The coronavirus pandemic could have a lasting impact on city life. WSJ’s Jaden Urbi explores how the ways we work, shop and play are changing as urban designers refocus on health, tech and open spaces.
Illustration: Zoë Soriano
Category Archives: Technology
Technology: “Can 5G Replace Your Home Internet?” (WSJ Video)
Blazing fast 5G speeds are here but they aren’t all that useful on the new 5G smartphones. WSJ’s Joanna Stern packed up a motor home to see if the connection could power all her connected gadgets, including laptops, printers, Xboxes and camera-equipped doorbells. She explains the confusing world of 5G along the way.
Photo illustration: Sharon Shi
Health: Scientists Develop Simple Smartphone App To Detect “Diabetes” With Up To 80% Accuracy (UCSF)
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.
In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.
Among the patients that the algorithm predicted did not have diabetes, 92 to 97 percent indeed did not have the disease across the validation datasets. When this PPG-derived prediction was combined with other easily obtainable patient information, such as age, gender, body mass index and race/ethnicity, predictive performance improved further.
The Future Of Driving: Michigan To Build USA’s First “Autonomous Vehicle Corridor”
The Detroit News (Aug 13, 2020)— Michigan is angling to build a first-in-the-nation connected and autonomous vehicle corridor in the state’s southeast corner, the latest bid to ensure the region remains the epicenter of an auto industry moving rapidly into a technology-driven future.
Local and state government officials, members of Michigan’s congressional delegation, Ford Motor Co. executives and project developer Cavnue confirmed plans Thursday for a roadway that would stretch from downtown Detroit to Ann Arbor. Along the way, it would connect to such key milestones as the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and would parallel parts of Interstate 94 to Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
The roadway would be publicly accessible and could feature both public transit and shared mobility options. It will be called the “Michigan Connected Corridor,” officials confirmed, sharpening a vision Ford shared when it acquired the historic train station two years ago.
Earth & Atmosphere Video: NASA Spacecraft Uncover Mystery Of “Aurora Beads”
A special type of aurora, draped east-west across the night sky like a glowing pearl necklace, is helping scientists better understand the science of auroras and their powerful drivers out in space. Known as auroral beads, these lights often show up just before large auroral displays, which are caused by electrical storms in space called substorms.
Until now, scientists weren’t sure if auroral beads are somehow connected to other auroral displays as a phenomenon in space that precedes substorms, or if they are caused by disturbances closer to Earth’s atmosphere. But powerful new computer models, combined with observations from NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms – THEMIS – mission, have provided the first direct evidence of the events in space that lead to the appearance of these beads and demonstrated the important role they play in our local space environment.
Read more: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/aurora-m…
FOOD & AGRICULTURE: “The Robot Producing Crops Of The Future” (WSJ Video)
Arizona has what researchers call “the climate of tomorrow, today.” Scientists are using a 30-ton robotic field scanner in the state to study plant genetics and hopefully develop stress-resilient crops.
Photo: Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal
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Top Innovations: Xiaomi Unveils “Mi TV LUX”, World’s First Transparent TV For Mass Consumer Market
Beijing, CHINA, Aug 11, 2020: Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition is the world’s first mass-produced transparent TV. With an edge-to-edge transparent self-luminous display transmitting images that seem to be suspended in the air, this TV ushers in a new way to consume visual content previously only seen in science fiction films.
Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition offers a perfect combination of cutting-edge display technology and exquisite industrial design. For Xiaomi, it is also a major exploration of future TV forms. When Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition is turned off, it looks like a mere glass display. The pictures it displays seem to be floating in the air, merging the virtual and the real to bring an unprecedented visual experience.
Unlike traditional TVs that come with a back panel, Mi TV LUX Transparent Edition creatively embeds all the processing units in its base stand, preserving the compact shape of the screen and in the meantime brings about countless technical challenges.
Technology: “The Robot Revolution Is Happening”
Nearly every company across every industry is looking for new ways to minimize human contact, cut costs and address the labor crunch in repetitive and dangerous jobs. WSJ explores why many are looking to robots as the solution for all three.
Photo: FedEx
New Medical Technology: UC Davis Scientists Invent World’s First Total-Body PET Scanner (Video)
UC Davis Health scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi spent 15 years developing the world’s first total-body PET scanner, called EXPLORER. This imaging machine scans a patient’s entire body at one time, delivering breathtaking image quality that improves patient diagnoses and disease research.
UC Davis Cultivating Health blog: https://health.ucdavis.edu/cultivatin…
Technology: “A Bridge Above – 20 Years Of The International Space Station” (NASA Video)
“What if we built a bridge, between and above all nations, to jointly discover the galaxy’s great unknowns?” Join us this fall as we prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the the International Space Station. As a global endeavor, 240 people from 19 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory, which has hosted more than 2,800 research investigations from scientists in over 100 nations.
The International Space Station is a modular space station in low Earth orbit. The ISS program is a multi-national collaborative project between five participating space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA. It is an international collaborative effort between multiple countries.
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