Day: September 26, 2022

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith on Saturday called for practical solutions to today’s global problems through multilateralism at the General Debate of the UN General Assembly.
The international community is facing multi-faceted challenges including armed conflicts, environmental crises, economic downturns. These challenges, already exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have hindered and reversed the development gains attained in past decades, he said, adding that the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals has never been so tarnished, he said.
Always at the heart of international cooperation, multilateralism has been undermined while unilateralism has been applied widely, he noted.
The most vulnerable countries are now suffering the most. They endured the most difficult period coping with COVID-19 impacts, are additionally confronting climate, food and energy crises, said the prime minister.
It is imperative than ever for the international community to find transformative, effective and more practical solutions to make sure the most vulnerable not left behind, said Saleumxay.
It is necessary that the United Nations be revitalized and increase its ability to effectively address global problems, he noted.
Unilateral sanctions or restrictive measures cannot be effective as they contravene the principles of the UN Charter and international law, hampering the development of other countries, he said.
Laos once again joins an overwhelming global call for the lifting of the economic embargo on Cuba and putting an end to all unilateral coercive measures, he said.
Laos remains hopeful and firmly believes that through multilateralism with the United Nations as a lead institution, the multiple crises and challenges can be appropriately addressed. Laos is strongly committed to supporting conflict resolution through peaceful means, he said.
It is hoped that the 77th session of the General Assembly will offer the opportunities to enhance solidarity and revive sustainable development paths in order to ensure transformative solutions for better livelihoods of the peoples of the world and the planet, he said.

Source: Lao News Agency

World Contraception Day, this year, was marked by the Ministry of Health, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and partners by gathering at That Luang, the landmark of Vientiane, for an early morning fun run, on Sept 24, 2022 to raise awareness to protect the ability of women to become pregnant by choice, not by chance.
Thousands of runners enthusiastically participated to emphasise the importance of women’s decision to become pregnant by choice, not by chance and thus reduce maternal deaths !
“The purpose of event is to show policymakers, young people, women and men the importance of contraception and return on investment of family planning,” said Dr Phayvanh Keopaseuth, Deputy Minister of Health.
“Let us all understand that family planning is not limited to having fewer children but also protecting women’s and children’s health. Births must be at least two years apart. This will improve women and child health, save the family’s expenses; women will have more time to earn a living, which consequently improves the economy. Contraception is also very helpful to those who are not ready to have or already have enough children.”
“Contraception or Family Planning is a shared responsibility for both women and men. A woman or girl’s ability to manage If, When and How many children to have can be the single most important factor in how her life will evolve. The more vulnerable a woman or girl is, for example, is less educated, poorer, has disabilities, does not speak the mainstream language, the more critical her sexual reproductive health outcomes, especially unplanned pregnancy, will be to broader opportunities and outcomes in her life,” said Ms Mariam Khan, UNFPA Representative to the Lao PDR.
Unplanned pregnancy is not always unwanted. While many unplanned pregnancies will be celebrated, others will end in abortion or miscarriage, and unsafe abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal death globally. In many cases, unintended pregnancies happen because women cannot decide on their bodily autonomy. Access to modern contraception can save and transform women’s lives, their families, communities and societies.
Reaching full coverage targets for Family Planning and Nutrition, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health interventions in the Lao PDR by 2030 is affordable and can generate six dollars in economic returns for every dollar invested (benefit-cost ratio = 6:1).
Within RMNCAH and Nutrition, the greatest return on investment is in making rights-based family planning methods available in all provinces to reduce unintended pregnancies. Averting unintended pregnancies reduces maternal deaths, reduces child deaths and unsafe abortions. It can further decrease the cost requirements for other health interventions and lead to economic benefits from increased workforce participation, additional years of education for adolescent girls especially, and increased lifetime earnings for women. Family planning scale-up also significantly improve nutrition and reduce stunting.

Source: Lao News Agency

The Lao PDR is a very diverse country, with four main ethnolinguistics groups incorporating over 50 languages. The mother tongue of almost 40% of people in the Lao PDR is a language other than Lao and primary teachers can experience challenges with teaching children who do not master Lao.
Indeed, if students aren’t competent in Lao, the official language of instruction, it will hinder their ability to understand the teacher and content of lessons and participate fully in learning activities.
To support teachers in their duty to ensure all students in the classroom have equal opportunities to participate, the E-learning team from the Research Institute of Educational Sciences has just released a new teacher development video on this topic. The video was produced with the support of Australia through the BEQUAL program. It is filmed in classrooms in the Lao PDR to show real examples of the techniques. The video is also dubbed in Sign Language to be more accessible for all.
In this new training video for teachers and trainers, five basic techniques for supporting students from non-Lao speaking backgrounds are detailed. The techniques are simple and can be easily applied in the classroom by teachers who do not speak the students’ home language. The objective of those techniques is to ensure that all children can participate more meaningfully in learning.
The first technique demonstrated in the video is how to adjust classroom language by speaking more slowly, using simple vocabulary, making short sentences and, most importantly, using body language as 70% of communication is conveyed non-verbally.
The second technique is to ask simple closed questions to check understanding as students often won’t say if they don’t understand and will simply stop participating.
Another recommendation is to allow the use of students’ home language at different points in lessons, such as to explain the meaning of a word to another student or discuss understanding of an instruction. Research indicates that having a strong hone-language foundation leads to a much better understanding of the curriculum as well as a more positive attitude towards school.
Creating a peer support system between students not confident in Lao with students very proficient in Lao is another way teachers can support their students. The video also gives some guidance on peer support systems.
The last technique is to create additional support activities at lunch or at the end of the day to help the students with the areas of Lao they find challenging. Those extension activities should be fun and interactive, and parents can be invited to participate. The new Lao Language teacher guides propose many different literacy games and activities that teachers can choose from when designing extension activities.
The video is released broadly via the ESTV – Education and Sports TV Channel on Lao Satellite 8, on Khang Panya Lao and on the ວິດີໂອສໍາລັບການພັດທະນາຄູ Teacher Development Videos YouTube channel.
With more than 1.9 million views, the ວິດີໂອສໍາລັບການພັດທະນາຄູ Teacher Development Videos YouTube channel launched in 2019 by the Ministry of Education and Sports with the support of Australia, through the BEQUAL program, is a great success. It contains training videos and audio materials for primary teachers, teacher trainers, and pedagogical advisors. The videos cover a range of subjects and techniques around the new curriculum and the new active learning pedagogical approach. Teachers use them to prepare lessons, improve their teaching method, and learn or review a specific technique. They also play the audio tracks containing music, songs, and English stories to students in the classroom.

Source: Lao News Agency

Ten months after launch, NASA’s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.
The cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destruct around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) some 11 million kilometers from Earth.
The mission’s finale will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.
It marks the world’s first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body.
DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, has made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors, with control to be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

Monday evening’s planned impact is to be monitored in real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
DART’s celestial target is an asteroid “moonlet” about 170 meters in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.
Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test cannot create a new existential hazard by mistake.
Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.
Smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts.
Also, their relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.
Robotic suicide mission
The mission represents a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft must ultimately crash to succeed.
The plan is for DART to fly directly into Dimorphos at 24,000 kilometers per hour, bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track closer to its larger companion asteroid.
Cameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART days in advance are designed to record the collision and send images back to Earth.
DART’s own camera is expected to return pictures at the rate of one image per second during its final approach, with those images streaming live on NASA TV starting an hour before impact, according to APL.
The DART team said it expects to shorten the orbital track of Dimorphos by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, proving the exercise as a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth — if one were ever discovered. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away could be sufficient to safely reroute it away from the planet.
The test’s outcome will not be known until a new round of ground-based telescope observations of the two asteroids in October. Earlier calculations of the starting location and orbital period of Dimorphos were confirmed during a six-day observation period in July.
DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Last year, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected in October 2020 from the asteroid Bennu.
The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates that many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity.
NASA has put the entire cost of the DART project at $330 million, well below that of many of the space agency’s most ambitious science missions.

Source: Voice of America

A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.
The galactic slam occurred at a harmless asteroid 9.6 million kilometers away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the space rock at 22,500 kph. Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.
“We have impact!” Mission Control’s Elena Adams announced, jumping up and down and thrusting her arms skyward.
Telescopes around the world and in space aimed at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Though the impact was immediately obvious — Dart’s radio signal abruptly ceased — it will take days or even weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s path has changed.
The $325 million mission was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.
“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, planetary science division director.
Earlier in the day, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reminded people via Twitter that, “No, this is not a movie plot.” He added in a prerecorded video: “We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the real-life stakes are high.”
Monday’s target: a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphos. It’s actually a moonlet of Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger that flung off the material that formed the junior partner.
The pair have been orbiting the sun for eons without threatening Earth, making them ideal save-the-world test candidates.
Launched last November, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.
Dart’s onboard camera, a key part of this smart navigation system, caught sight of Dimorphos barely an hour before impact.
“Woo-hoo!” exclaimed Adams, a mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins. “We’re seeing Dimorphos, so wonderful, wonderful.”
With an image beaming back to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with growing excitement as Dimorphos loomed larger and larger in the field of view alongside its bigger companion. Within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the pictures; it looked like a giant gray lemon with boulders and rubble on the surface. The last image froze on the screen as the radio transmission ended.
Flight controllers cheered, hugged one another and exchanged high fives.
A mini satellite followed a few minutes behind to take photos of the impact. The Italian Cubesat was released from Dart two weeks ago.
Scientists insisted Dart would not shatter Dimorphos. The spacecraft packed a scant 570 kilograms, compared with the asteroid’s 5 billion kilograms. But that should be plenty to shrink its 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around Didymos.
The impact should pare 10 minutes off that, but telescopes will need anywhere from a few days to nearly a month to verify the new orbit. The anticipated orbital shift of 1% might not sound like much, scientists noted. But they stressed that over years, it would amount to a significant change.
Planetary defense experts prefer nudging a threatening asteroid or comet out of the way, given enough lead time, rather than blowing it up and creating multiple pieces that could rain down on Earth. Multiple impactors might be needed for big space rocks or a combination of impactors and so-called gravity tractors, not-yet-invented devices that would use their own gravity to pull an asteroid into a safer orbit.
“The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program to help them know what was coming, but we do,” NASA’s senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin said, referring to the mass extinction 66 million years ago believed to have been caused by a major asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or both.
The nonprofit B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, has been pushing for impact tests like Dart since its founding by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago. Monday’s feat aside, the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, warned the foundation’s executive director, Ed Lu, a former astronaut.
Significantly less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects in the deadly 140-meter range have been discovered, according to NASA. And fewer than 1% of the millions of smaller asteroids, capable of widespread injuries, are known.
The Vera Rubin Observatory, nearing completion in Chile by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Energy Department, promises to revolutionize the field of asteroid discovery, Lu noted.
Finding and tracking asteroids, “That’s still the name of the game here. That’s the thing that has to happen in order to protect the Earth,” he said.

Source: Voice of America