This exhibit is located across the street from the Palm Springs Art Museum in a large courtyard. Easy to overlook, these sculptures of babies appear to crawl through the dirt and along the walls of the sandpit. These ten, unique sculptures are intended to be a statement on the influence of big tech and data on our lives and the world at large. However, this work of art can also be an eerie sight. Either way, the exhibit certainly……
In the Autumn of 1819, the body of a 15-year old girl was found floating along the estuary of the River Shannon. Through a police investigation, it was discovered that her death was orchestrated by her recently eloped husband John Scanlan, who was a few years her senior. Ellen Hanley was orphaned at an early age and was being raised by her uncle John Connery. She was known by the nickname “Collen Brawn,” because of her innocence and beauty. This attracted……
It’s hard to believe that fintech startup Revolut doesn’t have a proper banking license in its home country. But this is about to change as the company has applied for a banking license in the U.K. Up next, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) are going to look at the application. Revolut already has a banking license in the European Union. The Bank of Lithuania has granted a license and the company is taking……
Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the “kombucha mother” used to ferment tea. Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants. They also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the……
Atop Prospect Hill Park in Somerville, Massachusetts stands a 34-foot tall, four-story granite tower constructed in 1903. Soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars camped on Prospect Hill. It’s said that George Washington ordered the raising of a Grand Union Flag on the site on January 1, 1776. By the turn of the century, the monument was in danger of collapse, and restoration efforts were soon underway. The city of Somerville restored the tower and the surrounding plaza. The restoration……
Telecom company Orange is making some changes to its venture capital arm. Orange Ventures is becoming a separate legal entity and Orange itself is allocating $430 million (€350 million). With this new corporate structure, Orange could attract third-party investors in its fund. Other telecom companies have made some headlines with their venture funds in the past, such as SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Reliance Jio. Separating Orange Ventures from Orange is also going to boost confidence when it comes to……
In the 11th century, the Normans built a motte-and-bailey fortification on the coast, opposite a castle in Abergwyngregyn across the Menai Strait, suggesting the castles engaged in coastal communications. Named after a local river, it was a fortified structure built on raised ground, and you can stroll through what remains of the site today. Originally the castle was a wooden structure. Although its history is not fully documented, it faced its share of fighting, with different structures built at different times, and……
The basement of Laura Holder’s 1925 bungalow looks like many others in her Milwaukee neighborhood. Dappled sunlight streams through glass-block windows onto an assortment of exercise equipment and her husband’s woodworking tools. An unfinished corner houses the washer and dryer and a second fridge and freezer. But instead of meat and leftovers, Holder’s basement freezer is full of dirt. Eighty-five bags of sediment, to be exact, double-bagged, numbered, and frozen solid. They were collected by biologists with the Wisconsin……
Situated on the Swedish west coast, Tjörn is the country’s 7th-largest island. Like the rest of Bohuslän during the summer, the island hosts tourists from around Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany. However, what many visitors don’t know is that a little further inland in Pilane resides a very unique sculpture park. The park features a beautiful heath with undulating terrain. Around the park are around 90 different historical sites from the Iron Age such as stone circles, burial mounds,……
The U.S. House Office of the Attending Physician is telling members of the U.S. House of Representatives to get tested for COVID-19 after facing possible exposure to the virus while sheltering from Wednesday’s riots in the Capitol. In a message sent from the attending physician to House members and their staffs that was obtained by WTOP news partner NBC Washington, the attending physician said, “Many members of the House community were in protective isolation in room locating in…
It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use. Payment-processing company Stripe is the latest tech company to kick Donald Trump off of its platform, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. That means the president’s campaign website and online fundraising arms will no longer have access to the payment processor’s services, cutting off the Trump campaign from receiving donations. Sources told the Journal that the reason for……
DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs. It has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images. In short it is phenomenal!…
BEIJING (AP) — China’s state media lashed out at the latest move on Taiwan by the departing Trump administration, accusing U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “seeking to maliciously inflict a long-lasting scar on China-U.S. ties.” A writer for the official Xinhua News Agency also said in a commentary Sunday that the lifting of longstanding restrictions on U.S. government contacts with Taiwanese counterparts proves that Pompeo “is only interested in stoking unwarranted confrontations, and has no interest in…
SEATTLE (AP) — Whether it was John Wolford’s inexperience or Jared Goff’s battered thumb under center, the Seattle Seahawks should have had the advantage. No way the champs of the NFC West would lose at home to a quarterback making his second career start, or the guy less than two weeks removed from thumb surgery. Right? “I think about two weeks ago, I was sitting right here in this chair, knowing I have a broken thumb and lying to…
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Click here if you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. So much for a quiet start to the year. Any hopes of 2021 giving us respite from the turbulent waters of 2020 went splat, as the first week……
