Alone in the Universe

Are we alone in the universe?

It's a question that's been posed again and again. Carl Sagan posed it in the 1970s as a NASA mission scientist as the agency prepared to send its twin Viking landers to Mars.

And nearly 50 years after the first of two landers touched down on Mars, we're no closer to an answer as to whether there's life — out there.

Scientists haven't stopped looking. In fact, they've expanded their gaze to places like Saturn's largest moon, Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa.

The search for life beyond planet earth continues to captivate. And NASA has upcoming missions to both moons. Could we be closer to answering that question Carl Sagan asked some 50 years ago?     READ MORE...

Americans Are Becoming Less Produtive

Brian Bouser, 22, says his recent experiences in the workforce have prompted him to go into business for himself.  Brian Bouser

All of the quiet quitting rolling through the country is starting to make some real economic noise.

Data now shows that the U.S. workforce is not as productive as just a year ago — it seems people are not producing as much in the hours between clocking in and clocking out each day. 

In the end, this could have a profound effect on the country's well-being, according to economists.

For Brian Bouser, 22, questions about how much effort to put in at work began when he received a text in the middle of art history class at the University of Louisville last year. 

His boss at the car rental company where he made $25 an hour informed him his pay was going down to $13.50 an hour, without any explanation.

Bouser learned that all of his colleagues had seen their wages basically cut in half, and at a moment when companies were desperate for workers and pay was rising across the country. 

Still, he said that in his short time in the American workforce, where he'd already been laid off from another job at the beginning of the pandemic, he knew this is just how it goes with companies.  READ MORE...

OPEC+ Cuts Oil Production - Gas Prices to Rise

A man walks past OPEC headquarters in Vienna on Tuesday on the eve of the 45th meeting of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee and the 33rd OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting. The in-person meeting of OPEC members led by Saudi Arabia and allied members headed by Russia will be the first in the Austrian capital since the spring of 2020.  Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

In Vienna on Wednesday, the OPEC+ alliance is expected to consider a cut in oil production of up to 1 million to 2 million barrels a day — an amount that could drive oil and gas prices back up after weeks on a downward trend.

The meeting of the 24 OPEC+ oil-producing countries, including Russia, comes at a time when much of the world is already battling soaring energy costs. 

A supply cut could also exacerbate tensions between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., where President Biden has been trying to rein in prices at the gas pump ahead of the midterm elections.

OPEC+, formed in 2016, includes the 13 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members and 11 other non-OPEC members.  READ MORE...

An Ice Age Bison

Gold miners discovered the mummified Steppe Bison now called "Blue Babe." Researchers believe it is more than 55,000 years old. Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating tools can't measure any further back that.  University of Alaska Museum of the North



In 1979, researchers unearthed the mummified body of a 55,000-year-old Steppe bison in the Alaskan tundra. Shortly after, they sliced off a piece of its neck — to eat!

Here's a news story told in rhyme:
This is not a traditional story.
Not many names or dates, so don't worry.

It's also not incredibly timely,
But it's about an ice age Steppe bison
And a man whose thought process defies me.

Let's start with the creature, lived more than 55,000 years ago
Was brought to his knees by a lion-ancestor foe.

Down went the bison on permafrost ground,
Which kept him from being eaten or found.

Neither predator nor man disturbed the behemoth mass
As it remained encased in a protective frozen glass.

Leaping forward to 1979,
a team of explorers venture out to mine

Gold is what they are on the lookout for,
on the spot where the bison hit the floor

With a hydraulic mining hose, they melted away,
Some frozen sludge, 'til someone said, Whoa! Stop! Hey!

They reported their findings to University of Alaska Fairbanks officials
Dale Guthrie, led the excavation, limiting interstitials.

The skeleton, the skin, the muscles — all in near-impeccable condition,

Guthrie named it Blue Babe, then sliced off a piece for a culinary mission.

"You know what we can do?," he asked
Host a dinner party and with cooking the meat, I'll be tasked.

The Blue Babe neck steak served eight,
With veggies and spices, and lots of booze they ate

Years later, writing about the taste,
Guthrie said, When thawed, one could mistake

The aroma for beef, not unpleasantly earthy.
But once in the mouth, his wife, Mary Lee Guthrie,
Told podcasters from Gimlet, it was worse than beef jerky.

Still, it was a great party, she fondly remembered,
A dreamy symbolism of the meal that endured.

It was a feast; by all counts a true celebration
An "imagining of the human experience on earth!,"
She said, with elation.

Global Hunger

UNITED NATIONS — The spike in food, fuel and fertilizer prices sparked by the war in Ukraine is threatening to push countries around the world into famine, bringing "global destabilization, starvation and mass migration on an unprecedented scale," a top U.N. official warned Wednesday.

David Beasley, head of the U.N. World Food Program, said its latest analysis shows that "a record 345 million acutely hungry people are marching to the brink of starvation" — a 25% increase from 276 million at the start of 2022 before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The number stood at 135 million before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

"There's a real danger it will climb even higher in the months ahead," he said. "Even more worrying is that when this group is broken down, a staggering 50 million people in 45 countries are just one step away from famine."

Beasley spoke at a high-level U.N. meeting for the release of the latest report on global hunger by the World Food Program and four other U.N. agencies that paints a grim picture.

The report, "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World," says world hunger rose in 2021, with around 2.3 billion people facing moderate or severe difficulty obtaining enough to eat. The number facing severe food insecurity increased to about 924 million.

The prevalence of "undernourishment" — when food consumption is insufficient to maintain an active and healthy life — is used to measure hunger, and it continued to rise in 2021. The report estimates that between 702 million and 828 million people faced hunger last year.  READ MORE...

Renaming Clingman's Dome

The view from Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The mountain is the tallest peak in the park and sits on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. It's sacred to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who hope to see the name of the mountain changed to Kuwahi, which their ancestors called the mountain for hundreds of years.  Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council passed a resolution Thursday in support of changing the name of the highest peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Clingmans Dome.

Long before the mountain on the Tennessee-North Carolina border was a National Park attraction, the Cherokee referred to it as Kuwahi, which translates to "mulberry place." Tribal medicine men would journey up the mountain and pray for guidance, then share the visions they had with the rest of the community.

Lavita Hill, treasury specialist for the tribe, said she and her friend, fellow activist Mary Crowe, spent the last month preparing the name change proposal for the tribal government's approval. Hill said she was inspired by Yellowstone National Park's renaming of Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain, which was based on the recommendation of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Council.

Just Deleting a Text on Your Phone

When you save or send photos, videos, texts and other digital messages on your devices,

that data is extremely difficult to remove, even if you delete it from your phone or computer.  

Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

Texts and other electronic messages from the U.S. Secret Service have become a point a controversy after the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general told Congress that those records were deleted after his office had requested them. But can a text or other digital messages ever truly be erased from existence?

People delete text messages and other electronic messages for many reasons: to free up room on their device; to break contact after a sour conversation; and, from time to time, to wipe out a conversation, for one reason or another.

But deleting a digital correspondence isn't as easy as you might think. For starters, depending on the program you're using, the recipient still has a copy of the message you sent them. And that data might live on in cloud storage.

Alfred Demirjian, founder and CEO of TechFusion, has spent the past 35 years in digital forensics and data recovery in Boston. He said that once you hit send, that information will likely exist forever, especially if the government wants whatever you've sent.  READ MORE...

Monkeypox Outbreak in US

On June 13, a man in New York began to feel ill.

"He starts to experience swollen lymph nodes and rectal discomfort," says epidemiologist Keletso Makofane, who's at Harvard University.

The man suspects he might have monkeypox. He's a scientist, and knowledgeable about the signs and symptoms, Makofane says. So the man goes to his doctor and asks for a monkeypox test. The doctor decides, instead, to test the man for common sexually transmitted diseases. All those come back negative.

"A few days later, the pain worsens," Makofane says. So he goes to the urgent care and again asks for a monkeypox test. This time, the provider prescribes him antibiotics for a bacterial infection.

"The pain becomes so bad, and starts to interfere with his sleep," Makofane says. "So this past Sunday, he goes to the emergency room of a big academic hospital in New York."

At this point the man has a growth inside his rectum, which is a symptom of monkeypox. At the hospital, he sees both an ER doctor and an infectious disease specialist. Again, the man asks for a monkeypox test. But the specialist rebuffs the request and says "a monkeypox test isn't indicated," Makofane says. Instead, the doctor speculates that the man might have colon cancer.  READ MORE...

Charging Electric Cars

Electric vehicles are widely seen as the future.

Ford will soon start delivering its shiny new F-150 Lightning, the electric version of its pickup truck, and other auto makers are racing to electrify their most popular models.

But many drivers considering switching to electric vehicles cite a similar concern: the hypothetical nightmare of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere without any battery left.

The Biden administration has an ambitious plan to address that. It wants to build tons of chargers so that they become as common as a gas station, and closer to the ease and speed of pumping gas.

Here's how the plan would work – and what it would mean for electric car owners and prospective buyers.
What's the plan?

The federal government will spend $5 billion dollars to build 500,000 chargers. The money will go to states, who have until late summer to submit their plans to the federal government.

The funding comes with strings attached – strings intended to ensure that this network of chargers is fast, reliable, and convenient.  READ MORE...

Covid Tests No Longer Free

The first real-world consequences of dwindling federal COVID-19 funds have started to be felt in recent days.

Coronavirus tests for uninsured patients are no longer free in some places. That's because the program that reimbursed clinics and hospitals for the testing, as well as for treating uninsured patients with COVID-19, stopped accepting claims last week "due to lack of sufficient funds." Some clinics have already started to turn away people without insurance who come to get tested and can't afford to pay for it.

Free vaccines for uninsured people are next — that funding will run out next week. After that, the vaccines themselves will still be covered by the government — for now — but the costs of administering them will no longer be billed to the federal program.

In another blow to the COVID-19 response, federal shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments to states — drugs designed to keep people infected with the coronavirus out of the hospital — were also slashed last week by 35%, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Biden administration officials such as Becerra warn that this is just the beginning. They've cited a long list of consequences — short and long term — as they plead with lawmakers to allocate $22.5 billion more for pandemic relief.

At the moment, that request for funding appears stalled in Congress. That has hospitals and public health experts worried that the U.S. will be poorly equipped to identify — let alone manage — whatever happens next with the pandemic.  READ MORE...

Fighting Child Poverty in America

It was heralded as a game-changer for America's social safety net. It dramatically reduced child poverty. But, last month, the enhanced Child Tax Credit — a kind of "Social Security for kids" — expired, and millions of American children sank back into poverty.

In March 2021, President Biden and congressional Democrats revamped the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Rescue Plan. They restructured it, so that parents could get a monthly check from the government. They increased the credit's size, allowing parents to claim as much as $3,600 a year per child, or $300 a month. And they made the credit fully refundable, so that even super-low-income families who don't pay much — or anything — in federal taxes could get it.

For those primarily concerned with ending child poverty, these changes were a resounding success. Scholars at Columbia University found they reduced child poverty by about 30%. Another study found the enhanced program cut household food insufficiency by 26%.

But President Biden's efforts to renew the credit have been thwarted by opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans. They disliked how much the program cost and how generous it was, and they worried that it would encourage parents to stop working because it did not have a work requirement.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the beefed-up Child Tax Credit would cost around $225 billion per year (about $100 billion more per year than the original version, which is now back in effect). For context, that's less than a quarter of the annual cost of Social Security, about a third of the cost of Medicare, and about the same as the budget for the Department of Agriculture. A report from the Urban Institute finds that even with the enhanced Child Tax Credit, America spent only about 7% of its federal budget on kids in 2021 — and that is now projected to decline.

As for how many parents stopped working as a result of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, estimates range from about 300,000 to 1.5 million. There are about 50 million working parents in the United States, so even if we accept only the highest estimate, more than 97% of parents continued working after receiving the payments. That makes sense because 300 bucks a month is hardly enough for most families to live on.

The failure of Washington to renew the enhanced Child Tax Credit continues a long tradition in America: Our welfare system has long spent generously on the old, but it has consistently skimped on the young. While America spends about as much, or even more on the elderly than many other rich nations, it spends significantly less on kids. Among the almost 40 countries in the OECD, only Turkey spends less per child as a percentage of their GDP. It's a big reason why the United States has a much higher rate of child poverty than most other affluent countries — and even has a higher rate of child poverty than some not-so-affluent countries.

In a new paper, the economists Anna Aizer, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Adriana Lleras-Muney explore the reasons why the United States is such an outlier when it comes to fighting child poverty. While they acknowledge the reasons are varied and complex, they focus their analysis on one factor: American policymakers, influenced by economists, have dwelled much more on the costs of social programs than their benefits.  TO FIND OUT THE COST OF FOCUSING JUST ON COSTS, CLICK HERE...

African American History

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was an American historian, a scholar and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson was instrumental in launching Negro History Week in 1926.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Every February, the U.S. honors the contributions and sacrifices of African Americans who have helped shape the nation. Black History Month celebrates the rich cultural heritage, triumphs and adversities that are an indelible part of our country's history.

This year's theme, Black Health and Wellness, pays homage to medical scholars and health care providers. The theme is especially timely as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected minority communities and placed unique burdens on Black health care professionals.

"There is no American history without African American history," said Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C. The Black experience, she said, is embedded in "everything we think of as 'American history.' "

First, there was Negro History Week.  Critics have long argued that Black history should be taught and celebrated year-round, not just during one month each year.

It was Carter G. Woodson, the "father of Black history," who first set out in 1926 to designate a time to promote and educate people about Black history and culture, according to W. Marvin Dulaney. He is a historian and the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).

Woodson envisioned a weeklong celebration to encourage the coordinated teaching of Black history in public schools. He designated the second week of February as Negro History Week and galvanized fellow historians through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which he founded in 1915. (ASNLH later became ASALH.)

The idea wasn't to place limitations but really to focus and broaden the nation's consciousness.  "Woodson's goal from the very beginning was to make the celebration of Black history in the field of history a 'serious area of study,' " said Albert Broussard, a professor of Afro-American history at Texas A&M University.

The idea eventually grew in acceptance, and by the late 1960s, Negro History Week had evolved into what is now known as Black History Month. Protests around racial injustice, inequality and anti-imperialism that were occurring in many parts of the U.S. were pivotal to the change.  READ MORE...