Picture this: A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call. Digital twins are an important part of engineering, medicine, and urban planning, but in most of these cases each twin is……
Edenhall Hospital was based around the 1820 house known as Pinkieburn, home of the Lindsay family. In the late 1910s, during the First World War, Pinkieburn would be purchased to become the new home of the Edenhall Hostel for Limbless Soldiers and Sailors. The house itself, along with new extensions, would form the basis of the hospital. During World War II, the site would see further extensions with the construction of new huts. In 1953, Edenhall Hospital was transferred……
The Latest on the NATO summit taking place in Brussels: ___ BRUSSELS — NATO leaders agree that China poses a constant security challenge and is working to undermine the global rules-based system, and they are worried about how fast it’s developing nuclear missiles. In a summit statement Monday, the leaders said that China’s goals and “assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to alliance security.” While the 30 heads of state and…
Brazil is a country riven with economic contradictions. It has one of the largest and most profitable banking industries in Latin America, and is among the world’s most developed financial markets. Financial transactions that would take days to process in the United States through ACH happen instantaneously in Brazil. This sophistication, however, masks a backward state of affairs plagued by appalling customer service, exorbitant fees and lack of banking access for many. The country’s financial system is volatile and……
For most startups, the hardest early challenge is identifying a market and a product to serve it. That wasn’t the case for Nubank CEO David Velez, who understood the massive potential for success if he could break into Latin America’s most valuable economy with even a moderately modern banking offering. Instead, the challenge was how to rebuild the concept of a bank in a country where banking is widely hated, all while the incumbents heavily entrenched with the state……
As we saw in parts 1 and 2 of this EC-1, by mid-2013, Nubank CEO David Velez had most of what he needed to get started. He’d brought on two co-founders, assembled ambitious engineering and operations teams, raised $2 million in seed funding from Sequoia and Kaszek, rented a tiny office in São Paulo, and was armed with a mission to deliver the kind of banking services that customers in a market as large and lucrative as Brazil’s should……
Inspired by kirigami, the Japanese art of folding and cutting paper to create three-dimensional structures, MIT engineers and their collaborators have designed a new type of stent that could be used to deliver drugs to the gastrointestinal tract, respiratory tract, or other tubular organs in the body. The stents are coated in a smooth layer of plastic etched with small “needles” that pop up when the tube is stretched, allowing the needles to penetrate tissue and deliver a payload……
This sandstone cave is formed from a large overhanging rock, which is supported by a single, natural rock pillar almost in the middle of the cave. The cave itself is large enough to provide shelter for a small group of people. According to the legend, this cave might have been among the many places where the monks escaping Danish invaders either took shelter while transporting their most holy relic (St. Cuthbert’s body) or where Cuthbert himself may have spent time living……
Located in China‘s northwestern badlands near the edge of Gobi Desert, Yumen was once a buzzing oil city with a peak population of 300,000. However, as oil output plummeted, the old residential district became abandoned and now is a rare example of China’s true ghost towns. The town’s history dates back to the early 20th-century, when the Kuomintang regime dispatched a group of geologists to China’s barren northwest to prospect for oil. In 1939, oil was discovered in Yumen. The first oil……
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we tell the story of a community that came together in the 1930s to build this schoolhouse, and then came together again several decades later to build it a second time and preserve its legacy. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible……
It is obvious from the outside that the Bag of Nails is no ordinary pub. Two sleeping cats are visible, curled up on the windowsill, and a big sign warns visitors that no dogs are allowed, due to “pub kittens in training.” Inside, standing at the bar and ordering a drink, I am watched by one cat slinking along the bar, another half-dozing in an empty tonic box, and two more on a bench and a chair behind me…….
It was August of 1888. Captain Martin Van Buren Bates, formerly of the Confederate Army, was grieving. His wife had passed away, and he had ordered her casket from a manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio. Although Bates had provided precise dimensions for the coffin, his telegram created great consternation in the coffin maker’s office. When the coffin arrived, Bates was furious. He informed the designers that the casket was far too small—Bates’s original request had been completely accurate. Three days……
COPENHAGEN (AP) — As Christian Eriksen lay unconscious on the field, his pulse slipping away, Denmark team doctor Morten Boesen quickly realized there wasn’t a second to lose. “He was breathing, and I could feel his pulse. But suddenly that changed,” Boesen said Saturday. “And as everyone saw, we started giving him CPR.” The next 10 minutes were among the scariest to ever unfold during a match at soccer’s European Championship. Several medics worked frenetically to give Eriksen chest…
In a world of talking points and corporate jargon, opinions are refreshing — and Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett is full of them. One of his earliest lessons in life, for example, was that basically everyone is wrong about basically everything. If instilling that at a young age doesn’t force you to become an entrepreneur, I don’t know what does. Barrett’s ethos has, as reporter Anna Heim puts, led to Expensify having “its own take on almost everything”……
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. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. A small programming note: The Exchange column and newsletter are off next week (6/14-6/19), returning to regular service 6/21 after I get some sleep and come up with some new……
