July 25, 2025

The Download: saving the US climate programs, and America’s AI protections are under threat

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs Nonprofits are trying to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of…

Technology

This company makes wood products without trees

February 28, 2024
As she walks across Foray’s lab on the third floor of The Engine, Ashley Beckwith’s eyes brighten. Then, from an incubator, she pulls out petri dishes of wood-like cells that she and her team grew in the lab from black cottonwood plants. They envision turning those cells into wood-based perfumes, cosmetics, oils, and—someday—entire beams and…

Assessing Nvidia’s Significant Market Influence

February 27, 2024
Nvidia, a leading technology industry figure, is under intense scrutiny as it gears up to release its earnings report. The market is bracing for a significant shift in Nvidia’s stock,…

SynFlora is working on bioengineering a skincare revolution

February 27, 2024

Biotech startup SynFlora brought an enticing pitch for a new type of skin treatment technology to 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to improve understanding of the skin’s microbiome and engineer skin microbes with the goal of enabling more targeted and […]

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

The first-ever mission to pull a dead rocket out of space has just begun

February 27, 2024
More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began. Now, for the first time, a…

The Download: tiny TikTok-style soap operas, and how algorithms change us

February 27, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they…

Algorithms are everywhere

February 27, 2024
Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever’s newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the…

Bans on deepfakes take us only so far—here’s what we really need

February 27, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. There has been some really encouraging news in the fight against deepfakes. A couple of weeks ago the US Federal Trade Commission announced it is finalizing rules banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate…

How Wi-Fi sensing became usable tech

February 27, 2024
Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari’s chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns. …

China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas

February 27, 2024
Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub…