Year: 2018

A small Swiss company won $31 million in new investment on Tuesday to suck carbon dioxide from thin air as part of a fledgling, costly technology that may gain wider acceptance from governments in 2018 as a way to slow climate change. Climeworks AG, which uses high-tech filters and fans to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of about $600 a ton, raised the money from investors including Zurich Cantonal Bank. "It's all about cost reductions," Jan Wurzbacher, a co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, told Reuters of how the company would use the funds. Extracting vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help to limit global warming, blamed for causing more heatwaves, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels. The company says it has a long-term…

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Google, Twitter and Facebook were "treading on very, very troubled territory" and warned them to "be careful." Trump made the comments just hours after igniting controversy with a series of early-morning tweets claiming Google search results are "rigged" to turn up news unfavorable to the president's administration. The president asserted that people were complaining about biased results from social media searches. "We have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in," the president said. "You just can't do that." In response to a reporter's question in the Oval Office, Trump singled out Google, Facebook and Twitter for criticism and said, "You can't do that to people."  "Google is really taking advantage of a lot of people," the president said. "They better be careful." Google…

Alphabet's Google said Tuesday that it was partnering with a handful of Indian banks to bring quick loans to the masses, as it aims to woo tens of millions of new internet users in the country to its digital payments services. At an annual Google event in New Delhi, Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google's Next Billion Users initiative, said the move would make banking services accessible to tens of millions of Indians. Google launched payments app Tez, meaning fast in Hindi, in India last year, integrating it with the state-backed unified payments interface (UPI), as it sought to gain a foothold in the South Asian nation's digital payments space — which, according to Credit Suisse, will grow fivefold to $1 trillion by 2023. On Tuesday, Google rebranded the app as Google Pay and said it was partnering with four Indian…

Toyota will invest half a billion dollars into ride-sharing giant Uber as part of a deal for the two companies to work together on developing self-driving vehicles.  Toyota, one of the world's largest car makers, is seen as lagging behind other companies, including General Motors and Google's Waymo, in the autonomous-vehicle race.  Uber has already begun testing self-driving vehicles, but was forced to remove hundreds of autonomous cars from the road in March after one of its test vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian on a street in Tempe, Arizona.  The deal between Uber and Toyota is an indication that Uber does not want to go it alone in creating the complex, autonomous driving systems.  Self-driving cars have always been important to Uber, which sees them as a way to…

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is urging the United Nations to begin talks on a legally binding treaty to ban the use and development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. Representatives from more than 70 countries are attending a weeklong meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons, or CCW, to recommend future work on this issue. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is a global coalition of 76 organizations in 32 countries. Members include Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Mines Action Canada and the Nobel Women's Initiative. It began in April 2013 to pre-emptively ban lethal autonomous weapons systems, better known as killer robots. Activists say momentum is building for states to negotiate a ban on the devices when the CCW holds its annual meeting in late November; however, the…

A Russian artist is going back to the roots of photography, rejecting the digital trappings and the assembly-line convenience of the modern age, by designing and creating wooden cameras the way they were built a hundred years ago. Combining craftsmanship with the principles of old school photography, some consider his creations art forms in themselves. And as VOA's Julie Taboh reports, his wooden cameras, and the unique photographs he takes with them, are attracting buyers from around the world. ...

Scientists have used multibeam sonar and a remotely operated craft to locate the remains of the USS Abner Read, which was sunk nearly 75 years ago after hitting a Japanese mine off Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The ship had been sent to look for Japanese submarines following the only World War II battle to be fought on North American soil. VOA's Jill Craig has more. ...

A school in Massachusetts is using artificial intelligence tools to help teachers keep students engaged. Faith Lapidus reports. ...

Facebook banned a quiz app from its platform for refusing an inspection and concerns that data on as many as 4 million users was misused.   The social media company said Wednesday that it took action against the myPersonality app after it found user information was shared with researchers and companies “with only limited protections in place.” Facebook said it would notify the app's users that their data was misused. It's only the second time Facebook has banned an app, after it blocked one linked to political data mining firm Cambridge Analytica that sparked a privacy scandal.   The company said myPersonality was “mainly active” prior to 2012, and it wasn't clear why Facebook was taking action now.   The app was created in 2007 by researcher David Stillwell and…

Parents lament their teenagers’ noses constantly in their phones, but they might want to take stock of their own screen time habits.  A study out Wednesday from the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of parents are concerned about the amount of time their teenage children spend in front of screens, while more than a third expressed concern about their own screen time.  Meanwhile, more than half of teens said they often or sometimes find their parents or caregivers to be distracted when the teens are trying to have a conversation with them. The study calls teens’ relationship with their phones at times “hyperconnected” and notes that nearly three-fourths check messages or notifications as soon as they wake up. Parents do the same, but at a lower if still substantial…

Parents lament their teenagers' noses constantly in their phones, but they might benefit from taking stock of their own screen time habits. A new report from the Pew Research Center says two-thirds of parents are concerned about the amount of time their teenage children spend in front of screens. But more than half of teens said they often or sometimes find their parents or caregivers to be distracted by screens when trying to have a conversation with them. And more than a third expressed concern about their own screen time. The study surveyed 743 U.S. teens and 1,058 U.S. parents of teens from March 7 to April 10. The margin of error is 4.5 percentage points. ...

Around the world, 2.6 million newborns die within a month after they are born, according to the World Health Organization. A project called NEST360°, in the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health in Houston, is trying to reduce the number of preventable newborn deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. The key is to provide appropriate medical devices for hospitals in this region of the world. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details. ...