If there were a Nobel Prize for Overcoming Bureaucratic Adversity, do you know who would win it? Katalin Karikó. Her story of enduring decades of little to no support for her research into the properties of mRNA, which led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, has transcended science. It exposes a blind spot of our current scientific institutions to find and nurture every passionate scientist and line of inquiry. What can we learn from Karikó’s story to make sure we aren&
The holiday travel season is upon us and while your destination might involve family, food, and fun, getting there can be an exercise in frustration, futility, and frowning. It doesn’t have to be awful. Well, that awful anyway. Here are four indispensable apps for making holiday travel less painful. PackPoint: Leave nothing behind If you hate packing, give PackPoint a try. You tell the app how many days you’ll be gone, which types of activities you’ll be doing, how many fanc
Fully autonomous vehicles may not hit the roads until 2030 at the earliest, according to a McKinsey report. But when it comes to vehicles on the farm, that same timeline is nowhere near soon enough. Farmers need autonomy now, and they need it at scale. The need for autonomy on the farm isn’t for the sake of technological advancement alone. The need is born of the pressures farmers face today in their operations. Farmers have been embracing the most cutting-edge technologies in the market
A few months ago, the Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian tweeted a cryptic message about a “mind-blowing” webcam. In the photo Ohanian shared, the camera looked like a monolithic slab, punctured by a dozen microphone holes with an abnormally large lens on its left side. Its makers hailed from Apple, Beats, and Uber, he explained, and he had invested in the product. “Webcams, welcome to 2021,” he wrote. That webcam turned out to be the Opal C1, a $300 desktop camera whose
When Apple’s iOS 15 iPhone operating system debuted early this fall, it introduced a number of privacy enhancements. Mail Privacy Protection, for instance, hides your IP address from senders. On-device speech recognition for Siri processes voice requests on your phone, so they never get transmitted to the cloud. A host of iCloud Plus privacy features were also integrated into iOS 15, including iCloud Private Relay (Apple’s Tor-like web-surfing privacy service) and Hide My Email (wh
A couple of weeks ago, I did not expect to be playing Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins from start to finish. But when the Analogue Pocket arrived for review, and I excavated a stack of Game Boy cartridges from a box in my basement, I found myself sucked in. The $219 handheld gaming system, whose primary function is to play actual game cartridges from 30 years ago, is more engrossing than I’d anticipated. Analogue Pocket on the left, Game Boy Color on the right. [Photo: Jared Newman]Anal
Adobe has long dominated the market for professional graphics tools: Photoshop for editing images, Illustrator for drawing things like line art and logos, InDesign for laying out printed content, and the rest of its Creative Cloud suite of software for other tasks. But while these programs can be remarkably powerful, they also can be intimidating to novice users who are simply looking to touch up a photo for the web, create a nice-looking image of text to share on social media, or make a flyer f
If 2021 is any indication, 2022 could be a banner year for the IPO market. By the end of the third quarter this year, 1,635 companies had gone public around the world, a number that’s higher than the year-end totals of 2018, 2019, and 2020—and one that’s certain to top 2017 by December 31. Favorable market conditions have spurred many companies to make the jump. Things haven’t been quite so rosy for SPACs (special-purpose acquisition companies) or IPOs (initial public
From his home in Portola Valley, California, Sanjiv Gambhir logged on to an important meeting for his startup one afternoon in April 2020. He kept the video camera off. This was unusual, not least because he cherished face-to-face connections and was obsessed with visibility. A pioneer of molecular imaging and the director of Stanford’s Canary Center for Early Cancer Detection, Gambhir, known as Sam, had spent decades trying to make small, hidden tumors inside the body easier to see. Near
During the pandemic, video calls became a way for me to connect with my aunt in a nursing home and with my extended family during holidays. Zoom was how I enjoyed trivia nights, happy hours and live performances. As a university professor, Zoom was also the way I conducted all of my work meetings, mentoring and teaching. But I often felt drained after Zoom sessions, even some of those that I had scheduled for fun. Several well-known factors – intense eye contact, slightly misaligned eye c