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The Howe Ridge Fire last Sunday morning, August 12

A Fuming Glacier National Park Faces Long-Term Consequences

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 Editor’s Note: This article was
 
<a href="http://app.nationalproduction.wgbh.org/e/es.aspx?s=2531&amp;e=1078363&amp;elqTrackId=87bceb0e8d45455b8e6ff9d7c932edc8&amp;elq=04e21e15c26b4a2081fffebffd0b6c2c&amp;elqaid=5339&amp;elqat=1">

 originally published
 
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 On the evening of Saturday, August 11, lightning struck nine miles north of West Glacier, Montana and hit Glacier National Park’s Howe Ridge. A fire began.


 By the following day, the Howe Ridge Fire began to expand rapidly, with windy and dry conditions acting as the perfect fuel.


 As the fire grew, officials closed surrounding roads and issued an evacuation order for nearby campgrounds as well as Lake McDonald Lodge and North Lake McDonald Road, due east of the fire’s point of origin,
 <a href="https://www.nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/maps.htm">
 reports the National Park Service
 </a>
 . Management crews plan to establish point protection around structures and evaluate the areas in which they can construct control lines, but they face a major concern: Uneven terrain and the risk of falling trees prevent crews from safely establishing a direct fire line, the Park Service reports. About 250 personnel are assigned to the four fires burning within Glacier National Park, according to its Howe Ridge Fire hotline. Crew members assigned to Howe Ridge are using fire engines or taking to the sky in CL-215 ‘Superscooper’ airplanes and a K-Max helicopter to control the inferno, which currently spans about 3,500 acres.


 The Howe Ridge Fire’s estimated containment date, reads its
 <a href="https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/6135/">
 InciWeb
 </a>
 (Incident Information System) page, is approximately 12:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 1. But unfortunately, the embers could affect the landscape even after its last plume of smoke is distinguished, Jason Kean a U.S. Geological Survey research hydrologist who works with USGS’ Landslide Hazards Program, warns. Usually attributed to interactions between heavy rains, loose bedrock and gravity, landslides can be an all-too-real consequence of forest fires.

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 “You can look on Google Earth and see these scars from shallow landscapes all around,” he says.


 Fire primes a landscape for a slide in a few ways. When a fire strikes, some trees––sometimes many––are felled. The vegetation is like a “blanket on the soil,” Kean explains, with trees functioning as an anchor, securing soils in place. “When you remove the vegetation, raindrops can directly hit the soil and make those particles move.”


 But fire also chars the earth, transforming the hydrology, or water content, of its soil. As the soil burns, precipitation is less able to penetrate below the soil’s surface level. The ground’s surface could become unstable, and instability is a key ingredient for a landslide. Thanks to gravity, soil on a slope is most at risk.


 Most of Glacier National Park’s precipitation falls as snow, the National Park Service’s National Parks Fire Programs Coordinator Richard Schwab explains, but the Park is also home to powerful thunderstorms––the very cause of the Howe Ridge Fire. “It’s the summer thunderstorms that can trigger the kind of event that we’re concerned about,” Schwab says.


 “Particularly right after the fire, when the earth doesn’t have that blanket of vegetation, an intense storm can cause a real problem,” Kean adds. “Then in the spring, if you were to get rain on top of snow, the rain could melt the snow and essentially cause double the amount of water.”


 In the first year or two after the fire, the roots of trees it destroyed will still be intact, effectively creating support for the soil. But in time, the tree roots start to decay, and a shallow landslide–– one where the surface layers of soil slough off––can occur. Surface landslides can occur up to 10 years after a fire, Kean warns.


 Already, the Howe Ridge Fire has destroyed numerous private summer residences, park-owned boathouses, a camp house and its outbuildings. Tourists are being encouraged to stay on Glacier’s east side. Throughout Tuesday night, fire management crews heard noises that resembled gunfire, Montana’s
 <a href="https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2018/08/15/falling-trees-sound-like-gunshots-glacier-park-fire/999214002/">

 Great Falls Tribune
 
</a>
 reports––sounds made by trees collapsing to the ground.


 When rain finally falls again upon Howe Ridge, having fewer trees could cause its terrain to more readily slurp up moisture.


 Working with the
 <a href="https://www.nps.gov/glac/planyourvisit/maps.htm">
 NPS’ Burned Area Emergency Response
 </a>
 and other fire response teams, the USGS will conduct a debris-flow hazard assessment for the region scorched by the Howe Ridge Fire. This assessment entails using satellite imagery to generate a map of the burned area, finding the slope of the terrain within that area, and applying rainstorm models that are low, moderate, and severe in intensity to gauge the range of potential for a landslide, among “a whole suite” of other conditions, Schwab says, including at-risk “critical cultural resources, erosion, natural resources, invasive species and endangered species.”


 The Howe Ridge assessment will have to wait until its fire gets close to containment, USGS researchers say, but last year, the
 <a href="https://landslides.usgs.gov/hazards/postfire_debrisflow/detail.php?objectid=147">
 Sprague Fire
 </a>
 , which burned on the other side of Lake McDonald from the Howe Ridge Fire, was one of 96 different fires across the country that the USGS conducted an assessment for in 2017.

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 “Fortunately, that fire didn’t become problematic, unlike the others I’ve worked on,” Schwab, who’s currently stationed at California’s nearly 200,000-acre Carr Fire, says of the Sprague. He cautiously adds: “The Sprague fire has the potential to create a problem if you get the right rain event.”


 Responsible for the deaths of
 <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/body-mother-found-after-california-mudslide-death-toll-rises-21-n839546">
 21 people
 </a>
 , California’s 2017 Thomas Fire caused some of the worst debris flows that Kean had ever seen. “People need to plan for these events as soon as possible,” he says.


 The intensity of the Thomas Fire’s landslides makes Kean worry about the repercussions of California’s Mendocino Complex Fire––the state’s largest in recorded history––most. But he stresses that landslides are a very real repercussion within Montana’s Glacier National Park, too.


 “It’s definitely a possibility,” he says of landslides occurring as a result of the Howe Ridge Fire. “In 2003 and 2006, there were a bunch of debris flows that were associated with fires that aren’t too far from Howe Ridge. When you have intense slopes like these, there’s always the possibility."


 Photo credit: NPS Photo

Embers from the Howe Ridge Fire could affect the landscape even after its last plume of smoke is distinguished.

Type O can be safely administered to all blood types.

Scientists Find Enzyme That Could Help Create Universal Blood Type

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 Editor’s Note: This article was
 
<a href="http://app.nationalproduction.wgbh.org/e/es.aspx?s=2531&amp;e=1080894&amp;elqTrackId=87bceb0e8d45455b8e6ff9d7c932edc8&amp;elq=f56e48cb97b744b2a222da058630231b&amp;elqaid=5350&amp;elqat=1">

 originally published
 
</a>

 in an edition of NOVA’s email newsletter, NOVA Lens, and has now been repurposed for NOVA Next. Sign up for NOVA Lens
 
<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newsletters.html">

 here
 
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 During his time in the trenches of World War I, Dr. Lawrence Bruce Robertson, a Canadian surgeon who pioneered methods for blood transfusion, watched three men die of ruptured blood cells, multi-organ damage, and eventual organ failure—symptoms of a condition called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH).


 It was a time before scientists had identified the four major blood types in humans: A, B, AB, and O. The men Robertson had seen die had passed away due to a violent reaction to the blood they were given, which was incompatible with their own blood type.


 We now know that type O blood, which is a recessive trait, is the “universal donor.” If a blood transfusion is necessary, those with type O blood must receive type O blood; on the contrary, type O can be safely administered to all blood types. Now, in
 <a href="https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2018/august/gut-bacteria-provide-key-to-making-universal-blood-video.html?_ga=2.73840727.473629983.1535079314-891657040.1535079314">
 a new study
 </a>
 , researchers report that they used newly discovered gut bacteria enzymes to convert type A blood to type O at a rate faster than ever before. Omnipresent blood shortages could soon be no more.


 “What we’d be able to do, if this passes all the safety regulations, is to expand that reserve of available blood,” said Dr. Steve Withers, a professor of biochemistry at the University of British Columbia and the senior author of the new study, which he presented at the
 <a href="https://global.acs.org/events/256th-acs-national-meeting-exposition/">
 American Chemical Society National Meeting
 </a>
 in Boston on Tuesday.

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 First developed by the late Jack Goldstein of the New York Blood Center, the idea of
 <a href="https://www.nysun.com/national/scientists-convert-blood-to-type-that-can-be/51631/">
 converting type A, B, or AB blood to O
 </a>
 has been around for a while, explains Chief Scientist of the Canadian Blood Services Dr. Dana Devine, who was not involved in the new study. The challenge, she adds, has been how to commercialize it.


 “He’s got an enzyme that’s way more active and you can use less of it,” Devine said of Withers. “He may have the breakthrough to get over the cost hurdle,” she adds, referring to older methods with price tags that prevented them from becoming marketable.


 Some enzymes from bacteria that can be cultured in a lab––of which there are about 10,000, Withers points out––can be used to cut off the antigens, or small sugar or protein molecules, from type A or type B blood, effectively turning it to type O. (If an enzyme that feeds on type A antigens is paired with one that feeds on type B antigens, type AB blood can be converted to O.) In
 <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja5116088">
 a 2015 study
 </a>
 , published in the
 
 Journal of the American Chemical Society
 
 , Withers and his team found an enzyme that was capable of very slowly munching on type A antigens. Manipulating evolution, the researchers tweaked the enzyme, improving its ability to remove the sugar molecules by 170-fold.


 But Withers, an enzymologist with 35 years of experience, suspected that nature––specifically the human gut––had an even greater solution.


 “The human gut contains the A and B antigens,” he said. “It would make sense that bacteria would evolve to clip them off.”


 To see if this was the case, Withers and his team partnered with Dr. Jayachandran Kizhakkedathu, a pathologist at the Centre of Blood Research, and Withers’ University of British Columbia colleague Dr. Steven Hallam, a microbiologist and immunologist whose lab specializes in metagenomics, the study of genetic materials recovered directly from nature as opposed to those produced in a lab.


 Microbes are shaping the Earth’s environment and its other organisms, Hallam said, and there are far more of them than neurons and stars in the universe. “People are becoming more interested in tapping into that massive diversity of life, which creates an opportunity to discover enzymes and catalysts to solve worldwide problems,” he explains.


 With the support of Hallam’s lab, Withers’ team sifted through human feces to extract their bacterial DNA, then chopped the DNA into very large chunks, which on average contain 20 to 30 genes. They inserted those genes into an infamous host that’s easily cultivated in the lab—
 
 E. coli
 
 . “And then,” Withers said with a small chuckle, “we basically crossed our fingers and hoped these genes could be encoded.”


 It worked. The gut enzymes were even more efficient than those the team developed three years ago.


 The potential significance for society is profound, Devine said. “It would allow blood systems to do a much better job of managing their industry. They’re always struggling to get enough O blood––O donors––in the door,” she said of blood drives.


 In the event of an emergency transfusion, doctors automatically administer type O blood to a patient; taking time to conduct a screening could be life-threatening. Appeals for type O donors are therefore high, particularly in the summer months. “People start going on vacation and the general blood supply starts to drop,” Devine says. “Sometimes, you get increases in demand with people traveling. More traffic causes more accidents. It all lines up in the wrong way.”


 The new research is still in its preliminary stages. Through collaborating with the CDC and Canadian Blood Services, the team will have to perform further in vitro testing to determine whether blood converted from type A to O using gut microbe enzymes––which researchers would remove from the blood before administering it–– could cause abnormal reactions in patients. But if it passes safety studies, including a Phase 3 clinical trial in, the societal significance would be tremendous.


 “As scientists, we don’t often get the opportunity to make discoveries that make such a large human impact in the world. It’s rare. It’s a glorious thing. The idea of being able to take any kind of blood and transform it into any form would have a major health impact. It would literally save lives. And turning to the human body to find that solution is very elegant,” Hallam says. “It’s just beginning.”

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 Photo credit: @tOrange.biz 2004-2018 / (CC-BY 4.0)

In a new study, researchers report that they used newly discovered gut bacteria enzymes to convert type A blood to type O at a rate faster than ever before. Omnipresent blood shortages could soon be no more.

Also known as "water bears" or "moss piglets," tardigrades are microscopic animals with extreme survival abilities. Image credit: iStock

After Conquering Space, Water Bears Could Save the Global Vaccine and Blood Supply

Sporting a bulbous body, deflated head, and eight tiny caterpillar legs, this creature looks like a toddler’s drawing of a Macy’s Day Parade balloon. But the humble, microscopic tardigrade just might hold the secret to saving countless human lives.Also known as a “moss piglet” or “water bear” because of its striking appearance, the tardigrade is no stranger to experimentation. In the name of science, researchers have sent water bears to space, zapped them with X-rays, thrown them into a deep freeze, and heated them to extreme temperatures. And to everyone’s amazement, their <a href="https://www.livescience.com/62720-tardigrade-lifespan.html">tardigrade subjects almost always survived</a>, by resorting to their signature move: hibernation.
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Experts suggest that these nearly indestructible animals, which are just as at home on a backyard tree as in a sewage treatment plant in Antarctica, might live to see the eventual death of the Sun.Most organisms that thrive in extreme conditions do so by producing a special sugar called trehalose, which protects them from drying out. Strangely, most tardigrade species lack this sugar. But they do possess cytosolic-abundant heat soluble (CAHS) proteins, which have been found only in water bears and separate them from Planet Earth’s other extremophiles (organisms capable of surviving in extreme environments). University of North Carolina biologist <a href="https://endeavors.unc.edu/the-survivors/">Dr. Thomas Boothby</a> and his colleagues discovered that when tardigrades are deprived of water, their production of CAHS proteins is kicked into overdrive.In extreme conditions, <a href="https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:77b143b8-ec74-49f6-8a3d-6cffe0f81725">CAHS proteins</a> create a 3D gel-like network, which protects tardigrades’ other proteins from unfolding and combining with each other—a process that can lead to cell death. Boothby wondered if CAHS proteins could be recruited to protect vulnerable proteins that humans rely on, such as vaccines and blood in blood banks, both of which are protein-based and need to keep cool to stay viable. Medical experts call the temperature-controlled supply chain of vaccines and other protein-based pharmaceuticals the “cold chain.”
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Water_Bear_2.mov.01_04_58_05.Still001.width-990_z8Q2Qo2.png"/>
<figcaption>A water bear, as seen through a microscope, munches on waste in a sewage treatment plant at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. Image credit: Arlo Perez, WGBH
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New methods that allow for the safe and stable preservation of cells and bioreagents (biological substances like enzymes) are needed, “particularly when delivering drugs and medicine to inaccessible areas, or to areas that lack an infrastructure to maintain the cold chain,” says <a href="https://spu.edu/academics/college-of-arts-sciences/biology/faculty-staff/tenlen-jenny">Dr. Jenny Tenlen</a>, a biologist at Seattle Pacific University who studies tardigrade development. “Because of tardigrades' extreme stress tolerance, they have the potential to provide biological solutions to this problem.” About 90 percent of the cost of vaccination programs in developing countries, Boothby adds, comes from the need to keep vaccines cold.If tardigrade proteins could protect protein-based pharma, Boothby says, we wouldn’t have to rely on the cold chain to keep vaccines stable. “It might not seem like a big deal to us in a developed world,” he says. “But in other parts of the world, keeping things cold can be a logistical and economic burden.”
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Now, Boothby and his team are partnering with Cellphire, a biotech company focused on cell stabilization technology, to apply tardigrade proteins to pharmaceuticals. If successful, this research could make it easier to maintain vaccine supplies in developing countries and military zones, both of which can lack reliable access to refrigeration.To collect large amounts of CAHS proteins, the team inserts copies of tardigrade genes responsible for making CAHS proteins into bacteria, which are notoriously prolific. “We can grow billions or trillions of bacteria a day and engineer them to make the protein,” Boothby says.Converting bacteria into human protein factories is nothing new. The pharmaceutical industry uses them to create everything from insulin to cancer-fighting interferon. Safely extracting a desired protein from its engineered bacterial creators is always vital, Boothby explains, as bacteria can produce a toxic substance called an endotoxin. (To ensure its endotoxin cleanup is thorough, Boothby’s team is conducting immune studies in which CAHS proteins derived from the bacteria are inserted into mice.)Already, Boothby and his team have compared tardigrade proteins’ ability to preserve vaccines to that of FDA-approved protectants. CAHS proteins, they found, protect the proteins within pharmaceuticals about 10 times more efficiently than current methods.
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/150323-F-IT851-011.width-990_smRDAZs.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Vaccines and other protein-based pharmaceuticals currently rely on a temperature-controlled supply chain. In developing countries, it can be logistically challenging and immensely expensive to keep vaccines cold, and therefore viable. Image Credit: U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Areca T. Wilson
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The team’s ultimate goal, Boothby says, is to use CAHS proteins to protect human blood in blood banks. It's a challenge, because our blood is much more complex than the protein-based pharmaceuticals the team is currently working with. Blood is made up of many types of cells, each of which contain different types and ratios of proteins. So, the team will first attempt to use CAHS proteins to preserve each individual kind of cell found in our blood. If they can master this, the researchers hope, they can use CAHS proteins to preserve blood in its complete state.“The FDA keeps a tap on refrigerated blood for 60 days,” Boothby explains. “After that, you have to throw it out. You can imagine if there are soldiers on patrol, they can’t carry a mini fridge on their back. But, if we can get whole blood at a dry state at ambient or even hot temperatures and soldiers can carry it and someone needs a transfusion, they can just add water and use it.”Tenlen, who is not involved in the new research, believes Boothby’s preliminary work “provides encouraging evidence” that CAHS proteins can be used to stabilize biological substances under challenging conditions. But, she cautions, Boothby and his team will have to be careful that CAHS proteins don't introduce side effects when used to preserve vaccines and human blood.If the team does succeed in stabilizing vaccines and human cells, the societal impact—all originating from the blimp-like tardigrade—could be enormous.“You see these animals do these weird things and produce these materials that no other organism has,” Boothby says. “As I was looking into how tardigrades survive desiccation I started to think about how useful these proteins could be for people… And that’s what we should do, as good citizens of the world: help people.”
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Special proteins that help tardigrades survive extreme conditions might be the key to extending the shelf life of life-saving pharmaceuticals.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in 2006, is currently 4 billion miles away from Earth. It's scheduled to conduct a flyby of Ultima Thule, a small object in the Kuiper Belt, at 12:33 a.m. ET on Jan. 1, 2019.

New Horizons Ultima Thule Flyby Updates

NASA’s <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html">New Horizons</a> spacecraft confirmed a successful flyby of the enigmatic Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, just a few days shy of the thirteenth anniversary of the space probe’s initial launch in 2006, yesterday.NOVA is reporting live from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD.NASA's New Horizons team just released the first images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft during the Ultima Thule flyby.
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<img alt="Ultima Thule Revealed1" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/20190102-pr.width-990_DjK3Rpr.png"/>
<figcaption>“What you’re seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by spacecraft," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern said shortly after revealing the most up-to-date photo of Ultima Thule released by the NASA New Horizons team. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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 “Just about 36 hours ago, New Horizons swept down on Ultima Thule in an event that’s never been attempted before when it comes to space flight," <a href="https://twitter.com/NASANewHorizons">NASA New Horizons'</a> Principal Investigator Alan Stern said. "We didn’t even know of this object until 2014. It’s only about as large as Washington D.C., and about as dull as garden dirt," Stern added of Ultima Thule with a laugh. He explained that before the flyby event, New Horizons had to plunge toward Ultima at a speed of 32,000 miles an hour."I don’t think we stressed this enough," he said. "What this team and this spacecraft did is unprecedented."Carly Howett, a planetary scientist on the New Horizons team, explained that "now, we can definitively say that Ultima is red." "Both lobes—both Ultima and Thule—are red," she said. "But the neck section is brighter."
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<img alt="Ultima is Red" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Dv7djHBU8AE1BUS.width-990_LiD2Flu.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Using a composite of pictures, the NASA New Horizons team was able to discern the color of Ultima Thule—a rusty red.
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On the morning of January 1, at approximately 10:31 a.m. EST, the New Horizons team received their first information from the spacecraft's historic flyby."Ultima Thule is finally revealing its secrets to us. And even though it’s still a pixelated blob," Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist, said, "it’s a better pixelated blob."Shape-wise, the team explained at the time, the now iconic Kuiper Belt object could be one of two things: a double-lobed peanut-like object, or two objects orbiting each other.
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/02newhorizons4-jumbo.width-990_Yku3F4O.jpg"/>
<figcaption>An image of Ultima Thule, taken before the flyby and unveiled on New Year's Day. Ultima Thule may be a single, peanut-shaped object, or two objects stuck together; it's also still possible that there are two closely associated objects orbiting each other. New Horizons is thought to be approaching it from the side, as if descending down onto the top of a rotating propeller. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
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“We have a healthy spacecraft," Alice Bowman, the New Horizons Mission Operations Manager, AKA "MOM," said. "We just completed the farthest flyby.”
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<img alt="Alan Stern hugs Alice Bowman" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sequence_06.00_01_59_06.Still002.width-990_4MvHfVh.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission principal investigator, hugs Alice Bowman, mission operations manager, after receiving news of a successful flyby.
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Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist, cheered from the front row as Bowman's team announced that the spacecraft was healthy and had power.
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<img alt="Hal Weaver Cheers" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Unknown_18DsWgu.width-990_NADgIFK.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Hal Weaver, the New Horizons Mission project scientist, cheers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory auditorium after receiving news of the successful Ultima Thule flyby.
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Here's what New Horizons team members had to say the days leading up to the historic flyby:"Things have been happening so fast. I think all of us have been working through the weekend, so don't ask us what day it is," Bowman said."This definitely is more stressful than Pluto. Pluto is a much larger object. We've known about Pluto since 1930. This object we only discovered in 2014," she adds of Ultima Thule, an object in the Kuiper Belt that is approximately 20 miles wide and 4 billion miles away, which <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/new-horizons-ultima-thule-preview/">New Horizons will attempt to fly by</a> at 12:33 a.m. on New Year's Day (January 1). "This is a type of object that no spacecraft has ever observed up close. It's in an orbit that the scientists say has not been disturbed by anything since the formation of the solar system, so it's really, really neat to see what this object looks like and how it compares to the other objects that we see in our solar system."
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"[Yesterday] morning we actually made a slight adjustment to the observations onboard the spacecraft—we call that a knowledge update—and we found that we were arriving a little bit late. So we needed to adjust a few seconds so that we would arrive at that optimum point. The subject is so small. It's possible that the observations that target the surface of Ultima could, worst case, be just black sky," Bowman said.
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/BPL_111_Alice_Multigroup.width-990_yRHyNUX.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Alice Bowman tells NOVA about the New Horizons mission.
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"We all feel this connection to the spacecraft even though it's four billion miles from Earth. We feel that connection and we're proud of what it has accomplished and what it will accomplish."
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“We could see Pluto begin to show itself months ahead of time. And days and weeks ahead, we had a very good idea of what Pluto looked like," Encounter Mission Manager Mark Holdridge, who has been working on the New Horizon's mission for 17 years, said. "Ultima—it's not showing us anything. We won't be able to tell anything about shape until after the flyby when we get some of the first pictures back. We'll begin to see sort of its secrets revealed...That's the hope anyhow. But you never really know."
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<img alt="Mark Holdridge" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/MARK_H.width-990_a1jKGDO.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Mark Holdridge tells NOVA about the New Horizons mission. 
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"You spend years preparing for something like this and before you know it it's over. And sometimes you forget—you get caught up in the moment. You really do have to slow down once and say, 'This is really it. Let's make the most of this.'""<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/pluto-and-beyond/">Pluto and Beyond</a>" premieres Wednesday, January. 2 at 9/8c on PBS.
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NASA&#x27;s New Horizons spacecraft is about to fly by Ultima Thule, an object in the Kuiper Belt. NOVA reports live from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD.

Human fossil footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Human tracks may be earliest evidence of people in North America

In southern New Mexico lies the Tularosa Basin, an oblong bowl that’s home to a natural sandbox: White Sands National Park.In 2005, David Bustos came to White Sands to work as a National Park Service biologist. The following year, he took notice of odd animal footprints that would appear only when the ground was wet. (The first of these footprints was reported in the 1930s.) The markings, which would disappear as the earth dried up, became known as ghost tracks.Then in 2009, Bustos came across tracks he thought belonged to ancient humans walking alongside mammoths. But few scientists agreed, he says, rebutting with “No, no, those are the prints of camels that were slipping in the mud,” referring to now-extinct North American camels. And the tracks would disappear with changes in the weather. Heavy rainfall drowned them; periods of drought dried them up. It would take more than a decade—and cooperative weather—for scientists to agree that the tracks belonged to humans. Then, says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Research Geologist Kathleen Springer, “What everyone was asking is, ‘How old are these things, really?’”
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In September 2021, Bustos, Springer, and a group of other researchers published their findings in the journal Science: The team identified 61 human tracks within multiple levels of earth belowground, and between layers of these tracks were seeds from an ancient aquatic plant. Analyses of these seeds—and the footprints they were embedded within—are now challenging scientists’ understanding of when and how people arrived in the Americas.Archaeologist Joe Watkins, who was not involved in the study, believes the findings have potentially massive implications. “I think, outside the next big migration of going to the Moon or Mars, the migration to the Americas was the last great migration humanity had,” he says. Upending the timeline of this journey could have implications for both science and Native American cultures, Watkins, who is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, believes.<h3>Visiting the tracks</h3>At first light on a cold January morning in 2020, Bustos set out with Springer and her USGS colleague Jeff Pigati on all-terrain vehicles to visit White Sands’ ancient tracks. The team wore parkas to keep warm amid a prevailing wind. Springer recalls the hour-and-a-half journey through the dunes being like a “Disney ride.” It was the “funnest thing in the world,” she says. “Just being out there is surreal.”Eventually, after passing through a large swath of national park that borders the site of the first atomic bomb test, Springer, Pigati, and Bustos fell upon thousands of tracks. They belonged to packs of dire wolves, giant sloths, 13-foot-tall mammoths, and other animals. And, Springer says, “there’s a person track right smack dab in the middle of them.”
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<img alt="White Sands National Park dunes" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/White_Sands_Dunes.width-990_kjxnoic.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Gypsum sand dunes at White Sands National Park, New Mexico. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH
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“When Dave showed us these things and we had our eyes trained on them, we were almost afraid to step down,” Pigati says. “It looks like a painting in some places.”Bustos recalls the conditions that day being perfect for identifying tracks. The trio saw human footprints going underneath the sediment in places, illustrating that there was more than a surface layer of them. “We were seeing seed layers popping out all over the place,” Bustos says. To determine how old the footprints were, Springer and Pigati’s team would collect these ancient seeds from different layers of footprints. The overwhelming evidence of ancient plant life excited Bustos.About 36,000 to 19,000 years ago, lakes filled the Tularosa Basin. The largest of these was Lake Otero, which fluctuated in size and activity based on rainfall. Plants like spiral ditchgrass (Ruppia cirrhosa), whose seeds are now embedded in layers of earth, grew along Otero’s edges. About 23,000 years ago, the southwestern U.S. became drier and the lake shrank. This exposed a large area of land that was once underwater, whose clays and silts became overtopped by gypsum sand and silt. People began walking around these surfaces, which “were kind of squishy in some areas,” Springer explains. And the people weren’t alone: The impressions from mammoths, ground sloths, and camels, sit alongside—and sometimes right on top of—human prints. “This can only happen if they are in the area at the same time,” Pigati said in an email. “Exactly how they may have interacted in the vicinity of our [research site] is unknown, but there is definitive evidence that humans were harassing or stalking a giant ground sloth on the west side of the basin.”In many other cases, interactions between humans and animals seem peaceful. “What’s interesting to me,” Bustos says, “is it’s not just a mammoth and a hunter. It’s families. You see a baby mammoth turning around and spinning. We have the juvenile and adult megafauna prints with the babies and adult [humans].”
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sloth_Footprint.width-990_j4t67Wp.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A footprint from a Harlan's ground sloth at White Sands National Park. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Parks Service
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Having about 10 hours of daylight, the team got to work “trenching” the human footprints, Springer says. With ground-penetrating radar, they were able to determine that footprints were present within layers of sediment. They then dug a trench to view the layers in cross-section. If Springer and Pigati’s cross-section was a sandwich, the footprints would be the filling and the dateable material around the footprints would be the bread. Dating tracks only at the surface would yield inaccurate results, Pigati explains. “You can look in every direction and there are trackways everywhere in every horizon,” he says. But if you calculate the age of these footprints on the surface layer of earth only, you’ll just find that they’re younger than the ground they’re upon, he says. By looking at layers of sediment below the surface, the team set out to document how many layers contained footprints and find datable material above and below each layer. Each of these layers would contain footprints from a unique time period, the team posited. “The footprints are imprinted at the top of a given layer of sediment—they don’t really pass through the layers,” Pigati wrote in an email.As the sun rose higher in the sky, the white sand reflected a near-blinding light, and the day quickly grew warm. The researchers shedded their parkas and worked in t-shirts until the January sun fizzled and it was time to ride back through the dunes, chunks of sediment layers in hand.The team later extracted 40 to 60 ditchgrass seeds from every level of footprints in every sample. In a USGS lab in Golden, Colorado, they cleaned each set of seeds with a chemical treatment and began combusting them.  The combustion process, automated by a machine in the lab, didn’t obliterate the seeds but turned them into a gas. From this gas, a machine turned the once-seeds back into solids: graphite pellets about the size of a pencil tip. This technology of making “graphite targets” dates back to the 80s, Pigati says. “Every lab does it the same way in the world.”The team then took these pellets, tapped them down into cartridges, and sent them off to a lab to measure the amount of a radioactive isotope of carbon, called carbon-14, they contained. Then they waited for results.<h3>What the tracks mean</h3>Months later, they came. The seeds revealed that the footprints they were embedded within are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old—thousands of years older than what scientists generally consider to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas.“For forever, people thought Clovis were the first people to cross over [the Bering Strait] about 13,000 years ago,” Pigati says, referring to the commonly-held view among archaeologists. As the story goes, ice sheets in what is now Canada blocked passage between what is now Alaska and the rest of the Americas. Once these ice sheets began retreating, people came south through an ice-free corridor, Pigati explains. His team’s findings now challenge this belief. Carbon dating of the seeds within the White Sands footprints suggest that people were in the Americas while ice sheets still covered much of northern North America. “A lot earlier” than previously thought, Pigati says. “When we got the final dates back, it was very…” Springer pauses over Zoom, choosing her words carefully. “The arrows were going to start flying. We knew we needed an [evidence-supported] explanation why these findings were really robust.”
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Archaeologist Joe Watkins says that if the dating of the seeds, and therefore footprints, is correct, “it puts us at 20% older than the dates we have from the rest of America.” Therefore, ages of other important archaeological sites like Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, where scientists have found 16,000-year-old evidence of human life, may need to be reconsidered. (In 2014, Nikhil Swaminathan <a href="https://www.archaeology.org/issues/145-1409/features/2369-peopling-the-americas-meadowcroft-rockshelter">wrote for Archaeology Magazine</a> that Meadowcroft Rockshelter is “the longest-occupied site in the Americas.”)Watkins first heard about the White Sands tracks years ago while working in Washington D.C. as the chief of the Tribal Relations and American Cultures Program of the National Park Service. But he didn’t see them until after he’d retired, visiting White Sands during a NOVA shoot for the film “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/ice-age-footprints/">Ice Age Footprints</a>.” Seeing human footprints intermingling with those of ground sloths was overwhelming and “tremendously exhilarating,” he says.
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<img alt="Archaeologist Joe Watkins holds a clovis point" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Joe_Watkins.width-990_4i0j7w4.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Watkins pictured with a replica Clovis point. His interest in archaeology was piqued at 10 years old when he found an archaic point on his family’s Oklahoma homestead. Watkins, who’s now 71, showed the point to his grandmother. The artifact didn’t come from modern Choctaw, but was much older, she explained in her native language. From that moment, Watkins became “more interested in looking into the unwritten past,” and, with his grandmother’s support, began pursuing a career in archaeology, a field he recognizes isn’t always “in advantage to the Native American community,” he says. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH
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But Watkins cautions that, with no other aspects of culture present but footprints, scientists like him can only speculate how ancient humans were using the land. “Were they just walking? Were they hunting? Did they have a camp nearby?” he asks. Archaeology may not hold all the answers to these questions: “I do think it’s important for American Indians to be involved so they can offer their insights so we can better understand who these people were,” Watkins says, reflecting on his own Choctaw roots.As Native American identity is tied to the land, Watkins believes, “the Native peoples will say we’ve always been here,” he says. “I usually say [the first Americans] weren’t Native Americans. They weren’t Siberians. They were whatever they called themselves.” Combining this philosophy with science is a way to integrate belief systems, he says.
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The White Sands findings, Watkins says, “forced us to reconsider the most cherished ideas of the people of North America.”
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Watkins recites his people’s story about two stiff-legged bears that meet in a black-loam prairie and have a battle. Only one survives; it becomes the last of its species. “Some Choctaw interpret ‘stiff-legged bear’ as being a mammoth,” Watkins says. If humans did once walk alongside mammoths in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin 20,000 years ago, he adds, there’s a chance these people gave birth “to any number of tribal people across the U.S.” <h3>Racing against time</h3>Bustos, Springer, Pigati, and fellow researchers visited the ghost tracks again in January and April 2022. They extended their trench, identifying more footprints from potentially before and after the original set they excavated. To bolster their findings, Bustos explains, the team won’t rely solely on dating seeds. They’ll date pollen, too. “This work is not done,” Pigati says. “We have a window from 21,000 to 23,000 [years]. We don’t know if people were here before then.” But the clock is ticking. Erosion in White Sands is exposing and destroying the tracks, Springer says. Though the Tularosa Basin has been eroding for nearly 12,000 years, climate change is likely exacerbating erosion today, she explains. “The layers, they’re finite,” Bustos adds. “We’re losing thousands of tracks to erosion. It’s a race to document them before they’re gone.”Already, some tracks reveal clues about ancient daily life in the Tularosa Basin.“There’s something about the children,” Bustos says. “You see these toddlers running and jumping, and the story really comes alive.” Watkins agrees. “When we look at the tracks of children playing in perhaps puddled water surrounded by ground sloths,” he says, “it takes us back to childhood memories of children playing in puddles all around the world.”
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Footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park challenge scientists’ timeline of when humans first came to North America.

Ingenuity’s first black-and-white picture from the air. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Victory! Ingenuity conducts its first powered flight on Mars

When a diminutive 4-pound helicopter lifted off over a red landscape on Monday morning, it became the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.At approximately 6:15 a.m. EDT on Monday, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter team—along with eager viewers from across the globe—watched live as data from the red planet arrived to Mission Control via a <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/services/networks/deep_space_network/about/">Deep Space Network antenna</a>. The data signified that Ingenuity’s flight, which occurred approximately four hours earlier, had been a success.“Sometimes we have to do something just to show that we can do it,” NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen said during <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KolyCqICI">NASA’s livestream</a> of the event. “When the Wright brothers flew for the first time, they flew an experimental aircraft. And in the same way, the Mars helicopter is designed to show that we can fly a powered helicopter flight in the Martian atmosphere.”
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<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/nasa-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-first-flight/">Getting Ingenuity to fly</a>, Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung added, “was the unwavering dream of our team since day one.”On Monday, downlink lead Michael Starch, clad in an orange Ingenuity team polo, studied his computer screen in the helicopter control room. “This is downlink. Early indications,” he said, looking up from the monitor. “Data products look nominal.”Sitting close by was Aung, who visibly grinned under her mask.“This is downlink,” Starch repeated. “We’ve pulled in data products from Mars 2020.” He pauses for 39 seconds. The room was silent. “This is downlink,” he said again. “Confirming we received Mars 2020 telemetry. Confirming we received Mars 2020 event. Confirming we received helicopter data products.” Starch nodded his head up and down.Silence once again fell over the control room. Aung twiddled her fingers. Some teammates nodded. Others glanced at their laptops and then back at their anxiously-awaiting colleagues.“This is downlink,” Starch said. “Confirming we have helicopter data products, helicopter telemetry, helicopter event… battery data has been received.”
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<img alt="NASA JPL's Ingenuity Mars helicopter team" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/25819_4-PIA24585-web.width-990_lltuX2v.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Members of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter team, including MiMi Aung (front), in NASA JPL’s Space Flight Operations Facility prepare to receive the data downlink showing whether the helicopter completed its first flight on April 19, 2021. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Starch handed it off to Flight Control, which gave its announcement: “Ingenuity is reporting having performed spin-up, takeoff, climb, hover, descent, landing, touchdown and spin-down.”Aung gave two thumbs up and then waved her fists. The control room erupted with clapping, originating from both mask-wearing team members in person and those watching over Zoom.“Altimeter data confirmed,” Flight Control said. Cheers exploded from the control room. The altimeter plot of the flight, mechanical engineer Taryn Bailey explained during NASA’s livestream, indicates a peak. It starts off with a flat line, showing that Ingenuity is grounded, has a steep incline, indicating that the helicopter has spun up and risen, a dwell, showing that Ingenuity is hovering, and then another steep decline to the ground representing Ingenuity’s touchdown.“Confirmed that Ingenuity has performed its first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet,” Flight Control said.
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As the cheers and fist pumps continued, the team received its first picture from the mission: a black and white photo that Ingenuity snapped while hovering over the Martian surface, its shadow—four rotors, four legs, and a tissue box-like body—cast beneath it.Getting Ingenuity to fly on Mars was no easy feat. This first flight, initially scheduled for Sunday, Apr. 11, was delayed after team engineers identified a potential problem. (The team decided to update Ingenuity’s flight control software before attempting a maiden flight.) And years of preparation back on Earth was necessary.Starting in 2014, before testing Ingenuity, the team used helicopter models to simulate flight on Mars. These models were the precursors to Ingenuity and “went through extensive environmental and aerodynamic testing,” Bailey said.To properly test these models and then Ingenuity beginning in 2019, “We had to simulate a Mars-like atmosphere,” which is 1% the density of Earth’s, Bailey explained. The team did this by using NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 25-foot space simulator thermal vacuum chamber, which allowed the team to control temperature and pressure to simulate Mars’ atmospheric density. The team also used a gravity off-load system to compensate for the difference in gravity between Earth and Mars, Bailey said.After these tests “We said, ‘The next time we fly it’ll be on Mars,’” Aung said during a press conference on Apr. 9.
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<img alt="The Ingenuity Mars helicopter, photographed by Perseverance" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/25816_PIA24550-1200.width-990_N22JFql.jpg"/>
<figcaption>The first flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was captured in this image from Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on April 19, 2021. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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At four pounds, Ingenuity was built to be both light and fast, bolstering its ability to soar in Mars’ incredibly thin atmosphere. Despite its small size, the helicopter’s wingspan is 4 feet tip-to-tip: “super large for something that’s essentially carrying [a vehicle] the size of a tissue box,” Bailey said.Each of its four blades is made of a lightweight but strong composite material and weighs less than 2 ounces—the equivalent of four empty soda cans. To generate lift in an incredibly-thin atmosphere with few molecules to push around, Ingenuity’s blades move at an average speed of 2,500 rotations per minute. (Helicopters used on Earth typically operate at 450 to 500 rpm.)While Ingenuity’s first flight was modest—a 10-foot hover above the red planet’s surface and a touchdown—its upcoming four flights will increase in technical difficulty. The team hopes to eventually explore parts of Mars’ terrain that it can’t navigate with terrestrial rovers like <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-landing-success/">Perseverance</a>. “The rover has to navigate around a lot of obstacles on the ground that the helicopter can fly around,” Bailey said.“We’ve sent five rovers to Mars and now we have an aerial dimension, which...elevates the next stage of space exploration,” she added. Ingenuity and its eventual successors may also allow for more collaboration and eventually open the doorway for human exploration of other worlds, Bailey said.Though the Ingenuity team already received still images of the helicopter’s maiden flight from both Ingenuity and Perseverance, it expects to get video footage and more high-resolution images in the next couple of days. You can view these on <a href="https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/">NASA’s website here</a>.
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The 4-pound helicopter just became the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.

A Navajo family practices social distancing and mask-wearing during the coronavirus pandemic. Image Credit: Getty Images

American Indians have the highest Covid vaccination rate in the US

Before getting vaccinated against COVID-19 was an option, Francys Crevier was afraid to leave her Maryland home.She ordered all of her groceries and limited her time outside, knowing that each venture would put both herself and her immunocompromised mother, with whom Crevier shares her home, at risk. Knowing she could provide for Mom was “a blessing, for sure,” Crevier says. After all, American Indians and Alaska Natives were <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html">hospitalized and died</a> from COVID-19 at a higher rate than any other racial group in America throughout the pandemic, says Crevier, who’s Algonquin.“As a Native woman, I didn’t know if I was going to make it through this,” she says.
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Indeed, the U.S. Indigenous population had <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/sites/newsroom/themes/responsive2017/display_objects/documents/2020_Letters/Enclosure_DTLL_DUIOLL_11182020.pdf">more than 3.5 times the infection rate</a>, more than four times the hospitalization rate, and a higher mortality rate than white Americans, reports the <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/aboutihs/">Indian Health Service</a> (IHS), a federal health program for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Official data reveal that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/us/navajo-nation-infection-rate-trnd/index.html">the Navajo Nation</a>, the largest tribe in the U.S., has been one of the hardest-hit populations, reporting one of the country’s highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in May 2020, the <a href="https://navajotimes.com/reznews/a-broken-system-why-number-of-native-american-alaska-native-pandemic-deaths-may-never-be-known/">Navajo Times reports</a>.Being so disproportionately affected led to a sense of urgency toward vaccination among American Indians and Alaska Natives, says Crevier, who is the chief executive officer of the <a href="https://www.ncuih.org/index">National Council of Urban Indian Health</a>, a partner of IHS. And many IHS affiliates stepped up, showing early success with vaccination education and campaigns specifically for Indigenous communities, some of whom would otherwise have trouble accessing coronavirus vaccines.In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Twitter that its <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/index.html#vaccination-demographics-trends">COVID-19 data tracker</a> now displays U.S. vaccination progress by race and ethnicity. The tracker, “Percent of People Receiving COVID-19 Vaccine by Race/Ethnicity and Date Reported to CDC, United States,” showed that as of July 6, American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest vaccination rate in the country, with 45.5% having received at least one dose and 39.1% fully vaccinated. They’re followed by Asians (36.6%, 35%), whites (33.7%, 32.2%), Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders (35.9% 31.3%), Hispanic/Latinos (31.8%, 28.3%), and Black people (25.8%, 23.2%). As of late May, American Indian and Alaska Native vaccination rates were higher than white vaccination rates in 28 states, including New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska, where many Indigenous people receive care from tribal health centers and the IHS, Connecticut News Project’s <a href="https://ctmirror.org/2021/05/22/stark-racial-disparities-persist-in-vaccinations-state-level-cdc-data-shows/">CT Mirror reports</a>.
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<figcaption>Francys Crevier, the chief executive officer of the National Council of Urban Indian Health. Image courtesy of Matthew P. D’Agostino, University of Maryland, Baltimore
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For many, it’s a reason to celebrate. Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma member Walter Murillo, the chief executive officer of Phoenix-based <a href="https://www.nativehealthphoenix.org/">Native Health Central</a>, says he felt “almost daily” the loss of family members, community members, and extended community members. “Every day, having lived through that trauma, when there’s a way for safety, that’s the way to go,” he says of vaccination, wiping his eyes over Zoom.<h3>Success and challenges of Indigenous vaccine rollout</h3>In November 2020, the federal government offered tribes and urban Indigenous communities two potential options: Receive vaccines through the state or separately through the IHS. Many chose the latter, as receiving vaccination via the state, Crevier and Murillo explain, would have required Indigenous communities to fully adopt the CDC’s vaccination rollout phases. These phases, though recommended to tribes, Crevier says, didn’t completely align with Native American viewpoints, which often emphasize putting culture and language—and their keepers —first. (Some Native speakers are younger than 65 years old and therefore weren’t included in the earliest U.S. vaccination phases, for example.)In some tribes, fully complying to the CDC’s recommended phases would have entailed adopting slower vaccine rollouts than tribes actually undertook. “People knew they didn’t have to be hemmed in by those phases,” says Kerry Hawk Lessard, the executive director of Baltimore and Boston-based Urban Indian Health program <a href="https://nativeamericanlifelines.org/">Native American LifeLines</a>. “You can’t blame them. That’s their right as a tribal citizen.”The Mashpee Wampanoag of Massachusetts, Lessard says, opted to make vaccines available for tribal citizens and anyone who shares a household or works for a Native organization. <a href="https://www.kosu.org/health/2021-03-11/tribes-in-oklahoma-begin-opening-vaccine-eligibility-to-non-natives">In Oklahoma</a>, once tribal members were vaccinated, surplus supplies of vaccines went to teachers and other non-tribal citizens serving tribal communities, often before these people were eligible per state guidelines, she says. “Some of my family members live on the <a href="https://www.mtpr.org/post/tribes-report-highest-vaccination-rates-montana">Fort Peck Reservation</a>” in Montana, where “a huge amount of people are vaccinated” compared to people in the rest of the state, explains Lessard, who is Shawnee. “We’re fortunate in the Phoenix area,” Murillo adds, referring to having ample IHS resources and support, which greatly helped make vaccines accessible to Indigenous people living in the Southwest.And in Washington, <a href="https://nativeproject.org/">the Native Project</a>, a primary health care facility that services the greater Spokane community, decided to get its vaccine allocation through the state. “The state was very cooperative,” Crevier says. After a quick rollout, excess doses went to the NAACP and the Asian American community. “It was really kind of beautiful,” she says. “We are one big country, right? It’s nice that this community prioritized not just our [Native] community but other historically marginalized ones.”
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The “language you hear throughout Indian country is ‘be a good relative.' Do this for the grandmas, do this for the ceremony, do this for the language, because our people are precious...We already lost a lot. We can’t afford to lose more.”
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In states like South Carolina and Tennessee, however, vaccination rates have been far lower for American Indians and Alaska Natives than for white Americans, CT Mirror reports.After all, more than 70% of Indigenous people live off of reservations, many in urban communities that lack full IHS services: dental care, primary medical care, mental health care, and other facilities under one roof, free of charge for the Native American community. While IHS facilities in the American West commonly include full outpatient care, the entirety of the East Coast lacks such IHS services due to limited funding. (Though the IHS is promised an annual $48 billion by the federal government, it received <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/sites/budgetformulation/themes/responsive2017/display_objects/documents/FY_2021_Final_CJ-IHS.pdf">$6.4 billion</a> for the 2021 fiscal year.) A lack of urban services affected many vaccination campaigns, Crevier says, though Murillo points out that it ethically shouldn’t have: “Managing an outbreak of a communicable disease on a reservation is important. Why would it be less important for Indians living in the city?” he asks.
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Phoenix_Vaxx_Program.width-990_nzqpofh.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A woman receives a coronavirus vaccine through Native Health Phoenix's program. Image courtesy of Susan Levy, Native Health
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Lessard is very familiar with the challenge of offering vaccines to Indigenous people living in urban areas who are far from home reservations and full outpatient care. The Boston and Baltimore Indigenous communities her organization serves had “a lot of fear”: “We have a pretty good size of Navajo Nation citizens here. Seeing what’s happening at home is devastating” and plays into wanting to get vaccinated quickly, she says. Furthermore, Lessard and her team knew that many people in their community grappled with the decision to travel to their home reservation, where they could be vaccinated immediately but potentially put family members and tribal elders at risk of infection. “If they were at home, they wouldn’t necessarily have to wait for the U.S. phases,” Lessard says. This “amped up the pressure on us to make sure the vaccine was available in their area.”Native American LifeLines faced a lack of healthcare providers and no comprehensive healthcare services through the IHS on the Eastern seaboard, meaning there was no way for it to receive, store, and administer vaccines. The temperature requirements and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-clinical-trials/">shorter lifespan of Pfizer</a>, a vaccine now used exclusively at some of Native American LifeLines’ vaccination sites, added to the challenge, Lessard says. Her organization ultimately had to get its vaccine allotment through the state, potentially slowing rollout to Boston and Baltimore’s Native American communities.Faced with urgency and enthusiasm from the people her organization serves, “We realized early on we had to make a change,” Lessard says.
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“Managing an outbreak of a communicable disease on a reservation is important. Why would it be less important for Indians living in the city?”
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In January, Native American LifeLines began seeking out partnerships “to try to fill in the gaps,” deciding that identifying institutional partnerships would be best. Ultimately, it partnered with Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the University of Maryland Baltimore to establish IHS vaccine clinics, and as part of Governor Larry Hogan's Vaccine Equity Task Force in Maryland, with the National Guard to reach remote state-recognized tribes.The UMD Baltimore clinic, which carries only Pfizer, has seen a spike in appointments since youths became eligible to receive that vaccine, Lessard says. Now, she says, it’s just a matter of addressing situational gaps. For example, Native American LifeLines’ clinic with the Maryland National Guard uses only Moderna, so Lessard and her team are keeping an eye on the eligibility of younger people. And they’re deciding whether to set up other tribal health clinics to serve the growing list of eligible people.In Phoenix, Murillo and his team at Native Health Central, which recently administered more than 500 shots across two school districts, hope to soon incorporate <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/05/19/998420256/pfizer-vaccine-can-stay-longer-at-warmer-temperatures-before-being-discarded#:~:text=Ethics-,Pfizer%20Vaccine%20Can%20Now%20Be%20Stored%20At%20Warmer%20Temperatures%20Much,for%20up%20to%205%20days.">modified vaccine storing</a> standards into their rollout plans.
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<h3>“We can’t afford to lose more”</h3>The successes of Native American LifeLines, Native Health Central, and other organizations’ vaccine campaigns, and the CDC’s vaccination rate data, counter longstanding assumptions about vaccine hesitancy in Indigenous communities—assumptions that were already disproven in January by the results of a survey conducted in urban Indigenous communities, Lessard and Crevier say.The survey, issued by the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), involved nearly 1,500 American Indians and Alaska Natives representing 318 tribes across 46 states. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they’d be willing to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Many cited having a “strong sense of responsibility to protect the Native community and cultural ways,” as their primary motivation to get vaccinated, <a href="https://www.uihi.org/projects/strengthening-vaccine-efforts-in-indian-country/">the UIHI reports</a> on its website.The “language you hear throughout Indian country is ‘be a good relative,’” Lessard says. “Do this for the grandmas, do this for the ceremony, do this for the language, because our people are precious....We already lost a lot. We can’t afford to lose more.”As a Native American, “You have obligations to your community and your family,” adds Crevier, who on April 16 received her first dose of Pfizer through Native American LifeLines’ Baltimore program.Still, Crevier says, the CDC’s vaccination data likely has some gaps due to poor data collection practices.Many Indigenous people, particularly those living outside of reservations, may be listed by the CDC as “other” rather than American Indian/Alaska Native, Lessard explains. All Indigenous health data, she says, reports up from healthcare providers, and then sometimes to the Indian Health Service, before getting to the CDC. And not all healthcare providers collect data thoroughly with regard to race and ethnicity. Some of the forms that Lessard has personally filled out have included Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and other, but not Alaska Native or American Indian. “It’s kind of a junk in, junk out system,” she says. Crevier adds, “I always fill out American Indian/Alaska Native at the doctor’s office, but sometimes I get the form back and it says white.”And Crevier points out more white people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 than white people who got sick from the virus. “They were the first race to have that. That kind of shows the priority,” she says. She’d love to see more efforts during the current pandemic and in the future to prioritize “people who have never been at the front of the lines: Black, brown, Indians, and Alaska Natives who have had the worst outcomes.”A global pandemic wasn’t something that the National Council of Urban Indian Health or other Indigenous organizations could have possibly planned for, says Crevier, who personally grappled with the decision of where to go to get vaccinated before deciding to stay in the D.C. area “and fight for vaccine availability for my community.” But the pandemic reinforced a principle close to Crevier’s heart: While caring for patients and making treatments and vaccines available, historic barriers and trauma must be taken into account. “How do we do that moving forward?” she asks. “True, true investment guarantees we won’t be as vulnerable as we have been.”
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According to CDC data, Indigenous people are getting vaccinated quicker than any other group. Here are the successes—and challenges—of getting vaccines to urban Native American communities.

Sukee Bennett

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