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Sixteen teams from around the world have set their sights on the moon. The teams are also hoping to win the $30 million Lunar XPRIZE.

Google, the U.S. technology company, launched the international space competition in 2007. The goal is to use private financing to build a planetary rover and send it to the moon. This vehicle also has to travel 500 meters on the moon’s surface, and send high quality video and images back to earth. All the work is to be completed at less than what a public lunar project would cost.

One team from Germany is close to getting funding for its rover. They call themselves the Part-Time Scientists.

Robert Boehme founded the “Part-Time Scientists.” He says his team has been working on its lunar rover since 2008. The vehicle has an adjustable solar panel, which creates electricity from the sun’s light. It also has three cameras and four strong tires.

American Civics: Law, History and Political Science Combined
VOICE ONE:
Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Bob Doughty with Faith Lapidus. Our subject this week is American civics.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
Civics is a subject that deals with the rights and duties of citizens. It brings together law, history and political science.
In the nineteen sixties, a nonprofit group called the Center for Civic Education got started. Its job is to help people in the United States and other countries learn about the ideas of democracy. Its work includes an international civic education exchange program, Civitas.
In nineteen ninety-four, the Center for Civic Education developed five questions for teaching about civics and government. We will use these questions to guide our program. The answers will combine our own reporting with information from the center.

Attempts to protect the Great Barrier Reef are failing. A report released Monday by the government in Australia says water quality in the Great Barrier Reef is far below what it should be.

The report assessed the condition of the reef between 2009 and 2014. It showed that pesticide and pollution have decreased, but not enough to reach environmental targets.

Sediment and chemicals can weaken coral, hurting its ability to feed and grow. Coral are live animals that take root in the ocean floor, but they are not plants. Reefs are the hard skeletons left at the bottom of the sea by small marine creatures called polyps. The polyps then form the larger structure of a reef.

Corals also are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the entire planet. They can make a home for invertebrates, crustaceans, fish, and sea snakes to name a few.

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report.

Pigs in China's eastern Shandong Province receive a blue-ear disease vaccine
The government of China says much progress has been made in efforts to control the spread of blue-ear pig disease. Government officials said last week that forty-seven thousand pigs were infected in July. That was down more than fifty percent from the number reported for June.
The name for the virus comes from the fact that infected pigs can temporarily develop discolored ears. The scientific name is porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome.
China has an estimated five hundred million pigs. An Agriculture Ministry spokesman said more than one hundred million pigs have been given vaccine to prevent the disease.
The spokesman said two hundred fifty-seven thousand pigs were infected with the virus this year. Sixty-eight thousand of them died. Many more were destroyed.
An Agriculture Ministry official said the outbreak involves a form of the virus that is unusually deadly to pigs.

Many people around the world suffer from dust-related allergies. People with allergies have trouble breathing or suffer from tightness in the chest and shortness of breath.

Most allergies result mainly from very small creatures called dust mites. Dust mites live in bedding.

Now, scientists in Poland say they have successfully tested cloth that the microscopic creatures cannot pass through.

Most of us share our beds with thousands of dust mites. Each mite is just one-third of a millimeter wide.

University of Washington researchers say they used a laser to turn hot water into cool water.

Five engineers from the university are the first in the 50-year history of the laser to refrigerate liquids under normal conditions with light beams.

The group used a simple approach to the experiment. Lasers are known for producing hot temperatures. The University of Washington says they “essentially ran the laser phenomenon in reverse.”

The discovery has a future in the computer and medical fields. Computer interiors could be cooled by lasers. In a medical laboratory, individual cells could be cooled to see how they react.

Terrorist attacks in Paris are not expected to stop the United Nations from hosting a major climate conference in that city.

Next week nearly 120 heads of state and government will gather in the City of Lights to discuss ways to cut harmful pollution.

President Barack Obama, China's Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin are scheduled to attend. They will try to reach an agreement to fight changes in the Earth’s climate.

The meeting is known as COP21. The U.N. says it wants an agreement among nations to limit the rise in world temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius.

A United Nations organization is working to help developing countries become active partners in the world economy.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development says recent financial unrest shows the need for new thinking about international trade and development. The conference, also known as UNCTAD, notes financial problems like the debt crisis in Greece, growing debt levels in other nations and stock market troubles in Asia.

In a new report, UNCTAD is calling for reform of the International Monetary Fund to better meet the needs of developing countries. It also calls on nations to provide greater support for the IMF and development banks.

The report says countries should be able to pay for goods and services in their own currencies without having to use money from a third country. And pointing to the issue of debt, UNCTAD has called on international lenders to find better ways to restructure debt payments.