Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...

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The digital snow day is over, as Amazon Web Services has fixed the issues with its Simple Storage Service, or S3 for short, that crippled significant chunks of the internet Tuesday. Starting a little after 9:30 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, and lasting close to five hours, the S3 cloud storage service started experiencing “high error rates.” This outage knocked out access to a litany of websites and apps that run on AWS, including but not limited to Expedia, Slack, Medium, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The outage even temporarily affected the AWS service health dashboard, which displays outages and events...

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Game theory is the science of strategy. A branch of mathematics and economics that explores strategic situations across multiple stakeholders with different goals, whose actions can affect one another. Pioneering companies are changing the game with blockchain technologies. The new game of consumer interactions redefines transparency, immutability and security across industries. Much progress has been made with game theory. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 book Game Theory and Economic Behavior outlined classic game theory...

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For years, people have been urged be more active in their own care. Now providers are giving them better tools to make that happen. They’re told they need to do more to monitor their chronic conditions. They are directed to be more active in deciding what treatments to have, or whether to treat a condition at all. That has proved easier said than done. For some people, it’s a matter of feeling intimidated: Better to let the doctors decide. Some are overwhelmed by the choices they have to make about their care, which seem to get more complex every year. At the same time, many doctors are reluctant to change old ways of working...

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Health IT vendors are still missing the mark when it comes to answering the needs of America’s burnt-out physicians. “This is not about putting our hands up and saying stop innovation,” said Michael Hodgkins, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer at the American Medical Association. “It is simply about the need to focus on evidence, accuracy, how it’s integrated with our EHRs and how it’s integrated within our practice”...

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Teenagers across Australia are producing scientific findings that could potentially change the way we live and the world we live in. One of the country's brightest young minds has developed a way to make bacteria less resistant to antibiotics. Another has created six new types of bioplastic including one which decomposes at 300 times faster than plastic. Two brothers have come up with a laser device to make road cycling safer...

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Antibiotic resistance and infectious diseases have long been high on my list of things to worry about, with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis vying for top honors. In 2015, 10.4 million people became ill with tuberculosis, and 1.8 million died, making TB one of the top causes of death globally. Six countries account for 60% of the cases: China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa. As I noted in a previous post, India is critically important to control of drug resistance as well as tuberculosis, as it has the highest TB burden, with 2.2 million infections annually, as well as the largest antibiotic consumption...

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