Science and Technology

If the Biden administration is successful, many more electronic chips will be produced in factories located in, say, Texas or Arizona. These chips will then be shipped to partner countries like Costa Rica, Vietnam, or Kenya for final assembly and global distribution, powering everything from refrigerators to supercomputers. These places aren’t the first that come to mind when you think of semiconductors. But administration officials are trying to transform the global chip supply chain, and they’re negotiating hard to make that happen. Key elements of the plan include convincing foreign companies to invest in U.S. chipmaking and finding other countries…

When Chelsia Potts took her 10-year-old daughter to a psychologist for an evaluation for autism spectrum disorder, she decided, almost as an afterthought, to get tested herself. The results were surprising: Like her daughter, Ms. Potts was diagnosed with autism. At 35, Ms. Potts thought she was dealing with anxiety or something else. A first-generation college graduate, she had earned a Ph.D. in education and become a high-level administrator at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After seeing a psychologist, she had to figure out how this diagnosis would affect her work life. “I was confused at first and kept it…

In a new factory in northern Italy, Ferrari chassis slide onto robot trucks as engineers in cherry-red uniforms add components like the engine block, dashboard, and steering wheel, turning these bodies into hybrids. Soon: fully electric. There’s a lot at stake in Ferrari’s €200 million “e-building,” which opened last month. Almost twice the size of Rome’s Colosseum, the factory aims to propel the 77-year-old sports car maker, famous for the roar of its combustion engines, into the age of electrification. However, this effort comes at a delicate time for the auto industry. The transition to electric vehicles, which should have…