People generate more than 50 million tons of electronic waste every year, including copiers, televisions, and computers. Laptops are part of the problem, but engineers at Dell Technologies are working on a new approach to help keep them out of landfills. Tina Trinh reports. Camera: Deana Mitchell …
To address the relatively high cost of health care in Africa, a Kenyan mobile application lets users pay for medical services by selling their personal data through blockchain technology. Officials say Snark Health’s Hippocratic Coins have attracted more than 300 doctors and 4,000 users. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo. …
An organization that trains young people for conservation jobs is recycling dead trees and replacing them with new ones, salvaging valuable lumber in the process. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Long Beach, California. …
A controversial Chinese biophysicist, who had been imprisoned after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies, had his Hong Kong work visa revoked after immigration officials suspected he lied on an application form for a talent scheme. He Jiankui, who sparked an international scientific and ethical debate in 2018 when he revealed he had created the world’s first “gene-edited” babies resistant to HIV, said at the time at an international conference in Hong Kong that he had modified two embryos before they were placed in their mother’s womb. The scientist said he used a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls before birth. He said he had targeted a gene known as CCR5 and edited it in a way he believed would protect the girls from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It later emerged that a third gene-edited baby had been born. The …
Researchers in Kenya say they’ve detected an invasive mosquito that can transmit malaria in different climates, threatening progress to fight the parasitic disease. Kenya’s Medical Research Institute this week urged the public to use mosquito nets and clean up areas where mosquitos can breed. Kenya has detected the presence of a new malaria carrier, which was first discovered in the region in Djibouti in 2012. The new carrier, the Anopheles stephensi mosquito, transmits plasmodium vivax, the parasite the causes the deadliest type of malaria. Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He says it was only a matter of time before the mosquito was discovered in the country after it appeared in Ethiopia and South Sudan. “We’ve not been able to pick plasmodium vivax which is found in Asia and Kenya. It’s there in Ethiopia and this vector can also transmit it,” said Ogutu. “So that …
Participants at a global U.N. conference in France’s capital on Wednesday urged the international community to find better safeguards against online disinformation and hate speech. Hundreds of officials, tech firm representatives, academics and members of civil society were invited to the two-day meeting hosted by the United Nation’s cultural fund to brainstorm how to best vet content while upholding human rights. “Digital platforms have changed the way we connect and face the world, the way we face each other,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in opening remarks. But “only by fully evaluating this technological revolution can we ensure it is a revolution that does not compromise human rights, freedom of expression and democracy.” UNESCO has warned that despite their benefits in communication and knowledge sharing, social media platforms rely on algorithms that “often prioritize engagement over safety and human rights.” Filipina investigative journalist Maria Ressa, who jointly won the Nobel …
Decades of violence and humanitarian crises have left many Somali people traumatized, according to a health study by the U.N. and Somali organizations. Harun Maruf reported from Washington and Abdulkadir Zubeyr in Mogadishu spoke to mental health doctors and patients in the country. They have this report narrated by Salem Solomon. Camera: Abdulkadir Zubeyr. Video editor Betty Ayoub. …
The Supreme Court is taking up its first case about a federal law that is credited with helping create the modern internet by shielding Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies from lawsuits over content posted on their sites by others. The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday about whether the family of an American college student killed in a terrorist attack in Paris can sue Google for helping extremists spread their message and attract new recruits. The case is the court’s first look at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, adopted early in the internet age, in 1996, to protect companies from being sued over information their users post online. Lower courts have broadly interpreted the law to protect the industry, which the companies and their allies say has fueled the meteoric growth of the internet and encouraged the removal of harmful content. But critics argue that the companies have …
Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft. Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September. The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule. Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That …
The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000. Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months. The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak. In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi, including 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers who are at the highest risk in the outbreak. The current outbreak started in March last year and has spread to all 29 districts of Malawi. Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi, told reporters Monday that more assistance is needed to stop …
A growing number of startups are using artificial intelligence to replicate human voices. A company is creating synthetic voices for organizations to use for advertising, marketing and training. Phil Dierking reports. Videographer and video editor: Philip Dierking …
When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home. Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19. She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment. Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and …
Two 16th-century sculptures, jewels of French Renaissance art, have been on display since 1908 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But thanks to modern technology and an unusual agreement, precise 3D copies will be made and installed in the French castle where the originals long resided. The facsimiles plan is the fruit of a rare partnership between the Met, as the New York museum is known, and the Dordogne department in southwestern France. The statues, both from the early 1500s and by an anonymous sculptor, represent Biblical scenes entitled “Entombment of Christ” and “Pieta With Donors.” A tourism promotion agency in the Dordogne, Semitour, will be working with the Atelier of Fac-Similes Perigord (AFSP) to make the replicas over the coming months. For nearly 400 years, the originals graced the chapel of the Biron chateau in the Dordogne. Built on a strategic promontory, the sprawling fortress comprises buildings from …
United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity. Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impact. The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty. “The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic …
The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders. “I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP. “There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.” And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA). That agency, established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states. It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ Exclusive Economic Zones (which extend …
Under the fluorescent lights of a fifth grade classroom in Lexington, Kentucky, Donnie Piercey instructed his 23 students to try and outwit the “robot” that was churning out writing assignments. The robot was the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which can generate everything from essays and haikus to term papers within seconds. The technology has panicked teachers and prompted school districts to block access to the site. But Piercey has taken another approach by embracing it as a teaching tool, saying his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required. “This is the future,” said Piercey, who describes ChatGPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that prompted concerns about the potential for cheating. The calculator, spellcheck, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube. Now all his students have Chromebooks on their desks. “As educators, we haven’t figured out the best way to …
When Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turns testy or even threatening, it’s likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said. Tales of disturbing exchanges with the artificial intelligence chatbot, including it issuing threats and speaking of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus, or to be alive, have gone viral this week. “I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute, said Friday. A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context. However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says. “Large language models have no concept of ‘truth,’ they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their …
The little-noticed program that led to a Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States this month has been discussed in China’s state-controlled media for more than a decade in articles extolling its potential military applications. The reports, dating back to at least 2011, focus on how best to exploit what is known as “near space” – that portion of the atmosphere that is too high for traditional aircraft to fly but too low for a satellite to remain in orbit. Those early articles may offer clues to the capabilities of the balloon shot down by a U.S. jet fighter on Feb. 4. “In recent years, ‘near space’ has been discussed often in foreign media, with many military commentators pointing out that this is a special sphere that had been neglected by militaries but now has risen to hotspot status,” reads a July 5, 2011, article in the People’s Liberation …
World health officials warn the war in Ukraine is taking a heavy toll on the mental health condition of millions of people, requiring an urgent increase in mental health and psychological support. “An estimated almost 10 million people may currently have a mental health condition, of whom about 4 million may have conditions which are moderate or severe,” said Hans Kluge, World Health Organization regional director for Europe. Speaking in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, Kluge said he met Thursday with first lady Olena Zelenska, who summed up the prevailing situation in the country by telling him that “everyone in society has to become a psychologist.” Managing the critical situation, he said, “requires an all-government and all-society effort.” Data and evidence gathered by Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and WHO in recent months show the major priorities and challenges that need to be addressed are mental health, rehabilitation, and community access …
U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its “Full Self-Driving” system because it misbehaves around intersections and doesn’t always follow speed limits. The recall, part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker. It raises questions about CEO Elon Musk’s claims that he can prove to regulators that cars equipped with “Full Self-Driving” are safer than humans, and that humans almost never have to touch the controls. Musk at one point had promised that a fleet of autonomous robotaxis would be in use in 2020. The latest action appears to push that development further into the future. The safety agency says in documents posted on its website Thursday that Tesla will fix the concerns with an online software update in the coming weeks. The documents …
A top U.S. law enforcement official on Thursday unveiled a new “disruptive technology strike force” tasked with safeguarding American technology from foreign adversaries and other national security threats. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 U.S. Justice Department official, made the announcement at a speech in London at Chatham House. The initiative, Monaco said, will be a joint effort between her department and the U.S. Commerce Department, with a goal of blocking adversaries from “trying to siphon our best technology.” Monaco also addressed concerns about Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok. The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered Chinese company ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China’s government. The divestment has not taken place. The committee and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years aiming to …
Imagine if your dog or cat could use words to let you know when they’re angry, lonely or in pain. Well now they can, thanks to an innovative communication tool that’s helping them express themselves more effectively. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. Camera: Adam Greenbaum Produced by: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum …
Avian flu has reached new corners of the globe and become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to poultry, according to veterinarians and disease experts, who warn it is now a year-round problem. Reuters spoke to more than 20 experts and farmers on four continents who said the prevalence of the virus in the wild signals that record outbreaks will not abate soon on poultry farms, ramping up threats to the world’s food supply. They warned that farmers must view the disease as a serious risk all year, instead of focusing prevention efforts during spring migration seasons for wild birds. Outbreaks of the virus have widened in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, undefeated by summer heat or winter cold snaps, since a strain arrived in the United States in early 2022 that was genetically similar to cases in Europe and …
The confirmation of more bird flu cases in South America raised alarm bells in Brazil, which remains free of contagion even after its close neighbors Argentina and Uruguay confirmed cases there on Wednesday. In a press conference to discuss the global sanitary hazard, Brazilian Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said Brazil, the world’s biggest chicken exporter, would bolster measures to prevent outbreaks as the virus continued to spread. Until now, bird flu cases had been detected in commercial farms in Bolivia, which borders Brazil, and in Peru and Ecuador, Favaro said. On Wednesday, cases in wild birds were confirmed in Uruguay and Argentina, sparking a health emergency in both. In recent days, Brazil also investigated suspected cases of the highly pathogenic bird flu. The suspect cases occurred in wild birds in Rio Grande do Sul state, where many Brazilian meatpackers operate, and in domestic birds, ducks and chickens with bird flu …
