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Defense technology company Anduril on Thursday announced plans to expand its Southern California presence with the opening of a large campus in Long Beach, the coastal town where founder Palmer Lackey grew up. The expanded campus is expected to eventually support approximately 5,500 jobs. Lackey told TechCrunch that these will be new jobs, not transfers from other roles. Anduril’s headquarters are in nearby Costa Mesa, California, and it also has a large manufacturing facility in Ohio. The Long Beach campus spans 1.18 million square feet across six buildings and combines office space and industrial areas dedicated to research and development.…
In Silicon Valley, when a unicorn stumbles, there’s a sense of schadenfreude. So when the Journal broke the news Thursday afternoon that Capital One would acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock (Capital One issued an official release confirming the details a half-hour later), you could almost hear the collective laughter from Sand Hill Road to San Francisco’s South Park. This figure represents less than half of the final private market valuation of Brex’s 2022 Series D-2 round of $12.3 billion. Before anyone sharpens their knives, consider that this sale is a win for the VCs who originally…
It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that knowledge work (the white-collar jobs held by lawyers, investment bankers, librarians, accountants, IT, etc.) would be replaced by AI. However, despite the great advances made with basic models, changes in knowledge work have been slow to emerge. Models have mastered thorough research and agency planning, but for some reason, most white-collar jobs remain relatively untouched. This is one of the biggest mysteries in AI, and thanks to new research from training data giant Mercor, we finally have some answers. New research examines how leading AI models drawn from…
The experimental treatment uses specialized neurons derived from stem cells to “absorb” triggers of pain and inflammation in arthritic knees of mice.The experiments in laboratory mice suggest that this treatment could help people with chronic pain caused by diseases such as osteoarthritis, for example. Researchers say a “pain sponge” could help patients stop relying on opioid drugs for pain relief.And as a bonus side effect, the engineered neurons also promoted bone and cartilage repair in the mice tested, the researchers reported in a preprint posted on the server bioRxiv in December 2025. This study has not yet been peer-reviewed. you…
The extreme cold from the incoming winter blast could cause some trees to “explode,” a viral social media post claims, but don’t expect them to start blowing away like cars in an action movie.”Trees are likely to explode across the Midwest and northern Plains on Friday and Saturday as temperatures are expected to drop to 20 degrees below zero,” Max Velocity (real name Max Schuster), a weather-based content creator with a degree in meteorology, wrote in a post on social platform X.The frigid temperatures are caused by a wave of arctic air moving south. The National Weather Service (NWS) predicts…
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said he was “surprised” that OpenAI was already moving to introduce advertising within its AI chatbots. In an interview with Axios at Davos, the AI leader answered a question about using advertising to monetize AI services, saying the idea is something Google’s team is considering “very carefully.” Hassabis also said that despite how important advertising is to Google’s core business, his team feels no pressure from the tech giant to make decisions about advertising “on the fly.” The DeepMind co-founder’s remarks came on the heels of Friday’s news that OpenAI will launch Test ads as…
Although AI chatbots are getting better at answering questions, summarizing documents, and solving mathematical equations, they still act like helpful assistants for one user at a time. They aren’t designed to manage the heavy lifting of real collaboration, like coordinating people with competing priorities, tracking decisions over time, and keeping teams aligned over time. Humans&, a new startup founded by alumni from Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind, believes bridging that gap is the next major frontier for foundational models. This week, the company raised $480 million in a seed round to build a “central nervous system” for the…
The world’s oldest evidence of Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis and several chronic skin infections, has been discovered in 5,500-year-old human bones buried in a rock shelter in Colombia. However, genetic evidence suggests that the person was infected with a previously unknown strain of syphilis, further complicating the already complex picture of syphilis evolution.Researchers have debated the geographic origin and spread of treponemal diseases (syphilis, Bejel, Framboise, and Pinta) for centuries. All of these are caused by bacteria of the genus Treponema. The best-documented syphilis epidemics occurred in Europe in the 15th century, so early theories held that…
Tesla is offering passengers robotaxi rides in Austin without a human safety driver in the front seat. CEO Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X on Thursday: “Just started driving a Tesla robotaxi in Austin without safety monitors in the car. Congratulations to the Tesla AI team!” He then called for engineers interested in “solving real-world AI” to join the Tesla AI team, saying this would “likely lead to AGI.” Last June, the company launched a robotaxi in Texas in a limited run with a safety operator in the passenger seat. Tesla initially offered its first rides to…
A pill version of the popular weight management drug Wegovy has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is now available through various pharmacies and telemedicine services in the United States.The drug has been available by prescription as a once-weekly injection in the U.S. since 2021. Like the injection, Wegoby’s new pill contains the same active ingredient as Ozempic, semaglutide. It works by mimicking glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a hormone in the body that helps control appetite and blood sugar levels.Both forms of Wegovy, when combined with a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity, are approved to help…