Many of the technological advances in lithium ion batteries that now power many electric vehicles began in a laboratory just outside Chicago’s city limits decades ago. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports on new innovations at Argonne National Laboratory preparing for the next-generation needs of drivers.
Camera: Kane Farabaugh, Mike Burke
Produced by: Kane Farabaugh
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Day: April 26, 2022
Rising seas from climate change are forcing difficult choices for coastal communities around the world. The southern U.S. state of Louisiana plans to spend billions restoring land it has already lost to erosion. But the plan has winners and losers. Video: Steve Baragona, Arturo Martinez
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The United Nations is calling for better management to reduce the risks from rapidly increasing natural disasters largely triggered by climate change. The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has issued its 2022 Global Assessment Report, which prescribes solutions to lessen the threatened risks.
The report warns the world is set to face more frequent and extreme disasters and nations are ill-prepared to tackle the dangers.
It says the number of natural disasters experienced over the last two decades is five times higher than in the previous three decades.
Based on current trends, says Director of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Ricardo Mena, the world will face some 560 disasters per year.
“Disasters have forced over a quarter-of-a-billion people into internal displacement,” said Mena. “So, that is much more than those that have been displaced by conflict and war each year on average between 2010 and 2020.”
Over the last decade, the cost of disasters has amounted to around $170 billion a year. The U.N. report notes the Asia-Pacific region bears the greatest share of economic loss, followed by the African region.
Mena says it is the poorest countries that are most impacted by disasters, forcing the most vulnerable into a spiral of destruction.
But he says that destructive spiral can be stopped if governments adopt better risk reduction policies and management strategies.
“Governments will need to invest more in disaster resilience, strengthening national budgets to protect people, and critical infrastructure,” Mena said. “But they also will have to strengthen efforts to avoid the creation of new risks as a result of risk-line decisions.”
Mena says decisions people make on how they live, build, and invest can create new risks. For example, he says, someone who builds a house in an earthquake-prone area without respecting the building codes is likely to have his house destroyed. A municipality that builds a school in a flood-prone area may see the building washed away.
Making better decisions, Mena says, can lead to fewer disasters.
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Sensor-packed robots are changing how movies and commercials are made. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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The first all-private astronaut team ever flown aboard the International Space Station (ISS) safely splashed down in the Atlantic off Florida’s coast on Monday, concluding a two-week science mission hailed as a landmark in commercialized human spaceflight.
The SpaceX crew capsule carrying the four-man team, led by a retired NASA astronaut who is now vice president of the Texas company behind the mission, Axiom Space, parachuted into the sea after a 16-hour descent from orbit.
The splashdown capped the latest, and most ambitious, in a recent series of rocket-powered expeditions bankrolled by private investment capital and wealthy passengers rather than taxpayer dollars six decades after the dawn of the space age.
The mission’s crew was assembled, equipped and trained entirely at private expense by Axiom, a five-year-old venture based in Houston and headed by NASA’s former ISS program manager. Axiom also has contracted with NASA to build the first commercial addition to and ultimate replacement of the space station.
SpaceX, the launch service founded by Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, supplied the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule that carried Axiom’s team to and from orbit, controlled the flight and handled the splashdown recovery.
NASA, which has encouraged the further commercialization of space travel, furnished the launch site at its Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and assumed responsibility for the Axiom crew while they were aboard the space station. The U.S. space agency’s ISS crew members also pitched in to assist the private astronauts when needed.
The multinational Axiom team was led by Spanish-born retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, the company’s vice president for business development. His second-in-command was Larry Connor, 72, a technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated the mission pilot.
Joining them as “mission specialists” were investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52.
Connor, Stibbe and Pathy flew as customers of Axiom, which charges $50 million to $60 million per seat for such flights, according to Mo Islam, head of research for the investment firm Republic Capital, which holds stakes in both Axiom and SpaceX.
Fiery reentry
The splashdown, carried live by an Axiom-SpaceX webcast, was originally planned for last Wednesday, but the return flight was delayed, and the mission was extended to about a week due to windy weather. The potential costs of such an extension were factored into Axiom’s contracts with NASA and its customers, so none of the parties bore any additional charges, the company said.
The return from orbit followed a reentry plunge through Earth’s atmosphere generating frictional heat that sends temperatures surrounding the outside of the capsule soaring to 1,927 degrees Celsius.
Applause was heard from the SpaceX flight control center in suburban Los Angeles as parachutes billowed open above the capsule in the final stage of its descent — slowing its fall to about 24 kilometers per hour — and again as the craft hit the water off the coast of Jacksonville.
In less than an hour, the heat-scorched Crew Dragon was hoisted onto a recovery ship before the capsule’s side hatch was opened and the four astronauts, garbed in helmeted white-and-black spacesuits, were helped out one by one onto the deck. All were visibly unsteady on their feet from over two weeks spent in a weightless environment.
Each received a quick onboard checkup before they were flown back to Florida for more thorough medical evaluations.
“Everybody looks great and is doing reasonably well,” Axiom operations director Derek Hassmann told a post-splashdown news briefing, describing the astronauts as being “in great spirits.”
‘Low-Earth orbit economy’
Axiom, SpaceX, and NASA have touted the occasion as a milestone in the expansion of privately funded space-based commerce, constituting what industry insiders call the “low-Earth orbit economy,” or “LEO economy” for short.
“We proved that we can prepare the crew in a way that makes them effective and productive in orbit,” Hassmann said. “What it demonstrates to the world is that there is a new avenue to get to low-Earth orbit.”
Launched on April 8, the Axiom team spent 17 days in orbit, 15 of those aboard the space station with the seven regular, government-paid ISS crew members: three American astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts.
The ISS has hosted several wealthy space tourists from time to time over the years.
But the Axiom quartet was the first all-commercial team ever welcomed to the space station as working astronauts, bringing with them 25 science and biomedical experiments to conduct in orbit. The package included research on brain health, cardiac stem cells, cancer and aging, as well as a technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity.
It was the sixth human spaceflight for SpaceX in nearly two years, following four NASA astronaut missions to the ISS and the “Inspiration 4” flight in September that sent an all-private crew into Earth orbit for the first time, though not to the space station.
SpaceX has been hired to fly three more Axiom astronaut missions to ISS over the next two years.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Monday met mixed reactions as observers speculated how digital speech on the service might change under his leadership.
Musk, a prolific Twitter user who has criticized Twitter’s management in tweets, said in the press release Monday announcing the deal that “Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Musk’s takeover of Twitter was applauded by some U.S. conservatives who have alleged that internet firms — including Twitter — promote a liberal political agenda and suppress conservative voices.
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, tweeted that it’s “amazing to watch the Left panic at the prospect of free speech on Twitter.”
But others expressed concern that Musk’s takeover would mean less moderation of hate speech and misinformation on the site.
Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel with Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights organization, told VOA that Twitter doesn’t have a good track record of taking down hateful speech against Muslims.
“We already face threats and regular harassment on Twitter, and a weaker content moderation system will just make that even worse,” she said.
Twitter, with more than 400 million monthly active users, has a smaller audience than Facebook, with 3 billion users, and YouTube, with over 2 billion.
Twitter is primarily used in the U.S. and Western Europe, where it is influential among journalists, political leaders, celebrities and other thought leaders. Because powerful people use Twitter, it has an outsized influence, observers say.
Twitter allows people to post anonymously and is credited with helping marginalized voices around the world speak. Musk has talked recently of wanting to “authenticate all real humans” on the site, raising concerns among digital rights advocates that Twitter will require accounts to be tied to a person’s identity.
Twitter under Musk
Michael Posner, director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said that Musk’s statements about free speech “are not very well developed.”
“We have to hope that once he gets into the driver’s seat, he understands that social media platforms need to be moderated by people who own them and run them,” he told VOA. “A site where content moderation is not taken seriously is going to yield spam, pornography, hate speech and disinformation, and all kinds of things that are not good for society.”
Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank, said Twitter will probably change under the new leadership.
“Musk’s absolutist view of freedom of speech, his unfamiliarity with the challenges that many people face around the world in expressing their political points of view, these two things are going to clash,” he said in an interview with VOA. “And I expect that the Twitter of the future will look quite a bit different and quite a bit less inviting for many people.”
Concentration of power
Evan Greer, director of the digital rights organization Fight for the Future, said Musk’s acquisition exposes another issue: A handful of companies have a monopoly on “what can be seen, heard and done online,” she said.
“If we want a future of free speech, it’s not a future where the richest person on Earth can purchase a platform that millions of people depend on and then change the rules to his liking,” she said in an interview with VOA.
There’s been speculation that under Musk, former President Donald Trump, whom Twitter banned permanently in 2021, could return to the site. But Trump told Fox News prior to the announcement of the deal Monday that while he hoped that Musk would buy Twitter, he would not return to the service. Instead, he will join his own social media site, Truth Social, he said.
For his part, Musk appeared to acknowledge the varied reactions about his new role, tweeting Monday: “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal told employees Monday that he is uncertain of the direction the company will go after Tesla CEO Elon Musk takes over.
Musk reached an agreement Monday to buy Twitter for $44 billion, promising to make the platform more supportive of free speech. The move has raised questions about how far Twitter will go to relax restrictions on users’ speech and led critics to fear new policies would make it easier for people to spread disinformation and hate speech.
Agrawal answered employee questions Monday in a town hall that was heard by Reuters.
The news agency reported that Agrawal told employees, “Once the deal closes, we don’t know which direction the platform will go.” The CEO was answering a question about whether former President Donald Trump would be allowed to rejoin Twitter despite his permanent suspension.
“I believe when we have an opportunity to speak with Elon, it’s a question we should address with him,” Agrawal said.
Twitter banned Trump after the U.S. Capitol was stormed on January 6, 2021, citing a risk of more violence.
Musk has proposed relaxing the type of content restrictions that led Twitter to suspend the former president’s account.
Musk, who is also CEO of rocket developer SpaceX, has said Twitter needs to become a private company so that it can realize its potential for free speech. He has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist.”
Reuters reported that Agrawal deferred many staff questions to Musk, who he said would join Twitter staff for a question-and-answer session at a later date.
Agrawal also told employees there were no plans for layoffs.
Musk said in a securities filing this month that he did not have confidence in Twitter’s management.
He said in a statement Monday that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Some information in this report came from Reuters.