February 5, 2025

Supersonic planes are inching toward takeoff. That could be a problem.

Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…

Snapchat expands its paid subscription with Story expiration controls, custom sounds, and more

October 20, 2022

Snapchat+, Snapchat’s $3.99 per month subscription plan, is today rolling out three new features to entice users to its paid service. The company launched the subscription tier in late June as it looked for more revenue during an ad spending slowdown. Since the launch, more than 1 million users have paid for the service, the […]

Snapchat expands its paid subscription with Story expiration controls, custom sounds, and more by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

When you lose weight, where does it go?

October 20, 2022
What happens when we lose weight? This is really a question about how our bodies store and use the energy we need to function.  In general, we store backup energy in fat cells that are distributed around the body, some in the abdomen around the organs (visceral fat) and some under the skin (subcutaneous fat);…

The bird is fine, the bird is fine, the bird is fine, it’s dead

October 20, 2022
Twenty years have passed since I first met Aubrey de Grey, the man with the Methuselah beard. Back then he was already a True Believer in the quest for immortality. But he wasn’t famous, or notorious, yet; he wasn’t Aubrey!, as he would soon become to his fans in the anti-aging crowd. And he wasn’t…

Banyan raises $43M to grow its network of item-level purchase data

October 20, 2022

Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round — $28 million in equity and $15 million in debt — led by Fin Capital with participation from M13, […]

Banyan raises $43M to grow its network of item-level purchase data by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

GlobalFair secures new cash to simplify procuring construction materials

October 20, 2022

The construction materials market is fragmented, according to GlobalFair CEO Shaily Garg, because it involves layers of both supply chain and logistics complexities. In a 2021 survey for the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo, the vast majority of builders said that the time it takes to obtain materials — and the cost […]

GlobalFair secures new cash to simplify procuring construction materials by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Bill Gates’s energy venture fund is expanding into climate adaptation and later-stage investments

October 20, 2022
Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a later-stage fund to help clean-tech startups begin building plants and scaling up their technologies. The announcement came at the end of the firm’s Breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. To date, Breakthrough has been focused…

Why scientists want to help plants capture more carbon dioxide

October 20, 2022
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hello hello!  This week in The Spark, we’re taking a look back at one of my favorite sessions from our ClimateTech conference last week, from a chapter we called “Cleaning Your Plate.”  In…