Robots are becoming commonplace in many areas of society — from manufacturing to medicine to our homes. Now, a robot has taken to the stage, in a British play called “Spillikin.” A humanoid robot plays the male companion of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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From: MeNeedIt
In textiles, nothing has the impact of spider silk. These protein strands are stretchy and in some ways as strong as steel but without the weight. Scientists have been making artificial spider silk for years, with varying degree of success. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports some Swedish researchers have found a new way to spin the miracle fiber, and they make it look easy.
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From: MeNeedIt
There’s a bromance brewing between actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds.
The Hollywood stars say they hit it off so well during the filming of their new sci-fi thriller called Life that a genuine friendship has blossomed. The movie, about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station who find an alien life form from Mars, premiered Saturday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.
The Brokeback Mountain and Deadpool stars were mostly all jokes during rounds of press interviews before the film’s premier, answering most questions with a back-and-forth comedy shtick. But they turned serious when asked about the connection formed on set.
‘A lucky thing’
“You do these films and get to work with really amazing people, really talented people and you think ‘oh I’m going to hang out with these people afterward and see them again,’” said Reynolds. “You don’t most of the time because you go on living your life. But with this guy, we’ve stayed friends. That’s a lucky thing. It doesn’t always happen.”
Some of the first signs of the newly forged bond came earlier this week when Reynolds gave high praise to Gyllenhaal on Good Morning America, calling him one of the most interesting actors currently working in Hollywood. Reynolds said Saturday that his co-star is “one the greatest actors of this generation.”
“I loved working with this guy,” he said. “I loved spending time with this guy. It’s not often you get this experience.”
Gyllenhaal was equally complimentary, saying Reynolds’s role last year as a foul-mouthed superhero is exactly what he strives for: a performance so authentic that it would be nearly impossible for another actor to duplicate.
“We sort of grew up in this business together without knowing each other until very recently,” Gyllenhaal said. “It’s hard in a business where … a lot of times we’re pretending to get closer to the truth and to find somebody who you feel is genuine. I feel that way about him, so we’re friends.”
Parallels classic thriller
The movie plot draws some notable parallels to Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, tracking a team of scientists on a spaceship who encounter an alien life form that wreaks havoc. Their discovery — the first evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars — turns out to be a threat not only to the crew but to all life on Earth.
But even with the backdrop of a sci-fi heart pounder, Gyllenhaal says he and Reynolds found some levity throughout the filming.
“This experience of what’s happening right now was consistent to what it felt like while we were shooting,” Gyllenhaal said in between puns served as answers to questions. “We had really scary situations in the movie and scenes that were really tense, but we were laughing constantly and it was so much fun.”
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From: MeNeedIt
One of the kings of American rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry, has died. He was 90.
The legendary African-American musician, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, gave his first performance in high school. Since then, he forged a life that included three years in reform school, 20 months in prison, and decades in the spotlight, pioneering a musical form that has become synonymous with American music.
Charles Edward Anderson Berry, who went by the nickname Chuck, was famous for such 1950s hits as Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen, and Johnny B. Goode. The singles — revolutionary combinations of pop, country music and blues — were dance hits in high school gymnasiums and music clubs across the United States. His musical style helped give birth to the age of the American teenager, all hormones and energy and optimism.
Influence for many musicians
Berry’s hit Maybellene was a rock ’n’ roll treatment of a country song known as Ida Red. Berry wrote in a memoir that his music label, Chess, “couldn’t believe that a … hillbilly song could be written and sung by a black guy.”
His music influenced most of the popular musicians that came after him, including such well-known music legends as the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead. Referring to Berry in the mid-1980s, Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards famously quipped, “I’ve stolen every lick (guitar improvisation) he ever played.”
Born in the Midwest
Berry was born into a middle-class family in Missouri and gave his first performance at Sumner High School, historic in its own right as the first African-American high school west of the Mississippi River, a dividing line that separates the eastern third of the country from the West.
Berry is credited with originating many quirks exclusively associated with the rock ’n’ roll genre, including a rollicking, danceable beat, his famous “duck walk” and a heavy, rhythmic guitar style that he may well have been described in the song Johnny B. Goode: “just like he’s ringin’ a bell.” Legend has it that he developed his duck walk as a means of hiding the wrinkles in the one good suit he had brought on tour.
As for Johnny B. Goode — originally meant to be about a black boy, but changed to “country boy” for wider appeal — countless bands covered it, among them the Beatles, country star Buck Owens and heavy metal band Judas Priest.
Run-ins with the law
Berry’s brushes with the law came early and late. In high school, he was arrested for armed robbery and spent three years in a reformatory, between 1944 and 1947. He emerged to go to work in an automobile factory, but he was playing music publicly with the Johnnie Johnson Trio by 1953. A meeting in Chicago with famed blues musician Muddy Waters led to the release of Maybellene, national fame and a string of hits.
In 1961, Berry got in trouble for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines and served 20 months in prison, a period in his life that friends said changed him forever. In 1979, he served 120 days in prison for tax evasion.
Berry’s music evolved at a time when racism was running high; blacks and whites were segregated into different schools, businesses, churches and public facilities. But his music attracted fans of all ethnicities.
Music for everyone
“I made records for people who would buy them,” he said once. “No color, no ethnic, no political — I don’t want that, never did.”
Despite his troubles with the law and the conditions of the times, Berry rose to the top of his profession.
He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, became one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and was given a Kennedy Center Honors Award in Washington in 2000 for his lifetime of contributions to American cultural life.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced March 16 that Berry’s work will be featured in a new exhibit alongside that of Elvis Presley and other rock ’n’ roll greats, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the music magazine Rolling Stone.
Berry said the musical genres that inspired him were swing and big band, the music of the 1940s. In an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1987, Berry said he originally wanted to play the more traditional musical styles.
“The main guy was Louis Jordan. I wanted to sing like Nat Cole, with lyrics like Louis Jordan, with the swing of Benny Goodman, with Charlie Christian on guitar playing Carl Hogan’s riffs with the soul of Muddy Waters,” he said.
But Berry knew a good thing when he saw it. Married to his wife, Themetta Suggs, since 1948 and with four children to support, Berry embraced the musical style that made his career. In the 1957 hit Rock and Roll Music, Berry sang, “It’s gotta be rock ’n’ roll music, if you wanna dance with me.”
Berry’s final original album, titled Chuck, is expected to be released by Dualtone Music Group later this year.
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From: MeNeedIt
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the meeting of finance ministers of the G20 countries was a success Saturday despite the ministers not reaching agreement on trade protectionism.
“I will leave here confident that my colleagues and I are able to work in partnership to …foster and promote global growth and financial stability,” he said.
Citing President Donald Trump’s commitment to American companies and workers, Mnuchin pushed back on and effectively omitted a ban on protectionism from the joint statement released at the end of the summit.
Mnuchin did, however, say that the United States still believed in free trade.
“We believe in free trade, we’re one of the largest markets in the world, we’re one of the largest trading partners in the world,” Mnuchin said. “Having said that, we want to re-examine certain agreements,” he continued, speaking specifically about NAFTA.
Other world powers present played down any disagreement between the countries.
“It’s not true we are not agreed. It’s completely clear we are not for protectionism,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of host country Germany, told reporters, though he did, without mentioning a country by name, say that “maybe one or the other important member state needs to get a sense of how international cooperation works.”
The G20 is a informal forum on economic cooperation between 19 countries plus the European Union. Representatives from the 19 countries and the EU will meet for a formal summit in July.
From: MeNeedIt
For some medical students, getting a yes or no Friday was more important than finding the right life partner.
Friday was “Match Day,” the annual day when medical students find out which U.S. medical institution has accepted them for a residency program. It is a competition, of sorts: 32,000 training slots are available for 42,000 applicants, according to this year’s data.
A residency, three to five years of practical experience and training in a student’s chosen medical specialty, is the next step after medical school, which in the United States generally means four years of postgraduate university studies.
Of those 42,000 applicants vying for residencies, all but about 6,000 are foreign nationals. And that is where their aspirations could collide with President Donald Trump’s latest executive order regulating immigration to the United States.
‘Extensive upheaval’
The National Residency Match Program (NRMP), a nonprofit group that organizes the matches between students and hospitals, said the new immigration order has had a substantial impact on its program. In its current revised form, the order bans citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S., at least temporarily.
“The consequences of the [January 27] executive order are far-reaching for match applicants, and the upheaval it is causing is extensive,” NRMP’s chair, Dr. Maria Savoia, and CEO Mona Signer said in a joint statement.
“The affected applicants have worked hard for many years to achieve their goal of becoming physicians,” the two medical-education experts said, “and they should not be denied that opportunity because of a blanket policy that does not consider the individual.”
U.S. courts have issued a restraining order preventing enforcement of the travel ban, pending further legal arguments, but NRMP says it is concerned that some immigrants or foreign medical students with valid visas will nevertheless be delayed or rejected at U.S. borders.
Holidays at home are not care-free
In addition, foreign medical students who travel to their home countries during holidays or breaks in their university studies fear they may not be able to return in time to take up their new residencies in the U.S. Such medical programs typically begin each year on July 1.
“U.S. training programs should be able to select applicants based on their excellent character and qualifications, without regard to nationality. Both applicants and programs benefit from an orderly process for entry into graduate medical education,” said Signer, who is a public health specialist, and Savoia. “The executive order disrupts that process very considerably.”
Hospitals and other medical institutions that offer residencies worry that foreign students they choose for the multiyear training programs will be unable to begin their studies on schedule, Signer said.
Medical residencies are sometimes known as internships, or first-year post-graduate studies, because they occur during a fledgling doctor’s first year of practical training alongside or under direct supervision of a fully qualified physician in one of 21 recognized medical specialties.
Is US becoming less welcoming?
Those who administer medical residency programs do not directly choose the candidates they would like to attract. Instead they rank applicants in order of preference. Under those conditions, Signer said, “It seems likely that residency program directors will be reluctant to rank J-1 visa applicants because they may not be able to enter the country to begin training.”
The U.S. State Department’s J-1 visa program offers foreign nationals an opportunity to come to the United States “to teach, study, conduct research, demonstrate special skills or receive on-the-job training for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years,” according to Cultural Vistas, a nonprofit American group that has been organizing international exchange programs since 1963.
The perception that the United States is becoming less welcoming to foreign nationals in the medical professions appears to be having an effect.
Fewer non-U.S. citizen “international medical school graduates,” or IMGs, submitted program choices for this year: 7,284 in 2017 vs. 7,460 in 2016. However, NRMP said more of these candidates (52.4 percent) were matched with institutions – the highest match rate since 2005.
Foreign physicians benefit all Americans
About 1,800 IMGs already enrolled in accredited residency and fellowship programs in the U.S. are impacted by the travel ban, according to Dr. Thomas J. Nasca, CEO of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
“These physicians are providing much needed medical care to a conservatively estimated 900,000 patients in urban, suburban and rural communities across the country annually. They are a valued and welcomed group of colleagues,” he wrote in a statement.
“Many communities, including rural and low-income areas, often have problems attracting physicians to meet their health care needs. To address these gaps in care, IMGs often fill these openings. These physicians are licensed by the same stringent requirements applied to U.S. medical school graduates,” the chief executive officer of the American Medical Association, Dr. James Madara, wrote last month.
“The medical education community must support all international medical graduates and their families during these difficult times,” NRMP’s statement said.
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From: MeNeedIt
Mention New Orleans and most people will immediately associate it with jazz, a genre of music that originated among African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And that distinctly American music can be heard everywhere throughout the famed city – and in most other areas of the state of Louisiana.
The ‘Big Easy’
National parks traveler Mikah Meyer recently visited New Orleans to soak up some of those sounds and learn about the city’s other cultural highlights.
“There’s the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, which basically celebrates the contribution of the culture of New Orleans, to this music that is authentically and originally American…a relatively new genre that is distinctly American,” he said.
“So it’s a bunch of little sites basically all scattered throughout the French Quarter in the older parts of the city that celebrate this heritage.”
Wild wetlands
Just south of the city is the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, named in honor of a French pirate who helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in the final battle of the War of 1812.
Meyer spent time in the wetlands paradise that’s home to an impressive variety of plants and wildlife.
“The Preserve was a really good example of a lot of the sites I had seen throughout the whole Gulf Coast,” Meyer observed. “Everything from the Everglades, northwest up through Tampa, through Pensacola, all the way to New Orleans. It was a good example of that ecosystem that lives in between the ocean and easily habitable land.”
The National Park Service describes the six sites of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve as representing “a treasure trove of south Louisiana’s historical and cultural riches. People from nearly every country, ethnic group, language and religion have come to the lower Mississippi River delta and left traces of their passing.”
Ancient culture
Traces of a prehistoric culture that made the lower Mississippi River Delta home are preserved at Poverty Point National Monument. The 3,400-year-old Native American settlement is now a World Heritage site. Meyer noted the unique geometric design that is considered a masterpiece of engineering.
“It has six lines of slightly raised ground, which they believe is where people lived, and then it has a bunch of different mounds – basically like man-made hills with millions of pounds of dirt.”
Poverty Point, once at the center of a huge trade network, is one of North America’s most important archeological sites.
Creole influence
At the Cane River Creole National Historical Park, the fourth of Louisiana’s national parks, Meyer learned that the state’s culture was not just influenced by the French.
“It’s very heavily influenced by all the people and all the countries and cultures that did trade in New Orleans, so Spanish, British, French… and so this Creole culture that developed out of that melting pot in the melting pot of America is a very unique thing,” he said.
Even though they’re part of the U.S., Meyer says the southern states he has visited so far show just how diverse America can be.
“If someone is looking to understand the unique culture and portion of American History, along with topography, whether it’s from the western edge of the Everglades all the way over to Louisiana, the Gulf Coast offers that chance,” he said.
Meyer invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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From: MeNeedIt
It could be a Hollywood screenplay. Juliana Armelin and her husband Paulo Siqueira decided to radically change their lives in 2010, quitting jobs in Sao Paulo’s financial sector and moving to a farm seven hours away to start growing coffee.
Seven years later, they clinched for a second consecutive year Brazil’s most prestigious coffee award, beating hundreds of established producers in a country that has exported coffee for more than 200 years.
“I would never imagine we could reach this status in such a short period,” Siqueira told Reuters on Friday after the couple received the annual award from Italian roaster Illy.
“I used to say that we don’t have a story on coffee, but only some chapters so far,” said Armelin.
The couple met during college, graduating in engineering from Brazil’s top ranked university, USP. They spent some years together in the United States getting Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Chicago before starting careers in Sao Paulo.
Armelin is a former Mckinsey & Company consultant, while Siqueira held positions as a fund manager at Credit Suisse and boutique investment firm Vector Investimentos.
They ended up in the coffee business due to Armelin’s father, who decided to start producing the beans.
“I helped him in the research and started to like the idea.
We already had thoughts at running something together,” Armelin said.
After studying the possibility, they bought a 210-hectare (518 acres) farm in the municipality of Ibiá in a coffee-producing region known as the Cerrado Mineiro, in Minas Gerais state.
“It was an old cattle ranch, only pasture,” Siqueira recalled. They planted the first trees in 2011, collected the first beans two years later and had their first full harvest in 2015. Within a year, they received the first award.
The couple’s farm is a state-of-the-art facility. The fields are 100 percent irrigated, with a fully mechanized harvest. The washed arabicas are put to dry in raised beds to avoid contact with the soil, which could affect the flavor.
“We studied a lot, talked to a lot of people who knew how to produce high quality coffee and we did everything they said we should,” said Armelin. “Some people used to say that we were nerds that went to coffee production. And we used to say, ‘yes, we are.’”
The Terra Alta farm was chosen for aspects like the plentiful availability of water and its flat terrain to allow for mechanization.
The couple used as much government-backed credit as they could to buy all the equipment. “We have debt for the rest of our lives,” said Armelin, smiling.
The farm today exports 80 percent of its production, which varies from 10,000 to 13,000 60-kg bags per year. Many deals are done directly with gourmet coffee sellers in the United States.
Siquiera said the coffee community in the Cerrado region has always been very receptive, despite their unusual background.
But the couple stops short of recommending their experience to others.
“Even if you have the money, it really is not easy. Growing coffee requires extreme dedication,” Armelin said, adding that she takes care of the financial details while her husband likes to be out in the fields.
But they have no regrets. “We like this a lot. We will probably be coffee growers for the rest of our lives,” she said.
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From: MeNeedIt
Airbnb expects to maintain its rapid growth in Africa this year and double its customer numbers to 1.5 million, its Chief Executive Brian Chesky and regional head told Reuters on Friday.
The number of people using the online room rental service on the continent rose by 143 percent to about 765,000 guests in 2016 from the year before, said Nicola D’Elia, the firm’s Africa and Middle East chief.
“If you just look at 2017, it’s going to double, you will have 1.5 million people at the end of this year,” added D’Elia.
Airbnb CEO Chesky confirmed that the California-based company expected to double African customer numbers this year.
“Certainly that would be the forecast,” he said in an interview in Cape Town, adding: “This is literally just the beginning. It [Africa] is still relatively under-penetrated.”
Chesky said the company had 77,000 homes across Africa – out of its 3 million globally – but that it could easily have “hundreds of thousands” in a continent that’s home to over a billion people.
The 77,000 homes represented an increase of 95 percent from 2015 to 2016, the company said.
South Africa, which was an early adopter of Airbnb, is the top-ranked country in Africa in terms of listings and visitors, who mainly come from the United States, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.
The top five cities in Africa are Cape Town, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Casablanca, although listings are found in diverse locations from St Helena island in the south Atlantic Ocean to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and even a smattering in Somalia.
Chesky, who described Africa as “an incredibly exciting emerging market for travel”, was speaking to Reuters in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township where he put in an appearance to surprise graduates from an Airbnb training program.
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From: MeNeedIt
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it had awarded $100 million to upgrade Flint, Michigan’s drinking water infrastructure to address a crisis that exposed thousands of children to lead poisoning.
The grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will enable the city to “accelerate and expand” its work to replace lead pipes and make other improvements, according to the EPA. Estimates of the upgrade’s cost range from $200 million to $400 million.
Friday’s announcement made the disbursement official. Last year, Congress passed and former president Barack Obama signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to allocate $100 million to aid Flint.
$31.5 million to be paid immediately
The EPA’s state revolving funds, which Congress can allocate to help with cleanup efforts, were one of the few programs that the Trump administration did not slash in its proposed budget for the agency.
“Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure,” said a statement from agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The EPA will make $31.5 million immediately available for lead pipe replacements and upgrades, and Michigan will provide a $20 million required match.
The remaining $68.5 million will come after the city and Michigan complete additional public comment and technical reviews.
“Today we have good news for families in Flint who have already waited far too long for their water system to be fixed,” said a statement from U.S. Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, and Congressman Dan Kildee, all Michigan Democrats.
Flint mayor meets Trump
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, also a Democrat, said the funds would help the city reach its goal of replacing 6,000 pipes this year. She met briefly with President Donald Trump on Wednesday.
In January, 1,700 Flint residents filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Michigan, saying the EPA failed to warn them of the dangers of the toxic water or take steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The plaintiffs seek $722 million in damages.
Midwestern politicians are worried about the elimination in the proposed U.S. budget of funding for an effort to clean up the Great Lakes, from which some states draw their drinking water.
Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014. The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from pipes and into the drinking water.
The city returned to its original water source in October 2015.
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From: MeNeedIt
Beauty and the Beast is a tale for the ages. Maybe the most memorable version of this classic was the iconic 1991 Disney animation. Now, Disney is reviving its animated version rendition with live action heroes, making this Disney’s latest live action fairytale production, but by no means its last. VOA’s Penelope Poulou has more.
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From: MeNeedIt