Technology, AI, capital and institutions, examined through who builds systems, who controls them and who benefits.
11,488 articles · Technology & Power
Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume in 2024 — roughly 2.6 times Ireland's GDP — and the founders built the first version in a Palo Alto apartment before either turned 25.
Across France, Spain, Germany and Poland this week, control room operators are watching two graphs at once: the air temperature outside, and the temperature of the river water flowing past their nuclear plants.
On August 15, 1977, Ohio State's Big Ear radio telescope recorded a 72-second narrow-band signal from Sagittarius that was 30 times louder than background noise — sitting almost exactly on the hydrogen line where SETI researchers had been listening since 1959. Jerry Ehman circled it in red ballpoint days later. It has never been heard again.
The Netherlands has dispatched its trade minister to Washington in an unusual lobbying push against US legislation that would sharply tighten semiconductor export controls on China.
Indian customer engagement software firm MoEngage has acquired San Francisco-based AI startup Aampe in an all-cash deal worth tens of millions of dollars, according to TechCrunch . The acquisition is a structural bet that enterprise marketing is migrating away from segment-based campaigns toward a model where every individual customer is shadowed by a dedicated, autonomous AI agent.
In November 1957, a Moscow street dog became the first living creature to orbit Earth — and the first to die there, killed by a thermal control failure her engineers had no time to fix.
Stockholm-based Fika Jobs has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build what it describes as a video-first hiring platform, where candidates are interviewed by an AI agent rather than screened through resumes, as reported by TechCrunch . The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo behind Candy Crush.
Qualcomm is in advanced talks to buy Modular Inc.
In the mid-1990s, three researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory sat with a narrow, awkward problem: how do you hide the fact that intelligence communications are intelligence communications?
A Detroit pension fund has filed a derivative lawsuit against Uber's board and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, accusing the ride-hailing company of operating as a serial compliance offender that knowingly cut corners on safety.
On 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student posted a Usenet message apologising that his hobby operating system would "never be big and professional." The kernel he attached now runs roughly 90 percent of the world's cloud servers and every Android phone on Earth.
Before SpaceX existed, Elon Musk flew to Moscow in 2001 to buy a refurbished Russian ICBM for a mission called Mars Oasis — a small robotic greenhouse meant to grow the first plants on another planet and shame the public back into caring about space. The greenhouse never flew, but the theory of change behind it became SpaceX.
