By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) -U.S. government forecasters on Thursday said they expect a more dangerous Atlantic storm season than previously projected, raising their Atlantic hurricane outlook due to high sea surface temperatures.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast 14-21 named storms, with 6-11 potentially becoming hurricanes with winds of 74 miles per hour (119 kmh) or greater. Two to five of those hurricanes could become major events with sustained winds above 111 miles per hour (179 kmh), NOAA said.

In May, NOAA had predicted 12-17 named storms, 5-8 hurricanes and one to four major hurricanes. The raised outlook follows a similar projection by Colorado State University researchers.

An average Atlantic season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes. The season lasts to the end of November.

NOAA’s forecast was raised “to account for record warm sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic,” said meteorologist Matthew Rosencrans with the agency’s Climate Prediction Center. Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic where storms generally form are the warmest since 1950, he said.

El Nino, a weather system that forms from warm ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, increases vertical wind shear across the southern United States, lessening or breaking up tropical storms.

But this year’s El Nino may not develop soon enough to reduce the number of storms and their intensity, said Rosencrans.

Storms have not been unusually frequent so far.

“This season is actually right on a schedule,” said Jim Foerster, chief meteorologist at DTN, an agricultural, energy and weather data services provider.

“We normally have our 4th named storm on August 14th and first hurricane on August 11th, and we are at 4 named storms and one hurricane.”

Pacific winds have been blamed for fanning fierce wildfires in Hawaii this week. Hawaii is normally at increased risk of tropical cyclones during El Nino years.

Hurricane Dora’s epicentre currently lies hundreds of miles southwest of the archipelago. It is too early to say whether El Nino had contributed to the storm’s formation, said Chris Hewitt, director of climate services at the World Meteorological Organization.

Major hurricanes can disrupt offshore crude oil and natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico as well as heavily damage refineries along the Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Additional reporting by Gloria Dickie in London; editing by John Stonestreet)

By Mariam Sunny

(Reuters) -Johnson & Johnson said on Thursday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved its antibody-based therapy for patients with a difficult-to-treat type of blood cancer.

The therapy, Talvey, belongs to a class of treatments called bispecific antibodies designed to bring a cancer cell and an immune cell together so the body’s immune system can kill the cancer.

Talvey will be sold at a list price of $45,000 per month, the company told Reuters, adding the price could vary based on a patient’s weight, prescribed dosing and treatment duration.

J&J estimates a pricing range of $270,000 to $360,000 for an average treatment duration of six to eight months.

The company expects to make the therapy available to patients within three weeks.

Talvey was approved as a weekly or biweekly injection given under-the-skin to treat patients with relapsed multiple myeloma who have received at least four prior lines of treatment.

While the FDA approved J&J’s Tecvayli, another bispecific antibody, last year, Talvey is the first of its kind to target a protein known as GPRC5D, which is mainly present in cancerous plasma cells.

Around 35,730 people in the U.S. are expected to be diagnosed with multiple myeloma this year. The cancer starts in the bone marrow and disrupts production of normal blood cells.

“Although options for the treatment … have expanded significantly in recent years, the disease remains incurable, and therefore, patients are in need of new treatment options,” said Michael Andreini, CEO of the non-profit Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.

The therapy’s approval comes with FDA’s “boxed” safety warning, flagging the risk of a type of aggressive immune response and neurologic toxicity.

The accelerated approval is based on mid-stage trial data, which showed 73.6% patients achieved either partial or complete disappearance of cancer from their body.

(Reporting by Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Maju Samuel)

By Evan Garcia

TENNESSEE COLONY, Texas (Reuters) – The brown and black cattle of Texas, beloved symbols of the Lone Star state, walk through desiccated grass and stand in shrunken watering holes while their ranchers struggle to get them enough food.

For the second summer in a row, drought and extreme heat are stressing the health of cattle in Texas – the top beef-producing state in the U.S. by far – leading some ranchers to think about thinning their herds to save money on animal feed and hay.

“The grass is just not growing and primarily because it’s thirsty,” said rancher David Henderson. “Now we hit August and this is normally our hottest, driest time of the year … and the only thing I can think of, sometimes it calls for selling cows.”Henderson, 62, manages a herd of about 150 cows in Tennessee Colony in East Texas, and said he sold roughly 30 cows in 2022 due to the drought.

Dry conditions last year drove ranchers in East Texas to sell more than 2.66 million cattle from January 2022 through August 2022 — an increase of more than 480,000 cattle compared to that time period the previous year, according to the Texas Farm Bureau. 

Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon predicts extreme heat spurred by global warming will become the norm.

“Well, certainly for the next few decades, the trends are going to continue,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “This sort of heat will become normal in the summertime for Texas. And that, in addition, means that the heat extremes will be that much hotter and that much more severe.”

The drought, triple-digit heat and lack of food impacts just about every facet of the cattle industry – how much milk the calves get, how the cows fatten up, how much they reproduce, and how much that coveted steak will cost.

Jimmy Reed owns the Cattle Ranch Supply store in Tennessee Colony and, with pastures diminished, has been sending out feed deliveries to ranchers in early August instead of the normal time in mid-November.

“With everybody wanting to eat that rib eye and that T-Bone or those ribs, there’s going to be less supply. So the price of beef will once again take a rise,” Reed said.

Rancher Corey Davis, 39, said after plentiful spring rains he had been optimistic.

“This year, I thought being a young farmer, I said, ‘Well, we’re going to make a bunch of hay,'” Davis said.

“I was excited and you know, four or five months later, no rain for a month. So, we’re back in a drought again.”

(Reporting by Evan Garcia; Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The peculiar wobble of a subatomic particle called a muon in a U.S. laboratory experiment is making scientists increasingly suspect they are missing something in their understanding of physics – perhaps some unknown particle or force.

Researchers on Thursday announced new findings about the muon (pronounced MEW-on), a magnetic and negatively charged particle similar to its cousin the electron but 200 times more massive, in their experiment at the U.S. Energy Department’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

The experiment studied the wobble of muons as they traveled through a magnetic field. The muon, like the electron, has a tiny internal magnet that causes it to wobble – or, technically speaking, “precess” – like the axis of a spinning top while in a magnetic field.

But the wobble’s speed, as measured in the experiment, varied considerably from what was predicted based on the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces in the universe.

The new findings, building on data released in 2021, continue to hint at some mysterious factor at play as the researchers try to sort out the discrepancy between the theoretical prediction and the actual experimental results.

“We are looking for an indication that the muon is interacting with something that we do not know about. It could be anything: new particles, new forces, new dimensions, new features of space-time, anything,” said Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab and one of the authors of a research paper on the findings published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“I like crazy so I would love this to be something like Lorentz violation or some other new property of space-time itself. That would be insane and revolutionary,” Casey added.

Casey was alluding to a principle called Lorentz invariance that holds that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.

“Yes, it is fair to say that it could be pointing to unknown particles or forces,” University College London physicist and study co-author Rebecca Chislett said. “Currently due to new results in the theory community, it is difficult to say exactly what the discrepancy between the two (predicted muon behavior and observed behavior) is, but theorists are working hard to resolve this.”

The experiment was conducted at minus-450 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-268 degrees Celsius). The researchers shot beams of muons into a donut-shaped superconducting magnetic storage ring measuring 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter. As the muons zipped around the ring traveling nearly the speed of light, they interacted with other subatomic particles that, like tiny dance partners, altered their wobble.

The 2021 results similarly showed an anomalous wobble. The new results were based on quadruple the amount of data, bolstering confidence in the findings.

“With all this new knowledge, the result still agrees with the previous results and this is hugely exciting,” Chislett said.

The researchers hope to announce their final findings using all of their collected data in about two years.

“The experiment measures how fast muons spin in a magnetic field. The concept is simple. But to get to the required precision takes years of building the experiment and taking data. We took data from 2018 to 2023. The new result is based on our 2019 and 2020 data,” Casey said.

“We have to be patient because we need the Standard Model prediction to catch up to us for us to make the strongest use of our data,” Casey added. “We are also very baffled because there are different ways to predict what our experiment should see and they don’t agree well. So there is something very fundamental here we must be missing, which is very intriguing.”

(Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

By Adam Makary

CAIRO (Reuters) – When war in Sudan’s capital forced Sarah al-Sharif and her family to flee, the 19-year-old information technology student left her books and computer behind.

Now in Sennar, 30km (18 miles) southeast of Khartoum, she lacks a stable internet connection or passport to travel abroad and like many others sees no way of continuing her studies while fighting between rival military factions rages.

The conflict, which began in mid-April, has pushed Sudan’s faltering education system into a state of collapse, with many schools shut down or repurposed to host displaced people, and most national end-of-year exams cancelled.

“This war has spelled the end of education in Sudan, and things have turned from bad to impossible,” said Sharif.

The conflict has brought daily battles to the streets of Khartoum, a revival of ethnically-targeted attacks in Darfur, and the displacement of more than 4 million people within Sudan and across its borders.

According to Simone Vis of UNICEF in Sudan, there are “an alarming number of reports that both boys and girls are being recruited by armed groups”.

At least 89 schools across seven states are being used as shelters for the displaced, according the United Nations, raising fears that many children will have no access to schools in the new academic year and could be exposed to child labour and abuse.

On Wednesday, the education minister cancelled most end of year school exams in war-affected areas.

“In the current circumstances, anyone would see that it is impossible to have a new academic year,” said Sahar Abdullah, a displaced teacher from Khartoum also seeking refuge in Sennar.

TEACHERS STRIKE

Even before the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Save The Children ranked Sudan as one of the top four countries globally where education was at extreme risk.

Now the number of children out of school has risen to 9 million from 6.9 million, more than one million school-aged children have been displaced and at least 10,400 schools have been closed since fighting started, according to the charity.

While Khartoum has a proud intellectual tradition, the schooling system had been run down by underinvestment, political interference and a grinding economic crisis. It was then disrupted by street protests before and after the 2019 ousting of former leader Omar al-Bashir, by unusually heavy floods in 2020 and by the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to overcrowded school classrooms, “some of the students would bring chairs with them to class. There weren’t enough textbooks to help teachers do their job,” said Abdullah, the displaced teacher.

State-employed teachers staged a three-month strike over pay and working conditions just before the war broke out. As many as 300,000 teachers have not been paid since March, a senior member of the Sudanese Teachers’ Committee said.

“I haven’t been paid a salary in four months, and I have no idea when I’ll return to work,” said Fatima Mohamed, a displaced teacher who fled Khartoum to Gedaraf state after her school was overtaken by the RSF.

‘WAIT AND HOPE’

Despite the interruptions in recent years, Rabab Nasreldeen had managed to get to the third year of law studies at the University of Khartoum when the war broke out.

Then she too had to flee, abandoning educational certificates and papers that might allow her to continue studying elsewhere. “The only option we have is to wait and hope for the best,” she said.

Aid workers are trying to help alleviate the crisis, setting up safe learning spaces and providing children with psychosocial support.

Education Cannot Wait, the U.N. global fund dedicated to education in emergencies, has raised $12.5 million and aims to provide educational services for 120,000 children in Sudan and neighbouring countries.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents in wealthy countries “didn’t want the children to wait a year or a month for their education,” said Yasmine Sherif, the fund’s executive director.

“So why should we expect them (in Sudan) to wait for education until the conflict is over?”

Some of those who have fled Sudan are seeking entry to schools and universities outside its borders, including in Egypt. But in Chad, where more than 377,000 refugees have arrived, there are no such options.

“I cannot go back to continue my education and I lost contact with my family,” Khalifa Adam, a displaced student who escaped to Adre, Chad from Darfur, told Reuters. “I was told I can continue studying online but the internet connection here in Adre is very bad.”

(Reporting by Adam Makary in Cairo; additional reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz in Dubai and El Tayeb Siddig in Adre, Chad; editing by Aidan Lewis, William Maclean)