policy

The back-to-back catastrophic Helene and Milton attacks within the southeastern US are reshaping the presidential race and putting climate disasters at the middle of the ultimate stretch of the dueling campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

In interviews and speeches, on the campaign trail and on social media, Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Republican Trump are increasingly talking in regards to the same thing—hurricanes and disaster relief—and in very other ways.

For Helene, disasters were the main focus of the campaign because the storm made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region on September 26 as a Category 4 storm before dumping historic rainfall inland that triggered deadly flooding, particularly within the West North Carolina. In the wake of the storm, Harris and Trump adjusted their travel plans to go to affected communities and so they increasingly talked about recovery efforts.

The threat of Milton, one other powerful hurricane that hit Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday evening, only heightened candidates' attention to the difficulty.

Trump used the dual disasters to attack Harris and President Joe Biden over their response, spreading misinformation about it on his social media page Truth Social and in interviews and rally speeches. Trump falsely claimed that disaster relief funds can be diverted to migrants and that hurricane victims could only receive $750 in aid. He also claimed without evidence that the relief effort neglected Republican communities.

Meanwhile, Harris spends much of her time talking about hurricane preparedness, response and relief. The issue got here up when she appeared on ABC daytime talk show The View. She dismissed a few of Trump's baseless claims in regards to the government's post-Helene relief effort. She later called the Weather Channel to counter further misinformation about hurricanes. (Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, told Bloomberg News: “The only misinformation is coming from the Harris-Biden administration.”)

The Harris campaign also released a brand new ad attacking Trump's handling of past disasters during his time as president. It highlights the map of the trail of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, which Trump famously altered with a Sharpie – a saga that became often called Sharpiegate. The ad features interviews with two former Trump officials highlighting his response to the storm. “He would propose not to provide disaster relief to states that did not vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, the lead attorney for former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, says within the ad.

Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that climate change is increasing the strength of hurricanes, making them intensify more quickly and bringing more rain.

Harris didn’t address the connection between the storms and global warming. And so far, she has not made climate a cornerstone of her campaign, although the Biden administration has left a major climate legacy and plenty of Democrats say global warming is amongst their top election priorities. She only touched on the difficulty briefly in her speech to the Democratic National Convention. In the talk with Trump, she briefly mentioned Biden's green initiatives before touting U.S. oil and gas production. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” up to now, has vowed to gut Biden's climate policies while disparaging clean energy technologies corresponding to wind power and electric vehicles.

Both candidates are actually talking about climate change, even in the event that they don't use those words, says Pete Maysmith, senior vp of campaigns on the LCV Action Fund, the election-related site of the League of Conservation Voters.

“I think sometimes there's a view that we need these magic words or we're not talking about climate change,” Maysmith says. “Of course we're talking about climate change.” (Similarly, he argues that Harris has already talked about it in her comments on wind energy, solar energy, automotive batteries and more.)

Environmental groups have followed the Harris campaign's lead on find out how to raise the difficulty of climate with voters by focusing their ad buys and other voter education efforts on how federal climate spending creates recent jobs and usually lowers energy costs, reasonably than to present the political details intimately. And now they're following suit and making hurricane news.

The LCV Action Fund recently posted a brief video on Instagram showing images and pictures of Helene's damage, with a voiceover from Trump saying: “When people speak about global warming, I say that the ocean inside will decrease by 100ths of an inch over the subsequent 400 years. This will not be our problem.” (Trump has made versions of this claim in campaign rallies and tv interviews.) The video has been viewed greater than 4 million times, partially because American musician Billie Eilish reposted it.

The advocacy group Climate Power released a video Thursday with rapper Big Freedia highlighting how Project 2025 — a conservative wish list for a second Trump presidency that Trump himself has rejected — proposes privatizing the National Weather Service, which raises warnings issues that Americans proceed to depend on to maintain Helene and Milton protected.

“The indisputable fact that Hurricane Milton became such a strong storm in such a brief time period shows that the climate crisis is here and shows through a really clear lens the fee to people – in lost lives, in lost homes, within the lack of…”corporations,” says Alex Glass, communications director at Climate Power.

Today is Wednesday, August 7, the 220th day of the 12 months 2024. There are 146 days left within the 12 months.

Today in history:

On August 7, 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit performed an unauthorized tightrope walk between the 2 towers of the World Trade Center in New York, over 400 meters above the bottom. The event was documented within the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire.”

Also on this date:

In 1789, Congress established the U.S. War Department.

In 1960, Ivory Coast gained independence from France.

In 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad powers to cope with reported North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. forces.

In 1971, the Apollo 15 moon mission ended successfully when the command module splashed down within the Pacific Ocean.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared the Love Canal disaster in Niagara Falls, New York, a federal public health emergency; it later topped the list of Superfund-funded cleanup areas.

In 1989, a plane carrying Texas U.S. Representative Mickey Leland and 15 others disappeared over Ethiopia. (The plane's wreckage was found six days later; there have been no survivors.)

In 1990, President George HW Bush ordered U.S. troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to guard the oil-rich desert kingdom from a possible invasion by Iraq.

In 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

In 2007, San Francisco's Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run, breaking Hank Aaron's famous record with only one out within the fifth inning of a game against the Washington Nationals, who won 8-6.

In 2012, to avoid a possible death penalty, Jared Lee Loughner agreed to spend the remainder of his life in prison. He admitted to happening a rampage at a political rally in Arizona in 2011, killing six people and injuring 13, including U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords.

In 2015, movie show bomber James Holmes was spared the death penalty in Colorado and as a substitute received a life sentence after a jury in Centennial couldn’t agree on whether he ought to be executed for his murderous attack on a packed movie premiere that left 12 people dead.

Today's birthdays:

• Singer Lana Cantrell is 81.
• Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is 80.
• Actor John Glover is 80.
• Actor David Rasche is 80.
• Former diplomat, talk show host and activist Alan Keyes is 74.
• Country singer Rodney Crowell is 74.
• Actress Caroline Aaron is 72.
• Comedian Alexei Sayle is 72.
• Actor Wayne Knight is 69.
• Rock singer Bruce Dickinson is 66.
• Marathon runner Alberto Salazar is 66.
• Actor David Duchovny is 64.
• Actor Delane Matthews is 63.
• Actor Harold Perrineau is 61.
• Jazz musician Marcus Roberts is 61.
• Country singer Raul Malo is 59.
• Actor David Mann is 58.
• Actress Charlotte Lewis is 57.
• Actor Sydney Penny is 53.
• Actor Greg Serano is 52.
• Actor Michael Shannon is 50.
• Actress Charlize Theron is 49.
• Rock musician Barry Kerch is 48.
• Actor Eric Johnson is 45.
• Actor Randy Wayne is 43.
• Actress and writer Brit Marling is 42.
• NHL center Sidney Crosby is 37.
• MLB All-Star Mike Trout is 33.
• Actor Liam James is 28.

Originally published: August 7, 2024 at 1:00 am

Only about 600 people have ever traveled into space. The overwhelming majority of astronauts For the past sixty years, the soldiers have been middle-aged men on short-term missions of lower than twenty days.

Today, we’re witnessing a brand new era of human spaceflight as more private, industrial and multinational space operators and aviators enter the market, with missions lasting from minutes, hours and days to months.

As humanity hopes to return to the moon in the approaching decade, space missions will last significantly longer and can involve many more astronauts and even space tourists. This also implies that a greater diversity of individuals will experience the acute conditions of space – more women and folks of various ethnicities, ages and health conditions.

Because people respond in another way to the unique stressors and pressures of space, space health researchers like me try to raised understand the impact of spaceflight on human health. With such information, we will work out the way to help astronauts stay healthy each in space and after they return to Earth.

As a part of the historical NASA twin studyIn 2019, my colleagues and I published groundbreaking research on how a 12 months aboard the International Space Station affects the human body.

I’m a Radiation cancer biologist within the Department of Environmental and Radiation Health Sciences at Colorado State University. I even have spent the previous few years expanding on this earlier research in a series of recent articles published in your entire Nature journal portfolio.

These papers are a part of the Manuscript package “Space Omics and Medical Atlas”Data, protocols and repositories representing the biggest collection ever assembled for aerospace medicine and space biology. Over 100 institutions from 25 countries have contributed to the coordinated release of a wide selection of space data.

The NASA twin study

NASA Twin study seized a singular research opportunity.

NASA chosen astronaut Scott Kelly for the agency's first year-long mission, during which he spent a 12 months aboard the International Space Station from 2015 to 2016. During the identical period, his an identical twin brother Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and current U.S. Senator for Arizona, remained on Earth.

My team and I examined blood samples collected before, during and after spaceflight from our twin and his genetically an identical twin on Earth. We found that Scott's telomeres – the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes which can be just like the plastic tip on a shoelace that keeps them from fraying – grew unexpectedly longer during his 12 months in space.

When Scott returned to Earth, nonetheless, his telomeres began to shorten rapidly. In the months that followed, his telomeres recovered, but were still shorter after his trip than that they had been before his flight into space.

As you age, your telomeres shorten on account of various aspects, including stress. The length of your telomeres can function a biological indicator Your risk of developing age-related diseases equivalent to dementia, heart problems and cancer.

In a separate studyMy team studied a bunch of 10 astronauts on six-month missions aboard the International Space Station. We also had a control group of age- and gender-matched participants who stayed on Earth.

We measured telomere length before, during and after spaceflight and again found that telomeres were longer during spaceflight and shortened after returning to Earth. Overall, the astronauts had many more short telomeres after spaceflight than before.

One of the opposite researchers within the twin study, Christopher Masonand me conducted one other telomere study – this time with two high-altitude mountaineers – a similarly extreme environment as on Earth.

We found that the climbers' telomeres were longer after they climbed Mount Everest and shortened again after they descended. Their twins who stayed at low altitude didn’t experience the identical changes in telomere length. These results suggest that it was not the microgravity of the space station that caused the changes in telomere length we observed within the astronauts – other causes, equivalent to increased radiation exposure, are more likely.

Civilians in space

In our latest studyWe studied the telomeres of the crew aboard SpaceX's 2021 Inspiration4 mission. This mission had the primary all-civilian crew whose ages spanned 4 a long time. All crew members' telomeres lengthened through the mission, and three of the 4 astronauts also showed telomere shortening after returning to Earth.

What's particularly interesting about these findings is that the Inspiration4 mission lasted only three days. So not only do scientists now have consistent and reproducible data on how telomeres reply to spaceflight, but we also know that it happens quickly. These results suggest that even short trips, like a weekend trip to space, are related to changes in telomere length.

The health implications of such changes in telomere length should not yet fully understood by scientists. We have to do more research to know how each long and short telomeres affect an astronaut's long-term health.

Telomere RNA

In one other articlewe showed that the Inspiration4 crew – in addition to Scott Kelly and the high-altitude climbers – had elevated levels of telomeric RNA, called TERRA.

Telomeres consist of various repeating DNA sequences. These are transcribed into TERRA, which contributes to the structure of the telomeres and helps them perform their function.

Together with laboratory studies, these results show that telomeres are damaged during space travel. Although there continues to be much we have no idea, we do know that telomeres are particularly sensitive to oxidative stressThe chronic oxidative damage that astronauts suffer from 24/7 exposure to space radiation likely contributes to the telomere responses we observe.

We also wrote a Review article with a more futuristic perspective how a greater understanding of telomeres and aging could help humans not only survive long space journeys, but in addition thrive and even colonize other planets. This would require humans to breed in space and future generations to grow up in space. We don't yet know if that is even possible.

Plant telomeres in space

My colleagues and I even have also contributed other work to the Space Omics and Medical Atlas package, including an article published in Nature CommunicationsThe study team led by Texas A&M biologist Dorothy Shippen and biologist at Ohio University Sarah Wyattfound that plants in space didn’t have longer telomeres during their time aboard the International Space Station, unlike humans.

However, the plants increased their Production of telomerasethe enzyme that helps maintain telomere length.

As anyone who has seen “The Martian“As we all know, plants will play an essential role in the long-term survival of humans in space. This finding suggests that plants may be naturally better equipped to withstand the stresses of space than humans.”