As the world spiraled towards calamity with the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the essential role of virologists, infectious disease specialists, epidemiologists, and other scientists was thrust into the spotlight. Not only were these public health experts tasked with interpreting the rapidly evolving scientific and medical data, but they were often moved from the bench to the microphone and into the 24-hour media cycle. The public was looking for answers—but where would they derive them? This is w
There’s a ringing sound as I write this. There’s a ringing sound when I write anything. It reverberates like tinnitus. Several years ago, I started using an app from Twitter called TweetDeck to track my likes and retweets—they call tools like these social media dashboards, but they’re better understood as the vital signs for an internet dopamine junkie. One of the options in the app is to hear a shrill, school alarm bell sound anytime anyone interacts with one of your
The pandemic lockdowns, the emergence of the blockchain, the metaverse, and the unchecked power of Big Tech have many people thinking about what the web of the future will look like, and whether it can evolve away from the worst tendencies of today’s online world. And the term Web3 has come to represent one vision for what it could all look like. When the World Wide Web first became a phenomenon in the 1990s, it was a pretty static medium, and many websites looked like little more than di
A new camera designed for use with bird feeders promises to tell you when there are birds visiting your yard—and even use machine learning to identify what types of birds they are. The Birdfy, from Netvue which also makes surveillance cameras and video doorbells, has raised more than $38,000 on Kickstarter, with pricing starting at $149 and an initial batch of cameras slated to ship in time for Christmas. The system is designed to detect birds using motion detection, save their pictures t
Even people who haven’t paid much attention to the Oura smart ring may know one thing about it: A whole bunch of well-known people have been known to wear one. The not-so-short list includes Jennifer Aniston, Marc Benioff, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Arianna Huffington, Kim Kardashian, Jimmy Kimmel, and Gwyneth Paltrow, all of whom have talked about the ring publicly, praised features such as its sleep-tracking tools, or shared their own Oura stats on social media. Even Prin
Keyboard shortcuts are great—they save you a few seconds each and every time you use them. And if you use them often, that’s a lot of seconds saved. But there’s one problem: just because they’re shortcuts, doesn’t necessarily make them better. Which is why I heavily rely on an app called Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard shortcuts should be easy to pull off and easy to remember, but that’s not always the case. Take Option+Shift+Command+I, for example,
By the time Google’s Inbox app launched in 2014, the designer responsible for its vision knew it was destined for failure. “It was kind of [a] dead man walking,” says Michael Leggett, a former Gmail design lead and the person who guided Inbox through its first four years of development. Inbox, in case you don’t recall, was a daring reinvention of the tried-and-true email interface. Google initially described the effort as a “completely different type of inbox&#
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all adults, people are looking ahead to what next year holds for COVID-19 and the future of vaccination. And many questions remain. At the New Economy Forum this week in Singapore, Bill Gates said he expects that by mid-2022, deaths from COVID-19 and infection rates in general will drop lower than those for seasonal flu, so long as a new dangerous variant doesn’t crop up. That’s an even shorter tim
Back in my day, Black Friday was an actual day. The Friday after Thanksgiving! Those of us who wanted to score a $99 TV rolled ourselves out of bed and into a freezing cold car—all before sunrise. Then we’d wait outside—in the cold, remember —at the end of a big, long line of other foolish humans. All this was happening on pavement in front of a building made with bricks. At some point, an underpaid retail worker would unlock the doors far earlier than usual, we&
This article is about one of the honorees of Fast Company’s first Next Big Things in Tech awards. Read about all the winners here. A tractor moves slowly down a long field between rows of grape vines, spraying a fine mist of water on the plants. The space is tight but even though there’s no driver behind the wheel the machine stays perfectly between the rows. Its electric motor is barely audible. Cameras and sensors watch each plant, looking for signs of ill health or pest damage.