Mark Harris

As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The airship —…

The director of marine operations at OceanGate, the company whose submersible went missing Sunday on an expedition to the Titanic in the North Atlantic, was fired after raising concerns about its first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems before its maiden voyage, according to a filing in a 2018 lawsuit…

It’s no secret that Elon Musk has been deeply frustrated with OpenAI since stepping down from its board in February 2018, culminating in an open letter calling for the organization to pause work on more powerful systems. “It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source and…

As a Universal Hydrogen-branded plane, equipped with the largest hydrogen fuel cell ever to power an aircraft, made its maiden test flight in eastern Washington, co-founder and CEO Paul Eremenko declared the moment the dawn of a “new golden age of aviation.” The 15-minute test flight of a modified Dash-8…

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday a ChatGPT conversation that speculated about the 2019 transition of its creator, OpenAI, from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. The AI chatbot concluded that, if the for-profit business had used the nonprofit’s resources for the change, it would have been “highly unethical and illegal.” It…

The most serious crash to date involving a self-driving truck might have resulted in only moderate injuries, but it exposed how unprepared local government and law enforcement are to deal with the new technology. On May 5, a Class 8 Waymo Via truck operating in autonomous mode with a human…

When Matthew Dunbabin saw the devastation wrought on tropical reef ecosystems by overfishing and climate change, he wondered if robots could help. With money from the Queensland University of Technology, where he is a professor of robotics, Dunbabin’s team developed prototype surface and underwater robots to reseed dying reefs with…

One of Silicon Valley’s most infamous characters has narrowly avoided — yet again — the worst consequences of his actions. Anthony Levandowski reached a settlement agreement last week that resolves a number of disputes with his two former employers Uber and Google and puts to rest one of the most…

Joby Aviation is seeking permission for a series of high-profile air taxi flights over San Francisco Bay, according to documents filed with the FCC and obtained by TechCrunch. The tests of the startup’s second-generation pre-production prototype, called the S4, would be the first in full view of the public and…

It would have been a legendary payoff for any investor, let alone a public agency: swapping an undrivable car for a multibillion-dollar stake in a hot new EV startup. Until last year, Space Florida, the state’s economic development agency for aerospace, believed that it owned 3% of Rivian as a…

When Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill unveiled The Boring Company’s plan for a subterranean shuttle that would whisk visitors to different parts of the city’s vast Convention Center campus, he predicted it would take just under two minutes to travel between its farthest stations. “If the…

An environmental document that needs U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approval before SpaceX can begin testing the world’s largest rockets is missing key details about where its fuel will come from, experts say. The draft programmatic environmental assessment (PEA) for SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicles, which Elon Musk hopes…

A new lawsuit threatens a decades-long collaboration that brought Skype, robot delivery startup Starship Technologies and encrypted enterprise messaging service Wire into the world. TechCrunch has learned that Mark Dyne, one of Skype’s founding investors, is suing billionaire Skype co-founder Janus Friis in California’s Superior Court for the County of…

Less than two weeks after its official launch, The Boring Company’s Loop system in Las Vegas had its first security breach. On June 21, the morning of the final day of the International Beauty Show, an “unauthorized vehicle” joined the system’s fleet of Tesla taxis underground, emails between the Loop’s…

Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project’s Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a “little gumdrop on wheels” — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.

Nuro doesn’t have a typical Silicon Valley origin story. It didn’t emerge after a long, slow slog from a suburban garage or through a flash of insight in a university laboratory.

Nuro’s autonomous vehicles (AVs) don’t have a human driver on board. There’s no room in the narrow chassis for a driver’s seat, no need for a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals.

Pandemic pizza was definitely a thing. U.S. consumers forked out a record-breaking $14bn to have pizza delivered to their doors in 2020, and nearly half of that was spent with one brand: Domino’s.

The first sign that your town is about to welcome a horde of Nuro robots will be the appearance of a fleet of human-driven Toyota Priuses modified with cameras, lidars and radars.

Ask ‘Do you like working for him?’ and you’ll get a response that could have come straight from North Korea: ‘Yup, he’s a great leader! He motivates us to do great work.’

Please see update below… Restrictions put in place by Nevada regulators are making it difficult for The Boring Company (TBC) to meet contractual targets for its LVCC Loop, Elon Musk’s first underground transportation system. The Loop system at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) is supposed to use more than…

When Elon Musk stood onstage at Tesla’s Battery Day in September and promised to cut lithium-ion battery prices in half, he claimed some of the savings would come from reinventing the dirty and complex process of making their nickel metal cathodes. “It’s insanely complicated, like digging a ditch, filling it…

When ZeroAvia’s six-seater aircraft completed an eight-minute flight from Cranfield Airfield in the U.K. last September, the company claimed a “major breakthrough” with the first-ever hydrogen fuel cell flight of a commercial-size aircraft. The modified Piper Malibu propeller plane was now the largest hydrogen-powered aircraft in the world, wrote the…

Sergey Brin’s secretive airship company LTA Research and Exploration is planning to power a huge disaster relief airship with an equally record-breaking hydrogen fuel cell. A job listing from the company, which is based in Mountain View, California and Akron, Ohio, reveals that LTA wants to configure a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen…