February 2024

How sulfur could be a surprise ingredient in cheaper, better batteries

February 14, 2024
The key to building less-expensive batteries that could extend the range of EVs might lie in a cheap, abundant material: sulfur. Addressing climate change is going to require a whole lot of batteries, both to drive an increasingly electric fleet of vehicles and to store renewable power on the grid. Today, lithium-ion batteries are the…

KTrust launches an automated red team for Kubernetes security

February 14, 2024

KTrust, a Tel Aviv-based security startup, is taking a different approach to Kubernetes security from many of its competitors in the space. Instead of only scanning Kubernetes clusters and their configurations for known vulnerabilities, KTrust is taking a more proactive approach. It deploys an automated system that tries to hack into the system. This allows […]

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How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

February 14, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you ask any child in China what’s the most exciting thing about welcoming another year, they are likely to answer: the red packets. It’s a festive tradition: During the holidays, people…

Roam raises $24M to scale electric vehicle production in Kenya

February 14, 2024

Roam, an EV startup based in Kenya, has raised $24 million in a Series A round, including up to $10 million debt commitment from the U.S International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), to scale the production of electric motorcycles and buses. Equator, an Africa-focused climate tech VC fund, led the round, which also had the participation […]

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Surprise! Mark Zuckerberg thinks Quest 3 is better than Vision Pro

February 14, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg tried Apple’s Vision Pro headset and his verdict is that the Meta Quest 3 is a better product. Shocking, right? In a video posted on his Instagram account, recorded with Quest 3’s passthrough, the Meta CEO said before trying out the headset he thought that Quest 3 would provide better value to people […]

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Andrej Karpathy is leaving OpenAI again — but he says there was no drama

February 14, 2024

Researcher Andrej Karpathy confirmed today that he is leaving OpenAI for the second time to work on personal projects. He said in a post on X that the decision is not because of an event, issue, or drama. Karpathy, who was the founding member of OpenAI, left the company to join Tesla in 2017. He […]

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Foundry Group is shutting down and won’t raise another fund

February 14, 2024

Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds. The move was unexpected considering that the firm announced a $500 million fund last year. Boulder, Colorado-based Foundry first announced that its current fund would be its last on […]

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