iFixit is continuing on with its teardowns even amidst the current global health crisis. With the new MacBook Air comes Apple’s switch to the scissor switch Magic Keyboard and a few other changes making for a more repairable notebook than the last generation. iFixit highlights in its full teardown that the update to the reliable…
The Jacob K. Javits Center occupies over 22 million square feet on the west side of New York City, a block or so down from where the Lincoln Tunnel splashes into the Hudson River. This week, it had been scheduled to host the World Floral Expo until coronavirus fears scuttled those and most other non-essential…
I’ve spent most of the last five years writing and researching an oral history of September 11th, a world-changing disaster that rewrote our geopolitics, our economy, and our society. Now, of course, we’re all living through another once-in-a-century crisis—one that appears to have the potential to rewrite even more of our geopolitics, our economy, and…
Driving through eerily quiet Seattle on Friday, I tuned into an NPR interview in which a Dallas taco shop owner summed up the outlook for the country’s restaurants in the face of the coronavirus pandemic: “Bleak.” It’s a widely echoed sentiment. Making the rush-hour trip in a fraction of the time it normally takes to…
On Monday, Mo Korchinski drove to pick a woman up from prison. Korchinski is the project administrator for Unlocking the Gates Peer Health Mentoring Program, which provides support for formerly incarcerated people during the first 72 hours of their release. Korchinski had wasted the trip. The woman she had come to collect wasn’t able to…
Last week I wrote about the alarming math of a viral pandemic. We talked about how infectious diseases spread exponentially, not linearly—and how that can make what seems, for weeks, like a small problem suddenly very, very big. That’s the challenge faced by leaders: Sometimes the only way to avoid disaster is to take action…
On Monday, President Donald Trump promised that the White House would ease social distancing restrictions much sooner than epidemiologists say is necessary to prevent millions of Americans from dying. During a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House on Monday night, Trump addressed a nation anxiously socially distancing and sheltering in place, and told…
Can you see the novel coronavirus from space? You can, as it happens—if you know where to look. Since January, the Colorado-based space technology company Maxar has been taking low Earth orbit satellite photographs of Covid-19 hotspots in places like China, Italy, and America. The company’s four imaging satellites take the highest-resolution commercially available photographs,…
Gene-editing techniques like Crispr-based technologies aim to cure human disease by altering the genetic code of our DNA. For nearly every animal on Earth, any changes made to the DNA are transmitted from the cell nucleus by messenger RNA to the cytoplasm, the part of the cell that makes proteins. But one animal species—a squid…
Two times each day, New York Power Authority employees file out of the control room at the Niagara Power Plant just a few miles away from the eponymous waterfall. They are replaced by a cleaning crew that disinfects the banks of computer monitors and switch panels used to command the largest electricity generation station in…
