Sarah Buhr
Write about the wild new frontier of biotechnology (3D printed organs, one drop blood tests, or hamburgers grown in a lab? I’m your gal), also a bit of politics, gender and diversity and sometimes they put me on camera at TechCrunch to tell you about cool new gadgets and gizmos.
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Latest from Sarah Buhr
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CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna shines hope on the future of genetic modification at SXSW
Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR Cas9 technology, or the ability to program genes using a special enzyme, spoke about the promises of this technology on stage at SXSW this afternoon. In a keynote today, Doudna noted that while this technology is very young (less than five years old), “it’s been deployed very rapidly for existing applications,” she said. For example… Read More
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Bolt Threads debuts its first product, a $314 tie made from spiderwebs
It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs, but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behinds. The difference is this thread was mass produced from fermented microbial poop instead, and it’s the first product out from materials science startup Bolt Threads. Read More
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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are expecting another baby girl
Mark Zuckerberg is sure to get a ridiculous amount of likes for his latest post. The Facebook founder, now 32, posted this morning on his Facebook profile page he and wife Priscilla Chan are expecting a second daughter. No names have surfaced yet for the baby but this is very good news for the couple as they had some difficulty getting pregnant the first time. Zuckerberg wrote about the… Read More
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Scoot wants to expand its electric scooter operations globally with a white-label service
San Francisco-based electric scooter sharing network Scoot tells TechCrunch it plans to share its back-end software with third-party scooter operators in congested cities around the world. The idea is to allow those in other cities who have vehicles to hook into Scoot’s back-end operation system, allowing them to also run a scooter sharing network in their area. Read More
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Buoy hopes to fight fake online health news with an artificially intelligent app
Nearly every time I go to WebMD’s symptom checker it somehow leads to telling me I might have some horrible, cancerous disease. Heading over to Yahoo Answers is usually no different. The last time I typed in Google for “shoulder pain” I got an ad recommending I buy a “LightStim” tool promising to shoot “Multi-wave LED technology” through my body. So… Read More
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With $37 million in funding, health startup Virta aims to cure type 2 diabetes by watching what you eat
Type 2 diabetes is a disease affecting 415 million people globally and Virta, a Silicon Valley-based health startup, believes it has something unique to reverse it – remote monitoring of everything you eat. Most people with the disease end up having to constantly monitor their blood sugar with the prick of a needle and diabetic pills or can “cure” it with bariatric surgery. Read More
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Fresh with cash, Anand Sharma’s Gyroscope is building the backend to the journey of you
Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing. His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum… Read More
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Early cancer detection startup GRAIL closes on $900 million in Series B funding
Life sciences startups need a whole lot more cash than most and that’s certainly true for GRAIL, a cancer detection startup trying to figure out a way to find the “emperor of all maladies” much earlier through blood testing technology. The startup, which spun out of genomics company Illumina announced it has closed a whopping $900 million in Series B funding this… Read More
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Travis Kalanick apologizes for blowing up at Uber driver who complained about drop in pay
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has penned an open letter of apology for a heated exchange he had with his Uber Black driver back in January about the impact of competitive pricing. Kalanick was shown in a newly surfaced video arguing with driver Fawzi Kamel over Uber’s business model and what effect it has had on the driver’s pay. Kamel tells Kalanick in the video that Uber has cost… Read More
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Inside Forward, ex-Googler Adrian Aoun’s idea for the doctor’s office of the future
Forward, a new type of futuristic doctors office launched its first location in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district at the beginning of this year. Some in the health industry have had their doubts about a doctor’s office with propriety tools like a body scanner, stethoscope and its own in-house lab. So we asked founder and former Googler Adrian Aoun to show us around… Read More
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Uber employees are chatting with each other about Uber’s leadership on anonymous workplace app Blind
Uber employees have flocked to an anonymous workplace app called Blind as a sort of catharsis since ex-Uber engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti posted about being propositioned and discriminated against while working for the company, according to Blind’s founder Alex Shin. Rigetti’s explosive post went viral late Sunday night, leading to more than double an increase of Uber… Read More
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Uber says it’s ‘absolutely not’ behind a smear campaign against ex-employee Susan Fowler Rigetti
Uber is under attack once again today as the Twittersphere quickly concluded it was behind a smear campaign against a former engineer for the company, Susan Fowler Rigetti, who dropped a scathing blog post earlier this week detailing sexual harassment claims while working at Uber over the course of a year. But Uber swears it isn’t them. Rigetti took to Twitter this morning to post… Read More
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Uber board member Arianna Huffington releases statement after company all-hands
Following a scathing report of sexual harassment at Uber over the weekend, CEO Travis Kalanick hosted an all-hands meeting today, along with board member Arianna Huffington and Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey, to discuss the company’s next steps. Read More
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Self-driving Ubers are now picking people up in Arizona
Uber pinned hopes on running its self-driving fleet in San Francisco but motored off to Arizona two months ago when that plan ran up against some local red tape. Now, just as Uber is dealing with an explosive report of sexual harassment within its engineering team, the company has officially rolled out its self-driving cars in the Grand Canyon state. Starting today, those in Tempe, Arizona… Read More
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Uber’s Travis Kalanick details independent investigation regarding sexual harassment
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick sent a memo to employees today following allegations of sexual harassment from former Uber engineer Susan Fowler. In the memo, obtained by TechCrunch, Kalanick said the company has tapped former US Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran, partners at law firm Covington & Burling, to independently investigate the workplace issues Fowler spoke about in her… Read More
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Barbie becomes a hologram version of herself
Yes, after pulling herself out of her 1950’s rut as a swimsuit model to become everything from a doctor, lawyer, computer scientist, astronaut and even the president of the United States, Barbie has now become a 3D-animated hologram that can serve up the weather on command. As first reported in Wired, The Hello Barbie Hologram debuted at the New York Toy Fair this week. And like… Read More
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Theranos might be on life support
It probably comes as no surprise: Theranos, the blood testing technology company once worth billions, is struggling to survive. With no revenue, no money set aside to deal with legal expenses and a fraction of the funding it once had to work with, Theranos may not have long before it bleeds out entirely. Read More
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Transcend VR sues investor Mike Rothenberg for fraud and breach of contract
Mike Rothenberg has been in a heap of trouble over a series of purportedly fraudulent transactions within his investment firm Rothenberg Ventures and his virtual reality startup River Studios. Now Transcend VR, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal, is suing the venture capitalist on allegations of fraud, breach of contract and deceptive diversion of funds. Read More
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CRISPR-Cas9 inventor Jennifer Doudna’s plans on moving forward, genetically modifying humans
The decision of who owned the rights to a hotly disputed CRISPR gene editing patent came down in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today so you’d think the mood would be sour at the University of California, Berkeley, the other contender in the case. But Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna tells TechCrunch this is a positive for her. “I’m actually delighted to know… Read More
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Mulberrys is an on-demand laundry startup hoping to clean up where others have washed out
On-demand laundry has proven a tough business for some. Washio folded up its business last year, selling its assets into competitor Rinse. At the time Rinse’s founder Ajay Prakash told TechCrunch the on-demand model wasn’t the most efficient or economical way to handle the dirty business of cleaning clothes. But now Mulberrys, a new cleaning competitor in the Bay Area, hopes to… Read More
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