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NBA champion Tristan Thompson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that he is partnering with global telecommunications company World Mobile to launch a community-owned mobile network called Uplift. The network offers unlimited data plans starting at $9.99 per month. Uplift is built on blockchain technology and decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). With Uplift, every subscription contributes to growing the network at the neighborhood level, and local hosts, known as “AirNode operators,” earn a portion of the network revenue by providing community coverage. The idea behind Uplift is to challenge the centralized model of the $2 trillion telecom industry by allowing users…

“The idea that the internet is dying is real,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Digg founder Kevin Rose, referring to the idea that the internet is mostly bots rather than humans. Since then, the two entrepreneurs have teamed up to reimagine the way we build social communities in a world where it will soon be difficult to distinguish who is authentic online. Earlier this year, the two purchased the remaining assets belonging to Digg. Digg was originally founded by Rose and was a long-shuttered news aggregation site that was a staple of the Web 2.0 era. Now under Rose’s control…

Over three days this week, 20 startups participated in TechCrunch Disrupt 2025’s Startup Battlefield. Each was named the Best Player of the Startup Battlefield 200 and competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. After some intense pitching, the winner was decided. These startups were hand-picked to compete in the Startup Battlefield, where they performed live demos in front of VCs and technology leaders who judged the competition. After several hours of deliberation, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five companies: Charter Space, Glid, MacroCycle, Nephrogen, and Unlisted…

The rise of agent coding tools was a game-changer for software engineers across the industry. But things seemed especially tough for Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yakovenko said he has become increasingly comfortable putting software development tasks on the back burner. After more than 15 years of software development, Yakovenko says of his experience with agent coding: “Now you can see Claude stirring that thing around, and you can almost smell when it’s going off the rails.” “If people are having meetings with me and I’m not paying attention, it’s because I’m looking at Claude,” he…

A hot mystery about the sun may be close to being solved.Scientists have been trying for decades to understand why the sun’s outer atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface, even though it is further away from the core. The surface, or photosphere, is millions of degrees Fahrenheit, while the outside air is only about 10,000 F (5,500 C).Now, thanks to new high-resolution telescope observations, scientists have finally discovered the elusive “magnetic waves” in the Sun’s atmosphere that may be responsible for much of the corona’s incredible heating. The findings were published in the journal Nature Astronomy on October…

British archaeologists have discovered the 2,000-year-old skeleton of a teenager lying face down in a hole. This unusual burial position may provide a clue to the murder mystery.Researchers at Bournemouth University discovered a strange burial site earlier this year while excavating Celtic ruins in the county of Dorset in southwest England. Bournemouth University said the discovery occurred during the filming of a new television series, Sandi Toksvig’s Hidden Wonders, hosted by the broadcaster and comedian Sandi Toksvig.”This has the feel of a body thrown into a pit with its wrists bound,” Miles Russell, the project’s lead archaeologist, told Live Science…

At first glance, teeth look a lot like bones. Both are hard, white, and rich in calcium. So why aren’t teeth considered part of the skeletal system? Although teeth and bones have some basic similarities, they are actually quite different.The main similarity between teeth and bones is what teeth and bones are made of: hard tissue made up of minerals such as calcium, phosphorous, fluoride, and magnesium. At the molecular level, these minerals form solid crystal structures that make both teeth and bones much harder than everything else in the body.”They are petrified tissue,” says Dr. Edmund Hewlett, professor emeritus…

geCKo Materials, the 2024 runner-up of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, returned to the stage at this year’s show to further commercialize its technology and unveil new products. Founder Dr. Capella Kerst has revealed four new applications for geCKo’s ultra-strong dry adhesive. They are semiconductor wafer processing tools, robotic grippers for smooth surfaces (such as solar panels and glass), curved robotic “end effectors” for more irregular shapes, and multipurpose grippers for robotic arms. geCKo technology is inspired by the way real-life lizards use their feet to grip surfaces. Kerst positions it as a new form of Velcro, but one that…

A truck accident in Mississippi resulted in lab monkeys, initially thought to be carrying various diseases, escaping from the truck and law enforcement officers killing numerous animals. However, it is still unclear how dangerous they are.On Tuesday (Oct. 28), a truck carrying Tulane University’s rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) overturned in Jasper County, unleashing several macaques, but the exact number has not yet been reported.As of this writing, three monkeys are still at large, according to the latest information from the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department. Authorities believed the monkeys were aggressive toward humans and could transmit herpes, COVID-19, and hepatitis C,…

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levy doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies. Rather, he believes the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS and agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday. “Typically, once you create a business process, you want to be able to effectively define that process in business logic with a deterministic system, because there is a very high risk that that process will change on the same day,” Levie explained. “If you’re doing something mission-critical, we’ve already seen great examples where data is leaked…