Scientists say that in 2023, the Amazon region experienced the most severe drought in its recorded history. Rivers and lakes reached record low levels before rising in recent weeks. Thousands of people were isolated because of the lack of water in tributaries. Scientists say this should be considered a warning of what climate change can do. Yan Boechat reports from Manaus, Brazil. …
NASA collected samples of an ancient asteroid in space that took years to reach us back on Earth. Scientists expect this to be a long research process, but some theories so far suggest asteroids like this one brought water to our home planet. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …
Nearly all the countries attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, agreed Thursday to create a fund that would help poor nations deal with the effects of climate change. The floor was opened for pledges to be made to the new “loss and damage” fund, in which Germany committed to contribute $100 million. The United Arab Emirates, the host of COP28, also promised $100 million. The fund received additional pledges of $51 million from Britain, $17.5 million from the United States and $10 million from Japan. The European Union later added $245.39 million, which included Germany’s $100 million pledge. More contributions are expected to come in the next few days, although the fund will most likely fail to reach its $100 billion goal, set by developing countries. COP28 President Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber praised the decision to establish a fund, calling it a “positive signal of momentum to the …
The U.N. weather agency said Thursday that 2023 is all but certain to be the hottest year on record, and warning of worrying trends that suggest increasing floods, wildfires, glacier melt, and heat waves in the future. The World Meteorological Organization also warned that the average temperature for the year is up some 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times – a mere one-tenth of a degree under a target limit for the end of the century as laid out by the Paris climate accord in 2015. The WMO secretary-general said the onset earlier this year of El Nino, the weather phenomenon marked by heating in the Pacific Ocean, could tip the average temperature next year over the 1.5-degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) target cap set in Paris. “It’s practically sure that during the coming four years we will hit this 1.5, at least on temporary basis,” Petteri Taalas …
Vietnam, with the world’s second-largest reserves of the rare earths used in such modern devices as electric vehicle batteries and smart phone screens, is intensifying mining of the critical minerals. The industry, though, faces high processing costs, environmental concerns, and the takedown of industry leaders for illegal mining and mineral sales. Vietnam’s rare earth resources are second only to those of China, which has held a tight monopoly since the 1980s. With Chinese relations with the West becoming more volatile, many countries are looking for other sources for the elements. “China produces about 60% of the world’s rare earths but what they process is over 90%,” Louis O’Connor, CEO of Strategic Metals Invest, an Irish investment firm, told VOA. “It was not a good idea to allow one country to dominate critical raw materials that are critical to all nations’ economic prosperity and increasingly military capability,” he said. O’Connor added …
American leadership is essential in establishing norms and laws to “determine how we both glean the promise and manage the peril” of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital economic and social platforms used to connect billions of people around the world, a White House adviser told VOA. The Biden administration has rolled out a number of initiatives on the topic — most recently, an executive order that aims to set new AI safety and security standards. That order relies on cooperation from private developers and other countries, “because the attackers are in one set of countries, the infrastructure is in another and the victims are global,” said Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology at the National Security Council. Neuberger sat down with VOA White House Correspondent Anita Powell to explain these complex, compelling technologies and how she thinks they have exposed the worst but …
Rising sea levels, extreme weather and rising temperatures are threatening coastal communities in South Africa. For VOA, Derick Mazarura has the story from Eastern Cape, South Africa. Camera — Buhle Ndamase and Norah Chisa. …
The ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is returning to the company that fired him late last week, culminating a days-long power struggle that shocked the tech industry and brought attention to the conflicts around how to safely build artificial intelligence. San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.” The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter’s board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year. The other members will be former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo. OpenAI’s previous board of directors, which included D’Angelo, had refused to give specific reasons for why it fired Altman, leading to a weekend of internal conflict at the company and growing …
The U.S. government dealt a massive blow to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which agreed to pay a roughly $4 billion settlement Tuesday as its founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a felony related to his failure to prevent money laundering on the platform. Zhao stepped down as the company’s chief executive, and Binance admitted to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and apparent violations of sanctions programs, including its failure to implement reporting programs for suspicious transactions. “Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who called the settlement one of the largest corporate penalties in the nation’s history. As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. Treasury said Binance will be subject to five years of monitoring and “significant compliance undertakings, including to ensure Binance’s complete exit from the …
Growing up in Lahore — Pakistan’s cultural capital — fall used to be the perfect time for Mariam to enjoy outdoor activities after months of scorching summer heat. Now, she cannot imagine the same for her young daughters as Lahore’s air, ranked the most polluted globally, becomes unusually toxic in cooler months. “You can just smell, sometimes you can taste it, and feel it as well,” said the mother of two describing what it is like to breathe the polluted air. With an AQI reading of 345 early in the day, Lahore ranked second worst city in the world for air pollution on Tuesday, according to the Air Quality Index or AQI run by IQAir, a Swiss air purifier manufacturer. An AQI above 151 is unhealthy, while above 301 the air is hazardous for breathing. IQAir’s index ranked Lahore the most polluted city of 2022. Smog emergency The city, along …
More people work from home in Colorado, while Mississippi has the lowest percentage of teleworkers …
In a move that may soon be replicated elsewhere, the Gila River Indian Community recently signed an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put solar panels over a stretch of irrigation canal on its land south of Phoenix. It will be the first project of its kind in the United States to break ground, according to the tribe’s press release. “This was a historic moment here for the community but also for the region and across Indian Country,” said Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter. The first phase, set to be completed in 2025, will cover 1,000 feet of canal and generate one megawatt of electricity that the tribe will use to irrigate crops, including feed for livestock, cotton and grains. The idea is simple: install solar panels over canals in sunny, water-scarce regions where …
Innovations in food production could alleviate hunger for millions of people, according to Britain, which hosted a global summit on food insecurity Monday, but critics say the focus on technology ignores the growing inequality of wealth. The summit was a joint initiative between Britain, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at boosting food security through science and innovation. Innovation hub British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said a renewed focus was needed to alleviate hunger. “It can’t be right that today in 2023, almost 1 billion people across the world regularly do not have enough to eat, that millions face hunger and starvation, and over 45 million children under five are suffering acute malnutrition. In a world of abundance, no one should die from lack of food and no parent should ever have to watch their child starve,” Sunak …
Microsoft snapped up Sam Altman and another architect of OpenAI for a new venture after their sudden departures shocked the artificial intelligence world, leaving the newly installed CEO of the ChatGPT maker to paper over tensions by vowing to investigate Altman’s firing. The developments Monday come after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the power dynamics would shake out at OpenAI, whose chatbot kicked off the generative AI era by producing human-like text, images, video and music. It ended with former Twitch leader Emmett Shear taking over as OpenAI’s interim chief executive and Microsoft announcing it was hiring Altman and OpenAI co-founder and former President Greg Brockman to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team. Despite the rift between the key players behind ChatGPT and the company they helped build, both Shear and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said they are committed to their partnership. Microsoft invested …
As the 2024 U.S. presidential race begins to ramp up, some contenders are already using artificial intelligence to generate promotional videos, some of which blur the lines between what is real and what is not. Karina Bafradzhian has the story. VOA footage by Andrey Degtyarev. …
Indigenous rangers in northern Australia have started managing herds of feral animals from space. In the largest project of its kind in Australia, the so-called Space Cows project involves tagging and then tracking a thousand wild cattle and buffalo via satellite. Water buffalo were imported into Australia’s Northern Territory in the 19th century as working animals and meat for remote settlements. When those communities were abandoned, the animals were released into the wild. Their numbers have grown, and feral buffaloes can cause huge environmental damage. In wetlands, they move along pathways called swim channels, which have caused salt water to flow into freshwater plains. This has led to the degradation and loss of large areas of paperbark forest and natural waterholes, as well as spreading weeds. Under the so-called Space Cows program, feral cattle and buffaloes are being rounded up, often by helicopter, tied to trees, and fitted with …
A federal judge in Nevada has dealt another legal setback to Native American tribes trying to halt construction of one of the biggest lithium mines in the world. U.S. District Judge Miranda Du granted the government’s motion to dismiss their claims the mine is being built illegally near the sacred site of an 1865 massacre along the Nevada-Oregon line. But she said in last week’s order the three tribes suing the Bureau of Land Management deserve another chance to amend their complaint to try to prove the agency failed to adequately consult with them as required by the National Historic Preservation Act. “Given that the court has now twice agreed with federal defendants (and) plaintiffs did not vary their argument … the court is skeptical that plaintiffs could successfully amend it. But skeptical does not mean futile,” Du wrote Nov. 9. She also noted part of their case is still …
Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment is facing strong headwinds in the progressive state after an explosion of public drug use fueled by the proliferation of fentanyl and a surge in deaths from opioids, including those of children. “The inability for people to live their day-to-day life without encountering open-air drug use is so pressing on urban folks’ minds,” said John Horvick, vice president of polling firm DHM Research. “That has very much changed people’s perspective about what they think Measure 110 is.” When the law was approved by 58% of Oregon voters three years ago, supporters championed Measure 110 as a revolutionary approach that would transform addiction by minimizing penalties for drug use and investing instead in recovery. But even top Democratic lawmakers who backed the law, which will likely …
SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, failed in space shortly after lifting off Saturday, cutting short its second test but making it further than an earlier attempt that ended in an explosion. The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, helping boost the Starship spacecraft as high as 90 miles (148 kilometers) above ground on a planned 90-minute test mission to space and back. But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it achieved a crucial maneuver to separate with its core Starship stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching, a SpaceX webcast showed. Meanwhile, the core Starship stage boosted farther toward space, but a few minutes later a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle. “We have lost the data from …
Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods. “Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do. The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text. “We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,” said Shira Perlmutter, …
Advertisers are fleeing social media platform X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with billionaire owner Elon Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. IBM said this week that it stopped advertising on X after a report said its ads were appearing alongside material praising Nazis — a fresh setback as the platform, formerly known as Twitter, tries to win back big brands and their ad dollars, X’s main source of revenue. The liberal advocacy group Media Matters said in a report Thursday that ads from Apple, Oracle, NBCUniversal’s Bravo network and Comcast also were placed next to antisemitic material on X. “IBM has zero tolerance for hate speech and discrimination and we have immediately suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation,” the company said in a …
SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was presumed to have failed in space minutes after lifting off on Saturday in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion. The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, soaring roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) above ground on a planned 90-minute flight into space. But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it appeared to achieve a crucial maneuver to separate with its core stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching. Meanwhile, the core Starship booster carried further toward space, but roughly 10 minutes into the flight a company broadcaster said that SpaceX mission control suddenly lost contact with the vehicle. “We have lost the data from the second stage. … We think we may have …
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed earlier this week that Beijing will crack down on companies in China that produce precursor chemicals for fentanyl, an agreement that Biden said would “save lives.” In exchange, the Biden administration agreed to lift sanctions on China’s Physical Evidence Identification Center of the Ministry of Public Security and the National Drug Laboratory. In May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce sanctioned the lab for allegedly participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. China, which is the source of most fentanyl precursors used in the U.S., argued that U.S. export controls have “severely affected” China’s inspection and testing of fentanyl-related substances and impaired its “goodwill to help the U.S. in drug control,” according to the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the United States. Although a cooperative effort to curb the supply of fentanyl brought some …
Britain’s medicines regulator has authorized the world’s first gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease, in a move that could offer relief to thousands of people with the crippling disease in the U.K. In a statement Thursday, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency said it approved Casgevy, the first medicine licensed using the gene editing tool CRISPR, which won its makers a Nobel prize in 2020. The agency approved the treatment for patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia who are 12 years old and older. Casgevy is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Europe) Ltd. and CRISPR Therapeutics. To date, bone marrow transplants, extremely arduous procedures that come with very unpleasant side effects, have been the only long-lasting treatment. “The future of life-changing cures resides in CRISPR based (gene-editing) technology,” said Dr. Helen O’Neill of University College London. “The use of the word ‘cure’ in relation to sickle cell disease or …
