On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future. SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket...

On a foggy morning in early February last year, dozens of journalists from around the world gathered outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some walked around to find the best camera position; others climbed a ladder to peer into the fenced-off compound, its tall red-brick buildings hidden behind a thick mist. Security guards in blue uniforms lined...

I have spent a lot of my career, both in Silicon Valley and beyond, insisting that all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings.  The metaverse, which graduated from a niche term to a household...

Ransomware is hitting close to home for organizations of all sizes and sectors. With attacks making headlines daily, it’s no surprise that 62% of surveyed IT decision-makers are concerned about coping with malware and ransomware, according to the Dell Technologies 2021 Global Data Protection Index (GDPI). It’s not only the rising drumbeat...

Something has changed for the tech giants. Even as they continue to hold tremendous influence in our daily lives, a growing accountability movement has begun to check their power. Led in large part by tech workers themselves, a movement seeking reform of how these companies do business, treat their employees, and conduct themselves as global citizens...

In the early days of the pandemic, all eyes were on potential vaccines. In May 2020, the US announced Operation Warp Speed, a plan to spend billions on vaccine development. But mostly out of sight of the news media, quieter efforts to custom-design a covid-19 pill were moving forward with similar urgency and hope. Chemists at Pfizer’s research...