With the new omicron variant of the coronavirus on the rise, ordinary office gatherings may not be coming back any time soon. That’s why a New York startup called Luna Park—named for the famed Coney Island amusement park—is creating a massive library of human-hosted online games that companies can play together to allow employees to bond outside of regularly scheduled meetings and awkward Zoom and Slack small talk. “What we’re trying to do is bring games to the
A half century in astronomy has earned Garth Illingworth a front-row seat to several rocket launches bearing his fingerprints. But he’s particularly ardent about the one coming up on December 25. That’s when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) blasts off from Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, to an orbit 1 million miles away, where it will glimpse the infant universe. At $9.7 billion, the four-story, 14,000-pound space observatory is NASA’s most ambitious scien
The holidays are here and presents are arriving at doorsteps. But for delivery drivers in some states, the season is anything but festive as missing packages could have serious repercussions for them. As researchers at Data & Society conducting ongoing research on delivery drivers, we have found that they are often implicated when a package is missing or stolen. Accounts of goods being stolen off doorsteps are now commonplace in local newspapers, neighborhood forums, and Facebook groups, g
This past July, before he was banned from Wikipedia, Techyan was one of dozens of volunteers preparing to speak at the free-knowledge movement’s annual conference, Wikimania. Born in China’s northeast, Techyan, as he’s known in the Wikipedia community, had been editing Chinese Wikipedia since his early teens. As one of its three dozen elected administrators, he hoped his presentation would put a more positive spin on what, lately, had become Wikipedia’s ugliest battle
For years, people have been using the web-based collaborative platform Figma to brainstorm raw ideas, roughing them out in visual form as one might do on a conference-room whiteboard. They did so even though Figma—officially an interface design and prototyping tool—was never meant for that particular purpose. But when the company saw its customers embracing its product for whiteboarding, it put creating something optimized for the task on its to-do list. And for a long time, t
Online holiday shopping is expected to reach a peak of $910 billion in 2021—a cybercriminal’s jackpot after a record-breaking year of cybersecurity breaches like Colonial Pipeline and Kaseya. Shoppers overwhelmed by stress, and retailers distracted by supply chain challenges and staffing shortages will undoubtedly be more susceptible to phishing attempts and other social engineering attacks this year. Cybercriminals don’t take time off—and neither should your cy
Connecting teams in a business is like taking all the parts of a house: the electrical, the plumbing, sheetrock, flooring, foundation, roof, windows, insulation, and putting them all together to create a home. None of those parts are that functional without the others. Bringing our company’s culture together in actions and goals was the vision for 2021. We intended to accomplish this in 2019 and recognized then there was a lot of groundwork to do. We had no foundation to support where we
Looking for a holiday present that won’t fall victim to any supply-chain snafus? If so, there’s always crypto. The vast majority of Americans have never invested in or traded a cryptocurrency, but buying crypto is easier than you might think—and, as a gift, offers the potential of a big upside. Although cryptocurrency prices have recently plunged, crypto is predicted to keep growing in the coming years, and is (slowly) becoming popular with more online retailers—
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