The last thing Rania sold was her jewellery. In the weeks after her family first woke up to heavy shelling in northern Gaza, they lost everything as they journeyed south to escape the bombs. “Wherever we went, the houses would be destroyed,” she says. “We were sent running from place to place.”
After three long months, she found herself in the border city of Rafah parting with her rings, gold bracelets and necklaces to pay the $15,000 “coordination fees” needed to get her family on the evacuation list to leave Gaza.
In January, Rania entered Egypt through the Rafah crossing, the only remaining route out of the coastal exclave. Since war broke out in the wake of the Hamas attack on 7 October,the Egyptian authorities say more than 83,000 people have left Gaza. Most have since travelled to other countries, but activists say there may be thousands of Palestinians sheltering in Egypt, despite the absence of any centralised relief effort. Unlike in neighbouring countries, no UN body has taken responsibility for Palestinians who have fled to Egypt, while Egyptian authorities stand accused of profiting from high border-crossing fees.
Rania and her family are relying on grassroots charities to help them pay for food and rent for an apartment in Cairo. It stands in sharp contrast to her old life when, Rania says, she was the one people came to for support. Her husband earned a good salary working for an aid organisation – they owned two houses, two cars, and her children attended university. The family spent nights out in restaurants and cafes. In the summer, they would drive to the beach.
A week into the war, Israeli forces dropped leaflets on Rania’s neighbourhood giving them 24 hours’ notice to leave the area. The family decided to leave, setting off south, sheltering with strangers on the way. Three weeks into their journey, they were watching the news when they saw that their old neighbourhood had been hit. Their house had been destroyed in heavy bombing that claimed the lives of 20 of her extended family. “Those who survived were disabled,” Rania says. “Some of them lost arms. Some lost legs.”
When people in central Gaza were also ordered to evacuate, Rania’s family continued south, ending up in a tent in Rafah, from where she applied to cross into Egypt. She waited weeks for her request to be granted. Meanwhile, the bombs continued to fall. “People were dying all around us,” she says. “Anyone could die at any moment.”
While travel from Gaza into Egypt was initially orchestrated by multiple agencies charging wildly differing prices, a single company has since emerged with the monopoly on border crossings, charging a flat fee of $5,000 (£4,000) for an adult and $2,500 for each child.
Hala Consulting and Tourism “is now the only way for people to get out of Gaza”, according to one Egyptian activist.
For Layla’s family, Hala’s costs were too high. She too had lived a comfortable life in Gaza, earning good money in sales until the war began. Shortly after bombs started to fall on her neighbourhood, she fled south with her parents and her brothers, but by the time they reached Rafah and contacted Hala to get them across, their savings were gone. “It’s so much money for people who haven’t had work for six months,” she says.
Like many, Layla’s family in Europe launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise the $25,000 needed for their evacuation. They are now living in temporary accommodation in Egypt. Their efforts to join relatives in Europe have so far come to nothing.
A UK petition to create afamily reunification scheme for Palestinians – similar to the one put in place for people fleeing the war in Ukraine – has amassed the required 100,000 signatures needed to trigger a parliamentary debate.
A government spokesperson says: “We are working around the clock to get British nationals who want to leave out of Gaza. We currently have no plans to establish a separate route for Palestinians to come to the UK.”
Layla and Rania say their families have received no help from leading aid organisations. Since 1949, the responsibility for supporting Palestinian refugees has been spearheaded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa). The UK is among the countries that have frozen funding to the agency after allegations by Israel that some staff members were involved in the 7 October Hamas attacks. A spokesperson for Unrwa declined an interview, saying only that the organisation does not have a mandate to work in Egypt. A spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for refugees also declined to comment.
Dawn Chatty, professor emerita of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford, says she is not surprised by the lack of a coordinated response to Palestinians entering Egypt.
“There is a deep history regarding the UN agencies that take responsibility for Palestinian refugees,” says Chatty, citing common confusion in the limits of their mandates and the heavy politicisation of the issue.
“The Egyptian government is not going to give them asylum,” says Chatty. Granting official asylum to people fleeing Gaza could “destroy” their notional right to return to these lands and could put Egypt “in big trouble with other Arab states”, Chatty says.
Instead, families have had to rely on a network of grassroots volunteers and small collectives, connected by social media and WhatsApp groups.
One volunteer is Amira, an operations manager from Cairo who joined a local group at the outbreak of the war to send food and aid packages to Gaza. Since Palestinians began arriving in Egypt, Amira has focused her efforts on supporting them with food, clothing and accommodation. “People are coming here with nothing,” Amira says. “They are starved and hungry.”
Rania’s family, who crossed the border with what little they could carry, connected with volunteers in Egypt after seeing a Facebook page offering clothes to people from Gaza. Members of this group put them in touch with a sponsor who is now paying 1,000 Egyptian pounds (EGP) (£16.46) towards her EGP 9,000 monthly rent.
“In some cases, people are literally begging us to help them feed their children,” says Raya, an activist from the UK. She arrived in Egypt earlier this year and helped establish a mutual aid collective, connecting donors in Europe with Palestinian families in need.
In its first 38 days, Raya’s group raised more than $30,000, most of which it flew into the country as cash to be distributed among the 100 families it is supporting for accommodation and medicine. “Some of these families, if we hadn’t walked through the door, we’re not sure if they would have ever received this help,” she says.
Rania says her family is torn. “Life in Egypt is not easy,” she says. “We don’t want to stay here, but we don’t want to leave either. Sometimes we think about emigrating. But whenever we bring up the subject, we all know in our hearts that we just want to return to Gaza.”
UH Hilo Astronomer Discovers Rare Star Property – Mirage News
University of Hawaiʻi
For two decades, an international team of astronomers led by R. Pierre Martin, an associate professor of astronomy from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, has studied hundreds of Cepheids distributed across the Milky Way. Cepheids, pronounced “sef-ee-eds,” are large stars that pulsate, or “beat,” in a regular pattern over several hours to several days. They are critical in astronomy because their brightness varies, helping scientists measure distances in space and understand the structure of our galaxy.
R. Pierre Martin
During a recent survey conducted on Maunakea, Martin and his team observed an abundant amount of lithium within V470 Cas, a faint Cepheid star located in the Cassiopeia constellation. The team identified it while utilizing an instrument at the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope.
“It pulsates with a period of about 21 hours and has four times the mass of our Sun,” Martin explained. “Contrary to what is observed in almost all of Cepheid stars, the group discovered that the spectral line of lithium…is very prominent for V470 Cas.”
Rare find
Astronomers consider the discovery of abundant lithium within this star extraordinary because only seven other Cepheids among several thousands in the entire galaxy are known to display such a prominent lithium line. The researchers discovered that V470 Cas has the third highest abundance value of lithium ever measured in a Cepheid.
“We are facing a dilemma: [either] Cepheids with lots of lithium should not exist at all, or rather [they] should be very numerous across the galaxy. This discovery of the lithium-rich V470 Cas, adding to a very select group of Cepheid stars, suggests that there is something we do not fully understand yet in the evolution of these stars. An enigma to solve.”
Martin’s research team includes Ukrainian astronomers Valery Kovtyukh and S. M. Andrievskii (Mechnikov National University) and Sergey Korotin (Crimean Astrophysical Observatory). The astronomers recently published their findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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Researchers target neurogenesis in new approach to treat Parkinson’s disease – Science Daily
Researchers at the University of Toronto have found a way to better control the preclinical generation of key neurons depleted in Parkinson’s disease, pointing toward a new approach for a disease with no cure and few effective treatments.
The researchers used an antibody to selectively activate a receptor in a molecular signaling pathway to develop dopaminergic neurons. These neurons produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter critical to brain health.
Researchers around the world have been working to coax stem cells to differentiate into dopaminergic neurons, to replace those lost in patients living with Parkinson’s disease. But efforts have been hindered in part by an inability to target specific receptors and areas of the brain.
“We used synthetic antibodies that we had previously developed to target the Wnt signaling pathway,” said Stephane Angers, principal investigator on the study and director of the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.
“We can selectively activate this pathway to direct stem cells in the midbrain to develop into neurons by targeting specific receptors in the pathway,” said Angers, who is also a professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and holds the Charles H. Best Chair of Medical Research at U of T. “This activation method has not been explored before.”
The study was recently published in the journal Development.
Parkinson’s disease is the second-most common neurological disorder after Alzheimer’s, affecting over 100,000 Canadians. It particularly impacts older men, progressively impairing movement and causing pain as well as sleep and mental health issues.
Most previous research efforts to activate the Wnt signaling pathway have relied on a GSK3 enzyme inhibitor. This method involves multiple signaling pathways for stem cell proliferation and differentiation, which can lead to unintended effects on the newly produced neurons and activation of off-target cells.
“We developed an efficient method for stimulating stem cell differentiation to produce neural cells in the midbrain,” said Andy Yang, first author on the study and a PhD student at the Donnelly Centre. “Moreover, cells activated via the FZD5 receptor closely resemble dopaminergic neurons of natural origin.”
Another promising finding of the study was that implanting the artificially-produced neurons in a rodent model with Parkinson’s disease led to improvement of the rodent’s locomotive impairment.
“Our next step would be to continue using rodent or other suitable models to compare the outcomes of activating the FZD5 receptor and inhibiting GSK3,” said Yang. “These experiments will confirm which method is more effective in improving symptoms of Parkinson’s disease ahead of clinical trials.”
This research was supported by the University of Toronto Medicine by Design program, which receives funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Japan researchers make their mark in Sweden’s space exploration city – Kyodo News Plus
Some Japanese researchers have opted to make Sweden their home base as they seek to take full advantage of the Nordic country’s advanced space exploration research programs.
The northern city of Kiruna is a key center for space research in Sweden. It sits north of the Arctic Circle and draws researchers from all over the world, who favor the city’s geographical location as it gives them frequent opportunities to observe the aurora borealis.
The Kiruna-headquartered Swedish Institute of Space Physics, or IRF, is a state-run agency at the center of the country’s research and observatory programs associated with research on space and technology.
Photo taken in October 2023 of the Maxus rocket monument, a symbol of space exploration in Kiruna, Sweden. (Kyodo)
Annelie Klint Nilsson, an IRF public relations official, said the headquarters had some 30 researchers as of March, including four from Japan.
The number of foreign researchers working at the IRF increases if you add staff from its other research bases in Umea, Uppsala and Lund to the total figure, Nilsson said, noting that foreign-born researchers at the IRF also include those from India, France and Russia.
Although Japan has a strong scientific relationship with the United States in the field of space exploration, Japanese researchers are expected to work more closely with Sweden in the coming years.
Photo taken in October 2023 of Manabu Shimoyama of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, and a model of Viking, the country’s first artificial satellite, in Kiruna, Sweden. (Kyodo)
One of the researchers is Manabu Shimoyama, 49, who came to the IRF in 2015 after studying in Japan and Canada. He is involved in the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, project, which operates an interplanetary spacecraft designed to study Jupiter and its three icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
He serves as a coordinator between Japan and Sweden, which jointly developed some of the equipment on board the JUICE probe that was launched in April 2023 and is expected to enter orbit around Ganymede for observations in 2034.
Sweden is a member of the ESA, and the IRF is much smaller in scale than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States, as well as the space exploration agencies of other big countries.
Shimoyama says there are many positive sides and benefits of working at the IRF. “Since researchers and engineers are at the same facility, ideas take shape faster,” he said.
Cooperation in space exploration between Japan and Sweden took off in 1998 with the Japanese Mars orbiter, called Nozomi, and has continued with lunar, Mercury and Venus exploration projects.
“I think (Japan and Sweden) have been jointly involved in almost all missions in one way or another. Their strong ties are definitely noteworthy,” Shimoyama said.
With a population of about 23,000, Kiruna is famous for tourism built around the dazzling northern lights and the original Icehotel, made each year out of snow and ice. It also features the Maxus rocket monument as a symbol of the space exploration research city. Some Japanese experts have been studying there for two or three decades.
Photo taken in October 2023 of Yoshifumi Futaana explaining his research in Kiruna, Sweden. (Kyodo)
Yoshifumi Futaana, 48, who specializes in heliophysics (the study of the Sun and its connection with the solar system) came to Kiruna in 2003 to get involved in Mars exploration. Futaana praised the IRF for its “spirit of pursuing original and ambitious studies.”
Recently, young Japanese researchers have been coming to the IRF through connections with Futaana and others. Given the long-term nature of space exploration research, it is important to pass on the baton to the next generation.
“We want to do more joint work with Japan. To this end, it is essential to develop talent in Japan,” Futaana said.
