Psychedelics, long stigmatized as risky recreational drugs, are finally finding a place in polite society. More and more research from prominent institutions such as Johns Hopkins suggests that such drugs, in the right formulations and with supervision, can bring about therapeutic breakthroughs in patients, notably in those that have proven to be resistant to other types of treatment. Venture capital firms have taken notice—pouring money into startups developing psychedelic treatment
Twenty years ago, the U.S. Army tried something that was revolutionary at the time. In the early 2000s, video games were a political hot potato. Some elected officials were pointing to them as corruptive forces on the youth of America and an industry that was in dire need of regulation. Then, a few years later, the Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (which let two characters in the game have animated sexual intercourse) found its way out into the wild and all hell truly broke loose
If corporations succeed in building the metaverse—and one organization’s real estate becomes the epicenter of Web 3.0—having LGBTQ people in the creation process could make or break inclusivity efforts in the years to come. The rollout of social media over the past 15 years has shown us queer life online can be both treacherous and essential. GLAAD made waves last year when it released its first Social Media Safety Index and gave every major platform a failing grade. B
Recently, I canceled my subscription to Disney+, the streaming service, a little less than four weeks after signing up. This was not a rash decision, but a calculated one. I only joined to watch one thing (the much-hyped Beatles documentary Get Back) and knew I would quit before getting billed for a second month. Moreover, I already knew I wasn’t so into the basics of the Disney+ catalog—because I did this same join-and-quit exercise 18 months ago, to watch Hamilton. It turns
The vivid blue color of a new brand of Dutch soda doesn’t come from food coloring: The startup making the product, called Ful, makes the drink with spirulina, a blue-green algae that gives the soda more of a nutritional punch than the standard carbonated beverage. The company wants to use the product to make algae a more popular ingredient in order to help shrink the carbon footprint of the food system. The founders, who met as students at the Singapore campus of the business school INSEA
YouTube is officially getting into the NFT game. YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan announced in a blog post on Thursday that the platform will be introducing new tools to help creators make more money from their content, including monetization features for YouTube Shorts—the platform’s short-form videos, an e-commerce function for YouTube videos, and tools that would let YouTubers sell content as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. In the post, Mohan said the NFT tools wo
Over the past 40 years, networks such as HSN and QVC have made live commerce a familiar concept: presenters gushing over the features and hard-to-beat prices of goods on live TV for consumers to buy. However, live e-commerce is still a nascent enterprise in the United States, in particular, especially when you compare any efforts in the space to the powerhouse industry that’s been created in China. Live e-commerce in the U.S. is expected to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024—not ba
The metaverse is not only finding its way into everyday exchanges across the web, pop culture, and mainstream news media discourse, but also into closed-door corporate discussions as industries ruminate on if—and how—to be an early adopter of this modality. This understanding it represents a seismic shift that will challenge technological and cultural paradigms. While the global industry at large is still in the learning, planning, and development stage of the metavers
Apple’s augmented reality work is getting more real. The company has kept its work on augmented reality glasses fairly well hidden, but the media and analyst reports of the existence of the new wearable device are getting more frequent. The current thinking is that Apple is working on an AR headset product (than may also support VR) for release next year. It’s also working on a more svelte pair of AR glasses to be released sometime after that. On Tuesday the first mention of the (p
Online speciality health care company Thirty Madison is merging with Nurx, a telehealth platform most known for providing affordable birth control. The merger is an all stock deal that is light on specifics. “We saw women’s health as a really ripe area for our model, we saw it as a place where we can improve access and drive an outcome,” says Thirty Madison president Michelle Carnahan, who has previously held executive roles at both Sanofi and Eli Lilly. Carnahan will remain