The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarck says it will take advantage of the newly released Apple-Google exposure notification system—but that doing so will require it to run two separate apps. That even one of the...
Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection. The questions: Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess...
Apple and Google are releasing their much-anticipated “exposure notification” technology to help global health authorities track the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world can now use the technology in their own contact tracing apps, subject to approval by the two tech giants. Contact tracing—tracking down those who may have been exposed to an infectious person—is an...
The news: Astronomers have made what are possibly the first ever observations of a planet in the process of being born. The newly-released images are of a very young star system called AB Aurigae, about 520 light-years away. They feature a massive disc of swirling gas and dust. The disc features a prominent twist that could indicate where a new planet is being born. The findings were reported...
You are feeling feverish and have a cough. Is it just a cold, or is it covid-19? That’s a question that’s going to be hanging over all of us, possibly for several years. Right now, getting tested for the coronavirus means going to a doctor or a drive-in clinic and potentially exposing other people, and even then, a test can be hard to obtain. The US Centers for Disease Control is still...
Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. We’re making this episode—like much of the rest of our coronavirus coverage—free to everyone. No sooner had the stay-at-home orders come down than mobile app developers around the…
Take a deep breath. Now, tell me … how are you feeling? There are no wrong answers, and no one else needs to know. Give your day a score out of 10 if you can’t think of the right words. Even better, write it down. Set a reminder to write down how you’re feeling every day. Now you’ve started a mood diary. These sorts of techniques are usually reserved for the therapist’s chair. But...
We are witnessing a new wave of technological progress with enormous potential to profoundly transform our societies. Together with globalization, climate change, demographic transformations, and the risk of pandemics such as covid-19, digital disruption is generating far-reaching changes in the global economy. Economic growth is almost exclusively a feature of industrial revolutions and is...