Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
Air pollution has long been linked to respiratory disease, but new research is drawing a harder line between dirty air and cognitive decline. Scientists are finding measurable damage to brain function in populations exposed to elevated pollution levels, raising questions about urban planning and public health priorities that go well beyond the lungs.
From environmental health to the history books — a new video essay argues that Microsoft NetMeeting deserves far more credit than it ever received. Long before Zoom became a household word, NetMeeting was doing the heavy lifting of remote collaboration in the nineteen nineties, and understanding its rise and fall tells us a lot about how platform politics shape which technologies survive.
And on the lighter side of the feed, a new tool called Web Alter Ego is inviting people to generate a reimagined, personality-flipped version of their website. It is a small, playful project, but it touches on something genuinely interesting — how much of a website's identity is design convention versus actual choice, and what a different set of assumptions might produce.
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