CES kicked off in Las Vegas on Tuesday with hundreds of vendors showcasing their high-tech products.
This year, products that help people get into shape are a big draw. One of those products is Fight Camp.
Users wear wraps that are equipped with sensors around their hands. Once they put the boxing gloves on, they can hit the punching bag to measure the strength and frequency of their hits throughout the workout.
"The cool thing about Fight Camp is that we actually work with mostly beginners, a lot of stay-at-home moms or people that just maybe are intimidated to go to the gym," said Jessica Evans, lead trainer for Fight Camp.
Scripps News' Jason Bellini went head-to-head with Evans in a short workout. Watch the video to see how he fared.
Advancements in robots are also getting a lot of attention. A company showing off a robot on Sunday said it's capable of cleaning dishes and doing laundry.
One of the most unique products displayed on Sunday featured virtual makeup. Artificial intelligence is used to map different looks onto a person's face.
CES 2025 will feature more than 4,500 exhibitors, including from top tech brands and startups. The event runs from Jan. 7 through Jan. 10.
Inside a rehabilitation center in central Kyiv, young soldiers who have lost limbs in battle prepare for a different kind of fight. They are training to use some of the worlds most advanced bionic technologies an innovation borne out of necessity in a nation shattered by war.
Over the past three years, as many as 100,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs in combat. The staggering toll has turned Ukraine into an epicenter for groundbreaking advancements in prosthetic technology. Surgeons and experts from around the globe now descend on Kyiv, offering their skills to aid the wounded and test cutting-edge bionic solutions.
Among the patients is 35-year-old Serhiy Danilets, an infantry sniper whose life changed when a tank shell exploded near him in eastern Ukraine. The blast killed two of his comrades and left his arm shattered beyond repair. Surgeons were forced to amputate everything below his shoulder a severe case that would traditionally limit prosthetic options. However, Serhiys story took a different path at Kyivs Tytanovi Rehab clinic.
He has learned to control a bionic hand made by the Swedish biomedical company Integrum. Serhiy uses sensors that interpret micro-flexions in his chest muscles. Each movement from gripping objects to more intricate gesturesrequires mental and physical training.
Anton Ivantsiv, a triple amputee and Serhiys friend, explained the science behind the technology.
He has a very short amputation, Anton said, pointing to the sensors that capture Serhiys muscle signals and transmit commands to the prosthetic.
For Serhiy, the breakthrough means independence and a future where he can once again hold a weapon and teach survival skills to new recruits.
Bohdan Kovbasyuk, another patient at the center, has a different focus. After losing his leg in a rocket attack during a reconnaissance mission, the 28-year-old soldier faced an uphill battle. Despite enduring 52 surgeries, Bohdan is determined to reclaim his mobility.
I can already stand, he said, In Ukraine, there is almost zero accommodation for wheelchairs, and now I can get to almost any place.
Bohdan plans to marry his fiance, Daryna, in a few days. Though hell use a wheelchair to navigate the ceremony, he hopes wedding guests will contribute to his online fundraising for a permanent prosthetic le a cost of $90,000, half of which he must raise himself.
Some wounded soldiers travel 5,000 miles to Minneapolis, where the Ukrainian-American chief medical officer of the Protez Foundation, Yakov Gradiner, and his team have outfitted more than 200 soldiers with customized prosthetics.
Nobody knew before how vast the need would be, Gradiner said. We understand that we cannot take everybody.
The Esper Hand, a state-of-the-art bionic limb developed by a Kyiv startup, represents the next frontier. Using AI, the prosthetic adapts to users muscle signals, predicting the strength needed for various tasks. Roma, a 29-year-old soldier fitted with the Esper Hand, demonstrates its potential. Once a sniper, he is now remapping his brain to control the arms complex functions.
When I go to a rock concert, Ill do this, Roma joked, using his prosthetic to flash the universal rock-and-roll hand sign.
Despite his progress, Romas journey underscores the challenges amputees face. After losing his arm in a drone attack, Roma walked four miles to an evacuation point with a tourniquet on his arm for five hours.
I had adrenaline, he said. And I thought of my mom. She would get mad if I didnt make it home.
Ukraines amputees has become a passion project for one of the leading orthopedic doctors in the world: Rickard Brnemark, the founder and owner of the bionics maker, Integrum.
The Swedish surgeon, who owns has made multiple journeys to Kyiv for what he calls Mission Impossible operations, enabling bionic limbs for those with amputations so extreme they once would be unable to wear an advanced prosthetic until now. He is also training Ukrainian doctors to perform the procedures themselves.
In November, at an annual conference of global leaders in osseointegration the technical term for prosthetic medicineBrnemark brought a powerful message from Ukraines amputees: the urgent need for scientific breakthroughs.
The most pressing problem Brnemark is trying to solve is how to improve the signals picked up by sensors placed on the skin above muscles to control the bionics.
If you sweat or use it for long periods, or when you do movements, the skin might move and you will not pick up the right signal, he explains. To combat this, his team is developing implanted electrodes to directly capture signals
While implanting sensors is a promising possibility, it remains experimental. Were not there yet, Brnemark says. But the way this field has moved forward in the last ten years, I think its more than ever. So its a big shift now.
Brnemark is also acutely aware of the ethical considerations involved in experimental work with desperate patients.
The question is, can we use knowledge from their treatment to further advance for others? he reflects. Thats the problem.
Despite the challenges, Brnemark continues traveling to Ukraine, training doctors to treat victims with the most extreme amputations. His efforts have changed liveslike those of Bohdan and Serhiyand earned him the honorary title of Military Surgeon of Ukraine. I think about it every day, he says, recalling the emotional impact of his visits. I was crying every time on the plane home.
The resilience of these soldiers is perhaps best illustrated by their ability to find joy amidst hardship. At Bohdans wedding in October, his best man Serhiy has programmed his bionic hand to hold the rings.
This is probably the most important event in my life, Bohdan said, smiling.
Ukraines bionic revolution offers more than technological innovation its allowing amputees like Serhiy, Bohdan, and Roma to reclaim their independence. A few weeks after Bohdans wedding, Serhiy returned to his unit to teach the newly arrived how to survive and how to make sure they don't get killed so quickly.
Haiti is a nation that seems to be permanently at a crossroads between hope for some kind of stability and outright anarchy. Its now the latter.
Just 700 nautical miles from the U.S., violent paramilitary gangs commit widespread and severe human rights atrocities to maintain their unprecedented power.
Scripps News international correspondent Jason Bellini traveled to Port-au-Prince to document the human toll of Haitis descent into anarchy.
Brave Haitians shared with him detailed examples of how the gangs terrorize the population into submission. They recruit vulnerable children to fill their ranks. They use sexual violence as a means of instilling fear. They kidnap people and hold them for ransom to bankroll their arms purchases.
And their control of 80% of the countrys capital is resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe, which includes a growing number of babies suffering from severe malnutrition.
In this encore of Jason Bellini's on-the-ground reporting for "In the Shadows with Jason Bellni," he exposes the violent, lived experiences of Haitians struggling to survive in an anarchic gangland.
The United Nations is being presented with a new trove of evidence to support charges that Russia has stolen Ukrainian children and forced them to take Russian identities after a team at Yale University managed to hack into Russian adoption databases.
Yale's researchers secretly found within them what they say are 148 Ukrainian children. It's part of the most detailed and extensive evidence presented to date of alleged Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The new report uses open-source intelligence and satellite images to identify Russian government aircraft allegedly used to take away Ukrainian orphans from Russian-occupied areas of Eastern Ukraine.
The evidence collected by Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab builds upon methods and discoveries shown previously to Scripps News by its executive director, Nathaniel Raymond.
The report alleges that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, ordered this program; it traces how it was carried out by officials at the highest levels of Russia's federal government.
Once children are adopted by Russians, they become far more difficult to track.
The report tracks 314 Ukrainian children at least 67 of them now naturalized as Russian citizens. But it's believed that there could be thousands more.
With the release of this report, Kyiv is calling for Russia to provide a register of all Ukrainian children currently being held in its custody.
"Ukraine will not rest until our children are returned home and those responsible are held accountable," said Andriy Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in a statement.
On Wednesday, representatives from Ukraine's government, along with Yale's investigators, will appear before a special meeting of the united nations security council of which Russia is a veto-holding member.
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