Groupon confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s laid off more than 500 of its employees — 15% of its 3,416-person headcount. It’s also re-organizing the company to focus “only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support.” “Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we Read more…
Barred from her lab by pandemic restrictions, behavioral ecologist Daniela C. Robler caught local jumping spiders and kept them in clear plastic boxes on her windowsill, planning to test their reactions to 3-D-printed models of predatory spiders. When she came home from dinner one night, though, she noticed something strange. Read more…
Researchers are seeking thousands of volunteers in the U.S. and Europe to test the first potential vaccine against Lyme disease in 20 years — in hopes of better fighting the tick-borne threat. Lyme is a growing problem, with cases rising and warming weather helping ticks expand their habitat. While a Read more…
Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of “forever chemicals,” according to new research. Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don’t occur in nature. They are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down in the environment. They have non-stick or Read more…
A live-action film based on PAC-MAN is in the works from Bandai Namco Entertainment — the company behind PAC-MAN — and Wayfarer Studios, the production company founded by Justin Baldoni and Steve Sarowitz. First introduced in the U.S. in 1980 — and originally called Puck Man in Japan — PAC-MAN Read more…
Amazon.com hasn’t just bought a maker of robot vacuum cleaners. It’s acquired a mapping company. To be more precise: a company that can make maps of your home. The company announced a $1.7 billion deal on Friday for iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And yes, Amazon will Read more…
Only days after being launched to the public, Meta Platforms’ new AI chatbot has been claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, and repeating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. From a report: Chatbots — artificial intelligence software that learns from interactions with the public — have a history of Read more…