The World's Biggest Social Virtual Reality Gathering Is Happening Right Now . It’s one of the most under-appreciated science fiction films of the past decade, but Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (also the most expensive independent film ever made) subtly...

How Will Coronavirus End? It Depends on Our Immunity. Three Possible Outcomes . We’re all so ready for this to be over.

With the curve finally flattening in the US, the ramping up of anti-viral and vaccine trials against SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes Covid-19—and the launch of ...

This New Smartphone-Based DNA Test Could Help Track Disease in Real Time . On-the-spot DNA tests could prove invaluable to doctors, farmers, and officials responsible for food safety or environmental monitoring. Now Chinese researchers have created an ultra-portable, smartpho...

The Big Covid-19 Blind Spot: Lack of Risk Management Is Leaving Us Wanting . In many organizations, risk managers have long been essentially back-office roles, with limited or no access to boards, executives, and key decision-makers. They oversee a varied and ad hoc set of risk...

Linking Self-Driving Cars to Traffic Signals Might Help Pedestrians Give Them the Green Light . Automated vehicles don’t have human operators to communicate their driving intentions to pedestrians at intersections. My team’s research on pedestrians’ perceptions of safety shows their trust of traf...

This Startup Is Selling Thermal Imaging Glasses for Virus Detection . When will lockdowns end, and what will life be like when they do?

These are the questions on most of our minds today; we’ve accepted that even once restrictions ease, society won’t go back to looking l...

Contact Tracing Is the Next Step in the Covid-19 Battle—But How Will It Work in Western Countries? . One death in Steven Soderbergh’s terrifyingly prescient masterpiece, Contagion, stayed with me: Kate Winslet’s Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer who chased down people with a ter...

Why Bringing Contact Tracing Into Our Digital World Is Hard—and Why We Must Do It Anyway . One death in Steven Soderbergh’s terrifyingly prescient masterpiece, Contagion, stayed with me: Kate Winslet’s Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer who chased down peopled with a te...

New 'Hot Qubits' Let Quantum Computers Run 15X Warmer Than Before . When people say quantum computing is “hot” right now they are most definitely talking metaphorically; today’s leading devices have to operate at close to absolute zero. Now two research groups have dem...

Why Interest in Virtual Worlds for Online Collaboration Is Spiking . By now, it’s well known that usage of video-conferencing software like Zoom has exploded as a result of the Covid-19 shutdown. What is less known is that interest in avatar-based virtual worlds and bus...