THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Enormous floods have once again engulfed much of South Sudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced …
Read More »The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’
AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like …
Read More »Binance’s Top Crypto Crime Investigator Is Being Detained in Nigeria
Editor's note: Nigerian authorities have charged Binance and two company executives with tax evasion. See more in the update below. In his years as a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan helped to lead landmark investigations that took down cryptocurrency thieves and money launderers, dark-web drug dealers, and even crypto-funded child …
Read More »Wild Animals Should Be Paid for the Benefits They Provide Humanity
We need to understand the value of nature if we want to protect it—and that should include paying ecosystems for keeping us alive, argues Ian Redmond, head of conservation for not-for-profit streaming platform Ecoflix and cofounder of Rebalance Earth, a company that aims to build a sustainable, resilient, and equitable …
Read More »Countries Are Building Giant ‘Sand Motors’ to Protect Their Coasts From Erosion
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known …
Read More »The World's First Malaria Vaccine Program for Children Starts Now
Malaria expert Brian Greenwood had once resigned himself to the possibility that a successful vaccine for the disease might not become available in his lifetime. Now, at 86 years old, the moment he’s spent four decades working toward has arrived. “It’s been a long journey with many ups and downs,” …
Read More »New Malaria Vaccines Offer a Real Shot at Fighting the Disease
The world at last has a public health tool it has been seeking for more than a century: a reliable vaccine against malaria that can protect at least two-thirds of the children who receive it from developing the deadly disease. In fact, in an embarrassment of riches, the world now …
Read More »High Blood Pressure Is the World’s Biggest Killer. Now There’s a Plan to Tackle It
The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now up to 1.3 billion people. High blood pressure might …
Read More »A Global Surge in Cholera Outbreaks May Be Fueled by Climate Change
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In early 2022, nearly 200,000 Malawians were displaced after two tropical storms struck the southeastern part of Africa barely a month apart. Sixty-four people died. Amid an already heavy rainy season, the storms Ana and Gombe …
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