Alaska’s Iditarod Dogs Get Neon Visibility Harnesses After Crashes
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Iditarod, the annual sled dog race celebrating Alaska’s official state sport, is set to get under way Saturday with a new focus on safety after five dogs died and eight were injured in collisions with snowmobiles while training on shared, multiuse trails.
For the first time, mushers who line up for the ceremonial start in Anchorage will have the chance to snag light-up, neon harnesses or necklaces for their dogs before they begin the days-long race that takes the dog-and-human sled teams about 1,600 kilometers over Alaska’s unforgiving terrain.
The 38 mushers will trace a course across two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and along the ice-covered Bering Sea. In about 10 days, they will come off the ice and onto Main Street in the old Gold Rush town of Nome for the last push to the finish line.
Mushers always have contended with Alaska’s deep winter darkness and whiteout conditions. But the recent dog deaths even while training have put a focus on making the four-legged athletes easier to see at all times. Mushers typically wear a bright headlamp for visibility, but that doesn’t protect lead dogs running about 18 meters in front of the sled.
“I can’t make snowmachiners act responsibly, it’s just not going to happen,” said Dutch Johnson, manager of the August Foundation kennel, which finds homes for retired racing sled dogs. “But I can help make dogs more visible.”
Two dogs were killed and seven injured in November on a team belonging to five-time Iditarod champion Dallas Seavey on a remote Alaska highway used as a training trail in the winter. It has recently become more popular with snowmobilers, bikers and other users, making it more dangerous for dogs.
Seavey said in a social media post that the snowmobile was heading in the opposite direction at about 105 kph when it slammed into the lead dogs on the team. The snowmobile driver was later cited for negligent driving.
In December, musher Mike Parker was running dogs for veteran Iditarod competitor Jim Lanier on the Denali Highway when a snowmobile driven by a professional rider struck the dog team. Three dogs died and another was injured. The driver, Erik Johnson, was testing snowmobiles for his employer, Minnesota-based manufacturer Polaris, and both were cited for reckless driving.
Julie St. Louis, the co-founder and director for the August Foundation, is close to the Lanier family and knew the dogs involved. When brainstorming with Johnson, they decided to use the nonprofit foundation to help outfit the dogs with harnesses and necklaces.
“It was one way we could step up and do something that was still within our mission, because we’re all about keeping the dogs safe,” she said.
The August Foundation has since secured an $8,500 grant from the Polaris Foundation and raised another $2,500 to buy 400 light-up harnesses, which were handed out to mushers at sled dog races in Fairbanks and Bethel earlier this winter.
The harnesses burn with bright neon-like colors that help illuminate the dogs in the darkness of the Alaska winter and pierce the clouds of snow sometimes kicked up by snowmachines, what Alaskans call snowmobiles.
They are now accepting donations to outfit as many dog teams as possible. Providing each team with four harnesses or lighted necklaces and one illuminated vest for the musher costs $120. A separate effort, called Light Up the Lead Dogs, is raising money to buy lighted collars for dogs.
In each of the accidents, Johnson said the snowmobile that hit the dogs was riding behind another snowmobile, which obscured visibility by kicking up snow.
“What I’ve witnessed with these harnesses is they make a halo effect in that dust,” Johnson said. “So they do give you some warning of where the lead dogs are.”
Jeri Rodriquez, the vice president of the Anchorage Snowmobile Club, said the multiuser trails are getting busier and all users need to do all they can to be seen.
Johnson will hand out the lighted harnesses Saturday at the Iditarod’s ceremonial start in Alaska’s biggest city. The fan-friendly event includes a musher taking an auction winner in their sled over about 18 kilometers of trail. The race’s real start comes Sunday in Willow, about 121 kilometers north of Anchorage.
The dog deaths are the latest pressure point for the Iditarod, which began in 1973 and has taken hits in recent years from the pandemic, climate change, the loss of sponsors and the retirement of several big-name mushing champions with few to take their place.
The ranks of mushers participating this year dwindled even more last month as accusations of violence against women by two top mushers embroiled the Iditarod. Both were initially disqualified officially for violating the race’s conduct rules. One was reinstated later but wound up scratching because he had leased his dogs to other mushers and could not reassemble his team in time.
Three former champions remain in the race: 2019 champion Pete Kaiser, defending winner Ryan Redington and Seavey, who is looking for a record-breaking sixth championship.
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Rooted in Nature, Washington Festival Explores Ideas About Forests, Conservation
Exploring the relationship between humanity and nature, the Reach to Forest international festival brings artists together to plant ideas among viewers about the environment and conservation. From the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, VOA’s Cristina Caicedo Smit has the story. Camera: Phillip Datcher
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First US Moon Lander in 50 Years Goes Silent
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo astronauts fell silent Thursday, a week after breaking a leg at touchdown and tipping over near the lunar south pole.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, Odysseus, lasted longer than the company anticipated after it ended up on its side with hobbled solar power and communication.
The end came as flight controllers received one last photo from Odysseus and commanded its computer and power systems to standby. That way, the lander can wake up in another two to three weeks — if it survives the bitterly cold lunar night.
Intuitive Machines spokesman Josh Marshall said these final steps drained the lander’s batteries and put Odysseus “down for a long nap.”
“Good night, Odie. We hope to hear from you again,” the company said via X, formerly Twitter.
Before losing power, Odysseus sent back what Intuitive Machines called “a fitting farewell transmission.”
Taken just before touchdown, the picture shows the bottom of the lander on the moon’s pockmarked surface, with a tiny crescent Earth and a small sun in the background.
The lander was originally intended to last about a week on the moon.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines became the first private business to land a spacecraft on the moon without crashing when Odysseus touched down February 22. Only five countries had achieved that since the 1960s, including Japan, which made a sideways landing last month.
Odysseus carried six experiments for NASA, which paid $118 million for the ride. The first company to take part in NASA’s program for commercial lunar deliveries never made it to the moon; its lander came crashing back to Earth in January.
NASA views these private landers as scouts that will pave the way for astronauts set to arrive in another few years.
Until Odysseus, the last U.S. moon landing was by Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt in 1972.
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Ukrainian YouTuber Finds Her AI Clone Selling Russian Goods on Chinese Internet
washington — Speaking Mandarin and promoting love for China, countless videos of foreign-looking women made with artificial intelligence started popping up on Chinese social media platforms around the Lunar New Year earlier this month.
The avatars in the videos are created with online images that are stolen, reproduced and repurposed so that even the women in real life recognize themselves in the videos.
Olga Loiek is one of those women. She’s a 20-year-old Ukrainian who studies cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. A couple of months ago, Loiek started a YouTube channel where she talks about mental health and shares her philosophies about life.
However, shortly after that, she started receiving messages from followers telling her that they had seen her on Chinese social media. There, she’s not Olga Loiek but a Russian woman who speaks Mandarin, loves China and wants to marry a Chinese man. Her name is Natasha, or Anna, or Grace, depending on the social media platform you find her on in China.
“I started translating the videos with Google Translate, and I realized that most of these accounts are talking about things like China, Russia, how good the relationship between China and Russia is,” she told VOA. “This feels very violating.”
In some videos, the avatars talk about how much they value Russia and China’s close ties. In other videos, they praise Chinese history and culture or talk about how much Russian women want to marry Chinese.
“If you marry Russian women, we will wash clothes, cook, and wash dishes for you every day,” an avatar said. “We will also give you foreign babies, as many as you want.”
Several dozen videos of Loiek’s avatar speaking Mandarin have been found on video sites Douyin and Bilibili. Most of these accounts would ask viewers to visit their online stores to buy what they say are authentic Russian goods.
Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, has labeled some of these videos as potentially AI-generated. But comments show that many believed they were looking at a real woman. One netizen wrote, “Russian beauty, Chinese people welcome you.”
Loiek said she would never say things like that, obviously, given that she’s from Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since 2022.
She said, “This is probably used to make people, maybe people in China, feel that foreigners feel that their country is superior.”
On Bilibili, China’s biggest video site, some AI videos using Loiek’s face are marked with the logo of HeyGen, indicating that the video was generated on the company’s website.
In one tutorial on Bilibili, the demonstrator even shows how to make a short video on HeyGen with a clip of Loiek talking.
HeyGen is an AI company headquartered in Los Angeles that was launched in China in 2020. It specializes in realistic digital avatars, voice generation and video translating.
The technology developed by HeyGen was used in AI videos of Donald Trump and Taylor Swift speaking perfect Mandarin that went viral on Chinese social media in October 2023. According to Forbes, the company is now valued at $75 million.
HeyGen’s moderation policy states that users cannot generate avatars that “represent real individuals, including celebrities or public figures, without explicit consent.” The company’s official tutorial video on avatar making shows that users must submit a video of people giving consent to the use of their likeness. It’s unclear how some in China could circumvent the requirement to make videos of Loiek.
Loiek said that since she and her YouTube subscribers have sent complaints to Chinese social media companies, about a dozen of the accounts imitating her have been taken down.
VOA reached out to HeyGen and Douyin’s parent company, ByteDance, for comments but has not received a response.
The Chinese government rolled out provisions to regulate deepfakes and other “deep synthesis services” in early 2023. The law prohibits generating deepfakes without the consent of the people whose image or other information is used.
Loiek posted her story on YouTube, and it has been shared on Chinese social media. Netizens across platforms sympathized with her and called for tougher regulations on AI.
Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Tencent are investing heavily in AI technology. One of the most hyped-up services powered by AI is digital humans.
Tencent and Xiaoice, a Chinese AI studio spun off from Microsoft, offer digital human services that can clone people and turn them into AI avatars for as little as $145.
AI avatars have also been found in online disinformation campaigns that spread pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives. In February 2023, research firm Graphika found a social media campaign promoting Beijing’s interests using realistic-looking computer-generated people in videos.
In September 2023, the U.S. State Department warned in a report, “Access to global data combined with the latest developments in artificial intelligence technology would enable the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to surgically target foreign audiences and thereby perhaps influence economic and security decisions in its favor.
As for Loiek, she does not plan to quit YouTube or stop posting.
“We need some sort of regulatory frameworks, so we can understand and we can prevent these things from happening,” she said.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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