The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global emergency Thursday after the number of cases spiked tenfold in a week, calling it an “extraordinary event” that endangers countries outside China and requires a coordinated international response.This new declaration—made Thursday at the organization’s Geneva headquarters—will lead to more travel and trade restrictions on China.…

In the 1990s, web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer competed bitterly to offer the snazziest new features and attract users. Today, the browser landscape looks totally different. For one thing, Chrome now dominates, controlling around two-thirds of the market on both desktop and mobile. Even more radical, though, is the recent competitive…

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for dealing with disinformation. Sort of.Yesterday, the Democratic senator and presidential candidate known for her detailed policy objectives released a proposal titled “Fighting Digital Disinformation.” The part about what she intends to do as president, however, is a bit thin by her standards. The bulk of the plan is devoted…

Inside a small metal box on a laboratory table in Vienna, physicist Markus Aspelmeyer and his team have engineered, perhaps, the quietest place on earth.The area in question is a microscopic spot in the middle of the box. Here, levitating in midair—except there is no air because the box is in a vacuum—is a tiny…

More often than not, when people buy books online, they do so by clicking little thumbnails of novels and essay collections on Amazon’s website. Those thumbnails then materialize as physical copies on their doorsteps in a matter of days. Easy-peasy. The online retailer is the most dominant force in American bookselling today, accounting for over…

When Twitter suddenly announced it was shutting down Vine in 2016, fans immediately started campaigning to bring the beloved short-form video app back. Dom Hofmann, one of the original cofounders, has been working on doing just that for years. After a few stops and starts, his new app Byte finally launched last week. It already…

As the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaches, 36-year-old marathoner Desiree Linden is capturing hearts and headlines. This February, Linden will toe the line at the US Olympic marathon trials in Atlanta. Two months later, she’s lining up at the storied Boston Marathon, and—if all goes according to plan—she will represent the United States in Tokyo in…

In mid-November, as his House colleagues on Capitol Hill were consumed with questions about Ukraine and impeachment, Senator Mark Warner took to CNBC’s Squawk Box to discuss what he saw as one of the most important problems facing the country: Fitbit.Or, more specifically, the danger of allowing Google to swallow up the personal fitness and…

Rocket Lab’s first mission of the year, and 11th commercial flight overall, is planned to take off this afternoon from New Zealand and bring a payload from the National Reconnaissance…

For as long as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in China has been raging, public health officials have kept their eyes on one key variable: whether the virus was continuing to spread even far away from the epicenter in Wuhan. Last week, when the World Health Organization decided against declaring the outbreak an international…