Video games catch a lot of flack from critics who say the medium can be harmful to players. But the science on that claim is murky, at best. Now, one of the video game industry’s veteran executives is teaming with a medical device expert to make games that are specifically designed to help treat health conditions. DeepWell Digital Therapeutics, which launched Tuesday, plans to make video games that both entertain and provide treatment for a variety of issues, including mental health, one
Editor’s Note: This article is part of Fast Company Spark, a new initiative for middle and high school readers. The sharp fear of not having enough clean water to drink starting at six years old, as I was growing up in a working-class neighborhood at the south periphery of Puebla city in Mexico, is an experience I’ll never forget. It showed me a side of the climate crisis that people are experiencing around the world, and what happens when powerful countries and corporations p
With an ongoing shortage of infant formula leaving some parents frustrated and out of options, there’s at least a sliver of promising news: Infant formula startup Bobbie just raised $50 million dollars to expand its European-style infant formula offerings in the U.S. market. Founded in 2018 by Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy, Bobbie touts itself as a more holistic alternative to the major brands. Modi, now the CEO of Bobbie, says the idea for the company came when she was b
Designers are known to be exceptionally creative—but their success isn’t just luck and talent. Creativity is nothing more than an amalgamation of skills and habits that you must strengthen over time. This is particularly relevant now, as we navigate what’s become known as the Great Resignation. People everywhere are quitting their jobs, many of them because they were creatively stymied, leading to a surprising boom of new-business creation. [Image: courtesy HarperCollins Lea
It shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise that Adobe would like to be a leading purveyor of tools for creating content for the metaverse. It’s a reasonable enough aspiration for the company, given its nearly 40-year-history as a kingpin of software used for generating imagery and experiences, from the printed page to the web and beyond. There’s just one catch: The metaverse doesn’t exist yet. And in its fullest sense, it can’t—not until the te
With an ongoing shortage of infant formula leaving some parents frustrated and out of options, there’s at least a sliver of promising news: Infant formula startup Bobbie just raised $50 million dollars to bring its European-style infant formula to the U.S. market. Founded in 2018 by Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy, Bobbie touts itself as a more holistic alternative to the major brands. Modi, now the CEO of Bobbie, says the idea for the company came when she was breastfeeding her daughter, duri
Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight—inside your TV, fridge, car, and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the interne
As thousands of civilians risk their lives to resist a Russian onslaught, a global group of cyber guerillas have joined the fray too. They’ve disabled Kremlin-backed websites, leaked personal data, exposed disinformation, hijacked TV signals, and even hobbled infrastructure. One early and ongoing attack, launched in January, disabled the internal systems of a train network in Belarus, a country of 9 million people that’s sandwiched between Russia and Ukraine and has long been under
Google search is failing you, and not just because of its privacy and search quality issues. When you search the web, you won’t get any personal results from apps like Dropbox, Notion, or even Google’s own Google Docs. If you’re looking for a specific spreadsheet you made in Google Sheets, or a Slack conversation your recently had with a coworker, you’ll need to go looking into each individual app. It’s a pain and a waste of time. Now a new breed of tools
On a Zoom call the other day, a coworker of mine made a remark about the artwork I have hanging on the wall behind me: two very generic-looking pictures of deer. So generic, in fact, that I have thought about them exactly twice: the day I hung them and when my coworker mentioned them. It was then that I decided to dedicate the rest of my Zoom existence to using the virtual background feature (here’s how to do it, if you haven’t already played with it). And while Zoom has a decent c