レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

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レアジョブオリジナルの英会話ニュース教材です。世界の時事ネタを中心に、ビジネスから科学やスポーツまで、幅広いトピックのニュースを毎日更新しています。本教材を通して、ビジネスで使える実用的な英会話表現や英単語を身に付けることができます。

  1. 5h ago

    Never mind the humanoids, pocket robots are all the rage at IFA

    It had been an interesting mix at the giant electronics show in Germany. There was a pocket-sized robot to cheer you up, a watch that can count your calories, and a phone designed specifically to keep children safe. They’re all part of a joint conference led by consumer electronics company Sharp. Sharp was one of the first brands to kick off the massive electronics show last September 3, and the company’s most eye-catching offering was the pocket-sized robot. It’s all quite different from the full-sized humanoids we have become used to seeing at these conferences. The AI-driven character first appeared on a phone—now you can hold it in your hand and talk to it, as Sascha Lange, Sharp's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, demonstrated. He said, “So MIA is 12 centimeters tall, has an integrated camera, and is connected to ChatGPT. It is programmed in a way that it can speak very…Oh, you can’t hear it. It’s programmed in a way that it speaks very emotionally and also moves very emotionally.” “And MIA is already available in Japan at a retail price of around 300 euros and in Taiwan around 400 euros. So, this is a robot, quite affordable, right? And also Japan, our colleagues in Japan, last week announced the male version because she's a lady; that's the girl. And also the male version, which is a little bit less friendly, more straight, and that would launch in December this year. And then we have the second concept, this is Leomay, that is a European project, where we are focusing less the emotional part of the robot, but more the assistant part, so how it can really support things in life.” Sharp also highlighted its calorie counting feature for the Karada Mate watch, which claims to track calories as the wearer eats. IFA opened to the public on Friday, September 4, and continued until September 8. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

  2. 1d ago

    Africa’s mother tongues are finding new life as youth connect with roots and relatives

    A television game show in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos has an unforgiving rule: Speak English and you lose. For a U.S.-born millennial in the audience and a student of her parents' mother tongue, the high-stakes setting is a perfect classroom. Meanwhile, a 15-year-old Canadian speaks to a teacher about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away in Zimbabwe, learning a language her parents feared she would never speak. “Mhoroi,” Nyashadzashe Machingura says cheerfully with a pronounced Canadian accent while greeting in Zimbabwe's vernacular Shona. The scenes capture a new generation of interest and entrepreneurship around African languages once pushed to the margins by decades of colonialism. Often seen as secondary to English, French, and Portuguese, they are enjoying a renaissance that is also creating business opportunities. Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking roughly a third of the world’s languages, with between 1,500 and 3,000 across 54 countries, according to UNESCO. Experts say the revival in some of them is driven partly by second- and third-generation Africans in the diaspora finding it easier to reconnect with their roots and communicate with older relatives, thanks to social media, online learning, and entertainment. English remains the dominant language for education, business, and government affairs in the Southern African nation that officially recognizes 16 mostly Indigenous languages. “When you talk of Africa, you talk of English, French, Portuguese,” said Believe Mubonderi, a linguistics lecturer at Zimbabwe Open University. His research notes the importance of ensuring that African languages have a place in technologies shaping how people communicate, learn and trade. “In most cases, African languages were sidelined. They were never exposed or modernized to be used in commerce, science and technology," he said. "When a language has a very low status, there’s a danger that that language eventually becomes endangered.” Governments and international organizations are trying to reverse that trend. The African Union’s 2022 decision to adopt Kiswahili, spoken in much of East Africa, as an official working language has raised its international profile. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

  3. 2d ago

    Judge orders changes to Google’s digital ads business but spares it from a breakup

    A federal judge ordered Google to retool the system powering its monopoly in digital advertising, sparing the company from a wrenching breakup sought by the U.S. government. The initial two-page decision by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia marks the second time in a year that Google has received a reprieve from a Justice Department (DOJ) proposal to dismantle its internet empire. Meanwhile, what courts have described as the company's anti-competitive practices have enriched Google's corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., which has a market value of $4.11 trillion. The judge's full opinion, which includes the specific remedies, remained under seal for 14 days to allow the parties to review it and propose any necessary redactions. “We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs. After a judge declared Google's ubiquitous search engine an illegal monopoly in 2024, the Justice Department pushed for a penalty that would have required the company to sell its popular Chrome web browser. But it was rebuffed in September 2025 by another federal judge overseeing that case. Now, Brinkema has also rejected the government's argument that Google should be forced to sell parts of the technology underlying a Byzantine system that generates a significant portion of the company's nearly $400 billion in annual ad sales. Critics of Big Tech condemned the ruling. “It takes an Olympic level of mental gymnastics to find that Google is operating an illegal monopoly and then decide to do nothing about it," said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project. “With Big Tech continuing to suffocate new and innovative businesses from gaining traction, Judge Brinkema, like (U.S. District Judge Amit) Mehta before her, is sending the wrong message at the wrong time.” Brinkema is adopting an approach that the Justice Department adamantly opposed last November when the judge heard closing arguments during the trial’s remedy phase. The ad tech case dates back to the government’s 2023 filing of an antitrust lawsuit that resulted last year in an illegal monopoly judgment. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

  4. 3d ago

    Some US cities have begun rewarding careful drivers with fewer red lights

    Officials struggled for years to curb high-speed crashes along a residential corridor cutting through Albuquerque, New Mexico, but simply punishing the lead-footed drivers didn’t seem to work. What ultimately did was rewarding the law-abiding ones with fewer red lights. The solution, which the city credits for a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries along one busy stretch of road, is a relatively novel version of a long-standing traffic safety concept commonly known as “rest in red,” in which traffic signals default to red until a vehicle approaches. But Albuquerque and Portland, Oregon, took it a step further by adding speed sensors that grant a much earlier green light to drivers traveling at or below the posted limit. Portland recently rolled out the concept during the late-night hours on Southeast Powell Boulevard, a busy state highway with a long history of crashes, including fatal ones. Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city, calls the new approach a “virtual speed bump” and said the early results are promising. At the first intersection tested, rest in red was able to lower the average speed from 39 mph (63 kph) to 30 mph (48 kph), which is the speed limit, he said. Oregon State University researchers helped Portland choose its vehicle detection system for monitoring speeds, and now they’re assessing its performance. David Hurwitz, a professor of transportation engineering who leads the study, said it's too early to draw sweeping conclusions. “This choice that we are making to try to increase speed compliance seems like it’s working really well—seems like it has potential,” said Hurwitz, who stressed that further research is needed to ensure those gains aren’t offset by more drivers running red lights or other negative consequences. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

  5. 4d ago

    Keeping cool saves thousands of lives yearly, but at a cost of worsening global warming, experts say

    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.

  6. 5d ago

    Japanese automakers Nissan and Honda agree to work together on software for cars

    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.

  7. 6d ago

    Kentucky farm rears ostriches as alternative meat for allergy sufferers

    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.

  8. Sep 29

    Canada tariffs hurt Michigan furniture business owner’s ability ‘to put food on the table’

    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.

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レアジョブオリジナルの英会話ニュース教材です。世界の時事ネタを中心に、ビジネスから科学やスポーツまで、幅広いトピックのニュースを毎日更新しています。本教材を通して、ビジネスで使える実用的な英会話表現や英単語を身に付けることができます。

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