Like anyone who designs computer chips for a living, James Myers is, at his core, a silicon guy. “Silicon is brilliant,” he says. Brilliant because it’s a natural semiconductor—able to both conduct electricity and act as an insulator, depending on the conditions—and because it can be engineered at small scale. Brilliant because it is the […]

In the fight against Covid-19, contact tracing apps have so far largely been disappointments— in the United States, at least. Proposed in the spring as a way to help quickly stifle viral outbreaks by tracking down potential exposures using smartphones, they were stunted by technical glitches, concerns over privacy, and the US’s fragmented, haphazard pandemic […]

States such as Massachusetts and New Jersey have left their app plans in limbo or abandoned them to focus on the bigger picture. “States are struggling to stand up a public health response in general, including plain old vanilla contact tracing,” says Margaret Bourdeaux, a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School. Inadequate testing in some areas […]

Many things about Matt Bruinooge’s senior year at Brown are different from his previous college life. One is that he logs on to a website from tech giant Alphabet twice a week to schedule nasal swabs. Brown is one of the first customers of a pandemic safety service from Alphabet subsidiary Verily Life Sciences called […]

Opinions about wearing masks and maintaining social distancing are sharply divided, largely along red and blue lines. Conservatives Republicans are the least likely to wear a mask, according to poll data from Pew Research. Some neuroscientists believe that lessons from their field, applied appropriately, could help break the impasse and persuade more people to follow […]

Hildegarde Schell-Chaple, a professor of nursing in charge of screening people entering UCSF’s hospitals, says the available evidence revealed the time and expense of screening with infrared thermometers or cameras was unjustified. “People feel better if they see it happening, but it’s a false sense of security,” she says. “It’s something we should not be […]

As the coronavirus began to spread through Japan in March, workers at a warehouse in Sugito that processes millions of personal care products each day were overrun by a spike in demand for masks, gloves, soap, and hand sanitizer. To prevent workers from spreading the deadly virus, the company that operates the center, PalTac, introduced […]

“The hearing impaired find the device extremely helpful and it provides a lot of confidence and comfort,” said Wren Lester, chief experience officer and director of patient relations at Downstate Medical Center. Lester says the hospital hopes to expand the program after the crisis. Downstate isn’t currently using the technology to provide inpatient virtual care, […]

In 2011, two scientists at Cambridge University in the UK devised a clever way to measure and model the spread of the flu—an app called FluPhone that used Bluetooth and other wireless signals as a proxy for interactions between people, and asked users to report flu-like symptoms. If you’d had lunch with someone who later […]

“We’ve seen about a 30 percent increase compared with December,” said James Wantuck, physician and cofounder of Plushcare, a health care platform offering virtual visits and online screening. “So, the volume is increasing a lot, but it’s a very small percentage of those people today that we’re actually worried are infected with [coronavirus], on the […]