Title: AHA News: How You Feel About Aging Could Affect Health. Here's How to Keep the Right Attitude.
Category: Health News
Created: 8/19/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/19/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: You Could Live 9 Years Longer in Hawaii Than in Mississippi, New Data Shows
Category: Health News
Created: 8/23/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/23/2022 12:00:00 AM

Background

Recently, cough reflex hypersensitivity has been proposed as a common underlying feature of chronic cough in adults. However, symptoms and clinical characteristics of cough hypersensitivity have not been studied amongst phenotypes of chronic cough. This study aimed to compare symptom features, such as cough triggers and associated throat sensations, of cough hypersensitivity in patients with asthmatic chronic cough and those with refractory chronic cough (RCC).

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HARI SREENIVASAN: But first: The de facto capital of the Islamic State, Raqqa, in Syria fell yesterday to U.S.-backed forces.

However, the largest city the militants once held was Mosul in Iraq. They were ousted from it in July after a brutal 10-month-long fight that killed thousands.

Now a new major task: finding and destroying the ISIS mines, booby-traps and bombs that litter the city.

Special correspondent Marcia Biggs reports from Iraq.

MARCIA BIGGS, Special Correspondent: It was once a center of learning for over 6,000 students of technology, agriculture, and medicine.

Today, Mosul Technical Institute’s classrooms are burnt to the ground, laboratories reduced to rubble, and books charred and shredded. It’s one of the city’s five universities ravaged by the Islamic State and the battle to oust it.

Now that the battle is over, a new danger looms, the trail of land mines and booby-traps left by ISIS.

So this is the wire, and this is where it was buried.

CHRISTIAN, Team Leader, Janus Global Operations: Yes, they would cut the asphalt, and then they lay the wire in and put the main charge here.

MARCIA BIGGS: We spent the day with Christian, a team leader from Janus Global, a security and risk management firm hired by the U.S. government to sweep and clear major areas of unexploded ordnance and mines.

He’s not allowed to show his face or use his last name, for security reasons.

CHRISTIAN: There’s actually two more on that road before we get to the target building that have to be excavated and/or rendered safe.

MARCIA BIGGS: So, the first building you have to clear, you have got to get rid of the IEDs on the road to that building?

CHRISTIAN: Yes.

MARCIA BIGGS: It’s a long process.

CHRISTIAN: It is, but that’s what makes it interesting.

MARCIA BIGGS: The United States has sunk $30 million this year into clearing former ISIS territories all over Northern Iraq. Under this program, Janus has already cleared 727 buildings, removing 3,000 IEDs, which they say ISIS was producing on assembly lines at an industrial scale.

But State Department officials and experts say the number of unexploded ordnance in Mosul itself is unprecedented.

What’s your first line of attack, in terms of trying to clear Mosul?

CHRISTIAN: Our priority is more the community, rather than the individual, you know, infrastructure. You have got schools, power, sewer, water, so that the area can accept people back into it. And then, once this stabilization phase is over, we can move into the individual homes, so that they can be safer.

MARCIA BIGGS: Clearing Mosul is a process that they say could take years, even decades. So Janus is training local Iraqis to do the job, sending them out as a front-line search team, then investigating and removing any suspicious items themselves.

CHRISTIAN: We’re not going to be here the whole time, so when we — it’s our time to leave, they will have the capacity built from us, and the mentoring we have done, so that they can do it on their own.

MARCIA BIGGS: How are they doing?

CHRISTIAN: They’re — a lot of them are very apt to learn. They’re quick. They’re smart.

MARCIA BIGGS: Fawzi al Nabdi is the team leader for the Iraqi local partner. He’s cleared mines all over Iraq for the last six years.

CHRISTIAN: What you got?

FAWZI AL NABDI, Team Leader, Al Fahad Company (through interpreter): We are ready for this, because it’s my job and I love it. The Americans are here to complete our work and to help us. They have greater experience than we do. If we find any mines, we have to stop and they will investigate it and make a plan to remove it.

MARCIA BIGGS: But he says Mosul is the biggest project he has ever seen, and we’re told it could take at least a month to just get the campus cleared of mines. Only then can they start cleaning it up, so that students can resume classes, this itself a huge task.

ISIS fighters closed the university back in 2014, and used it as a military base. As coalition forces pounded ISIS targets, this seat of higher learning became a battleground.

Ghassan Alubaidy is the institute’s dean.

GHASSAN ALUBAIDY, Dean, Mosul Technical Institute (through interpreter): ISIS used our university to manufacture mines and bombs. For this reason, it was the target of airstrikes in the beginning. They struck the institute nine times, and they struck our workshops, too. Now we can’t use them.

MARCIA BIGGS: The former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, recently listed 81 locations where bombs were dropped, but had not yet exploded.

Facilities used to make weapons were often on the list of high-value targets for the coalition. So now those places are twice as likely to contain dangerous items.

So, this was once a workshop for electrical engineering students. You can still see the lab tables here. It was hit by an airstrike in 2015. Afterwards, members of the university staff found bomb-making instructions among the rubble. This was likely an ISIS bomb-making factory, and judging by the crater, a high-value target.

Despite the damage, Dean Alubaidy says he will hold classes this fall in alternate buildings, until the campus is ready. He’s expecting registration to be in the thousands, students who lost three years of education during the fighting and don’t want to lose another one.

GHASSAN ALUBAIDY (through interpreter): On our Facebook pages, we found a great number of students posting that they were full of encouragement to come back. For us, it was unbelievable. We couldn’t imagine it, to see how many students wanted to start again, how they were dreaming of the first day of classes, when they could sit in front of teachers again and start to live their lives again.

MARCIA BIGGS: Next door, Mosul University has already started classes. Students even volunteered to help in the cleanup.

But across the river, West Mosul was the site of ISIS’ last stand and bore the brunt of the battle. It’s densely packed Old City, with its flattened buildings, is a challenge for mine-sweeping.

FAWZI AL-NABDI (through interpreter): Most of the homes here were full of mines. And just here in front of us, a man with two kids came back to his home, and when he opened the door, the bomb killed him and his kids.

MARCIA BIGGS: Ahmed Younes fled back in early July with only the clothes on his back. Residents have been virtually banned from returning to his neighborhood on the outskirts of the Old City, but Ahmed said he got special permission, in order to retrieve some personal items.

AHMED YOUNES, Local Resident (through interpreter): We came on our own. We got permission to come, but they are not responsible if anything happens to us.

MARCIA BIGGS: Right now, there is no plan to begin clearing the Old City or even to determine how many mines there are. It is still out of bounds to anyone but the Iraqi security forces.

So the Janus team is focusing on progress in the rest of the city, building by building, bomb by bomb.

CHRISTIAN: Whoever made this device had a set goal. And to allow him to win, people get hurt. So you kind of compete against him to be better than him to take it out before it can do any harm.

MARCIA BIGGS: So, you feel like you’re winning the battle against ISIS?

CHRISTIAN: Yes, one IED at a time.

MARCIA BIGGS: For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Marcia Biggs in Mosul, Iraq.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Tune in later.

Frontline’s latest film, “Mosul,” was on the ground filming the fight as it unfolded street by street and house by house. That’s tonight on PBS.

The post The battle for Mosul is over, but this hidden ISIS danger could lurk for years appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A veteran aviation expert said Boeing could take up the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

A hotel worker called 911 to request urgent assistance before musician Liam Payne fell to his death from the third floor of the building in Buenos Aires on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old British singer and former member of the boy band One Direction died after he “jumped from the balcony of his room,” Buenos Aires Security Ministry Communications Director Pablo Policicchio told the Associated Press. He added that police had been called to the Casa Sur Hotel in the Argentine capital after receiving an emergency call shortly after 5 p.m. local time about an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”

A transcript of a 911 call published by the BBC shows a worker at the hotel telling the operator that they have “a guest who is high on drugs and who is trashing the room” and the staff therefore “need someone to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

To transport our planet across the universe, we would need to bring the whole solar system to sustain life on Earth – on this episode of Dead Planets Society, our hosts contemplate how to shepherd all that baggage on this scenic journey

If we want to terraform the Red Planet to make it better able to host microbial life, tiny rods of iron and aluminium may be the answer

A planet orbiting extremely close to a white dwarf may have formed inside its star – this could be the origin of some of the most promising worlds beyond our solar system to search for life

Brown dwarfs could be hiding dark matter inside their cores – if they are, there would be signs that could help us track it down

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration

A computer simulation suggests that some collisions between exotic, hypothetical stars would make space-time ripple with detectable waves

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Asteroids that regularly fly between Earth, Venus and Mars could provide radiation shielding for human missions to explore neighbouring planets

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Computer code dating back to the 1960s is still vital to banks, airlines and governments, but programmers familiar with the language are in short supply. Now AI models are being trained to fill the skills gap

An AI-powered model found that approaching intersections more slowly could lower yearly US carbon emissions by up to around 123 million tonnes

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

Information on faces recognised, voice commands and internet searches can be extracted from an Amazon Echo smart assistant without help from the user or manufacturer

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. This time, Rowan Hooper takes us to the early 2030s, when a technological step change enabled us to produce all the food we needed without the use of animals

A new design for a nuclear battery that generates electricity from the radioactive decay of americium is unprecedentedly efficient

Gears just a few micrometres wide can be carved from silicon using a beam of electrons, enabling tiny robots or machines that could interact with human cells

It is thought that humans can only maintain relationships with around 150 people, a figure known as Dunbar's number, but it seems that AI models can outstrip this and reach consensus in far bigger groups

The UK government's decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius surprisingly threatens the extinction of millions of website addresses ending in ".io", and no one is quite sure what will happen next

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

Next-generation phone networks could dramatically outperform current ones thanks to a new technique for transmitting multiple streams of data over a wide range of frequencies

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

The US Census Bureau processes data before publishing it in order to keep personal information private – but a new approach could maintain the same privacy while improving accuracy

One day, doctors might be able to 3D print copies of your organs in order to test a variety of drugs, thanks to a new technique that uses light and sound for rapid printing

Scientists say geoengineering, or doing things like intentionally increasing Earth’s reflectivity or blocking the sun, is a “really big deal” in slowing down climate change. Here are the ideas they are proposing.

In this week's issue of our environment newsletter, we look at the carbon capture potential of the world's oceans and what effect beavers are having in the Arctic (spoiler: it's not good).

Researchers calculated that if 30 per cent of vehicles in Chicago currently running on combustion engines were converted to electric, the reduction in pollution would save billions in health care costs every year. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson is seeking a smooth re-election to another term wielding the gavel, but a small group of discontent conservatives are again vying to shake things up at the top.

A new study suggests there could be water miles under the dusty surface of Mars, with enough water to fill a global-sized ocean a mile deep.

The sun blasted a coronal mass at Earth earlier this week, and after back-to-back major hurricanes, some are concerned it could impact the power grid.

Promising new vaccines are designed to be given to patients at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. If they perform well in clinical trials, they have the potential to one day rid society of dementia

Stem cells made in the lab may one day aid cancer treatment by reducing our reliance on donors

A band that measures the acidity of sweat could flag if athletes or manual workers are overexerting themselves

Levels of certain cells, fatty molecules and proteins in the blood are different in people with chronic fatigue syndrome than in those without it, which could help doctors spot the condition sooner

ALS, the most common form of motor neuron disease, can take a long time to diagnose, but a blood test could help doctors spot the condition sooner

A beam of radioactive carbon ions has been used to destroy cancer cells in mice, demonstrating a therapy that may cause less collateral damage than current techniques

A new diet based on research into the body's ageing process suggests you can increase your life expectancy by up to 20 years by changing what, when and how much you eat

People report greater life satisfaction six months after starting Parkrun events, which could partly be due to the supportive environment

The compound creatine, a popular exercise supplement that only occurs naturally in animal products, could one day be produced in edible plants

The epilepsy medication sodium valproate is linked to developmental problems in fetuses, but lab studies may now have found a way to prevent this

A chemical produced by gut bacteria could be the basis for a non-invasive test for endometriosis – and mouse experiments suggest it might also help treat the condition