Hawaii false killer whales could go extinct by midcentury
Scientists from NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and other institutions found that between 1999 and 2022, the population of protected dolphins — known as 'false killer whales' — shrunk by 3.5 percent annually. That trajectory places the species on a likely path to extinction by midcentury.
Roughly 132 individuals are believed to have lived in the population segment closest to Hawaii's main islands in 2022, compared to as many as 190 in 2015.
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Encounters with fishing vessels accounted for 'one of the most significant threats to this population,' the researchers found, along with pollution exposures and reduced genetic diversity.
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13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Here's How This Forgotten Healthcare Stock Could Generate Life-Changing Returns
Key Points CRISPR Therapeutics' first approved therapy, Casgevy, was a breakthrough. One of Casgevy's biggest achievements may be demonstrating the viability of CRISPR Therapeutics' strategy. The biotech company could soar if it can follow up that win with more clinical and regulatory milestones. 10 stocks we like better than CRISPR Therapeutics › Over the past few years, the market hasn't been kind to somewhat speculative, unprofitable stocks. CRISPR Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CRSP), a mid-cap biotech, fits that description. The company's shares are down by 24% since mid-2022. The S&P 500 is up 50% over the same period. Despite this terrible performance, there are reasons to believe that CRISPR Therapeutics could still generate life-changing returns for investors willing to be patient. Here's how the biotech could pull it off. CRISPR Therapeutics' first success CRISPR Therapeutics' first approval was for Casgevy, a treatment for sickle cell disease (SCD) and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia (TDT), which it developed in collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Before Casgevy, no CRISPR-based gene-editing medicine had been approved. While it became the first, it still faces some challenges. Ex vivo gene-editing therapies require a complex manufacturing and administration process that can only be performed in authorized treatment centers (ATCs). Moreover, they're expensive. Casgevy costs $2.2 million in the U.S. Getting third-party payers on board for that is no easy feat. Still, CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals are making steady progress. As of the second quarter, CRISPR Therapeutics had achieved its goal of activating 75 ATCs. It had also secured reimbursement for eligible patients in 10 countries. The two companies estimate there are roughly 60,000 eligible SCD and TDT patients in the regions they have targeted. Let's say they continue to strike reimbursement deals and can count on third-party coverage for 70% of this target population (42,000 people), then go on to treat another 30% of that group in the next decade (12,600 patients). Assuming they could extend that $2.2 million price tag to those countries, Casgevy could generate more than $27.7 billion over this period. Based on its agreement with Vertex, 40% would go to CRISPR Therapeutics, or roughly $11.1 billion over a decade. That's not bad, but it's not that impressive either. So, while Casgevy could contribute meaningfully to CRISPR Therapeutics' results -- and may even reach blockbuster status at some point -- the medicine may primarily serve as a proof of concept to demonstrate that the biotech's approach can be effective. Substantial progress with its first commercialized product will help the stock price. But the company's performance will depend even more on future clinical and regulatory milestones, especially as it shows with Casgevy that it can manage the intricacies and complexities of marketing gene-editing medicines. Can the pipeline deliver? CRISPR Therapeutics has six candidates in clinical trials, which isn't bad at all for a mid-cap biotech company. One of its leading programs is CTX310, a potential therapy designed to help reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in patients with certain conditions. CTX310 is already producing encouraging clinical trial results. Additionally, it's an in vivo medicine, meaning it bypasses the need to harvest patients' cells to manufacture therapies; in vivo gene-editing treatments are easier to handle than their ex vivo counterparts. The company's path to creating life-changing returns hinges on its ability to deliver consistent clinical and regulatory wins over the next few years for CTX310 and other important candidates. If CRISPR Therapeutics can successfully launch several new products in the next five to seven years, its shares are likely to skyrocket. In the meantime, under this scenario, the company would succeed in making gene-editing medicines more mainstream. This would encourage third-party payers to get on board -- and healthcare institutions, and perhaps even governments, to help push for more ATCs, since there'd be a greater need to accommodate these treatments. Can CRISPR Therapeutics achieve this? In my view, the biotech stock is on the riskier side, but does carry significant upside potential. There's a (small) chance the gene-editing specialist will deliver life-changing returns in the next decade, but investors need to hedge their bets. It's best to start by initiating a small position in the stock, then progressively add more if CRISPR Therapeutics lands more wins. Should you invest $1,000 in CRISPR Therapeutics right now? Before you buy stock in CRISPR Therapeutics, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and CRISPR Therapeutics wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $668,155!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,106,071!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,070% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 184% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 13, 2025 Prosper Junior Bakiny has positions in Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Here's How This Forgotten Healthcare Stock Could Generate Life-Changing Returns was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
San Andreas fault could unleash an earthquake unlike any seen before, study of deadly Myanmar quake suggests
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Faults like San Andreas don't necessarily repeat past behavior, which means the next big earthquake in California has the potential to be larger than any seen before, a new study suggests. The fresh insights into fault behavior came from studying Myanmar's devastating March earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people and caused widespread destruction. Scientists found that the fault responsible, an "earthquake superhighway" known as the Sagaing Fault, ruptured across a larger area, and in places that they wouldn't have expected based on previous events. Faults are fractures in Earth's crust. Stress can build up along the faults until eventually the fault suddenly ruptures, causing an earthquake. As the Sagaing and San Andreas faults are similar, what happened in Myanmar could help researchers better understand what might happen in California. "The study shows that future earthquakes might not simply repeat past known earthquakes," study co-author Jean-Philippe Avouac, a professor of geology and mechanical and civil engineering at Caltech, said in a statement. "Successive ruptures of a given fault, even as simple as the Sagaing or the San Andreas faults, can be very different and can release even more than the deficit of slip since the last event." Related: Almost half of California's faults — including San Andreas — are overdue for earthquakes The San Andreas Fault is the longest fault in California, stretching about 746 miles (1,200 kilometers) from the state's south at the Salton Sea to its north off the coast of Mendocino. In 1906, a rupture in the northern section of the fault caused a devastating magnitude 7.9 earthquake that killed more than 3,000 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Earthquakes are notoriously unpredictable, but geologists have long warned that the San Andreas Fault will produce another massive earthquake at some point. For instance, the area nearest to Los Angeles has a 60% chance of experiencing a magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years, according to the USGS. The 870-mile-long (1,400 km) Sagaing Fault is similar to the San Andreas Fault in that they are both long, straight, strike-slip faults, which means the rocks slide horizontally with little or no vertical movement. Geologists were expecting the Sagaing Fault to slip somewhere along its extent. Specifically, they thought that the rupture would take place across a 190-mile-long (300 km) section of the fault where no large earthquakes had occurred since 1839. This expectation was based on the seismic gap hypothesis, which anticipates that a stuck section of a fault — where there hasn't been movement for a long time — will slip to catch up to where it was, according to the statement. RELATED STORIES —First-of-its-kind video captures the terrifying moment the ground tore apart during major Myanmar earthquake —Russia earthquake: Magnitude 8.8 megaquake hits Kamchatka, generating tsunamis across the Pacific —'Sleeping giant' fault beneath Canada could unleash a major earthquake, research suggests However, in the case of Sagaing, the slip occurred along more than 310 miles (500 km) of the fault, meaning that it caught up and then some. The researchers used a special technique to correlate satellite imagery before and after the event. Those images revealed that after the earthquake, the eastern side of the fault moved south by about 10 feet (3 m) relative to the western side. The scientists say that the imaging technique they used could help improve future earthquake models. "This earthquake turned out to be an ideal case to apply image correlation methods [techniques to compare images before and after a geological event] that were developed by our research group," study first author Solène Antoine, a geology postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, said in the statement. "They allow us to measure ground displacements at the fault, where the alternative method, radar interferometry, is blind due to phenomenon like decorrelation [a process to decouple signals] and limited sensitivity to north–south displacements."
CBS News
3 hours ago
- CBS News
Capturing the melting of glaciers, with data and art
In the rugged North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, no one likely knows this glacier better than Mauri Pelto, who says, "My life has been shaped by this ice." For more than 40 years, Pelto, a glaciologist and a professor at Nichols College in Massachusetts, has returned to this remote wilderness. "We got 6,000 measurements on this glacier," he said. Today, the crunch of footsteps in the snow is now rivaled by the sound of melting ice. "It's always melting off," he said. "The crevasses are changing. We can hear the water flowing under our feet." Pelto founded the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project as a grad student in 1984. He vowed to measure these glaciers every summer for 50 years. This is Year 42. In that time the glaciers have changed more than he has, shrinking by 40%. Some have disappeared. Pelto's work has been featured by NASA, and fed into a worldwide glacier database. Of the 47 glaciers he has studied, returning to them year after year, he says 12 are now gone, "nine of them just in the last five years." Climate scientists say warmer summers and drier winters, driven by our burning of fossil fuels, are accelerating the loss. Seven of the 10 worst years for glacier melt worldwide have happened since 2010, according to Climate Central. Or just ask Mauri Pelto where the ice used to be. "Almost 50 feet above my head just a decade ago," he said. Glaciers are Earth's water towers, storing 70% of the freshwater supply, vital for drinking, farming, and the health of many ecosystems. As they melt, sea levels are rising, and coastal flooding is getting worse. During his annual treks to the North Cascades, Pelto has hiked nearly 6,000 miles, and slept 800 nights in a tent. "We got our picture window," he said of the view. "It's also one of those places that's really special to us as a family." His son Ben, daughter Jill, and now his nine-month-old granddaughter Wren have joined him in the field. Jill Pelto has spent 17 summers by her dad's side, but she doesn't just collect data. As the project's art director, she paints it. The data points that she and her dad measure eventually will go into her art. "Data is a story about something in the real world and that story has meaning and emotion," she said. "And that's what I'm trying to bring into my art." Her watercolor paintings are more than just beautiful landscapes; they reveal the science. Look closely and you see a bar graph of glacier decline in the North Cascades. One piece showing temperature rise and ice loss made the cover of Time magazine. Jill said, "I think sometimes when people see data there's this instant reaction, and so it's not like the data is any different in my art, but something about that combination maybe gets people to kind of put down the wall of like, 'Oh, I can't understand this,' or 'You know, this is not something I'm interested in.'" I said, "The average person is not going to read a scientific report, but they will see a painting. And it does impact you in a different way." "Yes, definitely," said Jill. Her art has given her dad a new way to share the story he's been recording for the past 42 years. And it's also changed their relationship: "We do it so seamlessly at this point," Mauri said. "Feels like you're one team out here?" I asked. "Yeah," he replied. Jill added, "This bigger project just means so much to us and has shaped our lives. So, sharing that year after year is beyond special." And now, Mauri Pelto has just eight summers left to fulfill his 50-year promise. Asked what he thinks it will be like to no longer come out to the glaciers, Mauri replied, "I don't know, I can't remember what it was like to not come out here. This landscape has been shaped by ice, and so to understand the landscape and the ice, you really have to walk across it." For more info: Story produced by Chris Spinder, in partnership with Climate Central. Editor: Chris Jolly. See also:
