-
2016 is the new hottest year on record – how NASA takes the planet’s temperature
NASA announced on Wednesday that in 2016, Earth experienced the hottest surface temperatures in modern history. Separate, independent analysis at NOAA provided the same conclusion. This makes the third year in a row that Earth experienced record high temperatures. These record years are part of a concerning long-term trend of increasing global temperatures. In fact, 16 of the 17 warmest years… Read More
-
Forward, a $149 per month medical startup, aims to be the Apple Store of doctor’s offices
It was cold and pouring outside as the Uber pulled up at 180 Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco. Inside, a man dressed all in black offered to take my jacket and umbrella as he ushered me through the clinical white lobby to a set of chairs, handing me a bottle of VOSS. I scanned the room, eyeing a bunch of connected fitness tools and fancy skin serums on a glass table in the front… Read More
-
A new lawsuit alleges anti-aging startup Elysium Health hasn’t paid its sole supplier
Chromadex, the sole supplier of anti-aging startup Elysium Health‘s two main product ingredients pterostilbene and Nicotinamide Riboside (NR), is suing the startup for failure to make payments on those ingredients and for breach of a trademark and royalties agreement. According to a document on Chromadex’s website, dated December 29, 2016, Elysium “made… Read More
-
SpaceX successfully lands its first-stage Falcon 9 rocket on drone ship
SpaceX successfully recovered its first stage Falcon 9 rocket during a launch on Saturday, marking the 7th rocket recovered overall, and the first one for this drone landing barge, ‘Just Read The Instructions.’ The recovery was captured on video from the rocket’s perspective, too, so you can see the entire process as it touches down. The first time SpaceX successfully… Read More
-
SpaceX successfully returns to launch with Iridium-1 NEXT Falcon 9 mission
SpaceX has succeeded in launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, its first launch since a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a launch pad in pre-flight procedures in September 2016. The launch took place at 9:54 AM PT Saturday, during an instant launch window. It’s a huge victory for SpaceX, which has had to delay its launch schedule since the explosion. The… Read More
-
This Swiss watch would power, and be powered by, a heartbeat
Swiss researchers have given a literal twist to the proverbial ticker, designing a clock-like device that could help power pacemakers by harvesting energy from the heart itself — just like an automatic watch harvests movement from the motion of the wrist. Read More
-
Women’s health startup Celmatix now offers genetic testing for fertility issues
Celmatix, a startup with a focus on personalized medicine for women, wants to take some of the mystery out of the science of baby-making with a new type of DNA-based fertility test called Fertilome. Fertilome looks at 49 variants in 32 genes that give you a likelihood or not for inherited disorders such as endometriosis or PCOS to help women determine the best course of action to take based… Read More
-
This 20-cent whirligig toy can replace a $1,000 medical centrifuge
Centrifuges are found in medical labs worldwide. But a good one could run you a couple grand and, of course, requires electricity — neither of which are things you’re likely to find in a rural clinic in an impoverished country. Stanford researchers have created an alternative that costs just a few cents and runs without a charge, based on a children’s toy with surprising… Read More
-
Illumina wants to sequence your whole genome for $100
The first sequencing of the whole human genome in 2003 cost roughly $2.7 billion, but DNA sequencing giant Illumina has now unveiled a new machine that the company says is “expected one day” to order up your whole genome for less than $100. Illumina’s CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in downtown… Read More
-
Uber’s David Plouffe will run politics for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
If you want to cure all disease and educate everyone, you’re going to need the government’s help, even if you’re as rich as Mark Zuckerberg. Today, he and his wife Priscilla’s philanthropic vehicle the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced it’s hired away Uber’s chief advisor and former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to lead its policy and advocacy team. Read More
-
Grail is raising at least $1 billion to fund its early cancer screening test
The early cancer screening startup Grail plans to raise more than $1 billion in Series B financing, possibly up to $1.8 billion. While the company doesn’t want to name investor names, only mentioning in a release the funding will come “primarily from undisclosed private and strategic investors,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google Ventures… Read More
-
Venneos launches a device for faster, better imaging of individual cells in biotech
The imaging technologies used in the medical and biotech fields may be powerful and indispensable for research and diagnosis, but they also can be slow and clumsy — relics of techniques that go back decades. Venneos wants to change that with its new device, which allows easy and continuous monitoring of a handful of individual cells without any of the fuss or mystery of existing solutions. Read More
-
SOSV, “the accelerator VC,” closes third fund at $150 million
Since the advent of accelerators, venture capitalists have competed to lock in deals with the best startups in a given batch. Entrepreneur turned investor Sean O’ Sullivan thought it would be better to develop a venture firm that owned and ran its own accelerators. Today that firm, SOSV, has closed its third fund at $150 million to back startups that are admitted to and have graduated… Read More
-
Crunch Network
How technology is merging with the human body
The gulf between “human” and “machine” is closing. Machine learning has enabled virtual reality to feel more “real” than ever before, and AI’s replication of processes that were once confined to the human brain is ever-improving. Both are bringing technology into ever-closer proximity with the human body. Things are getting weird. And they are going to… Read More
-
Neurable nets $2 million to build brain-controlled software for AR and VR
As consumers get their first taste of voice-controlled home robots and motion-based virtual realities, a quiet swath of technologists are thinking big picture about what comes after that. The answer has major implications for the way we’ll interact with our devices in the near future. Spoiler alert: We won’t be yelling or waving at them; we’ll be thinking at them. That answer… Read More
-
Move over Cas9, CRISPR-Cas3 might hold the key to solving the antibiotics crisis
Researchers at North Carolina-based Locus Biosciences think they have a potential cure for antibiotic resistance using CRISPR’s lesser-known Cas3 enzyme. Most of the interest in CRISPR technology centers around the enzyme Cas9, which acts as a type of genetic scissors, allowing scientists to snip out, edit and replace DNA at certain intervals along the genome. However, Cas3 goes beyond… Read More
-
Artificial leaf captures light to power drug production
Drug production is generally a matter of big factories churning out millions of aspirin or ibuprofen tablets a day, but there’s a lot to be said for manufacturing common drugs on a small scale, close to where they’re used. Researchers from the Netherlands have created an efficient and simple method for doing so that uses a method much like plants have for making their own resources. Read More
-
Facebook’s secretive hardware team signs rapid collaboration deal with 17 universities
Facebook’s shadowy Building 8 research team needs help from academia to invent futuristic hardware. But today’s pace of innovation doesn’t allow for the standard 9-12 month turnaround time it takes universities to strike one-off research partnerships with private companies. Enter SARA, aka Facebook’s “Sponsored Academic Research Agreement.” It’s a… Read More
-
Moth eyes inspired the design of this hypersensitive camera
If you wanted to see in the dark, you could do worse than follow the example of moths, which have of course made something of a specialty of it. That, at least, is what NASA researchers did when designing a powerful new camera that will capture the faintest features in the galaxy. Read More
-
NASA tech could track firefighters where GPS can’t reach
In the chaotic environment of a fire or disaster area, knowing where your fellow firefighters and first responders are is of the utmost importance, but GPS and other positional tracking systems aren’t always reliable. A project from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory aims to solve this with a tracker that relies on a totally different kind of electromagnetic phenomenon. Read More
Message Us