It’s been a blockbuster month for Yuga Labs, the owner of the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs. First, it acquired two other popular NFT projects: Crypto Punks and Meebits. Second, it announced the listing of the ApeCoin token on leading exchanges. And last, but not least, the company raised $450 million from marquee investors like a16z crypto, web3 gaming company Animoca Brands, and FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Now, it’s valued at over $4 billion. With this latest funding the firm has announce
For months now, a large and very active community of digital sleuths has been closely tracking the escalating crisis in Ukraine. These people have been using open-source intelligence to investigate and document the build-up to – and now the execution of – Vladimir Putin’s war of choice. But what exactly is open-source intelligence? And how is it helping efforts to understand what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine? Broadly speaking, open-source intelligence describes the knowledge or insight e
A renowned theoretical computer science expert recently released an astonishing physics pre-print paper that tosses fuel on the fiery debate over… whether humans could use wormholes to traverse the universe or not. Don’t worry, I’ll explain what this has to do with self-aware robots in due course. Fun with physics First, however, let’s lay the foundation for our speculation with a quick glance at this all-new wormhole theory. The pre-print paper comes courtesy of French researcher Pascal Koiran.
Among the things my generation has been promised, I’m especially excited about the rise of robotaxis. Sadly, they aren’t yet flooding the streets, as we expected or wished for. Regulatory approvals aren’t that easy to get, and the tech is still facing some hurdles. But don’t despair just yet — there are indeed some places around the world where you can actually take a ride with an AI driver. For now, the major players are operating in the US and China. So unless you already reside in the areas l
When Snoop Dogg announced his acquisition of Death Row Records last month, fans were thrilled that the legendary rap label was being resurrected. We were less thrilled when, weeks later, most of the Death Row catalog disappeared from streaming platforms. The sudden removals were swiftly linked to Snoop’s unusual plans for the brand. “Death Row will be an NFT label,” the Doggfather announced in February. “We will be putting out artists through the metaverse… Just like we broke the industry when w
Microsoft Azure recently announced that its quantum computing research teams had invented “a new kind of qubit” based on elusive, never-before-demonstrated properties of physics. According to the Redmond company, this will allow it to build scalable quantum computers capable of solving the hardest problems facing humanity. So, is this a breakthrough for the field or just an attempt to lean in to the marketing zeitgeist surrounding quantum computing? To sort out the answer, we’ll need to take a l
Last year, the story of a lawyer turning up to a hearing on a Zoom call with a cat filter went viral. It was hilarious and absurd. But the folks at Zoom seem to have liked it so much, they’re introducing animated animal-based avatars to sit in on your video calls. Think of this as animoji, but for conferencing. Let’s dig into this a bit more. Animal avatars? How will they work? When you turn on your avatar, your background will disappear, and your face will turn into an animal, like a cat or a d
Fearing Russia’s elite will evade economic sanctions by converting their wealth to cryptocurrency, high-profile US Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill into US Congress to stymie Russian crypto transactions. Warren warned a Senate committee hearing: So no one can argue that Russia can evade all sanctions by moving all its assets into crypto. But for Putin’s oligarchs who are trying to hide, you know, a billion or two of their wealth, crypto looks like a pretty good option. T
I miss Apple’s AirPort range. Back when I was taking my first forays into home networking, these wireless routers and extenders were a vital part of my setup. Yet, as per usual, good things couldn’t last. Back in 2018, Apple bowed out of the networking game entirely and discontinued its AirPort and Time Capsule line-up. Besides me, one who hasn’t let this slide is Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In a piece published earlier this week, the renowned Apple analyst and leaker called for the company to rein
In 2019, my colleagues and I discovered spooky glowing rings in the sky using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. The rings were unlike anything seen before, and we had no idea what they were. We dubbed them odd radio circles or ORCs. They continue to puzzle us, but new data from South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope are helping us solve the mystery. We can now see each ORC is centered on a galaxy too faint to be detected earlier. The circles are most likely enormous explosions of hot