LabCorp, which makes the test, is prioritizing health care workers and first responders
The US Food and Drug Administration has issued the first authorization for an at-home COVID-19 test kit. LabCorp, the diagnostics company producing the tests, says it will give first access to health care workers and first responders.
With this test, people who are eligible can swab their nose to collect a fluid sample, but they will still need to send it to a lab for testing. Self-sampling sidesteps the need for a clinician to perform the test, reducing their exposure to symptomatic patients. It also frees up more personal protective equipment, which is in short supply. The test costs $119.
Strategies and things that will change the way we think and work
Television shows of the 1960’s like The Jetsons predicted that the 21st century would be filled with flying cars, and airborne robots would be a part of our everyday lives. October 21st, 2015 marked the point in time in which Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) traveled to in Back to the Future Part II, the 1989 sequel to the time-travelling classic. The future he found was one which had captured the imagination of millions — instead today, we live in a world dominated by live streaming, smartphones and social networks, not flying cars or hover boards (maybe, because is this really a hover board?).
Within the span of 10 short years, or perhaps even less, service apps like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, AirBnB and others have spawned millions of users, and can be found on almost everyone’s smart phone. Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa have entered many of our lives. It would be terribly naive for anyone to say that the world hasn’t changed in the last 10 years. This technology growth and change is likely to continue for the next decade and beyond.
It’s the roaring 20’s baby! At the start of the millennium, Information Technology was deeply concerned about Y2K … “Oh no, the zeroes and the clocks!” When the clocks struck 12 in 2000, the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, 4k, 5G, and all the other fun things we know today didn’t exist. So what’s in store as a new decade begins?
Are you more interested in what skills you need to learn to keep pace with the technology trends of 2020?
Sumit Chanda, Ph.D., a professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys, gestures to experimental assays that test for compounds that may treat COVID-19.
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, the University of Hong Kong, Scripps Research, UC San Diego School of Medicine, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and UCLA have identified 30 existing drugs that stop the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Almost all of the drugs are entirely different from those currently being tested in clinical trials, and weren’t previously known to hold promise for COVID-19 treatment. The new candidates expand the number of “shots on goal” for a potential COVID-19 treatment and could reach patients faster than drugs that are created from scratch. The study was placed on bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-Archive”), an open-access distribution service for preprints of life science research.
“We believe this is one of the first comprehensive drug screens using the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and our hope is that one or more of these drugs will save lives while we wait for a vaccine for COVID-19,” says Sumit Chanda, Ph.D., director of the Immunity and Pathogenesis Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys and senior author of the study. “Many drugs identified in this study—most of which are new to the COVID-19 research community—can begin clinical trials immediately or in a few months after additional testing.”
The pandemic’s silver lining is the chance to experiment with technologies and co-operative approaches across borders that could lead to safer, more sustainable and more inclusive global futures.
The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed in 1972 by biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, holds that populations of living organisms tend to experience a significant amount of evolutionary change in short, stressful bursts of time. Gould and Eldredge argued that evolution isn’t a constant, gradual process—it occurs during episodes when species are in environments of high tension or especially crisis.
The human species is going through such a period right now: the Covid-19 pandemic. The profound pressures that individuals, organizations and societies face in this crisis are accelerating the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds. The current state of emergency compels us to consider the necessity of structural shifts in our relationship with the environment and how we conduct ourselves as a global community.
“We saw that business double overnight,” startup says of UK grocery deliveries.
On the morning of March 30, I set out from my home in Washington, DC, to the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In only a few hours, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam would issue coordinated stay-at-home orders. But I was going to GMU’s campus to check out a new technology seemingly tailor-made for the moment—technology that could help people get food without the risks of face-to-face interactions.
Campus was eerily quiet; most students and staff had long been sent home. But as I approached a Starbucks at the northern edge of GMU, I heard a faint buzzing and saw a six-wheeled, microwave-sized robot zip along the sidewalk, turn, and park in front of the coffee shop. The robot looked like—and essentially was—a large white cooler on wheels. It was a delivery robot from Starship, a startup that has been operating on campus since early last year.
SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service will begin private beta testing in around 3 months, with a public beta opening in around 6 months.
Elon Musk revealed this tentative timeline in a tweet after the Wednesday launch of 60 new Starlink satellites.
On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX sent one of its Falcon 9 rockets into space. It was carrying 60 shiny new satellites that will eventually become part of the company’s Starlink communications network. SpaceX has been launching the pint-sized satellites into space for months already, with over 400 of them now in orbit around Earth.
The long-term plan is for Starlink to serve high-speed data to just about every corner of the globe, but with an estimated 40,000 satellites needed to fulfill the company’s most grand ambitions, it was unclear exactly how long it would take before the system was up and running in any capacity. Thanks to some tweets by SpaceX boss Elon Musk, now we know.
The tech industry is rushing to offer remedies to the crisis and, in the process, trying to rehabilitate its image.
Before the pandemic, Yiying Lu was known for her work designing the Twitter Fail Whale and the dumpling and boba tea emojis. In the past few weeks, Lu said she was called to a higher purpose. From her apartment in San Francisco, she toiled away in a Slack channel with two dozen people she has never met to create a free website called Corona Carecard. It asks Americans to buy gift cards to their favorite local shops, providing a much-needed source of income while stores are shuttered.
Lu is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of workers across Silicon Valley trying to, in their words, hack the virus. The pandemic has stirred up a missionary zeal throughout Silicon Valley. Apple Inc. and Google put aside a decade-long rivalry to form an alliance to track the spread of infections. Facebook Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are procuring millions of masks for health-care workers. Jeff Bezos is donating $100 million and Jack Dorsey $1 billion.
In other corners of the Valley, people are developing test kits and possible vaccines, as well as software to treat the social and economic maladies of the pandemic. Smaller companies have created entirely new business models in response to the virus. The projects can be as simple as an app reminding people to wash their hands or one that connects users with barbers in Brooklyn for lessons on how to cut their hair at home.
There’s a feeling among some technologists that some of their work in recent years had become mercenary or frivolous—attempts to capitalize on a prolonged tech boom with apps that cater to the whims of wealthy coastal elites, rather than meeting the urgent needs of the rest of the world. “Facebook, Snapchat and the last decade of tech has brought us together in some ways but has also pushed us further away from real life,” said Lu, a former creative director at venture capital firm 500 Startups. “The virus is a warning for people in the Bay Area that we can’t just come here and take and take. We have to give, too.”
Work From Home Has Nearly Doubled Our Load on Infrastructure: BT Consumer CEO
People are overworked, stressed, and eager to get back to the office.
An executive at JPMorgan Chase & Co. gets unapologetic messages from colleagues on nights and weekends, including a notably demanding one on Easter Sunday. A web designer whose bedroom doubles as an office has to set an alarm to remind himself to eat during his non-stop workday. At Intel Corp., a vice president with four kids logs 13-hour days while attempting to juggle her parenting duties and her job.
Six weeks into a nationwide work-from-home experiment with no end in sight, whatever boundaries remained between work and life have almost entirely disappeared.
With many living a few steps from their offices, America’s always-on work culture has reached new heights. The 9-to-5 workday, or any semblance of it, seems like a relic of a bygone era. Long gone are the regretful formalities for calling or emailing at inappropriate times. Burnt-out employees feel like they have even less free time than when they wasted hours commuting.
Efficient quantum computing is expected to enable advancements that are impossible with classical computers. Scientists from Japan and Sydney have collaborated and proposed a novel two-dimensional design that can be constructed using existing integrated circuit technology. This design solves typical problems facing the current three-dimensional packaging for scaled-up quantum computers, bringing the future one step closer.
Quantum computing is increasingly becoming the focus of scientists in fields such as physics and chemistry, and industrialists in the pharmaceutical, airplane, and automobile industries. Globally, research labs at companies like Google and IBM are spending extensive resources on improving quantum computers, and with good reason. Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to process significantly greater amounts of information much faster than classical computers. It is expected that when error-corrected and fault-tolerant quantum computation is achieved, scientific and technological advancement will occur at an unprecedented scale.
But building quantum computers for large-scale computation is proving to be a challenge in terms of their architecture. The basic units of a quantum computer are the “quantum bits” or “qubits.” These are typically atoms, ions, photons, subatomic particles such as electrons, or even larger elements that simultaneously exist in multiple states, making it possible to obtain several potential outcomes rapidly for large volumes of data. The theoretical requirement for quantum computers is that these are arranged in two-dimensional (2-D) arrays, where each qubit is both coupled with its nearest neighbor and connected to the necessary external control lines and devices. When the number of qubits in an array is increased, it becomes difficult to reach qubits in the interior of the array from the edge. The need to solve this problem has so far resulted in complex three-dimensional (3-D) wiring systems across multiple planes in which many wires intersect, making their construction a significant engineering challenge.
Without government support, universities will struggle to provide the education people will need to rebuild their lives after Covid-19
Our universities are a vital and unique part of our society with an importance that far outweighs their considerable economic value. Yet research into the impact of Covid-19, conducted by London Economics for the University and College Union, shows that universities face a black hole of at least £2.5bn in fee and grant income for 2020-21 as students both in the UK and around the world defer or abandon their plans to study here.
The new analysis suggests that over 230,000 fewer students will enter higher education in 2020 as a result of the crisis, over half of which are international students. That fall in student numbers would translate into a drop in income of around £1.51bn from non-EU students, £350 million from EU students and £612 million from UK students opting to stay away.
Newsroom employment in the United States declined 23% between 2008 and 2019
Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers continues to plummet, falling by around half since 2008, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But a modest increase in jobs after 2014 in other news-producing sectors – especially digital-native organizations – offset some of the losses at newspapers, helping to stabilize the overall number of U.S. newsroom employees in the last five years.
The years covered in the current analysis predate the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. The economic effects of the virus have led to a fresh round of layoffs, pay cuts and other changes at U.S. media outlets, especially newspapers.
From 2008 to 2019, overall newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23%, according to the new analysis. In 2008, there were about 114,000 newsroom employees – reporters, editors, photographers and videographers – in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and “other information services” (the best match for digital-native news publishers). By 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.
