Microsoft and Sony will launch the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 later this year. While their hardware improvements are hard to argue with, they’re arriving in an unprecedented era of media consumption: Netflix on iPhones, Kindle on tablets, Spotify on PC, all three interchangeable on each piece of hardware. As videogames follow that same…
The way we tell it, surgery was butchery before Joseph Lister. In 1872, two out of every five compound fracture victims treated by surgeons in Germany subsequently died from infection. At the country’s best hospital in Munich, 80 percent of all wounds were infected by hospital gangrene. “Horrible was our trade!” a surgeon later declared.…
We’ve all been in a video conference where background noise coming from someone’s microphone ruined the entire conversation. Although this is easily solved by going on mute, the problem persists if the participant needs to speak. Thankfully, Google announced a noise cancelation feature for Meet, preventing the attendees from hearing unwanted background, back in April.…
Apple will announce that it’s shifting from using Intel processors to its own ARM-based chips this month at WWDC 2020, Bloomberg reports. The developer conference is due to take place starting on June 22nd with an online-only format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg notes that the timing of the announcement could change due to…
As if the Galaxy Note 20, Note 20+ (or Note 20 Ultra), Fold 2, and 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Flip smartphones were not enough to get us excited about Samsung’s rumored August 5 online-only Unpacked event, the company is also widely expected to unveil two new high-end Android tablets, one Android and iOS-compatible smartwatch, and some…
Speaking on a landline, the patient complained of an itchy eye. On the call’s other end, physician Carla Harwell considered the possibilities, from seasonal allergies to vision-damaging herpes. Luckily, the elderly patient’s daughter was visiting during the phone consultation, so Harwell asked her to text a picture of her mom’s eye. The photo shocked Harwell.…
Like a lot of people these days, Coralie Adam has been working from home. On an April morning in the Chicago suburbs where she was quarantining with her in-laws, Adam climbed out of bed, carried her laptop into a small home office, streamed a barre class, then sat down to watch her spacecraft approach a…
“I thought we were dead,” says Manny Bamfo, the CEO of room-rental startup Globe. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Globe—a sharing economy platform for people to rent rooms from one another for a few hours at a time—faced a daunting existential crisis. Its original concept hinged on the idea that travelers or…
Last month, members of the Berlin Philharmonic returned home to their concert hall after weeks of isolation. They sat onstage in a loose constellation, dispersed according to local virus regulations. Only 15 players could be onstage at a time. The strings sat two meters apart. The woodwinds and brass sat five meters apart—on account of…
The English doctor Thomas Dimsdale was nervous. It was the evening of October 12, 1768, and Dimsdale was preparing the empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, for her procedure. From a technical perspective, what he planned was simple, medically sound, and minimally invasive. It required only two or three small slices into Catherine’s arm. Nevertheless,…
