By Jan Wolfe and Brendan O’Brien WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Saturday he had taken a coronavirus test but that his temperature was “totally normal,” as he extended a travel ban to Britain and Ireland to try to slow the spread of a pandemic that has shut […]
Space Photos of the Week: Pretty Planets, Gorgeous Galaxies
The news is stressful but space is not, so this week we are going to cruise through the void to get some much needed perspective and beauty. We will begin at our smaller terrestrial neighbor, Mars and gaze upon some surprisingly beautiful terrain. Then we will stop by Jupiter, one […]
The Elegant Mathematics of Social Distancing
My cousin had to cancel his bar mitzvah, which was planned for Saturday in Washington, DC. Some 100 people were scheduled to be there, but like many houses of worship this week, the synagogue suspended its services to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. For my cousin, it means […]
Telemedicine Is a Safety Valve for a Strained Health Care System
“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 […]
Covid-19 Fears Shouldn’t Trash Your Zero Waste Efforts
For Bea Johnson, the author of Zero Waste Home, one of the founding texts of the zero waste movement, the hygienic uncertainty in the supply chain is one reason she prefers a reusable water canteen to disposable water bottles. “With disposables, you have no idea who has touched it. With […]
Telemedicine Is a Safety Valve for a Strained Health Care System
“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 […]
AI Is Coming for Your Most Mind-Numbing Office Tasks
In 2018, the New York Foundling, a charity that offers child welfare, adoption, and mental health services, was stuck in cut-and-paste hell. Clinicians and admin staff were spending hours transferring text between different documents and databases to meet varied legal requirements. Arik Hill, the charity’s chief information officer, blames the […]
How Long Does the Coronavirus Last on Surfaces?
By now, let’s hope you’re safely ensconced at home–going a little stir-crazy, perhaps, but doing your part to “flatten the curve.” But let’s say you’re one of those people who can’t stay in. Maybe you deliver Amazon boxes all day long, or you still need to drive a city bus. […]
Can You Calculate Pi by Drawing a Circle?
If you think about it, pi is really weird. This irrational number shows up in the craziest places. If you swing a mass back and forth on a string, there’s a pi in there. It pops up in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein’s general relativity, and the interaction between two […]
As Wall Street reels, veterans recall ’87 while the young look to textbooks
(C) Reuters. A man wears a protective mask as he walks on Wall Street during the coronavirus outbreak in New York By Noel Randewich and Ross Kerber (Reuters) – As U.S. financial markets reel from a week of historic swings, industry veterans are drawing on memories from their earliest years […]