
As Houstonians watch the waters recede, they are looking ahead to the next phase of the disaster: recovery. The unusually prolonged assault by Hurricane Harvey flooded nearly a third of Harris County, killed at least 38 people, and left thousands more homeless. The storm also effectively throttled commerce coming into and leaving Houston, the county seat. Both of its major airports closed, its rail yards and nearby ports were majorly disrupted, and the city's extensive highway system was largely underwater.
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The Partner State Key Laboratory of Chirosciences at the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology (ABCT) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) discovered a newly emerged superbug, hyper-resistant and hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae, which may cause untreatable and fatal infections in relatively healthy individuals and will pose enormous threat to human health.
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Sleep apnea, left untreated for even a few days, can increase blood sugar and fat levels, stress hormones and blood pressure, according to a new study of sleeping subjects. A report of the study’s findings, published in the August issue of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, adds further support for the consistent use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a machine that increases air pressure in the throat to keep the airway open during sleep.
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Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is in a downward spiral, with summer minimum extents about 40 percent smaller than in the 1980s. But predicting how the sea ice is going to behave in a particular year is tricky: There are still many unknowns about the conditions of the sea ice cover, to say nothing of the difficulties of forecasting weather and ocean behavior over seasonal timescales.
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