Science & Technology Archives - Page 4 of 9

Technology

The Chip Wars Heat Up

Chips with a side of CHIPS

February 7, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

"...there’s something much bigger at work here: The Chip Wars, as I’ve dubbed them, are heating up, and revealing some of the tensions between national needs and extraction from local communities."...

Science & Technology

To Fight Covid Variants, Let’s Rethink the Sherman Anti-Trust Act!

We have another new threat, but two pills that might fight it. We know “cocktails” work but our laws prevent drug companies from cooperating to make them.

November 30, 2021 • by Donald G. McNeil Jr.

We are now threatened by Omicron, a new Covid variant with a name like a villain from a Transformers movie. Although on paper its genes look scary, we still know very little about its real-life behavior. So, while travel precautions make sense until we know more (and perhaps we could finally get serious about ...

To Fight Covid Variants, Let’s Rethink the Sherman Anti-Trust Act!

Technology

Water Is Life, and Also a Trade Secret

Google won’t tell you how much water it uses and an Oregon city has its back

November 5, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Google may have been cowed into turning down subsidies for new office buildings in a few major cities, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t up to its usual shenanigans outside of those metro areas. Out in Oregon, in fact, Google is embroiled in a controversy in which it’s gotten a town to ...

Technology

Don’t Kill Facebook: Reform It

November 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

In 2018, as we were all still digesting how disinformation campaigns upended the 2016 election, technologist and internet critic Jaron Lanier published a manifesto. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Henry Holt) introduced readers to the methods by which platforms like Facebook and Twitter not only capture and ...

The Internet

The Fall of Facebook

Plus the insurrection subcommittee prepares to confront Trump and the debt ceiling fight continues

October 5, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted on Monday afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void ...

Technology

What’s Google Up To?

It says it turned down subsidies in three cities. What gives?

October 4, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Tech giant Google recently announced that it bought a building in New York City in a massive $2.1 billion deal, which is the largest real estate purchase in the U.S. since the pandemic began. Google also said it would not avail itself of the corporate subsidy programs offered by New ...

Technology

Facebook’s Data Center Fluff

A snazzy new public relations push can’t cover up the truth

September 27, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Last week Facebook rolled out a new website dedicated to the awesomeness of its data centers, the large facilities it builds to house all the data it collects from you, me, and everyone else it surveils on the internet. I’m not kidding. Facebook built and published an entire website extolling the virtues of ...

Capitalism

Welcome to the Chip Wars

Intel wants another HQ2 contest, this time for chip manufacturers.

September 15, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The Amazon “HQ2” contest—in which hundreds of cities threw everything including the kitchen sink at Amazon in the hopes of landing a new facility—was a national embarrassment showing just how tight corporate America’s grip on economic development policy is (at least until New York said no way). In a recent interview with ...

Science & Technology

The Covid Lab-Leak Debate Is Destructive

We don’t need to know the origins of Covid-19 to know how pandemics start—we need to know how to contain them and why our natural world is now more lethal

June 8, 2021 • by John Ehrenreich

_____ Was the coronavirus transmitted from wild animals to humans, or was it accidentally leaked from a lab? Whatever the answer, the spirited debate over the origins of the disease is a dangerous distraction from the serious discussion we need to have: how to prevent repeats of the Covid-19 pandemic. For most ...

The Covid Lab-Leak Debate Is Destructive

Science & Technology

The Story of the Sputnik V Vaccine

Vaccine nationalism and Cold War tropes abound

June 8, 2021 • by Marek Eby

_____ A distinct time-warp quality characterizes western reactions to Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. The international reception of the jab harkens back to the rhetoric of the Cold War, despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic permeates every aspect of contemporary life. But some knowledge of Russia’s past can lend nuance to ...

Science & Technology

Back to Belief

To believe in science – or that the aim of science is to deceive us – is to confuse opinion with belief

June 7, 2021 • by Michaël Fœssel

_____ When COVID-19 invited itself into our lives, it did not arrive alone. In its wake came a global flood of knowledge on respiratory viruses and their prevention and treatment. It has been pointed out that, in recent history, far more serious epidemics have swept through society, particularly the Spanish flu ...