It’s not really clear just what “humanoid” robots are actually for. I’ve seen them do all kinds of things, but almost none of them well; at our recent Robotics event in Boston, several leading experts in the field questioned their necessity. But we grew up with Data and Robby and Cylons, and so now we have Pepper. Performing funeral rites for cash-strapped people in Japan. Read More

 The Department of Justice has dropped its request for the IP addresses of visitors to an anti-Trump inauguration protest website. The news is a win for DreamHost, which went public with the situation last week, riling privacy advocates who decried the DOJ request for IP addresses that had visited disruptj20.org as dangerously broad. In its reply to the court, the Justice Department modified… Read More

 This afternoon Microsoft announced Brainwave, an FPGA-based system for ultra-low latency deep learning in the cloud. Early benchmarking indicates that when using Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs, Brainwave can sustain 39.5 Teraflops on a large gated recurrent unit without any batching. Microsoft has been pouring resources into FPGAs for a while now, deploying large clusters of the field-programmable… Read More

From flowers that closed prematurely to hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon on the loose, the eclipse had a strange impact on nature yesterday.

 Flat-pack furniture made Ikea a global powerhouse, and the same principles may help create a new generation of robots. Interactive Robogami is a project from MIT that lets users create ambulatory robots from a library of pieces that fold and fit together like origami. Read More

After viewing the solar eclipse yesterday, some watchers reported that their eyes felt funny, even though they wore certified eclipse glasses.

 Blue Apron is chugging along on its post-IPO bumpy road. For starters, The meal-kit company’s VP of human resources and talent, Kate Muzzatti, has left the company, Bloomberg first reported. In light of Muzzatti’s departure, Blue Apron is looking for a chief human resources officer, which is an entirely new role at the company, TechCrunch has learned. Blue Apron has also put… Read More

 Laura Deming is not your typical venture capitalist. Then again, she isn’t typical in many ways. For starters, the 23-year-old, New Zealand native was home schooled, developing a love of math and physics and, perhaps most interestingly, the biology of aging, along the way. In fact, she became so preoccupied with the last that at age 11, Deming wrote to Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned… Read More

 Earlier this year it looked as though Salesforce was starting to position itself as a company that would hit $10 billion in annual revenue run rate later this year — and, if all seems well, it looks like it may hit that target. Salesforce reported its second-quarter earnings today, saying it brought in $2.56 billion in revenue on earnings of 33 cents per share. This is a beat on both… Read More

NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba, who are making final preparations for a Sept. 12 launch to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews at 7 and 9 a.m. EDT, respectively, on Friday, Sept. 1.

 AccuWeather’s iOS app may be up to something fishy. Security researcher Will Strafach published a warning about the popular weather app’s behavior on Medium and users appear to be paying attention. I would find this less concerning if the AccuWeather's permission dialog mentioned tracking your home/work location, where you travel, etc. — Will Strafach (@chronic) August… Read More

 HP has been producing some solid gaming hardware as of late — the OMEN 17 laptop I reviewed and the cube desktop built by Maingear are good examples. However, HP has yet to go all out with their OMEN X brand — the “X” denoting the upper echelon of its high-performance brand — until now, with two new laptops. The OMEN X laptop comes in 15-inch and 17-inch… Read More

Through their pattern of firing, neurons influence the behavior of the cells that upon maturation will provide insulation of neuronal axons, according to a new study. The findings suggest the existence of a complex and nuanced interplay between neurons and the non-neuronal cells that support and protect them.

 Guy Fierens, Stijn Huys and Jasper Slaets realized that finding sign-language interpreters in Belgium – or anywhere, really, was wildly difficult. Their solution? A 3D-printed hand that recreates sign language automatically. Called Project Aslan (Antwerp’s Sign Language Actuating Node), the hand is available for printing and you can also have it printed for you by 3DHubs.… Read More

 When we imagine the existential threat to the humanity posed by automation, we usually think of the negative impact on the workforce, not robots quite literally bludgeoning us to death. In a post titled “Exploiting industrial collaborative robots,” security researchers at IOActive detail how popular models of consumer and industrial robots have already been compromised in such a… Read More

 Lilium is almost as ambitious as European startups come. The Munich-based company is developing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet, which it hopes will one day power an on-demand “air taxi” service, arguably making flying cars a reality. Read More

 The Village Voice, the oldest and best-known of the alternative weekly newspapers, announced today that it will no longer publish a print edition. The decision was made by new owner Peter Barbey, who emphasized that this isn’t the end of The Voice itself — the company says the publication will “maintain its iconic progressive brand with its digital platform and a variety of… Read More

Cassini gazes across the icy rings of Saturn toward the icy moon Tethys, whose night side is illuminated by Saturnshine, or sunlight reflected by the planet.

Dim objects called brown dwarfs, less massive than the Sun but more massive than Jupiter, have powerful winds and clouds -- specifically, hot patchy clouds made of iron droplets and silicate dust. Scientists recently realized these giant clouds can move and thicken or thin surprisingly rapidly, in less than an Earth day, but did not understand why.

 Code42, the company behind CrashPlan, just announced that it would stop selling home subscriptions in order to focus on business and education clients. CrashPlan has been a popular cloud backup service for years. Customers have a little bit more than a year to find an alternative. Chances are that you’re already backing up your computer to an external hard drive using Apple’s… Read More

 Video is the name of the game in social networking: sites like Facebook and Twitter have been doubling down on the medium in recent years to drive more traffic and engagement from users, and also as a platform to snare in more premium advertising away from traditional television broadcasters; Snapchat put video at the core of its service from day one. Now Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is hoping… Read More

 LG is building a new factory in Detroit suburb Hazel Park to supply electric vehicle components, the company announced on Tuesday. The facility will be a 250,000-square foot manufacturing plant, and should result in almost 300 new jobs, LG says, with a $25 million price tag from the company and $2.9 million in grand money supplied by Michigan over the next four years. LG’s EV… Read More

 Scoring the right meeting at TechCrunch Disrupt SF used to be like finding a needle in a hay stack, But our CrunchMatch program makes it dramatically easier for investors find the founders they are looking for. But don’t take our word for it; Michael Kocan, Managing Partner of Trend Discovery Capital Management, told us, “I get the most value from Disrupt at CrunchMatch.  At… Read More

Physicists throw new light on the interaction between the planet Mars and supersonic particles in the solar wind.