Author: GT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amazon has put in a bid to purchase TikTok, a Trump administration official said Wednesday, in an eleventh-hour pitch as a U.S. ban on the platform is set to go into effect Saturday.The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Amazon offer was made in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.The New York Times first reported on the bid.President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day gave the platform a reprieve, barreling past a law that had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme…

When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris. “The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where…

By Anna Tong A startup run by Tim Stokely, founder of adult content social media site OnlyFans, has partnered with a cryptocurrency foundation to submit a late-stage plan to acquire short video app TikTok from Chinese owner ByteDance, the two said on Wednesday. The intent to bid was sent this week to the White House by Zoop, billionaire Stokely’s new company, and the Hbar Foundation, which manages the Hedera cryptocurrency network’s treasury. While OnlyFans is known mainly for pornography, Zoop is mainstream and family-friendly, and gives back the majority of its revenue to those who post on the site, rewarding…

OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be the world’s most popular chatbot app. But rival services are gaining, according to data from analytics firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower. Similarweb, which estimates traffic to websites, including chatbot web apps, has recorded healthy recent upticks in usage across bots like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Copilot. Gemini’s web traffic grew to 10.9 million average daily visits worldwide in March, up 7.4% month-over-month, while daily visits to Copilot increased to 2.4 million — up 2.1% from February. Similarweb reports that Anthropic’s Claude reached 3.3 million average daily visits in March, and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s chatbot…

You know the online dating scene is bad when dating giants like Tinder are now introducing AI personas for users to flirt with. On Tuesday, the company announced a new game powered by OpenAI, allowing users to interact with an AI bot to practice flirting, reenact meet-cute scenarios, and receive scores with suggestions for improving their dating skills. To play Tinder’s The Game Game, tap the Tinder logo in the top-left corner of the app. The game gives users a deck of cards, with each one featuring a different AI persona and scenario. Users must use their voices to respond…

So far, crypto markets haven’t behaved as expected under the Trump Administration. Investors hoped that regulatory reform and policies like a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve would drive prices appreciably higher. But it’s been the opposite. Bitcoin (BTC-USD) has fallen from highs well above $100,000 at the beginning of the year to a trough in the mid-80,000s for most of March. Crypto prices have suffered from being increasingly correlated with traditional assets like stocks and bonds, which have been hit by macroeconomic uncertainty. Tariffs — surcharges the U.S. places on imports from other countries — have Wall Street worried about a global…

Nintendo Switch 2Courtesy: NintendoNintendo revealed the details of the Switch 2, its next game console, in a launch video on Wednesday.The Switch 2 will hit store shelves on June 5 for $449.99. Nintendo will launch game titles including “Mario Kart World” and “Street Fighter 6” alongside the new hardware.The new device is a bigger and faster version of the Nintendo Switch, which has sold 150 million units since it was released in 2017, making it the third-best selling game console of all time. Gamers will be able to use the Switch 2 as both a handheld console as well as…

When there are damages to energy infrastructure, such as electricity pylons or gas pipelines, expensive helicopters are frequently used to inspect them. Drones have begun to replace some of those inspections, but the flight-time for these can be limited. Now a new company has produced a drone with a very long range to fill this task, and, while the company demurred over any “dual-use” application, it’s clear that it could be used in a civilian setting to inspect infrastructure damaged by warfare. Hamburg, Germany-based Beagle uses long-range drones to capture data about energy infrastructure. It has now raised a €5…

The Bitcoin-Japanese yen (BTC/JPY) pair faced a setback at key trendline resistance Wednesday, as Goldman Sachs (GS) cited the anti-risk yen as the leading hedge against rising U.S. tariff and recession risks. The BTC/JPY trading on the Japan-based bitFlyer fell 1% after failing to take out the trendline drawn off the record high reached on Jan. 20, data from charting platform TradingView show. BTC’s USD-denominated price faced similar losses. Meanwhile, Asian equity indices and the U.S. equity futures treaded water ahead of President Donald Trump’s sweeping new “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday that could trigger a global trade war. The tariff…

The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has released a report calling for the UK to lead in navigating the complex intersection of arts and AI. According to the report, titled ‘Rebooting Copyright: How the UK Can Be a Global Leader in the Arts and AI,’ the global race for cultural and technological leadership is still up for grabs, and the UK has a golden opportunity to take the lead. The report emphasises that countries that “embrace change and harness the power of artificial intelligence in creative ways will set the technical, aesthetic, and regulatory standards for others to follow.” Highlighting that…