university of washington
A new Seattle biotech organization will be funded to the tune of $75 million to research “DNA typewriters,” self-monitoring cells that could upend our understanding of biology. The collaboration between…
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached…
Don’t you hate it when, after going just five or 10 meters underwater, you lose signal completely? Now this vexing limitation of modern technology is being addressed by researchers at…
We’ve had active noise canceling in wireless earbuds for a while, but that mostly benefits the person wearing the headphones to drown out the outside world. If you’ve been on…
Zap Energy has reached two milestones that could nudge it ahead in the race to offer low-cost, carbon-free energy — a $160 million Series C round, and a successful test…
If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if…
One of the reasons artificial intelligence is such an interesting field is that pretty much no one knows what it might turn out to be good at. Two papers by…
Researchers match DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 protein folding power with faster, freely available model
DeepMind stunned the biology world late last year when its AlphaFold2 AI model predicted the structure of proteins (a common and very difficult problem) so accurately that many declared the…
While the concept of “deepfakes,” or AI-generated synthetic imagery, has been decried primarily in connection with involuntary depictions of people, the technology is dangerous (and interesting) in other ways as…
Open-source software is at the core of… well, practically everything online. But while much of it is diligently maintained in some ways, in others it doesn’t receive the kind of…
Google to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera
Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone, expanding to a whole new group of…
Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry…
Sometimes it’s just not worth it to try to top Mother Nature. Such seems to have been the judgment by engineers at the University of Washington, who, deploring the absence…
Astrobotic teams with Bosch and WiBotic to give its moon rovers wireless charging and smarts to find power stations
Lunar exploration startup Astrobotic is working on developing ultra-fast wireless charging technology for its CubeRover shoebox-sized lunar robotic explorers. The project, which is funded by NASA’s Tipping Point program with…
Everyone is familiar with carrier pigeons, but what about carrier moths? This research project uses the nocturnal insects as a delivery service for tiny electronic packages that weigh less than…
Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinrikus of…
Microsoft has added to the slowly growing pile of technologies aimed at spotting synthetic media (aka deepfakes) with the launch of a tool for analyzing videos and still photos to…
The Trump administration’s sudden policy reversal on student visas are likely to have unintended side effects across the U.S.
Millions of historic newspaper images get the machine learning treatment at the Library of Congress
Historians interested in the way events and people were chronicled in the old days once had to sort through card catalogs for old papers, then microfiche scans, then digital listings…
Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the…
OctoML, a startup founded by the team behind the Apache TVM machine learning compiler stack project, today announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Amplify,…
Study behind updated FDA guidance shows self-swab tests are as effective as those done by clinicians
Earlier this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would be updating its guidance to allow self-swab tests for COVID-19, in which a patient collects a…
Update: This post has been updated to reflect that the kits being distributed are specimen collection kits. Not at-home tests. A project funded by the Gates Foundation will soon begin…
Companies in Seattle raised a record $3.5B in VC funding this year.
Even to an experienced carpenter, it may not be obvious what the best way is to build a structure they’ve designed. A new digital tool, Carpentry Compiler, provides a way…
Researchers have come up with a mobile-sensing system that can track and rate the performance of workers by combining a smartphone, fitness bracelets and a custom app. The mobile-sensing system,…
Featured Article
To detect fake news, this AI first learned to write it
One of the biggest problems in media today is so-called “fake news,” which is so highly pernicious in part because it superficially resembles the real thing. AI tools promise to help identify it, but in order for it to do so, researchers have found that the best way is for…
It’s no coincidence that Elon Musk wants to both tunnel down into and soar above the Earth. If you ask the team at HyperSciences, the best way to get to…
AWS isn’t exactly known as an open-source powerhouse, but maybe change is in the air. Amazon’s cloud computing unit today announced the launch of Neo-AI, a new open-source project under…
The freezing waters underneath Antarctic ice shelves and the underside of the ice itself are of great interest to scientists… but who wants to go down there? Leave it to…
