Category: Technology

This year’s flu season in the U.S. is the worst in 15 years and health officials predict there are weeks of sickness ahead. One company’s “smart thermometer” is tracking how the flu is spreading across the country in real time by gathering data every time someone takes a temperature. Michelle Quinn reports. ...

When a child feels sick, one of the first things a parent does is reach for a thermometer. That common act intrigued Inder Singh, a long-time health policy expert. What if the thermometer could be a communication device – connecting people with information about illnesses going around and gathering real time data on diseases as they spread?  That’s the idea behind Singh’s firm Kinsa, a health data company based in San Francisco that sells “smart” thermometers. Worst flu season in years With the U.S. in the midst of its worst flu season in years, Kinsa has been on the forefront of tracking the spread and severity of flu-like symptoms by region. The company says its data is a close match to flu data tracked by the U.S.Centers for Disease Control…

The annual Washington Auto Show is not the biggest or the most important convention of the year, but it still attracts a lot of attention, from enthusiasts and potential customers to automotive industry professionals.  Self-driving cars are still some time off, so the focus this year continues to be on fuel efficiency. VOA’s George Putic has more. ...

The controversy over information gathered from GPS-enabled fitness devices and published online – in some cases highlighting possible activity at U.S. military bases in places like Syria and Afghanistan – could be just the start of an ever-growing problem in a world where more people and devices are connected to the internet. Already, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has ordered a review of security protocols following concerns that a so-called Heatmap published by the fitness app company Strava showed locations and movement patterns of troops serving overseas. "We take matters like these very seriously and are reviewing the situation to determine if any additional training or guidance is required," the Pentagon said in a statement Monday. "Recent data releases emphasize the need for situational awareness when members of the military…

Amazon.com on Monday opened a rainforest-like office space in Seattle that it hopes will spark new ideas for employees. While cities across North America are seeking to host Seattle-based Amazon's second headquarters, the world's largest online retailer is still expanding its main campus. Company office towers and high-end eateries have taken the place of warehouses and parking lots in Seattle's South Lake Union district. The Spheres complex, officially open to workers Tuesday, is the pinnacle of a decade of development here. The Spheres' three glass domes house some 40,000 plants of 400 species. Amazon, famous for its demanding work culture, hopes the Spheres' lush environs will let employees reflect and have chance encounters, spawning new products or plans. The space is more like a greenhouse than a typical office. Instead…

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., one of the few Olympics sponsors signed up until 2028, said it wants to upgrade the technology that keeps the Games running and will study the Pyeongchang Games to help find ways to save future host countries money. "Pyeongchang will be a very important learning opportunity for our team to see how things are working and what's missing," Alibaba's chief marketing officer Chris Tung said in an interview. Alibaba, the cloud-services and e-commerce provider for the Olympics, will take back what it has learned at the Feb. 9 to 25 Pyeongchang Winter Games and develop solutions for the next Games. Ticketing, media and video services are among the areas that Tung said Alibaba wants to improve. It especially wants to end the inefficient practice of building…

Coming to a hotel or hospital near you may be a robot that makes deliveries.  Companies are creating robots to help with the workload and make human workers more efficient. One such company is Silicon Valley-based Savioke. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee met a couple of its robots at a hotel in Las Vegas. ...

The U.S. military says it is evaluating its policies after a global map of fitness activity drew attention to possible security concerns regarding locations of overseas bases and soldier movements. Strava published its so-called heat map of user activity in November showing the routes millions of users walked, ran and biked, with the most frequent routes showing up in brighter colors. The company says it excluded activities that users marked as private or ones that took place in areas people did not want to make public. The activities were tracked using GPS-enabled devices from manufacturers like Fitbit, Garmin and Polar, and even with the exclusions, Strava said its map included 1 billion activities between 2015 and September 2017. The Washington Post reported on the heat map and its implications, highlighting…

Projecting three-dimensional (3D) images in thin air, called holography, moved from science fiction to reality a long time ago. But this type of graphic display is not in wide use because the required equipment is still expensive. Scientists at the Brigham Young University have discovered a cheaper method of holography, using particles floating in the air. VOA's George Putic reports. ...

Incorporating technology into learning can sometimes be a slippery slope toward computer distraction. That's why some of the best new educational tools work in the real and the virtual world. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc said Sunday it would return about 46.3 billion yen ($425 million) of the virtual money it lost to hackers two days ago in one of the biggest-ever thefts of digital money. That amounts to nearly 90 percent of the 58 billion yen worth of NEM coins the company lost in an attack Friday that forced it to suspend withdrawals of all cryptocurrencies except bitcoin. Coincheck said in a statement it would repay the roughly 260,000 owners of NEM coins in Japanese yen, though it was still working on timing and method. Theft and security The theft underscores security and regulatory concerns about bitcoin and other virtual currencies even as a global boom in them shows little signs of fizzling. Two sources with direct knowledge of…

Although long replaced by more efficient types of engines, steam-powered machines still have a certain appeal, and not just for museum-goers. In Britain, the country that gave us both the steam engine and the legendary off-road vehicle the Land Rover Defender, one inventor combined the two, much to the amusement of technology enthusiasts. VOA's George Putic has more. ...

According to the World Health Organization, 2.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. Many of them rely on wells and streams, making testing the water for bacterial contamination of crucial importance. However, cheap and reliable testing equipment is often not available or not affordable. Scientists in Britain and elsewhere are working on a simple, paper-based test that can confirm that water is safe in a matter of seconds. VOA's George Putic reports. ...

Melinda Gates has launched a high-level international commission to spark new thinking on how developing countries can best harness new technologies to reduce poverty. The wife of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates spoke at the launch of the commission in Nairobi on Thursday. The 11-member commission aims to promote use of technology to fight poverty across Africa and provide opportunities for the poor.   Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the newly launched commission would create opportunities for everyone.   “Let us unleash the opportunity here of all the amazing entrepreneurs, because they are the ones. The markets then will scale these great ideas and so we want to make sure that part of this world we are thinking about everybody, not just the…

The young woman, new to the grind of Chinese factory life, knew the man who called himself Kalen only by the photo on his chat profile. It showed him with a pressed smile holding a paper cup in a swank skyscraper somewhere late at night. Yu Chunyan and her friends didn't know what to make of him. Some thought his eyes were shifty. Others said he looked handsome in a heroic sort of way. Yu was among the doubters. The daughter of factory workers, Yu paid her way through college by working in factories herself. She and thousands of other students had toiled through the summer of 2016 assembling iPhones at a supplier for Apple Inc., but they hadn't been paid their full wages. Kalen was offering to help -…

An estimated 5 million people around the world are bitten by venomous snakes each year, and more than 100,000 victims die. In many cases the key to survival is anti-venom, but getting the right treatment can depend on knowing what kind of snake did the biting. Some new medical tech developed in Denmark is taking the guesswork out of the snake bite business. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation in an accident involving a Tesla car that may have been operating under its semi-autonomous Autopilot system.  The board sent two investigators to Culver City, California, to learn whether the Autopilot was on and if so, how the car's sensors failed to detect a firetruck stopped on a highway near Los Angeles on Monday.  This is the second time the safety agency will look in to a crash involving Tesla's Autopilot feature.  In September, the NTSB determined that while the technology played a major role in the May 2016 fatal crash in Florida, the blame fell on driver errors, including overreliance on technology by an inattentive Tesla driver.  The California driver said the Autopilot mode was engaged when the car…

Apple's next major update of its mobile software will include an option that will enable owners of older iPhones to turn off a feature that slows the device to prevent aging batteries from shutting down. The free upgrade announced Wednesday will be released this spring. The additional controls are meant to appease iPhone owners outraged since Apple acknowledged last month that its recent software updates had been secretly slowing down older iPhones when their batteries weakened. Many people believed Apple was purposefully undermining the performance of older iPhones to drive sales of its newer and more expensive devices. Apple insisted it was simply trying to extend the lives of older iPhones, but issued an apology last month and promised to replace batteries in affected devices at a discounted price of…

The International Telecommunication Union reports hundreds of millions of people in the world’s poorest countries now have access to the Internet and mobile devices. It is increasingly difficult to function in this modern digital world without access to the Internet, a smart phone or other digital device. A new report by the International Telecommunication Union finds e-banking, e-commerce and other actions in cyberspace are no longer just the purview of the rich world. It says all 47 of the world’s Least Developed Countries are making huge strides in increasing their Internet access. The ITU says more than 60 percent of LDC populations are covered by a 3G network, referring to a third generation or advanced wireless mobile telecommunication technology. It notes by the end of last year, about 700 million…

Virtual reality allows the user to enter a different world through sight and sound. Several researchers and companies are adding a third element to the virtual experience: the sense of touch. Researchers in haptics, meaning the feeling of touch, are incorporating this sense into virtual reality with real-world applications.  French company Go Touch VR created a device called VRtouch that straps onto the fingertips. The device applies varying pressure to the fingertips that correlates to what the user is seeing, touching and lifting in the virtual world.  “That will open enormous possibilities,” said Eric Vezzoli, co-founder of Go Touch VR. Applications for the touch device include allowing users to undergo training in a safe virtual environment. Vezzoli said strapping three of the VR touch devices on each hand — the…

Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields. The answers they got wrong…

It seems like a game everyone wins: Some of China's biggest tech companies, looking to hook in new consumers, are using cash prizes to draw millions of contenders to mobile-based online quiz shows. Up to 6 million people at a time log into the free, live games on their smartphones to answer a series of rapid-fire questions in an elimination battle, with those remaining sharing the prize money. Over the weekend, search engine giant Baidu and video game maker NetEase launched their own online shows, joining news feed platform Toutiao, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd-owned UCWeb and Wang Sicong, the scion of Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin. But how they will cash in on the games and stay on the right side of government censors might prove to be a tricky question.…

There's little doubt that virtual reality is likely to be the future of video gaming. Now, a Russian company in Moscow is pushing the limits of the technology with a game changing VR experience. VOA's Kevin Enochs reports. ...

Facebook took a hard look in the mirror with a post Monday questioning the impact of social media on democracies worldwide and saying it has a “moral duty” to understand how it is being used. Over the past 18 months, the company has faced growing criticism for its limited understanding of how misinformation campaigns and governments are using its service to suppress democracy and make people afraid to speak out. “I wish I could guarantee that the positives are destined to outweigh the negatives, but I can’t,” wrote Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager of civic engagement. Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been looking more critically at how it is being used. Some of what it found raises questions about company’s long-standing position that social media is a force…

No cashiers, no lines, no registers — this is how Amazon sees the future of in-store shopping. The online retailer opened its Amazon Go concept store to the public Monday, selling milk, potato chips and other items typically found at a convenience shop. Amazon employees have been testing the store, which is at the bottom floor of the company's Seattle headquarters, for about a year. The public opening is another sign that Amazon is serious about expanding its physical presence. It has opened more than a dozen bookstores, taken over space in some Kohl's department stores and bought Whole Foods last year, giving it 470 grocery stores. But Amazon Go is unlike its other stores. Shoppers enter by scanning the Amazon Go smartphone app at a turnstile. When they pull…

Initial tests in Nevada on a compact nuclear power system designed to sustain a long-duration NASA human mission on the inhospitable surface of Mars have been successful and a full-power run is scheduled for March, officials said on Thursday. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and U.S. Department of Energy officials, at a Las Vegas news conference, detailed the development of the nuclear fission system under NASA's Kilopower project. Months-long testing began in November at the energy department's Nevada National Security Site, with an eye toward providing energy for future astronaut and robotic missions in space and on the surface of Mars, the moon or other solar system destinations. A key hurdle for any long-term colony on the surface of a planet or moon, as opposed to NASA's six short lunar…

Move over traditional billboards. Three-dimensional, slightly hypnotic holograms may soon replace two-dimensional signs and ads. Several companies with this technology said 3D holograms will revolutionize the way businesses and brands talk to potential customers. "It’s already replacing billboards, LED screens, LCD screens, because there hasn't been any revolution in the display industry for decades," said Art Stavenka, founder of Kino-mo, a company with offices in London and Belarus.  The main hardware of the technology is a blade that emits a strip of light creating holograms of images and words. Multiple blades can be synchronized for larger holograms. "As soon as this piece of hardware spins, you stop seeing hardware and you start seeing (a) hologram, and the piece of hardware spins fast enough so a human eye does not see…

Those two-dimensional billboards that dot the landscape of many cities around the world may soon be replaced -- with 3-D holograms. Companies working on this technology say it will revolutionize the way businesses and brands talk to potential customers. VOA's Elizabeth Lee got a glimpse of advertising's future at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. ...