Business

Google is revealing anonymized location data on the movements of people in 131 countries as a guide for public health officials during the coronavirus pandemic. The reports, available in PDF format, show how visits to broad categories of places—such as retail and leisure establishment, grocery and pharmacy stores, and residential areas—have changed in the past …

T-Mobile completed its acquisition of Sprint Wednesday, officially reducing the number of major mobile carriers in the US from four to three. With the deal closed, T-Mobile’s outspoken CEO John Legere stepped down, as planned, and was replaced by company president Mike Sievert. To win approval of the deal, T-Mobile promised regulators not to raise …

Worsening relations between Washington and Beijing could trigger punishing new US restrictions on Huawei’s supply of cutting-edge microchips. But some experts believe this would only backfire by pushing China, and other countries, to develop more alternatives to advanced US technologies. The Trump administration is reportedly mulling controls that would require any company using chip-manufacturing equipment …

If you can reach him, Gus Nasrallah, president and CEO of manufacturing equipment supplier Sharpertek in Pontiac, Michigan, can sell you a machine that cranks out the N95 face masks desperately needed by health workers treating Covid-19 patients. It will cost you $250,000 or more—but don’t expect it soon. “We’re telling them six-month delivery.” Keith …

Jana Jumpp has been working at an Amazon fulfillment center in Jeffersonville, Indiana, for over four years. Until recently, her experience at the company had been great. Amazon helped pay for Jumpp to go to massage therapy school, and even sent her to assist with the opening of a new facility in Texas last year. …

In these self-isolated days, silver linings are almost entirely obscured by clouds. Yet should the worst-case predictions of mass deaths and overwhelmed health care systems not come to pass, there’s a case to be made that the way the virus is spreading—in waves from Asia to Europe and to the US, rather than simultaneously everywhere—will …

For each new transmission of coronavirus, imagine the “tick tick tick” of a stopwatch. At least 2 million adults in the US could require hospitalization over the course of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates; that’s more than double the nation’s supply of hospital beds. Curfews and social distancing will hopefully …

Something was wrong with Malaysia’s internet. It was March 13, and the more Simon Angus looked at the data, the more he suspected that the country might be in the midst of a coronavirus crisis. Angus is an academic at Monash University and the cofounder of Kaspr Datahaus, a Melbourne-based company that analyses the quality …

The 148th most popular book on Amazon Wednesday wasn’t actually a book at all: It was a package of 50 disposable face masks—the kind that shoppers have scrambled to buy amid the coronavirus pandemic. Surging demand for masks, as well as supplies like hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes, has emptied store shelves, and in some …

When Edwin Catmull arrived at the University of Utah’s graphics lab as a grad student in 1970, its state-of-the-art monochrome monitors showed only blocky shapes made from polygons. He spent the next few years inventing mathematical techniques to display curved surfaces, and began to dream of one day creating a full-length movie from computer generated …