A prosthetic hand is a critical tool that allows amputees to find normalcy in their lives, but some elements, such as complete freedom of movement and sensations of touch, are not the same as a real hand.

“They’ve come a long way and they have a long way to go,” said amputee Charity McFarland, who lost her left hand in a car accident almost four years ago.

McFarland said of the accident, “All I saw were lights and I basically was trying to avoid getting hit, but then the accident happened, so it was like a rollover. They told me that I rolled over three times.”

An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S are missing a limb, according to research at Rice University in Houston.

While existing prosthetic limbs allow amputees to regain some of their abilities, there are very few devices that provide sensory feedback for the users.

Researchers from Rice University, the University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology are working to allow amputees to better perceive what their prosthesis is doing.

McFarland heard about the research and volunteered to help. The focus of the research is to create what are called haptic devices to better replicate a biological hand for amputees.

“Haptics is anything that has to do with the sense of touch. Any textures that you discern or even the ability to realize that you’re making contact with something. How much pressure you’re putting on it, if it’s slipping, all of those are haptic sensations,” said Rice University graduate student Janelle Clark, who was one of the researchers who measured how well test subjects could distinguish the sizes of objects grasped by a prosthesis with and without haptic feedback.

The tests include a rocker placed onto the subject’s remaining limb that moves back and forth and stretches the skin so the person can sense what the prosthesis is doing. The amount of stretch correlates to how opened or closed the prosthetic hand is on the user.

“The idea behind the research that we’re doing here is to create haptic devices that are simple, they’re intuitive, they’re not going to break and so that people can start to have an understanding of what’s going on with their prosthetic without looking at it all the time,” Clark said.

Researchers found blindfolded test subjects were able to more than double their ability to distinguish the size of objects grasped with a prosthetic hand when they received haptic feedback from a skin-stretch device.

McFarland, however, wasn’t one of them. “I still wasn’t able to sense what it was doing completely,” she said.

“This is going to be a long-term project… to create some sort of artificial hand that has the same capabilities, but maybe there are other changes in the short term that would also be appreciated,” Rice researcher Clark said.

For now, McFarland says she would appreciate a prosthesis that looks like a hand and allows the fingers to move and the wrist to bend and rotate just like a real hand.
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From: MeNeedIt

How does a former stay-at-home mom become an employee of a tech company that could be worth more than $1 billion?

For Ellein Cheng, mom to a 5½- and a 2½-year-old, the answer involved a “returnship.”

So-called returnships are internships that target men and women who have been out of the workforce, either for childrearing or other caregiving. It gives them a chance to retrain in a new field.

In Cheng’s case, the former math teacher and tutor took a returnship at AppNexus, an online advertising company.

For companies, returnships are an opportunity to tap into more mature and professionally diverse talent pools. For participants who may be out of the workforce, it’s a chance to refresh their networks, learn new skills and try on new roles.

Beneficial arrangement

For both parties, it’s a low-risk, low-commitment arrangement. Companies can achieve their goals to make the employee ranks more diverse. Job seekers can potentially find full-time work.

Cheng’s returnship was set up by Path Forward [[www.pathforward.org/]], a New York-based nonprofit that works with tech companies to coordinate 16-week, paid assignments for those who have been away from the labor market for two or more years because of caregiving.

The organization partners with tech companies that range in size from 30-person startups to behemoths such as PayPal, which has more than 10,000 employees.

“What these companies of every size in the tech sector have in common is rapid growth, and also not enough talent to fulfill their needs,” said Tami Forman, executive director at Path Forward.

Women re-entering the workforce often struggle to explain the gap in their resume and find employment harder to come by, Forman said.

“They often get feedback from companies and recruiters and hiring managers that makes them believe that they’ll never be hired, that no one will ever overlook their gap,” she said. The organization says it gets results — 40 out of the 50 women who have gone through the program were offered ongoing employment at the companies in which they interned.

Teaching background

In her job search, Cheng applied for teaching positions but was also open to other fields. The product support work struck a chord with her in its appeal for candidates “passionate about learning and teaching.”

The program gave both managers and participants the chance to see if a long-term opportunity would be the right fit for them.

It also provided a dose of inspiration.

Other employees were “inspired to see people stepping out of their comfort zone, taking a big risk, working on something they haven’t done before,” Lorraine Buhannic, senior director of talent acquisition at AppNexus, said.

For Cheng, the inspiration came from a more personal place — her daughters.

They are growing up “in a world that is changing so quickly with technology, and I just want to be part of that,” she said. “I want to grow with them, I want to learn with them.”

In the end, the match worked. After the returnship, AppNexus hired Cheng as a product support specialist.

Now working in the fast-paced world of online advertising, Cheng says she doesn’t feel she has left her old self behind.

“I’m still obviously learning a lot, because I’m switching careers completely, but at the same time, still bringing the teaching element part of it every day to work,” she said.
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From: MeNeedIt

When the ebola crisis erupted in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent staff to help West African countries contain the pandemic. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research and supported pharmaceutical giants to produce a vaccine that would save lives but not turn a profit.

In his budget proposal, President Donald Trump seeks big cuts in spending on global health research. Those cuts could affect work being done to end malaria and AIDS and protect against other infectious diseases. 

Trump’s proposed 2018 budget calls for an 18 percent funding cut for NIH and a 17 percent cut for the CDC. 

Impact on health security

“If these cuts as proposed were enacted, it would have severe impact on health security,” said Stephen Morrison, who heads the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Watch: Proposed US Budget Cuts Could Have Severe Impact on Health Security

And in the long run could be costlier because it’s far cheaper to be ready for a disease outbreak than to fight one once it starts, Jami Bay Nishi of the Global Health Technologies Coalition said.

“The National Academy of Medicine put out a report estimating that responding to a pandemic threat costs $60 billion,” she said. “Yet, ongoing investment in preventative research in attempts to mitigate against a future threat is $1 billion per year.”

U.S. investments, Nishi said, have produced malaria drugs that have saved 750,000 lives and an inexpensive meningitis vaccine that has prevented nearly 400,000 deaths.

The NIH has been instrumental in the fight against AIDS and malaria. AIDS deaths are now close to half of what they were in 2005, according to the U.N. AIDS agency, and researchers seem to be closing in on a malaria vaccine.

In addition, large pharmaceutical companies, like Johnson and Johnson, need the government to back research, especially for drugs for low-income countries. said Jamie Taylor of Johnson and Johnson.

“We can’t do it on our own, and that’s definitive,” she said.

If cuts become routine

But, Morrison observed, the president’s budget request isn’t a done deal.

“He’s not going to get all that he wants, but he’s going to get something,” he said.

The main problem, as Morrison and others see it, is if budget cuts continue, the U.S. will lose its position as a world leader in medical research, and the world will be more vulnerable to the spread of infectious disease. 

Elizabeth Cameron, from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, says bioterrorism could also become a greater risk to the U.S.

“(It’s) absolutely vital that we get to a point where we’re able to respond to any disease threat that comes our way no matter how it comes our way,” Cameron said.

And, finally, Nishi argues, U.S. research and development (R&D) creates jobs that would be lost by budget cuts.

“U.S. government investments in global health R&D not only save millions of lives around the world, but they support U.S. jobs, the U.S. economy and U.S. health security,” she said.

But the secretary of the Health and Human Services Department thinks budget cuts can be made without any loss of research.

“I think what the budget is trying to do, in the first step in this process, is trying to bring focus to the kinds of things that we ought to be able to do to get a bigger bang for our buck,” said Dr. Tom Price, secretary of HHS.

Congress will tackle these issues when the lawmakers return from their summer recess in September.
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From: MeNeedIt

As national parks traveler Mikah Meyer wrapped up the last leg of his journey across the western state of Utah, he appears to have saved the best for last — with visits to Bryce and Zion national parks — the last two of the five national parks that make up the ‘Mighty 5.’

Hoodoo! Who knew?

Mikah was one of millions of visitors who are drawn to Bryce Canyon National Park each year. The park is home to the world’s largest collection of hoodoos — giant pillars of rock that were sculpted by erosion millions of years ago.

“What makes this place unique is that it’s not just like one, or two, or three, like you’ll see in many places,” Mikah noted. “It’s thousands!”

“Native Americans believe the hoodoos were former humans that were turned into rock,” Mikah explained. “I don’t know the whole story,” he added, but that was one explanation provided about the ancient formations that rise from the earth seemingly out of nowhere.

Observing the odd-shaped pillars from one of the many overlooks was special, Mikah said, but even better was “hiking down into them and exploring the hoodoos up close.” He especially liked looking up at some of the hoodoos that were supporting massive rocks on top of their thin pillars …  

“You wonder at what moment… that giant rock is going to come tumbling down and will I be underneath it when it does?”

Mikah had arrived at the park just in time for the sunset, which gave the surreal landscape a warm, golden glow.

“Man, am I glad I did!” he gushed. “I parked the car… ran out to the overlook and looked at the view and said to myself ‘this is a 10 — it’s a 10 park.’ I mean the view was just so incredible… at sunset or not… it is one of the most other worldly places I’ve seen in the United States.”

During his visit to Bryce Canyon, Mikah encountered an unexpected obstacle: a group of cows standing in the middle of the road, refusing to give way. At one point, he was worried one of the animals was going to charge his van, but instead, it took off, leading away the rest of the herd.

Utah’s first national park

The bovine roadblock was just a momentary distraction as Mikah made his way to Zion National Park, which welcomed almost 5 million visitors last year, making it the fifth-most visited national park in the United States.

Many consider Zion the granddaddy of all the Utah parks.

“I think what makes Zion so spectacular is this combination of red and orange rock, and lush green forests and plants,” Mikah said. “So many places are either lush greenery or stark canyons in orange and reds, but Zion National Park has both.”

Zion Canyon is the main focus of the park, Mikah explained, where “on every side you look, there is another peak that looks like a mountain in its own right, except they’re all together, all lined up on each side of the canyon.”

Angels Landing – a devilish climb

One of the most popular hikes is up Angels Landing, a 454 meter (1,488-foot) tall rock formation that’s considered by many to be the most challenging and dangerous trail in the park.

“What makes it so popular and so well-known is that for the last portion — maybe the last half mile — you are up on a very thin strip of rock; and it’s thin enough that the park service puts a bunch of chains that people can hold onto because since 2004, six people have fallen and died.”

It does look intimidating, Mikah admitted, “because you’re going along this thin strip of rock and either side you look, there’s very quick, dramatic drops all the way to the canyon floor and you see the shuttles driving by and the river passing through, so I think it’s popular because of this risk element that’s added into these dramatic views.”

But Mikah was undaunted, and described his four-hour roundtrip hike as a “very cool experience.”

Patriotic hike

On his second day of his visit, Mikah was invited by a group of experienced hikers on a 4-hour, back-country hike up a high plateau made up of sheer rock face, which had no trail.

“To get there, it was climbing on all fours, it was sliding down sheer rock faces, some of the guys cut their legs and they said, ‘oh, you know, it happens. Now that just proves that I was out here today.”

When he reached the peak, his fellow hikers asked him to sing, which he agreed to… belting out the National Anthem over the canyon.

“These gentlemen I was hiking with, most of them have never heard a Countertenor — which is a male Alto or Soprano — so I think they were shocked and surprised by that,” Mikah said, adding that he was surprised by the echo of his voice bouncing off the canyon walls, “so we all got something unexpected!”

The Mighty 5

As Mikah wrapped up his journey across Utah, he observed that the “Mighty 5” parks — Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks — are especially popular among foreign tourists.

“It’s an incredibly international audience at all these five sites,” he explained. “More so than any other site I’ve been to, tenfold.”

After spending time in those magical places himself, Mikah can understand why.

“The concept of how long nature and animal life has survived on its own without any human interference creating these majestic spaces that have changed by centimeters every year, and we’re witnessing this one speck of time in its marvelousness… it’s definitely a lot to wrap your mind around.”

Mikah invites you to follow him on his epic journey by visiting him on his website TCBMikah.com, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

NASA launched the last of its longtime tracking and communication satellites Friday, a vital link to astronauts in orbit as well as the Hubble Space Telescope.

The end of the era came with a morning liftoff of TDRS-M, the 13th satellite in the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network. It rode to orbit aboard an unmanned Atlas V rocket. There were handshakes all around two hours later, when the satellite successfully separated from the rocket’s upper stage.

“We’re going to really celebrate this one,” said launch director Tim Dunn.

NASA has been launching TDRS satellites since 1983. The 22,300-mile-high constellation links ground controllers with the International Space Station and other low-orbiting craft including Hubble.

“It’s like our baby,” said NASA’s Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation.

“People have invested their soul and their sweat into making it happen” over the decades, Younes said on the eve of launch. “This spacecraft has served us so well.”

This latest flight from Cape Canaveral was delayed two weeks after a crane hit one of the satellite’s antennas last month. Satellite maker Boeing replaced the damaged antenna and took corrective action to prevent future accidents. Worker error was blamed.

The rocket and satellite cost $540 million.

Space shuttles hoisted the first-generation TDRS satellites. The second in the series was aboard Challenger’s doomed flight in 1986. It was the only loss in the entire TDRS series.

TDRS-M is third generation. NASA’s next-generation tracking network will rely on lasers. This more advanced and robust method of relaying data was demonstrated a few years ago during the moon-orbiting mission LADEE. NASA hopes to start launching these high-tech satellites by 2024. Until then, the space agency will rely on the current network.

NASA needs seven active TDRS satellites at any given time, six for real-time support and one as a spare. The newest one will remain in reserve, until needed to replace aging craft.

Besides serving other spacecraft, the satellites help provide communication to outposts at the South Pole. In 1998, the network provided critical medical help to a doctor diagnosed with breast cancer.
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From: MeNeedIt

As national parks traveler Mikah Meyer wraps up the last leg of his journey across the western state of Utah, he appears to have saved the best for last – with visits to Bryce and Zion national parks — the last two of the five national parks that make up the ‘Mighty 5.’ He shared highlights of his experiences in some of the most stunning desert landscapes he’s seen on his epic national parks journey so far with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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From: MeNeedIt

The United Nations should name and shame countries that fail to protect health workers in war zones and audit what steps they take to keep medics safe, an aid expert said on Thursday.

International law bounds all warring parties to respect and protect medical personnel, but the provision is largely disregarded, with hospital and medics often deliberately targeted in conflict areas, aid agencies say.

Last year, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for an end to impunity for perpetrators, but little has been done to implement it, said Leonard Rubenstein, head of Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a network of aid groups.

“Since 2016, we have had complete international paralysis,” he told an event in London, blaming the stalemate on divisions between Russia and other members of the Security Council.

At least 80 people were killed in attacks on health facilities in 14 countries in the first three months of 2017, according to the World Health Organization.

More than half the attacks were in Syria.

Rubenstein said impartial investigations and reforming both military training and practice could improve safety for health workers — but nations had to be pushed into adopting them.

“The only way to get them to do it is to shame them,” he told a panel at the Overseas Development Institute via video link, ahead of World Humanitarian Day on Aug 19.

In order to do so, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights should issue annual reports highlighting what steps countries have taken to implement resolutions made the year before, Rubenstein said.

“It’s not the most powerful mechanism that we have — but it is the only one that we (have) really got at the moment, and I think that would go a long way to forcing the states to take the actions that they have committed to do,” he said.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

A U.S. researcher says she has developed automated ways to identify links between online sex trafficking ads and the digital currency Bitcoin, techniques that may help locate children being sold for sex.

Law enforcement and anti-trafficking groups could use the methods to investigate Backpage.com, an online classified advertising site where sex ads can be found, according to a statement by the University of California Berkeley, where the research was based.

About 1.5 million people in the United States are victims of trafficking, mostly for sexual exploitation, according to anti-trafficking groups.

Most sex trafficking victims are children, and most are advertised or sold online, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report released this year.

Algorithms do the digging

The new research uses an algorithm that analyzes writing styles to identify authors and could be applied to online trafficking ads, Rebecca Portnoff, its lead author, said Thursday.

A second algorithm can use time stamps to trace ad payments to accounts, known as wallets, at Bitcoin, a web-based digital currency that allows money to move quickly and anonymously.

Comparing time stamps of ad purchases on Bitcoin and time stamps and information on Backpage ads could help identify who is paying for them, said Portnoff, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in computer science who developed the techniques as part of her dissertation.

“Where previously you might have five different phone numbers that you had no idea were connected, when you can see that they all came from the same wallets, that the same person paid for them, that’s a concrete sign that these five phone numbers are all related to each other,” she said.

“I knew this was an issue that law enforcement was especially interested in,” she added.

Boost for law enforcement

Having automated style and time stamp analyses to identify sex ads by authors and Bitcoin owners is significant, said Damon McCoy, a New York University Tandon School of Engineering assistant professor of computer science and engineering and a co-author of the research.

“Any technique that can surface commonalities between ads and potentially shed light on the owners is a big boost for those working to curb exploitation,” McCoy said in a statement.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said more than 70 percent of the reports it gets of trafficked children involve Backpage, based in Dallas, Texas.

Backpage did not respond to a request for comment.

The findings will be published by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, UC Berkeley said.

It said the work was funded by the Amazon Web Services Cloud Credits for Research Program, the technology and security firm Giant Oak, Google, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
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From: MeNeedIt

The August 21 solar eclipse, the first to travel coast to coast in the United States in nearly a century, has inspired dozens of citizen science projects involving solar physics, atmosphere and biology.

“Millions of people … can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world-class data,” said Matthew Penn, an astronomer with the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Penn is coordinating a citizen science effort to photograph the sun’s volatile outer atmosphere, known as the corona.

The corona’s pearly light is typically obscured by the bright glare of the sun, but during a total eclipse, scientists can get a clear view of the outer crown, a mysterious region that triggers solar flares and other storms that can disrupt satellites, power grids and other systems on Earth.

The view does not last long. Because the moon is moving at more than 2,000 mph (3,200 kph), it blocks the sun for only a couple of minutes, not long enough to detect key changes in the corona.

93-minute show

The eclipse will cast the moon’s 70-mile-wide shadow, called the “path of totality,” across the United States over 93 minutes, temporarily bringing darkness to daytime skies.

Penn’s project, called The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse Experiment, or Citizen CATE, involves a network of volunteers who will be stationed along the path of the eclipse with identical telescopes to take digital photos of the corona. The pictures will later be spliced together into a 93-minute movie.

Citizen CATE participants require special equipment and training, but dozens of other projects are open to anyone in the path of totality with a camera or cellphone.

Google and the University of California-Berkley are teaming up for Eclipse Megamovie 2017, a crowdsourced compilation of eclipse imagery.

For a project called Life Responds, the California Academy of Sciences wants field reports about how animals and plant life react during the eclipse. Using an app called iNaturalist, amateur scientists will log their observations and get help identifying flora and fauna.

“We want to collect exactly what all these animals are doing as it gets dark — what do we see, what do we hear,” said University of Missouri astronomer Angela Speck.

A number of zoos, wildlife preserves and 20 national parks are in the path of the eclipse.

EclipseMob

Another app-driven science project is called EclipseMob, organized by George Mason University in Virginia and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. It aims to collect information about radio waves passing through Earth’s ionosphere, the electrically charged outer layer of the atmosphere.

When sunlight is blocked during an eclipse, the ionosphere is suddenly transformed. Using home-built radio receivers and smartphones, participants will pick up radio waves transmitted by EclipseMob in Colorado and California and record how the signals change.

Other apps will record temperature changes and monitor clouds. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American Astronomical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have lists of citizen science projects on their websites.

“This is an opportunity to draw people from across the country into being fans of science,” said astronomer Speck, co-chair of the American Astronomical Society’s National Total Solar Eclipse Task Force.

“The change in light is so fast and what you get to see is so amazing that even people who chase eclipses and have seen dozens of them will still be wowed by this,” Speck said. “It’s not just visual, it’s an all-over experience.”
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From: MeNeedIt

They’re muscular, fit, and in much better physical shape than most people. They’re competitive body builders, and many of them in the U.S. are women, something that was evident at a recent Washington-area competition called the OCB Presidential Cup. At that event, three-quarters of the competitors were women. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi hit the gym and a few places you might not expect in this report on what it takes to make it in the world of competitive bodybuilding.
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From: MeNeedIt

From the sky over occupied Europe to an elephants stable in India and to its final resting place in an air museum in England, this was the 100-year journey for one of the world’s first strategic bombers. And the last part was the most astonishing because the planes’ remains, found in India, were almost beyond recognition. VOA’s George Putic has the story.
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From: MeNeedIt

Reading to children is one of the best ways to prepare them for a lifetime of learning. It introduces babies to language and teaches youngsters about colors, shapes and letters. But an Australian quantum physicist is experimenting with something different. He’s writing science books for babies and toddlers. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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From: MeNeedIt