A bare-bones Chinese app called “Are You Dead?” — whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they’re still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins — has rocketed to the top of China’s app store charts and gone viral globally without Read more…
Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes — problems California shares in abundance — but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 Read more…
The IRS’s IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal “efficiency” overhaul, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday. Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as Read more…
Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage. Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Read more…
In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal Read more…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Agrochemical maker Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement Tuesday to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup could cause cancer. The proposed settlement comes Read more…
In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. “Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for Read more…