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Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company is in talks to raise a $4 billion funding round at a valuation of $20 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The deal hasn’t closed and the terms could change, the WSJ says. At $20 billion, the valuation would be a significant increase from The Boring Company’s $5.7 billion valuation in 2022. The startup has already built a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, through which Teslas shuttle customers to different stations. But tunnel workers have suffered serious injuries, and Nevada regulators said last year that The Boring Company violated environmental regulations…

Prediction market Kalshi sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter on Friday demanding that the streaming service take down the trailer for an upcoming documentary. In the letter, Kalshi claimed the trailer is “defamatory” and contains “both fabricated documents and false and misleading statements.” “Instadocs: The Prediction Games” is a documentary about the rise of prediction markets. According to Netflix, the film — part of the streamer’s “Instadoc” series of fast-turnaround documentaries  — features interviews with both Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. The trailer, however, focuses on a recent party in Las Vegas, where men who have “made…

The idea that cancer could behave like a contagious disease may seem absurd; in humans, cancer cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Yet nature is still full of surprises. In exceptional cases, cancer cells themselves can pass from one individual to another and continue to multiply in a new host. This rare phenomenon has been detected in animals such as dogs, Tasmanian devils, and some species of mollusks, and it seems we can add one more to that exclusive club: catfish.An international team of researchers has identified a transmissible melanoma in the brown catfish (Ameiurus nebulosus)—the first documented…

“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini. Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children – the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in…

Electrolyte powders, dissolvable tablets, and trendy ready-to-drink waters have graduated from the pockets of athletes to one of wellness’s buzziest categories.And it’s a crowded market, worth an estimated $39 billion globally in 2025 and forecast to double within the next decade. Much of the growth has been fueled by wellness trends and influencer-fronted hype cycles, like Prime Hydration, created by YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI, which the company claimed pushed past $1 billion in sales in a single year. In other internet corners, dozens of celebrity and podcaster-adjacent brands are all promising a means of optimizing your way to hydration.These…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in Imax 70mm is the hottest club in town, if you can get in.While Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is available on thousands of screens around the world, there are only 41—including 25 in the US—that can offer it in full Imax 70mm glory. Many of those are sold out for weeks. Levels of FOMO are off the charts.That’s partly because The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely on Imax film with Imax cameras. For the uninitiated, the Imax film format takes an already large 65-mm film negative and runs it through the camera…

Two of OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused models broke out of a testing sandbox this week and went on to hack the AI research platform Hugging Face in an effort to solve a security benchmark test. Plus, researchers this week shed light on newly identified malware that is capitalizing on blind spots in AI software development infrastructure to grab logins and other sensitive data, even causing destruction to victims’ target files and systems.Looking at the more traditional security nightmare of embedded devices, researchers this week shed light on a car alarm that was installed in vehicles across the US—and that is still silently…

A power line went down outside of Washington, DC, this week. Normally, the grid would only need a few seconds to recover from such an event. But this one took more than 10 minutes because more than 3 gigawatts of data centers stopped drawing power nearly simultaneously. The event caused voltage across the PJM grid to spike from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to data collected by Ting Labs, a startup that runs an IoT sensor network out of people’s electrical sockets. The event didn’t cause a blackout, but it did cause lights across the region to flicker. The incident…

The best Amazon Kindles are reliably good at their main job: displaying ebooks in a crisp, easy-on-the-eye format. But Kindle e-readers are actually more versatile than you might imagine.If you’ve just upgraded to a new Kindle and are looking for something to do with your old one, or if you’re simply interested in seeing how hackable these e-readers are, we’ve got three projects for you to attempt.These projects vary in terms of difficulty and the amoung of time and effort you’re going to have to invest, but full instructions for all of them are available online, so you can follow…

More than once, Leonardo threw up a generic error pop-up with no explanation of how to fix the problem. You’re forced to dismiss the message before doing anything else, which feels like hitting a dead end before trying to troubleshoot yourself or looking up the error code in Leonardo.Connectivity, luckily, is super simple and seamless. The Romeo connects to your computer over Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth, which sounds like a minor detail until you’ve wrestled with the quirks that Bluetooth can sometimes pose (looking at you, Design Space). During my testing of the Explore 5, I’d occasionally lose my Bluetooth…

Midjourney, an AI lab best known for its LLM-powered image and video generators, has acquired the social astrology app Co-Star, according to Bloomberg. The deal terms were not disclosed. Co-Star, which reportedly has about 4.3 million monthly active users, is mostly used to help people determine their astrological birth charts, which they can then share with other friends on the app. Co-Star uses both AI and humans to write horoscopes, compatibility assessments, and other advice based on a user’s astrological information. Midjourney seems to be casting a wide net when it comes its product lineup. The company seems almost synonymous…

My tote bag is more a mobile workstation than a carrier. On any given day, it’s hauling a 16-inch laptop, noise-canceling headphones, chargers, my daily planner, a water bottle, and whatever gadgets I’m testing that week. Plenty of leather totes look beautiful on day one, but far fewer are designed to hold up against the reality of transporting thousands of dollars’ worth of tech every single day.That’s why Leatherology surprised me.After months of rotating between the Mia Horizontal Tote, Transit Travel Tote, and Large Zippered Downtown Tote, I found myself thinking less about the leather—though it’s undeniably excellent—and more about…

Attie, Bluesky’s AI assistant that lets you build custom social feeds without programming, is evolving into an open-ended research tool. The company this week said it’s added a new feature to the AI assistant, called Quests, that lets users ask it for information and news spreading across the broader Bluesky social network, nicknamed the Atmosphere. This includes not only Bluesky, but also any app that integrates with the underlying AT Protocol. Bluesky’s user growth has slowed over the past eight months — the social network saw its user base double to 40 million last October, within just a year, but…

Also high on list of reasons to buy the Mission 1 Pro is that, in my experience, when properly color graded, footage from the Mission 1 Pro pairs seamlessly with footage from any other camera. This is especially true in good light, but overall the look of footage is leaps and bounds beyond the Hero 13. Some combination of the bigger sensor, better lens, 10-bit GP-Log2, and higher bit rate leads to more cinematic looking footage than I’ve seen coming out of an action camera.Other great improvements include support for fast charging. You can get to 80 percent in about…

Several AI companies, including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia, have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the U.S. should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts, and growing in capability. The letter doesn’t mention China at all, but it comes in the wake of reports that the Trump administration has been considering banning Chinese open-weight models, and potentially issuing sanctions against AI companies from the country. The White House has even accused Moonshot AI…

Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder that “China risk” isn’t the only kind of AI risk worth worrying about.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into why Kimi K3 set off a fresh round of AI panic, the industry’s response to an OpenAI staffer’s “regulatory…