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This summer, a video game became available by prescription in the United States. This first-ever FDA-approved digital treatment builds on a tradition of gaming as a therapeutic tool that extends back more than a decade. Its game play gets good reviews, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last December, a glitch in the crew-scheduling system for American Airlines threatened to disrupt thousands of flights over the holiday season. The error allowed pilots to drop flights without requiring another pilot to cover for them, imperiling as many as 15,000 trips. And while the airline managed to spot the problem and staff the flights, the snafu was a reminder of how much we depend on computers to schedule the vast array of services and functions on which our societies have become completely dependent. All major airlines, for example, use sophisticated scheduling-optimization algorithms to assign crews to planes. And while the American Airlines incident was not caused directly by the failure of one of these algorithms, the end result was much the same. Such a failure would make it likely that hundreds of thousands of people would be stranded or seriously inconvenienced while the airline sought a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on major developments in the history of Kodak camera and the company Eastman Kodak. Topics mentioned include the awarding of the U.S. Patent Number 388,850 for the Kodak camera on September 4, 1988, the introduction of safety film made of cellulose acetate in 1908, the sales success of the Kodak Instamatic in 1970, and the company's filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012.

The hackers who unplugged 225,000 people from the Ukrainian electricity grid in December–the first confirmed cyber-takedown of a power system–have lent credence to calls by cybersecurity experts for greater vigilance by utilities. "It's really brought the whole thing to a head and made people aware that this isn't just chatter about the sky falling," says Eric Byres, a security consultant who commercialized one of the first firewalls for industrial control systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR GENERATIONS, beef was the United States' dominant meat, followed by pork. When annual beef consumption peaked in 1976 at about 40 kilograms (boneless weight) per capita, it accounted for nearly half of all meat. Chicken had just a 20 percent share. But chicken caught up by 2010, and in 2018 chicken's share came to 36 percent of the total, nearly 20 percentage points higher than beef. The average American now eats 30 kg of boneless chicken every year, bought overwhelmingly as cut-up or processed parts (from boneless breast to Chicken McNuggets). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. nuclear power plant operators are fighting a war on two fronts: Crashing prices for natural gas and accelerating market penetration of renewable energy have both contributed to dramatic drops in wholesale power price levels- in some states, they've fallen by more than two-thirds over the past decade. This has left nuclear power, whose operating costs are pretty much fixed, with few options other than surrender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]