It may feel like 2024 has been a terrible year — just like 2023, if not worse. The devastating wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan have dragged on, while the United States has seen an exceptional tornado season, deadly hurricanes and a fraught, polarized election cycle that has left many feeling exhausted, anxious or despairing. Not to mention that scientists say it is “virtually certain” that 2024 will become Earth’s warmest year on record. And yet — these difficult developments aren’t the full story of the year, either. Scientists continued work to fight disease, there were some wins for animal conservation, and many individuals — in ways big and small — continued to achieve remarkable things. If you’re looking for some hope this holiday season, read on. This year, Chad became the 51st country recognized by the World Health Organization for eliminating a neglected tropical disease. Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) — a fly-borne disease also known as sleeping sickness — is caused by parasites and spread through the bite of the tsetse fly. There is no vaccine to prevent the disease and, if left untreated, it is almost always fatal. Chad eliminated the disease following “years of dedicated efforts,” the country’s health minister said, including improved surveillance, testing and pest control. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved more drugs with the potential to transform lives, including a therapy that uses patients’ own cells to attack skin cancer, which was approved for use in adults with melanoma that has spread or cannot be removed with surgery. Experts said the decision could open the door to similar treatments for far more common cancers. A new drug for schizophrenia that appears to avoid the side effects that cause many patients to stop taking their medication also received FDA approval. And some previously approved treatments have started making an impact on patients’ lives — such as a technique to fix cartilage instead of full knee replacements, which one patient said meant she now experienced “zero pain.” We all know that exercise and eating healthily is good for us — but it can be easier said than done. Research this year has reminded us that even small steps can make a difference. For example, just an additional five minutes of exercise per day could help to slightly lower your blood pressure, while even low-intensity activities, like walking around while cooking, can increase your odds of healthy aging. Separate research found it’s never too late to take up weightlifting — which is great news for anyone hoping to stave off frailty in later life. And if it’s mental rather than physical health that’s on your mind — here’s a reminder that even small acts of kindness can be surprisingly beneficial. With the Olympics and Paralympics taking place in Paris over the summer, the world’s attention was on the physical feats of the world’s greatest sportsmen and women. Americans Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky became some of the most decorated Olympians in history, while Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone set a new world record — for the sixth time. More than 40 athletics records were broken during the Paralympics alone. Other individuals accomplished new goals, and inspired their communities, outside the spotlight of the Paris Games — including Betty Brussel, of British Columbia, who at 99 years old broke three competitive swimming world records in her age group, and Virginia Hislop, of Yakima, Washington, who received her master’s degree from Stanford University at the age of 105. There’s no denying the very real threat of a changing climate. But climate despair also worries some scientists, who fear this can lead to defeatism or inaction — so here are some positive advances to remember this year. Researchers were able to detect a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer — for the first time, almost 30 years after countries first agreed to phase out the chemicals. A new satellite launched in March to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry — an important step in tackling the greenhouse gas that accounts for almost a third of global warming. The NASA/Carbon Mapper satellite, which measures CO2 and methane emissions, also launched, providing detailed images from individual oil and gas facilities across the world. Back on Earth, the world’s largest plant for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened in Iceland. Norway became the first country to have more electric than gas-powered vehicles, while one Japanese island began using a new generation of batteries to help stockpile massive amounts of clean electricity. There were also small but important victories for animal conservation. The Iberian lynx, a European wildcat once on the brink of extinction, is no longer classed as an “endangered” species — in what experts have hailed as the “greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation.” And five Hawaiian crows — rare, intelligent birds also known as ʻalala — began flying free after years in captivity, as part of a radical conservation strategy. Despite a large number of powerful tornadoes to hit the United States in early 2024, the death tolls were fortunately not as high as meteorologists feared, in part due to improved forecasting technology. And even amid the devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, there were heartwarming moments. One father trekked 27 miles through roads flooded by Helene — a dramatic journey involving being trapped in mud, navigating debris, and the kindness of strangers — in time to walk his daughter down the aisle. And when an emergency room nurse and single mom lost her home and all of her possessions during flooding in Connecticut, a thoughtful stranger meant she was reunited with the sonogram photos of her 3-year-old son. Her local community also rallied to help her find free temporary accommodation, and raised more than $206,000 toward buying a new house. 2024 was a year for rare celestial sights. People in 13 U.S. states, as well as parts of Mexico and Canada, were treated to the sight of darkness falling in the middle of the day, as a total eclipse swept across the three countries in April. Then in May, countries from the United States to South Africa were treated to one of the most vibrant displays of auroras in 500 years, according to NASA, thanks to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm. If you’re a fan of auroras, there are also reasons for optimism in 2025 — NASA says the sun’s storm activity is peaking, which means there should be more opportunities to spot beautiful auroras in the year ahead.Kings fire coach Mike Brown less than halfway through his 3rd season, AP source says
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Voice cloning is an emerging technology powered by artificial intelligence and it's raising alarms about its potential misuse. Earlier this year, New Hampshire voters experienced this firsthand when a deepfake mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice urged them to skip the polls ahead of the primary. The deepfake likely needed only several seconds of the president's voice to create the clone. According to multiple AI voice cloning models, about 10 seconds of an actual voice is all that is needed to recreate it. And that can easily come from a phone call or a video from social media. "A person's voice is really probably not that information-dense. It's not as unique as you may think," James Betker, a technical staff member at OpenAI, told Scripps News. Betker developed TortoiseTTS, an open-source voice cloning model. "It's actually very easy to model, very easy to learn, the distribution of all human voices from a fairly small amount of data," Betker added. How AI voice cloning works AI models have been trained on vast amounts of data, learning to recognize human speech. Programs analyze the data and train repeatedly, learning characteristics such as rhythm, stress, pitch and tone. "It can look at 10 seconds of someone speaking and it has stored enough information about how humans speak with that kind of prosody and pitch. Enough information about how people speak with their processing pitch and its weights that it can just continue on," Betker said. Imagine a trained AI model as a teacher, and the person cloning the voice to be a student. When a student asks to create a cloned voice, it starts off as white noise. The teacher scores how close the student is to sounding correct. The student tries again and again based on these scores until the student produces something close to what the teacher wants. While this explanation is extremely simplified, the concept of generating a cloned voice is based on bit-by-bit, based on probability distributions. "I think, at its core, it's pretty simple," Betker said. "I think the analogy of just continuing with what you're given will take you pretty far here." There are currently some AI models that claim to only need two seconds of samples. While the results are not convincing yet, Betker says future models will need even fewer voice samples to create a convincing clone.Chinese modders create laptop-style PlayStation 5 with its own screen but no batteryWEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — An online spat between factions of Donald Trump's supporters over immigration and the tech industry has thrown internal divisions in his political movement into public display, previewing the fissures and contradictory views his coalition could bring to the White House. The rift laid bare the tensions between the newest flank of Trump's movement — wealthy members of the tech world including billionaire Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for more highly skilled workers in their industry — and people in Trump's Make America Great Again base who championed his hardline immigration policies. The debate touched off this week when Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur with a history of racist and conspiratorial comments, criticized Trump’s selection of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on artificial intelligence policy in his coming administration. Krishnan favors the ability to bring more skilled immigrants into the U.S. Loomer declared the stance to be “not America First policy” and said the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves. Much of the debate played out on the social media network X, which Musk owns. Loomer's comments sparked a back-and-forth with venture capitalist and former PayPal executive David Sacks, whom Trump has tapped to be the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar." Musk and Ramaswamy, whom Trump has tasked with finding ways to cut the federal government, weighed in, defending the tech industry's need to bring in foreign workers. It bloomed into a larger debate with more figures from the hard-right weighing in about the need to hire U.S. workers, whether values in American culture can produce the best engineers, free speech on the internet, the newfound influence tech figures have in Trump's world and what his political movement stands for. Trump has not yet weighed in on the rift, and his presidential transition team did not respond to a message seeking comment. Musk, the world's richest man who has grown remarkably close to the president-elect, was a central figure in the debate, not only for his stature in Trump's movement but his stance on the tech industry's hiring of foreign workers. Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the tech industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated, not expanded. Born in South Africa, Musk was once on an a H-1B visa himself and defended the industry's need to bring in foreign workers. “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent," he said in a post. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Trump's own positions over the years have reflected the divide in his movement. His tough immigration policies, including his pledge for a mass deportation, were central to his winning presidential campaign. He has focused on immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally but he has also sought curbs on legal immigration, including family-based visas. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump called the H-1B visa program “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. After he became president, Trump in 2017 issued a “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, which directed Cabinet members to suggest changes to ensure H-1B visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants to protect American workers. Trump's businesses, however, have hired foreign workers, including waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago club, and his social media company behind his Truth Social app has used the the H-1B program for highly skilled workers. During his 2024 campaign for president, as he made immigration his signature issue, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country" and promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But in a sharp departure from his usual alarmist message around immigration generally, Trump told a podcast this year that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges. “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country," he told the “All-In" podcast with people from the venture capital and technology world. Those comments came on the cusp of Trump's budding alliance with tech industry figures, but he did not make the idea a regular part of his campaign message or detail any plans to pursue such changes. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
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