The first three months of 2020 may have marked the worse start to the year ever, but Lance Bass just made things a little better by sharing some much-needed good news. During a recent video interview, The Daily Popcast with Lance Bass host shared that he and his *NSYNC bandmates are still close friends today…
On Thursday, a Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station is scheduled to depart from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakhstan desert. The coronavirus pandemic means there won’t be the usual crowds of wellwishers lining the streets to see the astronauts on their way, but the flight is a historic one. It…
Bernie Sanders has officially suspended his bid for the Democratic nomination for president. After getting steamrolled in a series of state primaries by former vice president Joe Biden, the Vermont senator and former front-runner accepted the reality that the contest was effectively over. “I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot…
Over the past three weeks, Massachusetts General Hospital has undergone a transformation. Like most US hospitals these days, a palpable tension hangs over the building. The halls are quiet and devoid of visitors, isolation wards are filling with patients, and staff are dressed in extensive protective gear. There’s an unusual stillness in the air. The…
Nearly fifty years ago, Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors packed into computer chips would double every two years. This infamous prediction, known as Moore’s law, has held up pretty well. When Intel released the first microprocessor in the early 1970s, it had just over 2,000 transistors; today, the…
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, any system that used smartphones to track locations and contacts sounded like a dystopian surveillance nightmare. Now, it sounds like a dystopian surveillance nightmare that could also save millions of lives and rescue the global economy. The paradoxical challenge: to build that vast tracking system without it becoming a full-on panopticon.Since…
By now, it’s hard to escape the severity of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. As more local and state authorities tell everyone to stay at home, traffic has declined to the point where there has been a meaningful (albeit temporary) fall in air pollution over major US cities as people give up their daily commutes and school…
Having delivered a lifetime’s worth of remote care, I’ve seen the limits of telemedicine, and it’s ball pain. In the era of social distancing, telemedicine has fully arrived. It promises to solve the ills of health care, both immediate needs during the present crisis and endemic faults beyond. Rural communities gain access to distant experts,…
It’s been nearly a decade since fingerprint sensors proliferated as a quick and easy unlocking mechanism for smartphones and laptops. Attacks to defeat these scanners have been around just as long, albeit impractical for all but the most motivated—and well-financed—hackers. But new research shows that the equipment needed to reliably spoof fingerprints and break into…
When Cher Horowitz felt impotent and out of control in Clueless, she found sanctuary in a place where she could gather her thoughts and regain her strength: the now-shuttered Westside Pavilion. When Jackie Brown pulled off a sting, conning both the feds and her gun-dealing accomplice, she chose the Del Amo Fashion Center. When they…
