March 14, 2025

Tern AI’s low-cost GPS alternative actually works

We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when the GPS glitches and you miss an exit on the highway. The team at Tern AI, which is building a low-cost GPS alternative, says that’s because the current technology is limited by its reliance on satellite positioning.  Tern AI says it has figured out how to locate […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

TopTechTrends

German startup wins accolade for its fusion reactor design

February 26, 2025

Proxima Fusion, a two-year-old, German nuclear fusion startup, has published plans for a working fusion power plant in a peer-reviewed journal, in what is being touted as a step-change in the race to generate limitless energy. Today’s nuclear fission reactors create radioactive waste, whereas nuclear fusion releases vast amounts of energy, with zero carbon emissions and […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Claude: Everything you need to know about Anthropic’s AI

February 26, 2025

Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI vendors, has a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform a range of tasks, from captioning images and writing emails to solving math and coding challenges. With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing so quickly, it can be tough to keep track of which Claude […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Anthropic’s latest flagship AI might not have been incredibly costly to train

February 25, 2025

Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power. That’s according to Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who in an X post on Monday relayed a clarification he’d received from Anthropic’s PR. “I was contacted by Anthropic who told me […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Studying the uninvited guests

February 25, 2025
Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very…

The poetry of data

February 25, 2025
Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class. Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid…

The man who reinvented the hammer

February 25, 2025
A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. “I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace…

An environmentally friendly alternative to plastic microbeads

February 25, 2025
The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-­lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used…

Tiny tubes wrap around brain cells

February 25, 2025
Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells. These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons…