The Download: robot reanimation, and AI crawler wars

February 12, 2025
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. Robots are bringing new life to extinct species In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. …

Lanch bags $27M for a social media-skewed take on fast food

February 12, 2025

E-commerce startups built around food continue to gobble up funding as investors look for sticky consumer concepts that can scale without breaking the bank. On Wednesday, Germany’s Lanch — which taps social media and influencers to develop popular food brands alongside retail networks for distributing them — closed funding of €26 million ($27 million) to […]

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EU abandons ePrivacy reform, as bloc shifts focus to competitiveness and fostering data access for AI

February 12, 2025

A long stalled bid to beef up European Union rules around online tracking technologies — and put penalties on a similar footing to the bloc’s data protection framework, GDPR, which allows for fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for breaches — has been withdrawn by the Commission after co-legislators failed to reach agreement […]

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No-code app builder Softr expands beyond Airtable databases

February 12, 2025

If you’re working for a small company and want to build a client portal or an internal tool, it can be difficult to find the budget and resources to allocate a developer to that small project. That’s why more than 600,000 people, including project managers, HR employees and marketing people, have been trying Softr’s no-code […]

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A woman in China sued Tesla after complaining of faulty brakes — now she’s paying Tesla $23K

February 12, 2025

As per an investigation by the Associated Press (AP), Tesla has won a defamation lawsuit against one individual called Zhang Yazhou, who in February 2021 was a passenger in a Tesla Model 3 car that allegedly crashed due to faulty brakes, resulting in a four-day hospital stay for both her parents. Following the accident, Zhang […]

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Robots are bringing new life to extinct species

February 12, 2025
Paleontologists aren’t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they’ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is…