レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

Cooling from air conditioning saves lives—more than 5,000 a year in the United States alone—but it also heats up the planet and taxes our electrical grid, scientists say.

As the world warms, heat waves strike nearly every continent, and United Nations officials estimate that about half a million people die a year from heat; air conditioning is needed and being used more than ever. A study in Nature Health reported that air conditioning saved nearly 58,000 lives between 2010 and 2020 in the U.S. Air conditioning use is skyrocketing around the world, with electricity demand from cooling expected to triple, according to the International Energy Agency and the United Nations Environment Programme.

It's also more of a problem than ever. Because most of the electricity for cooling comes from the burning of fossil fuels, the U.N. projects the amount of heat-trapping gas spewed into the atmosphere from air conditioning use to rise from 4.5 billion to 7.2 billion tons in the next 25 years or so. That 7.2 billion tons is almost as much as the carbon pollution from the United States and Europe now.

Everyone knows air conditioning works, but air conditioning from a climate change perspective is not an ideal, said Kai Chen, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health who was the senior author on the new study. It leads to more carbon emissions ... then it accelerates the climate warming problem.

Chen said the study concluded that the essential role of air conditioning saved on average 5,267 lives a year. But it also found that this has to be balanced with overuse. He pointed to offices—like his—which are cooled so much that many workers wear sweaters even in the summer. More than half the cases researchers looked at could be considered overuse, he said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Japanese automakers Nissan and Honda entered a deal to jointly develop computer parts and software for vehicles set to enter the market in fiscal 2029, both sides said.

Under the deal, Nissan, based in the port city of Yokohama, and Tokyo-based Honda will share standardized parts in “core ECUs,” or electronic control units, as well as software.

Nissan and Honda started talks in 2024 to work together in developing electric vehicles and auto intelligence technology.

Nissan makes Leaf electric cars and Infiniti luxury models, while Honda makes the Accord sedan, Civic compact, and Odyssey minivan.

The agreement did not specifically mention EVs or any model names and was focused on so-called software-defined vehicles, which could include EVs. These vehicles have functions and features that can be updated and controlled by software, rather than the mechanics of hardware.

The global competition in the auto industry is increasingly intensifying as it moves into various technologies, such as automated driving and zero emissions. Each vehicle is starting to be more like a computer packed with electronic parts and software rather than the old image of gas-guzzling engines.

Sharing components and collaborating on research will help cut costs and speed up development, as well as add efficiency through economies of scale once the vehicles go into production. European makers Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis are working together in software development so they can share the same operating system.

Both Nissan and Honda are overshadowed by Toyota Motor Corp., the top Japanese automaker, and working together could be a plus in competing against Toyota. However, Toyota has been mentioned in the past as engaging in software talks with Nissan and Honda, although it was not part of the announcement.

Toyota is working on software with other companies like Subaru, which is part of the Toyota group, and U.S. autonomous driving technology company Waymo. As part of their strategic partnership, Nissan and Honda will continue to explore other opportunities for collaboration across a range of areas, including zero-emissions and decreasing traffic fatalities. Both sides stressed that the use of intelligence and electrification technology is an important focus for working together.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

U.S. ostrich farmers say they’re finding new customers who suffer from a red meat allergy contracted from ticks. Ostrich meat has a similar taste and color to beef and is safe to eat for sufferers of the allergy called Alpha-gal syndrome.

There are only a few farms in the United States that are raising large herds of ostrich. They say they’re getting messages daily from Alpha-gal sufferers who crave the taste of red meat.

Alpha Roost Farms owner W.D. King got into the ostrich business after he lost his job in 2022. “I've been in poultry nutrition work most of my life in research, as a job, and then raised beef cattle here on the farm. And I kind of started joking that, ostrich, you know, I’ll start raising ostriches. That's what we'll do. And opened my mouth to the wrong fella. I was talking to Brent one day; he had the same question, you know, what are you going to do? I said, ah, you know, I'll just raise ostriches. And he said, if you're serious, I'm in,” says King.

The birds can stand nine feet tall (2.7 meters) and weigh more than 300 pounds (136 kilograms). Their meat is red and rich in iron, like beef.

King says his ostrich meat gets a lot of interest from people who suffer from Alpha-gal syndrome. “Alpha-gal is the main driver. That is what's driving the ostrich market. It does not, the ostrich meat, because it's a bird, not a mammal, doesn't contain the Alpha-gal molecule, so you can safely eat that meat without reaction, and it's very much like a steak.”

King says raising the birds is very different from raising chickens or cows. The males can be aggressive, so when he collects the eggs in the field, he has a special caged vehicle.

The farm has built a new barn to raise young ostriches that have hatched from eggs. It is growing its vendor list, as more Alpha-gal sufferers learn about the meat’s taste.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The owner of a Michigan furniture manufacturer said the White House’s new tariffs on Canadian imports hurt his business.

President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on scores of Canadian imports hamper the “ability for us to put food on the table for our family but also impacts the ability for us to give back to our community,” Michael Howard II, owner of Warren-based Howard Family Designs, said.

Howard and his wife started their business a decade ago. They make and sell everything from dining room tables to bookcases.

“To say that we don't need Canada is just disingenuous. It’s dishonest. And it's just absolutely not truthful,” Howard said.

The new levies impact about 5% of Canada's annual exports to the U.S.—or $20 billion in goods ranging from hockey sticks to agricultural products.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney quickly promised that his government would roll out “dollar for dollar” retaliatory measures starting September 8.

In a social media post, Trump said Canada has been ripping off the U.S. for years.

The U.S. and Canada once held one of the world's most durable trade alliances, but the latest escalation plunges the North American neighbors deeper into a rupture that has kept both sides of the border on edge throughout Trump's second term in office.

Renaldo Agostino, a city councilor in Windsor, Ontario, Detroit’s southern neighbor, said Canadians are angry and hurt by America’s actions, but that most blame Trump and his administration.

“This is more of a Washington thing,” said Agostino. “This is more the White House that is attacking our nation.”

“There’s so many of us that have family and friends, brothers and sisters over there, and it's become this bizarre relationship between the White House and the Canadian citizen that is insulted by the fact that the president of the United States of America continues to call us ‘the 51st state,’” Agostino added.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The contradiction of the trim Parisian and the butter croissant now has a storefront.

Le Butter Shop, billed as Paris’ first boutique devoted entirely to butter, opened in July, a short walk from the Eiffel Tower—with 30 varieties from small family producers in Brittany, the Loire Valley, and northern France.

France eats around 8 kilograms (18 pounds) of butter per person a year, says the agriculture ministry. It's among the most in the world. Yet the home of Chanel and Dior keeps an obesity rate well below the average for wealthy nations—14%, compared to an average of 19% for the developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

At the new boutique, customers taste by the spoonful before buying anything from a 10-gram pat to a kilogram (2.2-pound) block: the classics, then shallot, pepper, seaweed, wild garlic, fine herbs, and lemon with green pepper. At the sweet end: vanilla, raspberry, strawberry and chocolate.

“Most people don’t expect to like a raspberry butter or to like chocolate butter,” said owner Erwan Leo. “And when they try it, this is where they’re just like, ‘Oh wow, OK.’” Leo, who also runs a wine-tasting business, said butter should be used like wine, to make a meal better—“the goal isn’t to get drunk.”

Mehreen Himayat and Salman Bin Ehsan of Dublin, Ireland, saw videos of the shop at home before traveling to France. “We came here just to taste the butter,” Bin Ehsan told The Associated Press.

Alexandra Incolano, a 36-year-old who lives near Paris, came to the shop with a specific mission. “I’m getting married on Saturday, and I’m going to have a cheese centerpiece,” Incolano said. “I saw on Instagram that they had lots of great butters, and I thought it could be a little something extra for my guests, a little surprise.”

The reputation of French butter is also attracting visitors who work professionally with food.

“I know that there’s some of the best butter in France, but I’ve never tried any,” said Aleksandr Balaban, a 31-year-old Estonian chef working in Norway. “I work in Norway; they really like salted butter, and my friend asked me to bring him some French butter as well.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Artificial intelligence chatbots have become the bane of teachers everywhere, but to prepare for the new school year, a group of educators in Charleston, South Carolina, packed into a high school auditorium and talked about inviting AI into the classroom.

The teachers and principals watched as an instructor prompted an AI tool to create a map of the world.

The result drew gasps of disbelief and laughter. Projected on a large screen was a map riddled with bizarre errors. Mali was spelled Mail. Egypt was identified as Sopth. In place of Libya was something simply called Africa. Dozens of other countries' names were misspelled or written in pure gibberish.

If you ever want kids not to overtrust these tools, try the map demo, said the instructor, Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of AI for Education, an organization that helps schools draft AI policies and train teachers and students in what she calls safe, ethical, and effective use of the technology.

After initially trying to ban AI use, a growing number of U.S. public schools are trying a new strategy: encouraging classroom experimentation, partly so students can see its shortcomings, including generative AI's notorious tendency to hallucinate, or fabricate information.

AI literacy has become a buzzword of this back-to-school season as educators try to strike a balance between equipping students with the skills they need for an AI-driven future while preventing them from outsourcing their thinking to chatbots.

There is no single definition of what AI literacy means, or how it should be taught. Tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic offer schools training sessions in how to use their AI tools. But for educators, there is a growing consensus that AI literacy is about more than learning how to use generative AI and write good prompts.

Good AI literacy, said Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, includes knowing when not to use it.

Thirty-seven states have now published official AI guidance that schools can use as a blueprint. South Carolina is not one of them.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

When the temperature heats up, so do emergency rooms, according to a massive study of Chicago hospital and urgent care records, which found increased kidney complaints, skin problems, varicose veins, and even mental health issues.

Northwestern University medical school researchers pored through records of 916,404 visits to hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers in Chicago from 2011 to 2023 to see if they could spot trends in illnesses and injuries when the temperature hits 92.6 degrees Fahrenheit (33.7 degrees Celsius) or higher. They found that when it gets hot, more than a dozen broad categories of injuries and illnesses become more frequent, including some that most people don't associate with heat, according to the study in Science Advances.

While the study looked only at Chicago, outside experts said it highlights underestimated health problems and rising costs that affect much of the warming world.

This study “helps confirm that we've been underestimating health risks from heat exposures,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, chair of health and environment at the University of Wisconsin, who wasn't part of the research.

Northwestern researchers looked through all the records to see what became more frequent, instead of just focusing on known heat-related problems.

“Heat-related illness is undercounted when studies only search for explicit heat codes like heat stroke,” said Dr. Nicholas Cozzi, president-elect of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians. He wasn't part of the study.

Cozzi said that the study has an important message for the public: “Don’t wait for heat stroke symptoms to take heat seriously. If you have a chronic condition—kidney disease, MS (Multiple Sclerosis), venous issues—treat extreme heat days as a trigger for extra caution, not just an outdoor-activity problem.”

Many of the diseases that saw an uptick in heat had to do with kidneys and the renal system. The skin issues are known by doctors but not often seen in non-medical literature, study senior author Dr. Abel Kho said.

Kho said the study had him thinking back to the nights when he worked the emergency room: “When it’s hot out, it’s going to be a busy night. That’s just how it goes.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

A Chinese humanoid robot set a new 100-meter sprint record of 8.86 seconds in Beijing, beating its robot competitors—and the fastest recorded human time.

The race was part of China’s World Humanoid Robot Games, an Olympic-style competition now in its second year in Beijing. The event is also a showcase for China’s rapid advances in robotics amid an intensifying technology rivalry with the U.S.

The previous robot record of 9.39 seconds had been set just three days earlier. For comparison, the men’s 100-meter world record is 9.58 seconds, set by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt in 2009.

Experts are amazed to see such progress in the humanoid robot industry. “This is a significant milestone—not simply because the robot ran faster than a human, but because of what it takes to make a bipedal robot run at this speed,” said Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“As speed increases, balance, control, impacts, actuator performance, and mechanical robustness all become much more challenging,” said Hong.

The record-breaking robot fell after hitting the finish line, a padded barrier, with sparks flying from its waist. Hong pointed out that the fall leads to more meaningful and difficult questions: whether robots can move and stop safely, recognize unexpected obstacles, recover from mistakes and continue working, the capabilities that ultimately make them more useful.

The Games feature over 1,300 competitions involving more than 2,000 robots in 51 events like running, long jump, and table tennis, as well as ballroom dancing.

Unlike the traditional Olympics, the robots also compete in teams in real-world scenarios, including household tasks, hotel services, and emergency response.

“‘Housekeeper’ and ‘caregiver’ robots are still in the pilot and validation phase,” China's official newspaper People's Daily said, “(but) challenges are precisely where the focus of development lies…China's robotics industry is evolving toward higher quality and innovation.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Australia's recorded music industry will bar tracks wholly generated by artificial intelligence from official charts as burgeoning generative technologies threaten artists' livelihoods, a representative said.

The crackdown comes as a variation of Madonna's pop hit Like a Prayer created by an Australian producer using AI-generated vocals and drums has spent 16 weeks in the Australian top 20, stoking debate about generative AI's place in music. It peaked at number two on the Australian Record Industry Association's (ARIA) top 20 Australian singles chart in May and remained in fourth place in August 25.

Wholly AI-generated tracks will be banned from the ARIA charts, but some AI-assisted music will remain eligible, an ARIA statement said. Tracks can be eligible only if humans wrote the song and performed the lead vocal and the primary instruments, among other requirements, the statement said. AI-generated music would also be ineligible for the Australian industry's prestigious ARIA awards.

ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd said, These changes reflect our intent to remain dynamic and promote the human nature of artistry in what is—to say the least—a rapidly developing space.

The ARIA Charts will always remain a transparent measurement of the music Australia consumes, but a chart that rewards unlicensed AI output would undercut the very basis of the recorded music we exist to represent, Herd added.

Eligible music must also be produced using legal AI services.

The Australian rules are in step with new principles released in July by the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The federation represents the recording industry worldwide.

The international guidelines state that to qualify for official music charts, a track must be substantially human-made.

Sydney Conservatorium of Music composer and lecturer Alexis Weaver told Australian Broadcasting Corp. the debate around AI in music was exceptionally fraught and very emotional for a lot of musicians, and so everyone will have a different opinion.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Giles Sims, 34, was sick of getting passed over for jobs because he didn't have a college degree.

But with a wife and a widowed mother to help support, he needed a quick solution. So, the laid-off web developer turned to one of a growing number of three-year degree programs.

I can't afford to be out of the workforce for four years. That just seems like forever, and the three-year made it seem less daunting, said Sims, a student at Ensign College, a private Salt Lake City school that recently changed all its bachelor's degrees to require fewer classes than a traditional four-year degree.

The condensed programs have exploded in popularity. As of this spring, 26 U.S. states have a college that offers at least one reduced-credit, three-year bachelor's, according to the nonprofit research group RAND.

Advocates say these programs are a solution to the college affordability crisis and a godsend for non-traditional students like Sims.

Critics, however, worry that they'll narrow too much what students learn, confuse employers, limit graduate school options, and create headaches in fields that require state licenses.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for one, says the programs devalue the meaning of a college credential. This is not innovation. This is just cutting corners, said Todd Wolfson, AAUP's president.

For decades, colleges have offered accelerated programs that let students finish faster, often by forgoing long summer breaks, maximizing transfer credits, and condensing semester-long courses into shorter, five- to 10-week terms.

But those programs maintained the same course load, measured as credits. The new programs let students finish faster by completing as few as 90 credit hours. That shaves a year off the typical 120-hour bachelor's degree.

Three-year bachelor's degrees are common in other countries, including the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy. But they can create complications for graduates seeking admission to U.S. graduate schools, which sometimes require extra coursework.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.