Author: GT

Scott Bessent, US treasury secretary, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025. Bonnie Cash | Bloomberg | Getty Images Even if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with a federal appeals court’s ruling that most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal, it doesn’t mean the case is closed on those levies.U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told Reuters on Monday that there are “other authorities that can be used” to uphold the tariffs. One of them could be the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, Bessent said.(A curious side note: Smoot-Hawley is described…

Lithium has become the default choice for battery-powered systems, but its limitations — from volatile supply chains to short lifespans — are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Offgrid Energy Labs, a deep-tech startup based in India, wants to make lithium less central, especially when it comes to battery storage. The seven-year-old startup, incubated at IIT Kanpur, has developed a proprietary zinc-bromine-based battery system as an alternative to lithium-ion technology. Called ZincGel, it delivers 80–90% of the energy efficiency of conventional lithium batteries, but at a significantly lower levelized cost of storage, the startup said. As power demand grows worldwide, countries…

Volunteers are needed, and time is ticking! With just over a month until TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 hits San Francisco, we’re calling on students, aspiring founders, marketers, and event pros to step behind the curtain and help the TechCrunch events team pull off one of the largest and most anticipated startup events of the year, taking place October 27–29. The deadline to apply is September 30 Whether you’re looking to build your network, learn what it takes to launch a company, or get a front-row view from tech leaders like Aaron Levie (Box), Sarah Franklin (Lattice), and Elad Gil, volunteering is…

Five years ago, investor Katelin Holloway made what she calls a “literal moon shot” investment. A founding partner of the generalist venture firm Seven Seven Six admits she and her team had “no clue” what rocket company Stoke Space was talking about when they pitched the firm on its reusable launch technology. “We knew full well we were not the specialist,” she says. Since then, Holloway has also invested in Interlune, a company planning to harvest helium-3 from the moon and sell it back to Earth for quantum computing and medical imaging applications.  Holloway is well aware of the skepticism…

Every founder says they want visibility, traction, and growth. But with just 10 tables left and 5 days to grab one, the window to make that happen at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is closing fast. If you’ve been thinking about joining 10,000+ startup and VC leaders in San Francisco on October 27–29, this is your moment. Lock in your place on the Expo floor where ideas, capital, and connections collide. Here’s what’s waiting for you at your table Real investor exposure: We’re talking foot traffic from the likes of Sequoia, a16z, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and more. They walk the floor.…

Runway has spent the past seven years building visual-generating tools for the creative industry. Now, it sees a new opportunity for its technology: robotics. New York-based Runway is known for its video and photo generation AI world models, or large language models that create a simulated version of the real world. Most recently, the company released Gen-4, its video-generating model, in March and Runway Aleph, its video editing model, in July. As Runway’s world models started to improve — and get more realistic — the company began to receive inbound interest from robotics and self-driving car companies looking to use the tech,…

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (AP) — With jerky determination, robots played soccer, wowed children with shadow-boxing skills and shot arrows on Monday at the birthplace of the Olympic Games.As they shuffled and occasionally froze for a battery change, their creators and futurologists debated the central question of when robots will be ready to tidy closets and wash dishes.Outer space before house chores Despite the explosive advance of artificial intelligence in applications like ChatGPT, their physical cousins — robots with human-like appearances and skills — are lagging years behind.“I really believe that humanoids will first go to space and then to houses…

Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets. The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more…

The Duane Arnold nuclear plant northwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa is pressing ahead with plans to restart operations by the end of the decade after shutting down for economic reasons in 2020.The plant is the third – and likely the last – mothballed reactor in the U.S. that is in shape to come back online to support growing electricity demand in the U.S.Duane Arnold would follow similar restarts planned for the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which plan to resume operations later this year and in 2027, respectively, subject to approval by the Nuclear…

Picture taken on September 4, 2023 shows windmills at the Nysted Offshore Wind Farm constructed by Danish windpower giant Orsted in 2002-2003 in the Baltic Sea near Gedser in Denmark.Thomas Traasdahl | Afp | Getty ImagesNorwegian oil giant Equinor on Monday pledged to support Denmark’s Orsted with almost $1 billion of fresh capital, backing the beleaguered company amid sustained attacks on offshore wind projects from the Trump administration.In an apparent show of confidence in the world’s largest offshore wind developer, Equinor signaled its intention to participate in Orsted’s planned 60 billion Danish krone ($9.4 billion) rights issue and said it…