Rest of World

Alifosina Mtseteka’s family has been farming for generations in central Malawi, but she recently ran into a pest infestation that had her stumped.

The okra she grows along with beans and corn on her tiny farm was wilting due to a lack of water. It was then invaded by a colony of aphids, threatening the crop her family depends on for food. 

Mtseteka watered and watched the plants, tried the standard fixes passed down through generations, and asked neighbors for tips, but nothing…

Tolar Grande, a windswept settlement perched at 11,500 feet above sea level in northern Argentina, once received little more than a trickle of visitors. Then, in the late 2010s, hostels in the lithium-rich town began filling up with workers at mining companies, while the handful of small eateries shifted from serving the occasional tourist to feeding miners.

“Mining absorbed almost everyone,” Marta Ríos, who runs the civil registry in Tolar Grande, home to around 300 people, told Rest…

Oman’s dream for a spaceport sits in a swath of desert overlooking the Arabian Sea. If all goes according to plan, three separate complexes here will launch everything from small suborbital rockets for scientific experiments to superheavy behemoths into space, bringing payloads of satellites to the stars. There will be a large mission-control building, warehouses for rocket assembly and testing, and a business park. If the spaceport succeeds, by 2027 Oman will join the small number of…

Inside a multistory office building in Manila’s financial district, around 60 young men and women monitored and controlled artificial intelligence robots restocking convenience store shelves in distant Japan. 

Occasionally, when a bot dropped a can, someone would don a virtual-reality headset and use joysticks to help recover it. 

The AI robots are designed by Tokyo-based startup Telexistence, and run on Nvidia and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, the company has deployed the…

The resale value of electric vehicles is collapsing worldwide, hurting private owners and fleet operators.

The crisis became especially apparent when BluSmart, India’s pioneering all-electric ride-hailing service, collapsed in April amid financial fraud allegations. The Delhi-based company’s fleet of thousands of cars, originally worth over $12,000 each, suddenly flooded the market at about $3,000.

For Tesla owners in the U.S., their 2023 Model Ys are worth 42% less than what they…

In February 2023, half a year or so before I visited, a couple of Chinese ships cut two domestic undersea cables running out from Taiwan’s main island. One of these, named Taima No. 3, provided connectivity to the island of Nangan. On paper, the ships were a fishing boat and a cargo vessel, but the Chinese navy so frequently uses ostensibly civilian craft for military purposes that it’s impossible to be certain whether the cuts to these cables were accidental or not. Nangan is part of a…

Ko Ho-dam, a high school junior on South Korea’s Jeju Island, was at first curious to hear that the government planned to roll out artificial intelligence-powered textbooks. The program would provide personalized learning for students, help prevent dropouts, and reduce the workload of teachers, authorities promised.

The program — a flagship initiative of former President Yoon Suk Yeol — took shape over the last year and a half, with about a dozen publishers approved to develop the…

Farmers on Jamira, a tiny island on Bangladesh’s flood-prone Jamuna River, are used to warring with the river that’s eating their land. 

Next year, they’ll have one more weapon in their arsenal: cash payments from the international nonprofit GiveDirectly delivered days before a flood hits. The group uses Google’s artificial intelligence-based flood forecasting to identify at-risk villagers. 

This flips the traditional humanitarian model — where aid is delivered to entire…

As Washington tries to curb Chinese influence in artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley can’t get enough of Chinese researchers. The tension highlights a paradox at the heart of America’s AI strategy: Lawmakers are pushing to limit Chinese talent on national security grounds, while for tech companies, many of the brightest minds come from China. How the U.S. reconciles these competing pressures could shape who leads the global race in AI.

China accounted for nearly half the…

OpenAI last week launched Sora 2, an artificial intelligence model that can generate high-definition video clips with sound and more realistic physics. The release has been described by the company as a turning point for AI-video generation. 

Halfway across the world, Indonesia’s film industry is already transforming due to AI tools such as Sora, Runway, Midjourney, Google’s Veo, and ChatGPT. Entertainment companies and filmmakers are using AI to become more efficient and generate…