~the-next-web | Bookmarks (124)

Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient’s heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from the body. Creating these electrodes isn’t as easy as it might seem. Human skin is complex. Its properties, such as how well it conducts electricity, can...

As China’s DeepSeek threatens to dismantle Silicon Valley’s AI monopoly, a European alliance has emerged with an alternative to tech’s global order. They call their project OpenEuroLLM. Like DeepSeek, they aim to develop next-generation open-source language models — but their agenda is very different. Their mission: forging European AI that will foster digital leaders and impactful public services across the continent. To support these...

A German startup plans to jumpstart European EVs with an AI-powered brain. Sphere Energy built the system to simulate battery behaviour. The company then predicts a power source’s lifetime in numerous scenarios, from driving styles to temperatures on the road.  According to Sphere, the insights shrink the battery testing cycle by at least a year. Developing a car, meanwhile, could be completed “at least”...

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy — those who understand how AI works — who are most eager to adopt it. Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using...

In 1981, American physicist and Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, gave a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) near Boston, in which he outlined a revolutionary idea. Feynman suggested that the strange physics of quantum mechanics could be used to perform calculations. The field of quantum computing was born. In the 40-plus years since, it has become an intensive area of research in...

There are a handful of challenges that many developers like to tackle as something of a rite of passage to prove their coding worth. One is creating a compiler. That fundamental building block of many programming languages ​​​​translates the more human-understandable code into something a computer understands. Another and far more ambitious challenge is building an operating system. The scope is almost limitless. You...

Shares in ASML have bounced back from the hit inflicted by DeepSeek’s AI advances. Celebrating the results, ASML predicted that the sudden emergence of low-cost models will boost demand for the firm’s semiconductor machines. The company’s stock price rose by over 10% on Wednesday after the Dutch business reported impressive orders for its chip-making equipment. The tools produce the most advanced semiconductors in the...

From 2013 to 2023, the number of ICT specialists in the EU increased by 59.3% according to Eurostat. In that period, most of these tech workers were found in Germany, which provided employment for 21.5% of the EU’s ICT specialists—unsurprising when you consider the fact that the country is home to a myriad of high-tech companies and organisations such as SAP, Siemens, Bosch, and...

DeepSeek sent ripples through the global tech landscape this week as it soared above ChatGPT in Apple’s app store. The meteoric rise has shifted the dynamics of US-China tech competition, shocked global tech stock valuations, and reshaped the future direction of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Among the industry buzz created by DeepSeek’s rise to prominence, one question looms large: what does this mean for...

DeepSeek proves that Silicon Valley can’t monopolise AI innovation, according to a European AI entrepreneur. Muj Choudhury, the CEO and co-founder of British voice processing startup RocketPhone, welcomed DeepSeek’s rapid rise. He hopes the Chinese company signals a shift in the balance of AI power. “AI development has long been dominated by Silicon Valley’s powerful VC firms, which wield immense influence by pouring vast...

Spanish tech star TravelPerk has raised a whopping $200mn and sealed the acquisition of expenses platform Yokoy. The investment values TravelPerk at $2.7bn — almost double last year’s $1.4bn valuation. The business travel giant said the funds would fuel further product development and expansion into the US. European VC firm Atomico led the Series E investment. Alongside the cash injection, TravelPerk announced the purchase...

Remember when spotting a drone in the sky was a novelty? Now it’s like playing whack-a-mole with flying machines. Delivery drones, military drones, AI drones, hobby drones — our skies are busier than the queue at airport security. Without air traffic control, we’re one step away from midair collisions and drones arguing over parking spots.  Enter AirDodge, a Norwegian startup that’s stepping in to...

Stunning AI advances from Chinese startup DeepSeek have sent tech stocks tumbling across the US and Europe. DeepSeek released a free chatbot and new open-source AI models last week. Within days, the chatbot had overtaken ChatGPT to reach the top spot on the Apple App Store’s free app rankings. The new R1 models sent further shockwaves through the AI world. R1 promised performance to...

The practice of medicine has undergone an incredible, albeit incomplete, transformation over the past 50 years, moving steadily from a field informed primarily by expert opinion and the anecdotal experience of individual clinicians toward a formal scientific discipline. The advent of evidence-based medicine meant clinicians identified the most effective treatment options for their patients based on quality evaluations of the latest research. Now, precision...

Right now, there’s at least one nuclear-power, nuclear-armed submarine stealthily patrolling the waters off the UK. The sub is powered by a nuclear reactor, so it can cruise undetected for over 20 years without refuelling. Oh, and it’s also armed with eight nuclear warheads — each six times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  Since 1969, the Royal Navy has kept...

Donald Trump’s big AI announcement has turned heads on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump revealed this week that OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have formed a joint venture — called Stargate — that will invest $500bn in AI infrastructure. The companies said $100bn of the funding was available immediately. The rest would be deployed over the next four years. Trump billed Stargate as “the...

Ah, quantum computing… that moonshot technology full of potential, full of promise — and jam-packed with enough jargon to make the average person cry.  Qubits, entanglement, superposition, trapped-ions, Schrödinger’s cat. These terms sound strange because the world of quantum mechanics — where things can exist in multiple states at once — is strange.  And that’s why I want you to bear with me while...

A new season of the “Champions League of Tech” has begun with the return of TECH5 — Europe’s hottest scaleup contest. Over the next five months, TECH5 will showcase the continent’s future stars. The competition comes to a climax on June 19-20, when the 2025 winners are announced on the main stage of TNW Conference. Applications for the tournament opened this week. Promising scaleups...

An Icelandic scaleup has sparked hopes of a breakthrough in dementia treatment after raising €26.5mn for groundbreaking research. Arctic Therapeutics (ATx) attracted the investment after pioneering a new approach to drug development. Founded in 2015, the company first analyses genomic data with bioinformatics — a blend of computer science and biology. After identifying disease-associated genes and proteins, ATx targets the root causes of a...

Dutch scaleup Mosa Meat, the maker of the “world’s kindest burger,” has submitted its first request to sell cultivated meat in the EU.  Cultivated or “lab-grown” meat is made by harvesting animal cells and growing them in a high-tech bioreactor filled with a nutrient-packed broth. The result? Real meat minus the slaughterhouses and climate-heating emissions.  Singapore, the US, and most recently Israel are the...

Google DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs expects testing on its first AI-designed drugs to begin this year, as tech startups race to turn algorithmic magic into actual treatments. “We’ll hopefully have some AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of the year,” the firm’s Nobel Prize-winning CEO Demis Hassabis told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. “That’s the plan.”  ...

Stuttgart, Germany-based Sereact has secured €25mn to advance its embodied AI software that enables robots to carry out tasks they were never trained to do.  “With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences. They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy,” said Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder of Sereact (short for “sense, reason, act”). Early...

A startup called Scenexus has unveiled plans to build digital twins of cities around the world. A spin-off from Dutch research organisation TNO, Scenexus launched this week with a new platform for urban planning. The software blends multiple datasets to clone entire cities and regions. Planners and engineers then use the replicas to precisely analyse the impacts of their ideas. According to Scenexus, the...

Four billion years ago, Earth was a fiery, tumultuous world of molten rock, volcanic eruptions, and toxic skies, with searing heat and the constant threat of asteroid impacts. Thankfully, our planet has cooled off a bit since then. Nevertheless, the Earth still radiates vast amounts of geothermal energy. It’s a clean, limitless, always-on power source lying beneath our feet — we just have to...