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Here’s what you need to know
No foreign fans at Tokyo’s Olympics. If the 2020 games happen this year, safety measures will keep travelers away.
Vaccines are working. The first bits of real-world data on vaccinations are full of very encouraging results.
China’s hack of corporate email is huge. Tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers including some used by government agencies and businesses have been compromised.
The US and EU temporarily dropped some retaliatory tariffs. The duties had been placed on wine, cheese, whiskey, and other products to penalize each for illegally subsidizing Boeing and Airbus.
India might allow some cryptocurrency after all. India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman promised “keep a window available” for crypto-currency experimentation, instead of a complete ban.
President Joe Biden responded to voting concerns. His executive order, while limited in scope, could expand access to voting registration.
Beijing told the US to mind its own business. The foreign minister called for an end to “unreasonable restrictions” on cooperation and told the US not to “not create new obstacles.”
What to watch for
The Disneyland theme park could reopen as early as April 1 as new rules from California health officials in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic take effect. April’s opening day would be the first time crowds have descended upon the park since March 14, 2020.
Disney’s parks in Hong Kong, Orlando, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris have reopened (and sometimes re-closed, and reopened) throughout the year due to the pandemic, and Disney said it planned to lay off 32,000 workers, primarily working in its Parks and Resorts.
As the most populated state in the US, California has led the country in Covid-19 cases and deaths, with a particularly large surge of cases at the end of 2020. The changes announced by state health officials on March 5 follow a decline in the rate of infections across the US rollout of vaccines, which are now reaching more than 2 million people per day.
Charting the anti-Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett and Cathie Wood are polar opposites when it comes to investing. Each have cult followings—Buffett’s flock to see him at the company’s annual meeting, while Wood’s show their adoration on Twitter and TikTok.
In recent years, the funds managed by Wood, the founder of ARK Invest, have blown away the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffet’s $565 billion conglomerate that owns America’s largest railroad, as well as stakes in everything from Coca-Cola to Chevron.
Wood’s strategy often starts by figuring out the total addressable market of a technology, like battery storage, and then finding companies that can benefit from such a fast-growing area of opportunity. She seeks out what she calls technology platforms, from genome sequencing to blockchain, that can disrupt and transform the economy.
Someone call a doctor!
Covid was bad for pretty much everything. It was great for telemedicine.
Remote interactions with healthcare professionals increased by 54% in the US last year. In a few months, providers in the Johns Hopkins Medicine network went from 70 visits a month to upwards of 90,000 during the pandemic’s peak.
As the pandemic continues to force people to shun in-person visits, venture capitalists have bet on growth, with US investments in telemedicine in 2020 up $1.8 billion from the year before. Even Italian prime minister Mario Draghi highlighted remote medicine’s importance in his first address to parliament, highlighting its presence as a key ingredient of healthcare’s future.
Most tellingly, medical professionals, who have long resisted telemedicine, are along for the ride.
✦ Learn more about how telehealth could become the future of medicine in our field guide. Not yet a member? Try it for a week for free.
Surprising discoveries
Bacteria are effectively immortal. Scientists were able to feed dormant, 100-million-year-old bacteria trapped in sub-ocean sludge and observe them reproducing.
Japan answered Taiwan’s call to order pineapples. China’s ban on the Taiwan-grown fruit has been met with a surge of purchase orders from Japan.
AI can fool facial recognition AI. Microsoft and Amazon’s facial recognition services fell for deepfakes.
What’s the German word for face mask? The pandemic has conjured more than 1,200 new words in German, a language prone to compound words.
This dog is not a wolf. Visitors to the wolf enclosure at a Chinese Zoo were surprised to find a Rottweiler.
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