Science has been searching for a definitive reason why domesticated honeybee colonies continue to suddenly die off. But Colony Collapse disorder, as it is called, is still somewhat of a mystery. To try and get some answers, a university is using high-tech monitoring tools to listen in on the bees’ conversations for clues to their health. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Beside rows of rusting shipping containers, a decorative wrought iron fence surrounds Taquería Mi Pueblo, one of the first family-run Mexican restaurants in southwest Detroit, Michigan.
Its owner, Jalisco-native José de Jesús López, surveys the trees he planted and his ornamental roosters.
“Everything was abandoned, a dump over there,” he said, walking down Dix Street. When he first arrived as an undocumented immigrant in 1981, López recalls a drug-addict-infested lot and overrun lawn.
“Mexicantown,” as the area is affectionately and marketably called today, is one of Metro Detroit’s most vibrant dining scenes for locals and tourists — and a model for other immigrant neighborhoods.
Landing destination
Like López, many foreigners stumbled upon Detroit, viewing the city as an economically viable “second landing destination” — friendly to immigrants, but with cheaper housing and commercial space than traditional immigrant hubs like New York and San Francisco.
Through the 2008 recession and recovery, native-born residents fled. But immigrants kept coming, starting new businesses, hiring local residents and making their neighborhoods a safer place for children.
A June study by Global Detroit and New American Economy reveals that the city’s immigrant population grew by 12.1 percent between 2010 and 2014, at a time when the city’s overall population declined by 4.2 percent. Though the four-year increase in immigrants amounts to merely 4,137 individuals, the study claims the effects have been widely felt.
Watch: Beleaguered Detroit Relying on Immigrants to Revitalize City
“Immigrants are leading in the city’s recovery,” said Steve Tobocman, director of Global Detroit, “particularly in its neighborhoods like Mexicantown, in Banglatown, where new residents are moving in and helping to stabilize working-class communities by fixing up homes, opening up businesses, and creating more consumers.”
Depopulation, Tobocman adds, remains Detroit’s biggest challenge moving forward, while immigrants are “our best hope to rebuilding,” especially on the neighborhood level.
No ‘magic bullet’
According to Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and Fiscal Policy Institute, more than one-third of Detroit-area “Main Street” business owners were immigrants as of 2013.
But data measuring their economic contributions can be misleading, says Stanley Renshon, CUNY professor of political science.
“Any economic activity is grabbed by economists as positive,” Renshon told VOA. “Yes, you increase the overall financial numbers of the country, but the people who benefit most from that are the immigrants themselves, and that’s fine. We want them to prosper, but don’t tell me that what you’re doing is saving the country or the city or the town.”
Detroit’s ongoing struggles, including a long history of political corruption and one of the highest murder rates in the country, can’t be solved by new immigrants, he added.
Hurting American workers?
Last week, White House senior adviser for policy Stephen Miller announced the administration’s support for an immigration bill that would cut legal immigration by half.
Their premise that less-skilled immigrants take away work opportunities from native-born Americans is an “America first” message intended to resonate with President Donald Trump’s base in depressed rust belt towns like Detroit.
“How is it fair, or right or proper that if, say, you open up a new business in Detroit, that the unemployed workers of Detroit are going to have to compete against an endless flow of unskilled workers for the exact same jobs?” asked Miller during a White House press briefing Aug. 2.
Global Detroit’s Tobocman says Trump’s proposed policies won’t produce any new jobs and may cost the Michigan economy hundreds of millions of dollars.
“[Trump’s actions would choke] off a critical supply of talent, of investment, and of global connections that are critical to the future of Michigan, to us being a mobility capital for the world,” Tobocman said.
Detroit suffered an unemployment rate of 28.4 percent during the great recession, but had rebounded to 7.8 percent in June.
Banglatown
Following the likes of Mexicantown, Metro Detroit’s second-most populous foreign-born community, from Bangladesh, hopes to follow suit and create a cultural tourist destination of its own: Banglatown.
“You will hardly find any vacant spot right now,” said Ehsan Taqbeem, founder of Bangladeshi-American Public Affairs Committee (BAPAC), driving his Jeep Grand Cherokee past South Asian restaurants, fabric and fish shops in Detroit and neighboring Hamtramck.
“The value of the homes have gone up since [the recession], businesses have been thriving, and traffic has gone up tremendously,” he said.
Unlike Mexicantown, Banglatown is a concept still in its early stages. There are no traditional rickshaws carrying tourists down Conant Avenue — at least not yet.
But Taqbeem, who runs an automotive retrofitting service, along with other local business owners, sees the benefit of being a branded community in a global-minded city.
Mahabub Chowdhury, part-owner of Aladdin Sweets & Cafe, found success in nourishing his neighborhood and patrons, a majority of whom are non-Bangladeshis. One regular customer, whom he describes as a nice “American white person,” calls him directly.
“Sometimes his car is broken, and he calls us, ‘Can you pick me up from my house?’ And we go to his house and bring him to our restaurant,” Chowdhury said.
‘Believing in Detroit’
In Mexicantown, Lopez’s eyes well as he recalls his early days on a Jalisco ranch, before finding eventual success in Detroit.
“My main dream was to be able to buy a truck for my dad,” Lopez said. “I worked all my life, and when I had the money, I didn’t have my father anymore.”
Now an American citizen, López, a father of four, says he accomplished the American Dream by creating something that will outlive him and provide for the community long after he has passed.
What Detroit still needs, he said, is more people to call it home.
“That’s happening little by little,” Lopez said. “The greatest changes won’t happen overnight.”
“They happen slowly, and that’s part of believing in oneself, believing in Detroit,” he said.
Scientists from U.S. and Britain have found four planets, slightly larger than Earth, orbiting a star visible with a naked eye.
Using a technique so sensitive that it can measure tiny changes in the light emitted by stars, scientists at University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Hertfordshire detected the planets orbiting the star Tau Ceti, which is 12 light-years from Earth. Two of the planets orbit in the so-called habitable zone, meaning the surface water could possibly exist.
The changes in light are caused by gravitational pull of the planets orbiting the star.
Tau Ceti, in the south of the constellation Cetus, emits light spectrum similar to our sun but is about 25 percent smaller.
The two planets in its habitable zone are larger than Earth, but frequent bombardment by asteroids and comets from the star’s massive debris ring make them improbable candidates to sustain life.
Observations were done from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
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Some countries depend heavily on fossil fuels for power, including the Philippines. But now a kind of solar energy “flower” is among the clean power alternatives there. The Smartflower can produce 40 percent more energy than a traditional rooftop solar design. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Detroit, Michigan, knows hardship and recovery. One of the hardest hit areas in the country during the Great Recession, the Midwestern Rust Belt city has since found an ingredient to its economic revitalization through empowerment of its immigrant communities. But not everyone is convinced that the solution is viable or helps anyone beyond the immigrants themselves. Ramon Taylor has more.
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The Perseid meteor shower peaks every year about this time as the Earth passes debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet, but this year the annual shower will come about a week before a total solar eclipse.
The meteor shower, which occurs each year in July or August, will see hundreds of meteors pass through the sky in an event that will be visible around the world.
Experts expect the shower to peak overnight Saturday into Sunday, though the Perseids could be a bit harder to see this year with the moon nearly full. Typical rates are about 80 meteors per hour – last year, 2016, the rate was 150-200 meteors per hour.
The shower occurs when the Earth travels through the tail of dust and ice left behind as the Swift-Tuttle comet orbits the sun. The actual meteors are usually no bigger than a grain of sand, but when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at speeds upwards of 60 kilometers per second, they burn up in a mesmerizing color show of white, orange and green hues.
The Perseids are named after the Perseus constellation, as that is where they appear to originate from in the northeastern night sky.
While the Perseids likely will draw large crowds of spectators around the world, those based in the United States will have the chance to see an even bigger astronomical event next week when the U.S. will witness the first total solar eclipse across the country in almost 100 years.
During the eclipse on August 21, the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, completely blocking the face of the sun and darkening skies all the way from Oregon on the West Coast to South Carolina on the East Coast.
While total solar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth almost every year, they mostly occur in remote locations or over the ocean, where few if any people actually witness them. The last time a total eclipse happened over the contiguous U.S. was in 1979.
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Pilates is a fitness regimen that has been around for nearly 100 years, using controlled movements to build strength and improve flexibility. Now, a pilates class in New York City is taking on a 21st century malady specific to our digital culture and obsession with texting. VOA’s Tina Trinh went to the Gramercy Pilates NYC studio to check out their “Pilates for Text Neck” class.
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Around the world, support is growing for electric cars. Automakers are delivering more electric models with longer range and lower prices, such as the Chevrolet Bolt and the Tesla Model 3. China has set aggressive targets for electric vehicle sales to curb pollution; some European countries aim to be all-electric by 2040 or sooner.
Those lofty ambitions face numerous challenges, including one practical consideration for consumers: If they buy electric cars, where will they charge them?
The distribution of public charging stations is wildly uneven around the globe. Places with lots of support from governments or utilities, like China, the Netherlands and California, have thousands of public charging outlets. Buyers of Tesla’s luxury models have access to a company-funded Supercharger network.
Charging stations scarce
But in many places, public charging remains scarce. That’s a problem for people who need to drive further than the 200 miles or so that most electric cars can travel. It’s also a barrier for the millions of people who don’t have a garage to plug in their cars overnight.
“Do we have what we need? The answer at the moment is, ‘No,’” said Graham Evans, an analyst with IHS Markit.
Take Norway, which has publicly funded charging and generous incentives for electric car buyers. Architect Nils Henningstad drives past 20 to 30 charging stations each day on his 22-mile (35-kilometer) commute to Oslo. He works for the city and can charge his Nissan Leaf at work; his fiancee charges her Tesla SUV at home or at one of the world’s largest Tesla Supercharger stations, 20 miles away.
It’s a very different landscape in New Berlin, Wisconsin, where Jeff Solie relies on the charging system he rigged up in his garage to charge two Tesla sedans and a Volt. Solie and his wife don’t have chargers at their offices, and the nearest Tesla Superchargers are 45 miles (72 kilometers) away.
“If I can’t charge at home, there’s no way for me to have electric cars as my primary source of transportation,” said Solie, who works for the media company E.W. Scripps.
Small percentage of electric vehicles
The uneven distribution of chargers worries many potential electric vehicle owners. It’s one reason electric vehicles make up less than 1 percent of cars on the road.
“Humans worst-case their purchases of automobiles. You have to prove to the consumer that they can drive across the country, even though they probably won’t,” said Pasquale Romano, the CEO of ChargePoint, one of the largest charging station providers in North America and Europe.
Romano says there’s no exact ratio of the number of chargers needed per car. But he says workplaces should have one charger for every 2.5 electric cars and retail stores need one for every 20 electric cars. Highways need one every 50 to 75 miles, he says. That suggests a lot of gaps still need to be filled.
Filling the charging gap
Automakers and governments are pushing to fill them. The number of publicly available, global charging spots grew 72 percent to more than 322,000 last year, the International Energy Agency said. Navigant Research expects that to grow to more than 2.2 million by 2026; more than one-third of those will be in China.
Tesla Inc., which figured out years ago that people wouldn’t buy its cars without roadside charging, is doubling its global network of Supercharger stations to 10,000 this year. BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Ford are building 400 fast-charging stations in Europe. Volkswagen is building hundreds of stations across the U.S. as part of its settlement for selling polluting diesel engines. Even oil-rich Dubai, which just got its first Tesla showroom, has more than 50 locations to charge electric cars.
But there are pitfalls. There are different types of charging stations, and no one knows the exact mix drivers will eventually need. A grocery store might spend $5,000 for an AC charge point, which provides a car with 5 to 15 miles of range in 30 minutes. But once most cars get 200 or 300 miles per charge, slow chargers are less necessary. Electric cars with longer range need fast-charging DC chargers along highways, but DC chargers cost $35,000 or more.
That uncertainty makes it difficult to make money setting up chargers, says Lisa Jerram, an associate director with Navigant Research. For at least the next three to five years, she says, deep-pocketed automakers, governments and utilities will be primarily responsible for building charging infrastructure.
There’s also the question of who will meet the needs of apartment dwellers. San Francisco, Shanghai and Vancouver, Canada, are now requiring new homes and apartment buildings to be wired for EV charging.
But without government support, plans for charging stations can falter. In Michigan, a utility’s $15 million plan to install 800 public charging stations was scrapped in April after state officials and ChargePoint objected.
Solie, the electric car owner in Wisconsin, likes Europe’s approach: Governments should set bold targets for electric car sales and let the private sector meet the need.
“If the U.S. were to send up a flare that policy was going to change … investments would become very attractive,” he said.
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In the sports world, repetitive movements and muscle overuse eventually lead to strain and injury.
The consequences of staring down at our phones day in and day out? Text neck. It’s the poor posture that results from your bent head adding tension to your neck and spine.
One Pilates class in New York City — “Pilates for Text Necks” — is tackling this 21st century malady.
“The more and more that people are texting and being on their computers,” said Kimberly Fielding, creator of the class and director of teacher training at Gramercy Pilates NYC. “They’re suffering later on.”
Watch: Got Text Neck? Try Pilates
Havoc for the body
The problem, as she sees it, is that anything that changes the curve of the neck can create havoc for the rest of the body.
“Instead of the cervical spine going inward, the curve can be a little bit different, and it causes nerve pain and herniation and different muscle tension headaches, different things that really can reduce quality of life,” she said.
Fielding created the class after noticing more and more of her clients coming in with forward head posture, wherein the head and neck tended to be stretched forward instead of properly aligned over the spine.
The class uses different exercises to release tension in the neck, shoulders and upper body, while strengthening back and neck muscles.
“It’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s because those muscles a lot times are so weak from being overstretched and being in this other position,” Fielding said.
Start with breathing
The class works with the whole body, incorporating chin tucks, neck stretches and upper and lower body strengthening exercises. Breathing and posture awareness are essential components.
Fielding recommends aiming for a “360-degree expansion” of your ribcage, getting your breath to move up and down your torso, back, middle and front, by breathing in through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.
“The easiest thing that someone can do is to start to breathe, to try to release some of those muscles that are in our back and in our neck,” she said.
Outside of the Pilates studio, there are everyday fixes. Chin tucks (tucking your chin down and back to make a double chin) are one. The action helps bring your neck in alignment with your spine. Fielding recommends doing 10 chin tucks at a time, holding each for 5 seconds.
Then there’s the not-so-cool solution: Holding your phone at eye level like an actor onstage giving Julius Caesar’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech.
“I have a feeling that more and more people are going to be doing this, because we have to save our spine, right?” she said.
‘I have a neck now’
Students report positive results.
“I feel a big difference,” said Yasmin Venable. “I used to carry a lot of tension, especially in my upper arms and have like this, ugh feeling and now I feel like, I have a neck now.”
Skeptics may have their doubts, but texting isn’t going away anytime soon. Not to mention video games, laptops and computers, where text neck positions are often assumed.
With some corrective action, the aches and pains associated with these digital-age habits no longer have to be a pain in the neck.
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There’s no doubt Antarctica is getting warmer. Not only is the ice melting, but native moss covers more of the frozen continent and it’s growing faster, according to British researchers. For people who live on the coasts, it means there will likely be more unwelcome water in their future. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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U.S. stock market indexes posted gains in Friday’s trading, a change in direction after several down days amid tensions between President Donald Trump and North Korea.
In New York, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and the Dow Jones industrial average each advanced about one-tenth of a percentage point, while the Nasdaq composite index rose almost eight-tenths of a percentage point. Earlier, stocks in Paris and London were off 1 percent, while Hong Kong stocks fell 2 percent and Korean shares slid nearly as much.
Global stock prices had been falling for several days, losing nearly $1 trillion in value during angry exchanges between the U.S. and North Korea, which continued Friday.
Investors have reason for concern, according to Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist of IHS Markit. He said the economic consequences of even a conventional conflict would most likely be “horrific” and “devastate” the South Korean economy, hurting that nation’s trading partners, particularly Japan.
In an email exchange with VOA, Biswas called the possibility that North Korea could actually use nuclear weapons a “nightmare but still low probability scenario” and noted there had been prior incidents of rising tensions on the peninsula.
A similar view came from Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network, who wrote, “All parties, including the North Koreans, have substantial incentives to once again cut a deal rather than fight. Based on past crises, there will be a great deal of theater, only to end in some kind of deal.”
He wrote that military action was “unlikely” in the short term, suggesting “worry is overdone at the moment.” But he wrote that military action “is actually very possible in the medium term.”
McMillan wrote that such a conflict could have “dramatic and substantial” impact on many economies because South Korea “is a major trading and manufacturing hub.” That means “disruption there would break supply chains around the world” and might last “for months or years.”
He wrote that rising uncertainty would prompt money to move out of stocks and into less risky investments, which would drive down stock market prices: “Clearly, there are real reasons to try to avoid a war.”
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Children and teenagers have become busier than ever. But neurologists and psychologists say pushing kids to be constantly learning and practicing, even during summer vacation, is not good for them.
Strength vs. weaknesses
Helping children succeed and thrive is one of the issues psychologist Lea Waters has been researching for two decades. In her book, The Strength Switch, she suggests that parents focus on building up their child’s strengths rather than fixing their weaknesses.
“If you’re only focusing on what’s wrong with your child, what’s missing, what needs to be fixed, really the best results you can ever hope for is to take them from weakness to above average. But if you start putting more of your time and attention as a parent on what’s right, amplifying their strength, that’s when they really reach their full potential.”
Waters calls this approach the strength-based parenting. But she cautions that sometimes parents can go overboard trying “to get them extra tutoring, to get them into … every class possible and potentially risking over-structuring their life with the idea that practice equals building the strength. In some senses that’s true, but it’s only partly true.”
The result is often an overcrowded schedule, keeping kids’ brains constantly busy with learning, gathering information and practicing.
“Yes, practice builds up strength, but so does downtime,” she said.
What other experts find
Waters’ book is mainly based on her research in positive psychology, parenting and education at the University of Milbourn, Australia. She also refers to a variety of studies by other researchers.
She cites Deena Weisberg and her colleagues at Columbia University who have studied play curriculum and what happens to a child’s well-being and ability to think when play is deliberately incorporated into the school environment.
“And I love Kathy Hirsh-Pasek’s research at Temple University on not overscheduling your kids. She’s really influenced the way I parent my kids personally,” Waters added.
“I love Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s research. She’s a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. She’s done a lot of work on the idea that our brains have two alternative systems.”
Brain’s default mode
The brain’s two alternative modes or networks are on-task focus and free-form attention.
Researcher Immordino-Yang says the on-task focus is about perceiving one’s environment, watching and paying attention. That happens when you play sports, for example.
“You need to be watching other people on your team, and running fast and coordinating emotions and reacting to the things you’re perceiving,” Immordino-Yang explained. “Then, there is another network that’s extremely important for being able to make sense of what you’re doing. This network seems to be deactivated when people are sort of playing sports and attending to the outside and it’s activated when you’re resting and just daydreaming, thinking about your memories, imagining things that don’t exist here and now. You need both modes of attention in order to function as a person in the world.”
Psychologist Waters says slowing down actually helps kids reach their full potential.
“It’s a little bit like if you have too many programs running on your computer,” Waters said. “Your computer starts to slow down. And when you shut these programs down, the computer speeds up again. It’s very much like that for the child’s brain.”
Goofing off
Waters says machines need to reboot and kids need to goof off.
“What I mean by goofing off is really allowing kids to have some downtime, where they are not focused on any specific task, something that they choose to do like shooting baskets, or doing a creative project, or cooking,” she said. “It’s a project they’re interested in doing that they can do it automatically and get enjoyment from.”
Goofing off doesn’t mean the brain becomes inactive.
“It goes into this default network mode and uses that time to process all the information it had during the day, to integrate the new information,” she said.
Waters hopes parents understand that children don’t have to be busy constantly and, instead, should be given permission to goof off every now and then.
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There’s a word that everybody should learn because in a few years it may be in almost every day use.
According to scientists at Harvard University, advances in research of xenotransplantation, or transplantation of animal organs to humans, promises to bridge the huge gap between the number of human organs available for transplants and the number of patients on waiting lists.
The experiments stem from the fact that humans share a lot of DNA with mammals, specifically pigs. Pig heart valves are already being routinely transplanted into humans, some diabetes patients have transplanted pig pancreas cells and pig skin is often used for treating patients with severe burns.
Combining gene editing technique called CRISPR with cloning, Harvard scientists created piglets that do not harbor viruses harmful to humans. This, they say, may lead to the first direct xenotransplantation within as little as two years.
Such patients would still be required to take anti-rejection drugs so the ultimate goal is to grow pigs with human ready organs that don’t require any medication.
Other scientists express skepticism saying a lot more research is needed before xenotransplantation becomes widely available.
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Rising tensions between the United States and North Korea brought a wave of falling stock prices recently as worried investors moved money out of equities and into the perceived safety of gold, Swiss currency and similar products. At one point, this change of investment strategy cut $1 trillion from the value of global stock markets.
For some perspective on these concerns, VOA’s Jim Randle spoke with IHS Markit’s Rajiv Biswas in Singapore. IHS Markit employs thousands of financial, data, and other experts who track economic issues worldwide. Biswas is the company’s chief economist for APEC. His comments here were edited for brevity and clarity.
Randle: Why do rising nuclear tensions prompt falling stock prices?
Biswas: In the nightmare, but still low-probability scenario in which North Korea were to succeed in using nuclear weapons against South Korea, the devastation of the Korean peninsula would be catastrophic. Global financial markets would also suffer a tremendous shock in the short term, with massive flight to safe haven assets such as gold, USD and CHF. The humanitarian crisis and economic reconstruction of the Korean peninsula after such a nuclear conflict would require large-scale international cooperation led by China, the U.S. and EU, and would likely take over a decade to rebuild the economy.
Even a conventional war would result in considerable destruction to the South Korean economy… and likely result in tremendous casualties in both South and North Korea. The economic consequences … would likely be horrific, and … also result in a temporary shock to global financial markets. The greatest vulnerability would be for the South Korean financial markets and Korean won. Other regional East Asian financial markets would also be vulnerable, particularly Japanese financial markets, with risks of disruption to Northeast Asian regional trade and investment flows and manufacturing supply chains.
The South Korean economy accounts for around 1.9% of world GDP, and a severe drop in South Korean GDP … would have negative effects on key trade partners. Japan is also concerned that North Korea could launch missiles at Japanese targets, particularly… U.S. military bases in Japan. The reconstruction and rebuilding of South Korea’s economy after a major conflict would likely take many years, with significant international support needed to help South Korea with the reconstruction task.
Randle: Why do worried investors seek gold, oil, and Swiss currency?
Biswas: If international investors fear that the probability of a military conflict on the Korean peninsula is rising, they will likely reduce their exposure to global growth assets, such as Asian equities and Asian currencies… as they fear that the world economy and Asian countries near North Korea could suffer economic dislocation and trade disruption in the event of a conflict.
In times of geopolitical crisis, the traditional safe haven assets for global investors are gold, U.S. dollars, U.S. Treasuries and Swiss francs, as these are very stable, internationally traded liquid assets. These safe haven assets tend to rise in value when investors fear that geopolitical crises could weaken global growth prospects as investors switch their investments out of global equities and emerging market currencies into the safe haven assets.
Randle: Are U.S. stocks ripe for a fall?
Biswas: While geopolitical risks due to escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula have been reflected in some modest declines in some international equity markets in recent days, there has been many previous episodes of rising military tensions on the Korean peninsula. Global investors have previously shown considerable resilience to earlier bouts of geopolitical tensions on the Korean peninsula, such as North Korea’s sinking of the South Korean navy warship Cheonan and the North Korean artillery shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island in 2010
During 2017 to date, the U.S. equity market has been driven by a wide range of positive factors, including sustained U.S. economic growth momentum, planned corporate tax cuts by the Trump administration, moderate inflation pressures and positive U.S. corporate earnings growth prospects, so geopolitical risks from North Korea are not the only factor impacting on the U.S. equity market outlook.
Randle: Even if actual hostilities don’t break out, could these nuke worries be enough, in theory, to spark a sharp drop in financial markets?
Biswas: “The canary in the coal mine that will signal rising international financial markets’ risk aversion [worry] is likely to be South Korean asset classes. The South Korean stock market and the Korean won are likely to be most vulnerable to declines in response to rising international investor concerns that military tensions are escalating further. One measure of financial risk are the South Korean sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads, with IHS Markit data indicating that South Korean CDS spreads widened in July following North Korea’s ICBM tests, and spiked up further this week following North Korea’s threat to attack Guam. So far, these widening spreads only signal a moderate increase in financial markets perceptions of geopolitical risks on the Korean peninsula, but a sharp further widening of the South Korean sovereign CDS spread would be a clear signal of rising investor anxiety.”
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U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla is close to testing a long-haul self-driving electric truck that could drive in convoys following a lead vehicle.
The company is reportedly also in contact with Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles about the possibility of testing the truck on the state’s roads.
Earlier this year Tesla’s founder Elon Musk announced that a new long-haul truck would be revealed in September but did not mention plans to make it self-driving.
Long-haul trucks on interstate highways often drive at relatively constant speeds with little or no intersections which makes autonomous driving easier to achieve.
Several large truck manufacturers, such as Volvo and Mercedes, as well as Silicon Valley companies have been working on the so-called ‘platooning’ technology that will enable long-range trucks to drive in formation, with only the lead vehicle having a human driver.
But even if the tech gets perfected, automakers are still struggling with the current limitations of electronic vehicles, namely their limited range per charge.
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Google’s workforce needs to “represent the world in totality,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, at an international girls coding competition held on the company’s campus here Thursday night.
His comments come as the search engine giant grapples with a high profile internal debate over the number and influence of its female employees. Last year, the company reported that women represent just 31 percent of Google’s workforce and held 24 percent of leadership roles. Several initiatives are underway to boost those numbers, but those efforts are now a focus of some criticism.
On Monday, the company fired James Damore, a male engineer, who wrote about the role of women in tech and criticized the company’s efforts to bring more women into its workforce.
This week, the author of the memo filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The company canceled an employee town hall meeting because of online harassment prior to the meeting, according to reports.
But the coding competition, Technovation, provided an apt backdrop for Pichai’s comments.
With girls waving their country flags and pitching their products, Pichai appeared to address the controversy without speaking about it directly.
“I want you to know there’s a place for you in this industry,” Pichai said. “There’s a place for you at Google. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You belong here, and we need you.”
The girls had competed for months – often teaching themselves to code – to make it to the final round in Mountain View, Calif. They learned how to test their products in the market and make their pitches in English.
Winners
A team from Kazakhstan won the senior round for their mobile app QamCare, which helps users keep track of each other in case of an emergency. They will receive $15,000.
Five runner-up senior teams from Kenya, Armenia, India and Kazakhstan will receive $10,000 each.
In the junior division, a team from Hong Kong won for Dementia Care Companion app. It uses games and cues to help people with dementia and their families stay connected. They will receive $10,000.
Runner-up teams from Cambodia, India, Canada and the U.S. will receive $5,000 each.
In the eight years of the competition, 15,000 girls from more than 100 nations have completed the program, said Tara Chklovski, founder and chief executive of Iridescent, the non-profit organization behind the event.
“The growing scale is exciting,” she said. “Many of these girls go on to win startup competitions, go to major in computer science. They get featured in national press. They get invited by heads of state.”
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Israel has been known as the land of milk and honey since Biblical times – but the land of single malt whiskey? One appropriately named distillery is trying to turn Israel into a whiskey powerhouse.
Smooth, honey-brown whiskey is not the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Israel. However, at the Milk and Honey Distillery, rows of casks proudly stamped “Tel Aviv” hold liters of the stuff.
The country’s first whiskey distillery is preparing to release Israel’s first single malt whiskey.
“It’s a young whiskey,” said Eitan Attir, the distillery’s CEO.
Attir says the brew is aged for three years and two months in virgin oak and old bourbon barrels at the company’s renovated former bakery in a rugged industrial area of south Tel Aviv.
“It’s complex for its age,” he said. “The taste feels like more than three years, more like seven or eight and again the story is much more important in this case. This is the first ever single malt whiskey that any distillery has released from Israel.”
Although wine has been produced in the Holy Land for millennia, and modern Israeli wines have gained international renown in recent years, whiskey production is new to the country.
Milk and Honey was founded in 2013 and began distilling small experimental batches of whiskey a year later. One hundred bottles from their first cask of Single Malt are set to be sold at an online auction starting August 11.
Whiskey is universally acceptable for religious Jews to consume, Attir says, and Milk and Honey’s drink is “ultra-kosher.”
“We don’t work on Saturday, we don’t work on Yom Kippur or Passover,” he said. “And we want to symbolize our being Jewish or Israeli and then we called it the Milk and Honey Distillery.”
Warmer climate more amenable
The single malt was made in Israel from start to finish, according to the company’s website, though the ingredients, barrels and equipment were imported from the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere. The warmer climate in Israel allows for a speedier aging process in the barrel than whiskey made in colder climates, according to Ran Latovicz, an Israeli whiskey connoisseur and bar owner.
“In colder climates like Scotland or Ireland, whiskey usually ages for about seven to 10 to 12 years before it’s even bottled because [it is] just the way, you know, it gets to its full potential,” he said.
The distillery believes it is well positioned to ride a wave of growing international interest in new world whiskeys, like rising stars from Taiwan or India, and hopes this initial offering whets the appetites of aficionados everywhere.
“There’s a huge demand nowadays for whiskey from other places around the world – new world whiskey. There’s more than 70 countries now with a minimum of one distillery and one of them is Israel,” Attir said.
Gal Kalkshtein, Milk and Honey’s founder and owner, said he hopes that once the whiskey starts getting shipped abroad in 2019, it will create a buzz for Israeli whiskies.
“We want to be recognized for our quality, not the gimmick,” he said.
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Researchers in the United States have unveiled a prototype of a battery-free mobile phone using technology they hope will eventually be integrated into mass-market products. The phone is the work of a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and operates by harvesting tiny amounts of power from radio signals, known as radio frequency or RF waves. VOA’s George Putic has details in this report by Kevin Enochs.
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As the Trump administration reviews a government report that contradicts its views on climate change, another report confirms that humans have pushed the planet to record-setting temperatures. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
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Four U.S. Senate Republicans from oil-refining states Thursday urged the Trump administration not to block oil shipments from Venezuela as part of U.S. sanctions against the country, saying it could raise costs for U.S. fuel consumers.
The United States sanctioned President Nicolas Maduro and other Venezuelan officials after Maduro established a constituent assembly run by his Socialist Party loyalists and cracked down on widespread opposition. It has not placed sanctions on the OPEC member’s oil industry.
Four senators
Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker of Mississippi said in the letter, which was seen by Reuters, that unilaterally blocking oil exports could harm the U.S. economy and the Venezuelan people.
The United States imports about 740,000 barrels per day of oil from Venezuela.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, which was addressed to President Donald Trump.
“We believe it is critical to consider the role the U.S. energy industry and refining sector play in our economic and national security interest,” the senators wrote. “Blockading imports could inflict great harm on this industry and burden U.S. taxpayers with the cost.”
Effects on Venezuela
The senators said sanctions on shipments of Venezuelan oil to the United States could also increase the likelihood of a disorderly default by Venezuela, given the oil business is its main source of revenue. Creditors could then seize Venezuelan oil assets and cut off the government’s remaining sources of financing.
They also noted that such sanctions could expand the interests of China and Russia in Venezuela’s oil business. Both countries have invested in Venezuela for years.
Sources have said the United States could use heavy crude from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve held in caverns along the Gulf Coast, to relieve any short-term supply pressure if Venezuela’s shipments were blocked. Nearly 680 million barrels of oil are in reserve.
A drilling boom in the United States has allowed the government to store more oil than it needs to meet international spare supply agreements.
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Arctic fjords that hid Soviet nuclear-powered submarines during the Cold War are now being used as a weapon in the sanctions war with Europe – to rear fish that Russia can no longer import.
Three years ago, Russia banned food imports from the West in response to a series of Western sanctions that aimed to punish Moscow for its role in the Ukraine crisis, including its annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
Trout and salmon, grown specially for Russia’s vast market at farms in Norway next door, were among the first victims of the sanctions war.
Moscow’s ban on the largest exporter of red fish to Russia led to a sharp hike in prices, while also offering lucrative prospects for Russian fish farmers.
In the Murmansk region in Russia’s northwest, where the rocky coastline of the Ura Bay still features deserted Soviet-era bases and top secret berths for today’s submarine fleet, huge fish farming cages are now becoming part of the landscape.
Thousands of adult trout and salmon swarm inside the open-sea cages as workers toss in generous portions of high-calorie feed.
The cages belong to Russian Aquaculture which farms salmon and trout in the Barents Sea off Murmansk and in Russia’s northern Karelia region.
When they mature, the fish are loaded onto special ships and, still alive, are brought to a Murmansk factory for processing.
Here the fish are either deep frozen or turned into filets and steaks.
Russian Aquaculture reared fish before the Ukraine crisis but under a different name. Once the sanctions were introduced, it increased production to fill the gap in the market previously occupied by Norwegian imports.
The company’s drive to increase output hit difficulties in 2015 when many of its fish succumbed to diseases. It says it has now overcome those problems, and is pushing hard again to produce more fish.
Over the next five to 10 years, Russian Aquaculture aims to ramp up its output to produce 25,000-30,000 tons of fish per year. In the first half of this year, the company produced 8,400 tons of fish.
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Climate change is affecting the timing of river floods across Europe, and societies may have to adapt to avoid future economic and environmental harm, scientists said Thursday.
River floods are among the costliest natural disasters worldwide, causing annual damage of more than $100 billion. They affect millions of people each year because many towns and cities are built along rivers.
Examining flood data across 50 years, researchers found significant shifts in timing along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe from 1960 to 2010.
According to a paper published in the journal Science, half of the measurement stations from England to Portugal showed floods were occurring on average at least 15 days earlier by 2010 compared with a half century earlier.
In northeastern Europe, earlier snowmelts also brought river floods forward by at least eight days over the 50 years, while areas around the North Sea are now seeing floods happen more than a week later than in 1960.
“If the trends in flood timing continue, considerable economic and environmental consequences may arise, because societies and ecosystems have adapted” to the average timing of floods, the authors concluded.
Farming, water provision
They cited possible harm to farming around the North Sea from later winter floods that leave the ground softer going into spring. Water utility companies in northeastern Europe may need to begin filling reservoirs with the earlier water surges rather than waiting for later flooding to ensure sufficient supply for hydropower plants and irrigation, they said.
The study’s authors, led by Guenter Bloeschl of Vienna’s Technical University, cautioned that the precise mechanism by which flood patterns change is complex and still needs to be fully understood.
While data on the timing of floods showed a clearer link with climate change than past studies that looked into flood severity, the researchers noted that several factors affect the timing of floods — including the amount of rainfall, the nature of the soil, upriver snowmelt and land use. Not all the shifts are necessarily caused by man-made global warming, they said.
Bloeschl said the researchers would try to use their findings to predict future changes in the timing of seasonal floods.
“We really expect these trends to increase,” he said.
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Artificial intelligence robots are turbocharging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The condition attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure.
There are only two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally, and there is no cure.
“Many doctors call it the worst disease in medicine, and the unmet need is huge,” said Richard Mead of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, who has found artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up his work.
Such robots — complex software run through powerful computers — work as tireless and unbiased super-researchers.
They analyze huge chemical, biological and medical databases, alongside reams of scientific papers, far quicker than humanly possible, throwing up new biological targets and potential drugs.
Cell deaths prevented
One candidate proposed by AI machines recently produced promising results in preventing the death of motor neurone cells and delaying disease onset in preclinical tests in Sheffield.
Mead, who aims to present the work at a medical meeting in December, is now assessing plans for clinical trials.
He and his team in northern England are not the only ones waking up to the ability of AI to elucidate the complexities of ALS.
In Arizona, the Barrow Neurological Institute last December found five new genes linked to ALS by using IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Without the machine, researchers estimate the discovery would have taken years rather than only a few months.
Mead believes ALS is ripe for AI and machine-learning because of the rapid expansion in genetic information about the condition and the fact there are good test-tube and animal models with which to evaluate drug candidates.
That is good news for ALS patients seeking better treatment options. Famous sufferers include Gehrig, the 1923-39 New York Yankees baseball player; actor and playwright Sam Shepard, who died last month; and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, a rare example of someone living for decades with the condition.
If the research goes on to deliver new medicines, it would mark a notable victory for AI in drug discovery, bolstering the prospects of a growing batch of startup companies focused on the technology.
Those firms are based on the premise that while AI robots won’t replace scientists and clinicians, they should save time and money by finding drug leads several times faster than conventional processes.
British ‘unicorn’
Mead from Sheffield is working with BenevolentAI, one of a handful of British “unicorns” — private companies with a market value above $1 billion, in this case $1.7 billion — which is rapidly expanding operations at its offices in central London.
Others in the field include Scotland’s Exscientia and U.S.-based firms Berg, Numerate, twoXAR, Atomwise and InSilico Medicine — the last of which recently launched a drug discovery platform geared specifically to ALS.
“What we are trying to do is find relationships that will give us new targets in disease,” said Jackie Hunter, a former drug hunter at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) who now heads Benevolent’s pharma business. “We can do things so much more dynamically and be really responsive to what essentially the information is telling us.”
Unlike humans, who may have pet theories, AI scans through data and generates hypotheses in an unbiased way.
Conventional drug discovery remains a hit-and-miss affair, and Hunter believes the 50 percent failure rates seen for experimental compounds in mid- and late-stage clinical trials due to lack of efficacy is unsustainable, forcing a shift to AI.
A key test will come with a study by Benevolent to assess a previously unsuccessful compound from Johnson & Johnson in a new disease area — this time for treating Parkinson’s disease patients with excessive daytime sleepiness.
Big pharmaceutical companies like GSK, Sanofi and Merck are now exploring the potential of AI through deals with startups.
Being careful
They are treading cautiously, given the failure of “high throughput screening” in the early 2000s to improve efficiency by using robots to test millions of compounds. Yet AI’s ability to learn on the job means things may be different this time.
CPR Asset Management fund manager Vafa Ahmadi, for one, believes it is a potential game-changer.
“Using artificial intelligence is going to really accelerate the way we produce much better targeted molecules. It could have a dramatic impact on productivity, which in turn could have a major impact on the valuation of pharmaceutical stocks,” he said.
Drugmakers and startups are not the only ones chasing that value. Technology giants including Microsoft, IBM and Google’s parent Alphabet are also setting up life sciences units to explore drug R&D.
For Benevolent’s Hunter, today’s attempts to find new drugs for ALS and other difficult diseases amount to an important test vehicle for the future of AI, which is already being deployed in other high-tech areas such as autonomous cars.
“The aim is to show that we can deliver in a very difficult and complex area, ” Hunter said. “I believe if you can do it in drug discovery and development, you can show the power of AI anywhere.”
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Venezuelan homemaker Carmen Rondon lives in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, but has spent weeks cooking with firewood due to a chronic shortage of home cooking gas – leaving her hoarse from breathing smoke.
Finding domestic gas cylinders has become increasingly difficult, a problem that oil industry analysts attribute to slumping oil output in the OPEC nation – which is struggling under an unraveling socialist economy.
State oil company PDVSA says the problem is due to difficulties in distributing tanks amid four months of anti-government protests in which its trucks have been attacked.
“I’ve spent three weeks cooking with wood and sometimes the food does not even soften properly, I can’t stand it anymore,” said Rondon, as she lined up to buy a cylinder under the scorching sun in the city of San Felix in southern Venezuela.
More than 100 people were ahead of her in line.
Nine out of 10 Venezuelan homes rely on cylinders for home gas usage, with only 10 percent receiving it via pipelines, according to official figures. The government launched a plan 12 years ago to bring some 5 million households onto the natural gas network but was unable to follow through.
Venezuela’s socialist economy has been in free-fall since the oil price collapse in 2014, creating shortages of everything from diapers to cancer medication and spurring inflation to triple-digit levels.
President Nicolas Maduro says he is the victim of an “economic war” by the opposition, and says violent street protests are part of an effort to overthrow him.
With oil output near 25-year lows, PDVSA has been forced to import liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, which is used to fill natural gas cylinders. Venezuela imported 26,370 barrels per day of LPG in the first half of 2017, according to data seen by Reuters.
PDVSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Long lines to buy cylinders have spurred protests.
Demonstrators in May burned 22 PDVSA trucks in a single day in response to the shortages.
The company says it is now distributing gas cylinders at night and before daybreak due to such protests, which also include roadblocks that prevent free movement of vehicles.
“It’s not fair that a country with so much oil is going through this,” complained Maria Echeverria, a 44-year-old homemaker, who started waiting at dawn to buy a gas cylinder in San Cristobal, near the border with neighboring Colombia.
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