Last September, Dr. Shuhan He, a faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Computer Science Lab, contributed an article to the Journal of the American Medical Association drawing attention to the creation of a comprehensive set of medical emoji. “The next step is for the medical community to better leverage these hard-won emoji. But how? And why?” he wrote. In his piece, the doctor outlined a rash of ideas for how clinicians could use these digital hieroglyphs.
The video game industry has never been shy about embracing a new technology, but the speed at which publishers and developers hopped on board the NFT hype train was dizzying. Seemingly overnight, game makers announced ways they planned to incorporate the tokens into their product, with one eye on the metaverse and another on bigger revenues. Players, though, are having none of it. And that pushback may be having an impact. The trickle of game companies backing away from NFTs that started in Janu
Tim O’Reilly has been a conversation starter within the tech industry for more than three decades. The company he founded, O’Reilly Media, launched the first true commercial website in 1993, and remains a tech-industry staple that publishes tech books, offers online education, and holds virtual events. O’Reilly saw firsthand the first wave of big dot-com companies swell, crest, and crash in the late 1990s. His company helped promote the rise of a new group of internet compan
One of the most notorious symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of taste and smell. There are varying estimates on just how many tongues and noses went out of business, but one study shows that as many as 1.6 million Americans lost their senses. Now a new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York University Langone Health, published in the journal Cell, finds that the culprit of this olfactory dysfunction may be our immune response to COVID-19. The new insight may help our understand
The Pozio Cradle is a phone-charging accessory with an unusual feature: It has the ability to defeat your smartphone’s microphone. People don’t normally buy new gadgets to block functions in their old gadgets, but the capabilities of smartphones—including personal-assistant services that might be listening silently—don’t make them normal devices. Hence the theoretical market for this $119 device from a Vancouver startup, which I first inspected in person at CES
Listen: let’s just get through February. We’re all in this together. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s the perfect time to stay inside and get some work done. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work efficiently, of course, so let’s continue to leverage time-savers and cool tools. We’ve got something of a retention theme this month, with apps purpose-built to supercharge your notes-to-self, intelligently organize your scans, and jog your memory
It was hardly a surprise when Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it was acquiring a major game developer this week. By Sunday night, video game Twitter was exploding with rumors that an announcement would be coming Monday. No one had Bungie on their prediction list, though. However, it’s unlikely this was a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard. Jim Ryan, president and CEO of SIE, says this acquisition has been in the works for the past
Fast Company’s fourth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list promises to be more comprehensive than ever, offering half a dozen brand-new categories. Here are six reasons why you should apply.
- Brand exposure Every company selected as a finalist will be featured in the September issue of the magazine and on fastcompany.com (more than 12 million monthly unique visitors and more than 40 million page views).
- Talent retention Public recognition as a Best Workplace for Innovator
This year for his birthday, Carmen Draper, 58, got some unwelcome news: His 31-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer. “It had already moved to her lymph nodes,” he explains. That was in late October, and by Thanksgiving she was in her second week of chemotherapy. During five weeks of treatment that included both chemotherapy and radiation she became extremely dehydrated and worn down. “They have to almost kill you to save your life,” Draper
When Apple got into the smart-speaker business with the HomePod four years ago with a sharp focus on music, it seemed to be miles behind Amazon and Google. Those companies had spent years tacking on new features to their Alexa and Google Assistant speakers, and they had a long head start on integrating smart home devices. They’d even enlisted developers to create third-party voice skills so that users could order a Domino’s pizza or call for an Uber without lifting a finger. I admi