For his youngest Spring/Summer Show 2025The fashion brand Diesel filled a catwalk with mountains of denim scraps, making a spectacle his efforts to scale back waste.

Haunting yet poetic: the “forgotten” by-products of fashion production have been reclaimed and transformed into something artistic. But the irony is just not lost considering that fashion shows like this require significant resources.

Diesel's event is an example of a growing trend toward the “spectacle of sustainability,” during which performative performances are prioritized over the deep, structural changes needed to handle environmental problems.

Can the style industry balance its penchant for spectacle with its environmental responsibility? The youngest Spacesuit collaboration between Prada and Axiom Space is a refreshing example of how it might try this, embracing innovation that goals to advance fashion technology and rewrite fashion norms.

Performance art as a substitute of content change

The fashion industry has at all times relied on some type of spectacle to proceed the style cycle. Fashion shows mix art, performance and design to create powerful experiences that capture people's attention and set the tone for what's “in”. Promotional material from these shows is widely shared, helping to solidify latest trends.

However, the spectacle of fashion is just not helpful in conveying the complexity of sustainability. Fashion events are likely to give attention to superficial ideas while ignoring deeper systemic problems similar to the recognition of fast fashion, people's purchasing habits and dealing conditions Garment factories. These problems are interrelated, so solving one problem requires solving the others.

It's much easier to throw a flashy event that inevitably reinforces the issue it's alleged to fix. International fashion events have a big carbon footprint. This is partly due to how many individuals they move all over the world, but in addition because they encourage consumption (while sustainability requires buying less).

The pandemic has helped find some solutions to this problem by forcing fashion shows develop into digital. Brands like Balenciagathe Congolese brand Hanifa and lots of more took part in virtual fashion shows with animated avatars – and lots of identified as a possible solution to the industry's sustainability problem.

But the industry has now largely returned to live fashion shows. Virtual presentations are relegated to their very own area inside fashion communication, while live events take center stage.

Towards a sustainable fashion future

Technology and innovation clearly play a job in making fashion more sustainable. The youngest Prada-Axiom Spacesuit collaboration brings this into focus in a brand new way.

The AxEMU (Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit) suits might be worn by Artemis III crew members in NASA's planned 2026 yr Mission to the moon. The suits are constructed from durable and high-performance materials that may withstand the acute conditions of space.

By joining this collaboration, Prada, known for its high fashion, enters an emblematic arena of technological advancement. This will likely help position the corporate on the forefront of sustainability and technology discussions – at the very least within the minds of consumers.

Prada itself has various levels of compliance with regards to achieving sustainability goals. The standard ethics rankings has classified it as “sustainable” while the web site rates sustainability Good for you rated it as “not good enough” and cited the necessity for improved transparency and higher use of dangerous chemicals.

Recently the brand work on it Producing recycled textiles similar to nylon fabric (nylon is a component of the brand DNA) from fishing nets and plastic bottles. It too began a high fashion jewelry line constructed from recycled gold.

Innovations for a changing world

Prada's partnership with Axiom represents a milestone in fashion's ability to influence high-tech industries. Such innovations not only strengthen Prada's image, but may also result in more sustainable fashion.

For example, advanced materials developed for spacesuits could eventually be converted into heat-resistant on a regular basis clothing. This is becoming increasingly essential within the context of climate change, particularly in regions already scuffling with drought and heatwaves. The IPCC warns that if global temperatures rise by 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, twice as many megacities are prone to suffer from heat stress.

New innovations are intended to assist consumers keep a cool head despite rising temperatures. Nikes Aerogami is a performance clothing technology that claims to extend breathability. Researchers from MIT did it too Designed garment vents which open and shut once they sense sweat to create airflow.

Similarly, researchers from Zhengzhou University and the University of South Australia have created a substance that reflects sunlight and provides off heat to lower body temperature. Such cooling textiles (which is also utilized in architecture) could help reduce the necessity for air-con.

A future challenge is to extend demand for these innovations by making them appear fashionable and “cool.” Collaborations just like the one between Prada and Axiom are helpful on this front. A spacesuit—an item normally considered a functional, durable piece of technology—becomes something more with the Prada name on it.

The collaboration also points to broader potential for brands to make use of large, attention-grabbing projects to convey their sustainability skills. In this manner they’ll mix spectacle with sustainability. The key might be to be certain that one doesn’t come on the expense of the opposite.

By Arthur Allen, KFF Health News

On May 13, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) published an open letter to Novo Nordisk on the front page of a number one Danish newspaper, urging the Danish company to live as much as its altruistic standards and lower U.S. prices for its successful diabetes and weight-loss drugs.

What Sanders didn't know was that Denmark, a rustic of six million people, was fighting its own crisis over the financing of Novo Nordisk's drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.

Most other developed countries, including Denmark, negotiate drug costs for his or her residents and pay prices which might be a fraction of those within the United States. But if a drug is effective and expensive, pharmaceutical corporations can clamp down on pricing. And Novo Nordisk did so, not less than initially, pushing the Danish health care system to its limits.

The country's public health system had adopted Ozempic as a diabetes drug for years, but in 2022 doctors began prescribing it for weight reduction as well, and shortly “they emptied all the coffers of the entire public health system,” said Jens Juul Holst, a professor on the University of Copenhagen and co-inventor of the drug.

Countries all over the world are fighting how and when to pay for Ozempic, Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and other drugs in the identical chemical class, especially when prescribed for weight reduction. In fact, the astronomically high prices within the U.S. set a bar that pharmaceutical corporations can use of their negotiations with other health systems.

In Denmark, where prescriptions for these drugs will devour 18 percent of the regional pharmaceutical budget in 2023, officials considered the unthinkable in a system that prides itself on free cradle-to-grave care: forcing patients to pay for Ozempic—a drug manufactured within the country—out of their very own pockets.

In America, stricter insurance policies are making it increasingly difficult for patients to acquire the medications, which may cost as much as $1,350 a month.

“In our clinic, there are month-to-month changes in terms of care, coverage and available drugs,” said Michael Blaha, director of clinical research on the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. He said doctors and patients play “a constant game of prior authorizations and appeals.”

The use of the drugs for weight reduction is a very sensitive issue. Novo Nordisk and Lilly are fighting for reimbursement – backed by some doctors and patient groups, lots of whom are funded by the drug corporations. They are pushing to overturn a 2005 federal regulation that prohibits Medicare from reimbursing weight-loss treatments.

“There's a strong likelihood that Medicare will cover these obesity drugs sooner or later,” said David Kim, an assistant professor of drugs and public health on the University of Chicago. If Medicare pays, he added, private insurers will likely follow suit.

The impact on government and personal insurance budgets, he said, depends upon three unanswered questions: How many individuals will ultimately get the drugs? How long will they take them? And at what cost?

The potential Medicare market alone is big. In 2020, about 13.7 million Medicare beneficiaries, a few quarter of the entire, were diagnosed as obese or obese, in keeping with Juliette Cubanski and Tricia Neuman, researchers at KFF, a nonprofit health information organization that features KFF Health News. Assuming a 50% discount on Wegovy's $1,300 monthly list price, that involves $107 billion. The total federal share of Medicare Part D spending in 2024 has been estimated at $120 billion.

Novo Nordisk has spent $7.6 million lobbying Congress over the past 12 months, and lobbying disclosures show that the vast majority of that cash was used to push bills within the House and Senate to expand the usage of GLP-1 drugs.

The pressure from pharmaceutical corporations is relentless. Pfizer, which has a GLP-1 drug in development, commissioned a white paper from the consulting firm Manatt arguing that Medicare law already allows coverage of those obesity drugs because they provide advantages beyond weight reduction. Novo and other pharmaceutical corporations have funded studies showing that taking these drugs results in savings in health look after chronic diseases.

But the Congressional Budget Office, whose estimates of the prices of such measures are crucial as to whether they’re ultimately implemented, has not yet issued a final statement. In a presentation in March, the office said it was “not aware of any empirical evidence directly linking the use of obesity drugs to reductions in other health care spending.”

Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy reimbursement manager whose clients are employers that sponsor drug plans, released a study this 12 months that found that only a 3rd of patients who take a GLP-1 drug take it for a full 12 months. That means getting insurance firms to cover the drugs can sometimes be a waste of cash, said Patrick Gleason, chief research officer at Prime Therapeutics, because research shows that patients are likely to regain weight after stopping the drugs.

This does not likely surprise Danish scientist Holst. He says that for many individuals, appetite suppression through GLP-1 drugs is “so miserably boring that they can no longer stand it and have to go back to their old lives.”

One answer could possibly be weight reduction programs that use GLP-1 for a 12 months, for instance, followed by maintenance therapy with cheaper drugs, Kim says.

Either way, many experts in the sector say it is sensible to start out shedding weight before obesity-related chronic diseases equivalent to type 2 diabetes develop.

Because obesity is related to so many comorbidities, pharmaceutical manufacturers are currently conducting studies showing that GLP-1 drugs even have a positive effect on conditions equivalent to sleep apnea and heart, liver and kidney disease.

But even those that support the usage of these drugs acknowledge that there’s uncertainty about how long it takes for the health-promoting effects to take effect and whether shorter-term use can prevent or alleviate longer-term illnesses.

“Modeling the impact is complicated,” says Alison Sexton Ward, a researcher on the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics on the University of Southern California. “Medical costs will not fall immediately. The diseases prevented may not appear for years.”

Starting next 12 months, out-of-pocket costs for Part D Medicare enrollees can be capped at $2,000, meaning U.S. taxpayers could have to cover most Medicare drug costs. So it's no surprise that the Congressional Budget Office expects the administration to start Medicare price negotiations for semaglutide under the Inflation Reduction Act “within the next few years,” in keeping with its March presentation.

Under the terms of the law, Ozempic could possibly be subject to cost negotiations by the federal government as early as next 12 months, with recent prices taking effect in 2027. The negotiated unit price would apply to all types of the drug – Ozempic, its higher-dose weight-loss version Wegovy, and a pill called Rybelsus.

It is unclear how high the worth can be. Wegovy costs patients in Denmark as much as $365 a month, which normally doesn’t cover the fee of the drug – and about 140 $ in Germany and $92 within the UK

Meanwhile, generic drugmakers are preparing to sell their versions of semaglutide, that are expected to hit the market in China and Brazil as early as 2026. In the U.S., Americans will likely must wait until not less than 2032 because of patent restrictions within the U.S. The Federal Trade Commission has sought to shorten the drugs' exclusivity periods by difficult Novo Nordisk's patent applications for applicators used to inject the drugs – which might extend their market exclusivity to as much as 30 months.

Currently, patients who cannot afford or don’t have access to the drugs often resort to ready-made preparations that will not be FDA-approved, although their raw materials come from FDA-registered factories. Blaha has “a number of patients” who don’t have access to the brand-name drugs and are available to the clinic with vials of ready-made preparations.

Two weeks before Sanders published his letter in Denmark, Novo Nordisk cut the local price of Ozempic by 34 percent to $130 a month – about 15 percent of the U.S. list price. The government, which had threatened to stop covering the drug, agreed to cover the fee of Ozempic diabetes treatment, but just for patients who had previously tried a less expensive drug equivalent to metformin.

Wegovy, the identical weight-loss drug in higher doses, would must be paid for by the patient in just about all cases. The monthly cost is $365. That price, while moderate by U.S. standards, has sparked heated debate in regards to the unequal impact of social class on the affordability of the drug, says Nils Jakob Knudsen, an endocrinologist in Copenhagen.

Calculating drug prices is complex for the Danes, he added, because “the booming economy for Novo also drives our very healthy Danish economy.”

Novo Nordisk's market valuation of $591 billion on August 2 was significantly higher than Denmark's entire GDP.

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©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Originally published: August 17, 2024 at 3:30 am

They will not be running for president or have won any Olympic medals, but two California celebrities are getting lots of attention this week.

The first recent pandas within the United States in 21 years – Yun Chuan, a five-year-old male, and Xin Bao, a four-year-old female – are causing a stir because the pair of giant pandas from China make their first public appearance on the San Diego Zoo on Thursday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom rode the wildlife wave on Wednesday, declaring Thursday “California Panda Day” and announcing that he and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, will attend the opening of Panda Ridge on the San Diego Zoo. The recent habitat for the bears is 4 times the dimensions of the previous panda enclosure the famous Southern California zoo built for its last pair of pandas, which returned to China in 2019.

Since 1972, when China first loaned pandas to the National Zoo in Washington DC as an indication of kindness to former President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat Nixon, the friendly ambassadors have been considered a crucial a part of diplomacy with the United States.

Following growing tensions between the 2 countries five years ago, China recalled a lot of its pandas from the United States. Today, the one remaining ones are on the Atlanta Zoo.

But now a rapprochement between the pandas appears to be underway.

Last November, during talks with President Biden on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would send recent pandas to America as “envoys of friendship.”

In April, San Francisco Mayor London Breed signed an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association to bring two pandas to the San Francisco Zoo in 2025 after a panda enclosure is built there. The city is working to lift $25 million for the project by soliciting donations from outstanding firms and philanthropists – from SalesForce to Google.

“We are ready to welcome visitors from all over the world to our beautiful zoo,” Breed said in April. “This is a momentous opportunity and I am grateful for it. I know I join many who can't wait to see her in San Francisco.”

Likewise, the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute announced in May that two giant pandas will come to the zoo in Washington, DC by the tip of 2024.

The pair from San Diego arrived in late June. Zoo officials say they’ve adjusted well to their recent surroundings.

“(Yun Chuan) loves his bamboo. He's really comfortable in his habitat. He's exploring everything and he's curious,” Megan Owen, vp of wildlife and conservation science on the San Diego Zoo, told “Good Morning America” ​​on Tuesday.

“We give each of our pandas a choice so they can tell us what they like best,” she said. “And we have to balance that with the type of bamboo that is most nutritious for the bears.”

Pandas typically grow to weigh as much as 113 kilograms and be 1.80 meters long. Due to deforestation and population growth in China, their home country, their numbers are slowly increasing because of conservation efforts. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded their status from “critically endangered” to “vulnerable.” Today, there are about 1,800 pandas living within the wild and over 200 in captivity.

San Diego Zoo and city officials are warning of heavy traffic in the primary few days around Balboa Park, where the zoo is positioned, and are urging visitors to make use of public transportation or carpool.

The zoo shouldn’t be disclosing what number of recent visitors it expects. China typically charges U.S. zoos $1 million a 12 months for 10 years to borrow the pandas. When pandas first got here to the San Diego Zoo in 1987, they attracted two million visitors that 12 months.

Officials in each countries hope the brand new couple will give birth to a cub.

The zoo plans to establish a “panda cam” soon so the general public can get a glimpse of the fluffy pair. Until then, zoo visitors can see the pandas by purchasing a timed ticket to Panda Ridge as a part of their zoo admission, joining a queue when those time slots are full, or by paying $92 to $115 per person for a special 60-minute early morning tour with a zoo expert.

For more information, see https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/giant-pandas/visit

Originally published: August 7, 2024 at 3:32 pm

There are greater than 200 species of birds that inhabit the world of di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa. And soon, nature lovers may have a brand new secret spot from which to see all of them: a huge sculpture that winds through the landscape and features a hide specifically for birdwatching.

For those that have never been to di Rosa, it’s an art complex within the Carneros wine region with two indoor galleries and 217 acres of out of doors art. Think a seven-story Samuel Yates filing cabinet, a flock of hands rising from the earth, or a motorized angel flying through the air like a helicopter. These works at the moment are being joined by “Falcons and pigeons”, a monumental constructing by Philip Krohn and his organization AUXART.

The artist is currently in the process of building the sculpture – visitors are welcome to watch him at work during opening hours most Thursdays and Fridays. When it is finished in November, the sculpture is expected to be more than 147 metres long and will be set amongst the Art Institute's ancient olive trees. It is so sprawling that it is impossible to see the entire thing from one spot, and that is not the only part that cannot be seen. Hawks and Doves will include a birdwatching post where visitors can hide to watch all the many different birds (including some rare species) that flit about.

Krohn is an interdisciplinary artist and art producer who divides his time between Sonoma and Oregon. He specializes in large-scale, site-specific artworks that often incorporate sound or music, and has exhibited at the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Portland Art Museum, the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, and elsewhere. The artist is undertaking the Napa project as part of his residency program with di Rosa, which invites Northern California creatives to reimagine the land surrounding the art facility.

“Unlike previous residents, Krohn's work doesn’t happen within the gallery but directly on the land amidst di Rosa's historic olive grove and sculpture meadow,” said Twyla Ruby, assistant curator, in a statement. “Krohn's long-standing sculptural practice includes working with waste materials found on site. In this case, he works directly with olive tree trimmings and other materials to create a shocking architectural installation that rises and falls to the rhythm of the land, inviting visitors to interact with the deep history of this special place.”

Visitors who come to watch the artist at work are encouraged to bring picnics, as the grounds include meadows, hiking trails and a scenic lake.

Details: The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art is open Thursday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is located at 5200 Carneros Highway, Napa. General admission tickets are $25 and are available at dirosaart.org.

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