she’s doing it at an impressive clip, too. Many albatrosses take a year off between eggs, because the process of laying and incubating an egg is so energy-intensive.
But every year since 2006, Wisdom and her current mate, Akeakamai, have laid an egg at the same nest in Midway Atoll.
When not raising their young there, Wisdom and Akeakamai are world travelers. Albatrosses are renowned long-distance fliers, capable of soaring thousands of miles without even flapping their massive wings, more than 6 feet across.
"Time to walk the walk," Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "Very few members of Congress actually pay their interns. We will be one of them." With new appropriations, other members may soon join her.
(Source: NPR)
"I'm sorry that I hurt people," the comic said, referring to anti-gay tweets he had posted years earlier. He had initially refused to apologize, only to announce hours later that he was stepping down.
(Source: NPR)
At first, Stephen DiRado thought his dad was dealing with depression. Gene DiRado, then in his late 50s, had become more withdrawn, more forgetful. So Stephen processed his growing concern by doing what he’d done since the age of 12: taking photographs. It was the 1980s, and Stephen schlepped his 8x10 camera and tripod over to his parents’ home in Marlborough, Mass., to check in on Gene and make portraits of him.
“I was running toward him with the sense of fear that something was wrong,” Stephen says now about those years.
The camera, he thought, would help bring him closer to his dad, who was a painter. With each print, the two men would discuss the composition, the design. Increasingly, Gene was forgetting things. Still, it was years before Stephen realized his father was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Stephen’s black-and-white portraits of Gene, spanning decades, turned into a documentary project called With Dad. The project is the winner of the 2018 Bob and Diane Fund, awarded this week, which aims to support photographic work about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia through a $5,000 grant.
“I would see it in his face — and that’s when I would get that sinking feeling,” Stephen says of those early years, when he was struggling to come to terms with his dad’s declining health. “I started to look for me in those photos. What’s my role?”
The two continued the project until Gene’s death in 2009. Since then, Stephen has been photographing his mother Rose as she navigates life without her husband. With the grant money from the Bob and Diane Fund, Stephen plans to make a book of the photographs.
Photo credits: Stephen DiRado
(Source: NPR)
llustrated by LA Johnson
Written by Elissa Nadworny
(Source: NPR)
Programmers have banned the song after fielding listener complaints that the song is offensive, only to face a backlash against that decision.
(Source: NPR)
The U.S. drug crisis does not appear to be letting up. The nation experienced a shattering 47,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017.
Driving the surge are potent, cheap synthetics like fentanyl that have spread into the illicit drug supply. In response, communities have been trying a range of interventions, from increasing the availability of the antidote naloxone to upping treatment resources.
But an analysis released Thursday by the Rand Corporation, a policy think tank, concludes it’s time to pilot an approach from outside the U.S.: offering pharmaceutical-grade heroin — yes, heroin — as a form of treatment for longtime heroin users who haven’t had success with other treatments. It’s already happening in several European countries and Canada. But prescribing heroin would challenge culture, laws and practice in the U.S.
Here’s how programs that offer prescription heroin, or heroin-assisted treatment, work:
Patients typically get a regular, measured dose of pharmaceutical-grade heroin — also known as diacetylmorphine or diamorphine — and inject it under close medical supervision inside a designated clinic.
The idea is if people have a legal source of heroin, they’ll be less likely to overdose on tainted street drugs, spend less time and energy trying to get their next fix, and instead be able to focus on the underlying drivers of their addiction.
Image: picture alliance/picture alliance via Getty Image
(Source: NPR)
In the lush green mountain town of Lares, Puerto Rico, even the dead and buried were scarred by Hurricane Maria.
The September 2017 storm dumped so much rain onto the town’s only cemetery that it triggered a landslide. The flow of mud and water was so powerful that it damaged nearly 1,800 tombs — expelling caskets from their graves and sending some of them tumbling down a hillside.
The damage was so extensive — and so horrifying — that health officials locked the cemetery gates. They haven’t been reopened in the 14 months since. And so, for the families and friends of those buried in the Lares Municipal Cemetery, every day has only brought more heartache.
“My father is in there. My grandmother is in there,” said Giovanni Ramirez Santiago. “The town can’t take this anymore.”
Now, the town’s residents are furious that officials have yet to make any repairs. And the longer they’ve been kept out, the more desperate they’ve grown to get in. They want to see the damage to their family members’ tombs but are also fearful of what they’ll find.
“We want to fix them up, take them flowers,” said José Luis Rivera López, whose parents and sister are buried there. “But we can’t. If we cross the fence, they’ll arrest us.”
Across Puerto Rico, people are trying to leave the traumas of Hurricane Maria behind. But doing so has been impossible because the pace of the island’s reconstruction has been so slow. In Lares, the unrepaired destruction in the town’s cemetery has been an especially brutal reminder of everything the storm took.
The yearning for closure — for peace of mind — has led many residents to take drastic measures. Since the start of the year, more than 50 people have gotten permits to exhume the cadavers of their loved ones and take them away, according to figures provided by Puerto Rico’s health department.
Photos: Erika P. Rodriguez for NPR
(Source: NPR)