backs

Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures is backing a new thermal storage startup, expanding its investments in long-duration power backup.Fourth Power converts renewable power to heat, storing it for future use. Relying on liquid tin, the thermal battery transfers heat to stacks of carbon blocks at extremely high temperatures, which can later be discharged as electricity through thermophotovoltaic cells. Doing so could help solve intermittency issues with renewables. Investor DCVC led the Series A round of $19 million,…

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to ban rodeos in the city despite opposition by some in L.A.’s Latino equestrian community, who painted the crackdown as an attack on their culture. Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who represents the west San Fernando Valley, led the council in passing the ban, describing in graphic detail the broken bones and pain endured by rodeo animals. The vote, 14 to 0 with Councilmember Nithya Raman absent, asks the city attorney’s office to draft an ordinance outlawing rodeos…

The host of the United Nations‘ COP28 climate change summit cast doubt on whether eliminating fossil fuels would help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, saying there is “no science” behind it. Scientists told The Guardian, which first reported the comments, that his remarks are “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial.” “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” Sultan Al-Jaber, who is CEO of United…

In a recent development, billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. and owner of the social media platform X, has come under fire for endorsing an antisemitic post on his platform. The post, which targeted members of the Jewish community, accused them of promoting “dialectical hatred” against white people. Musk’s endorsement of the post was evident in his reply, where he expressed agreement, stating, “You have said the actual truth.” This incident adds to a series of controversies surrounding Musk’s…

It looks nothing like a typical "fan on a stick" wind turbine, but this oval track with evenly spaced wing blades could be an enormously disruptive addition to the renewable energy mix, since it slashes the cost of wind power to unprecedented lows.Wyoming's Airloom Energy has come out of stealth mode with a new CEO fresh out of Google, US$4 million in seed funding, led by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, and a radically different technical approach that it says fundamentally upends the financial equation…

They're also all designed to simplify life for high-performance software developers. With them, programmers can gain continuous integration, turnkey software stacks, and performance testing. This will make their lives much easier. This new foundation addresses the growing ubiquity of HPC in scientific computing, digital engineering, and AI applications. The foundation plans to leverage investments from the US Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international…

Ben Crump, co-counsel Ray Hamlin, and other attorneys held a press conference on Tuesday in New York featuring a key witness who claims undercover officials were involved in the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Mustafa Hassan — who spoke for the first time publicly about his observations from the day Malcolm X was killed, and was part of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), formed by Malcolm X — said he was on security detail at the event at Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot. Hassan read…

An internal policy memo drafted by OpenAI shows the company supports the idea of requiring government licenses from anyone who wants to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems. The document also suggests the company is willing to pull back the curtain on the data it uses to train image generators.The creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E laid out a series of AI policy commitments in the internal document following a May 4 meeting between White House officials and tech executives including OpenAI Chief Executive Officer…

Bay Area-based robotics firm Figure this week announced that its humanoid officially took its first steps — a milestone it hit a few days shy of of the company’s first anniversary. Figure has made a good deal of progress in a short period, due in no small part to founder and CEO Brett Adcock’s initial $100 million bootstrapping. Of course, running any robotics company is a wildly expensive endeavor, let alone one that is building hardware and software for a multipurpose humanoid — a longtime holy grail in this space.…

Days after Musk announced that Twitter will be limiting the number of tweets non-Twitter Blue subscribers can read in a day to 600, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has tweeted that she supports Musk's idea and bold steps like these are necessary for Twitter's mission…