Amazon has announced that it has added features to its Alexa voice assistant that can help users determine their risk level for having got the COVID-19 coronavirus (新型冠状病毒). As of now all Alexa users in the United States can ask Alexa questions like, “Alexa, what do I do if I think I have COVID-19?” or “Alexa, what do I do if I think I have coronavirus?” upon which Alexa will begin triaging (检验分类) them.

Once one of the above questions is asked, Alexa will ask the user about their symptoms, travel history, and any possible exposure they may have had to someone infected with the disease. Depending upon the user’s response, Alexa will offer the user guidance that comes directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about what they should do next.

Another cool feature added to Alexa is the ability to ask the personal assistant to sing a song for 20 seconds while you wash your hands. Twenty seconds is the minimum washing time with soap and water people need to perform on their hands in order to destroy traces of the virus they may have picked up.

Users can take advantage of Alexa’s new COVID-19 features on any device Alexa runs on, including smartphones, tablets, Kindles, and more. It should also be noted that Amazon isn’t the first to empower its voice assistant to offer CDC COVID-19 information. Earlier this week Apple pushed an update out to Siri that allows users to ask, “Hey Siri, do I have the coronavirus?” and get advice based on CDC information.

It all started in 2013, when Shea Stollenwerk, then eight years old, asked for a new hand for Christmas. Shea was born with a partial right hand, which restricts her ability to do things that other kids take for granted.

“My mom went online”, says Shea, who lives in Muknowango, Wisconsin. Shea’s mother, Ranee, soon learned about a community of artists, designers, and scientists who are making big breakthrough with artificial hands.

Frankie Flood, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was among the designers who saw Ranee’s online request. Flood obtained help from fellow professor Adeam Blair and their students, who were learning how to make designs using a 3-D printer. “We made a mold(模子) of Shea’s hand out of plaster(石膏), and then we 3-D scanned her hand,” Flood says.

While being fitted in Flood’s laboratory, Shea got to choose the color of her new hand. She went with bright pink. She now has a pink hand, a purple hand, and a purple and pink one, and can do things that she couldn’t do before, like peeling potatoes, picking up objects, and catching a ball.

Flood and his team have since built hands for six other local children. Indirectly, they have helped dozens more by posting their designs online so that people around the world can print them out. Flood is also working on artificial legs for military soldiers who were injured on the battlefield. “Without a covering, the artificial leg is kind of ugly and plain,” Flood says. “Soldiers want something that will restore the shape of their legs and make them look cooler when they’re playing sports.”

As for Shea, the aspiring musician can now play her violin with the help from an adaptive device that Flood’s team created. “Nothing is ever going to hold her back,” Shea’s father, Steve, told a local reporter.

At the age of 15, Roxanne Black-Weisheit was told that she got lupus, a systemic autoimmune (自身免疫) disease that occurs when one’s body’s immune system attacks the healthy tissues and organs. Shortly after, Black-Weisheit desperately sought emotional support. She wanted a friend who could truly understand her situation, and she figured there were others who needed this, too.

So, during her first year of college, she created Friends’ Health Connection (FHC), a non-profit organization that helped people with similar health conditions.

As she was starting FHC, lupus was destroying her kidney function. During her senior year of college, she had her first kidney transplant and 13 years later, she had her second one. Through it all, she didn’t forgo FHC. She’d even transformed her hospital room into an “office” and worked in her hospital bed.

After graduation, she secured enough funding to continue growing her organization, and it became her full-time job. But, unfortunately, lupus and kidney transplants weren’t the end of Black-Weisheit’s health issues. Five years ago, at 42, she had lymphoma.

Black-Weisheit’s new disease left her extremely weak and tired, and she knew she had to make a choice about FHC. “Since my time and energy were limited and my future was uncertain, the board and I decided to close our office. I wanted to devote all my energy to keeping my family life as normal as possible,” she explained.

Her career didn’t end there, though. When she started feeling better, she felt the urge to start working again. Using her experience from FHC, she started a new company — Schedule Authors.com, which helps other companies schedule different types of speakers for their events. This is now Black-Weisheit’s current job. But she missed running her own non-profit organization, so she started trying to figure out how to bring back FHC.

And, recently, she received some great news: A past FHC donor would provide her with a grant to get the organization running again.