MIT Technology Review

The US isn't ready to hold a vote during a pandemic. It needs to get there, quickly.

Ten years ago I ran away to sea after a family crisis. But life on a container ship was a very different kind of loneliness from the self-isolation caused by coronavirus.

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 9 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. They will be discussing what it’s like to treat patients with covid-19 in New York City,…

In the first employment report after social distancing measures had taken hold in many US states, the Department of Labor announced that 3.3 million people had filed jobless claims. A week later, in the first week in April, an additional 6.6 million claims came in—almost unfathomable compared with the previous record of 695,000, which was…

In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of all people who test positive for covid-19. The goal is to find who gave it to them and whom they may have given it to, in the hopes of isolating infected…

The news: Facebook has launched a new app called Tuned, which lets couples message each other, swap music, share their mood, keep a daily shared diary, and send photos and voice memos. It can be used without a Facebook profile and is pitched as a “private space” for couples to connect. However, it isn’t end-to-end…

Transfusions of blood serum from people who’ve recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from survivors—or “convalescent plasma”—isn’t new, but it’s now being tried against covid-19 because there aren’t any drugs known to work. A survivor’s blood is charged up with…

The novel coronavirus sweeping the globe has exposed how vulnerable international supply chains are to disruption. The World Economic Forum has a pitch for how to make them more resilient: blockchains. Covid-19 chaos: Quarantines, lockdowns, and reduced air travel have disrupted normal business operations all over the world and made it difficult for buyers to…

Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertainment. And we’re using it a lot. Between January and late March, internet traffic increased by around…

Far from breaking it, the surge in usage the internet is seeing right now is driving a major upgrade.

A small study from China suggests transfusions of blood from those who have beaten the disease could help buy time for new victims

We all know by now that flattening the curve is one of the most important things we can do to mitigate the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. China and Italy provided a grim picture of what happens when you’re unsuccessful: overwhelmed hospitals are forced to choose which patients receive life-saving resources, overworked doctors are more…

Every state’s health-care capacity will have an outsize impact on covid-19 deaths.

The news: WhatsApp has said it will implement new limits on message forwarding amid growing concerns that it is being used to spread misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. From today, messages identified as “highly forwarded” can be forwarded to only a single person as opposed to five, the company, which is owned by Facebook, said in a…

From today, messages identified as “highly forwarded” can be forwarded only to a single person instead of five.

The messy network of labs rushing to increase testing capacity has some big problems, but they’re fixable.

Jason Bae, an urgent-care physician in Northern California, has been seeing covid-19 patients for almost a month. When he first started ordering coronavirus tests, around the week of March 9, his health-care system was quoting a 48- to 72-hour turnaround time from their third-party laboratory. But “even from the very beginning, a lot of tests…

The coronavirus pandemic has turned back the clock to a kinder time on the web, before the novelty of virtual connection wore off. Will it last?

Update: this episode has ended. You can watch here. To register, click this link just before 4 p.m. ET. We also recommend you download or enable the Zoom application. You will be muted when you enter the Q&A. In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Tomas Pueyo, whose Medium…

Hundreds of researchers attempted to predict children’s and families’ outcomes, using 15 years of data. None were able to do so with meaningful accuracy.

Calendars cleared by coronavirus are filling up with virtual happy hours, and some people are starting to feel exhausted.

There is a lot of hype around the potential for antibody testing to help get us back outside sooner rather than later. Here’s how it works.

Families in indefinite lockdown are turning to Asana and Trello to run their households.

That could lend more weight to the argument in favor of wearing a mask while in public.

Zoom has rapidly become the video-conferencing platform of choice as people stay home during the coronavirus pandemic. Now it’s under pressure.

But it’s not clear whether unusual partnerships and shared designs will be enough to stay ahead of escalating coronavirus infections.

We spoke to Ian Haydon, who will soon be one of 45 people who will get an experimental covid-19 vaccine in Seattle.

Kids are getting a crash course on texting and social media with “technology on training wheels.”

Home delivery services are experiencing unprecedented growth in demand as people stay home.

Digital manufacturers are stepping in to crank out nasal swabs, ventilator parts, and more as critical supply chains fail.

The field is in disagreement about where it should go and why.

There’s a gap in vital data that could help us understand the Covid-19 outbreak, but unfortunately, it’s been misinterpreted and co-opted by policymakers.

Watch our visualization to see how confirmed cases outside China have exploded in recent weeks.

The record unemployment numbers only hint at the crisis facing many with no work.

A proposal for a new kind of government-run payment platform didn’t make it into the US Congress’s coronavirus relief plan. But it won’t be the last we hear of the idea.

Quarantines and lockdowns are forcing us to relearn how to date—and figure out how to have sex without touching.

The data collected from more than 750,000 people could help us understand why people’s experiences of coronavirus vary so wildly.

The country is woefully behind where it should be, and that’s going to make it much harder to track and curtail the coronavirus’s spread.

It won’t be pleasant, but it could help prove quickly if a Covid-19 vaccine works.