Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in th
Don’t you hate it when, after going just five or 10 meters underwater, you lose signal completely? Now this vexing limitation of modern technology is being addressed by researchers at the Univer
We’ve had active noise canceling in wireless earbuds for a while, but that mostly benefits the person wearing the headphones to drown out the outside world. If you’ve been on the other end
Zap Energy has reached two milestones that could nudge it ahead in the race to offer low-cost, carbon-free energy — a $160 million Series C round, and a successful test of a prototype fusion reactor
If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if you could scatter your sensors th
One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by leading labs published in the journal Natur
DeepMind stunned the biology world late last year when its AlphaFold2 AI model predicted the structure of proteins (a common and very difficult problem) so accurately that many declared the decades-ol
While the concept of “deepfakes,” or AI-generated synthetic imagery, has been decried primarily in connection with involuntary depictions of people, the technology is dangerous (and intere
Open-source software is at the core of… well, practically everything online. But while much of it is diligently maintained in some ways, in others it doesn’t receive the kind of scrutiny t
Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone, expanding to a whole new group of people health and
Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. Th
Sometimes it’s just not worth it to try to top Mother Nature. Such seems to have been the judgment by engineers at the University of Washington, who, deploring the absence of chemical sensors as
Lunar exploration startup Astrobotic is working on developing ultra-fast wireless charging technology for its CubeRover shoebox-sized lunar robotic explorers. The project, which is funded by NASA̵
Everyone is familiar with carrier pigeons, but what about carrier moths? This research project uses the nocturnal insects as a delivery service for tiny electronic packages that weigh less than a hund
Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinriku
Microsoft has added to the slowly growing pile of technologies aimed at spotting synthetic media (aka deepfakes) with the launch of a tool for analyzing videos and still photos to generate a manipulat
The Trump administration's sudden policy reversal on student visas are likely to have unintended side effects across the U.S.
Historians interested in the way events and people were chronicled in the old days once had to sort through card catalogs for old papers, then microfiche scans, then digital listings — but modern ad
Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-I
OctoML, a startup founded by the team behind the Apache TVM machine learning compiler stack project, today announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Amplify, with participation from
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