After more than a century of powering their wares with engines that produce hundreds of small, carefully controlled explosions each minute, the auto industry is moving toward a battery-driven future. But that doesn’t mean one without any helpful explosions. Last month, industry supplier Bosch revealed details on what it calls the pyrofuse, a new safety…

There's a certain kind of security threat that catches the headlines—the massive data breach, or the malware that holds your computer to ransom—but it's also important to keep your guard up against some of the lesser-known attacks out there too.These threats may not have the same high-level profile as an unfixable iOS bug, but they…

A recent study found that prehistoric babies drank milk from ceramic sippy cups, including some with cute animal motifs. Lest you be overwhelmed by the cuteness, there's a heartbreaking side to that discovery: Bronze and Iron Age parents buried their dead infants with their clay sippy cups.ARS TECHNICAThis story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a…

In 1972, NASA launched two twin probes, called Pioneer 10 and 11. These predecessors to the Voyager mission were the first to visit Jupiter and Saturn and to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the solar system (which they will both do one day, many thousands of years from now). The Pioneer probes were…

The theme of this week is by now a familiar one: "Things keep getting worse." Starting with the security of countless so-called real time operating systems that all share some variation on the same decades-old code. That makes them all vulnerable to the set of Urgent/11 vulnerabilities we had reported on just the other week.…

I recently decided to purchase a phone that had more of what I wanted (battery life!) and less of what I didn't (news alerts, social media notifications, emails). I used to have a device exactly like this—a flip phone that could last a week on a single charge, and that didn't act like a supercomputer…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the new Extra Crunch series where we’ll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything…

In a wide-ranging conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last week, Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann made light of the company’s lack of IPO documents. The San…

Dr. Stuart Russell, a distinguished AI researcher and computer scientist at UC Berkeley, believes there is a fundamental and potentially civilization-ending shortcoming in the “standard model” of AI, which is…

(UC Berkeley’s Dr. Stuart Russell’s new book, “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, goes on sale Oct. 8. I’ve written a review, “Human Compatible” is a provocative…