Popular LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr has disabled location-based features for users within the Olympic village of the Paris Games, which kicked off today. The measures are not designed to stop athletes hooking up between sprints, swims, or shot puts theyre a safety precaution. If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app, said Gri

The Paris Olympics 2024 kicked off today. But as the City of Light opens its gates to millions of spectators, officials are bracing themselves for a cyber war. Analysts predict that there could be as many as four billion cyber attacks at this years Games. The official Paris Olympics 2024 app is particularly vulnerable. This app handles vast amounts of personal and transactional data, making it a prime target for cybercriminals, said Sakthi Mohan, cloud security lead at California-based Synopsys

Installing and updating applications and other dependencies on a computer really should be a solved problem by now. Yet almost every major desktop operating system provides multiple options, with no real clear answer to which is best. Linux, despite long-established package managers such as apt, deb, and rpm, just to name a few, still suffers from confusion and inconsistency between open source vs proprietary instals, as well as between developer tools and more user-focussed tools. Additionally,

An exercise machine for astronauts has entered an Airbus accelerator. Built by UK startup Physical Mind London, thedevice mitigates the impacts of zero gravity, which can be brutal. After six months in space, astronauts can lose up to 20% of their bone mass. Their muscles can also shrink dramatically. On short flights, they can suffer muscle loss of 20%. If no countermeasures are applied, this can rise to 50%. Physical Mind London wants to provide those countermeasures. The companys flagship pro

Inside a hangar on the outskirts of Gothenburg, Sweden, lies the sleek metal frame of an electric plane poised to change the way we fly forever. The hangar belongs to Heart Aerospace. The Swedish startup is building a hybrid-electric 30-passenger airliner called the ES-30. It could offer a cleaner, cheaper alternative to short-haul flights on routes across the world. Unlike other battery-powered planes like flying cars or air taxis the ES-30 looks, for lack of a better word, pretty normal. A l

Growing up, Jari Hazelebach was a full-time interpreter. Both of his parents are deaf, and from a young age he helped them communicate in a world largely oblivious to the struggles of the 430 million people suffering from disabling hearing loss. While my parents could lip-read, their hearing disability made group conversations almost impossible, Hazelebach told TNW. Even family Christmas gatherings were a struggle. Thats what drove Hazelebach to found Speaksee: so people suffering from hearing l

A team of students from the Technical University of Delft have made history by crossing the North Sea in a fully hydrogen-powered boat. TU Delfts Hydro Motion team set off from Breskens, Netherlands on July 11, with 160km of rough ocean ahead of them. Shortly into the trip, however, the vessel suffered a failure in its cooling pump and had to dock in Belgium for repairs. After a bit of tinkering, the issue was resolved and the crew set sail once more. They arrived at Ramsgate, UK, 12 hours later

Imagine walking through a bustling railway station. Youre in a hurry, weaving through the crowd, unaware that cameras are not just watching you but also recognising you. These days, our biometric data is valuable to businesses for security purposes, to enhance customer experience or to improve their own efficiency. Biometricsare unique physical or behavioural traitsand are part of our everyday lives. Among these, facial recognition is the most common. Facial recognition technology stems from a b

Cultivated meat is now approved for sale in Europe but dont break out the fine China just yet. The first dishes are exclusively reserved for pets. Our furry friends can now legally dine on cultivated chicken from Meatly, a startup based in London. The company announced on Monday that British regulators have rubber-stamped sales of the product. Byproviding the green-light, the UK has become the first European country to commercialise lab-grown meat. Its the start of a viable and sustainable alte

From your phone to your clothes or even the breakfast you ate this morning, theres a high chance a boat transported it from where it was made to where you bought it from. The global shipping industry accounts for around 90% of world trade. Most of these goods are ferried by giant cargo ships that carry huge amounts of stuff. But, theyre slow and not exactly nimble. This can result in long waiting times for shipments. Whats more, diesel-guzzling cargo ships contribute around 3% of global CO2 emis

Samsung has snapped up UKstartup Oxford Semantic Technologies, in a bid to hyper-personalise user experiences with AI. Founded in 2017, Oxford Semantic specialises in knowledge graphs, which integrate and analyse data. The technology powers countless applications, from voice assistants to search engines. Oxford Semantic baked knowledge graphs into a product called RDFox, which the company describes as an AI reasoning engine. The system supports an array of use cases, from recommendation engines

Danish startup Again has raised money again. Google Ventures and Berlin-based HV Capital led the $43mn funding round, which brings the startups total to date to just shy of $100mn. Again takes waste CO from industry, combines it with hydrogen and then feeds the concoction to a host of millennia-old bacteria. The little germs devour the brew, turning it into commercial-grade compounds like acetate. This is the base chemical in everything from plastics and cosmetics to paint. Again spun out from o

While this year thus far has been less profitable for ASML, the tech giant saw orders for its chip making machines increase again over the past three months. According to the companys earnings report for the second quarter of 2024, net bookings (i.e. orders) reached 5.6bn rising over 24% year-on-year. A significant chunk consisted of orders for ASMLs EUV machines, which accounted for 2.5bn. The Dutch company is the worlds sole manufacturer of these Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines

Welcome to the new episode of the TNW Podcast the show where we discuss the latest developments in the European technology ecosystem and feature interviews with some of the most interesting people in the industry. In todays episode, Linnea and Andrii talk about the launch of Ariane 6 and its consequences, the woes of Firefly, robotic laundry folding, the math of swimming, and more. Youll also hear a panel discussion Andrii moderated a few weeks ago at the Pendomonium + #mtpcon Roadshow in Amst

Today, UK error-correction specialist Riverlane and startup Atlantic Quantum announced they have entered into a strategic partnership to scale fluxonium-based qubit architecture and advance the technology towards useful quantum computing. It is a really encouraging time to be writing about quantum tech. Beyond the fact that it is increasingly being acknowledged as a strategically important technology by security agencies and governments globally, after decades of feeling just five years out of r

Sixty years ago the animated series The Jetsons finished its first and only season before being cancelled. Just 24 episodes were broadcast between September 1962 and March 1963. Despite this, the cartoon has achieved huge influence in popular culture, with countless reruns, a reboot in the mid-1980s (51 episodes over two seasons) and a feature-length movie in 1990. The Jetsons was created by the Hanna-Barbara animation studio in Los Angeles as a futuristic version of the studios hit series The F

Yandex founder Arkady Volozh is building a cloud service platform for developers to train artificial intelligence models. Named Nebius Group, the company says its aim is to become a European global leader in AI infrastructure. The launch follows news from yesterday that Yandex had successfully sold its Russian assets in a $5.4bn deal, in what constitutes the largest corporate exit from the country since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine over two years ago. Yandex was a rare Russian

UK-based AI startups are now worth $256bn, according to new data from Dealroom and HSBC Innovation Banking. They also account for 22% of the countrys innovation ecosystem value up from 12% in 2019. In the first half of 2024, startups in the field raised $2.1bn. And this amount is projected to more than double in the coming five months. This means theyre on track for another record-breaking year, following a $4.1bn total investment in 2021. The leading AI rounds span a wide range of applications

UK-based Huma has launched today the Huma Cloud Platform, a Shopify-like tool for the healthcare ecosystem to design, build, and launch digital health services. The digitalization of the healthcare ecosystem is a transformative force that is reshaping how we deliver and experience healthcare and how we conduct research, Dan Vahdat, founder and CEO of Huma, told TNW. Founded in 2011, Huma has been working with national healthcare providers and big pharma. Its technology powers digital clinical tr

When Ariane 6 suffered a glitch on its first flight, the mishap felt strangely inevitable. Nearly half of all rockets fail on their first launches. After a troubled development and four years of delays, Ariane 6 looked like a prime candidate to join the list. The launcher was commissioned to create a European pathwayinto the cosmos. Since the retirement of Ariane 5 last July, the continent has had no independent access to space. Thierry Breton, the EUs commissioner for the internal market, descr

Japanese tech group SoftBank has acquired yet another British chip player. This time it has snapped up Bristol-based AI processor developer Graphcore, whose very survival was in doubt over the past year. The acquisition comes as investors compete to back the next big thing in AI. Moreover, larger tech companies who feel that their own in-house AI capabilities are falling short have been searching high and low for acquisitions that can mitigate these inadequacies and give them a leg up on the com