Blockchain may be swimming into the mainstream with the force of a torpedo, but there are dams standing in the way. Among the biggest: its impact on the climate. Take a look at cryptocurrency mining, one of the most widely used consensus mechanisms for determining how blockchain ledgers are written. It’s a greenhouse gas giant that won’t stop growing. Calls to regulate the burgeoning industry are getting louder, and even Congress is listening. It held its first convenings on the to
Last week, when many Americans were waiting in long lines and scouring drugstores for COVID-19 tests due to the spread of the omicron variant, some Googlers were casually testing daily from the comfort of their own home. The device they use, a $249 machine that churns out PCR test results in 20 minutes, comes from a San Diego-based company called Cue Health. The company has been painted as providing COVID-19 testing for the elite, but Clint Sever, one of the company’s cofounders and its c
If you’ve ever wondered about the influence big tech wields in the Capital, you could literally hear it coming out of the mouths of lawmakers on Thursday, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee met to mark up an antitrust bill that would prohibit marketplace and app store owners from self-preferencing their own products. The bill is Congress’s most serious attempt yet to reign in the power of big tech companies–mainly Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and—potenti
In a new study, researchers and surgeons at the University of Alabama Birmingham were able to successfully transplant a genetically modified pig kidney into the body of a brain-dead human. The surgery adds to a growing body of evidence that xenotransplantation—transplants of live organs, tissues, or cells to humans from nonhuman species—can work. Their use for patients who need kidneys may be closer than previously thought—as soon as five years from now. (Early this month, t
UFC fans who have enviously watched basketball fans jump into the nonfungible token (NFT) frenzy via NBA Top Shot—the massively popular blockchain app that allows basketball buffs to buy, trade, and sell NFT “Moments” of, say, a LeBron James dunk—are about to get their own dose of Web3 fun. On Sunday, Dapper Labs, the Vancouver-based company behind NBA Top Shot, is launching UFC Strike, a similar experience built around digital collectibles—in this case,
It may have started with a dress code. When tech entrepreneur and investor Tom Chavez was a senior at Albuquerque Academy in the 1980s, he bristled at the private school’s clothing rules—no jeans, collared shirts—a holdover from the school’s roots as an elite boys’ prep school. “I thought it created an income-sorting, elitist atmosphere,” he recalls. So Chavez, a straight-A student who attended the school on a partial scholarship, successfully lob
Washington’s main antitrust regulators–the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ)–made a joint announcement on Tuesday that they intend to look at big tech mergers through a different lens in the future. The two agencies held a joint news conference Monday morning to announce the beginning of a joint process to write new guidelines for considering horizontal mergers, or those between companies that may compete in the same marketplace. (The agencie
Lina Khan has given her first on-camera interview since being named chair of the Federal Trade Commission. In it, the legal scholar, who has previously excoriated companies like Amazon for nimbly working around antitrust laws to undercut competitors and expand into new territory, talked about the current state of the commission. Below are five takeaways from her conversation with CNBC’s Aaron Sorkin and New York Times columnist Kara Swisher. The agency is underfunded “We are severe
NFTs entered the mainstream through the art world, as collectors paid headline-grabbing sums for digital works. And now there’s a growing number of Web3-first startups, including Catalog, Royal, and Sound.xyz, betting on the music industry carrying the next big NFT wave. Case in point: DoomsdayX, a new Web3 studio focused on developing tools and experiences to connect music fans and artists. DoomsdayX, a sister company to video production outfit Doomsday Entertainment, announced today a $