Growing up on Mount Boutmezguida in southwest Morocco on the edge of the Sahara desert, Khadija Ghouate never imagined that the fog enveloping the nearby peaks would change her life.

For hours every day and often before sunrise, Ghouate and other women from nearby villages would walk 5 km (3 miles) to fetch water from open wells, with girls pulled out of school to help and at risk of violence on the lonely treks.

But with groundwater levels dropping due to overuse, drought and climate change, the challenge to get enough water daily was becoming harder, and almost half of people in the local area sold up and quit rural life after generations for the city.

As the future of the traditional Berber region by Mount Boutmezguida floundered, a mathematician whose family came from the area had a eureka moment gleaned from living overseas – using fog to make water.

Now Ghouate’s village is connected to the world’s largest functioning fog collection project, alleviating the need to collect water that fell mainly on women, and with state-of-the-art equipment setting an example for other projects globally.

“You always had to go to the wells, always be there, mornings, evenings,” said Ghouate, a mother-of-three, as she prepared lunch for her family, showing off the tap in her home.

“But now water has arrived in our house. I like fog a lot.

The project, running since 2015 after nine years of surveys and tests, was founded by the Moroccan non-government organization Dar Si Hmad, which works to promote and preserve local culture, history, and heritage.

It was the brainchild of mathematician and businessman Aissa Derhem whose parents were originally from Mount Boutmezguida where the slopes are covered in mist on average 130 days a year.

Derhem first came across fog collection when he learned of one of the world’s first projects – in Chile’s Atacama Desert – while he living in Canada in the 1980s studying for his PhD.

But it was not until visiting his parents’ village years later that he realized the mountainous location, situated at the edge of the Sahara and about 35 km (22 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, was perfect for fog.

Ideal Location

Mist accumulates in coastal areas where a cold sea current, an anticyclone and a land obstacle, such as a mountain range, combine.

“When the sea water evaporates, the anticyclone … stops it from becoming rain, and when it hits the mountain, that’s where it can be gathered,” Derhem told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, looking out from the top of Mount Boutmezguida besides a small building used as a fog observatory and tool deposit.

“If we look at the planet, we see this happening in all tropical regions … In Chile and Peru in Latin America. The Kalahari desert in Africa. In Western Australia. Around the Thar desert in India and in California,” he listed as examples.

Developed in South America in the 1980s, fog collection projects have since spread globally to countries including Guatemala, Ghana, Eritrea, Nepal and the United States.

In Morocco, Dar Si Hmad has built a system of nets stretching about 870 square metres – about 4.5 tennis courts.

These nets are hung between two poles and when wind pushes the fog through the mesh, water droplets are trapped, condense and fall into a container at the bottom of the unit with pipes connecting the water to reservoirs.

Derhem hopes the success of the Mount Boutmezguida scheme can help other areas in West Africa and in North Africa – where the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says fresh water resources are among the world’s lowest.

Studies show climate change impacting water patterns globally and Derhem said in Morocco levels have dropped to about 500 cubic meters a person a year from about 1,500 cubic meters a person in the 1960s on calculations based on government figures.

Challenges Too

The principles behind fog collection are simple, and throughout nature examples exist of creatures capturing moisture from the air in the most arid conditions, ranging from beetles in the Namib Desert to lizards in the Australian outback.

But creating a water collection project on a large scale comes with challenges, as the research and development, as well as the infrastructure and technology involved in expanding and developing fog collection projects, can be costly.

The project at Mount Boutmezguida, however, has been a trailblazer for other projects due to its equipment, according to its founders.

The original nets used were insufficiently resistant to the high winds and tore but a partnership with the German non-profit Water Foundation allowed Dar Si Hmad to develop a stronger net.

The CloudFisher was described by the WaterFoundation as the first maintance-free fog collector that can withstand wind speeds of up 120 kph with flexible troughs following the movement of the net in the wind.

Now collected water is filtered and combined with underground water before being distributed to villages on the grid with homes paying for water through a pre-paid system.

The initial pilot project served five villages. At present, the 870 square metres of nets installed reach about 140 families – 14 villages – while a second set of nets is being built.

“Fog is like aeroplanes at the start. At the beginning they were only little toys but, with some effort, things have changed … but it needs investment,” said Derhem.

“Along the coast, there is three times as much fog as there is available on Mount Boutmezguida. The government spends millions for water desalination processes. This is something that is worth exploring.”

For with dry wells comes anxiety and risk but also the unraveling of traditional livelihoods and communities.

Mohamed Zabour, president of the local municipality, said more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of the region live without running water in their homes.

Between 2004 and 2014, 2,000 of the 5,000 local residents moved to cities.

“Our region is rich but it needs infrastructure. And water is one of the priorities,” said Zabour.

“If we don’t find a solution in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a catastrophe … It’s going to be like a desert. Empty.”

For Ghouate, the fog scheme has improved village life.

“When we were kids, we didn’t even know what it meant to need water  … Now there is less rain and if I still had to go to the wells, I wouldn’t find much water now,” she said. “Everything is about water, everything. I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”
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Facebook said a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. The bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.

The problem, which Facebook said it has fixed, is the latest privacy scandal for the world’s largest social media company.

It said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to “friends only” or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.

The news follows recent furor over Facebook’s sharing of user data with device makers, including China’s Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm got access to the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Jonathan Mayer, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, said on Twitter that this latest privacy gaffe “looks like a viable Federal Trade Commission/state attorney general deception case.” That’s because the company had promised that the setting users set in their most recent privacy preferences would be maintained for future posts. In this case, this did not happen for several days.

Facebook’s 2011 consent decree with the FTC calls for the company to get “express consent” from users before sharing their information beyond what they established in their privacy settings. Even if the bug was an accident on Facebook’s part, Mayer said in an email that the FTC can bring enforcement action for privacy mistakes.

Facebook, which has 2.2 billion users, says the bug was active from May 18 until May 27. While the company says it stopped the error on May 22, it was not able to change all the posts back to their original privacy parameters until later.

The mistake happened when the company built a new way for people to share “featured items” on their profiles. These items, which include posts and photo albums, are automatically public. In the process of creating this feature, Facebook said it accidentally made the suggested audience for all new posts public.

When people post to Facebook, the service suggests a default distribution for their posts based on past privacy settings. If someone made all posts “friends only” in the past, it will set their next post to “friends only” as well. People can still manually change the privacy level of the posts — anywhere from “public” to “only me” — and this was the case while the bug was active as well.
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High costs of extracting greenhouse gases from thin air could tumble with new technologies that can help to combat climate change, scientists said on Thursday.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based clean energy company, outlined the design of a large industrial plant that it said could capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of between $94 and $232 a ton.

That is well below past estimates of about $600 a ton by the American Physical Society, said David Keith, a Harvard University physics professor and the founder of Carbon Engineering who led the research.

“I hope to show that this as a viable energy industrial technology, not something that is a magic bullet … but something that is completely doable,” he told Reuters of the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Joule.

Carbon Engineering, which has about 40 employees and produces about a ton of carbon dioxide a day from an experimental plant. The technology makes synthetic fuels using only air, water and renewable power.

Keith said an industrial-scale plant could make fuel at a dollar a liter. That would be competitive in California, where low carbon fuel standards to cut pollution from cars and trucks mean high prices.

He said some investors were interested. An industrial plant, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, could capture a million tons of carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to emissions by 250,000 cars.

Other experts welcomed the study as a step to clear up huge uncertainties about the costs of “direct air capture.”

U.N. reports indicate that governments may have to deploy such novel technologies this century to remove carbon from nature and bury it to limit global warming under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“Direct air capture is a politically promising route for carbon dioxide removal,” said Oliver Geden, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

And an air capture plant could be built almost anywhere. It would not threaten farmland, unlike options of planting vast forests which soak up carbon dioxide, he said.

Climeworks, a Swiss company and Carbon Engineering’s main rival, also told Reuters it was hoping to cut its production price to $100 a ton in the next 5-10 years, from about $600 now. It sells carbon dioxide to greenhouses as an airborne fertilizer to grow tomatoes or cucumbers.

Jan Wurzbacher, a founder of Climeworks, said more and more governments are likely to jack up penalties on carbon emissions to limit floods, storms and rising seas in coming years, making the technology more viable.

The World Bank says Sweden has the highest carbon taxes, currently 1,150 Swedish crowns ($133) a ton.
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Google won’t do artificial intelligence work for weapons, the company said Thursday.  

The company will not work on “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” wrote Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, in a blog post.

Google has come under fire in recent months for its contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to use AI for sifting through drone footage. AI is a field of study whereby a computer or technology is able to do things typically associated with human behavior, such as make decisions, plan and learn.

Google and other tech firms have been bringing the advances in AI to fields such as medicine, natural disaster planning, energy, transportation and manufacturing.

But these advances have also led to ethical concerns about the kinds of decisions being made without human input.

“How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come,” Pichai wrote. “As a leader in AI, we feel a special responsibility to get this right.”

Sifting through drone footage

In recent months, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a petition calling for the cancellation of the company’s contract with the Department of Defense as part of the DoD’s Project Maven initiative. They joined other critics in raising alarms that the project could lead to the use of autonomous weapons.

Last week, a Google executive reportedly told employees that the company would not seek to renew its Project Maven contract with the military.  

Kirk Hanson, the executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, which counts Google as a financial supporter, said Google’s contract highlights a larger debate about AI and military applications.

“Until we have trust that those systems will not make mistakes, we’re going to have a lot of doubts about the use of artificial intelligence for autonomous weapons,” Hanson said.

Google will continue some work for the military, Pichai said.

“We want to be clear that while we are not developing AI for use in weapons, we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas,” he said. “These include cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, veterans’ healthcare, and search and rescue.”
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India is the global host of the 2018 World Environment Day. Highlighting its theme “Beat Plastic Pollution,” environmentalists will urge everyone, from those in government, industry as well as ordinary citizens, to reject the so-called ‘single-use plastic’ items which are slowly choking the planet’s waters and the animals that live in them. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Facebook is pushing back against a media report saying that it provided extensive information about its users and their friends to third parties like phone makers.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Facebook struck data-sharing deals with at least 60 device makers, including Apple and Amazon, raising more concerns about what users give up when they use Facebook.

Facebook says it disagrees with reporting by the paper regarding software it rolled out 10 years ago that helped get Facebook on to devices like iPhones. Ime Archibong, vice president of product partnerships, said in blog post that Facebook has maintained tight control over the technology, known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, and that it is not aware of any abuse by the companies that it teamed with.

The Times report says Facebook allowed the companies access to the data of friends of the user without their explicit consent, a practice that landed the company in the crosshairs of Congress during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Some device makers, according to The Times, could get personal information from those friends even though they were under the impression that they had barred any sharing if their data.

Archibong said that the companies it partnered with had signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any purpose other than to recreate Facebook-like experiences. And friends’ information was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends, he said.

The APIs now in question, according to Archibong, are very different from those used by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica in light of allegations that it had improperly harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts and used the material in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. Cambridge Analytica has since been dissolved.

Facebook announced in April that it was winding down access to the device-integrated APIs because fewer people rely on them today. To date, Facebook has ended 22 such partnerships with technology companies.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress in April to answer questions about data the company provided to third parties about their users. Late last month, he testified before European Union lawmakers, where he apologized for the way the social network has been used to produce fake news, interfere in elections and sweep up people’s personal data.

Shares slipped less than 1 percent at the opening bell Monday.

 
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An accident, a stroke, or a disease can leave someone paralyzed and unable to walk. That happens to more than 15 million people around the world each year.

But new technological advances and physical therapy could help some of them walk again.  

Among the most promising is the use of robotic exoskeletons, like one made by Ekso Bionics. It looks a bit like a backpack that straps on the user’s back and around the midsection. Robotic ‘legs’ complete with foot panels extend from either side of the pack and wrap around the patient’s legs. A video game-style controller attaches to the pack with a long cord.

“I’m going to be a robot!”

Lindsey Stoefen has been doing physical therapy with the exoskeleton for an hour a day, as she works to recover from the rare disorder that put her in a wheelchair in October.

The 17-year-old athlete climbed into a specially designed exoskeleton for the first time in late April, after becoming an in-patient at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago.

She recalls being nervous. “I was like ‘Dang, I’m going to be a robot!’ I was scared at first.  I was like, ‘Am I going to like it?  Will I be okay?’  And once I got into it, I loved it.”

Lauren Bularzik, Lindsey’s physical therapist, says the exo robots help to accelerate the rehabilitation process. “For someone who takes a lot of energy to only walk a few feet, exo can get them up, can get them moving, it can supplement their movements, get that reciprocal pattern, encourage the correct motor planning.”

Beside speeding up recovery times, these robotic skeletons are especially helpful for those with paralysis, from spinal cord injuries and strokes. Using the machine can help some patients rewire their brains to use secondary muscles, so they can eventually walk again – without the device.

The downside

Scientists at the University of Notre Dame are leading the way with their work on wearable robots that allow patients to regain some or all of their mobility.  But Patrick Wensing, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, says exoskeletons have one big drawback.

“While existing exoskeletons are very powerful, they don’t understand what the user wants to do. So in order to transition between activities in daily life, you often have to press a button interface to tell the exoskeleton ‘I would like to stand up now.’”

Wensing and his team are collaborating with Ekso Bionics, a leading developer of wearable robots, to create a machine that can understand what its user wants to do without implanted sensors and complicated control panels.

The new three-year project funded by The National Science Foundation’s robotic initiative, hopes to achieve a more fluid, intuitive system.

Taylor Gambon has spent the last year analyzing data from exoskeleton users and comparing them to models of everyday walking. “What we’re seeing is that slow walking in general, whether in the exoskeleton or just the human, is much different from walking at a speed that you would choose naturally.”

Later this year, the team will travel to Ekso Bionics’ California headquarters, where they will work directly with exoskeletons to design programs that interact with users of various disabilities, so that more people like Lindsey Stoefen can get back on their feet again.
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Every year more than 15 million people worldwide suffer injuries and illnesses that leave them unable to walk according to the World Health Organization. But new technological advances and physical therapy could help some of them walk again. Among the most promising – is the use of robotic exoskeletons. As Erika Celeste reports, scientists at the University of Notre Dame are leading the way with their work on wearable robots that allow patients to regain some or all of their mobility.
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Birds and airplanes share the sky, so inevitably collisions occur. But airport authorities try to limit those encounters because bird strikes cause costly damage to jet engines and can lead to crashes. Some airports employ trained dogs, others use loud noises to frighten birds away. A company in the Netherlands says its robotic predator Robird is much more efficient. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Google says it will not extend a contract into next year to help the U.S. military analyze drone videos following complaints from company employees.

U.S. media reports said Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., told Google employees about the decision Friday. The development was first reported by tech publication Gizmodo.

Google employees say the tech giant will continue to work on the Maven Project until the contract ends next March. The military project uses artificial intelligence to increase defense capabilities, including using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze aerial drone imagery.

Thousands of Google employees signed a petition urging the company to cancel the contract, arguing that helping the military would violate Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Reuters reports that several hundred Google employees had planned to hold a public rally in San Francisco in July to protest the military contract.

Google had earlier defended the company’s involvement in the project saying it was limited to helping the military with nonoffensive tasks and said the project would help save lives.

Google says it will soon release new company guidelines related to the ethical uses of AI.
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Space X recently launched another rocket from California carrying satellites into space – accelerating interest by more businesses and research facilities that now view space as an opportunity. At this year’s Milken Institute Global Conference, those in the space business describe why orbiting the Earth is so exciting. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has details from Los Angeles.
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A Portland, Oregon, family has learned what happens when Amazon.com Inc’s popular voice assistant Alexa is lost in translation.

Amazon on Thursday described an “unlikely … string of events” that made Alexa send an audio recording of the family to one of their contacts randomly. The episode underscored how Alexa can misinterpret conversation as a wake-up call and command.

A local news outlet, KIRO 7, reported that a woman with Amazon devices across her home received a call two weeks ago from her husband’s employee, who said Alexa had recorded the family’s conversation about hardwood floors and sent it to him.

“I felt invaded,” the woman, only identified as Danielle, said in the report. “A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, ‘I’m never plugging that device in again, because I can’t trust it.'”

Alexa, which comes with Echo speakers and other gadgets, starts recording after it hears its name or another “wake word” selected by users. This means that an utterance quite like Alexa, even from a TV commercial, can activate a device.

That’s what happened in the incident, Amazon said. “Subsequent conversation was heard as a ‘send message’ request,” the company said in a statement. “At which point,

Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’ At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customer’s contact list.”

Amazon added, “We are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.”

Assuring customers of Alexa’s security is crucial to Amazon, which has ambitions for Alexa to be ubiquitous — whether dimming the lights for customers or placing orders for them with the world’s largest online retailer.

University researchers from Berkeley and Georgetown found in a 2016 paper that sounds unintelligible to humans can set off voice assistants in general, which raised concerns of exploitation by attackers. Amazon did not immediately comment on the matter, but it previously told The New York Times that it has taken steps to keep its devices secure.

Millions of Amazon customers have shopped with Alexa. Customers bought tens of millions of Alexa devices last holiday season alone, the company has said. That makes the incident reported Thursday a rare one. But faulty hearing is not.

“Background noise from our television is making it think we said Alexa,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said of his personal experience. “It happens all the time.”
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