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Study finds that a third of maternal deaths occurred postpartum

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Over the past five years, a significant portion (almost a third) of maternal deaths in the United States were reported within six weeks after birth, according to a study published on Jama Network Open. This study was one of the first to track maternal health complications during pregnancy and the postpartum years.

Pregnancy-related mortality rates in the US increased by almost 28% between 2018 and 2022, but researchers noted a slight decline since 2021, which was at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr. Rose L. Morina, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the study, emphasized the importance of maintaining focus on maternal health due to these findings.

Women need access to high-quality care from conception through the first year after giving birth, according to Dr. Rose L. Morina. The study, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Reproductive Health Department, highlighted the risk of maternal deaths occurring within six weeks to one year postpartum.

The study also revealed significant disparities in maternal mortality rates among different racial and ethnic groups, with Native American and Alaska Native women having higher mortality rates compared to white women.

The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommends that all women receive postnatal care within the first three weeks after giving birth and continue to receive ongoing care as needed.

Dr. Tamika Auguste, chair of Women and Infant Services at Medstar Washington Hospital Center, stressed the importance of timely postnatal care, especially for women with hypertension.

Mortality rates related to pregnancy have more than tripled across different states, with the southeastern states having higher mortality rates compared to states like California and Minnesota.

Cardiovascular disease was identified as the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths, particularly among women aged 25-39, highlighting the importance of monitoring and managing cardiovascular health during and after pregnancy.

Source: www.nytimes.com

New research suggests Voyager 2’s approach to Uranus in 1986 occurred during an uncommon solar event

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When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, scientists got their first close glimpse of the giant icy planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, a puzzling new mystery faced scientists. The energetic particles around Uranus defied their understanding of how magnetic fields trap particle radiation. The cause of that special mystery is a cosmic coincidence, according to a new study. Just before Voyager 2's flyby, Uranus was found to have been affected by an unusual type of space weather that crushed and dramatically compressed the planet's magnetic field. Its magnetosphere.

The first panel of this artist's concept depicts how Uranus' magnetosphere operated before NASA's Voyager 2 flyby. The second panel shows that an unusual type of solar weather occurred during the 1986 flyby, giving scientists a biased view of the magnetosphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The planetary magnetosphere (the region around a planet dominated by its magnetic field) influences the environment around the planet, and understanding its properties is important for mission planning.

Voyager 2's close encounter of Uranus reveals a unique magnetosphere that is highly asymmetric and appears to lack plasma, a common element in the magnetospheres of other planets, and has an unusually strong band of high-energy electrons It became.

The signatures from this single measurement have since been used as the basis for understanding Uranus's magnetic field, but these anomalies have been difficult to explain without complex physics.

“If Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, we would have seen a completely different magnetosphere on Uranus,” said Dr. Jamie Jasinski, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The spacecraft observed Uranus in a situation that has a probability of only about 4%.”

Jasinski and his colleagues reanalyzed Voyager 2 data before the flyby and found that the spacecraft encountered Uranus shortly after a violent solar wind event that ejected streams of charged particles from the Sun's atmosphere.

This compressed Uranus's magnetosphere, creating a condition that only occurs 4% of the time.

In this state, we see a plasma-free magnetosphere with highly excited electron emission bands.

The authors suggest that two magnetospheric cycles may exist during solar minimum due to variations in Uranus' solar wind.

Additionally, the chances of Uranus' outermost major moons, Titania and Oberon, orbiting outside the magnetosphere may be very low, giving scientists the possibility of detecting an underground ocean without interference from the magnetosphere. There is.

“The 1986 flyby was full of surprises, and we were looking for an explanation for its unusual behavior,” said Dr. Linda Spilker, also of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The magnetosphere measured by Voyager 2 is just a snapshot in time.”

“This new study explains some of the apparent contradictions and will once again change our view of Uranus.”

of findings Published in today's magazine natural astronomy.

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JM Jasinski others. Unusual conditions in Uranus' magnetosphere during Voyager 2's flyby. Nat Astronpublished online on November 11, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02389-3

Source: www.sci.news

Our Sole Encounter with Uranus Occurred During a Peculiar Moment for Earth

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Uranus is more normal than we thought

NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute

Uranus’ strange magnetic field may be much less strange than astronomers first thought, and it could mean that Uranus’ largest moon is much more active and perhaps even has a global ocean It means that there is.

The only direct measurement of Uranus’s magnetic field was obtained by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew close to the planet in 1986. The spacecraft’s measurements suggested that the magnetic field was skewed, meaning it was not aligned with the planet’s rotation, and that it was an anomalous field. It is rich in highly energetic electrons and lacks the plasma that is common in the magnetic fields of other gas giant planets like Jupiter. Astronomers at the time thought the results were so strange that they either invoked complex physics to explain the measurements or simply dismissed them as evidence that Voyager 2’s instruments had gone awry.

now, jamie jasinski Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California reanalyzed Voyager 2 data and found that a rare explosion of solar wind that crushed Uranus’ magnetic field just before the spacecraft arrived may have distorted the data, causing the measurements to I discovered that it was disturbed. This means everything we thought we knew about Uranus’ magnetic field may be wrong, Jasinski says. “This is almost like resetting everything,” he says.

Jasinski and his team found that the solar wind compressed Uranus’s magnetic field to a size that typically occurs only 4 percent of the time. But for the past 40 years, scientists have assumed that is the normal state of affairs. Jasinski says the collapse of the magnetic field explains some of the strange results so far, including the lack of plasma and high-energy electrons.

If there is indeed plasma in Uranus’ magnetic field, and Voyager 2 just happened to miss it, it’s possible that not all of it came from the planet itself. Some may have come from Uranus’ moons, the largest of which are called Titania and Oberon. Until now, these moons were thought to be inert, but new research leaves open the possibility that they may be geologically active after all. This is consistent with recent calculations that suggest there may be a hidden ocean on the moon. “The solar wind may have wiped out all evidence of an active satellite just before the flyby occurred,” Jasinski said.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

The Milky Way’s most recent major merger occurred billions of years later than previously believed

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The discovery was made possible by ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, which is mapping more than a billion stars across the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, tracking their motions, brightness, temperature, and composition.

This image visualizes the Milky Way and its surrounding halo of stars. New Gaia data reveals that the wrinkles seen in the Milky Way are likely the result of a dwarf galaxy colliding with the Milky Way about 2.7 billion years ago. Our galaxy’s two major satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are visible at the bottom right. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / Donlon other./ Stephen Payne Waldenaar.

The Milky Way galaxy has grown over time as other galaxies have approached, collided, been torn apart, and been swallowed up.

Each collision still sends ripples through different groups of stars, influencing their movements and behavior in space.

One of Gaia’s goals is to study these wrinkles to unravel the history of our Milky Way galaxy. It does this by pinpointing the positions and motions of more than 100,000 stars close to Earth, a tiny fraction of the roughly 2 billion objects it observes.

“As we age, we tend to get more wrinkles, but our research shows that the opposite is true in the Milky Way – it’s like a cosmic Benjamin Button, and it gets less wrinkled over time,” said Dr. Thomas Donlon, an astronomer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Alabama.

“By looking at how these wrinkles fade over time, we can trace when the Milky Way last experienced a major collision — and it turns out this happened billions of years later than we thought.”

The Milky Way’s halo contains many stars with unusual orbits, many of which are thought to have been incorporated into the galaxy in an event that astronomers call the last great merger.

As the name suggests, this is the last time the Milky Way has experienced a significant collision with another galaxy, which is proposed to have been a giant dwarf galaxy that smothered the Milky Way with stars passing very close to the center of the Milky Way.

Astronomers estimate that the merger occurred between 8 and 11 billion years ago, when the Milky Way was still in its infancy, and is known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.

But data from Gaia’s Data Release 3 suggests that another merger could have resulted in the unusually behaving star.

“For the stellar wrinkles to be as clear as we see in the Gaia data, the stars would have had to have appeared on Earth less than 3 billion years ago — at least 5 billion years later than previously thought,” said Dr. Heidi Jo Neuberg, also of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“Every time a star passes back and forth through the center of the Milky Way, a new stellar wrinkle forms.”

“If they had merged with us 8 billion years ago, there would have been so many wrinkles next to each other that we wouldn’t be able to see them as separate features.”

This discovery suggests that these stars did not result from the ancient Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, but must have arisen from a more recent event called the Virgo radial merger, which occurred less than 3 billion years ago.

“The history of the Milky Way is currently being constantly rewritten, thanks in large part to new data from Gaia,” Dr. Donlon said.

“Our image of the Milky Way’s past has changed dramatically since even 10 years ago, and I think our understanding of these mergers will continue to change rapidly.”

“This finding that most of the Milky Way galaxy joined Earth within the last few billion years is quite different from what astronomers previously thought.”

“Many prevailing models and ideas about the growth of the Milky Way predict that a recent head-on collision with a dwarf galaxy of this mass would be extremely rare.”

“The Virgo radial merger likely pulled in a group of other small dwarf galaxies and star clusters, all of which joined the Milky Way at about the same time.”

“Future exploration will reveal which of these small objects previously thought to be related to the ancient Gaia sausage Enceladus are in fact related to the recent Virgo radial merger.”

of Investigation result Appears in Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Thomas Donlon otherThe year is 2024. The remains of the “last great merger” are dynamically young. MNRAS 531(1):1422-1439; doi:10.1093/mnras/stae1264

Source: www.sci.news

UAE government denies cloud seeding occurred prior to Dubai floods

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The National Meteorological Center, the government task force responsible for cloud seeding missions in the United Arab Emirates, stated that they did not carry out any weather modification techniques in anticipation of severe storms that led to flooding in places like Dubai.

According to CNBC, the group confirmed that they did not deploy pilots for seeding operations before or during the storm that affected the UAE on that fateful Tuesday.

Omar Al-Yazidi, deputy director of NCM, emphasized that no seeding operations were conducted during the storm, stating, “If you find yourself in severe thunderstorm conditions, you should carry out seeding operations before the rain falls. It’s too late.”

On Tuesday, the UAE experienced heavy rainfall. NCM reported that Al Ain received 10 inches of rainfall, while Dubai saw over 100 mm. This is significantly higher than the average annual rainfall in the UAE, which ranges from 140 to 200mm.

NCM’s statement contradicted previous reports suggesting that some of the rain was caused by cloud seeding. The process of cloud seeding has been a crucial aspect of the UAE’s efforts to combat water scarcity since the 1990s, with over 1,000 hours of cloud seeding conducted annually.

The increase in precipitation is attributed to climate change, with a study projecting a 30% increase in precipitation by 2080. This shift in weather patterns has posed challenges for the UAE’s infrastructure, especially in managing drainage systems during heavy downpours.

The UAE government issued warnings through the National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority, advising residents to adhere to safety guidelines due to the extreme weather conditions.

Despite the region’s unique weather patterns, the UAE’s drainage systems struggled to handle the unprecedented rainfall, leading to flooding in many areas, including Dubai Airport.

Source: www.nbcnews.com