STOCKHOLM — Lower voter turnout and increasingly contested results globally are threatening the credibility of elections, an intergovernmental watchdog warned on Tuesday, as its sub-index for free and fair elections suffered its biggest decline on record in 2023. In its report, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) said 2023 was the eighth consecutive year with a net decline in overall democratic performance, the longest consecutive fall since records began in 1975. The watchdog bases its Global State of Democracy indexes on more than 100 variables and is using four main categories - representation, rights, rule of law and participation - to categorize performance. The category of democracy related to free and fair elections and parliamentary oversight, a sub-category of representation, suffered its worst year on record in 2023. "This report is a call for action to protect democratic elections," IDEA's Secretary-General Kevin Casas-Zamora said in the report. "The success of democracy depends on many things, but it becomes utterly impossible if elections fail." The think-tank said government intimidation and electoral process irregularities, such as fraudulent voter registration and vote-counting, were increasing. It also said that threats of foreign interference, disinformation and the use of artificial intelligence in campaigns added to challenges. It also said that global voter participation had fallen to 55.5% of eligible voters in 2023 from 65.2% in 2008. Globally, in almost 20% of elections between 2020 and 2024, one of the losing candidates or parties rejected the results. IDEA said that the democratic performance in the U.S., which holds a presidential election this year, had recovered somewhat in the past two years, but the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in July highlighted continued risks. "Less than half (47%) of the Americans said the 2020 election was 'free and fair' and the country remains deeply polarized," IDEA said.

The reefs in Eilat displayed widespread bleaching, a phenomenon in which the symbiosis between coral and algae fails, typically due to high water temperatures.

Americans live under the assumption that water is cheap, pure, and plentiful. But how true is that?

Duchess Sophie wins hearts after touching exchange at Windsor: WatchThe Duchess of Edinburgh, Sophie, accompanied a 21-year-old Emily, who has cerebral palsy, in a heartwarming gesture.Emily had taken part in the BBC Children in Need and The One Show's fundraiser, The Challenge Squad, in which she...

The Arab region is among the most water-scarce areas globally, as nearly 392 million people live in countries facing water scarcity or absolute water scarcity. So dire is the situation that, of the 22 Arab countries, 19 fall below the annual threshold for water scarcity in renewable resources, defined as 1,000 cubic meters per person. […]

The technical assistance (TA), which will be approved with the proposed Integrated Water Resources Management Project, will help the Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology: (i) implement one of the activities of output 2 (para 6), (ii) inform rice farmers about and train them to implement innovative climate mitigative water management technology, and (iii) disseminate this innovative AWD technology to the entire country. The TA project's demonstration activities are expected to reduce emissions by 11,750 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Project objectives. The proposed project will assist the government in addressing climate vulnerabilities and enhancing public health and economic conditions by ensuring inclusive access to safe, reliable, climate-resilient, and sustainable WSS services for the residents of Andijan, Djizzak and Fergana provinces; and the Republic of Karakalpakstan. The project will help upgrade and expand the WSS infrastructure in the project regions and support regional suvtaminots in implementing transformational changes.

See the incredible shots that have won this year's BMC Ecology and Evolution and BMC Zoology Image Competition

Breaching is a common behaviour in a wide range of sharks and rays, and it is thought to have functions related to courtship, birthing and hygiene

X-ray videos of Japanese eels swallowed whole by dark sleeper fish have revealed how the eels can make a daring escape from being digested

Some lizards dive into streams to escape predators, and a specialised bubble-breathing technique enables them to stay submerged for up to 18 minutes

Asian elephants at Berlin Zoo show impressive skill when using a hose as a tool, and even appear to sabotage each other by stopping the flow of water

The Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii has begun erupting, spewing volcanic gas and ash across the island

Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres

The destruction of telecommunications cables during the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in 2022 shows that underwater debris currents can travel at 122 kilometres per hour

Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano, located on the country’s south-west Reykjanes peninsula, has erupted after weeks of earthquake activity

An ocean research vessel has just discovered four underwater mountains, the tallest almost 3 kilometres high, that might be hotspots of deep-sea life

Climate change is making extreme cold upwellings more common in certain regions of the world, and these events can be catastrophic for animals such as bull sharks

Photographer Diane Tuft has documented how global warming is affecting bodies of water around the world

A documentary film about three young survivors of super-typhoon Odette, a tropical cyclone that hit the Philippines in 2021, wins the New Scientist Editors Award at Earth Photo 2024

Millions of tonnes of water vapour have been lingering in the atmosphere since the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in 2022– possibly contributing to global warming

Oil and water can be separated efficiently by pumping the mixture through thin channels between two semipermeable membranes

Asian elephants at Berlin Zoo show impressive skill when using a hose as a tool, and even appear to sabotage each other by stopping the flow of water

Feedback is intrigued by new research into how major sports tournaments "were associated with increases in the number of babies born" nine months later - but only for supporters of the winning teams

Ancient Egyptians may have relied on a vertical shaft that could be filled with water, along with a network of water channels and filtration structures, to build the Step Pyramid of Djoser 4500 years ago

Title: 2002 Oil Spill May Shed Light on Health Problems for Deepwater Workers
Category: Health News
Created: 8/23/2010 8:10:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 8/24/2010 12:00:00 AM

Title: Water May Be Secret Weapon in Weight Loss
Category: Health News
Created: 8/24/2010 11:12:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/24/2010 11:12:41 AM

Title: Health Tip: Kids Shouldn't Watch Too Much TV
Category: Health News
Created: 8/27/2013 7:35:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/27/2013 12:00:00 AM

Title: Health Tip: Exercise While Watching Television
Category: Health News
Created: 8/29/2014 7:35:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/29/2014 12:00:00 AM

Title: Food, Even Water Can Spoil When the Power Goes Out
Category: Health News
Created: 8/22/2016 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/23/2016 12:00:00 AM

Title: Harvey's Floodwaters Harbor Many Health Hazards
Category: Health News
Created: 8/30/2017 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/30/2017 12:00:00 AM

Title: Before Volcano Buried Pompeii, Toxic Water May Have Plagued Residents
Category: Health News
Created: 8/29/2017 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/30/2017 12:00:00 AM

Title: Millions of Contigo Kids Cleanable Water Bottles Recalled
Category: Health News
Created: 8/28/2019 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/28/2019 12:00:00 AM

Title: Why Water Is Key to Your Heart's Health
Category: Health News
Created: 8/24/2021 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/25/2021 12:00:00 AM

Title: Smart Phones, Watches Can Mess With Implanted Pacemakers
Category: Health News
Created: 8/26/2021 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/26/2021 12:00:00 AM

Title: Don't Forget to Apply Sunscreen Before & After Water Fun
Category: Health News
Created: 8/27/2021 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/27/2021 12:00:00 AM

Title: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Cleanup Put Workers at Risk for Asthma
Category: Health News
Created: 8/22/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/22/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: Poliovirus Discovered in New York Wastewater
Category: Health News
Created: 8/12/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/15/2022 12:00:00 AM

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical role of genomic surveillance for guiding policy and control. Timeliness is key, but sequence alignment and phylogeny slow most surveillance techniques. Millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes have been assembled. Phylogenetic methods are ill equipped to handle this sheer scale. We introduce a pangenomic measure that examines the information diversity of a k-mer library drawn from a country's complete set of clinical, pooled, or wastewater sequence. Quantifying diversity is central to ecology. Hill numbers, or the effective number of species in a sample, provide a simple metric for comparing species diversity across environments. The more diverse the sample, the higher the Hill number. We adopt this ecological approach and consider each k-mer an individual and each genome a transect in the pangenome of the species. Structured in this way, Hill numbers summarize the temporal trajectory of pandemic variants, collapsing each day's assemblies into genome equivalents. For pooled or wastewater sequence, we instead compare days using survey sequence divorced from individual infections. Across data from the UK, USA, and South Africa, we trace the ascendance of new variants of concern as they emerge in local populations well before these variants are named and added to phylogenetic databases. Using data from San Diego wastewater, we monitor these same population changes from raw, unassembled sequence. This history of emerging variants senses all available data as it is sequenced, intimating variant sweeps to dominance or declines to extinction at the leading edge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis of extractables and leachables and subsequent risk assessment is an important aspect of the determination of biocompatibility for many medical devices. Leachable chemicals have the potential to pose a toxicological risk to patients, and therefore it is required that they be adequately characterized and assessed for potential safety concerns. One important consideration in the assessment of leachables is the choice of a suitable simulating solvent intended to replicate the use condition for the device and its biological environment. This aspect of study design is especially difficult for blood-contacting medical devices due to the complexity of simulating the biological matrix. This publication reports a comparison of the extracting power of different binary solvent mixtures and saline in comparison with whole blood for a bloodline tubing set connected to a hemodialyzer. Ten different known extractables, spanning a range of physicochemical properties and molecular weights, were quantified. The results indicated that for low-molecular-weight analytes, a suitable exaggeration for whole blood can be obtained using a low-concentration ethanol/water mixture (20%), and in general, extracted quantity increases with the concentration of alcohol cosolvent. For polyvinylpyrrolidone, the opposite trend was observed, as solubility of the polymer was found to decrease with increasing alcohol concentration, resulting in lower extracted quantities at high alcohol concentrations. Analysis of ethanol/water concentrations in the extract solutions post extraction indicated no change in solvent composition.

For clean-room technologies such as isolators and restricted access barrier systems (RABS), decontamination using hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) is increasingly attractive to fulfill regulatory requirements. Several approaches are currently used, ranging from manual wipe disinfection to vapor phase hydrogen peroxide (VPHP) or automated nebulization sanitization. Although the residual airborne H₂O₂ concentration can be easily monitored, detection of trace H₂O₂ residues in filled products is rather challenging. To simulate the filling process in a specific clean room, technical runs with water for injection (WfI) are popular. Thus, the ability to detect traces of H₂O₂ in water is an important prerequisite to ensure a safe and reliable use of H₂O₂ for isolator or clean room decontamination. The objective of this study was to provide a validated quantitative, fluorometric Amplex UltraRed assay, which satisfies the analytical target profile of quantifying H₂O₂ in WfI at low nanomolar to low micromolar concentrations (ppb range) with high accuracy and high precision. The Amplex UltraRed technology provides a solid basis for this purpose; however, no commercial assay kit that fulfills these requirements is available. Therefore, a customized Amplex UltraRed assay was developed, optimized, and validated. This approach resulted in an assay that is capable of quantifying H₂O₂ in WfI selectively, sensitively, accurately, precisely, and robustly. This assay is used in process development and qualification approaches using WfI in H₂O₂-decontaminated clean rooms and isolators.

Watch President Donald Trump and the Greek prime minister’s joint news conference in the player above.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says the U.S. stands with Greece as they recover from their economic crisis. He is speaking with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at the White House in a joint news conference.

The U.S. president says the two leaders have discussed defense, energy, commerce and trade.

Trump is praising Greece for its defense spending under NATO and is noting a potential sale to Greece to upgrade its F-16 aircraft, which he says would be worth up to $2.4 billion and generate thousands of U.S. jobs.

Tsipras says his country has made economic strides and is “leaving behind the economic model that led to the crisis.” He says Greece’s relationship with the U.S. is “more important than ever.”

The post WATCH: Trump and Greek prime minister hold joint news conference appeared first on PBS NewsHour.