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Like most interns, Stefan Reichert was assigned a bunch of menial tasks while working for top tier design consultancies in Silicon Valley. No one asked the German student to fetch coffee, but he was assigned the art school equivalent—setting up and maintaining the office’s 3-D printer. [...] Read More »

Before daybreak on Monday, at 6 a.m., my phone was alight with texts and phone calls -- hours after some had been chased from their homes by flames. I woke up bleary-eyed and answered the latest call. "It's gone," my cousin said, her voice drained by shock, "It's all gone." As a reporter, I've chased more tragedies than I can count. Mass shootings, murders, suicides, fallen trees, car accidents — you name it. I drove into them, ran into them, knocked on their doors, called them on the phone. But this week, the tragedy came to me. By that morning, Santa Rosa was in flames, along with other parts of Sonoma, Mendocino, Napa and Solano counties. By late Monday morning, hordes of people in packed cars were headed north, many with no certainty where they were going...

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Last week President Obama urged businesses to “give America a raise.” But even if the minimum wage were raised, it wouldn’t necessarily help a huge class of low-wage employees. That’s because firms like Walmart don’t directly employ the workers hauling or selling their goods. [...] Read More »

You may never have heard of it, but IMS Health knows an awful lot about your medical history. A global company based in Danbury, Connecticut, IMS IMS 1.58% buys bulk data from pharmacy chains such as CVS CVS 0.72% , doctor’s electronic record systems such as Allscripts, claims from insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and from others who handle your health information...

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Only 4 of the 81 people with confirmed cases of bird flu in China have fully recovered, according to a new study of the outbreak by the New England Journal of Medicine. The report also confirms that human-to-human transmission of H7N9, which could cause a deadly global pandemic, can’t be ruled out. Here’s a summary of the report. Read More »

Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine. Read More »