Year: 2018

Movie and TV show endings can be a major let down, but what if you could control the storyline as it develops? Eko is an entertainment company that's putting viewers in the director's chair with interactive TV shows and videos. Tina Trinh reports. ...

Before Facebook, Vu Kim Chi thought something was lacking in her job, which is to promote the economy in and around Vietnam's famed Ha Long Bay. Posting updates to her department's website, or photocopying missives to send to constituents, she said, was mostly one-sided. But after she set up an official Facebook page for Quang Ninh province, the conversations started to flow in both directions, between Chi and the local residents or businesses. That's why, when it comes to social media, she thinks more civil servants need to catch up with the rest of the country. "Social media, especially the Facebook application, is really used a lot in Vietnam," said Chi, who is deputy head of the province's investment promotion and support office. "But for public agencies that use it…

SpaceX continues making news in 2018. The company first broke its own record from 2017 when it passed 18 launches in year. On Sunday, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX launched another record-setting rocket… this one for U.S. national security. Arash Arabasadi reports. ...

Batteries have been around for hundreds of years, but don't go thinking this technology is old hat (old fashioned). Batteries are the future. A team of California Scientists with support from the National Science Foundation are on the cutting edge of building a battery that lasts longer and holds more energy. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Some 1.3 billion people live with some form of vision impairment, according to the World Health Organization. A team of innovators at an Israeli technology company has developed a small device to help them. As Laura Sepulveda reports from Jerusalem, the device connects to regular glasses and helps people with visual limitations identify people and products, and read in more than 14 languages. ...

Elon Musk's SpaceX scrapped Saturday's launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the U.S. military due to strong upper-level winds. The next launch attempt will be on Sunday at 8:51 a.m. EST/13:51 UTC, according to Space X officials. The launch would have been the rocket firm's first national security space mission for the United States. ...

Forests are often called the lungs of the planet because they produce so much oxygen. But they also store huge amounts of carbon. NASA scientists want to know exactly how much carbon, and so they have just launched a satellite that will finally give them an exact measurement. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

When drones buzzing over the runway forced London's busy Gatwick Airport to shut down, many travelers wondered why it's so hard for authorities to stop such intruders. Shoot them down, some said. Jam their signals, others suggested. Experts say it's not that easy. Britain and the U.S. prohibit drones from being flown too high or too close to airports and other aircraft. In Britain, it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Still, there is little to stop a drone operator bent on disrupting air traffic, which British officials say was the case with the Gatwick incident that began Wednesday evening. The number of close calls between drones and aircraft has increased dramatically in recent years as the popularity of drones has soared. Basic models for…

The attorney general for Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that the nation's capital had sued Facebook over reports involving Cambridge Analytica's use of data from the social media giant. "Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used," Attorney General Karl Racine said in a statement. "Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users' permission." The lawsuit came as Facebook faced new reports that it shared its users' data without their permission. Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign at one point, gained access to personal data from tens of millions of Facebook's users. The D.C. attorney general said in the lawsuit that this exposed nearly half of the district's residents' data to manipulation…