The ScanPyramid team made news last week when they announced the discovery of a ‘void’ inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. And while the void may remain a mystery, the team’s detailed map of the pyramid now allows visitors to roam its depths from anywhere in the world. VOA’s Kevin …

After pledging to do more to combat foreign interference on social media platforms, the heads of Facebook, Google and Twitter will have to work with Congress to find a way forward. VOA’s Congressional reporter Katherine Gypson sits down with California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, who represents Silicon Valley, to learn where …

The Texas church massacre is providing a familiar frustration for law enforcement: FBI agents are unable to unlock the gunman’s encrypted cellphone to learn what evidence it might hold.   But while heart-wrenching details of the rampage that left more than two dozen people dead might revive the debate over …

Struggling social media platforms Twitter and Snapchat are taking on new looks as the services seek wider audiences in the shadow of Facebook. Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets. And Snapchat, long popular with young people, will …

As U.S.-backed forces made their final push into the city of Raqqa to liberate what had once been the Syrian capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, they faced a problem. Not only were the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holding IS fighters — some captured and some who had surrendered …

German bureaucrats — notorious for their ability to create lengthy tongue twisters consisting of one single word — are celebrating the doubling of Twitter’s character limit. Twitter announced Tuesday it’s increasing the limit for almost all users of the messaging service from 140 to 280 characters, prompting a mix of …

To learn more about how stars are formed, astronomers look at light coming from deep space that illuminate events that happened billions of years ago. Cosmic dust, vapor in the earth’s atmosphere and light pollution can obscure that vision, but scientists at NASA found a way around all this by …

Microsoft and the U.N. Refugee Agency have partnered to teach about two dozen young refugees from around East Africa how to code and develop software. For VOA, Lameck Masina has the story from the Dzaleka refugee camp in central Malawi. …

A team of scientists who last week announced the discovery of a large void inside the Great Pyramid of Giza have created a virtual reality tour that allows users to “teleport” themselves inside the structure and explore its architecture. Using 3-D technology, the Scan Pyramids Project allows visitors wearing headsets …

Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.   Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.   The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit …

In the same affluent, suburban city where Google built its headquarters, Tes Saldana lives in a crowded but tidy camper she parks on the street. She concedes it’s “not a very nice living situation,” but it also is not unusual. Until authorities told them to move, more than a dozen …

Indonesia on Monday vowed to block Facebook’s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, said message encryption prevented it from monitoring the animated graphics …

Snapchat faced a worldwide outage for at least four hours on Monday, prompting a flood of complaints on rival mobile application Twitter a day before posting its third quarterly earnings as a public company. “We’re aware of the issue and working on a fix,” Snapchat said on its support Twitter …

Technology can hopefully reverse some of the harm caused to the planet by  industrialisation and help end disease and poverty, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be controlled, physicist Stephen Hawking said on Monday. Hawking, a British cosmologist who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease aged 21, said technology could …

Africa’s mobile internet connections are set to double in the next five years, a study showed on Monday, thanks to affordable smartphones and the roll-out of high-speed networks. A report by research and consulting firm Ovum in London estimates that mobile broadband connections will rise from 419 million at the …

Chipmaker Broadcom made an unsolicited $103 billion bid for Qualcomm on Monday, setting the stage for a major takeover battle as it looks to dominate the fast-growing market for semiconductors used in mobile phones. Qualcomm said it would review the proposal. The San Diego-based company is inclined to reject the …

Afghanistan’s government has decided against blocking the instant messaging services of WhatsApp and Telegram in the face of widespread anger and sustained criticism of the controversial move from civil rights groups and users. President Ashraf Ghani held a meeting Monday with Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and “decided that there will …

The Supreme Court has rejected Samsung’s appeal of court rulings that it impermissibly copied features of Apple’s iPhone. The justices on Monday left in place rulings in favor of Apple involving its patents for smartphone features that include auto-correct and a slide that unlocks the device. In 2014, a jury …

Rustlers, the villains in countless Wild West movies, are a very real threat to ranchers and farmers today. In Britain, sheep farmers are resorting to technology to protect their flocks. Faiza Elmasry reports on some high tech ways farmers are tracing their animals. Faith Lapidus narrates. …

As private and public transportation slowly shifts to electric propulsion, fans of Formula One car racing wonder whether the thrill of roaring turbocharged engines and the smell of burning car tires will someday be replaced by the subdued sleep-inducing whine of electric motors. But Formula E cars keep gathering fans …

A growing amount of the waste in the world is out-of-date electronics. And inside all of our devices are a lot of valuable metals, and also some dangerously toxic ones. All that stuff needs to be handled with care, and Indonesia is working to make sure it doesn’t end up …

The extent to which technology is always watching us is on stark display at a new London exhibit called “The Glass Room.” It allows visitors to see just how much of their lives is always available online. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

Authorities in Afghanistan are temporarily blocking WhatsApp and Telegram social media services in the country, citing security concerns, officials confirmed Friday. An official at the Afghan Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, ATRA, told VOA the social media tools will be suspended for 20 days. The decision follows a request from state security …

Hybrid cars are slowly working their way into car markets, and there are waiting lists for Elon Musk’s new all-electric Tesla Model 3. But as popular as these cars are, they have the natural limitations of their batteries. But an answer may be in sight. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter Inc employee whose last day at the company was Thursday, and the account was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said. “We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support …