It was an early-career tragedy that inspired Australian neurologist Tom Oxley to work on a new kind of brain-computer interface. When Oxley was beginning his neurology training, he worked with a patient who was so diminished by a stroke that he couldn’t move anything but his eyes. The man—only 40, and the CEO of a company—made it clear that he didn’t want to live in his current “locked-in” condition. He wanted to die. So the doctors obliged him, doi
The demand for electric vehicles is on the rise. Global EV sales more than doubled in the first quarter of the year, and about one out of every 10 new cars sold today is electric. However, the supply cannot catch up. The EV battery industry is not sustainable in its current form. Battery makers are facing shortages from all sides. Their most important raw material, lithium, is in short supply. There’s plenty of lithium in the Earth’s crust, but accessibility is an issue. Lithium fr
A 55-pound satellite will become the first spacecraft to test-drive the unique lunar orbit chosen for NASA’s planned Gateway space station—all while demonstrating the space agency’s embrace of smaller players in private industry. The microwave-sized Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) is slated to launch June 6 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from New Zealand for a four-month journey to orbit. There, it will s
The Aamoth household is a divided bunch when it comes to personal electronics. I, an Android person, am married to an Apple person. My mom is also an Apple person. My brother and father are Android people. This makes video conferencing tricky but not impossible. We generally default to Google Duo (soon to be merged with Google Meet), which works well across devices, but there have been some painful moments. Last week when I was out of town, my wife wanted to fire off a quick video call before th
Senator Amy Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act is taking center stage in the latest clash between Amazon and forthright critics of Big Tech. The legislation would prohibit Amazon and similar platforms from giving preference to their own products and unfairly limiting availability of competing products on their platforms. The bill, which currently stands before the U.S. Senate, receives bipartisan support, and although the idea of regulating Big Tech is slightly le
When Reddit decided to hire its first chief product officer last year, one of the first candidates that cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman spoke with was Pali Bhat, the VP for product management and design at Google Cloud. Huffman was impressed—but he also had his reservations. “My concern with Pali was that he hadn’t worked on something like Reddit before,” Huffman remembers. “Consumer internet is its own thing. And then there’s Reddit, which is further do
If you are inspired by the stories of the Great Resignation where someone left their stable, but lusterless 9 to 5 only to land on a new career path that ignited their passions, you’re not alone. About 4.3 million people quit their jobs in January according to the U.S. Department of Labor to search for the job that ticks all their boxes, but for those with the majority of their career behind them is it too late to change their career course? Absolutely not. In fact, there 
A century ago, English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson proposed a startling idea for that time: constructing a systematic process based on math for predicting the weather. In his 1922 book, “Weather Prediction By Numerical Process,” Richardson tried to write an equation that he could use to solve the dynamics of the atmosphere based on hand calculations. It didn’t work because not enough was known about the science of the atmosphere at that time. “Perhaps some day
Amazon Astro is the rare tech product that makes a point of getting in your way. For the past few weeks, I’ve been living with Amazon’s $1,450 autonomous robot, which can follow you around while delivering reminders, playing music, or carrying small objects on its back. Astro can also check on things around the house and send live video to your phone, plus it can patrol for intruders when you’re not home. (The robot is currently selling at a discounted price of $1,000 on an
As chief operating officer of Meta, Sheryl Sandberg was one of the company’s most prominent voices for more than a decade. Sandberg announced her departure from Meta (formerly Facebook) on Wednesday, and longtime employee Javier Olivan will now assume the COO role. But don’t expect to see as much of Olivan. Whereas Sandberg, in many ways, was partners with founder Mark Zuckerberg, the COO role is being reworked into a “more traditional COO role where [Olivan] will be focused