There have been a number of high-profile electric vehicles in recent years, from the Tesla Model S to the Ford F-150 Lightning and the Chevy Bolt EV. With many models now pushing upwards of the 300-mile range, electric vehicles are looking increasingly more practical. And with gas prices soaring, they also look more economical. But you still pay a substantial premium on most EVs. And even with government subsidies, it can take several years for the lower fuel and maintenance costs associated wit
When an indescribable tragedy was inflicted upon Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, we saw the predictable platitudes. We saw well-worn promises of changes that will never come. And we saw growing frustration that so many political leaders are willing to sacrifice children on the altar of the Second Amendment. But we also saw a comparatively newer element of the post-shooting ritual rear its ugly head: the increasingly insistent claims that technology can magically keep our kids safe. It w
Virtually everyone can articulate one of healthcare’s myriad issues: it’s expensive, feels impersonal and corporate, and confronts people with cascading folios of options and choices they’re not prepared for. From my years of working in this space, I might summarize all these issues under the umbrella term of “uncertainty”—that is, the converse of assurance and peace of mind. Uncertainty runs deep in this industry. Patients, sensing (correctly) that ther
The COVID-19 vaccines that we now have are very good at blunting the impact of the virus once it enters the body, preventing serious illness and death. But fast-spreading newer strains, such as delta and omicron, have brought renewed calls for development of vaccines that can do more—that can stop the virus as it attempts to enter the body, keeping an individual’s viral load extremely low, and drastically reducing their ability to transmit COVID -19 to someone else. Instead of a ja
There are several mushroom coffee companies on the market these days—coffee substitutes consisting of special types of fungi that purportedly boost energy and enhance clarity, like caffeine but without the jitters. Some employees at the mushroom coffee brand MUD\WTR are taking it one step further, adding small amounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms to their morning brew. To be clear, MUD\WTR does not include psychedelics in the mushroom coffee it sells—yet. If the legal landscape chan
I’m down here in Florida (it’s really hot) helping my Dad out. He had a stroke a few months back and just got sprung from his rehab place. He’s back home now and happy to be here, but he needs help and has very little mobility on his right side. The fear of him falling when nobody’s around is very real, so he needs an easy way to ask for help in case of emergency. I naturally immediately Googled “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” to remi
A star entrepreneur in Armenia, Marina Aghayan is an embodiment of her country’s ambitions in biotechnology—and a reflection of its grit. From her hometown of Yerevan she went as a graduate student to Spain, subsisting on a food budget of 3 euros a month. “I found a place to buy bread with 25 slices for 33 cents,” Aghayan tells me. “I found out that when you cook rice—80 cents for 1 kilogram—you triple the size and the mass of the rice. So it 
Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. After sweeping by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, it is now almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth in interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, carry little pieces of humanity in the form of their Golden Records. These messages in a bottle include spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds and images from nature, an album of recordings and images from numerous cultures, and a written m
Most of the roughly 40 trillion cells of your body have nearly identical copies of your genome–the DNA inherited from your parents, containing instructions for everything from converting food to energy to fighting off infections. Healthy cells become cancerous through harmful mutations in the genome. If a cell’s genome is damaged by ultraviolet light, for example, it can result in mutations that tell the cell to grow uncontrollably and form a tumor. Identifying
Parks, small woodlands, and even simple patches of grass not only keep a city attractive, but also help people find a sense of bliss in an otherwise bustling urban environment. With new technologies, we can plan and monitor these urban “green spaces” better than ever before. As several studies have highlighted, nature within urban settings plays a pivotal role in combating many of the global public health challenges commonly associated with urbanization. This includes maladies such