Fred Guterl

COVID-19 may have made a future pandemic—from a lab leak, bioterrorism or natural causes—more likely. Is Biden making the right moves to protect us?

In 1972, Alex van der Eb, a molecular biologist, took cells from an aborted human embryo and cultured them in his lab in Leiden University in the Netherlands. The cells have since become “immortal,” meaning the descendants of the original cells have played a role in the research of numerous vaccines, including rubella, adenovirus, polio, rabies, chickenpox, Ebola and, most recently, several of the most widely used coronavirus vaccines.That puts the Roman Catholic Church, which opposes abortion a…

Back in 1994, when quantum computers existed only as so much chalk on a blackboard, mathematician Peter Shor invented what may soon prove to be their killer app.Shor trained his efforts on a calculation called “factoring,” which ordinarily nobody but a mathematician would care about, except it just happens to be an Achilles heel of the internet. If someone were to invent a computer that could perform this operation quickly, messages that are currently hidden from hackers, terrorists, military ad…

More than four in 10 Americans say they won’t get the COVID vaccine when it becomes available. Big problem: Even a highly effective vaccine won’t do much to rein in the pandemic if enough people can’t be persuaded to get the shot.

Just one day after the U.S. surpassed China to become the country with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency updated its assessment of the origin of the novel coronavirus to reflect that it may have been accidentally released from an infectious diseases lab, Newsweek has learned.The report, dated March 27 and corroborated by two U.S. officials, reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it “judged that the outbreak probably occurre…

The criticism may heighten tensions between Trump, who has touted the drug, and Dr. Fauci and other experts, but is unlikely to affect coronavirus treatment in the short term.

The Thwaites Glacier is about the size of a U.S. swing state and holds enough ice to raise sea levels by about 10 feet. This alone is scary enough to justify its nickname, the Doomsday Glacier, but there’s more. The Thwaites sits along a 75-mile stretch of shoreline in Antarctica that serves to partially shield the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet from the warm ocean waters. The WAIS has enough ice to raise the seas by 200 feet.Forty years ago, the Thwaites was thought to be shedding 40 billion ton…

Listening to Jimmy Wales speak is a bit like reading a Wikipedia page: Sound bites are few, but the tone is fair and measured.That’s one reason people tend to listen to him; another is that Wales is one of Silicon Valley’s most successful internet entrepreneurs. Wikipedia, his brainchild, attracts 1.2 billion page views per month by one ranking, second only to Google’s YouTube.Now Wales is sounding the alarm about social media. The problem, he says, is that Facebook makes most of its money selli…

Google engineers built a quantum computer that can perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years, a feat that can only be described as impressive. But they got some blowback for their claim to have reached a crucial milestone—the point at which quantum computers can outperform conventional ones.In 2012, John Preskill in Quanta magazine dubbed this milestone “quantum supremacy.” The Googlers borrowed his phrase in the title of their paper—“Quantum supre…

Forget cars: Ford is now in the “mobility” business. In an exclusive Newsweek interview, company CEO Jim Hackett says autonomous vehicles are the biggest revolution since the Model T.