Fitbit's flagship fitness tracker finally has a successor after two years: the Fitbit Charge 6. Ever since Google acquired Fitbit, the company has slowly been adding Google features to its trackers, and the Charge 6 is the latest to receive apps like Google Maps for route-tracking and Google Wallet for …
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Kamal Sonavane knew she’d pass out if she chewed smokeless tobacco one more time. It was a scorching April afternoon in the middle of another of India’s brutal heat waves, and with no job to go to, the farmworker had already chewed tobacco five times that day. “Even an addicted …
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A 58-year-old man has become the second person ever to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig. The patient, Lawrence Faucette, was facing near death from heart failure and wasn’t eligible for a traditional transplant with a human organ. So surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center …
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Last week, Apple’s iPhone 12 was banned by a French regulatory body. The charge? The phone emits too much radiation. If you browse the German or UK versions of Amazon, you’ll find plenty of iPhone 12s. But on the French branch you’ll see a black hole surrounded by iPhone 11s …
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On the morning of September 11, critical care specialist Anoop Kumar was presented with an unusual situation. Four members of the same family had been admitted to his hospital—Aster MIMS in Kozhikode, Kerala—the previous day, all similarly sick. Would he take a look? He gathered his team of doctors to …
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Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink has announced it is one step closer to putting brain implants in people. Today, the company stated that it will begin recruiting patients with paralysis to test its experimental brain implant and that it has received approval from a hospital institutional review board. Such …
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is taking on the world’s worst killer, laying out its first plan to conquer hypertension—a level of high blood pressure that affects one in every three adults globally. That figure has doubled since 1990. It’s now up to 1.3 billion people. High blood pressure might …
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In late 2016, Hugh Harvey was working as a consultant doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. Harvey had dabbled in machine learning while doing a research degree, and had seen the potential for artificial intelligence to revolutionize health care. But he felt strongly that the introduction of AI into …
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I see you, reader. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the …
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About 10 years ago, Žiga Avsec was a PhD physics student who found himself taking a crash course in genomics via a university module on machine learning. He was soon working in a lab that studied rare diseases, on a project aiming to pin down the exact genetic mutation that …
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