Christine Cemelli was at home on March 16 when she got the text. Her husband, a chef at a fine-dining restaurant in New Jersey, had been laid off. Earlier that day, Governor Phil Murphy had signed an executive order restricting the operations of nonessential businesses in an attempt to slow the spread of the novel…
You’ve heard of binary star systems, right? It’s where there are two stars close to each other, and they both orbit around a common center of mass. Sure, you saw binary stars in the original movie, where Luke Skywalker was on the desert planet Tatooine. Oh wait, that’s Star Wars and this is Star Trek.…
My partner recently made the leap from iPhone to Android. “So how do I get my WhatsApp messages from my old phone to my new one?” they asked shortly after setting the new phone up. “Simple!” I chirped. “You just restore it from your backup.” How wrong I was. It turns out your WhatsApp chat…
If you’re a responsible human, you’re at home right now waiting out the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps getting very drunk on American whiskey. Spill some on the table, and something fascinating will happen as it dries out: If it’s on glass, and you shine light sideways at the residue and take a photo, you’ll see that…
It’s not until I became cooped up inside my New York apartment (thanks, coronavirus) that I realized a smart display is not a terrible companion to have in the home. I’ve been talking to Google Assistant the past four months through Google’s 10-inch smart display, the Nest Hub Max, a smart speaker like the Google…
Google’s second-generation Pixel Buds may have just appeared in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filings, indicating that the company’s new true wireless earbuds could hit their spring release window (via 9to5Google). Two new FCC filings from Google for wireless earphones appeared yesterday. The filings have two different model numbers, G1007 and G1008, possibly correlating to one…
SteamedSteamedSteamed is dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s PC gaming service.Virtual reality means options. If you own a high-end VR headset like the Valve Index, you likely have money and, therefore, options that those less fortunate than you do not. Also, you can do funny things with headcrabs.Half-Life: Alyx players have embraced VR’s…
A newly developed test from the U.K. could quickly diagnose the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, with the help of a smartphone app. The smart testing device — developed by researchers at Lancaster University, Brunel University in London, and the University of Surrey — could provide results within 30 minutes using a combination of artificial…
For a brief moment there, it looked as though the coronavirus pandemic might escape the muck of partisanship. It’s true that President Donald Trump, wary of a recession during a reelection year, had first tried to talk the virus into submission. His counterfactual insistence that the situation was under control did nothing to slow the…
Next week, blood banks across the Netherlands are set to begin a nationwide experiment. As donations arrive—about 7,000 of them per week is the norm—they’ll be screened with the usual battery of tests that keep the blood supply safe, plus one more: a test for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Then, in…
