Meet the Texas startup that wants to decarbonize the chemical industry

Solugen, a startup that has set itself up with no less lofty a goal than the decarbonization of a massive chunk of the petrochemical industry, may be the first legitimate multi-million dollar company to start out in a meth lab. When company co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt began hunting for a lab to test […]

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Nvidia announces its next-gen RTX pods with up to 1,280 GPUs

Nvidia wants to be a cloud powerhouse. While its history may be in graphics cards for gaming enthusiasts, its recent focus has been on its data center GPUs for AI, machine learning inference, inference and visualization. Today, at its GTC conference, the company announced its latest RTX server configuration for Hollywood studios and others who […]

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Fifty years of the internet

Leonard Kleinrock Contributor Share on Twitter Leonard Kleinrock is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. When my team of graduate students and I sent the first message over the internet on a warm Los Angeles evening in October, 1969, little did we suspect that we were at […]

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Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed fund invests in a global geothermal energy project developer

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment firm financed by billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Jack Ma that invests in companies developing technologies to decarbonize society, is investing $12.5 million in a geothermal project development company called Baseload Capital. Baseload Capital is a project investment firm that provides capital to develop geothermal energy power plants […]

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India’s Ola is adding a monthly billing option for its ride-hailing customers

Ola, the ride-hailing service battling Uber in India, is introducing credit services to its users as it moves closer to a major new funding round. Today the company took the wraps off Ola Money Postpaid, a service that builds on Ola’s existing payment service — which can be used to pay rides and also third-party […]

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First buses, now Shenzhen has turned its taxis electric in green push

Roads in a Chinese city have gotten much quieter in recent years. Shenzhen, widely called the Silicon Valley of hardware, has been pouring resources to phase out rattling diesel vehicles chugging through the city of 12 million people. All public buses in the city went electric by the end of 2017. Taxis soon followed suit. […]

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How a Ugandan prince and a crypto startup are planning an African revolution

Crypto and blockchain enthusiasts have been railing for years against the centralized world of banks, but many have been doing so from the privileged vantage point of developed countries. But what if blockchain technology turned out to be most revolutionary in emerging economies?

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Tapping into the power grid could predict the morning traffic

Why is there traffic? This eternal question haunts civic planners, fluid dynamics professors, and car manufacturers alike. But just counting the cars on the road won’t give you a sufficient answer: you need to look at the data behind the data. In this case, CMU researchers show that electricity usage may be key to understanding movement around the city.

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The next Russian attack on U.S. elections could be more serious than Facebook memes

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This is not a drill. Nor, alas, is it the fever dream of a Cold War hack novelist, as much as it sounds like one. In 2017, Russian hackers gained control of the U.S. power grid to the point where they could cause blackouts. And the U.S. government doesn’t know if they’re still able to do it. 

Worse yet, there’s reason to believe this is part of an attack on the 2018 election — one that could make Russia’s pivotal 2016 shenanigans (its fake news machine, DNC email hacking, voter registration hacking and Facebook meme-making) look like child’s play. 

We learned about a Russian attack on American infrastructure when the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security released a report in March, but we didn’t know how bad it was until a DHS briefing on Monday. Hundreds of utility companies had fallen victim to the hackers; there may be many more out there that have been hacked and don’t know it. Energetic Bear managed to get into the control rooms of power stations, even into supposedly secure “air-gapped” networks, via vendors.  Read more…

More about Elections, Putin, Electricity, Midterms, and 2018 Midterm Elections

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There’s something called Bacoin now

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin. The […]

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Solar project lending startup Wunder Capital raises $112 million as renewable energy shines

As renewable energy continues to gobble up more and more of the new energy capacity coming online, the solar project lending company Wunder Capital has raised $112 million in primarily debt financing to boost its business. The 90 percent debt and 10 percent equity commitment came from the multi-strategy investment firm Cyrus Investments, which has […]

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