For our 2021 technology of the year, we explore the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on digital technology.

The potential of digital contact tracing to slow the spread of a virus had been quietly explored for over a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic thrust the technology into the spotlight. But can it actually be effective in the hard-to-model complexity of real-world social networks?

The increasingly prominent — and inescapable — role of digital technologies during the coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by concerning trends in privacy and digital ethics. But more robust protection of our rights in the digital realm is possible in the future.

Wearable electronic devices, which allow physiological signals to be continuously monitored, can be used in the early detection of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases of COVID-19.

An all-elastomer strain engineering approach, which uses patterned elastomer layers with tunable stiffnesses, can be used to create intrinsically stretchable transistor arrays with a device density of 340 transistors cm^–2 and strain insensitivity of less than 5% performance variation when stretched to 100% strain.

A platform based on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology operating with qubits close to 100 mK can generate static and dynamic signals for the control of many qubits.

By using a conformable electrical interface as an electrical modulating unit and a Venus flytrap as an actuating unit, a biohybrid actuator can be created that is power efficient and responsive, and it can be wirelessly controlled via a smartphone.

The non-ideal characteristics of resistive memory devices can be used to develop low-power and resilient probabilistic neuromorphic computing hardware, suitable for highly constrained edge-based applications.

This Review examines the three established approaches for creating stretchable transistors—buckling engineering, stiffness engineering and intrinsic-stretchability engineering—and explores the current and future capabilities of stretchable transistors and circuits in human-integrated electronics.

A networked system of eight computing chips, each with its own on-chip memory, can be used to efficiently implement a range of neural network models and sizes.

For our 2021 technology of the year, we explore the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on digital technology.

The increasingly prominent — and inescapable — role of digital technologies during the coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by concerning trends in privacy and digital ethics. But more robust protection of our rights in the digital realm is possible in the future.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced students and educators across all levels of education to rapidly adapt to online learning. The impact of this — and the developments required to make it work — could permanently change how education is delivered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought an infodemic of misleading and unreliable information. In response, social media platforms have taken unprecedented steps to moderate content and promote official sources of information, which, combined with new policies and appropriate communication, could help tackle misinformation.

The potential of digital contact tracing to slow the spread of a virus had been quietly explored for over a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic thrust the technology into the spotlight. But can it actually be effective in the hard-to-model complexity of real-world social networks?