“I independently made my money, as opposed to say, inherited an emerald mine.” —Halli, a recently laid-off Twitter worker, fires back at his former boss Elon Musk, who accused Halli of shirking his work responsibilities. The big story Why can’t tech fix its gender problem? August 2022 Despite the tech sector’s great wealth and loudly […]

When the crackdown on video games happened in 2021, the social media industry was definitely spooked, because many Chinese people were already comparing short-video apps like Douyin to video games in terms of addictiveness. It seemed as though the sword of Damocles could drop at any time.  That possibility seems even more certain now. On […]

There was reason to worry. In 2016, after Peter Thiel, one of Altman’s mentors, expressed interest in possibly getting age-defeating blood transfusions, he was mocked in the media as a vampire on the prowl for young victims. A year later, the HBO parody show Silicon Valley drove the stake in with an episode called “Blood […]

Even then, patients won’t get the treatments if insurers and governments balk at paying. It’s a real risk. For instance, a different gene therapy for beta-thalassemia, developed by Bluebird Bio, was pulled out of the European market after governments there refused to pay the $1.8 million price.   CRISPR 2.0 The first generation of CRISPR treatments […]

In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting experiments where it pumped water deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada.  The results—which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively—suggest that Houston-based Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more importantly, the system can […]

The crust stretched, thinned, and broke into blocks that tilted, forming mountains on the high side while filling in and flattening the basins with sediments and water, as John McPhee memorably described it in his 1981 book, Basin and Range. From a geothermal perspective, what matters is that all this stretching and tilting brought hot […]

Tiffany and Cartier are not the first brands to team up with Snap’s AR. Louis Vuitton just partnered with the artist Yayoi Kusama to create a filter on Snap that envelops landmarks around the world in Kusama’s trademark polka dots. Snap has already collaborated with Dior, Gucci, and Prada using virtual try-on technology.  “Brands are […]