VIDEO: An estimated 1 million people will pack New York City’s Times Square to watch the huge, brilliantly lighted, crystal ball drop to signal the start of the new year. It is an American New Year’s tradition that goes back more than a century. As VOA reports, a lot of work goes into making sure that ball lights up the sky in spectacular fashion, exactly on time.

ON THIS DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY On December 31, 1879, inventor Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates his incandescent light bulb by lighting a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey. While the incandescent bulb had been invented some 40 years earlier, Edison’s was the first practical design that could burn steadily and relatively efficiently. Anticipation for Edison’s demonstration was so high that the Pennsylvania Railroad company ran special trains to Menlo Park to accommodate public interest in the event.

From “fire and fury” to talks of a new era of peace on the Korean Peninsula, 2018 was a significant year of engagement for the once reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, including multiple meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore .

VIDEO: A French technology company has created a tiny tracking device to combat poaching. The tracker is smaller, lighter and cheaper than previous methods, such as radio collars. The creators say the technology can also allow those in remote villages to share information on the internet regardless of language or literacy barriers.

VIDEO: NASA scientists are getting a very special New Year’s Day gift. The New Horizons spacecraft is moving into unexplored space beyond Neptune to investigate objects so far out in our solar system they can hardly be seen by telescope. The probe may help scientists figure out how the solar system was created.

VIDEO: With the new advancement of Kurdish-led forces into Hajin, in eastern Syria, thousands have fled their homes in Islamic State-controlled pockets. Cold weather and lack of equipment add to their hardship.