Exploring a distant moon usually means trundling around its uniquely inhospitable surface, but on icy ocean moons like Saturn's Enceladus, it might be better to come at things from the bottom up. This rover soon to be tested in Antarctica could one day roll along the underside of a miles-thick ice crust in the ocean of a strange world.

Google has joined Twitter in revising its political ad rules ahead of what promises to be a brutal election season. But while the latter chose to ban political advertising altogether, Google is mainly limiting the ability to target political demographics, and promises to take action against “demonstrably false claims.” In a blog post Wednesday afternoon, […]

If you wander into the Bandit coffee shop in Midtown New York, you won’t be able to just walk up to the counter and order something. Instead, you’ll need to download a mobile app. I experienced it for myself yesterday afternoon, when I — along with several other customers — pulled out my phone, downloaded […]

SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype encountered an explosive failure during early testing in Texas on Wednesday – you can see exactly what happened in the video below, but basically it blew its lid during cryogenic testing – a standard test that you use to see if the vehicle can hold up to extreme cold temperatures, like […]

Sonos revealed during its quarterly earnings report that it has acquired voice assistant startup Snips in a $37 million cash deal, Variety reported on Wednesday. Snips, which had been developing dedicated smart device assistants that can operate primarily locally, instead of relying on consistently round-tripping voice data to the cloud, could help Sonos set up […]

Apple announced today an expansion of its program designed to get more students coding. The company says it has redesigned the “Everyone Can Code” curriculum with a focus on introducing more elementary and middle school students to coding, while also adding more resources for teachers, a new student guide, and refreshed Swift Coding Club materials. […]

PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page […]

Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new bare metal service, dubbed the Bare Metal Solution. We aren’t talking about bare metal servers offered directly by Google Cloud here, though. Instead, we’re talking about a solution that enterprises can use to run their specialized workloads on certified hardware that’s co-located in the Google Cloud […]

User-first products are driving rapid company growth in an era where individuals discover, adopt, and share software they like, but what if your company doesn’t fit that profile?

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Spotify’s free music service will now stream on Alexa devices, plus Bose and Sonos smart speakers Spotify has worked with Amazon […]

The Mercedes-Benz EQC 400 4MATIC, the German automaker’s first all-electric vehicle under its new EQ brand, will start at $67,900 when it arrives in the U.S. early next year. Mercedes-Benz announced the price of the EQC 400 Wednesday at the LA Auto Show. The price, which doesn’t account for the $7,500 federal tax credit, is […]

Apple just released the iPhone 11 Pro’s battery case and it comes with a surprise: a button for the camera. This is a minor, but welcomed, addition to an otherwise standard battery case. The button is clever. It’s located on the bottom half of the case and is not a soft button that presses something […]

After a year of testing out environmental technologies for a private company, co-founder Patricia Ayma developed a process for bioplastic production using bacteria. The system turns organic matter, such as food waste, into a product that can be used as a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics. “I realized that it was a simple technology for […]

At its Cloud Next event in London, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian today announced that Smart Compose, the AI-powered feature that currently tries to complete phrases and sentences for you in Gmail, is also coming to G Suite’s Google Docs soon. For now, though, your G Suite admin has to sign up for the beta […]