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Ethos Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of life insurance sales software, went public on the Nasdaq on Thursday. As one of the first big tech IPOs of the year, the insurtech platform is being watched as a bellwether for the 2026 listing cycle. The company and its selling shareholders raised approximately $200 million in a public offering, selling 10.5 million shares at $19 each under the ticker symbol “LIFE.” It was one of the more nifty options in recent memory. The name is perfect. Ethos operates a three-sided platform that allows consumers to purchase insurance online in 10 minutes without…
Apple had a great first quarter, but what really stood out was iPhone sales. The company reported its best quarter ever for its flagship devices, thanks in part to surging sales in regions such as China and India. “iPhone had its best quarter ever, driven by unprecedented demand, with record highs across all geographic segments,” CEO Tim Cook said on an earnings call Thursday. According to Apple’s earnings report, the company sold $85 billion worth of iPhones in the first quarter, up from $69 billion a year earlier. During a question-and-answer session on the conference call, Cook said sales in…
Three of Elon Musk’s companies are considering a possible merger: SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla. Negotiations appear to be in the early stages, but at least one company could end up being acquired by SpaceX, according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters. Two scenarios are considered. According to Bloomberg, citing unnamed insiders, SpaceX and Tesla may merge. In another case, SpaceX and aXI (which already owns Musk’s social media platform X) would merge. According to a report from Reuters, a merger between SpaceX and xAI could occur ahead of SpaceX’s IPO, which is scheduled for this year. This will bring together…
A hustle culture may be the norm at tech companies in the age of AI, but starting tomorrow, it will stop working on publishing platform Medium. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine has given his employees permission to take time off to participate in tomorrow’s national general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Activists on general strike are calling for people to “stop going to work, stop going to school, stop shopping” as they call for ICE to be defunded. ICE has escalated raids in US cities, killing several people, including two Americans in Minneapolis earlier this month. In a…
Halley’s Comet is named after the famous astronomer who was the first to describe its movement through space, but new research suggests he wasn’t the first to discover its periodic orbit past Earth.Halley’s Comet is named after the British astronomer Edmund Halley, who in 1705 pieced together the space rock’s orbit using a combination of his own observations and historical records from other observers. However, recent research suggests that Halley’s comet was not the first to discover the approximately 75-year cycle of his namesake comet. Instead, the English monk Aylmer of Malmesbury (also known as Ethelmer) may have linked the…
Microsoft installed the first of its AI chips in one of its data centers this week, and the company says it plans to deploy more chips in the coming months. The chip, named Maia 200, is designed to be what Microsoft calls an “AI inference powerhouse,” meaning it’s optimized for the compute-intensive task of running AI models in production. The company announced impressive processing speed specs for Maia, saying it outperforms Amazon’s latest Trainium chips and Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Cloud giants are turning to their own AI chip designs, in part because getting the latest and greatest…
Fintech company Marquis told customers it plans to seek compensation from its firewall provider for a breach that allowed hackers to steal customers’ personal and financial data. In a memo shared with customers this week seen by TechCrunch, Marquis said he believes the August 2025 ransomware attack occurred because SonicWall, the company’s firewall service provider, suffered its own data breach that exposed critical security information about customers’ firewalls. The memo states that a previous SonicWall breach allowed hackers to obtain the credentials needed to launch a ransomware attack against Marquis. Marquis said a third-party investigation found that hackers obtained information…
Editor’s note: This article was updated on January 29, 2026. This article was originally published in May 2025 when related research was released as a preprint. The research is currently undergoing peer review and published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. A quote from NASA’s statement has also been added.The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has once again broken its own record by discovering the most distant galaxy ever observed.The galaxy, called MoM-z14, “has the most distant origin ever confirmed by spectroscopy, extending the observational frontier to just 280 million years after the Big Bang,” the researchers say in the…
The ongoing measles outbreak in South Carolina has reached a staggering 789 cases, making it the largest outbreak since the United States eradicated measles in 2000.Texas currently holds the record, with 762 cases from January to August 2025, according to CNN. The outbreak claimed the lives of two school-age children in the state. No deaths have yet been reported in the outbreak in South Carolina.The South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) announced the number of new cases on January 27th. The epicenter of the outbreak is Spartanburg County, where more than 750 cases have been reported and student measles…
A new joint study by SentinelOne SentinelLABS and Censys reveals that the deployment of open source artificial intelligence (AI) has created a vast “layer of unmanaged, publicly accessible AI computing infrastructure” spanning 175,000 unique Ollama hosts in 130 countries. The company says these systems span both cloud and residential networks around the world and operate outside of the guardrails and monitoring systems that platform providers have in place by default. The majority of exposure is in China, accounting for just over 30%. Countries with the largest infrastructure footprint include the United States, Germany, France, South Korea, India, Russia, Singapore, Brazil,…