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Astronomers Hope to Save Comet Lander Before Its Batteries Run Out - The Atlantic
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The solar-powered space probe launched from the comet-hunting Rosetta craft is currently in
long-term standby mode, after its batteries were unable to recharge.
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Even after its gas thrusters and anchoring harpoons failed, the European Space
Agency probe Philae still managed to make a historic, albeit bumpy, landing on a
comet.
SHIRLEY LI
But since the touchdown, times on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko have

been arduous for the little lander that could.
First, Philae almost bounced off of the space rocks surface on its first landing
attempt. The washing machine-sized lander, nearly weightless on the comet,
hopped more than a mile and a half through nothingness for two hours before
landing again, according to the European Space Agency. It then made another
smaller bounce, and finally settled in a precarious positionsideways with one
leg suspended toward space.
To make matters worse, the solar-powered robot ended up nestled beneath a
shadowy cliff. The location prevented the probe from recharging its batteries,
which are calculated to drain completely sometime later today. Now,
astronomers are racing to get Philae to conduct crucial experiments and beam
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back results before its batteries die out.
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The first panoramic image from the surface of a comet from Philae. Superimposed on top of the image is a
sketch of the Philae lander in the configuration the lander team currently believe it is in. (ESA)
On Friday the lander began drilling 10 inches into the comets rock and ice, the
AP reported. But communication poses a problem for the team of astronomers
charged with talking to the probe. Right now it takes about 28 minutes for
mission control to exchange signals with the lander. The team contacts Philae
through the Rosetta spacecraft hovering above the comet, but that connection
often gets interrupted. In fact, the next time the mothership will have contact
with Philae is around 4:00 pm ET today, according to Reuters.
"This will be exciting because we're not sure if the batteries will have enough
power to transmit this data," said Stefan Ulamec, Philae lander manager.
In order to retrieve the data, the team said it will have to take some risks. During
that communications window, the ESA astronomers are going to attempt a
daring hop to reposition the probe into a sunnier spot, The Guardian reported.
Using the built-in springs in Philaes legs, the team hopes to fire the probe out of
its dark crater. If that fails, The Guardian reported that the team might try to
have Philae cartwheel out of the crevice by spinning its flywheel. But that may
also prove futile if the lander is already out of juice.
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If the ESA exhausts all of those last-ditch efforts to prevent Philae from going
into hibernation, the team may still have one final opportunity to continue the
mission: The comet may pass close enough to the sun to wake up Philae. Comet
67p, which drifts between Mars and Jupiter, is on a six-and-a-half-year orbit
around the sun and is currently reaching a close point to the star.
Even if everything fails, and Philae does not survive the night, its creators insist
the operation was still wildly successful. ESA said that Philae has carried out
Page 2 of 5
11/21/14 4:19 AM
about 80-to-90 percent of the science that it was intended to do already.

"Let's stop looking at things that we could have done if everything had worked
properly," said flight director Andrea Accomazzo, to the AP. "Let us look at
things that we have done: what we have achieved and what we have on the
ground. This is unique and will be unique forever."
On Friday evening, the ESA announced that Philae's batteries have indeed been
depleted and lander is "asleep." The machine is now in a deep standby mode,
and will only make contact again if it manages to catch enough sunlight to
recharge its batteries (which may never happen, but is still a possibility.)
However, before shutting down, Philae was able to transmit all of the scientific
data it had gathered while on the comet's surface. In addition, the Rosetta craft
that delivered Philae will continue to orbit the comet as it continues its journey
around the sun.
Lander Manager Stephan Ulamec said, "This machine performed magnificently
under tough conditions, and we can be fully proud of the incredible scientific
success Philae has delivered."
Jason Major
@JPMajor
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That'll do, @Philae2014. That'll do.

-_7:32 PM - 14 Nov 2014
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NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR is an assistant editor at The Atlantic, where he covers science news. He has
previously reported for Science, NPR, and Scientific American.
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Will Cheap Gas Undermine the UN's Climate Change Efforts? - The Atlantic
11/21/14 4:22 AM
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Will Cheap Gas Undermine ClimateChange Efforts?
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Crude oil has hit its lowest price in four years, just days after the UN asked the world for a
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This week, the United Nations called upon the global community to curb fossil
fuel usage now or risk irreversible environmental damage in 2100. But with oil
prices falling to a four-year low in the United States, any urgency may be voided
by the absolute excitement over cheap gas.
Prices at pumps across the country dipped below $3 a gallon, while the current
price for Brent crude, the reference for crude oil trading, fell to $82 a barrel in
the United States on Tuesday. The plunge comes after Saudi Arabia
unexpectedly cut its export prices to the United States, and follows a global trend
that has seen oil prices drop 25 percent since June, according to Reuters.
"This is like putting a Big

Mac in front of people
The price drop comes just days after the UN

declared that fossil fuel emissions must drop to
zero by the end of the century in order to keep
global temperatures in check. These low oil prices
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Will Cheap Gas Undermine the UN's Climate Change Efforts? - The Atlantic
11/21/14 4:22 AM
who need to diet or

watch their cholesterol."
may undermine the message from the UNs climate

panel, Anthony Perl, a political scientist from
Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said.
He studies the intersection of transportation and
the environment in countries like the U.S. and Canada.
I dont think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today, Perl
said. Instead, he explained, people may choose to fill up their cars and burn fuel
while the costs are low. Falling oil prices may also deter businesses from
switching to energy-saving technology, as a 2006 study in the Energy Journal
suggested. Saving several pennies at the pump, Perl said, may tempt Americans
away from actions that can lead to a sustainable, post-carbon future.
Indeed, in the past month some automakers noticed a jump in gas-guzzling car
sales. According to CNN, October saw a 52 percent jump in Jeep SUV sales and a
36 percent rise in Ram trucks. Some hybrid and electric vehicle sales fell at the
same time.
This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their
cholesterol, Perl said. Some people might have the willpower to stick with their
program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before
committing to a dietbut if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty
traumatic.
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Caltech's Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, - The Atlantic
11/21/14 4:21 AM
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Space Is Filled With Orphaned Stars
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When galaxies collide, some stars are flung from their homes and left to wander space alone.
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A time-lapse photograph of the CIBER rocket launch, taken from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia
in 2013 (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
SHIRLEY LI
For billions of years, galactic train wrecks have scattered stars across the
cosmos. Alone in space, the celestial orphans only dimly light their drift through
the blackness. Now, after detecting the faint flickers, astrophysicists believe they
have found that cosmic collisions may have left as many as half of all stars
floating without a galaxy.
The merging of galaxies is a messy process, said Michael Zemcov, an
astrophysicist from Caltech and lead author on the study published Thursday in
Science. Some of the stars mash together and form bigger galaxies, but some of
them get tossed out completely and flung over very large distances.
Many of the reclusive stars form dim halos around
"The merging of galaxies the galaxies in which they used to reside. Although
astronomers previously knew about these halos,
is a messy process."
they were unsure of how many there were, because
the light that singular stars emit gets drowned out
by their much brighter neighboring galaxies.
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Caltech's Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, - The Atlantic
11/21/14 4:21 AM
As a part of their research into ancient galaxies, Zemcov and his team of
scientists from the U.S., Japan, and Korea, launched a rocket equipped with a
built-in telescope to take an enormous picture of space. The experiment, called
Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, had a field of view that was
20 times larger than the surface of the moon, according to Zemcov. It offered the
team a single image of millions of galaxies.
When the team analyzed the data, they observed twice as much infrared light as
they expected to find. To investigate the discrepancy, the team blacked out the
light coming from the star clusters and observed that a lot of light seeped from
between the galaxies.
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An artist's concept of a number of galaxies sitting in huge halos of orphaned stars (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Its like looking at a LiteBrite with all of the little pegs being galaxies with
clusters of stars, said Zemcov. We masked the light emitted from the galaxies,
or pegs, and expected to see a black screen, but actually there were small
amounts of light still emitted.
The findings stumped the team at first. Not until they eliminated several other
possibilities did they deduce that the light was coming from large amounts of
rogue stars. The research, they said, shows that there are much more solo stars
out there than previously thought. Since orphaned stars can harbor orbiting
planets, the researchers said that this finding may provide further insight into
how many celestial objects wander the void of space.

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Lonesome George, the Last of His Kind, Strikes His Final Pose - Scientific American
11/21/14 4:25 AM
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Lonesome George, the Last of His

Kind, Strikes His Final Pose
After the century-old giant tortoise died, Galpagos conservationists and a taxidermist had to
figure out how to continue his legacy
October 27, 2014 | By Nicholas St. Fleur
Tucked beside fossils of long-gone gigantic

sloths and knee-high horses stands a
newcomer to the American Museum of
Natural Historys extinction parade:
Lonesome George, the last known Pinta
Island giant tortoise.
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For four decades the 100-year-old reptile

served as a conservation icon on Ecuadors
Galpagos Archipelago. His subspecies,
hunted for meat and tortoise oil, all but
vanished in the 1900s. George was its only
survivor, and despite several attempts to get
him to reproduce with giant tortoises from
similar subspecies, he died without
descendants on June 24, 2012. Now, what
remains of Lonesome Georges legacy is a
lifelike mount at the American Museum of
Natural History (AMNH) in New York City.
Designed by an expert team of taxidermists,
the display depicts George at his most
majestic; with neck outstretched and shell
polished.
Away
Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?
Lonesome George is on view in the Museums 4th

floor Astor Turret through January 4, 2015.
Credit: AMNH/R. Mickens
More In This Article

Lonesome George, the
Last of His Kind, Strikes
His Final Pose
[Slideshow]
Serendipity brought him to the museum. On the same morning that Fausto Llerena,
Georges handler since 1983, found the tortoise sprawled out dead in his pen, a
congregation of conservationists had just arrived to Santa Cruz Island for a citizen
science workshop. Santa Cruz Island, where George drew millions of visitors over his
40-year tenure, is one of four inhabited islands in the Galpagos chain; the other more
than three-dozen islands and islets are untouched wilderness preserves. When Llerena
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lonesome-george-the-last-of-his-kind-strikes-his-final-pose/
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informed the Galpagos National Park Service of Georges passing, they shared the
sad news with their guests, many of whom began to cry. For Eleanor Sterling, a chief
conservation scientist at the AMNH who arrived on the island that day, the next 24
11/21/14 4:25 AM
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hours were filled with disbelief. We just witnessed extinction, she says.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency) seeks methods to accurately
forecast the spread of
Galpagos tortoises can live up to 150 years, so Georges death came unexpectedly.
The park had made no prior arrangements. Its always hypothetical until youre in the
NIH Single Cell Analysis Challenge: Follow That
middle of it, Sterling says. Then suddenly youve got this big weight on your
shoulders.
Sterling and the other conservationists, many of whom were members of the
Galpagos Conservancy, shifted gears from conducting citizen science to making
postmortem arrangements. A veterinarian was called to conduct the necropsy; after
splitting Georges shell in half with a chainsaw it was determined he had died of
natural causes. Next the group needed to stabilize Georges carcass before the 100degree Fahrenheit tropical heat could rot his remains. For that, they needed plastic
freezer wrap and a refrigerator. So the group made frantic calls to local village
hardware stores on Santa Cruz Island.
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>> Click here to see a slideshow of Lonesome George's final adventure

The hardware stores were out of plastic freezer wrap, and it would take two weeks to
The Human Cost of Science: Stephen Hawking

and The Theory of Everything
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get more. When the team explained that the supplies were for Lonesome George,
employees sniffed out some freezer plastic at a local pig farm. The group then wrapped
every centimeter of Georges 1.5-meter-long frame to keep him frozen and thwart
freezer burn; they had to protect each individual toe to prevent it from breaking off in
the refrigerator. For Sterling, the process was exciting and terrifying.
After 36 hours, the bulky, 75-kilogram tortoise was put in a large freezer, safely
wrapped and mummified. Meanwhile, word of his death went viral. The Galpagos
Conservancy was flooded with e-mails from impassioned fans suggesting next steps.
Some recommended burying Lonesome George on his home island. Others wanted to
parade him from country to country like a rock star on a world tour. One letter even
suggested barbecuing his remains for a celebratory ingesting George feast.
Members of both the conservancy and the Galpagos National Park System decided
the best option was to preserve George via taxidermy; that way, the thinking went,
George could continue to herald conservation efforts even in death. But the
restoration job would require a very special taxidermist.
George Dante was tinkering in his office at Wildlife Preservations, a taxidermy firm in
Woodland Park, N.J., when Steve Quinn, a senior diorama artist from the AMNH,
called. I could not believe what I was hearing, Dante says. Everything was moving
in slow-motion. I remember trying to process the fact that George had passed away
and this was the end of a species. And then this honor, that theyre asking me if Im
interested in doing this.
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Sterling had recommended Dante for the job. After I had my 24 hours of sadness and
self-reflection, I realized the museum could and had the resources to make a
difference, she says. Dante had done the taxidermy restoration work on 2.5-metertall Alaskan brown bears and other creatures for the museums North American
Mammal Hall in 2012. Preserving George would be his biggest challenge since that
project.
Acting on Dantes instructions, the parks carpenters and mechanics built a custom
box made of hardwood tree bark to ship George from the Galpagos to Dantes New
Jersey office. Getting the tortoise there would require special permits from Ecuadors
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wildlife agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ecuadors presidential office and
other authorities. It ended up taking nine months for George to be cleared for travel.
In the meantime all Dante could do was cross his fingers while the tortoise sat in a
freezer on an island with little infrastructure and frequent electrical blackouts.
On March 10, 2013, the morning of Lonesome Georges departure arrived. James
Gibbs, a conservationist from the State University of New York College of
Environmental Science and Forestry, had flown down to chaperone the corpse. Gibbs
had worked with George for a number of years but says that the tortoise had never
liked him. Gibbss job was to draw blood samples from George, so every time he would
approach the tortoise, George would recede into his shell.
Before dawn Gibbs helped load the frozen tortoise into his box and then onto a truck
that took them via ferry to the airport. Along the way, people asked what was in
Gibbss 225-kilogram box. When he told them it carried Lonesome George, they would
touch the box as if it were the casket of a loved one. Some people cried; many offered
to accompany George on his journey. I could actually see in the eyes of people that
they really believed in the importance of this, Gibbs says. It personalized the
meaning of extinction for me.
On March 11, after 28 hours of travel, Gibbs delivered George to Dante in New Jersey.
Opening the hardwood box was a nail-biter: What if the carcass had thawed en route?
But after Dante pried the box apart he found that Georges remains were still fully
frozen.
Dante defrosted the corpse. After Georges body thawed he measured every centimeter
of the tortoise before molding a replica of the body. He filled the mold with foam,
which would eventually become the base on which he would add a water-based clay to
create Georges features. On top of that clay he would stretch out Georges skinintact
in one whole piece. His biggest hurdle was working on a species that had never been
mounted before. Not surprisingly, taxidermy-supply companies do not make parts for
extinct giant tortoises. The beauty is that theres no handbook on how to do it, he
says.
Dante was well aware he was working on what he had dubbed the worlds pet. As
such, he knew there was no room for error. Every centimeter had to be scientifically
accurate, from his saddle-back shell to the missing toenail on his left front foot. We
Page 3 of 5
11/21/14 4:25 AM
couldnt just look at this as a project of mounting a Galpagos tortoise. Dante says.
We are re-creating this character.
He checked hundreds of pictures to fashion every wrinkle in Georges skin. He dashed
green stains around Georges mouth and neck to make it appear as if the tortoise had
just finished grazing. And he had a glass company create the worlds first pair of
custom-made glass tortoise eyeballs for George, which meant visiting a local zoo to
observe the intricate colors of a live tortoises eyes. When it came time for a pose,
Dante consulted Fausto Llerena, who was a part of the group that first found George
and the man who discovered he had died. Llerena advised Dante to portray George in
a familiar stance, with his neck outstretched in dominance and yet with his tail tucked
submissively. Llerena, who is also a well-known wood carver, sent Dante a handcarved wooden tortoise as a sign of gratitude for restoring his friend of 40 years. This
is my Oscar, Dante says of the softball-size carving.
On September 18, 2014, after 500 hours of labor conducted over more than a year,
Dante was finally ready to present George to the museum and the people who helped
bring him there. Among the congregation at Georges unveiling were several people
who were also present for his death, including Gibbs and Sterling. They were all
pleasantly surprised with Dantes work. You could see the look in his eye, and you
could see the pose, Sterling says. He brought Lonesome George back to life.
Surrounded by other species lost to time, George looked a little less lonesome. But the
difference between him and his neighboring specimens was not lost on anyone who
attended the unveiling. The other animals in the hall were driven to extinction by
changing climates. George and his kind disappeared because of man.
Editor's Note: Lonesome George is on temporary display at the museum until
January 4, 2015, after which he will be shipped and put on display in Quito,
Ecuador.
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EnvironmentalBiologist DashRiprock
October 27, 2014, 7:04 PM
That mentality is a big part of the problem with regards to extinction.

Think of it this way:
Panthera tigris is the species name for tigers.
Subspecies would be Bengal, Siberian, Caspian tigers, etc. They are NOT the same, and you cannot
just discount their importance and say they don't matter.
Page 4 of 5
Nurses Unions Call for Better Ebola Support from CDC - Scientific American
11/21/14 4:25 AM
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Nurses Unions Call for Better Ebola

Support from CDC
Two of the nations largest nursing unions blast the CDCs handling of U.S. Ebola cases and ask
for more resources and hands-on training
October 17, 2014 | By Nicholas St. Fleur
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention stepped out of line in claiming
that a breach in protocol caused an
American nurse treating an Ebola victim to
contract the deadly virus, the two largest
U.S. nurses unions charged Wednesday.
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National Nurses United (NNU), the largest

union of registered nurses in the U.S. with
National Nurses United reads statements from
around 185,000 members, said that the
Dallas Presbyterian RNs who describe what
CDCs assertions about a violation in
occurred at their hospital.
Jaclyn Higgs, National Nurses United
hospital procedures was unwarranted
because current Ebola protocols are either
inadequate or nonexistent in hospitals across the country. The organization held a
national conference call for nurses and press on October 15 calling for hands-on
training nationwide to prepare nurses to treat Ebola patients. The union asked the
CDC and Pres. Barack Obama to meet its demands for better training, supplies and
treatment regimens. Not one more nurse, not one more patient should be put at risk,
said RoseAnn DeMoro, NNU executive director.
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A handful of the 11,000 nurses listening in on the call phoned into the conference to
echo DeMoros sentiments. Nurses from Massachusetts, Florida, California and
Washington, D.C., complained of inadequate Ebola training in their hospitals. Some
said they received less than 10 minutes of instruction whereas others were only given
colored flyers with Ebola fact tips and instructions to visit the CDC Web site for
further information.
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The NNU called the two U.S. Ebola cases in Texas a nightmare for nurses across the
country. The group read an anonymous statement by nurses at Texas Health
Presbyterian Hospital Dallas (THPH), which had cared for Thomas Duncan, the first
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nurses-unions-call-for-better-ebola-support-from-cdc/
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Page 1 of 3
Nurses Unions Call for Better Ebola Support from CDC - Scientific American
11/21/14 4:25 AM
case of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S.
The union claimed that the hospital was ill-prepared to treat Ebola. Its letter stated
that Duncan was not immediately put into isolation but was left for several hours in an
area with other patients. The nurses at THPH, moreover, had little protective
equipment when they were dealing with the late Duncans bodily fluids. The nurses
strongly feel unsupported, unprepared, lied to and deserted to handle the situation on

their own, the statement said.

Texas Health Resources, the nonprofit health system that owns THPH, released its
own statement October 16 countering several of the claims made by NNU about how
THPH handled the Duncan case. The nonprofit health care system asserts that
Duncan was rushed to isolation on entering the hospital and that the nurses treating
him were given protective gear in line with CDC recommendations.

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The NNU is not the only nurses union expressing similar concerns. The American
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Federation of Teachers (AFT), which also organizes nurses and has more than 80,000
members, held a briefing on October 16. All nurses and health care professionals
must receive up-to-date, appropriate training, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT
president. Her organization wants the CDC to implement a three-part plan, which
would include infection-control protocols, establishing dedicated teams of volunteers

mice
specially trained to identify and treat Ebola and the inclusion of health care workers in
formulating planning measures.
Health preparedness requires funding, Weingarten said. That funding has been
slashed by politicians and must be restored. Both the NNU and the AFT have called
for increased public funding so that hospitals can afford the most advanced protective
equipment for health care workers.



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No Airli(s for Sickened African Ebola

Docs
West African physicians confront the same dangers as foreign health workers, but unlike their
counterparts they do not receive emergency evacuations if they fall victim to the Ebola virus
September 29, 2014 | By Nicholas St. Fleur
Many foreign aid workers in the ongoing

Ebola epidemic have a safeguard that their
West African counterparts are denied:
emergency air evacuation should they
become dangerously ill.
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Since June, air ambulances have rescued at

least 10 foreign health workers who came
West African health workers working against the
into contact with the Ebola virus. Those
Ebola outbreak.
cases include a Doctors Without Borders
Credit: EC/ECHO/Cyprien Fabre via Flickr
staffer sent home to France, a British man
sent to the U.K., two Dutch doctors airlifted to the Netherlands and four infected
Americans flown to U.S. hospitals to receive experimental serums, according to the
Associated Press. All survived except for two Spanish priests who were flown back to
Spain for treatment. So far 373 health workers from Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and
Sierra Leone have contracted the virus, according to the World Health Organization,
and 208 have died.
In two cases the Sierra Leone government sought aid from the World Health
Organization to evacuate infected physicians. Both requests were denied.
Four Sierra Leone physicians were among the caretaker casualties, according to news
reports. The latest loss was Dr. Olivet Buck, who caught the virus on Tuesday,
September 9. Following the diagnosis, President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone
sent an urgent letter to the WHO seeking aid in organizing her evacuation for Friday,
September 12, to Hamburg, Germany. The president felt that his country, which
already has a shortage of health workers, could not lose another doctor.
The WHO replied on September 13 that it could not comply with Koromas request to
organize Bucks medical air transport. Instead it pledged to provide Buck with medical
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No Airlifts for Sickened African Ebola Docs - Scientific American
care, such as experimental drugs, back in Sierra Leone. But her home countrys
hospitals were already overwhelmed with patients. Later that night Buck died. Her
death and those of her compatriots, including the physicians Sheik Humarr Khan,
Modupe Cole and Sahr Rogers, is a significant blow to the countrys health care
service.
Following Bucks death, officials from Sierra Leone criticized the WHO for its
sluggish response, which came a day after the expected evacuation date, according
to the AP. Khan also died while the Sierra Leone government was still negotiating
potential evacuation plans with the WHO. Sierra Leones president has said that he
was ready to approve the $70,000 Bucks evacuation to Germany would have cost and
that the hospital in Hamburg was ready to take Buck.
Were not in a position to evacuate every health worker, says WHO spokesperson
Tarik Jasarevic. We evacuate the people we employ, and have done so twice.
Evacuations are the responsibility of a health workers employer, Jasarevic says. Only
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one West African was flown to a hospital abroad: a Senegalese epidemiologist and
WHO staffer. If the WHO had planned to evacuate all infected West African health
care staff, at $70,000 apiece the airlifts would have come to $26.1 milliontoo
expensive for the agencys budget. The WHOs 20142015 expenditure on infectious
disease is $841 million, after suffering a $72-million cut from the previous year.

mice
Ethicists agree that the WHO could not evacuate every West African doctor to better
facilities outside of the hot zone, but disagree on the specific cases of Buck and Khan.

For the single request at that time, its hard to understand why the WHO explained it
away, especially when those doctors can serve as heroes and inspirations to other
doctors, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist from New York University. Caplan says that
in these two cases the WHO had the resources to evacuate the doctors. [The WHO]
havent opened up the flood gates, they are just saying how about these two?
Nancy Kass, a bioethicist from Johns Hopkins University, agrees that the WHO
should commit first-rate treatment for West African caretakers, but believes that air
evacuations are not the best use of the WHOs deeply underfunded budget. The
[WHOs] response does not seem inappropriate to me at all, she says. Its easy to say
Its just one person, but its never just one person.
The best way to treat the infected local health workers, the WHO says, is for the
international community to send more aid workers to provide care and assistance.
Kass suggests that an NGO should undertake the task of airlifting West African
doctors for treatment abroad. The U.S., rather than considering airlifting physicians
out of their home countries, should expedite making experimental treatments
available there, she says. It absolutely seems that someone should be taking care of
the heroes in West Africa who are giving themselves up to take care of people, she
says. But thats not what WHO does. They cant afford it.


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Do The World Cup's Fluttering Kicks Put Fans' Hearts At Risk?

July 09, 2014
4:17 PM ET
NICHOLAS ST. FLEU R
i
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Brazil's cataclysmic World Cup loss to Germany broke the heart of a nation.
But for some fans, the emotional anguish may have felt all too real resulting in heart attacks that not
even the U.S.'s star goalie Tim Howard could stop.
A 2008 analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that cardiac events
skyrocketed during World Cup matches.

Researchers looked at data from hospitals around Munich during the 2006 games held in Germany.
They found that the number of cardiac emergencies more than doubled on days when Germany was
playing in World Cup matches compared with days when the German team was idle and also a control
period when no matches were played. About 43 cardiac events were seen on German match days
compared with 18 on the non-match days and 15 daily during the control period.
The emotional stress during matches, the paper argues, increases a fan's risk of suffering a heart
attack.
"Soccer is engaging, but if you're on the losing side you can feel helpless," says Dr. David Spiegel, a
psychiatrist from Stanford University who specializes in stress and wasn't involved in the 2008 study.
"That combination of a time limit and the difficulty of overcoming being behind makes it a stressful sport
to watch."
Stress, Spiegel tells Shots, changes what's circulating in the bloodstream.
When someone watches a particularly exciting or emotional match, such as the United States' defense
in the net against Belgium's onslaught, the body releases adrenaline and other hormones into the
bloodstream.
This surge can be dangerous for people who already have buildups of artery-narrowing plaque, Johns
Hopkins cardiologist Seth Martin says.
The plaques can rupture. The body creates blood clots to patch the damaged arteries. But the clots can
block oxygen-rich blood from reaching the heart, causing a cardiac attack.
"It's not like this could happen suddenly in anybody," Martin tells Shots. There has to be underlying
disease, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Unhealthful habits, such as sitting in front of the TV
or computer for too long, could exacerbate the chances of suffering a cardiac attack during a game.
"We don't know what day someone will have a heart attack," Martin tells Shots. But heart attacks are
more likely to happen in people with risk factors for them.
Already in Brazil, a 69-year-old man suffered a heart attack in a bar while watching the nail-biting
penalty kick duel between Brazil and Chile. The man, who had diabetes, died two hours after being
brought to the hospital.
Martin said he wasn't surprised that soccer matches could trigger cardiac events in fans. He was
surprised however by the magnitude of the trigger reported in the paper about the German World Cup
experience.
Still, some researchers are skeptical about any connection between soccer games and cardiac events.
Epidemiologist Francesco Barone-Adesi says that any evidence of soccer-induced heart attacks
disappears at the population level. He authored a 2010 meta-analysis titled, "It is just a game: lack of
association between watching football matches and risk of acute cardiovascular events."
He analyzed 10 previous papers that looked at associations between heart attacks and World Cup
games in people living in Belgium, France and Australia. In his analysis, which had included the
German study, he found no link between World Cup matches and heart attacks.
"The German study was an outlier and inconsistent with all those other studies," he says. "It's telling a
different story."
He also conducted his own study that looked at death certificates in Italians during the 2006 World Cup
and found no connection between watching soccer games and heart attacks.
If the results obtained by the German study are accurate, then Barone-Adesi says that "would mean
that watching a football match is the strongest cardiac event trigger found so far," he says, adding,
"that's just not plausible."
But cardiologist Robert Kloner, of the University of Southern California, says that the triggers that the
German study found can't be totally ignored.
"Look, there's a signal here in this study," Kloner tells Shots. "You're not going to see it in all games. It
depends on the patient. If he says, 'I feel my heart racing,' then that's concerning."
In 2010, Kloner published a paper titled, "Sporting Events Affect Spectators' Cardiovascular Mortality: It
Is Not Just a Game." His study looked at Super Bowl games in Los Angeles in much the same way that
previous studies looked at soccer games. He found a small, but statistically significant, increase in heart
attack-related deaths following the games.
After reviewing the scientific literature, Kloner says that watching sporting events, such as soccer
matches and Super Bowls, may trigger heart attacks in people prone to them. But, he cautions, "These
are correlations, you cannot call them causative."
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Playing Video Games Can Help Or Hurt, Depending On

Whom You Ask
August 08, 2014
1:19 PM ET
NICHOLAS ST. FLEU R
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Parents worry that video games are bad for kids, but the evidence on how and why they may
be harmful has been confusing.
"Most of popular media puts the most emphasis of concern on aggression," says psychologist
Jay Hull from Dartmouth College. "But aggression is just the tip of the iceberg."
So Hull looked at other negative behaviors that could be affected by gaming, including binge
drinking, smoking cigarettes and unprotected sex. His study found that teenagers who
regularly play violent video games such as Manhunt and the Grand Theft Auto series are
more likely to take those risks.
The study was published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Previously Hull led a study that looked at the relationship between violent video games and
reckless driving habits. Playing games that promote "acting evil" may distort a teen's sense of
right and wrong, Hull says. In that study he found that teens who played violent video games
were more likely to drive recklessly, such as cutting people off while on the highway. Both
studies, he says, conclude that video games alter a teen's sense of self.
"They might think 'I've done much worse things in these games,' " he told Shots. "They're less
likely to find things as being wrong that other people would find wrong."
But teenagers who played aggressive games that had noble protagonists were not as likely to
engage in risky behaviors, the latest study found. That included Spiderman II, in which the
player is a web-slinging vigilante with good motives, rather than a thug for hire.
Humans
It's A Duel: How
Do Violent Video
Games Affect
Kids?
In another study published this week, scientists looked at

both the negative and positive effects of video games.
One hour or less of video game play per day is associated

with children and teenagers ages 10 to 15 being happier
and more satisfied than those who do not play at all, a
study published Monday in Pediatrics found. But the study also found that kids who played in
excess of three hours daily were less satisfied with their lives and had more difficulties both
socially and personally than nongamers.
"If there was a magic dose, it would be less than one hour," says Andrew Przybylski, an
experimental psychologist from the University of Oxford who led the study. And "if there was a
dangerous dose, it would be more than three hours."
His study looked at survey responses from nearly 5,000 children in the Understanding Society
UK Household Longitudinal Study. Unlike many studies in this field, this study looked at both
the positive and the negative effects of video game playing.

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The impact of video games on a child's social well-being is

modest at best, Przybylski says, accounting for only 2
percent of a child's psychological and social function. Other
factors, such as family life, play much bigger roles, he
says.
Neither study proves that the video games are the cause of changes of behavior or emotions,
says James Ivory, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who analyzes the effects of video
games. He was not involved in either study.
Rather, he says that both studies support the idea that video-game play can be used to
understand a teenager's family and environment. Teens who do not play video games at all
may be socially isolated, Ivory says, and parents who allow teens to play violent adult games
might be less focused on preventing risky behaviors.
"If a parent is just worried that their kid is playing Grand Theft Auto, and not worried about
other factors that influence their kids," Ivory says, "then they're looking the wrong way."
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Many Women Leave Engineering, Blame The Work

Culture
August 12, 2014
2:32 PM ET
NICHOLAS ST. FLEU R
i
iStockphoto
From the aerospace sector to Silicon Valley, engineering has a retention problem: Close to 40
percent of women with engineering degrees either leave the profession or never enter the
field.
Conventional wisdom says that women in engineering face obstacles such as the glass
ceiling, a lack of self-confidence and a lack of mentors. But psychologists who delved deeper
into the issue with a new study found that the biggest pushbacks female engineers receive
come from the environments they work in.
The findings were announced recently at the annual American Psychological Association
convention in Washington, D.C.
Over the course of three years, Nadya Fouad, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin,
Milwaukee, surveyed 5,300 women who earned engineering degrees within the past six
decades in order to figure out why so few stayed in engineering. Fouad reported that only 62
percent of respondents were currently working in engineering. Those who left the field
provided their reasons for doing so in the survey.
The answer, Fouad said, was simple:
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"It's the climate, stupid!" she said during her presentation,

referring to the "old-boys club" workplaces that she says
still exist in many engineering organizations.
Respondents in her study reflected her sentiments, with
many calling the engineering workplace unfriendly and
even hostile to women. They also said they felt that many
of these companies did not provide opportunities for
women like them to advance and develop.
"Women's departure from engineering is not just an issue
of 'leaning in,' " said Fouad, lead researcher of the study.
"It's about changing the work environment."
Often when women are frustrated with the office climate
and choose to leave their jobs, they also end up leaving the
engineering industry entirely, Fouad said.
For the past two decades, 20 percent of engineering graduates have been women, yet only
11 percent of practicing engineers are women, Fouad said. Compared with other skilled
professions such as accounting, medicine and law, engineering has the highest turnover of
women.
Fouad also found that support for women did not differ between engineering disciplines.
Women faced the same issues in the fields of aerospace, biotech and computer software. The
findings may provide additional insight into why so few women work as computer engineers in
Silicon Valley.
i
American Psychological Association
The study found that only 17 percent of women left engineering because of caregiving
reasons, which Fouad said dispels the notion that pregnancy plays a big part in keeping
women out. But she does point out that many of those who did leave to stay home with
children did so because their companies did not offer flexible enough work-life policies.
Fouad also said lack of confidence was not a factor as to why women left engineering her
study found no difference in confidence levels between those who left or stayed in the field.
Although there are many programs in place at undergraduate universities to feed the
engineering pipeline, she said that when those women graduate and enter the work force,
that's when they face the problems that ultimately cause them to exit engineering.
"It's not women who need to change it's the work environment that does," she said.
Fouad offered some recommendations for engineering companies looking to retain female
employees. She says the organizations first need to recognize the problem, and then commit
to change at the leadership level. That way change can perpetuate throughout the system.
But not everyone agrees with Fouad's findings.
"Women aren't leaving engineering to go and hide in a corner. They are leaving for many
reasons which a study like this may not find," said Elizabeth Bierman, president of the Society
of Women Engineers and an aerospace engineer for 20 years. "The work environment may
be one reason, but for the majority it is not the case."
Her organization recently conducted its own retention study and found that although women
do leave the engineering workplace faster than men, they do so for a variety of reasons. Many
of those reasons, such as lack of work-life balance, also resonate with men, Bierman said.
The bigger problem facing women and engineering, she said, is getting more women into the
engineering pipeline. Bierman says companies looking to retain both women and men should
improve their work-life balance policies.
"We've found that women stay in engineering because they want to make sure they are
making a difference," she says. "If women feel they are making that difference, retention
levels will be higher."
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Science Notes 2014: Fireball Physics
Illustration: Mary Williams
The best-documented meteor was a blast for scientists to reconstruct. Nicholas St. Fleur retraces the
Russian shock waves. Illustrated by Mary Williams.
Peter Jenniskens paused as he reached for the front door to his hotel in Chelyabinsk,
Russia. Only a few jagged shards of thick glass stuck out from the wooden frame. He
collected the fragmentsthe first of many clues that the NASA scientist would gather
to understand the gigantic fireball that erupted over the city three weeks earlier.
I had in my hands pieces of glass that were destroyed by an asteroid impact. How unbelievable is that?
Jenniskens says.
The shards were tiny pieces of a puzzle assembled by Jenniskens and an international team about the most
startling cosmic encounter in decades. The Chelyabinsk meteor on February 15, 2013, came without warning.
It streaked across the dawn sky in a dazzling display of red and orange trailed by two columns of puffy
smoke. Then with a flash of light, it exploded mid-air. Moments later, a fierce shockwave rocked the one
million people below.
No one died, but the blast injured 1,600 peoplesome through flying glass like the shards Jenniskens
collected. Evidence about the intense physics of the blast came from patterns of damaged buildings, sound
recordings in the atmosphere, and pieces of the rock itselfincluding a 1,400-pound chunk fished from a
nearby lake. But the best clues came from security cameras and car-mounted dash cams that captured
footage of the meteor as it shot through the atmosphere and explodedmaking it, by far, the bestdocumented space impact in history.
We know that these events can be very violent, but to have this happen in our lifetime in this densely
populated of an area was incredible, Jenniskens says.
http://sciencenotes.ucsc.edu/2014/pages/meteor/meteor.html
1/8
11/21/2014
But to illuminate the extraordinary physics of a real fireball, the team had to spend weeks on the ground in
Siberia, tracing hints of the blasts imprints at every turn.
Examining the tapes

A tall, skinny man whose face brightens at the word meteorite, Jenniskens had led an expedition to recover
a space rock that crash-landed in Sudan in 2008. He also tracked down meteorites from the 2012 Sutters
Mill impact in the Sierra Nevada. Like nearly everyone else, he was alerted to the Chelyabinsk fireball
through headlines on the news and a flood of footage uploaded to YouTube. Thanks to social media, what
would have been an isolated explosion became the airblast heard, and seen, around the world.
Meteor expert Peter Jenniskens of NASA holds two keepsakes from the February 2013 fireball over Chelyabinsk,
Russia: a shard of blown-out glass and a fragment of the meteorite itself. (Photo: Nicholas St. Fleur)
By sheer coincidence, scientists were preparing for a much larger asteroid called 2012 DA14 to hurtle past
Earth that same day. But the Chelyabinsk fireball was a surprise. The asteroid was relatively small, and its
arrival was masked by the suns glare. It evaded detection of every satellite and radar when it pierced the
atmosphere.
Low frequency, long-distance vibrations called infrasound that emanated from the shockwave clued
scientists in to what had happened. Infrasound stations across the world detected the waves. The closest
detectors in Kazakhstan reported an explosion equivalent to the energy released by 500 kilotons of TNT,
bigger than most small nuclear blasts. In 1908 an impact perhaps 10 to 100 times more powerful had
flattened a huge tract of trees near Tunguska, Siberia. But that astral invasion was poorly documented.
Chelyabinsk was the first blast captured and shared in the social networking era. With a few clicks, footage
was seen by millions. It provided a wealth of evidence for remote scientists like Jenniskens to delve into
immediately.
2/8
11/21/2014
For the next few weeks, he pored over the films. Here's a perfect video, Jenniskens says, playing a clip from
the dash cam of a car stopped at a traffic sign. When the driver arrivesfor just a few framesyou see the
fireball appear. And from that moment on you get a beautiful record of the whole trajectory.
Jenniskens and his team combed through more than 400 such videos. Each one provided a different
perspective and viewing angle of the event. The videos created the foundation for his investigation. When
Jenniskens found one that met his criteriaa still, clear camera shot with points of reference, such as trees
or buildingshe downloaded it and extracted its individual frames. He narrowed his search to ten videos
that represented the locations he felt he needed to visit.
Chelyabinsk Infographic
Map data 2014 Google
Terms
3/8
11/21/2014
Click on this interactive graphic to see videos used by meteor hunter Peter Jenniskens and Nature authors J.
Borovika et al. to reconstruct the Chelyabinsk fireball. Yellow markers indicate where Jenniskens traveled to
map the night sky. Blue markers show the locations used by the Nature authors to calculate the trajectory. Blue
dots show places visited by both teams. The red line marks the fireball's trajectory, with dots marking key
moments. Data from Popova, O. P. et al. in Science 342, 10691073 (2013) and Borovika, J. et al. in Nature 503,
235237 (2013). (Infographic by Nicholas St. Fleur.)
The moment I saw the videos, my emotion was that I want to go there, Jenniskens says. Ideally I would
have liked to have been there when it happened. He found a host: meteor modeler Olga Popova of the
Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres, who invited Jenniskens to join her team
in Chelyabinsk to reconstruct the meteorites trajectory.
Many videos caught the meteors entrance and exit, but missed its middle moments when the explosions
intense light blinded the cameras. To determine the rocks speed, Jenniskens analyzed traffic camera footage
that caught moving shadows from the backside of houses as the meteor blew up. This speed, and the
asteroids path as it punched through the atmosphere, let scientists trace the rock back to its origins in our
solar systems asteroid belt.
Jenniskens knew from his expedition in Sudan that sleuthing this meteor impact on the ground would be no
easy task. He needed to visit each site and take a photo of the scenery against the night sky, precisely
matching each reference point to triangulate the objects flight course. The stars, he says, act like a compass
for determining the direction of the fireball and deducing its orbit from space. Even small changes when
lining up his camera could have big consequences for accuracy.
But unlike his previous ventures, this one was a race against time. The data were rapidly disappearing: glass
was being repaired, chunks of meteorites were being recovered, and peoples memories were fading. Three
weeks after the fiery impact, Jenniskens embarked for Russia.
Cold case
After landing in bone-chilling Chelyabinsk, where the temperature dropped to 0F, Jenniskens and his team
first investigated a damaged zinc factory. The buildings walls had collapsed following the Chelyabinsk
explosion. It was one of more than 7,000 buildings to have its windows blown out by the shockwave.
The team marked the sites where they saw shattered glass to map the physical extent of the damage caused
by the shock. You see the pressure wave not just push against the glass, but also push the whole window
frame, Jenniskens says. You see people get blown off their feet from the shockwave. You wonder why more
people didnt get hurt. In a city of a million people, no one dieddespite the blasts intense power. But
many injuries did occur when people ran to their windows to see the bright flash of light, just before the blast
wave roared across the city.
The team traveled to more than 50 villages on the outskirts of the blast, some more than 50 miles away. They
visited local markets at each stop to speak with shop owners, who had spent three weeks discussing the
events with customers. The shopkeepers would summarize how the fireball impacted their town. When the
team heard other reports of damage, they traveled to those sites and assessed the impact.
Every person we spoke to had something to say
about it. Either they had seen the fireball or they
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11/21/2014

felt the pressure wave coming towards them, says
Jenniskens. It was really an exceptional event.
The testimonies supplied information beyond what
the videos could capture, such as the smells,
sounds, and injuries in the blasts aftermath.
In some cases, Jenniskens met people who were
outside during the fireball. Many of them reported
smelling sulfur, like after a fireworks display. One
In this video produced by Nicholas St. Fleur, NASA

researcher Peter Jenniskens describes his trip to Russia
to document the dramatic Chelyabinsk fireball and
meteor explosion in February 2013.
coal miner was working in a snowfield right under

the blast; he suffered severe sunburns and peeling
skin. Jenniskens calls the airburst, which produced
brutally bright light, the most exceptional aspect of the entire event.
The team also collected fragments of the meteorites, which they sent back to labs around the world to
analyze. Geologist Qing Zhu Yin of UC Davis received a penny-sized fragment. He used intense X-rays to
examine the meteorites consistency. Its weakly bound layers of minerals and severe fragmenting revealed
why it exploded into thousands of pieces of debris. His team also looked at the rocks magnetic field and
determined that it was made of ordinary chondrite, a rocky asteroid containing little iron.
This is one of the bystander witnesses to the formation of the solar system four and a half billion years ago,
Yin says. Most asteroids that hit Earth will be like this one, he notes. Much more rare are solid iron bodies,
like the one that gouged Meteor Crater in Arizona 40,000 years ago.
Bursts and blasts

A week before Jenniskens left for Chelyabinsk, physicist Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratory in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, was already on his way. Boslough, a world authority on air blasts, uses computer
models to simulate how fireballs cascade toward the groundand their potential to kill people. Asteroids
that pierce the atmosphere release much of their kinetic energy as pressure, which creates the air blast. The
Chelyabinsk meteor provided a natural lab to test Boslough's ideas about how things blow up overhead.
Boslough was one of the first American scientists to find out about the meteor event. He too got the message
through social media. An hour after the fireball exploded, a Canadian friend who plays late-night chess
online with Russian players shared the news from a site documenting the explosion. Boslough immediately
identified it as an airburst.
It was an adrenaline rush from that moment I saw the first video, he says. The first thing I wanted to do
was set up a model and start simulating it.
A few days later, a team from the NOVA television program contacted Boslough to accompany them to
Chelyabinsk for three days as their meteorite expert. They wanted to detail the event in a short documentary
called Meteor Strike. But Boslough had more than just TV on his agenda. Equipped with a camera, tripod,
and warm winter clothes, he set out to track down data and learn more about the blast. During the day he
filmed with the NOVA crew, but at night Boslough sleuthed with a taxi driver across the countryside, looking
for clues.
I dont think of it so much as Sherlock Holmes, because he's all about solving mysteries with clues,
Boslough says. There was never a mystery about what this was. We just wanted to get the best possible data,
and we wanted to get it quickly so we could explain all the details surrounding the blast. In particular, the
airbursts path overheadcreated by the asteroids trajectorywould help test Bosloughs simulations of
explosions above the ground at different angles.
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11/21/2014
He also used his model to help deduce why the airwave created twin trails of smoke. When we first saw the
airwave split we didnt know why, but as soon as we started modeling it, it all made sense, Boslough says.
The meteor ignited a horizontal cylinder of hot air. As that buoyant air rose, it split into two horizontal
vortices resembling sideways tornadoes.
Modeling ties everything to physics, Boslough says. The way the airwave split into two, the intensity of the
shockwave, and the pattern of damage on the groundall of these are completely explainable with physics,
but only if you make the observations.
Podcast produced by Nicholas St. Fleur. Click on arrow to play.
SciCom Slugs
The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion
4:04
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The unlikely impact

Thousands of miles away in Canada, Bosloughs partner Peter Brown, a meteor scientist from the University
of Western Ontario, started analyzing the data Boslough transmitted. Together, they calibrated the blast to
characterize the meteorites size, energy, and the physics of its impact. It was the first time scientists had
such calibrations for an airburst.
In the first few hours, it was clear to me from looking at the data that this object was way beyond the scale
and scope of anything wed ever seen, says Brown. Within 12 hours, Brown had made a preliminary
estimate that the blast exploded with 420 kilotons of energy. Over the next six months, he used data from
infrasound, dash-cam videos, light detectors, and seismic sensors to put that number at 500 kilotons. It had
been more than a century since humans had recorded anything that powerful from a piece of space debris.
I certainly never expected to see an object of this size hit anywhere on the earth, let alone near a city, during
my career," Brown says. "Its just very unlikely.
Brown, Boslough, Jenniskens, and their colleagues used the deluge of data to pinpoint where the rock came
from, decode what it was made of, and trace its destructive path through the sky. Nine months following
their trips, the two teams reported a suite of superlatives in the journals Science and Nature: a 12,000-ton,
65-foot-wide space rock had hurtled across the sky at 42,500 miles per hour, bursting 14 miles above the city
in a flash of light 30 times brighter than the sun and 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic
bomb.
Brown says the event gives scientists a better sense of the hazard that any given small object poses to our
planet. The mild 18-degree angle at which the asteroid entered and then exploded was lucky for Chelyabinsk.
Had the rock come at a steeper angle, such 45 degrees, the downward-driving airburst would have had
graver impacts on the residents.
It also helps reveal the frequency of such events. Previously touted as a once-in-a-thousand-years event,
Chelyabinsk-size impacts are getting their frequencies reevaluated. According to David Morrison, an
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11/21/2014
astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California,

similar events may strike every 40 to 100 years, on average.
It makes you question at what size of an incoming object
would you want to evacuate or get out of the way and at what
size would you say Hey thats cool, lets go watch it. This was
right on the border between those two, he says.
The blast investigation, says Morrison, helps lay the
groundwork for preparing for the next event. Scientists now
can use models to run an ensemble of scenarios that vary in
meteorite size, impact angle, speed, and other variables, then
create risk assessments accordingly.
It's not that scientists didnt know this could happen,"
Morrison says. "Rather, now theres a broader community concerned about these impacts and saying Hey,
we need to understand this.
His colleague, Peter Jenniskens, holds two keepsakes from his time in Chelyabinsk: a small, smooth chunk of
the meteorite and a thick shard of glass shattered by the shockwave. The pocket-sized souvenirs are pieces to
a physics puzzle that he never thought he would be so fortunate to solve.
2014 Nicholas St. Fleur / UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program

Top
Biographies
Nicholas St. Fleur
B.S. (biological sciences; minor: communications) Cornell
University
Internships: National Public Radio, Scientific American
A magnitude-7.0 earthquake triggered my interest in science
writing. The sliding tectonic plates and severe aftershocks were
fascinating enough, but the human side of the seismological story
inspired me.
I was a first-year premed student when the quake devastated Portau-Prince, the capital of Haitiand the city where my parents were born. For the next week I was transfixed
as medical correspondents painted a morbid picture of the disease outbreaks and death following the
disaster. Though it was unsettling to watch, I found myself captivated by this juxtaposition of medicine and
media.
I soon enrolled in a science and health reporting course and developed a passion for storytelling. Only rare
science stories have tragedy at their epicenters, but they all have humanity beneath the surface, and I intend
to unearth it.
Nicholas St. Fleur's website
...................................................
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