Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams were back for a third time in a month once again taking a ride out to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 to climb on board the spacecraft sitting atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that lifted off amid mostly clear skies at 10:52 a.m. to take the pair to the International Space Station.

“Let’s get going,” said Wilmore minutes before launch. “Let’s put some fire in this rocket and let’s push it to the heavens where all these tough Americans have prepared it to be.”

Let’s relive liftoff of #AtlasV carrying #Starliner #CFT for @NASA and @BoeingSpace! pic.twitter.com/MxlAZE45aK

— ULA (@ulalaunch) June 5, 2024

The pair are flying the Crew Flight Test mission, a followup to two uncrewed test flights of Starliner, the first of which came in 2019. That mission was a partial failure as it was not able to rendezvous with the ISS forcing a 2 1/2-year delay to Boeing’s program to remedy hardware, software and management issues. The second uncrewed test flight in 2022 made it to the ISS, but post-launch review and preparation for the CFT brought further delays with more hardware issues popping up.

But half a decade later, Williams and Wilmore were set to fly, entering quarantine on April 22. Finally, on May 6, they tried for the first time to take off from the Space Coast, but an issue with a fluttering valve on ULA’s upper Centaur stage scrubbed that attempt with about two hours to go on the countdown clock. Then a second attempt this past Saturday was scrubbed within four minutes of launch because of ULA computers not synching at the launch pad.

“I am very impressed with my colleagues for being such optimists and such professionals.” said NASA astronaut for future Starliner crew member Mike Fincke during NASA’s live commentary leading up to launch. “They’ve been in quarantine for a long time. You know we’ve been waiting for over five years to get Starliner launched, but they are very, very excited about today. You can see that they’re focused on getting the job done and they are very ready for this mission.”

In the end, the third attempt went smoothly.

“Everything was fine. No hiccups, no drama and nothing to worry about,” Fincke said. “So I was really happy for Butch and Suni and happy with the whole team. … Now we just got to get to space station.”

The duo began suiting up before 6 a.m. at KSC’s Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building venturing out after 7:30 a.m. to climb aboard the updated Starliner-themed Airstream Astrovan for the ride over to neighboring Cape Canaveral and make their way back on board the Starliner spacecraft.

Before driving over, they played a traditional prelaunch game with chief of the astronaut office, Joe Acaba, not leaving until they had lost to Acaba — this time in a quick game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The idea is that losing that game is the worst thing that happens on a launch day.

“Speaking as a child of the 70s, a lot of us watched “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” and Mr. Rogers would tell us to take our time to do it right, and that’s what we’re doing here,” Fincke said.

Just before 9 a.m., teams waited the conclusion of a weather brief before moving forward with hatch closure, but were given the go for hatch closure with less than two hours to go before launch.

“We are ready. We’re smiling out here, see you in a couple weeks,” said Wilmore.

Pictures: Launch day for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on Crew Flight Test

The astronauts will spend just over 25 hours making their way to the ISS set to dock Thursday at 12:15 p.m., where they will spend about eight days on board before returning to Earth for a landing in one of five locations in the desert in the southwestern United States.

If successful, this will be the final required mission for Boeing under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to achieve certification and set up regular rotational missions to the ISS, sharing duties with SpaceX.

“We need that access,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free. “So right now we have we have one provider giving us that access to the space station. This will give us a second provider, which means if we have a problem with either, we have ways to get our crews to and from station, which helps keep the tempo that we’ve had for 23 years of having humans in low-Earth orbit, but also that opportunity to get the crews back if there’s an issue at all and keep that presence going.”

Wilmore and Williams will spend time on both the way up and down from the ISS testing out manual control overrides among other facets of the mostly automated spacecraft.

“There’s a thought of how things should be, but then there’s the reality how things need to be,” said Wilmore ahead of the launch attempt. “That’s what this test is all — everything we do is test. It’s been a process over the years that is such a benefit in all aspects of the capabilities of this spacecraft, and we’re excited to be a part of it.”

The pair are former Navy test pilots and veterans of two spaceflight each, with both having traveled on board Russia Soyuz capsules as well as the space shuttle. Wilmore is commander and joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2000 while Williams joined in 1998.

Williams was given the honor to name the capsule after it landed, and dubbed it Calypso, in deference to oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’sfamed vessel. The zero-gravity indicator for the mission follows the maritime theme, a stuffed narwhal that is also named Calypso.

Starliner is only the sixth ever U.S.-based spacecraft to fly with NASA astronauts following Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the space shuttleand SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Williams is the first woman to fly on an orbital test flight among NASA’s spacecraft.

Starliner will also become the first U.S.-based capsule to make a land touchdown as Crew Dragon, Apollo, Gemini and Mercury all made waterlandings, as will the Artemis program’s Orion capsule that has yet to fly with humans. Russia’s Soyuz, though, features land touchdowns.

It also marked a return of human launches from Cape Canaveral’s launch pads, which last saw a crewed flight in 1968 with the launch of Apollo7. Every Apollo mission afterward as well as the space shuttle and Crew Dragon launches have come from nearby Kennedy Space Center.

It’s the first time an Atlas V has flown with humans as well, although earlier iterations of the Atlas rocket flew several human spaceflights in the early 1960s including John Glenn’s historic trip to space as the first American to each orbit in 1962.

This also marked the 100th launch of an Atlas V rocket, and Wilmore had a special message for ULA after launch.

“They’ve been a member of the family for a long time, but now it’s official, and we want to welcome them to human spaceflight,” he said.

Perhaps you envisioned the days before penicillin when ordinary cuts and infections were often deadly. This scenario may not stay in our past. It will be our future, too, if we don’t address the growing crisis of antimicrobial resistance.

First used in the 1940s, penicillin was revolutionary. But one of the discoverers, Alexander Fleming, warned in 1945 that the wonder drug might lead to resistance. Today, we have many drugs that treat bacterial and fungal infections, yet Fleming’s fear has come true: Pathogens can adapt and evolve into “superbugs,” infections resistant to the antimicrobials designed to kill them.

Antimicrobial resistance was linked to the deaths of nearly 173,000 people in the United States and almost 5 million people worldwide in 2019. Things worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic as drug-resistant hospital-acquired infections and deaths increased at least 15%.

We’re particularly vulnerable here in California.

Consider the fungal infection valley fever. In the five years between 2014 and 2019, cases of valley fever in California quadrupled. In August, the California Department of Public Health warned of an increased risk of valley fever this fall.

Meanwhile, California had the second highest number of cases of the deadly, drug-resistant fungus Candida auris in 2022. Cases of drug-resistant Shigella, which can cause severe diarrhea and fever, are increasing. And in February, Los Angeles County saw four cases of an unusual drug-resistant bacterial infection from contaminated eyedrops that can cause blindness and death.

We need a consistent stream of new antimicrobial treatments to catch and keep up with resistance. But the market for antimicrobial medicines is uniquely broken.

To preserve these drugs’ effectiveness, they must be used sparingly. Clinicians only prescribe them when appropriate and for short periods to not exacerbate antimicrobial resistance. That means antimicrobials — appropriately — have low sales, which don’t justify the huge financial risks companies take to invent new medicines.

As a result, many companies have left the business. In the 1980s, 18 large firms were inventing antimicrobials, but by 2019, there were just three. Small companies have picked up the mantle at their own risk. The FDA has approved nine antibiotics from small companies, including one in California, since 2010. But today, every company behind those antibiotics has gone bankrupt, is financially underwater, or was sold at a loss.

The number of new antimicrobials has shrunk commensurately. The FDA approved 63 new antibiotics between 1980 and 2000, but just 15 between 2000 and 2018.

This broken market directly threatens California, where the life sciences industry supports more than 1 million jobs and generates $472 billion in business output.

Instead of paying companies per sales volume, the government would contract with firms for a reliable supply of a new drug, regardless of how much of the medicine was required. This model would revitalize antimicrobial research and development, and ensure patients’ access to novel treatments while supporting their appropriate use.

Unless we change our current trajectory, superbugs are estimated to kill as many as 10 million people a year by 2050 — exceeding the COVID-19 pandemic and matching the death toll from cancer. Congress must act before it’s too late.

Mike Guerra is the president and chief executive officer of California Life Sciences, a membership organization representing the state’s life sciences industry.

The truth of the matter is that the most impactful decisions about AI are being made by a few people with little to no input from the rest of us. That is a recipe for unrest if I’ve ever heard one.

A couple dozen AI researchers think there’s a chance that AI could lead to unprecedented human flourishing. So, they have taken it upon themselves to develop ever more advanced AI models.

At the same time, they have freely admitted that they increasingly have limited control over the technology itself and its potential side effects.

Is it any surprise that more than a few folks feel disenchanted with a governing system that purports to give power to the people but, in practice, empowers computer scientists to more or less unilaterally throw society into a potential doom loop?

It’s as if we’ve been asked what we wanted for dinner, answered, “Thai,” and then we’re told we could decide between Pepperoni or Canadian Bacon. That’s not a choice. That’s not power. That’s democratic gaslighting.

A functioning democracy should not leave decisions that may create irreversible harm for generations to a room of computer scientists.

In addition to allowing a small set of AI labs to introduce humankind-altering technology with no input from you and me, now our elected officials are asking these same unrepresentative and unelected tech leaders for advice on how best to regulate this emerging technology.

News from Washington, D.C., last week included headline after headline about Senator X consulting with tech leader Y. Missing from the headlines and, more importantly, from those meetings – representatives of the communities – foreign and domestic– who are going to bear the brunt of the good, bad and ugly generated by AI.

It’s again worth noting that some of us, perhaps many of us, think AI should not have been introduced at this point or at least not at this scale.

If you’re still with me and you still agree with me, you might be lamenting the fact that it’s already too late. We’re at the “pepperoni or Canadian bacon” stage of this decision making process, so whatever influence we wield now over the development of AI will have an insignificant impact on its long-term trajectory. Worse, there’s a chance that if we succeed in halting the deployment of AI models, China or (fill in the blank “bad guy” country) will just keep advancing their own models and eventually use those models against us in some war or economic contest.

Such arguments are flimsier than cheese-filled crust. I’d rather live in a United States that has strong communities where people perform meaningful work, still use their critical thinking skills, and trust their social institutions than a United States that leads the world in AI.

In fact, I’d bet on that version of the United States to outlast and outcompete any other country that thinks technology is the key to human flourishing.

We need to shift the narrative from “how do we shape the development of AI?” to “when and under conditions should we permit limited uses of AI?” In the interim, it’s fine for our officials to consult AI experts and leaders but voters, not tech CEOs, should be the ones determining when and how AI changes our society.

Kevin Frazier will join the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University as an assistant professor starting this fall. He currently is a clerk on the Montana Supreme Court. ©2023 The Fulcrum. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Vivian Rhodes figured she would eventually have sex.

She was raised in a Christian household in Washington state and thought sex before marriage would be the ultimate rebellion. But then college came and went — and no sex. Even flirting “felt unnatural,” she said.

In her early 20s, she watched someone she followed on Tumblr come out as asexual and realized that’s how she felt: She had yet to develop romantic feelings for anyone, and the physical act of sex just didn’t sound appealing.

“Some people assume this is about shaming other people, and it’s not,” said Rhodes, 28, who works as a certified nursing assistant in Los Angeles. “I’m glad people have fun with it and it works for them. But I think sex is kind of gross. It seems very messy, and it’s vulnerable in a way that I think would be very uncomfortable.”

For what researchers say is an array of reasons — including technology, heavy academic schedules and an overall slower-motion process of growing up — millennials and now Gen Zers are having less sex, with fewer partners, than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did. The social isolation and transmission scares of the COVID-19 pandemic have no doubt played a role in the shift. But researchers say that’s not the whole story: The “no rush for sex” trend predates the pandemic, according to a solid body of research.

UCLA has been tracking behavioral trends for years through its annual California Health Interview Survey, the largest state health survey in the nation. It includes questions about sexual activity. In 2021, the survey found, the number of young Californians ages 18 to 30 who reported having no sexual partners in the prior year reached a decade high of 38%. In 2011, 22% of young people reported having no sexual partners during the prior year, and the percentage climbed fairly steadily as the decade progressed.

California adults ages 35 to 50 who participated in UCLA’s 2021 survey also registered an increase in abstinence from 2011 to 2021. But with the percentage of “no sex” respondents rising from 9% to 14% during that time frame, the increase was not as pronounced.

The broader trend of young adults forgoing sex holds true nationally.

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey — which has been following shifts in Americans’ behavioral trends for decades — found that 3 in 10 Generation Z males, ages 18 to 25, surveyed in 2021 reported having gone without sex the prior year. One in four Gen Z women also reported having had no sex the prior year, according to Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor who reviewed the data for her book “Generations.”

In an age where hook-ups might seem as unlimited as a right swipe on a dating app, it’s easy to assume that Gen Z “should be having the time of their lives sexually,” Twenge said.

But that’s not how it’s playing out. Twenge said the decline has been underway for roughly two decades.

She attributed the slowdown in sexual relations most significantly to what she calls the “slow-life factor.” Young people just aren’t growing up as fast as they once did. They’re delaying big milestones such as getting their driver’s licenses and going to college. And they’re living at home with their parents a lot longer.

“In times and places where people live longer and education takes longer, the whole developmental trajectory slows down,” she said. “And so for teens and young adults, one place that you’re going to notice that is in terms of dating and romantic relationships and sexuality.”

A slight majority of 18- to 30-year-olds — about 52% — reported having one sexual partner in 2021, a decrease from 2020, according to the UCLA survey. The proportion of young adults who reported having two or more sexual partners also declined, from 23% in 2011 to 10% in 2021.

Though sex was on the decline in the years leading into the pandemic, COVID-19 made dating trickier.

Many people tightened their social circles when the pandemic surged in 2020 and 2021. And young people’s reliance on cellphones and apps for their social interactions only intensified when in-person meet-ups posed a risk of serious illness.

In general, people coming of age in an era of dating apps say the notion of starting a relationship with someone they meet in person — say a chance encounter at a bar or dance club — seems like a piece of nostalgia. Even friendships are increasingly forged over texting and video chats.

“A lot of young people when you talk to them will say their best friends are people they’ve never met,” said Jessica Borelli, a professor of psychological science at UC Irvine. “Sometimes they live across the country or in other countries, and yet they have these very intimate relationships with them. … The in-person interface is not nearly as essential for the development of intimacy as it might be for older people.”

Ivanna Zuniga, 22, who recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in psychological sciences, said her peers have largely delayed sex and romance to focus on education and career. Zuniga, who is bisexual, has been with her partner for about four years. But their sex life is sporadic, she said, adding that they hadn’t been intimate in the month leading up to her graduation.

“I’ve been really preoccupied with my studies, and I’m always stressed because of all the things I have going on,” she said. “My libido is always shot, and I don’t really ever think about sex.”

The sexless phenomenon has made its way into pop culture. Gone are the days when meet-cutes in bars leading to one-night stands and sex at college parties were the cornerstone of coupling in films.

In “No Hard Feelings,” released this year, a 32-year-old woman is hired by “helicopter parents” to deflower their shy 19-year-old son. At a party, the woman frantically searching for her date busts open bedroom doors where she expects to find people feverishly tangled in sheets. Instead, she finds teens sitting side by side on a bed, fully clothed, scrolling their phones or playing virtual reality games. Bemused, she yells, “Doesn’t anyone f— anymore?”

While there are practical benefits to waiting to be in a physical relationship, including less risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancy, Twenge argued that there are also downsides to young people eschewing sex and, more broadly, intimacy. Unhappiness and depression are at all-time highs among young adults, trend lines Twenge ties to the rise of smartphones and social media. And she noted with concern the steady decline in the birth rate.

“It creates the question of whether Social Security can survive,” Twenge said. “Will there be enough young workers to support older people in the system? Will there be enough young workers to take care of older people in nursing homes and in assisted-care facilities?”

Zuniga, who plans to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology, can’t imagine pausing her education or career to have children, so safe sex is particularly important, she said. Others interviewed said “horror stories” involving friends who contracted herpes or other sexually transmitted infections had turned them off from casual sex.

“I prioritize my studies too much, and I can’t fathom the thought of having my identity as an academic fall secondary to being a mother,” Zuniga said. “Moving out of the income bracket that you’re born into is so hard to do, and a very secure way to do it is through education.”

For Rhodes, not having sex has taken a lot of the pressure off social interactions.

“It lets me relax,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t care about how I look or how I come off to other people. But I have a little extra help caring less about it, because I don’t have to worry about attracting specific kinds of people for specific things.”

And she pushes back against the notion that shying away from sex is some sort of societal problem that needs to be “fixed.” It might even be a sign that young people have more control of their bodies and desires, she said.

“Maybe you don’t have to have sex all the time,” Rhodes said. “Maybe if you’re doing other things in your life, and you’ve got other priorities, or you just don’t feel like it, that can be a good enough answer.”

___

©2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

NASA satellites captured the progression of rising water in the 10-million-acre lake returning back to life.

Here is some drone footage from a very windy Tuesday evening out over Tulare Lake. #tularelake #dronephotography #dronevideo #stratford pic.twitter.com/dlEylqO4mK

— Mike Mendoza (@DayTrippinMike) May 10, 2023

Flood fears are still high for the Tulare Lake Basin and Southern San Joaquin Valley as the melting of the massive Sierra Nevada snowpack accelerates with the approach of summer.

Dry for nearly a century; this CA basin is filling up. The seasonal lake dried in the early 1900s & was converted into cropland. After a torrent of winter storms, #Landsat imagery shows Tulare Basin’s lake reappearing. #ImageOfTheWeek. https://t.co/VrfClHQUaV pic.twitter.com/6XcFOKwXAf

— USGS EROS (@USGS_EROS) May 10, 2023

When traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation fail, lung cancer can be a death sentence for many patients.

That, however, may be changing, with Northwestern Medicine leading the way.

Northwestern plans to begin regularly performing double lung transplants on patients with terminal lung cancer, after successfully transplanting lungs into two patients who would have otherwise died of the disease, the health system announced Wednesday.

Northwestern surgeons successfully performed a double lung transplant on Albert Khoury, then 54 of Chicago, in 2021, after he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Northwestern then performed a second similar transplant on Tannaz Ameli, 64, of Minneapolis, last July. Moving forward, Northwestern hopes to do at least 10 to 15 such transplants a year. The outcomes of the first 75 patients to participate will be tracked in a new research registry available on ClinicalTrials.gov.

“We are really excited about this because these are patients that are some of the most hopeless patients because a lot of them are going to be at the end of the road, and to be able to make such a dramatic impact, it’s quite compelling,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute.

Until now, lung transplants on patients with advanced lung cancer have been rare operations. Typically, patients with cancer are not eligible to receive organ transplants because it’s feared that the cancer will recur after the transplant. Patients who receive new organs must take medication to suppress their immune systems, which can lead to a recurrence if any cancer cells are left in the body.

Northwestern doctors, however, used lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to perform the transplants on cancer patients. In June 2020, Northwestern performed the first known double lung transplant in the country for a COVID-19 patient whose lungs were severely damaged by the disease. During that and subsequent similar surgeries, doctors had to be careful not to contaminate the blood stream during the transplant.

“Most COVID transplants we did had tons of bacteria in them,” Bharat said. “We felt if we could carefully remove those lungs and transplant them, we probably should be able to do the same in cancer ridden lungs.”

In the lung cancer transplant surgeries, patients are put on full heart and lung bypass, while both lungs are removed at the same time, along with the lymph nodes. Doctors wash the airways and the chest cavity to clear the cancer before putting in the new lungs, he said.

Not all patients with lung cancer are eligible for the surgery. The surgery is only for patients whose cancer has not spread beyond their lungs and who have run out of other treatment options, such as chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy and other surgeries.

Northwestern is now working with other health systems across the country, in hopes that other hospitals will develop similar programs, giving more patients the option of a transplant, Bharat said.

The two patients who’ve already received the transplants at Northwestern are still cancer free, Bharat said.

Khoury underwent the 7-hour-long surgery in September 2021.

The year before, Khoury, who was a nonsmoker and a cement finisher in Chicago, developed back pain, sneezing, chills, and a cough with mucus. At first, he thought he had COVID-19, but he was soon diagnosed with lung cancer.

Khoury said he was told by doctors at other health systems that he wouldn’t survive. Before the transplant at Northwestern, he was on a ventilator and had developed pneumonia and sepsis. When he got a transplant, he likely only had days left to live, said Dr. Young Chae, a medical oncologist with Lurie Cancer Center at Northwestern Medicine.

“I did not know if he would make it,” Chae said at a news conference Wednesday. “His lungs were both filled with cancer cells, and day by day, his oxygen saturation was dropping.”

Now 18 months past his transplant, Khoury has gone back to work. He calls the surgeons at Northwestern his “guardian angels.”

“The first day I went back to work, I was so happy,” Khoury said. “I was like, ‘I’m back. I did it. I made it.’”

Meanwhile, as Khoury was undergoing his life-saving transplant, Ameli was dealing with a lingering cough.

She was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in January 2022. She underwent chemotherapy, without success, and was recommended for hospice. Her husband reached out to the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute’s Second Opinion Program, where she was told she was eligible for a transplant.

“The first thing Dr. Bharat told me on consultation was, ‘I can make you cancer-free,’” said Ameli, a retired nurse and grandmother of four. “These are the words every cancer patient wants to hear. I could not believe it. Even today, every day I wake up and I go, ‘I’m cancer free,’ and it’s unbelievable.”

She said the transplant has given her a new perspective on life. She now appreciates daily life more, even the snow and ice of Minnesota winters.

“Life has a different meaning now,” she said at the news conference, sitting side-by-side with Khoury. “Now, I look at the snow and go, ‘It’s so beautiful.’”

“Everything is beautiful,” Khoury added.

©2023 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Boston scientists in groundbreaking research have used a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents.

The Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers created a cancer vaccine to simultaneously kill and prevent the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma. The team developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity — training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring.

“I’m a big believer that the cure for these tough cancers might be in the cancer itself, that we can use cancer against cancer,” the Brigham’s Khalid Shah told the Boston Herald on Wednesday.

“Our team has pursued a simple idea: to take cancer cells and transform them into cancer killers and vaccines,” said Shah, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy and the vice chair of research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and faculty at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “Using gene engineering, we are repurposing cancer cells to develop a therapeutic that kills tumor cells and stimulates the immune system to both destroy primary tumors and prevent cancer.”

The researchers tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of glioblastoma, with promising results.

Cancer vaccines are an active area of research for many labs, but the approach that Shah and his colleagues have taken is new. Instead of using inactivated tumor cells, the team repurposed living tumor cells, which possess an unusual feature — living tumor cells will travel long distances across the brain to return to the site of their fellow tumor cells.

Taking advantage of this unique property, Shah’s team engineered living tumor cells using the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 and repurposed them to release tumor cell killing agents. Also, the engineered tumor cells were designed to express factors that would make them easy for the immune system to spot, tag and remember, priming the immune system for a long-term anti-tumor response.

“Our goal is to take an innovative but translatable approach so that we can develop a therapeutic, cancer-killing vaccine that ultimately will have a lasting impact in medicine,” Shah said.

The researchers will soon be asking the FDA for approval for a Phase 1 trial. That would be for about 20 patients in the Boston area.

Last month, Moderna — which has been known for its COVID vaccines — announced groundbreaking data that shows the potential of mRNA-based personalized cancer vaccines. Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine combined with a Merck treatment immunotherapy slashed the risk of melanoma coming back, according to new trial results.

Influenced both by her mother, who taught her to care about nature on a local level, and her father, a veterinary university professor who studied large canines and had a more global view, Fox has made it her mission to speak in the defense of coyotes as well as other predators.

For the past 15 years, Fox — and no, she didn’t change her name — has been executive director of Project Coyote, a national organization she founded and based in Marin County. The organization’s mission is to dispel the myths about coyotes and other wild animals and to educate people on peaceful coexistence with them.

“I think for a lot of people, seeing a coyote is their first experience with a wild predator, especially those that live in urban areas,” Fox says. “Often there is a knee-jerk fear response. Coyotes are the most misunderstood and maligned wild carnivores in the country.”

We talked with Fox about Project Coyote and why we shouldn’t be so afraid.

Q. Why do people get so freaked out when they see a coyote in a developed area?

A. Humans have a natural fear of predators. After all, we were once prey on the savanna. It’s natural and normal for people to fear a wild predator. Part of our job is to inform people about these wild carnivores, what is their normal behavior and what we can do to better understand them.

We try to acknowledge their fears, recognize them and educate people about normal and natural behaviors. Once we understand their life cycles and what’s normal and what’s not normal, then we can feel more comfortable when we see a coyote and recognize aberrant behavior that might necessitate calling authorities.

Q. Coyotes have this historical reputation as wanton killers of livestock and a threat to humans, and we have had some scary coyote attacks in recent years. How do you make people feel comfortable around coyotes?

A. Whenever there is an encounter, it gets blown up in the media. We work all year, not just after an encounter, to assist communities with programs and plans educating urban dwellers on how to live with coyotes peacefully and reduce encounters. We also have a ranchers’ program that teaches nonlethal and humane ways to reduce conflicts between cattle and wild carnivores.

When we see an uptick in calls and conflicts with coyotes, it’s usually when coyote parents are raising their young. Off-leash dogs may come too close to a den site, and the coyotes are protecting their pups. We teach people to be aware and do things such as keeping their dogs on leashes during pupping season.

We also stress that people should not intentionally provide a food source to coyotes, which increases the chance of encounters. All you need is one bad actor feeding animals and habituating them to humans. That usually leads to trouble, which leads to the death of the animal.

Part of our messaging is keeping wild animals wild and wary, appreciating them from a distance.

Q. Why is it important to have coyotes?

A. Coyotes are a native species that play an important role in providing a healthy environment. For one thing, coyotes are great rodent controllers. An adult coyote can consume up to 1,800 rodents in a year.

Q. Can coyotes and people co-exist in developed areas?

A. Absolutely. More often than not, we are already coexisting with coyotes and other animals, as well. What we hear in the media is the rare time when a conflict occurs, not all the other times. Your chances of being bitten by a neighborhood dog or having a negative encounter with a deer on the roadway, or even being injured from a flying champagne cork is much greater than you being injured by a coyote or other wild animal.

Q. We often talk about coyotes being a threat to us, but are we as much of a threat to them?

A. Our mission is to work hard to understand and protect coyotes, bears, wolves, bobcats and mountain lions. Many have no state or federal protections and can be killed year round — and killed by what many consider indiscriminate and inhumane methods.

One of our campaigns is to end wildlife killing contests, where a species is targeted, and participants are awarded prizes for killing the most or the largest of that targeted species. We started in California, and were able to convince the California Fish and Game Commission to end those contests in 2014. We have 60 organizations working together and have banned the practice in eight states and are working to end it in all 50.

Q. If you could look ahead 20 years, what do you hope will have been accomplished with Project Coyote?

A. Since I started, I feel the overall tenor of communities has really shifted for the positive. We are now partnering with Fish and Wildlife and other organizations to provide presentations and workshops on how to live with and reduce conflicts and are hitting a larger audience.

Right now, we have a Keeping it Wild youth education program that fosters respect and appreciation for animals, and we work with educators across the nation to teach about apex predators. We also are working to pressure the federal government to restore gray wolves to their original lands and restore them to the protected species list.

I would hope in 20 years that that ethos has increased and spread.

Camilla H. Fox

Position: Founder and executive director of Project Coyote

Age: 53

Education: Boston University, undergraduate degree in English literature and women’s studies; Prescott College, post-graduate degree in environmental studies with a focus on wildlife ecology and conservation.

Past work: Leadership positions with Animal Protection Institute, Fur-Bearer Defenders and Rainforest Action Network

Family: Longtime partner, Philip, and rescue dog, Mokie

Residence: Larkspur

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT CAMILLA FOX

1. She played the flute with the Boston University Orchestra and has collected flutes from all over the world.
2. She’s an avid yogini.
3. Her greatest joy is to escape into the wild and be rejuvenated.
4. She loves to write, including poetry, and enjoys wildlife photography.
5. The biggest influences in her life are friend and mentor David Parson, who led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s efforts in 1990-1999 to reintroduce the endangered Mexican gray wolf to portions of its former range in the Southwest; her father, Dr. Michael W. Fox, and her mother, Bonnie Fox; and anthropologist Jane Goodall

STOCKHOLM — Three scientists jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work on quantum information science that has significant applications, for example in the field of encryption.

Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that unseen particles, such as photons or tiny bits of matter, can be linked, or “entangled,” with each other even when they are separated by large distances.

“Being a little bit entangled is sort of like being a little bit pregnant. The effect grows on you,” Clauser said in a Tuesday morning phone interview with The Associated Press.

It all goes back to a feature of the universe that even baffled Albert Einstein and connects matter and light in a tangled, chaotic way.

Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described “a spooky action at a distance” that he thought would eventually be disproved.

“I was betting on Einstein,” Clauser said. “But unfortunately I was wrong and Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right.”

Clauser, who from 1969 to 1996 worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley, said his work on quantum mechanics shows that you can’t confine information to a closed volume, “like a little box that sits on your desk” — though even he can’t say why.

“Most people would assume that nature is made out of stuff distributed throughout space and time,” Clauser said. “And that appears not to be the case.”

Quantum entanglement “has to do with taking these two photons and then measuring one over here and knowing immediately something about the other one over here,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “And if we have this property of entanglement between the two photons, we can establish a common information between two different observers of these quantum objects. And this allows us to do things like secret communication, in ways which weren’t possible to do before.”

That’s why quantum information is not an esoteric thought experiment, said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee. She called it a “vibrant and developing field.”

“It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology,” Olsson said. “Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements.”

Everything in the universe could be entangled but “usually the entanglement just kind of washes off. It’s so chaotic and random that when you look at it … we don’t see anything,” said Harvard professor Subir Sachdev, who has worked on experiments that look at quantum entangled material consisting of up to 200 atoms. But sometimes scientists can unsnarl just enough to make sense and be useful in everything from encryption to superconductors, he said.

Speaking by phone to a news conference after the announcement, Zeilinger said he was “still kind of shocked” at hearing he had received the award.

“But it’s a very positive shock,” said Zeilinger, 77, who is based at the University of Vienna.

Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger have figured in Nobel speculation for more than a decade. In 2010 they won the Wolf Prize in Israel, seen as a possible precursor to the Nobel.

While physicists often tackle problems that appear at first glance to be far removed from everyday concerns — tiny particles and the vast mysteries of space and time — their research provides the foundations for many practical applications of science.

The Nobel committee said Clauser developed quantum theories first put forward in the 1960s into a practical experiment. Aspect, 75, was able to close a loophole in those theories, while Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that effectively allows information to be transmitted over distances.

“Using entanglement you can transfer all the information which is carried by an object over to some other place where the object is, so to speak, reconstituted,” said Zeilinger. He added that this only works for tiny particles.

“It is not like in the Star Trek films (where one is) transporting something, certainly not the person, over some distance,” he said.

When he began his research, Zeilinger said the experiments were “completely philosophical without any possible use or application.”

Since then, the laureates’ work has been used to develop the fields of quantum computers, quantum networks and secure quantum encrypted communication.

A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine Monday for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.

They continue with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

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Jordans reported from Berlin. Seth Borenstein contributed from Kensington, Maryland, and Maddie Burakoff contributed from New York.

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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

We spoke with Dr. Nicole Stelter, Director of Behavioral Health at Blue Shield California, about what to keep in mind. She shared some tips for how to talk with kids about mental health, what to look out for, and how to help.

Q: When and how should parents start talking to their kids about mental health?

A: It’s not an easy conversation, but it doesn’t have to be hard either. Sometimes it is just being willing to know that you are not going to get it right the first time. You are not going to be perfect, but you just have to be a good enough parent, you don’t have to be perfect.

A lot of times parents and guardians, grownups in general, worry we could “infect” our children with mental health issues or anxiety because we ask questions or talk to them about it, which is fortunately not true.

Part of stigma reduction is making it about health. When we start telling our kids “don’t ride your skateboard without a helmet, because that’s not safe,” “don’t climb up a bookcase and jump off the top,” when we talk to them about taking care of their bodies, that’s a great time to talk about what it means to take care of your mind and your brain.

What does that look like? Destigmatizing it, normalizing it as part of just what you do to take care of yourself and to take care of each other. Those are conversations a lot of parents are already having in different ways. So this isn’t anything different, per se, it’s just an addition.

Q: This is the second year of kids going back to school since COVID, and we’ve heard a lot of discussions about how COVID has challenged young people’s mental health. What are the specific concerns that have arisen in the past few years?

A: Anything that disrupts the social fabric of what our kids and communities do is potentially a challenge for mental health and emotional well-being. There’s a similar kind of disruption, right, those are the places that we find social support, that we find community. And for kids, they’re working out where they fit in the world, and they’re going to be curious about whether that’s OK, all of those things that are really, really important for development.

There’s just a lot of interruption to that normal social development. Part of the other thing we’re starting to recognize is how much learning was impacted too over the last couple of years.

There’s some catch up or reframing and reinforcing that needs to happen. This is a generation of kids who are going to be experiencing academics and learning in a completely different way than any of the rest of us have had to do. And I think we’re still trying to figure some of that out.

Q: What are the specific mental health concerns that are the most common, and that parents should be looking out for?

A: I think our biggest concerns right now are not necessarily any different than before, or going to be any different going forward.

Parents should be looking out for their kids being anxious. A lot more worry, isolation, withdrawal. Those are all concerns to make us start thinking about anxiety, start thinking about trauma response, depression, concerns about substance abuse.

Substance abuse to some extent is an indicator someone is needing to check out from something that is overwhelming. It can be substance abuse, it can be too much time with video games. When a parent, teacher, community, or guardian sees a kid finding ways to check out, you should be concerned about what overload is happening there.

And the overload can be about pressure to perform, because kids know they’re not the same students they were three years ago, so some are feeling their performance lapsing.

It could also be about social skills. A lot of us are, frankly, are out of practice. And if you’re a kid, you’re new to doing a lot of those things. So that can be pretty stressful. And they might want to withdraw or avoid.

Q: If a parent is noticing a kid isolating more, or they are concerned about substance abuse, what should they do to help their kid or to get them help?

A: Probably the most important thing is to ask them. Parents and guardians will avoid asking directly, because we expect them to blow us off, or we think we might infect them with the idea of something when it’s not really happening and make it worse.

But those are the most important things to address, and not avoid. Don’t wait for it to go away. Find a way to ask questions about how they’re doing.

The kind of questioning I’m talking about is really open ended. Asking a question in a way that says ‘I care about the answer, but it doesn’t have to be a particular answer.’

I would say parents can absolutely reach out via their insurance provider to find out what is available for help. We [Blue Shield] have our BlueSky program, which is focused on teens and kids, but also it can be for parents, teachers, guardians, so that people can find free resources really quickly.

You don’t have to wait for there to be a problem before you start taking care of yourself. It’s like going to the gym. We don’t go because we have a backache, we go to prevent the backache.

Q: How can parents model good mental health habits for their kids?

A: I think we forget that this is part of how we teach our kids.

We can be open about our own health. If you think about your physical health, you would talk about something that’s going on for you, a medical concern, so this is very, very similar.

What gets a little tricky is, there’s a boundary in there as a parent. If I’m stressed out because I’m worried about my kids, what can happen is our kids can take that on. And we don’t want that, they’re working through their own stuff.

You can say “work has been really hard lately,” or “I’ve been having a lot of stress,” and “here’s what I’m doing about it.”

The most important thing you would want your kid to hear is, “and here is how I’m taking care of myself,” and that it is OK to do that. I’m putting myself and my health first, just in the same way I want you to do.

Q: Are there specific habits that parents should either be encouraging or discouraging for their school-age children that make a big difference in their mental health?

A: It’s really the simple things. It’s the basics.

Are they going to bed and getting up relatively at the same time and getting enough sleep? Sleep hygiene is really important. It is just as helpful for older kids as it is for younger kids to have a bedtime routine or a ritual, which includes reducing screen time, giving your brain a chance to quiet down before you need your body to also quiet down and go to sleep.

For older kids, disconnecting from content that is stimulating, things like social media, the news. Make sure that they are getting regular physical exercise, not drinking caffeine too late in the day.

The other parts are really about eating well. I know it sounds oversimplified. Are they drinking enough water? Are they eating as regularly as they need to? Is it balanced?

Those are the things that can set them up to be able to take on what they need to from a mental health perspective. So pretty basic, but it’s a very important foundation to being able to be resilient and take care of themselves.

DR. NICOLE STELTER

Title: Director of Behavioral Health for Blue Shield of California

Residence: South Orange County – just moved from Long Beach where she lived for almost 30 years. “So I still kind of ‘claim’ The LBC.”

Education: La Mirada High School, BA Psychology, MS Marriage and Family Counseling, PhD Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Family: 2 teenage boys, 2 step-sons, fiancé, 2 step-kitties, 1 dog

FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DR. STELTER

• Lifetime Green Bay Packers fan whose dad was from Wisconsin
• Served from 2010 to 2015 as a Behavioral Health Officer in the California State Guard/Army National Guard
• Worked as a family and marriage therapist for almost 30 years, and in organizational mental health for almost 20 of those same years.
• Played intercollegiate softball at California State University, Dominguez Hills
• Learning how to play the bass guitar.