Citing “disturbing” levels of power used by cryptocurrency miners, a group of Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren is urging the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to crack down on the controversial industry. The letter, signed by four senators and two representatives, calls on regulators to compel cryptominers to disclose their carbon emissions and energy use. Environmentalists have long raised concerns about Bitcoin and other power-hungry, proof-of-stake ...read more

The first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope reveals faraway galaxies. Click on the image for a larger view. (NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI) President Joe Biden got in on today’s celebration of the first full-color image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion observatory that’s been decades in the making. But the star of the show was the image itself, billed as the deepest and sharpest infrared view of the universe to date. The picture shows a patch of sk ...read more

Elon Musk's father told The Sun he had a second child with his 35-year-old stepdaughter. "The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce," he said, echoing his son's remarks on kids. Elon Musk's dad has fathered a second child with his stepdaughter, who is 41 years his junior, he said in a new interview. Errol Musk, 76, told The Sun Wednesday that he had a daughter with Jana Bezuidenhout, 35, in 2019. The elder Musk and Bezuidenhout previously welcomed a son, Elliot Rush, who is now 5 ...read more

Because most of the ocean’s vast area is far from land, it can be dangerous and expensive for crewed vessels to conduct research expeditions. This spurred Julie Angus to cofound the startup Open Ocean Robotics to design, build, and operate oceangoing uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) drones. She is the company’s CEO.“Our planet’s oceans are full of information that can help us protect at-risk marine life, allow ships to select more fuel-efficient routes, crack down on illegal fishing, bett ...read more

Bill Gates announced a $20 billion gift to support an increased annual payout by the Gates Foundation. (John Keatley Photo) The Bill Melinda Gates Foundation says it will increase its annual payout in grants and other financial assistance by 50% to $9 billion by 2026, responding to what it describes as “compounding global crises” including the pandemic, inflation, the Russian war in Ukraine, and climate change. Supporting the increased payout, Bill Gates says he is giving $20 billion t ...read more

TL;DR: All single-player downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 is now free. The good news comes as a result of EA decommissioning the unpopular BioWare Points system, which used to be the only way to buy these add-ons. EA will remove BioWare Points from its Origin game store on October 11, according to an email the company recently sent out to users. Before 2017, the currency was the only way to buy DLCs for older Bioware titles including ...read more

The end of Moore’s Law is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to miniaturize transistors and pack as many of them as possible into chips. So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process.Samsung, for instance, is adding AI to its memory chips to enable processing in memory, thereby saving energy and speeding up machine learning. Speaking of speed, Google’s TPU V4 AI chip has doubled its processing power compared wi ...read more

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of July 10, 2022. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Computer science lecturer sues Univ. of Wash. leaders over indigenous lands statement A lecturer at the University of Washington is suing university leaders over his free speech rights, cl ...read more

Advocates and organizers had been preparing for Roe v. Wade to be overturned since the U.S. Supreme Court draft decision leaked in early May. But Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of period care company August, still felt heartbroken when the decision became official in late June. “One of the things that always made me passionate about policy and legislative action was that it always felt so permanent,” she told TechCrunch. “For Roe to be rolled back went against many of the beliefs I had ...read more

WTF?! China, always at the forefront of Orwellian surveillance technology, has created a device that detects when someone is watching pornography, a pastime that has been illegal in the country since 1949. As reported by the SCMP (via Hackaday), China uses a combination of AI bots and human appraisers, called Jian Huang shi, most of whom are women, to search the web for images and decide if they contain explicit content deemed illegal. But tiredness and overexposure mean even these safeguards ...read more