Inside the biosafety level 4 lab at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) in Boston, researchers wear three sets of gloves and breathe air piped into moon suits through snaking tubes. Before them, under a plastic shield, are human lung-sac cells grown from organoids, blobs of cells that mimic organs. Now it’s time to infect them with the coronavirus. What happens...
The news: IBM has said the company will stop developing or selling facial recognition software due to concerns the technology is used to promote racism. In a letter to Congress, IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said the tech giant opposes any technology used “for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms.” He called for a “national dialogue” on...
The news: Lockdowns in Europe helped stop 3.1 million deaths up to the start of May, researchers have estimated. Strictly limiting people’s movements and enforcing social distancing cut the average number of people that contagious individuals infected by 81%. The measures pushed the epidemic’s reproduction number, R, down from 3.8 to below 1 in all 11 European countries they studied, including...
In the business world, the opportunities for applying quantum technology relate to optimization: solving difficult business problems, reconfiguring complex processes, and understanding correlations between seemingly disparate data sets. The main purpose of quantum computing is to carry out computationally costly operations in a very short period of time, while at the same time accelerating...