Tuesday is Halloween, the spookiest day of the year. Some people like to use the holiday to visit scary attractions like haunted houses. In historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a ghost tour takes visitors to places that are said to be haunted. But that’s no surprise to locals, who say they often see and hear paranormal activity. VOA’s Deborah Block has the spine-chilling story.
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While American’s prepare for Halloween — a holiday known for ghosts and goblins and costumed children going door-to-door and scaring candy from their neighbors — in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, a thousand people dressed as vampires from around the world descended upon the Royal Opera House for the final dress rehearsal of an opera about history’s best-known vampire. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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When Angelina Jolie puts her name on a film, you will likely find an important message in there. “The Breadwinner” is no exception, spinning an inspiring tale of an Afghan girl who won’t be denied her human rights. The film was recently screened in Washington with a special guest who could relate to the story firsthand.
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Stores watching Amazon take a larger share of clothing sales are trying to solve one of the most vexing issues for online shoppers: finding items that fit properly.
The retailers are unleashing tools that use artificial intelligence to replicate the help a salesperson at a store might offer, calculate a shopper’s most likely body shape, or use 3-D models for a virtual fitting room experience. Amazon, which some analysts say will surpass Macy’s this year as the largest U.S. clothing seller, is offering some customers an Alexa-powered device that doubles as a selfie-stick machine and a stylist.
Retailers want to reduce the rate of online returns, which can be up to 40 percent, and thus make customers happier — and more likely to be repeat shoppers. And the more interaction shoppers have with a brand, the more the technology will learn about shoppers’ preferences, said Vicky Zadeh, chief executive of Rakuten Fits Me, a tech company that works with QVC and clothing startup brands.
“It’s all about confidence,” she said. “If they have the confidence to buy, they will come back to the retailer time and time again.”
The push is coming from big names like Levi’s and The Gap and startups like Rhone and Taylrd.
Levi’s new Virtual Stylist texts back and forth with online customers to offer recommendations, based on their preferences. Marc Rosen, Levi’s president of global e-commerce, said early tests show the chatbot is driving more browsers to become buyers.
Reliance on body shape
Rakuten Fits Me, which works with QVC and other companies, fine-tuned its fitting technology this summer and said its retail partners now offer garments that should fit shoppers’ body shapes when the customer first does the initial search. Shoppers provide three measurements — height, weight and age — and then it calculates a person’s most likely body shape, not size, to determine the fit for any garment and offer more accurate recommendations.
And Gap Inc. has an augmented reality app in collaboration with Google and startup Avametric that allows shoppers to virtually try on clothes. Shoppers enter information like height and weight and then the app puts a 3-D model in front of them. However, the tool only works on Google Tango smartphones.
Sebastian DiGrande, executive vice president and strategy and chief customer officer at Gap, said the augmented reality app had produced good feedback, but the company is still determining whether shoppers really want a virtual 3-D model.
Clothing brand Tommy Hilfiger similarly has built its mobile app around the camera and image recognition. It has an augmented reality feature enabling shoppers to see what the clothes look like on a virtual runway model — but not their own body type.
And men’s online clothier Bonobos, now owned by Wal-Mart, launched an app that offers customers a virtual closet to see items they bought and saved. The app is converting browsers to buyers at a faster rate, said Andy Dunn, founder of Bonobos.
Companies are smart to offer new tools, but many are too “gimmicky,” said Sapna Shah, principal at Red Giraffe Advisors, which makes early-stage investments in fashion tech.
“If it’s not Amazon, will brand-specific apps be the way for people to shop in the future?” she said. “How many apps are people going to have on their phone?”
And all the companies need to win over customers who prefer to touch and see things in person.
“It’s great that they’re busting their tail with all these apps, but I am skeptical,” said Doug Garnett of Portland, Oregon. Garnett said he buys some clothes online when he knows and understands the brands, but otherwise, “I really need to see them on my body before I act, and really prefer that to be in a store.”
Personalized offers
As Amazon dives further into fashion, it could use its base of data to spur trends and personalize offers for its customers. Its Echo Look features a built-in camera that photographs and records shoppers trying on clothes and offers recommendations on outfits. It works with its Style Check app, using machine learning and advice from experts. The potential: Learn shoppers’ styles and recommend outfits to buy. Amazon reportedly is exploring the idea of quickly fulfilling online orders for custom-fit clothing.
The company also reportedly acquired Body Labs, which creates true-to-life 3-D body models.
“We’re always listening to our customers, learning and innovating on their behalf and bringing them products we think they will love,” said Amazon spokeswoman Molly Wade. She wouldn’t comment on the prospect of custom-fit or the reports about Body Labs.
Steve Barr, the U.S. retail and consumer sector leader at consultants PwC, said that Amazon was trying for a curated experience based on massive data analytics. But he said he thought such an approach had limitations.
“No matter how great Amazon is with artificial intelligence and predictive behaviors,” Barr said, “they can’t put a red tab on a pair of a jeans or a swoosh on a pair of shoes.”
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Under pressure in advance of hearings on Russian election interference, Facebook is moving to increase transparency for everyone who sees and buys political advertising on its site.
Executives for the social media company said Friday they will verify political ad buyers in federal elections, requiring them to reveal correct names and locations. The site will also create new graphics where users can click on the ads and find out more about who’s behind them.
More broadly, Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president in charge of ad products, said the company is building new transparency tools in which all advertisers, even those that aren’t political, are associated with a page, and users can click on a link to see all of the ads any advertiser is running.
Users also will be able to see all of the ads paid for by the advertisers, whether those ads were originally targeted toward them.
3,000 Russia-linked ads
The move comes after the company acknowledged it had found more than 3,000 ads linked to Russia that focused on divisive U.S. social issues and were seen by an estimated 10 million people before and after the 2016 U.S. elections.
Facebook, Twitter and Google will testify in Congress Tuesday and Wednesday on how their platforms were used by Russia or other foreign actors in the election campaign. The Senate and House intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee are all holding hearings as part of their investigations into Russian election interference.
Facebook’s announcement comes a day after Twitter said it will ban ads from RT and Sputnik, two state-sponsored Russian news outlets. Twitter also has said it will require election-related ads for candidates to disclose who is paying for them and how they are targeted.
Federal election ad archive
Facebook’s Goldman said the company also will build a new archive of federal election ads on Facebook, including the total amount spent and the number of times an ad is displayed, he said. The archive, which will be public for anyone to search, would also have data on the audience that saw the ads, including gender and location information. The archive would eventually hold up to four years of data.
Goldman said the company is still building the new features. They plan to test them in Canada and roll them out in the United States by next summer ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
“This is a good first step but it’s not at all the last step, there’s a lot to learn once we start testing,” Goldman said in an interview.
Facebook already had announced in September that the platform would require an advertiser to disclose who paid for the ads and what other ads it was running at the same time. But it was unclear exactly how the company would do that.
Heading off legislation
The moves are meant to bring Facebook more in line with what is now required of print and broadcast advertisers. Federal regulations require television and radio stations to make publicly available the details of political ads they air. That includes who runs the ad, when it runs and how much it costs.
It is also likely meant to head off bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would require social media companies to keep public files of election ads and try to ensure they are not purchased by foreigners. Though Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democratic co-sponsor of the legislation, has said his bill would be “the lightest touch possible,” social media companies would rather set their own guidelines than face new regulation.
Facebook has responded swiftly to the attention it has received in recent months on Capitol Hill, boosting staff and lobbying efforts. The company has spent more than $8.4 million in lobbying Congress and the rest of the government through the third quarter of this year, according to federal records.
Some analysts have warned that policing such online election ads can be difficult. It’s one thing to enforce advertising rules for a print newspaper or a TV station, where real humans can vet each ad before it is printed or aired. But that is much more complicated when automated advertising platforms allow millions of advertisers, basically anyone with a credit card and internet access, to place an ad.
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Things are weird, as usual, in Key West.
A pair of Vikings push a stroller full of stuffed chimps down Duval Street. A man with a ponytail swallows a steel sword. People dressed only in body paint and glitter wander and jiggle from bar to bar.
Fantasy Fest, one of Key West’s major tourist draws of the year, is in full swing. And that’s a relief for Florida Keys business owners trying to weather the economic storm that hit after Hurricane Irma battered the middle stretch of the tourism-dependent island chain.
Bucket list trip
The festivities have not disappointed Gary Gates from Buffalo, New York, who planned this “bucket list” trip 10 months ago with six friends.
“We were coming whether there was a hurricane or not,” the former NFL cameraman said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. To come down here and actually see people dressed in all kinds of costumes — or no costumes at all — was something that I needed to see.”
Gates flew into Key West and has not left during its annual 10-day festival of costume parties and parades, so he has not seen the devastation that lingers more than a month since Hurricane Irma made landfall Sept. 10 about 20 miles north of the city.
Middle Keys hit hardest
The mostly residential middle stretch of the island chain took the brunt of the hurricane’s 130-mph winds. The area is almost entirely brown, with debris piled alongside the highway and mangroves stripped bare. A stranded boat was christened the SS Irma with spray paint and offered “free” to drivers passing by.
But at opposite ends of the 120-mile-long island chain, tourist attractions in Key Largo and Key West escaped significant damage.
Dolphins Plus Bayside was ready for visitors three days after Irma’s landfall, but business has been down by half compared to last fall, said Mike Borguss, the third generation in his family to run the Key Largo attraction.
Some staff now live with friends or in temporary trailers parked outside their damaged homes, but the dolphins swim up to the water’s edge to check out new people toting cameras, and an adjacent hotel property is open for weddings and other events that had to be canceled elsewhere in the Keys because of Irma, said Art Cooper, Borguss’ cousin and curator at Dolphins Plus Bayside.
“The water’s pretty, the weather’s beautiful and we wish you were here,” Cooper said.
Tourism down significantly
Scott Saunders, president and CEO of Fury Water Adventures, estimated tourism in Key West has been about a third of what it was at this time last fall, even though the city’s hotels, restaurants, cruise ship operations and beaches quickly reopened after the storm.
“There’s no reason not to be doing everything we did last year,” Saunders said before one of his fleet’s sunset cruises. “We should be having that tourist base down here, but we haven’t had any.”
Jodi Weinhofer, president of the Lodging Association of the Florida Keys and Key West, blames news coverage of Irma, but not the hurricane itself, for the downturn.
“There was over a $100 million worth of negative press,” Weinhofer said.
Tourism big business in Keys
Tourism is a $2.7 billion industry in the Keys, supporting 54 percent of all jobs in the island chain, according to Monroe County’s Tourist Development Council.
Some jobs have been lost to Irma. Last week, Hawks Cay Resort on Duck Key, about 35 miles northeast of Irma’s landfall, let go 260 workers amid ongoing repairs. The Islamorada Resort Company said its four properties in the Middle Keys will be closed for renovations over the next six months.
But up and down the island chain, bars, marinas and mom-and-pop establishments able to reopen have been hiring laid-off workers and keeping people from moving away, Daniel Samess, CEO of the Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce.
About 70 percent of roughly 35 hotels and motels in the Middle Keys are open, though those rooms mostly are filled by displaced residents and state and federal recovery workers. Officials plan to provide alternative housing and open those hotel rooms fully to tourists within the next two months, Samess said.
Final sweeps for debris in some parts of the Keys are scheduled Sunday, which also is the finale for Fantasy Fest. So far, the amount of broken tree branches and remnants of homes and belongings wrecked by Irma could fill over 133 Goodyear Blimps, according to Monroe County officials.
The cleanup will help create a good impression for visitors to Key West long before they arrive in the southernmost city in the continental U.S., said Key West Mayor Craig Cates.
“It’s a scenic cruise in your car coming down, and it’s very important that they get it cleaned up,” he said.
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The ever expanding field of consumer technology just got several dozen new specimens, showcased at the Netherlands’ first Consumer Electronics Show. None are expected to spectacularly change our lives … but at least some of them may prove to be truly useful. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election nearly a year ago, there has been increasing scrutiny of how Russian-backed operatives used accounts on Facebook, Google and Twitter to try to influence its outcome.
Executives from those companies appear before at least three congressional hearings starting Tuesday, facing questions from lawmakers about what happened and how they plan to respond.
What happened on the internet companies’ services during the 2016 election “was the undermining of our political process,” said Ann Ravel, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school and a former chair at the Federal Election Commission, the federal agency that enforces campaign finance law.
The congressional spotlight on the internet marks a shift in how lawmakers and the public think of the global communications network, observers say.
View of the internet
For years, the internet was viewed as “an egalitarian force, basically giving voice to the voiceless,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor.
The 2016 election, with Russian-backed operatives reportedly placing political ads on social networks or posing as Americans talking about hot-button issues, changed that utopian view of the internet.
“We realized that once you allow anyone to speak to as many people as they want no matter when they want, that enables certain types of speakers who hold undemocratic speech,” Persily said.
On the streets of San Francisco, people interviewed echoed frustrations heard around the country that little is known yet about how and why Russian-backed actors used internet firms.
But some say tech companies should take responsibility for what happens on their services and play more of a monitoring role than they have done.
“Social media is accessible to everyone,” peer counselor Moinnette Harris said. “People can engage in it or put whatever they want on there, whether it’s true or false.”
Lia McLoughlin, a stay-at-home parent, said, “I think Facebook has a responsibility. … If you know that there’s something that is affecting our democracy, and if you have any idea that it might be fake, there is a reason to stand in there. It’s our democracy.”
Facebook and other companies share responsibility if their services were used by foreign agents, said Christian Simonetti, an administrative assistant. But any new rules or penalties the internet companies face should be done “without infringing on people’s democratic rights to express themselves,” he said.
Proposed legislation
Law lecturer Ravel said that congressional leaders and regulators should require that internet companies be transparent about who is using their services for political ads, something that billboards, TV stations and newspapers have to do.
In recent weeks, some of the companies have vowed to make changes in reaction to the scrutiny. Twitter and Facebook have said they will do more to make political advertisements more transparent.
Twitter also banned RT and Sputnik, two Russian-backed media companies, from advertising on its site.
But almost everyone agrees it would be harder to regulate — for the government and internet firms — so-called “issue-based ads,” which are about hot topics such as gun rights and gay marriage. Those ads may not be tied to a specific candidate or ballot measure.
Even harder would be fake Facebook or Twitter accounts created overseas but purporting to have been created by people living in a targeted community.
“There is currently no clear industry definition for issue-based ads,” Twitter said in a blog post.
How the U.S. navigates these issues will matter to the rest of the world, Ravel said.
“It’s important for the United States to be a leader to balance innovation we want from the internet for people to speak openly on the internet,” Ravel said, “yet to do something to prevent the intervention in the election.”
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We’re interacting with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending October 28, 2017.
It’s a good week in the Top Five: not only do we get a new song, we also greet a new champion.
Number 5: Portugal. The Man “Feel It Still”
It all starts in fifth place, where Portugal. The Man advances a slot with “Feel It Still.” Why the wacky name?
This alternative rock act first came together in Alaska about 16 years ago, then moved to Portland, Oregon and released its debut album in 2006. The band members say they wanted their group name to have a bigger than life feel, but didn’t want to name it after any members. They decided on a country, and Portugal was the first to come to mind.
Number 4: Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do,”
It’s a bounce-back week for Taylor Swift, as her former champ “Look What You Made Me Do” revives a slot in fourth place.
Taylor drops her “Reputation” album on November 10, and she’s giving us more new music and videos. On October 20, Taylor released a promotional single, “Gorgeous,” reportedly about her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn. On October 26, Taylor gave us the futuristic video for “…Ready For It?”
Number 3: Logic, Alessia Cara and Khalid “1-800-273-8255”
Are you ready for Logic, Alessia Cara, and Khalid? They’re making a run for the gold, as “1-800-273-8255” jumps a slot to number three.
On October 21, Alessia joined many other top stars at a charity concert in Los Angeles. Held at the Hollywood Bowl, the fifth annual We Can Survive event benefited the Young Survival Coalition, which works to educate young women about breast cancer.
She’s no longer our champ, and that’s just the start of Cardi B’s problems.
Number 2: Cardi B “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)”
Cardi B ends her three-week run at the top, as “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)” falls to second place.
On October 22, police removed Cardi from the Hilton Hotel in Albany, New York. The hotel had called them due to complaints about noise and the scent of marijuana near her room.
Cardi took to Instagram to say that neither she nor her team smokes, and that she was sick with a cold. Billboard Magazine has reached out to Cardi B’s representatives for comment.
Number 1: Post Malone Featuring 21 Savage “Rockstar”
Post Malone and 21 Savage have both reached the Hot 100 summit for the first time in their respective careers – meet your new number one single, “Rockstar.”
This is one of 12 champion songs to bear the word “rock” in the 59-year history of the Hot 100 chart. Elton John did it first back in 1973 with “Crocodile Rock,” while LMFAO last reached the top in 2011 with “Party Rock Anthem.”
We’ll resume the party next week, so join us if you can.
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As the best-of-seven 2017 World Series shifts from Los Angeles to Houston at one game apiece, diehard fans of the hurricane-devastated city can sense a first-ever baseball championship within their grasp. Houstonians admit that a series victory — if only a momentary distraction — would lift the city’s spirits. Ramon Taylor reports from Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros.
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Automakers from around the world take the stage this weekend at the 45th annual Tokyo Motor Show. Designers will showcase electronic cars with advanced artificial intelligence and at least one concept car with safety features for the world around it. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Facebook, Google and Twitter are heading to Washington to answer questions about how their services were used by Russia-based operatives to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In Silicon Valley, there’s concern that the scrutiny may bring new regulations, as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
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Police in Hawaii will ticket people who get caught looking at digital devices while crossing a street in the state capital, Honolulu.
The law, passed in July, came into effect this week, making Honolulu the first major city in the U.S. to pass such a law.
The only exemption to the Distracted Walking Law is to use a device to call 911 to report an emergency.
The fines for the offenses will range from $15 to up to $99 for repeat offenders.
Pedestrians are still allowed to talk on their phones while crossing the streets, as long as they look at their surroundings.
The National Safety Council added “distracted walking” to its annual list of injury risks in 2015.
According to a study in the Journal of Safety Studies in 2015, some 400 pedestrians distracted by a phone were injured in the United States each year between the years 2000 and 2007. But after the introduction of the smartphone, the numbers have risen. The study found an estimated 1,300 pedestrians were injured in 2012.
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Actress Ashley Judd says she escaped Harvey Weinstein’s sexual advances by making a deal.
She says she told him, yes, she would submit to him only after winning an Oscar in one of his movies.
Then she says she fled from his hotel room where, two decades ago, she had arrived as a young actress for what she thought would be a business meeting.
Appearing on Thursday’s “Good Morning America,” Judd says she remains of two minds about how she handled the confrontation. She says she feels ashamed. She also credits her snap decision as brilliant.
Judd was among the first of what has become dozens of women alleging sexual harassment or assault by Weinstein, who is now under criminal investigation for rape in London, New York and Los Angeles.
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Drake’s “More Life” album won’t earn him more Grammy Awards: The rapper didn’t submit the album for consideration at the 2018 Grammys.
A person close to the nomination process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not allowed to publicly talk about the topic, said the multi-platinum rapper did not submit “More Life” for album of the year or best rap album. The person also says Drake did not submit any of the songs from the album.
Drake has described “More Life” as a mixtape and playlist. Despite that, the album has sold more 2 million units and includes the Top 10 hits “Fake Love,” “Passionfruit” and “Portland.”
Representatives for Drake and the Grammys did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Twitter is reporting a loss of $21.1 million in its third quarter, but turned in a better-than-expected profit when one-time charges and benefits are removed.
Shares of Twitter Inc. soared almost 9 percent before the opening bell Thursday.
The San Francisco company had a loss of 3 cents, but a gain of 10 cents if those non-re-occurring events are removed. That’s 2 cents better than industry analysts had predicted, according to a survey by Zacks Investment Research.
Revenue was $589.6 million in the period, in line with expectations.
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Twitter is enacting new policies around hate, abuse and ads, but creating new rules is only half the battle – the easy half.
The bigger problem is enforcement, and there the company has had some high-profile bungles recently. That includes its much-criticized suspension of actress Rose McGowan while she was speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, and the company’s ban, later reversed, of a controversial ad by a Republican Senate candidate.
The twists and turns suggest that Twitter doesn’t always communicate the intent of its rules to the people enforcing them. The company says it will be clearer about these policies and decisions in the future.
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Jessica Alba and husband Cash Warren are expecting their first baby boy.
The actress and Honest Company founder announced her pregnancy on Instagram in July and revealed on the platform Wednesday that the baby is a boy.
She chatted about her pregnancy later with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” Alba told Fallon she’s been trying to resist cravings for ice cream.
Alba and Warren have two daughters, Honor and Haven.
Alba most recently appeared as a judge alongside fellow actress-turned-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow on the Apple Music summer series “Planet of the Apps.”
Robert Salazar has been playing with origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, since he was 8 years old. When he sees a sheet of paper, his imagination takes over and intricate animals take shape.
“Seeing the single uncut sheet, it has everything you need to create all of the origami that have ever been folded. It is all in the single sheet so there is endless potential,” Salazar said.
The endless potential of origami, folding a single sheet of paper into an intricate sculpture, reaches all the way to space.
Salazar’s 17-year experience with origami is appreciated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a contractor and intern, Salazar is helping create objects that may one day be used in space exploration.
“Origami offers the potential to take a very large structure, even a vast structure, and you can get it to fit within the rocket, go up, then deploy back out again. So it greatly magnifies what we are capable of building in space,” Salazar said.
Folding a large object into a relatively small space is not a simple task.
“A big challenge in origami design in general is that because all of these folds share a single resource, which is a single sheet … everything is highly interdependent, so if you change just one feature it has an impact on everything else,” Salazar said.
“One of our guide stars really is keep it as simple as can be,” said Manan Arya, a technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Don’t add unnecessary complexity because every piece of complexity, every piece of hardware you add, that ends up being another potential point of failure.”
Starshade
Folding an object the size of a baseball diamond so that it could fit into a rocket is the goal of a NASA project called Starshade.
Once it opens in space, Starshade would allow a space telescope to better see the planets around bright stars.
“Seeing an exoplanet next to its parent star is like trying to image a firefly next to a search light, the searchlight being the star,” said Arya, who is working on the Starshade project. “Starshade seeks to block out that starlight so you can image a really faint exoplanet right next to it.”
Origami robot
Origami is also used in designing a robot called the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, or PUFFER. It has a body that can fold itself flat and roll under small spaces. PUFFER has been tested on desert terrains and snowy slopes. It may one day end up on a mission to another planet.
“It [PUFFER] is to explore environments otherwise inaccessible to a robot that could not fold itself to fit inside these cracks, [to] explore cave systems, could be other planets, even on our own,” Salazar said.
Origami antenna
Another application for space origami design is to pack an antenna into satellites the size of a briefcase, called CubeSats.
“The bigger the antenna you have, the more gain your antenna has, so it is useful to have a big antenna that gets packaged into this tiny space that unfolds out to be a large antenna. The biggest CubeSat antennas right now are about half a meter,” Arya said.
Unexplored territory
There are also largely unexplored surfaces that can utilize origami concepts in designing new technologies.
“So often, origami design has been tailored toward materials that are already lying flat,” Salazar said. “But there is actually a vastly, a much larger field of application for which the surfaces are not flat, so they could be parabolic. They could be spherical. They could be many combinations of doubly curved surfaces coming together. All of these things can also be folded.”
In the current origami-inspired technologies being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a graceful beauty to the folding and unfolding of designs such as the Starshade, which unfurls into what looks like a sunflower. In origami, Salazar said, art, science and engineering are only superficially different.
“Really, when it comes down to it, you’re looking at the world,” he said. “You’re making observations. You’re finding patterns in these observations. [You’re] developing an understanding of what you see, then using that understanding to create. And when you’re creating, [it] can either be creating with the intention of solving a physical problem or it could be nonphysical. It could be aesthetic. You’re trying to find a particular impact on people when they see your work. So really, the practice is the same.”
In origami, Salazar said art, science and engineering are quite similar. They draw on making observations and creating something that produces an impact.
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Paper folding known as origami is widely considered a Japanese art form. From a single piece of paper, an animal, a flower or even a boat can take shape. Besides the fun and artistic side of origami, the art of paper folding also has applications that can take it to outer space. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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