Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden steps down, replaced by COO John Mountain as interim CEO; Starling, which has raised over $1B, reports £453M in FY2023 revenue (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden steps down, replaced by COO John Mountain as interim CEO; Starling, which has raised over $1B, reports £453M in FY2023 revenue  —  Anne Boden nearly lost a grip on Starling Bank years ago when the neobank was in the middle of a coup effort led by […]

Exploring the links between diet and cancer

Every three to five days, all of the cells lining the human intestine are replaced. That constant replenishment of cells helps the intestinal lining withstand the damage caused by food passing through the digestive tract. This rapid turnover of cells relies on intestinal stem cells, which give rise to all of the other types of […]

Elementl, which offers data orchestration services based on Dagster, raised a $33M Series B led by Georgian, bringing its total funding to $48.8M (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: Elementl, which offers data orchestration services based on Dagster, raised a $33M Series B led by Georgian, bringing its total funding to $48.8M  —  Elementl, a startup that is building a data platform based on the popular Dagster orchestrator, today announced that it has raised a $33 million Series B round […]

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces suffers crashes, feedback glitches, and audio failures (Kevin Breuninger/CNBC)

Kevin Breuninger / CNBC: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces suffers crashes, feedback glitches, and audio failures  —  – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement plans evening were derailed by massive technical glitches on Twitter that prevented him from declaring his candidacy.

Helping robots handle fluids

Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push […]

Figure, which is developing a humanoid robot that recently took its first step, raised a $70M Series A led by Parkway, following a self-financed $100M seed (Brian Heater/TechCrunch)

Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Figure, which is developing a humanoid robot that recently took its first step, raised a $70M Series A led by Parkway, following a self-financed $100M seed  —  I spent a bit of time at Figure’s Sunnyvale offices during a recent visit to the South Bay.  The firm is currently in that […]

Istanbul-based AI marketing startup Insider raised $105M at a $2B valuation, up from $1.22B during its $121M Series D in March 2022, taking its funding to $274M (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: Istanbul-based AI marketing startup Insider raised $105M at a $2B valuation, up from $1.22B during its $121M Series D in March 2022, taking its funding to $274M  —  Insider, a Turkish artificial intelligence-backed marketing platform, was valued at almost $2 billion in a funding round …

US filing: South Korea, Samsung, and SK Hynix ask the US to review its chip subsidy criteria, concerned over the impact on limiting chip investment in China (Soo-Hyang Choi/Reuters)

Soo-Hyang Choi / Reuters: US filing: South Korea, Samsung, and SK Hynix ask the US to review its chip subsidy criteria, concerned over the impact on limiting chip investment in China  —  South Korea has asked Washington to review its criteria for new semiconductor subsidies, concerned over the impact of rules …

Tiny diamond rotor could improve protein studies

Many of the biological materials that researchers are most interested in studying, including those associated with major diseases, don’t lend themselves to the conventional methods that researchers typically use to probe a material’s structure and chemistry. One technique, called magic-angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance, or MAS-NMR, has proven highly successful as a way of determining […]

A better way to match 3D volumes

In computer graphics and computer-aided design (CAD), 3D objects are often represented by the contours of their outer surfaces. Computers store these shapes as “thin shells,” which model the contours of the skin of an animated character but not the flesh underneath. This modeling decision makes it efficient to store and manipulate 3D shapes, but […]

Tokyo-based taxi-hailing app Go says it raised ~$72M from Goldman Sachs at a ~$1B valuation and commands 70% of the Japanese market, outpacing Uber and Didi (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg)

Takashi Mochizuki / Bloomberg: Tokyo-based taxi-hailing app Go says it raised ~$72M from Goldman Sachs at a ~$1B valuation and commands 70% of the Japanese market, outpacing Uber and Didi  —  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made Japan’s leading taxi-hailing provider, Go Inc., a unicorn with its biggest startup investment in the country.

Elliptic: some Chinese chemical suppliers accept cryptocurrency for fentanyl ingredients and the majority use “three specific exchanges” based outside of China (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Andy Greenberg / Wired: Elliptic: some Chinese chemical suppliers accept cryptocurrency for fentanyl ingredients and the majority use “three specific exchanges” based outside of China  —  And it’s happening in plain sight.  —  Fentanyl has long been one of the most dangerous wares …

Samsung demos multiple OLED panels, including a long rollable display and one that measures heart rate, blood pressure, and stress levels from a user’s finger (Jon Porter/The Verge)

Jon Porter / The Verge: Samsung demos multiple OLED panels, including a long rollable display and one that measures heart rate, blood pressure, and stress levels from a user’s finger  —  The Rollable Flex is an interesting new flexible screen from Samsung Display that can be unrolled from just 49mm to 254.4mm, over five times […]

Building AI responsibly matters more than competition, one company cannot fulfill AI’s potential alone, and global cooperation, especially US-EU, will be key (Sundar Pichai/Financial Times)

Sundar Pichai / Financial Times: Building AI responsibly matters more than competition, one company cannot fulfill AI’s potential alone, and global cooperation, especially US-EU, will be key  —  Fulfilling the technology’s potential is not something that one company can do alone  —  The writer is CEO of Google and Alphabet

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy releases a 19-page report arguing social media can have a “profound risk of harm” for kids and teens and calls for action (New York Times)

New York Times: US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy releases a 19-page report arguing social media can have a “profound risk of harm” for kids and teens and calls for action  —  Dr. Vivek H. Murthy urged immediate action from policymakers, tech companies and parents to safeguard against potential harms.

Google expands its AI-based flood forecasting service Flood Hub to 80 countries, up from 20, offering forecasts up to 7 days in advance to 460 million people (Yossi Matias/The Keyword)

Yossi Matias / The Keyword: Google expands its AI-based flood forecasting service Flood Hub to 80 countries, up from 20, offering forecasts up to 7 days in advance to 460 million people  —  Flood Hub is expanding to 80 countries, providing forecasting up to 7 days in advance of a flood to 460 million people.