Day: September 9, 2021

The crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday reported that smoke alarms went off in the Russian segment of orbiting laboratory, and the crew reported seeing smoke and smelling burned plastic.

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said the incident took place in the Russian-built Zvezda module and occurred as the station’s batteries were being recharged. The smell reportedly wafted from the Russian module into the module operated by the U.S. space agency NASA.

Roscosmos said the crew activated air filters and returned to their normal schedule once the air quality was back to normal. It was unclear what caused the smoke.

Russian Cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov proceeded with their scheduled six-hour spacewalk to continue integrating the Russian-built Nauka science lab that docked with the space station in July.

Shortly after docking, the lab briefly knocked the orbital outpost out of position by accidentally firing its engines — an incident Russian space officials blamed on a software failure.

The space station is also occupied by NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Source: Voice of America

Africa is slated to receive 25% fewer COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year than it was expecting, the director of the World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa said Thursday.

The African continent, already struggling with a thin supply of vaccines while many wealthy nations initiate booster shot programs, has fully vaccinated just more than 3% of its residents.

The global vaccine sharing initiative COVAX announced Wednesday that it expects to receive about 1.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the year, as opposed to the projection of 1.9 billion doses it received in June.

Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa director, said during a press conference Thursday that the United States has thrown away three times as many vaccine doses as COVAX has delivered to African countries since March.

COVAX delivered more than 5 million doses to Africa in the past week, but the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention said that as of September 1, U.S. pharmacies have thrown away more than 15 million doses since March.

The United States and other wealthy nations have been under increasing pressure to donate their surplus of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries as the pandemic wreaks havoc across the globe with the emergence of new and more contagious variants of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, on Wednesday implored wealthy nations to forgo COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for the rest of the year to ensure that poorer countries have more access to the vaccine. Tedros had previously asked rich countries not to provide boosters until September.

Also on Thursday, Turkey’s health minister said the country is soon likely to approve a locally made vaccine, which began late-stage trials in June, for emergency use. Ankara expects it will start mass producing “Turkovac” this October.

Italy sent teams to the island of Lampedusa to inoculate newly arrived immigrants. Lampedusa is one of the main arrival points for African migrants from Libya and Tunisia. Roughly 40,000 migrants from North Africa have arrived in Italy so far this year, twice as many as in 2020.

In Los Angeles

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Board of Education approved a measure Thursday that would mandate vaccinations against COVID-19 for all students 12 years and older. Students would be required to receive their first dose by November 21 followed by a second dose by December 19 in order to be fully vaccinated by the next semester.

The measure also requires students participating in in-person extracurricular activities to receive both shots by the end of October. The district will allow medical or religious exemptions.

Los Angeles is the largest school district in the U.S. to impose a mandatory vaccination policy. The district is the nation’s second-largest, with just more than 600,000 students.

In Japan

Separately, Japan announced Thursday that it would extend its current coronavirus state of emergency for Tokyo and 18 other areas until Sept. 30. Two prefectures will be shifted from full emergency status to more targeted restrictions.

The state of emergency was first imposed for the city and a handful of other prefectures just weeks before the start of the Tokyo Olympics as Japan struggled under the surge of new infections sparked by the delta variant and a sluggish vaccination campaign.

Japan currently has more than 1.6 million confirmed infections, including 16,600 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, with nearly 50% of its population fully vaccinated.

Source: Voice of America

SAINT-PAUL-LES-DURANCE – Teams working on two continents have marked similar milestones in their respective efforts to tap an energy source key to the fight against climate change: They’ve each produced very impressive magnets.

On Thursday, scientists at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France took delivery of the first part of a massive magnet so strong its American manufacturer claims it can lift an aircraft carrier.

Almost 20 meters (about 60 feet) tall and more than 4 meters (14 feet) in diameter when fully assembled, the magnet is a crucial component in the attempt by 35 nations to master nuclear fusion.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and a private company announced separately this week that they, too, have hit a milestone with the successful test of the world’s strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet that may allow the team to leapfrog ITER in the race to build a “sun on earth.”

Unlike existing fission reactors that produce radioactive waste and sometimes catastrophic meltdowns, proponents of fusion say it offers a clean and virtually limitless supply of energy. If, that is, scientists and engineers can figure out how to harness it — they have been working on the problem for nearly a century.

Rather than splitting atoms, fusion mimics a process that occurs naturally in stars to meld two hydrogen atoms together and produce a helium atom — as well as a whole lot of energy.

Achieving fusion requires unimaginable amounts of heat and pressure. One approach to achieving that is to turn the hydrogen into an electrically charged gas, or plasma, which is then controlled in a donut-shaped vacuum chamber.

This is done with the help of powerful superconducting magnets such as the “central solenoid” that General Atomics began shipping from San Diego to France this summer.

Scientists say ITER is now 75% complete and they aim to fire up the reactor by early 2026.

“Each completion of a major first-of-a-kind component — such as the central solenoid’s first module — increases our confidence that we can complete the complex engineering of the full machine,” said ITER’s spokesman Laban Coblentz.

The goal is to produce 10 times more energy by 2035 than is required to heat up the plasma, thereby proving that fusion technology is viable.

Among those hoping to beat them to the prize is the team in Massachusetts, which said it has managed to create magnetic field twice that of ITER’s with a magnet about 40 times smaller.

The scientists from MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems said they may have a device ready for everyday use in the early 2030s.

“This was designed to be commercial,” said MIT Vice President Maria Zuber, a prominent physicist. “This was not designed to be a science experiment.”

While not designed to produce electricity itself, ITER would also serve as the blueprint for similar but more sophisticated reactors if it is successful.

Proponents of the project argue that even if it fails, the countries involved will have mastered technical skills that can be used in other fields, from particle physics to designing advanced materials capable of withstanding the heat of the sun.

All nations contributing to the project — including the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, South Korea and much of Europe — share in the $20 billion cost and benefit jointly from the scientific results and intellectual property generated.

The central solenoid is just one of 12 large U.S. contributions to ITER, each of which is built by American companies, with funds allocated by Congress going toward U.S. jobs.

“Having the first module safely delivered to the ITER facility is such a triumph because every part of the manufacturing process had to be designed from the ground up,” said John Smith, director of engineering and projects at General Atomics.

The company spent years developing new technologies and methods to make and move the magnet parts, including coils weighing 250,000 pounds, across their facility and then around the globe.

“The engineering know-how that was established during this period is going to be invaluable for future projects of this scale,” Smith said.

“The goal of ITER is to prove that fusion can be a viable and economically practical source of energy, but we are already looking ahead at what comes next,” he added. “That’s going to be key to making fusion work commercially, and we now have a good idea of what needs to happen to get there.”

Betting on nuclear energy — first fission and then fusion — is still the world’s best chance to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, said Frederick Bordry, who oversaw the design and construction of another fiendishly complex scientific machine, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

“When we speak about the cost of ITER, it’s peanuts in comparison with the impact of climate change,” he said. “We will have to have the money for it.”

Source: Voice of America