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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 free to profit from it at will. To be sure, AstraZeneca has said it will sell these vaccines at no ...

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 the problem arises. The thing is, our understanding of color is richer and more nuanced beyond its a...

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. A decade on, it has significantly reduced its dependance on China for rare earths, and continues to ...

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, rent, and toilet paper, but more related to celebrations, recreation, and sending love. How we cal...

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 pandemic. “This was not the outcome anyone wanted, but despite a huge effort that exhausted all p...