One of the most notorious symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of taste and smell. There are varying estimates on just how many tongues and noses went out of business, but one study shows that as many as 1.6 million Americans lost their senses. Now a new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York University Langone Health, published in the journal Cell, finds that the culprit of this olfactory dysfunction may be our immune response to COVID-19. The new insight may help our understand
The Pozio Cradle is a phone-charging accessory with an unusual feature: It has the ability to defeat your smartphone’s microphone. People don’t normally buy new gadgets to block functions in their old gadgets, but the capabilities of smartphones—including personal-assistant services that might be listening silently—don’t make them normal devices. Hence the theoretical market for this $119 device from a Vancouver startup, which I first inspected in person at CES
Listen: let’s just get through February. We’re all in this together. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s the perfect time to stay inside and get some work done. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work efficiently, of course, so let’s continue to leverage time-savers and cool tools. We’ve got something of a retention theme this month, with apps purpose-built to supercharge your notes-to-self, intelligently organize your scans, and jog your memory
It was hardly a surprise when Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it was acquiring a major game developer this week. By Sunday night, video game Twitter was exploding with rumors that an announcement would be coming Monday. No one had Bungie on their prediction list, though. However, it’s unlikely this was a knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard. Jim Ryan, president and CEO of SIE, says this acquisition has been in the works for the past
Fast Company’s fourth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list promises to be more comprehensive than ever, offering half a dozen brand-new categories. Here are six reasons why you should apply.
- Brand exposure Every company selected as a finalist will be featured in the September issue of the magazine and on fastcompany.com (more than 12 million monthly unique visitors and more than 40 million page views).
- Talent retention Public recognition as a Best Workplace for Innovator
This year for his birthday, Carmen Draper, 58, got some unwelcome news: His 31-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer. “It had already moved to her lymph nodes,” he explains. That was in late October, and by Thanksgiving she was in her second week of chemotherapy. During five weeks of treatment that included both chemotherapy and radiation she became extremely dehydrated and worn down. “They have to almost kill you to save your life,” Draper
When Apple got into the smart-speaker business with the HomePod four years ago with a sharp focus on music, it seemed to be miles behind Amazon and Google. Those companies had spent years tacking on new features to their Alexa and Google Assistant speakers, and they had a long head start on integrating smart home devices. They’d even enlisted developers to create third-party voice skills so that users could order a Domino’s pizza or call for an Uber without lifting a finger. I admi
It’s a term on the tip of everyone’s tongue and yet still a concept that lacks a clear definition. It’s an idea that is capturing the brightest minds at the biggest technology companies—Apple, Meta nee Facebook, Microsoft—and yet no one really knows what it will be. It’s the metaverse. While questions remain, what we do know is that it’s coming. Arguably, it already exists. We know it will integrate today’s internet with virtual reali
Ever since they were introduced at the turn of the 20th century, England’s iconic double-decker buses have moved billions of people. Now, some of these buses are being converted to serve the country’s most vulnerable population. Over the past 18 months, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.K. has almost doubled, with more than 130,000 households made homeless because of COVID-19. For them, somewhere to sleep is vital, but so is access to services like employment
I first experienced the power of bold risk-taking when working for Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early 2000s, while he was not only inventing the gold standard of e-commerce but also literally building rocket ships. However, it wasn’t until I worked at Google that I truly caught the vision for the moonshot process: I saw it while sitting with the Google X team a day a week for over a decade and watching them invent the technologies that will power our future lives. Google X, now renamed sim