French upstart Circular has unveiled a fresh challenge to Oura — the current lord of the smart rings. Circular has just released a new smart ring that offers two key advantages over Oura, which currently dominates the global market for the trendy wearables, which monitor your health metrics and display the info on an app.      Dubbed the Circular Ring 2, it’s a quantum leap forward from its predecessor, the Circular Slim, which The Verge described as a product that held “a lot of promise” but executed on “almost none of it.” Firstly, Circular has swapped the plastic shell in the…

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Dutch battery startups must innovate at “critical pinch points” in the supply chain to compete globally, says Kevin Brundish, CEO of Eindhoven-based battery company LionVolt. The comments come at a tough time for Europe’s battery sector, which has been left reeling following the recent collapse of Northvolt. The Swedish startup’s gigafactories were perhaps the continent’s greatest hope for a homegrown battery success story.  Northvolt’s failure serves as a cautionary tale of the immense challenges in scaling battery production, from securing supply chains to managing infrastructure costs and maintaining investor confidence. But building big and building fast isn’t the only way…

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Hollywood is infamous for celebrity excess, but Tinseltown strictly controls one scandalous indulgence: swearing. Director Scott Mann encountered these constraints after shooting the thriller Fall. Movie giant Lionsgate — best-known for the John Wick, Saw, and Hunger Games franchises — wanted to release the film in the US. But the studio had big problems. Thirty-six of them, to be precise.  “They said it had too many f*cks,” Mann tells TNW on a video call from LA.  All those f-bombs were pushing Fall towards an R rating, which would slash the potential audience. To secure the PG-13 needed to extend the…

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In the 1977 Star Wars film A New Hope, there’s an iconic scene where the beloved droid R2-D2 casts a beam of light to create a hologram of Princess Leia pleading for the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sadly, almost 50 years on, we’re not much closer to the true holograms science fiction promised us, let alone the teleportation devices and flying cars.  Yes, we have AR and VR headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens or Apple’s Vision Pro, but those simply use transparent screens to give the effect of a hologram. Even Tupac’s famous “live” Coachella performance 16 years after his death…

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Our growing reliance on technology at home and in the workplace has raised the profile of e-waste. This consists of discarded electrical devices including laptops, smartphones, televisions, computer servers, washing machines, medical equipment, games consoles and much more. The amount of e-waste produced this decade could reach as much as 5 million metric tonnes, according to recent research published in Nature. This is around 1,000 times more e-waste than was produced in 2023. According to the study, the boom in artificial intelligence will significantly contribute to this e-waste problem, because AI requires lots of computing power and storage. It will,…

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