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May 12, 2021 Over nearly two decades, a new study has found, government agencies have given at least £175 million ($248 million) to develop ChAdOx, a vaccine delivery system developed by scientists at Oxford University. Charities like the Wellcome Trust have given at least a further £53 million. As much as 99% of the total disclosed funding for ChAdOx research came from public or philanthropic money. And yet ChAdOx now sits at the heart of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, and the company is ...

It seems intuitive enough: Red means stop, amber means caution,  green means go. As Covid-19 levels fluctuate around the world, health officials are devising ways to quickly alert their constituents about the virus’s threat level. Predictably, most have turned to color and many have adopted the hues of traffic lights. After all, the three-color schema developed in Detroit in the 1920s based on a British system for railroad traffic, has been universally used for over a century. This is where ...

April 23, 2021 In 2010, the Japanese government had a rude wakeup call: Beijing had abruptly cut off all rare earth exports to Japan over a fishing trawler dispute. Tokyo was almost entirely dependent on China for the critical metals, and the embargo exposed this acute vulnerability. The silver lining to this incident, which sent global rare earth prices skyrocketing before they crashed down as the speculative bubble popped, is that it forced Japan to rethink its critical raw materials policy. ...

April 16, 2021 The Covid-19 pandemic has crushed some sectors of the global economy, with shuttered businesses leaving many people jobless. Others have been buoyed by it, as consumers have shifted their behavior and spending. Many of these shifts are apparent in transactions made on Venmo, a PayPal-owned payment platform for people in the US. Our analysis of emoji used in over 68,000 transactions from March 2020 and March 2021 suggests there are fewer transactions related to paying for haircuts...

April 13, 2021 The most beloved movie theaters in Los Angeles are closing. Now cinephiles in the movie-obsessed city are shining a Bat-Signal into the sky, hoping a deep-pocketed company (or individual) will swoop in and rescue them. The question is: Who will answer the call? ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres are permanently shuttering all 16 of their southern California locations, the theater chains announced in a statement yesterday, citing financial hardship brought about by the Covid-19...

April 4, 2021 The past year has brought seismic changes to workplace culture. “The factors that drive employee engagement have shifted,” says Julia Anas, chief people officer at Qualtrics, an employee experience analytics company. While still looking for growth and leadership opportunities, “employees value a sense of belonging more than ever before,” she says. But that isn’t all employees want. They’re also looking for flexibility and a relief from the pressure to always be on when...

March 16, 2021 At the end of May last year, as protests exploded over police killings of Black Americans, numerous fashion and beauty companies went online to post their messages of support for the Black community and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as to pledge their own commitments to change. Instagram was a preferred channel for these declarations. It’s become a vital way for companies to connect directly with audiences, and its photo-based sharing has made it particularly powerfu...

March 16, 2021 The results are clear. Companies increased the diversity of skin tones in their Instagram posts, following their mid-2020 pledges to support Black Lives Matter and, in particular, commitment to improving representation. However, it is also clear that those increases were often only marginal. For all of our readers, we visualized the data we collected for nine of 34 brands. Exclusively for Quartz members, here are the data and visualizations for every brand we analyzed, representi...

January 20, 2021 Joe Biden isn’t wasting time. On his first day in office, the newly inaugurated US president signed 17 executive actions. It’s not unprecedented for world leaders to get to work on day one, but the number of directives on Biden’s desk is much higher than usual. It took his recent predecessors weeks to sign 17 executive orders. Trump, Obama, Bush, and Clinton signed four executive orders or memos on their first day—combined. Biden’s executive orders vs Trump, Obama, Bu...

January 15, 2021 On Dec. 30. the EU and China agreed in principle on a deal that will govern their bilateral investment going forward. The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) was first proposed in 2012, as Europe increasingly saw its economic future in Asia (pdf), and sought out deeper ties with Beijing. Their relations have taken a hit since then, poisoned by the US-China trade war and a crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Many—this writer included—thought the C...