Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Lloyd Albert Quarterman was born in Philadelphia on May 31, 1918. As a young boy he soon discovered his passion for science and spent many hours working with chemistry sets. When he was older during the 1930’s, Quarterman went to college at St. Augustines in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was here that Quarterman not only developed a reputation for science, but also for his abilities on the football field. He earned his bachelors degree in 1943.
Immediately following graduation Quarterman was hired by the United States War Department. He was one of only six African Americans to be involved with research for the atomic bomb. His official title was an assistant to an associate research scientist and chemist. It is not known what his exact duties were because those who worked on the Manhattan Project were sworn to secrecy. Many different teams were involved with the building and completion of the atomic bomb. Quarterman worked on the teams at Columbia University in New York City and at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
It was on this team at the University of Chicago that the atom was first split, creating nuclear fission. Quarterman occasionally worked along side Albert Einstein to help create uranium isotopes. These were necessary for uranium gas, which made fission possible. This project was very secretive and also became known as the plutonium project. It was under this project that the first nuclear reactor, pile, was built. This is the most essential part of modern nuclear power plants. In 1945 when W.W.II ended, Quarterman was recognized with a certificate from the US War Department for helping to bring the war to an end.
This Chicago team became known as Argonne National Laboratories. This lab, funded by the University of Chicago, but no longer secretly, searched for peaceful uses for nuclear energy. Quarterman remained involved with this team for the next 30 years. During this time he also studied quantum mechanics. This helped to strengthen his ability as a scientist. In 1952, because of his dedication and hard work, he earned a Masters of Science from Northwestern University.....Read more here.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Americans as a whole don’t regularly wear sunscreen, but Americans of color especially don’t. This is striking given sunscreen’s wide-ranging benefits. It fades acne scars, which can last for weeks or even months. It staves off conditions that are caused or worsened by the sun, such as lupus, which is especially common among women of color. And it protects skin that becomes more photosensitive due to certain medications, including those for high blood pressure—a condition more likely to affect African Americans.
Then there’s skin cancer. While more white people get diagnosed with skin cancer than people of color, black people are less likely to survive the diagnosis, because physicians tend to catch their cancer in later stages.
Pervasive misconceptions about people of color not needing sunscreen are one factor that keeps them from applying it and not getting diagnosed early. But there may be another catalyst: Sunscreen often looks terrible on richly pigmented skin. YouTube videos like “Scale of 1–ASHY?!” and “We Put These Sunscreens to the Ashy Test” show women of color trying on different sunscreens that make them look like they’ve put on Phantom of the Operamasks.
These white, blue, purple, and even green masks appear thanks to certain ingredients. Sunscreen companies use various formulas to block two types of sun rays: ultraviolet B rays, which can cause sunburn and skin cancer, and ultraviolet A, which can accelerate sagging skin. Chemical sunscreen, a category of sunscreen that works by absorbing or reflecting rays, tends to protect best against UVB rays—though some formulations protect against both. Physical sunscreen, meanwhile, uses white compounds that are insoluble in water, such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, to sit on the skin and act as a physical barrier that deflects both UVA and UVB rays.
In order for their products to be certified as broad-spectrum in the United States, sunscreen companies have to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that their sunscreen can block both UVA and UVB light. As a result, many use physical ingredients, which are less likely to cause an allergic reaction: They’re “considered relatively inert, meaning we believe that they don’t really interact with your skin that much,” says Ginette Okoye, the chair of dermatology at Howard University Hospital. The problem is, physical ingredients are the ones that leave a white cast.
Because the FDA regulates sunscreen as a drug instead of as a cosmetic, U.S. companies are especially limited in their choices of protective ingredients, whether chemical or physical. The FDA has been criticized for being slow to approve new ingredients, especially compared to Asian and European countries, which tend to have more ingredients available. Because of the long approval process, U.S. sunscreen companies can be laser focused on just getting effective treatments out. Okoye points out that these companies don’t necessarily consider the appearance angle. “The purpose of sunscreen is for skin-care prevention. They measure success not by how it looks, but how it prevents skin cancer or sunburn,” she says.
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The 70th annual Emmy Awards subjected viewers to an almost unending barrage of secondhand embarrassment. Full of stilted banter, dubious jokes, and painful comedic mismatches, the ceremony dragged on with all the excitement of an extended commercial break.
Still, even within the parade of uncomfortable drudgery, one moment felt particularly unnerving. The comedian James Corden, who hosted the 2016 Tony Awards with an appropriate measure of gravity, gravely misfired when he lent his commentary to the de facto theme of Monday night’s Emmys: diversity. “Let’s get it trending,” he told the crowd and, more importantly, viewers at home. “#EmmysSoWhite.”
Likely meant as a reference to the social-media-driven
campaign to diversify the Academy Awards, or perhaps more generously as a reference to the honoree Betty White, Corden’s half-hearted exhortation was met with nervous laughter. The discomfort was palpable. But Corden’s request was just one of several self-referential nods to the awards show’s lack of “diversity,” that pesky euphemism most often used to refer to people of color without substantively engaging difference or talent.
From the ceremony’s opening moments, the hosts, Michael Che and Colin Jost, congratulated themselves, and the ceremony, for a patently nonexistent racial harmony. Rather than take the opportunity to meaningfully address any number of political concerns facing Hollywood at the moment, the duo traded toothless quips about racial differences. “I just wanna say, six awards so far, all white winners, and no one’s thanked Jesus yet,” Che noted, referencing an earlier joke in which he’d said his mother didn’t enjoy “white” awards shows because no one thanked the Lord. The joke was technically adequate, but it did little to address the disconcerting trend already under way.
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On Monday, Sheldon Scott flew from his home in Washington, DC, to Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where his mother and sister live. He was on an evacuation mission: With Hurricane Florence bearing in, he needed to get his family members to safety.
The decision to leave the island was not easy. “It’s the only home my mom has ever known,” Scott, an artist and performer, said by phone from DC, where his family is now, too.
Pawleys Island is a narrow, 4-mile long barrier island south of Myrtle Beach, connected to the mainland by a pair of causeways. The land Scott’s mother lives on was part of the rice plantation where their family members were enslaved more than 150 years ago, he said. Her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother all lived on the island—and generations before that, too. That’s the story of the Gullah/Geechee nation, an estimated 200,000 people living on the barrier islands of the Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coast. They carry on a distinct culture rooted in West Africa, where many of their ancestors were enslaved by British traders in the colonial era.
The decision to leave the island was not easy. “It’s the only home my mom has ever known,” Scott, an artist and performer, said by phone from DC, where his family is now, too.
Pawleys Island is a narrow, 4-mile long barrier island south of Myrtle Beach, connected to the mainland by a pair of causeways. The land Scott’s mother lives on was part of the rice plantation where their family members were enslaved more than 150 years ago, he said. Her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother all lived on the island—and generations before that, too. That’s the story of the Gullah/Geechee nation, an estimated 200,000 people living on the barrier islands of the Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coast. They carry on a distinct culture rooted in West Africa, where many of their ancestors were enslaved by British traders in the colonial era.
If Scott’s mother’s home is damaged or destroyed, she could face huge barriers to rebuilding or receiving FEMA relief. Worse, a speculator could buy up the land from beneath her. That’s because the land is classified as “heir’s property,” a legal condition that leaves it particularly vulnerable, especially in a disaster. “It’s a constant conversation, but it becomes more sensitive and heightened during times like these,” Scott said.
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SINCE 2014, THE NATION OF SÃO TOMÉ AND PRINCIPE HAS HAD ZERO MALARIA DEATHS, MAKING IT THE ONLY COUNTRY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA TO ACHIEVE That FOR CONSECUTIVE YEARS. OZY: THIS SMALL ISLAND PARADISE IS SHOWING AFRICA HOW TO BEAT MALARIA
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Hamilton Nascimento remembers missing months of school as a child when he repeatedly got sick with malaria. It used to be an unavoidable part of life in São Tomé and Príncipe, a nation of two tiny islands in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, where Nascimento grew up. But not anymore.
“Most people in São Tomé knew someone who died from malaria, but now we haven’t had a death in years,” says Nascimento, who leads the government’s anti-malaria office and has helped steer the islands through a dramatic turnaround.
São Tomé and Príncipe is best known for stunning beaches, Galapagos-caliber birdwatching and historic coffee plantations. But in recent years, the maritime nation has acquired a new reputation as one of Africa’s most successful countries in fighting malaria, a disease that kills more than 400,000 people across the continent every year. According to the World Health Organization:
Nonfatal infections are also dropping drastically, from a high of more than 50,000 in 2002 — in a population of 200,000 — to fewer than 4,000 in 2016. That rate of decline is three times faster than the average for Africa, which as a continent has seen the world’s slowest gains against malaria despite having by far the largest share of cases.
These figures put São Tomé at the vanguard of a small, elite group of African countries that are poised to eliminate malaria within the next five years. Behind the success is the world’s highest per-capita level of spending by the government and international donor organizations — $16 — on anti-malaria measures like indoor mosquito spraying and free treatment clinics.
Nascimento’s office opened in 2003, and since then the war against malaria has reached nearly every corner of the islands: 355,000 bed nets distributed; 76,000 people given free treatment; and 222,000 structures sprayed, making it the only country in Africa where 100 percent of the population is covered by preventative measures, according to the U.N.
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Brutal attacks on civilians and security forces in anglophone regions of Cameroon have escalated in recent weeks and could rise even further in the run-up to presidential elections next month, rights groups have warned.
A self-declared member of the Ambazonia Liberation Forces appeared in a new video alongside images of a soldier’s decapitated head, according to Amnesty’s experts, who said the head had bruises on it and lay on a blood-soaked white cloth next to what could be the man’s genitalia.
“Ambazonia” is the name separatists would like to give to their new country, if they achieve independence, and is derived from Ambas Bay in southern Cameroon.
“The situation in the anglophone regions of Cameroon is becoming increasingly desperate, with no one spared from the violence, which is spiralling out of control,” said Samira Daoud, the deputy regional director of campaigns in west and central Africa. She called for the government to act immediately to restore peace, adding: “Violence will only fuel further incidents, crimes and untold suffering.”
At the weekend, armed men attacked a school near Buea in the Southwest Region, wounding more than 20 people including children, according to the governor of the province.
Schools are central to the conflict, which erupted after security forces responded violently to protests in October 2017 calling for English be used in classrooms and courtrooms in Cameroon’s anglophone regions.
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Shelia Stubbs made history in August when she won the Democratic primary for a state Assembly seat in Wisconsin’s 77th District. A 12-year veteran of the Dane County Board of Supervisors running unopposed in the general election, Stubbs will become the first African American to represent the district, which spans some of the poorest and wealthiest areas in Madison.
Days before her victory, though, while canvassing in her district, a police officer approached Stubbs in response to an unidentified man’s complaint that Stubbs, who was with her 71-year-old mother and 8-year-old daughter, might be in the neighborhood to buy drugs.
According to a police report obtained by Madison’s Capital Times and BuzzFeed, the man called police on August 7 to complain about a “suspicious vehicle.” The report cited a police dispatch in which the caller suggested that the vehicle, which was occupied by Stubbs’s mother and daughter, was “waiting for drugs at the local drug house.”
Shortly after, a police officer arrived at the vehicle and spoke with Linda Hoskins, Stubbs’s mother. Hoskins explained that her daughter was a politician canvassing in her district. When Stubbs returned to the car, she showed the officer her campaign materials and name tag.
“I felt humiliated. I felt outraged, I felt angry. I felt embarrassed,” Stubbs told CBS News. The caller has not been identified, although Stubbs notes that she was in a predominantly white neighborhood at the time.
The incident, which garnered national attention this week after Stubbs spoke with the Capital Times, is just the latest in a string of incidents in which the police have been called to deal with black people waiting in Starbucks, barbecuing, napping in a dorm, swimming in pools, selling water, mowing a lawn, and riding in a car with a relative.
In fact, Stubbs isn’t the first black politician to report being approached by police as they canvassed. Earlier this year Oregon state legislator Janelle Bynum was forced to defend her presence in a neighborhood after someone called 911. In September, a local Florida politician was surrounded by several police officers and a helicopter after accidentally tripping a security alarm as he campaigned.
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