What Robots Can Do Is So Amazing

Obama's Decision to Support Same-Sex Marriage

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This week, President Obama said he now supports same-sex marriage.

BARACK OBAMA: "I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

He became the first sitting American president to express that opinion. Earlier he had said his thinking on the issue was "evolving."

Reaction in Congress was mixed. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the minority Democrats in the House of Representatives, welcomed the news.

NANCY PELOSI: "America’s children and families and workers saw history being made right before their very eyes: the president of the United States advancing civil rights in our country.”

But Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans in the House said the president was sending the wrong message at the wrong time.

JOHN BOEHNER: “I believe that marriage is the union between one man and one woman. And the president, the Democrats can talk about all this all they want. But, the fact is, the American people are focused on our economy, and they are asking the question: where are the jobs?”

House Republicans are leading a court case against the administration for not defending a federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act. That nineteen ninety-six law defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

In the Senate, Republicans did not say much about the president's announcement. Instead, they stressed the need for jobs. Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would support same-sex marriage if the issue were put to voters in his home state of Nevada.

Mr. Obama received strong support from politically influential gays and lesbians in the two thousand eight campaign. His re-election campaign says donations from both groups have greatly increased since his announcement.

Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential candidate, opposes same-sex marriage.

MITT ROMNEY: "My view is that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman, and that is the position I have had for some time and I don't intend to make any adjustments at this point."

Support for same-sex marriage has grown in recent years, especially among younger people. A recent Gallup public opinion survey suggested that Americans are now evenly split on the issue. Gallup first asked the question in nineteen ninety-six. That year only twenty-seven percent of people said they supported same-sex marriage.

The president's position on the issue gained new attention after a TV appearance Sunday by Vice President Joe Biden. He was on NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

JOE BIDEN: "I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties."

President Obama announced the change in his thinking on ABC News on Wednesday.

BARACK OBAMA: "At a certain point, I just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

He noted his success at ending the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and his opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act.

But Mr. Obama said he still supports the right of individual states to decide the marriage issue. He spoke a day after a large majority of voters in North Carolina approved a state constitutional ban on homosexual marriage. North Carolina became the thirtieth state to pass such an amendment. The ban also includes civil unions and domestic partnerships.

Currently, six of the fifty states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex couples to marry. Nine states allow civil unions or provide rights under domestic partnership laws.

And that's IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.

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Contributing: Michael Bowman, Marissa Melton, Dan Robinson and Cindy Saine

Adopted from the VOA website

The Power of the Mind and Technology

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Controlling a device with your mind. Powering your home with the energy of your own activities. These are two of the developments that experts at IBM think will become reality within the next five years.

The technology company has released its latest "5 in 5" report. The experts think people will soon be able to control many electronic devices simply by using their minds. Scientists at IBM and other companies are researching ways to do this in a field of science known as bioinformatics.

They say people will soon have a way to just think about calling or e-mailing someone in order to make it happen. Bernie Meyerson is IBM's vice president of innovation.

BERNIE MEYERSON: "[It's a] simple ability to command a system to do something for you without actually doing or saying anything, literally thinking and having something happen as a result that's accurate. Something with really deep capability so that a person, for instance, a quadriplegic, a paraplegic can actually utilize brainwaves to make things happen and basically run their own lives independently."

Another prediction is a way for people to power their homes and offices using energy from activities like walking or running. Bernie Meyerson says this is known as micro-electronic generation.

BERNIE MEYERSON: "For instance, you can have somebody in the third world who has access to a phone or a smartphone but doesn't have access to the power grid, which is a very common thing, and literally in a shoe has something that recovers energy from walking and can charge the battery to enable that person to actually become connected with the rest of the world."

Another prediction: passwords could soon become a thing of the past. IBM says developments in biometric technology could soon make passwords unnecessary. Some of the most common biometrics used to identify people are fingerprints, face and voice recognition, and iris scans. The iris is the colored part of the eye.

Bernie Meyerson says this technology will soon be more widely used by money machines and other devices.

BERNIE MEYERSON: "Imagine that things recognize you. You walk up to an ATM [automated teller machine]. [It] takes one look, says, Yep, you're you."

Another prediction from the experts at International Business Machines: better technology to prevent unwanted e-mail.

BERNIE MEYERSON: "The device, as you act upon it, as you eliminate mail, you don't read it, you just look at it and kill it, after a while it learns your habits and works for you as as your assistant by eliminating stuff you never wanted anyway."

The fifth prediction on IBM's 5 in 5 list is an end to the "digital divide" between those who have technology and those who do not.

BERNIE MEYERSON: "Think about the digital divide today: the haves and the have-nots, people who are and are not connected. We anticipate within five years, better than eighty percent  coverage of the world’s populations by cellular to smartphones. At that point, imagine having, for instance, the ability to speak openly with anybody anywhere, anytime and any language -- real time translation. Literally, the old 'Star Trek' idea of the universal translator coming to be, and how the world would change if there were that kind of communication and openness."

And that’s the Special English Technology Report. What are your predictions for the next five years? Share them. I'm Steve Ember.

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Contributing: Faisa Elmasry

Adopted from the VOA website

Smoking and TB Deaths

 

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

The World Health Organization recently reported that the number of cases of tuberculosis has been falling since two thousand six. Also, fewer people are dying from TB. But a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, says smoking could threaten this progress.

Nearly twenty percent of all people use tobacco, and millions of non-smokers get sick from breathing the smoke. The new study predicts that smoking will produce an additional thirty-four million TB deaths by twenty-fifty.

Efforts to control the spread of tuberculosis have mainly focused on finding and treating infections. Much less effort has been made to understand the causes. Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

ANTHONY FAUCI: "Despite our control efforts, that you still have more than a million people each year, you know, dying from TB and millions and millions getting infected, we realize it's still a very important problem. So we have to do the practical thing and we have to do the fundamental research things at the same time."

Smoking does not cause tuberculosis; bacteria cause the infection. But the study says smoking affects the nervous system in a way that makes an inactive case of TB more likely to develop into an active one.

Stanton Glantz is director of the University of California's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and an author of the new study. He says it shows that tuberculosis cannot be controlled unless tobacco use is controlled.

STANTON GLANTZ: "It increases the number of people who will get tuberculosis by about seven percent. It increases the number of people projected to die from tuberculosis between now and twenty-fifty by about twenty-six percent."

The study is described as the first to identify a direct link between tobacco use and rates of TB infection and death. Professor Glantz says the results should guide those creating health policies and TB control efforts.

STANTON GLANTZ: "If you want to control the infectious disease of tuberculosis, you have to control the tobacco industry and the tobacco industry's efforts to increase tobacco use, particularly in developing countries where tuberculosis is a big problem."

The study predicts that the situation will only get worse if tobacco companies continue to sell more of their products in those countries. It says strong efforts to control tobacco would not only reduce deaths from smoking-related diseases like emphysema, heart disease and lung cancer. They could also prevent millions of deaths from tuberculosis.

The study appeared in BMJ, the British Medical Journal.

And that's the VOA Special English Health Report. For more news about efforts to control tobacco, go to voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Bob Doughty.

Adopted from the VOA website

AIDS Study - the 2011 breakthrough

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The journal Science chose an AIDS study as the twenty-eleven "Breakthrough of the Year." The study found that antiretroviral drugs can greatly lower the risk of spreading HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It showed that infected people with early treatment were ninety-six percent less likely to infect their partners.

The study was a clinical trial known as HPTN 052. Myron Cohen led an international team that began the study in two thousand seven and announced the results last May. But Dr. Cohen says the work really began twenty years ago.

MYRON COHEN: "We had a strong suspicion based on all the biological studies we had done that when we treat people and lower the concentration of HIV in the blood and secretions, we were rendering them less contagious. But we didn’t understand the magnitude of the benefit. It blows a gigantic wind behind the idea that treatment will serve as prevention."

UNC at Chapel Hill

Dr. Myron Cohen, Director, Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina.

Dr. Cohen is director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases paid for the study.

The study involved heterosexual couples in nine countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. The results have already had an effect on government policies. Those changes include treating HIV-infected people when their immune systems are still relatively healthy.

MYRON COHEN: "This particular 052 study in the last six months has generated policy changes at the level of the United States and the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. And it's inspired new community-based clinical trials that are just about to be launched that apply the scientific discovery. So when you do a single study and it receives so much recognition, and then seems to inform policy in a dramatic way, you think, OK, this was twenty years well-spent."

Dr. Cohen says the study results will be wasted unless they are linked to other areas of HIV treatment and prevention.

MYRON COHEN: "So the 052 study kind of lends itself to understanding that if we don't know who's positive and negative, there's no benefit. If people aren't linked to care, there's no benefit. If they aren't provided drugs, there's no benefit. If they receive the drugs but don't take the pills, there's no benefit. So this cascade is now the focus of our attention."

AIDS activist Mitchell Warren was among those who welcomed the results.

MITCHELL WARREN: "Treatment is prevention. And that becomes a fundamentally different conversation because for many years debates have waged whether we should do treatment or prevention. And the results of the HPTN 052 study actually affirm once and for all that treatment is prevention."

Science also recognized nine other scientific developments last year. You can find the list at voaspecialenglish.com. They include progress on a malaria vaccine and research on the DNA of our ancient ancestors. They also include a study of cells that have stopped dividing. It found that clearing them from the bodies of mice can delay some of the effects of aging.

I'm Faith Lapidus.

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Contributing: Joe De Capua

Adopted from the VOA.