Year: 2023

The white-colored humanoid "Garmi" does not look much different from a typical robot — it stands on a platform with wheels and is equipped with a black screen on which two blue circles acting as eyes are attached. But retired German doctor Guenter Steinebach, 78,…

The U.N.’s premiere global body fighting for gender equality on Saturday called for wide-ranging efforts to close the gap between men and women in today’s technology-driven world and urged zero tolerance for gender-based violence and harassment online. In a document approved by consensus after all-night…

Barbara Washington is a lifelong resident of Convent, Louisiana, a town of fewer than 500 residents along the Mississippi River that has been hit hard by cancer. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven … about eight,” she told VOA, counting the number of people…

Advisers to the World Health Organization urged China to release all information related to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic Saturday after new findings were briefly shared on an international database used to track pathogens. New sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well as additional…

Burundi has declared a national public health emergency after polio was detected in a 4-year-old and two other children who had been in contact with the child.   The polio outbreak is Burundi's first in more than 30 years.  The landlocked African country is preparing a…

The COVID-19 pandemic could settle down this year to a point where it poses a threat similar to flu, the World Health Organization said Friday. The WHO voiced confidence that it will be able to declare an end to the emergency sometime in 2023, saying…

The Southern Nevada Water Authority on Thursday voted to accept a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to fund cloud seeding in other Western states whose rivers feed the parched desert region.  The weather modification method uses planes and ground-based cannons to…

Health officials in Tanzania are investigating an illness that killed five people in the country's northwest with Ebola-like symptoms, raising fears that it could be the deadly virus.  Tanzania’s Ministry of Health late Thursday issued a statement saying seven people in northwest Kagera region showed…

Mozambique’s health minister said Friday a cholera outbreak in the area hit by Cyclone Freddy killed eight people this week and hospitalized 250 – part of 600 sickened since the record storm made landfall in February. Health Minister Armindo Tiago told state-run Radio Mozambique the…

Lack of access to clean drinking water is being exacerbated by climate change. In fact, less than 1% of the world's water is fresh and accessible, according to Melissa Ho, senior vice president of freshwater and food at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "Although we…

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a number of improvements in access to mental health care on Thursday to reduce suicides in the military but held off on endorsing more controversial recommendations to restrict gun and ammunition purchases by young troops, sending them to another…

Deaths of pregnant women in the United States fell in 2022, dropping significantly from a six-decade high during the pandemic, new data suggests. More than 1,200 U.S. women died in 2021 during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth, according to a final tally released Thursday by…

For the first time, scientists have created baby mice from two males.  This raises the distant possibility of using the same technique for people — although experts caution that very few mouse embryos developed into live mouse pups, and no one knows whether it would…

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses, truck drivers, grocery clerks and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. "Now we are vilifying them … and this has long-term ramifications for our well-being," said Manuela Tomei, International Labor Organization assistant director-general for governance,…

Every month, young girls in Ghana are forced to miss school days due to menstruation. But a schoolteacher is working to find a solution by providing reusable sanitary pads. Hamza Adams visited a school in Afari, Ghana, and has this story narrated by Salem Solomon.…

The Webb Space Telescope has captured the rare and fleeting phase of a star on the cusp of death. NASA released the picture Tuesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The observation was among the first made by Webb following its launch…