Innovation Hub

If you have a cough or a fever nowadays, you know exactly what to do: go to the doctor, get a COVID test, and quarantine so you can stop the spread. But we also know that plenty of people contract COVID-19 and transmit it before they know they have it — and some people never even realize that they are contagious at all. So, when it comes to asymptomatic carriers, how do you shut down the line of transmission?

According to Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the answer is wide-scale and frequent rapid testing. The tests are cheap, effective enough to find the superspreaders, and currently exist in large numbers in some countries. However, in the U.S. there is no easy access to at-home, instant-result rapid tests yet.

When we last spoke with Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, about COVID-19 and obesity back in June, the pandemic was still relatively new. We didn’t know how long it would take to get a vaccine, how many would be affected or who would struggle the most. Mozaffarian was just beginning to sift through some of the early hospitalization data, and he noticed one risk factor that seemed to be particularly risky: obesity.

Now, with far more data at our fingertips, it’s clear that America’s slow-moving obesity problem has intensified the coronavirus pandemic. Plus, Mozaffarian says greater attention to our diets could have a huge positive impact on future disease prevention as well as on economic security, racial equity and climate change.

The pandemic has been a catastrophe for tourism and travel, upending an almost $9 trillion industry that once accounted for approximately 330 million jobs around the world. And there continues to be great uncertainty about what the future holds. When will everyone feel safe to fly again? When we do, where will we want to go, and will we be able to afford it?

The road to recovery for American leisure and business travel will be long and complicated, according to Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group.

Elizabeth Becker, the author of “Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism,” believes the pandemic has a silver lining though. She says it has created an opportunity for U.S. policy makers to tackle tourism’s impact on the environment and its contribution to climate change. The industry can build back in a more sustainable way, she argues.

You might not think that a simulation meant for kids could change how something plays out in real life, but in the 1990s, the arcade game NBA Jam did exactly that. One feature of the game allowed players to be “on fire.” The more a player scored, the higher chance he or she had of scoring again.

Fast forward to today and you can’t escape the concept of a hot streak, or a “hot hand”' as it’s called in basketball. Athletes swear by it, even refusing to touch another player’s “hot” hand. But is a hot streak as real as some people believe it to be?

Ben Cohen, a sports writer for The Wall Street Journal and author of “The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks,” argues that the idea of a hot hand is very real — and it isn’t exclusive to basketball either.

From our smartphones to our bicycles, the user experience provided by manufactured products has an enormous impact on our lives. Down to the smallest details, designers often puzzle over how to best align a product with the demands of the customer. But that wasn’t always the approach, and Cliff Kuang, author of User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play, explains how this revolution of design has taken hold and dramatically changed our patterns of consumption and use.

In offices around the country, mail has piled up. Plants have died. Coffee cups sit unwashed, with a ring of old espresso cemented to the bottom. In some buildings, the lights have been left on since March — and who knows when someone will be back to turn them off.

According to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, we’re in the middle of “a structural, seismic shift” in the workplace. The majority of employees booted out of the office earlier this year don’t want to come back, says Liz Fosslein, head of content at human resources company Humu. So have we seen the end of the “out of office” email, water cooler talk and cubicle-sharing? When people finally return to the office, what will it look like? And where will it be?

In the past few months, a pandemic of mental health has shadowed COVID-19. Across the country, cases of depression, anxiety, alcoholism and domestic violence have been on the rise — intensifying an existing shortage of mental health care providers. With shutdowns and social distancing guidelines, access to therapy has also changed dramatically, with a forced transition to online sessions. This switch to telepsychiatry is a big move but, according to Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a psychiatry professor at the University of California Davis, there might be a silver lining.

Yellowlees, the former president of the American Telemedicine Association, began practicing teletherapy nearly 30 years ago to help meet rural psychiatry needs in the Australian outback. Technology advances steadily opened new avenues to online psychiatry, but conventional attitudes and inflexible licensing processes have held the field back for years, Yellowlees says. COVID-19, though, has thrust therapy into a new, virtual world, and Yellowlees believes we are now getting a glimpse of the future.

About 1500 years ago, the world was a very different place; Pope Gregory was spreading Catholicism far and wide, a plague was running rampant, and some dominoes were about to start falling. The end of that cascade would end up in a world where a certain group of people started to think quite differently from those who had come before them. Their brains began to change, the societies they built thrived and they grew so influential and culturally dominant that their way of thinking permeated our entire psychology. In other words, it created W.E.I.R.D. people — a Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic population that grew into a global powerhouse.

That’s according to Joseph Henrich, chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and author of “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” He writes that people who learn to read, who are educated in a Western way – no matter where they live in the world – have brains that look and think unlike more traditional human brains.

In the spring, more than 50 million K-12 students were hurriedly sent home as the nation’s public schools shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those students have returned to their classrooms now, for full or partial in-person instruction, while others have continued with distance learning or quit public school systems altogether.

Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education discuss the changes afoot in American education and the consequences for students across the country.

Remote learning has placed a heavy burden on many parents, including Courtney Wittenstein, Maria Makarenkova and Jenna Ruiz, who share their experiences and the decisions they have made about their children’s education during the pandemic. And Joseph Connor, the co-founder and chief operating officer of the company, SchoolHouse explains why COVID-19 has led to an increasing interest in microschools and learning pods.

The pandemic has made life as an artist hard — real hard. Museums and studios have closed, live shows have been canceled and concerts have been pushed online. But according to William Deresiewicz, this is just the most recent act in a long, profound shift in the arts.

Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale University and author of “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech,” says the digital age has devastated and demonetized the arts — whether that’s music, videos, visual art or the written word. We’re facing the loss of the moderately successful artist and “you can’t have even the stars without an ecosystem that supports them,” he says. So where does that leave us?