The construction industry is finding new uses for artificial intelligence. In a multi-story building project in the northwestern U.S. city of Seattle, autonomous robots are tasked with documenting progress and detecting potential hazards. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya has the story.
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Day: July 29, 2024
Bangkok — Millions of lives could be put at risk unless urgent action is taken to curb the spread of drug-resistant malaria in Africa, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.
The paper says the parasite that causes malaria is showing signs of resistance to artemisinin, the main drug used to fight the disease, in several east African countries.
“Mutations indicating artemisinin-resistance have been found in more than 10% of malaria infected individuals in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania,” according to the report.
Artemisinin Combination Therapies, or ACTs, have been the cornerstone of malaria treatment in recent years — but there are worrying signs that they are becoming less effective, says report co-author Lorenz von Seidlein of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok.
“We have increasing reports from eastern Africa saying that they have documented resistance against the first line treatments against malaria,” he says. “The first line treatments are artemisinin combination therapy – that has been used for the last 20 years and has worked excellently well. And it’s now not working quite as well as it used to do.”
It’s estimated that over one thousand children die every day from malaria in Africa. The World Health Organization estimates that the global death toll from malaria in 2022 — the most recent figures available — was 608,000.
Past lessons
Before artemisinin therapies were developed, chloroquine was the medicine most used to treat malaria. The report authors say that in the 1990s and early 2000s, signs that the malaria parasite was developing resistance to chloroquine were widely ignored.
“When chloroquine resistance slowly sneaked into Africa there was a whole wave of childhood mortality followed by it. So really, a large number of children — probably in the millions — died because chloroquine didn’t work as well as it used to do. And now we see these first signs that something similar is happening with the ACTs. And that is of course very worrying,” von Seidlein says.
Urgent action
The report authors urge policymakers and global funding bodies to act now to prevent artemisinin resistance taking hold.
Their recommendations include combining artemisinin drugs with other medicines.
“Combining an artemisinin derivative drug with two partner drugs in triple artemisinin combination therapies [TACTs] is the simplest, most affordable, readily implementable, and sustainable approach to counter artemisinin resistance,” the report says.
The authors also call for the rollout of new, more effective insecticides and mosquito nets; better training of community health workers; the rapid deployment of new malaria vaccines; and better monitoring of parasite mutations.
Southeast Asia
Many of these methods were used to halt the spread of artemisinin resistance in south-east Asia since 2014, notes von Seidlein.
“Ultimately, there was an understanding that this could be a major health emergency globally and so there were a lot of investments from funders for the from high-income countries towards these countries in the Greater Mekong sub-region to stop the spread of artemisinin resistant parasites,” he says.
The report says that sense of urgency must now be applied to tackling artemisinin resistance in Africa.
“We ask funders, specifically the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria [GFATM] and the U.S. Government’s President’s Malaria Initiative, to be visionary and to step up funding for malaria control and elimination programs to contain the spread of artemisinin resistance in Africa — as they have done effectively in Southeast Asia since 2014,” says report co-author Ntuli Kapologwe, the director of preventive services at Tanzania’s Ministry of Health.
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The malaria parasite is showing signs of resistance to artemisinin, the main drug used to fight the disease, in parts of Africa. A new report warns of potentially millions more deaths without immediate health policy changes. Henry Ridgwell has more from Bangkok.
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Midyat, Turkey — Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century before Jesus Christ.
Archaeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020.
Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120 meters of tunnel carved out of the rock.
But that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000-square-metre area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’s southern Anatolia region.
“Maybe even in the world,” said Midyat conservation director Mervan Yavuz who oversaw the excavation.
“To protect themselves from the climate, enemies, predators and diseases, people took refuge in these caves which they turned into an actual city,” Yavuz added.
The art historian traces the city’s ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC.
At its height in the seventh century BC, the empire stretched from The Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west.
Referred to as Matiate in that period, the city’s original entrance required people to bend in half and squeeze themselves into a circular opening.
It was this entrance that first gave the Midyat municipality an inkling of its subterranean counterpart’s existence.
“We actually suspected that it existed,” Yavuz recounted as he walked through the cave’s gloom.
“In the 1970s, the ground collapsed and a construction machine fell down. But at the time we didn’t try to find out more, we just strengthened and closed up the hole.”
A hiding place underground
The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world.
Many major empires conquered or passed through these lands, which may have given those living around Matiate a reason to take refuge underground.
“Before the arrival of the Arabs, these lands were fiercely disputed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and then the Byzantines,” said Ekrem Akman, a historian at the nearby University of Mardin.
Yavuz noted that “Christians from the Hatay region, fleeing from the persecution of the Roman Empire… built monasteries in the mountains to avoid their attacks”.
He suspects that Jews and Christians may have used Matiate as a hiding place to practice their then-banned religions underground.
He pointed to the inscrutable stylized carvings — a horse, an eight-point star, a hand, trees — which adorn the walls, as well as a stone slab on the floor of one room that may have been used for celebrations or for sacrifices.
As a result of the city’s long continuous occupation, he said it was “difficult to pinpoint” exactly what at the site can be attributed to which period or group.
But “pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, all these believers contributed to the underground city of Matiate,” Yavuz said.
Centuries of invasions
Even after the threat of centuries of invasions had passed, the caves stayed in use, said curator Gani Tarkan.
He used to work as a director at the Mardin Museum, where household items, bronzes and potteries recovered from the caves are on display.
“People continued to use this place as a living space,” Tarkan said.
“Some rooms were used as catacombs, others as storage space,” he added.
Excavation leader Yavuz pointed to a series of round holes dug to hold wine-filled amphorae vessels in the gloomy cool, out of the glaring sunlight above.
To this day, the Mardin region’s Orthodox Christian community maintains that old tradition of wine production.
Turkey is also famous for its ancient cave villages in Cappadocia in the center of the country.
But while Cappadocia’s underground cities are built with rooms vertically stacked on top of each other, Matiate spreads out horizontally, Tarkan explained.
The municipality of Midyat, which funds the works, plans to continue the excavation until the site can be opened to the public.
It hopes the site will prove a popular tourist attraction and attract visitors to the city of 120,000.
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GALAPAGOS ISLANDS, Ecuador — Warm morning light reflects from the remains of a natural rock arch near Darwin Island, one of the most remote islands in the Galapagos. In clear, deep blue water, thousands of creatures — fish, hammerhead sharks, marine iguanas — move in search of food.
The 2021 collapse of Darwin’s Arch, named for the famed British naturalist behind the theory of evolution, came from natural erosion. But its demise underscored the fragility of a far-flung archipelago that’s coming under increased pressure both from climate change and invasive species.
Warming oceans affect the food sources of many of the seagoing animals in the Galapagos. Marine iguanas — one of many species that are endemic, or unique, to the Galapagos — have a harder time finding the red and green algae they prefer. Sea turtles struggle to nest in warmer temperatures. Raising young gets harder as water warms and fewer nutrients are available.
While the Galapagos are known for a great multitude of species, their numbers aren’t unlimited.
“We have something of everything here – that’s why people say the Galapagos is so diverse – but we have a small number of each thing,” said Natasha Cabezas, a naturalist guide.
The Galapagos have always been sensitive to changes in ocean temperature. The archipelago itself is located where major ocean currents converge — cool from the south, warm from the north, and a cold upwelling current from the west. Then there’s El Nino, the periodic and natural Pacific Ocean warming that affects weather worldwide.
While temperatures vary depending on the season and other naturally-occurring climate events, ocean temperatures have been rising because of human-caused climate change as oceans absorb the vast majority of excess heat in the atmosphere. The ocean experienced its warmest decade since at least the 1800s in the last 10 years, and 2023 was the ocean’s warmest year on record.
Early June brings winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Cromwell current brings whale sharks, hammerheads, and massive sunfish to the surface. It also provides nutrients for penguins, marine iguanas and sea lions in search of food. As more of those animals make themselves known this season, scientists are tracking how they fared in the warming of the past year’s El Nino.
El Nino can bring food shortages for some species like marine iguanas and sea turtles, as the warmer ocean means dwindling food sources. Scientists observing the species have noted a significant decline in population numbers during El Nino events.
Marine iguanas swim like snakes through the water from rock to rock as waves crash against the shore of Fernandina Island. They latch themselves onto the undersea rocks to feed on algae growing there, while sea lions spin around them like puppies looking for someone to play with.
The iguanas were “one of the most affected species from El Niño last year and right now they are still recovering,” said Galapagos Conservancy Director Jorge Carrión.
As rising ocean temperatures threaten aquatic or seagoing life, on land there’s a different problem. Feral animals — cats, dogs, pigs, goats and cattle, none of them native — are threatening the unique species of the islands.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are abandoning the dogs and cats they wanted to keep them company, Cabezas said.
“If you don’t take care of them they become a problem and now it’s a shame to see dogs everywhere. We have a big problem right now I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said.
The non-native animals are a special threat to the giant tortoises closely associated with the Galapagos. The tortoises declined dramatically in the 19th century due to hunting and poaching, and authorities have worked to protect them from humans. It’s been illegal to kill a giant tortoise since 1933.
“In one night, a feral pig can destroy all nesting sites in an area,” Carrión said. Park rangers try to visit areas with nesting sites once a day, and kill pigs when they find them. But the pigs are elusive, Carrion said.
Feral cats feed on marine iguana hatchings, and both pigs and cats compete for food with the tortoises.
If invasive species and warming oceans weren’t enough, there’s the plastic that is a widespread problem in the world’s oceans. One recent study reported microplastics in the bellies of Galapagos penguins.
“There are no animals in the Galapagos that do not have microplastics in their food,” Carrión said.
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NEW YORK — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel “The Country Girls” before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93.
O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.
“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”
O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s taboos on religion, sex and gender. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution. A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.”
O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” became one of Ireland’s most polarizing works of fiction in memory. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women — Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”
Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s home town of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was already becoming estranged.
O’Brien would be recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners” named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde among others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson and befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”
O’Brien’s other books included the novels “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a woman’s sexual liberation that was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father, and autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. Her most recent work, “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Harem, came out in 2019.
Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, quite likely out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on the author’s imagination, the force of her regrets made her a lifelong muse and a near stand-in Ireland itself, “the cupboard with all things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”
By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy, Thackeray and O’Connor among others in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since sneaking out to the nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a biography of James Joyce and learned that “Portrait Of An Artist As a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”
“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.
“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”
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New York — A manipulated video that mimics the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away.
The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody.
The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic president nominee, released last week launching her campaign. But the video swaps out the voice-over audio with another voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.
“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate,” the voice says in the video. It claims Harris is a “diversity hire” because she is a woman and a person of color, and it says she doesn’t know “the first thing about running the country.” The video retains “Harris for President” branding. It also adds in some authentic past clips of Harris.
Mia Ehrenberg, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in an email to The Associated Press: “We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
The widely shared video is an example of how lifelike AI-generated images, videos or audio clips have been utilized both to poke fun and to mislead about politics as the United States draws closer to the presidential election. It exposes how, as high-quality AI tools have become far more accessible, there remains a lack of significant federal action so far to regulate their use, leaving rules guiding AI in politics largely to states and social media platforms.
The video also raises questions about how to best handle content that blurs the lines of what is considered an appropriate use of AI, particularly if it falls into the category of satire.
The original user who posted the video, a YouTuber known as Mr Reagan, has disclosed both on YouTube and on X that the manipulated video is a parody. But Musk’s post, which has been viewed more than 123 million times, according to the platform, only includes the caption “This is amazing” with a laughing emoji.
X users who are familiar with the platform may know to click through Musk’s post to the original user’s post, where the disclosure is visible. Musk’s caption does not direct them to do so.
While some participants in X’s “community note” feature to add context to posts have suggested labeling Musk’s post, no such label had been added to it as of Sunday afternoon. Some users online questioned whether his post might violate X’s policies, which say users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
The policy has an exception for memes and satire as long as they do not cause “significant confusion about the authenticity of the media.”
Musk endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, earlier this month. Neither Mr Reagan nor Musk immediately responded to emailed requests for comment Sunday.
Two experts who specialize in AI-generated media reviewed the fake ad’s audio and confirmed that much of it was generated using AI technology.
One of them, University of California, Berkeley, digital forensics expert Hany Farid, said the video shows the power of generative AI and deepfakes.
“The AI-generated voice is very good,” he said in an email. “Even though most people won’t believe it is VP Harris’ voice, the video is that much more powerful when the words are in her voice.”
He said generative AI companies that make voice-cloning tools and other AI tools available to the public should do better to ensure their services are not used in ways that could harm people or democracy.
Rob Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, disagreed with Farid, saying he thought many people would be fooled by the video.
“I don’t think that’s obviously a joke,” Weissman said in an interview. “I’m certain that most people looking at it don’t assume it’s a joke. The quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. And precisely because it feeds into preexisting themes that have circulated around her, most people will believe it to be real.”
Weissman, whose organization has advocated for Congress, federal agencies and states to regulate generative AI, said the video is “the kind of thing that we’ve been warning about.”
Other generative AI deepfakes in both the U.S. and elsewhere would have tried to influence voters with misinformation, humor or both.
In Slovakia in 2023, fake audio clips impersonated a candidate discussing plans to rig an election and raise the price of beer days before the vote. In Louisiana in 2022, a political action committee’s satirical ad superimposed a Louisiana mayoral candidate’s face onto an actor portraying him as an underachieving high school student.
Congress has yet to pass legislation on AI in politics, and federal agencies have only taken limited steps, leaving most existing U.S. regulation to the states. More than one-third of states have created their own laws regulating the use of AI in campaigns and elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Beyond X, other social media companies also have created policies regarding synthetic and manipulated media shared on their platforms. Users on the video platform YouTube, for example, must reveal whether they have used generative artificial intelligence to create videos or face suspension.
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CHADDS FORD, Pa. — At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a cemetery destroyed by war, with charred coffins ripped from broken concrete vaults and arched marble tombstones flattened by a bomb blast.
Then, the viewer begin to discern details: the coffins and vaults are actually parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, the apparent tombstones are inscribed with words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic.”
“It looks like a graveyard,” photographer Frank Stewart said.
Stewart’s ghostly photograph of a New Orleans church organ ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina is part of a career retrospective of his decades documenting Black life in America and exploring African and Caribbean cultures.
“Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present,” is on display at the Brandywine Museum of Art through Sept. 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop for the exhibition, which was organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.
“I wanted to talk about the Black church and what influence they had on the culture,” Stewart said of his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. “This organ, the music and everything corresponds. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of churches and the music and the culture.”
Music is elemental to Stewart’s practice. He was the long-time photographer for the Savannah Music Festival, and for 30 years he was the senior staff photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which paired him with artistic director and Grammy-winning musician Wynton Marsalis.
“He’s like my brother,” said Stewart, whose exhibition includes “Stomping the Blues,” a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra off the stage during a world tour of his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields.”
Stewart, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with the likes of musicians Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King.
Describing himself as a child of the “apartheid South,” Stewart has drawn inspiration from photographers such as Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was among Stewart’s instructors at New York’s Cooper Union, where Stewart received a bachelor of fine arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of 1950s Harlem led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes on the 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.”
Cole, a South African photographer, achieved acclaim in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” the first book to inspire Stewart. It chronicled apartheid using photographs he smuggled out of the country. Cole was never able to replicate his early success and fell on hard times before dying at age 49 in New York City. A documentary about him, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“He came to New York and he was homeless in New York, so I would see him on the street and we would talk,” said Stewart, who is quick to draw a distinction between his work and Cole’s.
“I consider myself an artist more than a documentarian,” explained Stewart, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before enrolling at Cooper Union and was a longtime friend and collaborator of artist Romare Bearden.
That’s not to say Stewart doesn’t have journalistic instincts in his blood. He recounts a work history that includes the Chicago Defender, the largest Black-owned daily in the country at the time, and stringing for Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. He looks back less fondly on a short stint of large-format work photographing fine art for brochures and catalogs, an undertaking he described as “tedious.”
Through it all though, Stewart has maintained an artistic approach to his work, looking to combine pattern, color, tone and space in a visually appealing manner while not leaving the viewer searching for the message.
“It has to still be ‘X marks the spot,'” he explained. “It still has to be photographic. It can’t be just abstract.”
Or maybe it can. How else to explain the color and texture seen in “Blue Car, Havana” from 2002?
“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart said in wall text accompanying the photo.
The retrospective shines a light on how Stewart’s work has evolved over time, from early black-and-white photographs to his more recent prints, which feature more color.
“It’s two different languages,” he said. “English would be the black and white. French would be the color.”
“I worked in color the whole time, I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.
While photography can inform people about the world around them, Stewart has noted there is a gulf between the real world and a photograph.
“Reality is a fact, and a photograph is another fact,” he explained. “The map is not the territory. It’s just a map of the territory.”
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