Elham Mansoori, member of Afghan Dreamers, an all-girls robotics team in Afghanistan, works on their prototype of a ventilator. In Afghanistan, a group of teenage girls are trying to build a mechanized, hand-operated ventilator for coronavirus patients, using a design from M.I.T. and parts from old Toyota Corollas. It sounds like an impossible dream, but then again, the all-girls robotics team in question is called the "Afghan Dreamers." Living a country where two-thirds of adolescent girls cannot read or write, they're used to overcoming challenges. The team of some dozen girls aged 15 to 17 was formed three years ago by Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech entrepreneur who heads the Digital Citizen Fund, a group that runs classes for girls in STEM and robotics and oversees and funds the Afghan Dreamers.

Kabul – On most mornings, Somaya Farooqi and four other teenage girls pile into her dad's car and head to a mechanic's workshop. They use back roads to skirt police checkpoints set up to enforce a lockdown in their city of Herat, one of Afghanistan's hot spots of the coronavirus pandemic. The members of Afghanistan's prize-winning girls' robotics team say they're on a life-saving mission -- to build a ventilator from used car parts and help their war-stricken country battle the virus. "If we even save one life with our device, we will be proud," said Farooqi, 17. Their pursuit of a low-cost breathing machine is particularly remarkable in conservative Afghanistan.

Artificial intelligence is helping doctors accurately diagnose eye disease in 96 per cent of cases at Dubai Diabetes Centre. Thousands of routine eye scans have been fed into an AI programme to identify retinal damage caused by diabetes in a trial during February -- UAE Innovation Month. The programme's success could now lead to it being permanently adopted at the centre in 2nd of December Street, as it is helping doctors treat more patients at an earlier stage. "To diagnose diabetic retinopathy, regular retinal imaging is required and in some cases optical coherence tomography is also used," said Dr M Hamed Farooqi, director of Dubai Diabetes Centre. "This imaging test provides cross-sectional images of the retina that show the thickness of the retina, which will help determine whether fluid has leaked into retinal tissue."