November 7, 2024

Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this…

The Download: robotic table tennis, and future space habitats

August 9, 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. Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis What’s new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has…

Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis

August 9, 2024
Do you fancy your chances of beating a robot at a game of table tennis? Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play the game at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it’s the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a…

Watch a video showing what happens in our brains when we think

August 9, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. What does a thought look like? We can think about thoughts resulting from shared signals between some of the billions of neurons in our brains. Various chemicals are…

This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit 

August 9, 2024
More people are traveling to space, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 people at a time. The Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture lab based in Cambridge, MA, has an approach that may help: a habitat that can be launched in compact stacks of flat tiles and self-assemble in orbit. Building large…

Rocket Lab’s sunny outlook bodes well for future constellation plans 

August 9, 2024

Rocket Lab surpassed $100 million in quarterly revenue for the first time, a 71% increase from the same quarter of last year. This is just one of several shiny accomplishments executives showed off to investors on Thursday — and a good omen for the space company’s medium-term ambitious plans. Executives continued to tease plans for […]

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CloudPay, a payroll services provider, lands $120M in new funding

August 9, 2024

In 1996, two companies, Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions, formed a venture called CloudPay to provide payroll and payments services to enterprise clients. CloudPay grew quietly over the next several decades, adding workflow automation features to maintain pace with upstart rivals. It’s still growing, CFO Andy Thomson assures TechCrunch. Thomson claims that CloudPay is handling […]

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