Counselors volunteering at the Trevor Project need to be prepared for their first conversation with an LGBTQ teen who may be thinking about suicide. So first, they practice. One of the ways they do it is by talking to fictional personas like “Riley,” a 16-year-old from North Carolina who is feeling a bit down and […]
Month: February 2021
Decoding the CRISPR-baby stories
The conventional story of CRISPR genome editing is one of heroic power and promise with an element of peril. That peril became personified when MIT Technology Review’s Antonio Regalado revealed in November 2018 that a young Chinese scientist named He Jiankui was using CRISPR to engineer human embryos. At least three of them became living […]
The beauty of TikTok’s secret, surprising, and eerily accurate recommendation algorithms
Deven Karpelman would never have joined TikTok if it hadn’t been for the pandemic. And she certainly never expected to be famous on it. But the app has a way of rewarding good content with views, dropping new creators in front of a broad spectrum of fans. That’s how Karpelman, a 57-year-old who works in […]
Digital contact tracing brought tech rivals together while the pandemic kept us apart
If we’ve learned anything from covid-19, it’s the extent to which our lives are enmeshed with those of the people around us. We interact constantly, spreading our germs and picking up theirs. That’s why exposure notifications—using your phone to tell you if you’ve crossed paths with an infected person—seemed so promising. Technology offered a way […]
Twitter Announces Super Follows for $4.99/Month, Auto Blocking, More
Twitter, today at its Annual Investor Relations virtual event, announced new features for its platform. The new features include auto-blocking, Facebook-like communities, and Super Follows. Here’s everything you need to know. Continue reading → Powered by WPeMatico
How to Use Multiple External Monitors with M1 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air
Apple’s M1-powered Macs have managed to set a new standard in terms of performance and battery life. What’s even more impressive is that despite an integrated GPU, they feature pretty impressive graphical performance. However, there’s a lot of confusion on M1 Macs support for external monitors. More specifically, they only support one external monitor as […]
Report: 14-inch MacBook Pro Could Feature Brighter Mini-LED Displays, Thinner Bezels
A recent report by Taiwanese publication Digitimes claims that Apple will release the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with Mini-LED displays in the second half of this year. The latest report falls in line with Kuo’s earlier report. Continue reading → Powered by WPeMatico
Texas’ Icy Disaster Makes the Case for Uniting the US Grid
The national grid is split into sections that can’t share much power. Connecting them won’t be cheap or easy, but it will help usher in the future of energy. Powered by WPeMatico
What progress means
“Progress.” We take for granted that it’s a good thing. We constantly invoke it to justify change. But all the ways in which society is measured—from economic indicators to health and education metrics to markers of political development and technological sophistication—rely on long-held assumptions about what progress is. As the economic and political shocks of […]
10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021
This list marks 20 years since we began compiling an annual selection of the year’s most important technologies. Some, such as mRNA vaccines, are already changing our lives, while others are still a few years off. Below, you’ll find a brief description along with a link to a feature article that probes each technology in […]