Self-driving car startup Aurora is ready to go public in a reverse merger withReinvent Technology Partners Y,a special acquisition company (SPAC). The merger will give Aurora an infusion of cash to develop autonomous trucks and, later, self-driving passenger cars. Going public is not the norm for companies that don’t have a working and profitable business model. And what makes Aurora’s reverse IPO even more odd is that it comes at a time that theself-driving car industry is strugglingwith missed deadlines, shuttered projects, unsettled technical challenges, growing cash-burn rates, and loss of public trust....

Is Bitcoin a good hedge against the market? It depends on your horizon Bitcoin as a short-term hedge First, let’s see how differently Bitcoin has behaved on a day-to-day basis, compared to the S&P 500. To figure that out, we checked how often Bitcoin’s price went up when on a stock market trading day the S&P 500 also went up, and how often Bitcoin’s price moved down in tandem with the S&P 500....

Twitter is bursting over this “new autonomous electric train that does not need traditional tracks.” This is incredible!China ?? is testing it’s new autonomous electric train that does not need traditional tracks. It runs on a virtual track. Can go everywhere. pic.twitter.com/56505GeK1U — Erik Solheim (@ErikSolheim)May 19, 2021 To begin with, it’s notthatnew. The Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit (ART) guided articulated vehicle was developed back in 2013 by Chinese rail makerCRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Co....

Gaming catering to a Middle Eastern audience has seen many new developments in the last month. A new Facebook game likened to Farmville, Jordan-based Aranim’s gameHappy Oasis, racked up100,000 usersin 10 days. On the opposite side of the spectrum, an Egyptian iPad game,Egyptian Revolution (Jan 25)based on the Egyptian popular uprising, has been criticized for an attempt to cash in on events that led to the deaths of almost 1,000 people....

Is COVID-19 becoming milder? Here’s everything we know so far Slowly mutating It will take some time for the virus to acquire substantial genetic diversity. Sars-CoV-2 mutates fairly slowly for a virus, with any lineage acquiring acouple of changes every month;two to six-fold lowerthan the number of mutations acquired by influenza viruses over the same period. Still, mutations are the bedrock on which natural selection can act. Most commonly mutations will render a virus non-functional or have no effect whatsoever....