There’s still time to enter our giveaway of Google’s Pixel 9 and Yaber’s T2 Projector. This month we’ve teamed up with our friends at Yaber to celebrate the launch of its newest smart projector models, including the K300s, L2 Plus, and T2 Series. You can head below now to enter the giveaway and check out Yaber’s new projectors the K300s, L2 Plus.
more…
Though Netflix is planning to bring back a number of its ongoing series in the coming months, the streamer has decided to cancel its adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
Netflix announced today that The Sandman will conclude with its upcoming second season. In a statement about the show coming to an end, Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg said that the series “has always been focused exclusively on Dream’s story, and back in 2022, when we looked at the remaining Dream material from the comics, we knew we only had enough story for one more season.”
As Variety notes, Netflix took its time before renewing The Sandman after its first season and did not announce a specific number of episodes it ordered. Netflix also made a point of referring to the renewal as “a continuation of The Sandman world,” which at the time included the Dead Boy Detectives adaptation that was canceled last August after a single season. That all makes Heinberg’s statement sound plausible, but the timing of Netflix’s move to cancel The Sandman links it to the multiple allegations of sexual assault that Gaiman is currently facing. In response to the allegations, Gaiman wrote in a blog post earlier this month, “I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”
Amazon made a similar decision last year when it first halted production on the third season of its Good Omens (a Guiman novel co-written with Terry Pratchett) adaptation following earlier reporting about Gaiman’s actions, and ultimately decided to rework it into one 90-minute-long finale episode. Disney also decided to axe its plans to adapt Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. More recently, Dark Horse Comics announced that it was dropping its series based on Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. Amazon’s adaptation of Anansi Boys has been in development for ages and was intended to debut later this year, but it wouldn’t be surprising if those plans changed as well.
To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI the company finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of a new non-opioid pain medication this week, marking the first time in over two decades that the agency has approved a non-opioid pain drug with a novel mechanism of action.
The drug, Journavx (suzetrigine), is an oral pill that treats acute pain, such as from surgery or injuries. Unlike opioids, which work by latching onto receptor proteins on nerves in the central nervous system, suzetrigine works only in peripheral nerves—that is, those outside the brain and spinal cord. Specifically, the drug inhibits a voltage-gated sodium ion channel called 1.8 (NaV1.8) that is known to relay pain signals, but only in peripheral nerves.
Because it works outside the brain by a different mechanism than opioids, the new medication offers a safe alternative to opioids, which can be highly addictive.
© Vertex
BioWare now has fewer than 100 employees after laying off “around two dozen” staffers and shifting others to different projects at EA, Bloomberg reports.
The changes follow BioWare’s own “Studio Update” published this week where GM Gary McKay said the studio had “worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles.” According to Bloomberg, “dozens” of staffers that had been “loaned out” to other teams at EA after the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard apparently learned this week that those shifts would be permanent.
McKay said that as a “core team” at the studio is developing the next Mass Effect game – which got a teaser trailer more than four years ago – and that the changes will help BioWare “become a more agile, focused studio.”
McKay’s post didn’t mention layoffs. Bloomberg reports that BioWare had “more than 200 people two years ago.”
Last week, EA said that The Veilguard significantly missed expectations. EA Sports FC hasn’t done as well as expected during EA’s 2025 fiscal year, either.
EA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IGN also reported this week on layoffs at BioWare.
Key resources for environmental data and public health have already been taken down from federal websites, and more could soon vanish as the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.
Warnings floated on social media today about an impending purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spurring calls to save as much data as soon as possible. The CDC shares data on a wide range of topics, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancies in the US — and it’s just one of the agencies in the crosshairs.
Researchers have been archiving government websites for months
Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for months. This is typical with every change in administration, but there was even more imperative with the return of Donald Trump to office. Access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed during the first round of Trump’s deregulatory spree. And now, it seems, similar moves are happening fast.
The CDC’s social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — tools that could show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks — have both been taken offline within the past week. In 2007, during the Bush administration, social scientists, geographers, and statisticians started developing the social vulnerability index (SVI), which incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors including poverty, race, and ethnicity over the years.
The Biden administration launched the environmental justice index (EJI) in 2022. “Too many communities across our nation, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution. Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that,” then Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release at the time.
Since stepping into office, Trump has tried to undo previous administrations’ work to address health disparities when it comes to race and gender. In an executive order Trump signed to undo Biden-era policies, the president wrote that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has “corrupted” government institutions.
He also claimed that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term in office, there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. It’s too soon to know what the damage might be this time around, but some webpages have already vanished. The US Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website has removed pages on both “climate and sustainability” and “equity.” It follows an internal memo sent this week instructing USDOT operating administrations to identify and ultimately “terminate” Biden-era activities relating to climate change and DEI.
Donald Trump’s efforts to limit foreign aid seem to have also led to information being taken down on HIV and AIDS. The data webpage for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) was taken down this week. PEPFAR has been around since 2003 and helped more than 20.6 million people get access to antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a snapshot of the website taken by the Wayback Machine on January 26th, before it was taken down.
The End of Term Web Archive project has saved content on federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that formed after Trump was first elected also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets available elsewhere. It has backed up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index and shared it on a webpage for The Public Environmental Data Project.
Yet even if these datasets have been archived, they aren’t as helpful when they aren’t updated. “Any dataset has a lifespan of utility,” says Dan Pisut, senior principal engineer at GIS software company Esri.
Aging datasets might not fully represent what’s actually happening on the ground, so people have to be careful about how they use them, Pisut points out. It could be risky, he says, but “better than nothing.”
Midha says R1 won't stop AI from spending billions.It means they will do more with the compute power they can obtain.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The Federal Communications Commission demanded that CBS provide the unedited transcript of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that is the subject of a complaint to the FCC and a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump.
CBS News on Wednesday received a letter of inquiry in which the FCC requested "the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds" of the Harris interview, The New York Times reported today. "We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do," a CBS News spokesperson told media outlets.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr repeatedly echoed Trump's complaints about alleged media bias before the election and has taken steps to punish news broadcasters since Trump promoted him to the chairmanship. Complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations were dismissed under former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, but Carr reversed those dismissals in his first week as chair. Carr also ordered investigations into NPR and CBS.
© Getty Images | Erik McGregor
MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release one of the world’s largest collections of public domain voice recordings for AI research. The data set, called Unsupervised People’s Speech, contains more than a million hours of audio spanning at least 89 different languages. MLCommons says […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Some companies are blocking DeepSeek over concerns their data will end up with the Chinese government.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Welcome to episode 39 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, we talk about our long-term Pixel 9 Pro XL review.
Sponsored by Yaber: Check out Yaber’s latest projectors that combine exceptional image quality, powerful sound, and smart features to revolutionize your viewing experience. On sale now.
In this jam packed launch episode, Sophia Tung and Zac Hall dive deep into DeepSeek’s arrival to the AI race, how NVIDIA and OpenAI are responding, and the state of current AI tools; this week’s biggest tech surprises, what has us excited and what has us concerned, and much more.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is the latest in the long-running 4X strategy franchise that first debuted in 1991 on MS-DOS. The new turn-based game from Firaxis Games and the titular, legendary designer is set to release on PC and modern consoles in on February 11th, 2025 — over eight years after the last installment.
Civ VII promises to expand the scope of how players can write their own historical fantasy, offering the freedom to mix and match civilizations with different historical figures, such as Hatshepsut reigning over the Roman empire in the Age of Exploration. It’s the kind of game that easily consumes hundreds of hours of playtime, constantly offering new and unexpected ways to engage with its deep city-building systems. Our own Ash Parrish details in her hands-on impressions how she only managed to scratch the surface in a lengthy three-hour demo.
Here’s all our coverage of the next major title in the Civilization series.
