Russia launched attacks on major cities and airports across Ukraine, shelling more than a dozen cities and towns and crossing the border in multiple locations.
The invasion was met with sharp rebuke from the United States, the European Union and NATO allies, with broad, unprecedented financial and diplomatic sanctions promised against Russia, sanctions that are likely to affect business, trade and finance across the region.
The impacts of the invasion are also, undoubtedly, being felt across Ukraine’s wider tech ecosystem, which includes not only hundreds of startups and larger tech firms, but also research and development offices for some of the world’s biggest technology brands.
As the situation on the ground changes rapidly over the next few hours and days, TechCrunch will continue to bring news and analysis on how the conflict unfolds across the tech and startup community.
Based on electrolytes, this novel skin produces a spectrum of spike signals to capture everything from pressure to motion.
The “Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle” has materialized from your Black Mirror nightmares.
Science fiction has seeped into science reality this week, as a robotics company showed off its sniper rifle-equipped robo-dog at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington, D.C.
Continue reading “Welp, Now We Have Robo-Dogs With Sniper Rifles” »
A new report claims that Tesla is starting work on building a new factory adjacent to Gigafactory Shanghai in order to double production capacity to two million cars annually.
Tesla currently operates two main factories, Tesla Fremont and Gigafactory Shanghai, and it has Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin slowly starting to ramp up production.
Those four projects alone should push Tesla’s production capacity beyond three million vehicles annually by the end of next year, but the automaker has much greater ambitions for this decade that will require several more factories. The company recently confirmed that it plans to announce a new location for a factory by the end of this year.
Scientists identify a long-sought magnetic state predicted nearly 60 years ago.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a long-predicted magnetic state of matter called an “antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator.”
“Broadly speaking, this is a novel type of magnet,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Mark Dean, senior author on a paper describing the research just published in Nature Communications. “Since magnetic materials lie at the heart of much of the technology around us, new types of magnets are both fundamentally fascinating and promising for future applications.”
Astronomers find evidence for the tightest-knit supermassive black hole duo observed to date.
Locked in an epic cosmic waltz 9 billion light years away, two supermassive black holes appear to be orbiting around each other every two years. The two giant bodies each have masses that are hundreds of millions of times larger than that of our sun, and the objects are separated by a distance roughly 50 times that which separates our sun and Pluto. When the pair merge in roughly 10,000 years, the titanic collision is expected to shake space and time itself, sending gravitational waves across the universe.
A Caltech-led team of astronomers has discovered evidence for this scenario taking place within a fiercely energetic object known as a quasar. Quasars are active cores of galaxies in which a supermassive black hole is siphoning material from a disk encircling it. In some quasars, the supermassive black hole creates a jet that shoots out at near the speed of light. The quasar observed in the new study, PKS 2131-021, belongs to a subclass of quasars called blazars in which the jet is pointing toward the Earth. Astronomers already knew quasars could possess two orbiting supermassive black holes, but finding direct evidence for this has proved difficult.
