The US Food and Drug Administration has greenlit the first test for chlamydia and gonorrhea that will allow users to collect samples at home. After HIV, this is the first FDA-authorized test that will allow more accessible home collection for a sexually transmitted infection.

The Simple 2 Test, made by New York- and Dublin-based LetsGetChecked, got FDA market authorization Wednesday.

Up until now, people concerned that they might have chlamydia or gonorrhea would have to get tested at a doctor’s office.

Users of the new test won’t need a prescription and can activate it online. They fill out a health questionnaire for a clinician to go over, collect a vaginal swab or urine sample using the Simple 2 collection kit and then send it in to be evaluated. Test results are delivered online. If the test is positive or if the results are invalid, a health care provider follows up.

“This authorization marks an important public health milestone, giving patients more information about their health from the privacy of their own home,” said Dr. Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a statement.

Home diagnostic tests have become a more widely used option during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Shuren said the FDA is eager to support more opportunities for people to get access to diagnostic tests at home.

Peter Foley, founder and CEO of LetsGetChecked, told CNN in an email that the test “will empower individuals to proactively manage their health from home. We greatly appreciate FDA’s collaboration throughout this process.”

Gonorrhea and chlamydia are very common infectious diseases that can be passed from one partner to another through oral, anal and vaginal sex without a condom. Both infections can be treated with antibiotics.

Increased sexual activity during the pandemic, coupled with fewer routine screenings for sexually transmitted infections, supercharged the spread of these diseases around the world.

There were more than 700,000 cases of gonorrhea reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2021. Rates have increased 118% since their record low in 2009, the agency says.

Symptoms of gonorrhea can include stomach or pelvic pain, increased vaginal discharge, painful urination and bleeding between periods. Many people don’t notice any symptoms, making routine screenings important to catch infections.

Without treatment, the infection can cause serious and permanent health problems. If it spreads to the blood, it can cause disseminated gonococcal infection, which can lead to arthritis, skin problems and tenosynovitis, which can cause pain and swelling. The condition may even become life-threatening.

Cases of chlamydia have also been on the rise, the CDC says. In 2021, there were more than 1.6 million cases reported to the agency, making it the most common notifiable sexually transmitted infection in the US that year. Symptoms include pain or burning while urinating, pain during sex, belly pain, abnormal vaginal discharge, swollen or tender testicles, and bleeding around the anus.

Chlamydia can also cause permanent damage to a woman’s reproductive system and make it difficult to get pregnant later. It can also cause an ectopic pregnancy, where the pregnancy happens outside of the womb.

A major U.S. government report published today describes how intensifying climate change is disrupting lives and businesses nationwide, even as communities in every state ramp up their response to the crisis.

Over some 2,000 pages, the Fifth National Climate Assessment provides a climate-themed tour of the country, identifying the impacts plaguing every region, how communities are increasingly protecting themselves and how much more action is needed to ensure a safer future. Mandated by Congress and led by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, hundreds of climate experts, from both inside and outside of government, contributed to this assessment. The fifth edition of the report follows the fourth edition, which was published in phases in 2017 and 2018; the first assessment appeared in 2000.

Here are the report’s five main takeaways:

1. Climate impacts are here, getting worse and costing a lot of money.

The first sentence of Chapter 1 summarizes the nation’s sobering reality: “The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States.” A small taste of what that means: Warming is happening everywhere, and nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures in most places, notably reducing crop yields in the Southeast.

Warming isn’t just playing out on land. Hot oceans are shifting the distribution of certain marine species, pushing some fisheries to the brink of collapse. Minor and moderate coastal flooding is also on the rise along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, a combination of rising seas impacting flooding from high tides and big storms. Meanwhile, warmer winters are contributing to declining snowpack levels in the Northwest, affecting water supplies and recreation industries.

But the most devastating way people experience climate change is in the form of major disasters, which are not only knocking out power and bringing daily life to a standstill but also destroying homes and claiming lives. Between 2018 and 2022, the country experienced 89 disasters that each cost at least $1 billion in damages — a mix of droughts, floods, severe storms, tropical cyclones, wildfires and winter storms. During that time, Texas alone experienced $375 billion in disaster damages.

2. Certain communities are at higher risk.

3. Climate solutions are already being deployed nationwide.

The burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of greenhouse gas releases into the atmosphere, which are causing the planet to warm. Knowing the source of the problem means we also know how to stop it: by cutting emissions, which can be achieved by transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy, and possibly by using a mix of natural and manmade processes to pull carbon dioxide and other emissions directly out of the air.

In the U.S., efforts are already well underway to do this. “Annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell 12% between 2005 and 2019,” largely due to natural gas replacing coal for some electricity generation, the report states. Between roughly 2010 and 2022, cumulative onshore wind capacity, utility-scale solar and EV sales have all gone up nationwide as costs associated with these low-carbon technologies have dropped.

Moreover, since 2018, the number of city- and state-level adaptation plans and related actions around the U.S. increased by nearly a third. There was also a smaller increase in new state-level efforts to rein in emissions during that time.

Take the city of Pittsburgh, which committed in 2021 to be carbon neutral by 2050 and in 2022 started requiring new developments to plan for heavier rainfall. Then there’s Phoenix’s adoption of a climate action plan in 2021, committing the city to net zero emissions by 2050.

4. Today’s efforts aren’t nearly enough to halt global warming.

Back in 2015, the U.S. joined the Paris Agreement, agreeing to limit future global warming to well below 2C, ideally to 1.5C, compared to preindustrial levels. President Joe Biden then set a national target for the U.S. to cut its emissions by at least 50% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Now the reality check: The world is on track to warm above 2C, in part because the US, the second biggest current emitter and largest historical emitter, is not on pace to meet its goals.

U.S. net emissions would have to fall by more than 6% each year on average to meet existing targets, according to the report. In contrast, U.S. emissions fell by less than 1% per year, on average, between 2005 and 2019.

5. What now? It depends on us.

The science is clear: The more warming there is, the worse the impacts will be. In a world where the increase in global average temperatures reaches 2C, compared to the preindustrial era, the average increase in U.S. temperatures will very likely be even higher, between 2.4C and 3.1C. Science can’t tell us exactly how hot the planet will get because that depends on what we — society as a whole but especially our political leaders — decide to do. In the U.S., and elsewhere in the world, people have a choice right now to do more to cut their carbon footprint and prevent much worse warming.

“How much more the world warms depends on the choices societies make today,” states the report. “The future is in human hands.”

___

©2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Long hidden in a dark hangar at Moffett Field, the remarkable Pathfinder 1 — a gigantic white cigar-shaped airship — was rolled out into the bright Bay Area sunshine for some quick exercise last week, then rolled back in.

The behemoth aircraft, the brainchild of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and aviation innovator Alan Weston, behaved exactly as intended.

It didn’t float, because it was securely tethered by ropes held by ground crew. That’s planned for next time, probably within several weeks. Its initial maneuvers will be around Moffett Field, which Google leases from NASA Ames. Over the next year, it will fly several FAA-approved missions at an altitude below 1500 feet over the waters of the South Bay, including the Dumbarton Bridge.

But, as hoped, Pathfinder “superheated” when its skin was warmed by the sun, causing it to expand and lighten. When propelled by small electric motors, it swung one direction, then another.

“It performed really well,” said Weston, chief executive officer of maker LTA Research and former director of programs at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he led more than 50 spacecraft, rocket, interceptor and air vehicle missions that revolutionized space science.

The Pathfinder is not a blimp, like the familiar balloons that drift over football stadiums. Blimps have no internal structure so can lose their shape, and deflate. The Pathfinder is an dirigible, with a rigid framework of 10,000 carbon-fiber reinforced tubes and 3,000 titanium hubs to form a protective skeleton around the gas cells, surrounded by a lightweight synthetic Tedlar skin.

The airship is about 400 feet long. By comparison, the traditional Goodyear blimp is 250 feet long.

Pathfinder 1 will be the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the ill-fated Hindenburg dirigible of the 1930s, a major air disaster that was broadcast to people all over the world.

A towering example of technological prowess, the Hindenburg was nearing the end of a three-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Germany when flames erupted from its skin. In one horrifying minute, 36 people died.

But unlike the Hindenburg, Pathfinder is not filled with flammable hydrogen. Instead it is filled with stable helium, which is much safer — and creates lift without burning fuel. The helium is held in 13 giant rip-stop nylon cells and monitored by lidar laser systems.

The goal of this week’s Pathfinder outing was to study how the vehicle’s internal helium and polymer skin responded to sunshine, and whether its propeller motors, four on each side, could redirect its weathervane-like tendencies.

“Everybody’s super happy with the data we gathered” from the airship’s first outing in daylight, Weston said. “We gained an understanding of ‘how does it work?’ ”

Until now, Pathfinder has undergone only in-hangar testing. Three months ago, it was wheeled out in darkness to see how it handled the world outside, without the influence of the hot sun.

For most of aviation history, lighter-than-air vehicles (or LTAs) have never been particularly popular, because they’re big and comparatively slow

But technological advancements such as improved motors, solar cells, fly-by-wire controls and lidar sensing could help make such air travel feasible — and someday, perhaps, commercially viable.

LTA, which stands for “Lighter Than Air,” was founded in 2016 but has operated largely under the radar. It now has 250 employees.

The company devised a rotisserie system, called “the roller coaster,” where the entire airship sits in a cradle and rolls, so fabrication and assembly teams can work at ground level.

“Initially, it was just a crazy idea. Now it’s not a crazy idea — it’s a revolutionary idea,” boosting accuracy and speeding up the manufacturing process by ten-fold, said Weston, “It’s faster, better, cheaper, safer.”

Pathfinder’s outing has offered a vision of what aviation could look like years from now — one in which aircraft don’t emit dangerous greenhouse gases.

“I believe that airships can perform a complementary function,” in addition to other efforts, “to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief,” said Weston.

Brin, worth an estimated $105 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, also funds a disaster charity called Global Support and Development,  which provides rapid response aid after volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and storms.

Airships could also play a role in the reduction of carbon footprint of transportation, said Weston.

“They’re not going to eliminate airplanes,” he added.  “But I see a path to decarbonisation.”

LTA is one of many companies working on electric aviation. A French company called Flying Whales is building an airship, also lifted by helium, that could carry up to 60 tons of cargo. Hybrid Air Vehicles, a British company, has developed a helium-based “Airlander 10” aircraft to transport people in rural regions. The New Mexico startup Sceye is making a helium-powered aircraft that could hover high in the stratosphere, perhaps offering a new tool for telecommunications.

Pathfinder 1 is just the first in what could be a family of airships, according to Weston.

Even as this prototype learns how to reliably fly in real-world conditions, LTA is starting construction of another and much larger airship, called Pathfinder 3, in the same Akron, Ohio, hangar where Goodyear built the U.S. Navy’s rigid airships of the 1930s.

That aircraft, one-third bigger than Pathfinder 1, could be ready for flight later this year.

What was an itsy-bitsy spider spinning webs a few months ago is now a large, fully-grown exterminator helping keep the pest population under control.

Is it peak spider season? Not necessarily, because there are usually more spiders in the spring after they hatch their eggs. By September to November they are fully grown, easier to find and make larger webs.

Some spidey facts

Almost all are venomous but only a few can harm you. According to the Burke Museum in Seattle, only 25 have venom that can cause harm to humans. So just 1/20 of 1% of spiders are dangerous to humans.

According to the University of Kentucky, spiders don’t have a jaw and teeth like many animals, they have chelicerae – external structures that work somewhat like a jaw. Spiders use their chelicerae to hold prey in place while they inject it with venom.

Instead of chewing their food with mandibles, spiders will first spit enzymes either on or in their prey to liquefy it. They then eat the prey by sucking in the juices created by the enzymes with their mouth parts, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

They all make silk, but they don’t all make webs. About half the species catch prey with silky webs, while the others use it to make nests, cocoons or egg sacs.

Many spiders replace their entire web every day. According to science.org a study was conducted in 2018 that discovered that certain spiders’ webs are stronger than steel and if human-size, would be tough enough to snag a jetliner.

UC Irvine has a web page with photos of all the spiders, ticks and mites in Orange County here.

Keeping them out

Even though spiders may help control insect populations, many people have some form of arachnophobia or simply don’t want them inside their homes. As the days cool, spiders might be looking for warmer places to winter.

A few tips

Seal potential entry points like cracks and gaps along the building’s foundation.Keep doors, windows and screens sealed.

Prevent other insects from inhabiting the area by keeping a clean home.

Reduce clutter to limit hiding places.

Use a botanical repellent. Spiders don’t like the scent of lavender.

Source: Hebets Lab, Burke Museum, reconnectwithnature.org, National Space Society, University of Kentucky, earthkind.com, The National Pest Management Association Illustrations by KURT SNIBBE and staff artists

That includes the designing of Menlo Park’s TIDE Academy — a science, technology and engineering-focused school in the Sequoia Union High School District that won a top award for its architecture earlier this year — among other award-winning projects spanning the Bay Area, including the Los Medanos College student union and kinesiology complex in Pittsburg, and the Agnew K-12 Campus in San Jose. Pierce spoke with the Bay Area News Group about why this type of design matters, and how green design can benefit students throughout the region.

Pierce’s answers were edited for clarity and brevity:

Q: What is a green school?

A: Essentially, it’s a school that uses less resources and is more resilient than a traditional school. They’re built with environmentally friendly materials and (are) more energy efficient, so less costly to operate on a daily basis. And, they’re more resilient for both day-to-day and for long-term use, especially when considering climate change, natural disasters, and other factors.

A green school would also fit into and support community resiliency and community health and wellness. Are the schools walkable or bikeable? Do they create shade? Do they utilize outdoor space, so we’re not overbuilding and creating more things that have to be dredged from the earth? The thing is, it’s getting warmer. We all feel it. So, we’re thinking a lot about having outdoor spaces to supplement what we build, and how to create the spaces that will continue to be habitable and provide shade.

Q: What does that look like in practice?

A: We designed a school, TIDE Academy in Menlo Park, that sits fairly close to the bay. If you look at the models of the bay, it’s going to continue to rise with climate change, and storm surges will start to have effects on the flood zone. At that site, we actually raised the school — the entire site — by three feet as a resiliency measure, helping to lift it out of the flood zone. We raised all the primary electrical equipment another three feet so that if it floods, the school can get back into operation that much more quickly.

Another example is the Agnews K-12 campus, which combines grades pre-K through 12 on a 55-acre site in San Jose. The elementary, middle and high school are all built on one campus and are in very close proximity. Designing the campus gave us a unique opportunity to rethink how we build schools, and how to build them in a cohesive progression from elementary to middle to high school. How do you have a student go to the same campus for 13 years, but still feel like they’re progressing? To do that, we designed each school so they relate to each other architecturally, but differ in terms of the growing maturity of the design.

We really liked the idea that resources could be shared. A student from the middle school could go to a library shared with the high school, and interact with the students there. Staff could collaborate between grade levels. And across all three schools, resources could be made available to everyone. We were able to build less because we were sharing resources more, including the site itself.

There’s also more of the traditional green school concepts: we focused a lot on energy efficiency, working with the landscape and with daylight, the orientation of the building and where the windows were, and planting trees. We made the spaces between the buildings pleasant, habitable and supportive of wildlife, along with providing shade.

Q: How much do these types of schools cost — and how are districts paying for them?

A: I’m not an expert on this, but I know most of it comes from bonds — meaning, it comes from the community.

In terms of how much it costs, that’s a broad range. In very gross numbers, the Agnews campus is about 400,000 square feet of construction and it cost around $400 million. That’s a 55-acre site with a new elementary school, a new middle school, and a new high school, plus all of the athletic fields and everything.

But today, we’re seeing the per square foot costs for new construction in the Bay Area to be very close to $800 to $1,000 a square foot, depending on the type of project it is. And then if we’re modernizing a school — say, building new finishes, new ceilings, new lightings — we touch the building very lightly, and that could be just a couple hundred dollars per square foot.

Q: Why does this type of building matter?

A: I think that frankly, if you’re an architect today, you have to be interested in these things. We all see the effects of what happens when we aren’t — and no one can claim ignorance of not knowing the effects of building and occupying the environment anymore.

We know that where students learn matters. Spaces that are adequately sized, adequately lit, and have access to daylight and views all support student learning and teacher teaching. As you can imagine, if you worked in a cramped space with no windows, you probably wouldn’t show up to work very often. But if you worked in a beautiful office with lots of windows and great views, you’d come into work every day, right? You’d enjoy it, and you’d feel more like a human being.

At a very basic level, the spaces that we all love and enjoy as human beings, that support all our needs as human beings, are the spaces you’re going to learn and teach best in. You’re more likely to show up every day, not get sick, and thrive.

Helen Pierce
Company: LPA, Inc.
Title: Design director
Residence: Santa Cruz
Education: Bachelor of Architecture, Drexel University

Five facts about Helen Pierce
1. She studied martial arts for 20 years and holds a black belt in karate.
2. She is originally from Delaware.
3. She has two unruly dogs and is about to get a third.
4. She enjoys playing guitar and singing for those unruly dogs!
5. She loves super spicy hot food.

Dr. Howard Maibach, now in his mid-90s, filed a court petition challenging a University of California San Francisco report accusing him of using “questionable research methods” in experiments in the ’60s and ’70s on at least 2,600 male inmates at the California Medical Facility, a state prison hospital in Vacaville. According to the petition, the report was conducted in response to claims by colleagues that his “racist” research while working for the school was conducted on Black prisoners.

The UC San Francisco report issued in December cited medical publications detailing Maibach’s “intravenous dosing of pesticides and herbicides,” along with applications of those chemicals to inmates’ skin, and the pressing of caged mosquitos against prisoners’ skin and observation of the “direct penetration of the proboscis,” the part of the insect that sucks human blood.

The university issued a news release about the report that referred to “harms that were done.” The release also said, “Such practices were common in the U.S. at the time and were increasingly being criticized both by experts and in the lay press.”

UC San Francisco did not respond to questions about Mailbach’s petition.

Records and medical publications show no protocols were adopted to ensure informed consent by prisoners subject to Maibach’s experiments, or that they were told about research risks, according to the report, which drew nationwide attention. “Incarcerated individuals were not suffering from any diseases or conditions that the research was intended to treat,” the report said. The university’s news release said many of the men had psychiatric issues.

Maibach’s 60-page petition targeting the Regents of the University of California said the report and investigation that led up to it “are not objective academic research or scholarship motivated by a genuine desire to seek out or tell the truth.” Rather, they were undertaken by UC San Francisco “as a mechanism to target, persecute, and cast aspersions on” Maibach, his petition filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court claimed.

The school approved his work at the facility — which included research to help protect U.S. soldiers from malaria, and farmworkers from pesticide harms — and his projects complied with professional and ethical standards at the time, according to his petition. In the petition, Maibach rejected the university’s claim that he did not have the informed consent from prisoners.

The report, his petition noted, “does not claim that any participant in research conducted by Dr. Maibach has made any allegation of suffering or experiencing any harm from the research.”

Maibach remains employed as a professor at UC San Francisco and has been a frequent expert witness in court cases involving chemical exposures to skin. His petition seeks a court order that would force the Regents to provide records it has been “unlawfully denying” concerning the report on his research, and the UCSF Program for Historical Reconciliation that investigated him. The UC Regents did not immediately respond to Maibach’s claims.

His petition claims the records allegedly withheld show UC San Francisco manipulated the investigation to denounce him and “falsely portray him as an unethical and racist doctor” while “covering up” the school’s responsibility for the prison research. The report was based on a “severely biased, knowingly incomplete, and wholly unreliable … spurious investigation” conducted to shield the school from accountability over the prison research, his petition alleged.

An “anti-racism task force” created in 2020 by UC San Francisco faculty of color in the wake of police killings of Black people had spurred the probe and report, according to the petition. The task force claimed Maibach conducted “racist research” on Black prisoners and demanded the school ask him to resign, the petition said.

Maibach said in his petition that California state records show that in 1961, the prison hospital’s population was almost three-quarters White, a number he claimed “directly refutes any false claim that the research (at the facility) was done on only or mostly Black individuals.” The petition did not say what percentage of his research subjects were Black.

In a letter to the UC San Francisco dermatology department about the report, Maibach said he regretted the research, and that ethical requirements for medical studies had changed over the decades. He said he explained the procedures to inmates, and the research risks. He also said he performed the procedures on himself to show the prisoners what was involved. He added that at the time, race was “ubiquitously used in patient descriptions” but through advancements in science he has come to understand that it “has always been a social and not a biological construct.”

The dermatologist cited “benefits” to his research subjects including compensation and skin care.

The report contains a link to a message to the UC San Francisco dermatology department from its chairman Dr. Jack Resneck, saying Maibach expressed remorse in his letter, but “it unfortunately also defends the experiments.”

HONOLULU — A pond in Hawaii has turned so bubble-gum pink it could be from the set of “Barbie,” but the bizarre phenomenon is no cause for a dance party. Drought may be to blame for the strange hue, scientists say, and they’re warning against entering the water or drinking it.

Staff at the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge on Maui have been monitoring the pink water since Oct. 30.

“I just got a report from somebody that was walking on the beach, and they called me up like, ‘There’s something weird going on over here,'” said Bret Wolfe, the refuge manager.

Wolfe was concerned the bright pink could be a sign of an algae bloom, but lab tests found toxic algae was not causing the color. Instead an organism called halobacteria might be the culprit.

Halobacteria are a type of archaea or single-celled organism that thrive in bodies of water with high levels of salt. The salinity inside the Kealia Pond outlet area is currently greater than 70 parts per thousand, which is twice the salinity of seawater. Wolfe said the lab will need to conduct a DNA analysis to definitively identify the organism.

Maui’s drought is likely contributing to the situation. Normally Waikapu Stream feeds into Kealia Pond and raises water levels there, but Wolfe said that hasn’t happened in a long time.

When it rains, the stream will flow into Kealia’s main pond and then into the outlet area that’s now pink. This will reduce the salinity and potentially change the water’s color.

“That might be what makes it go away,” Wolfe said.

No one at the refuge has seen the pond this color before — not even volunteers who have been around it for 70 years. The pond has been through periods of drought and high salinity before, though, and Wolfe isn’t sure why the color has changed now.

Curious visitors have flocked to the park after photos of the pink pond appeared on social media.

“If that’s what gets them there, it’s OK,” he said. “It is neat.”

The wildlife refuge is a wetland that provides nesting, feeding and resting habitat to the endangered Hawaiian stilt, known as aeo, and the Hawaiian coot or alae keokeo. It also hosts migratory birds during the winter.

The water doesn’t appear to be harming the birds, Wolfe said.

As a wildlife refuge, people aren’t supposed to wade into the pond or let their pets in the water regardless of its color. But officials are taking an extra precaution to warn people not to enter the water or eat any fish caught there because the source of the color has yet to be identified.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10 times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, has died. He was 95.

Borman died Tuesday in Billings, Montana, according to NASA.

Borman also led troubled Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and early ’80s after leaving the astronaut corps.

But he was best known for his NASA duties. He and his crew, James Lovell and William Anders, were the first Apollo mission to fly to the moon — and to see Earth as a distant sphere in space.

“Today we remember one of NASA’s best. Astronaut Frank Borman was a true American hero,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Thursday. “His lifelong love for aviation and exploration was only surpassed by his love for his wife Susan.”

Launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Dec. 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 trio spent three days traveling to the moon, and slipped into lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. After they circled 10 times on Dec. 24-25, they headed home on Dec. 27.

On Christmas Eve, the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis in a live telecast from the orbiter: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Borman ended the broadcast with, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

Lovell and Borman had previously flown together during the two-week Gemini 7 mission, which launched on Dec. 4, 1965 — and, at only 120 feet apart, completed the first space orbital rendezvous with Gemini 6.

“Gemini was a tough go,” Borman told The Associated Press in 1998. “It was smaller than the front seat of a Volkswagen bug. It made Apollo seem like a super-duper, plush touring bus.”

In his book, “Countdown: An Autobiography,” Borman said Apollo 8 was originally supposed to orbit Earth. The success of Apollo 7’s mission in October 1968 to show system reliability on long duration flights made NASA decide it was time to take a shot at flying to the moon.

“My main concern in this whole flight was to get there ahead of the Russians and get home. That was a significant achievement in my eyes,” Borman explained at a Chicago appearance in 2017.

It was on the crew’s fourth orbit that Anders snapped the iconic “Earthrise” photo showing a blue and white Earth rising above the gray lunar landscape.

Borman wrote about how the Earth looked from afar: “We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality, an intensely emotional experience for each of us. We said nothing to each other, but I was sure our thoughts were identical — of our families on that spinning globe. And maybe we shared another thought I had, This must be what God sees.”

After NASA, Borman’s aviation career ventured into business in 1970 when he joined Eastern Airlines — at that time the nation’s fourth-largest airline. He eventually became Eastern’s president and CEO and in 1976 also became its chairman of the board.

Borman’s tenure at Eastern saw fuel prices increase sharply and the government deregulate the airline industry. The airline became increasingly unprofitable, debt-ridden and torn by labor tensions. He resigned in 1986 and moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico.

In his autobiography, Borman wrote that his fascination with flying began in his teens when he and his father would assemble model airplanes. At age 15, Borman took flying lessons, using money he had saved working as a bag boy and pumping gas after school. He took his first solo flight after eight hours of dual instruction. He continued flying into his 90s.

Borman was born in Gary, Indiana, but was raised in Tucson, Arizona. He attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1950. That same year, Borman married his high school sweetheart, Susan Bugbee. She died in 2021.

Borman worked as a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, operational pilot and instructor at West Point after graduation. In 1956, Borman moved his family to Pasadena, California, where he earned a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering from California Institute of Technology. In 1962, he was one of nine test pilots chosen by NASA for the astronaut program.

He received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor from President Jimmy Carter.

In 1998, Borman started a cattle ranch in Bighorn, Montana, with his son, Fred. In addition to Fred, he survived by another son, Edwin, and their families.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – A Pittsburgh military veteran says psychedelics have allowed him to get his life back. He’s among a growing number of vets using them to treat PTSD, but the idea is not without controversy.

KDKA-TV lead investigator Andy Sheehan digs into the potential dangers of using these drugs and the likelihood the VA might allow their use.

“I was homeless. My tent and the materials I was living in was about 250 yards that way. I was living in the woods,” John Lewandowski said.

Lewandowski returned from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury and a drinking problem. He had left the war but an IED explosion and the horrors of combat remained in his head, leading him deeper into addiction and isolation. But he says the help he got from the Veterans Administration failed to break his downward spiral.

“Their solution is benzos, opioids and having conversations with professional men and women that haven’t been in the shoes of the veteran,” he said.

“For someone who has been in so many repetitive traumatic events, there is no pill, there is no pharmaceutical that is able to change that brain chemistry,” he added.

Like a growing number of veterans, Lewandowski says he found hope and recovery in a so-called magic mushroom containing the hallucinogen psilocybin. He says he had a kind of psychic breakthrough letting him face the trauma and go through it, finally finding peace on the other side.

“I was able to get through those night terrors and that isolation and I was able to really heal from that trauma and put it in the past,” he said.

Like other psychedelics, psilocybin is illegal under federal law and classified as a Schedule I drug, which the Drug Enforcement Administration says have a “high potential for abuse and no recognized medical value.” As a result, there are roadblocks to research its effectiveness in treating PTSD and the VA is prohibited from prescribing or administering it. But local Congressman and Naval vet Chris Deluzio is supporting legislation to change that.

“I say let the science and medicine lead us here and if there are safe therapies that are helping veterans and helping people, we should be making those available to folks,” Deluzio said.

Deluzio sits on the House Veterans Affairs and Armed Services committees and is supporting bipartisan legislation to foster research of psychedelics and pave the way for their administration. And he’s calling VA officials to a hearing next week.

“If this research is showing that folks can be helped, that some of these treatments work, I don’t want federal law standing in the way. Now we gotta do this safely, we gotta have those kind of safeguards you’d expect and demand,” Deluzio said.

In a statement to KDKA-TV Investigates, the VA says it is now open to the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD.

“VA is committed to safely exploring all avenues that promote the health of our nation’s Veterans. In line with this goal, VA conducts research studies under stringent protocols at various facilities nationwide to identify if compounds such as MDMA and psilocybin can treat Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other serious mental health conditions.”

“I don’t want anyone doing something on their own and hurting themselves as a result,” Deluzio said.

But approval could be years away and Lewandowski says he will not stop his own self-treatment, which he says has changed his life.

Andy Sheehan: “You happy?”Lewandowski: “Aw, man. Happy isn’t the word. Optimistic, proud, functional, ecstatic.”

For now, veterans like him say they must secure the medicine they need outside the law. Maybe that will change in the near future.

Click here for updates on this story

A pair of studies have found that older adults who use marijuana have more risk of heart attack or stroke when hospitalized than non-users and are more likely to develop heart failure if they are a daily user.

The two studies, which have not been published, were presented Monday at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Philadelphia. Both studies excluded cannabis users who also smoke tobacco to focus solely on the cardiovascular effects of marijuana consumption.

The AHA recommends against smoking tobacco or marijuana because of the potential damaging effects on the heart, lungs and blood vessels.

“The latest research about cannabis use indicates that smoking and inhaling cannabis increases concentrations of blood carboxyhemoglobin (carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas) and tar (partly burned combustible matter) similar to the effects of inhaling a tobacco cigarette, both of which have been linked to heart muscle disease, chest pain, heart rhythm disturbances, heart attacks and other serious conditions,” University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences professor Robert Page II said in a statement.

One of the studies presented Monday found that frequent marijuana use has a negative effect on people with chronic conditions, like high blood pressure and cholesterol or diabetes. The researchers found that people who use marijuana had a 20% greater risk of of having a heart attack or stroke while hospitalized.

Furthermore, in the short term, smoking marijuana lowers blood pressure, which can lead to stroke if levels drop enough. Over longer periods of time, marijuana use can lead to an increase in blood pressure, which can lead to cardiovascular difficulties.

The second study, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, found that daily marijuana users were more likely to develop heart failure — when the heart does not pump oxygenated blood to support other internal organs as well as efficiently as it can — compared to people who reported not smoking.

Roughly 6.2 million adults in the United States have heart failure, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We want to provide the population with high-quality information on marijuana use and to help inform policy decisions at the state level, to educate patients and to guide health care professionals,” lead study author Yakubu Bene-Alhasan, M.D., M.P.H., a resident physician at Medstar Health in Baltimore, said in a statement.

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