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Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show how homes and offices might be built a decade from now. The project is a sort of huge sculptural planter, “hanging gardens” inspired by the legendary structures in the ancient city of Babylon. (Incidentally, it was my ancestor, Robert Koldewey, who excavated/looted the famous Ishtar Gate to the place.) Begun in 2019, Semiramis (named after the queen of Babylon back then) is a collaboration between human and AI designers. The general idea of course came from the creative minds of its creators, architecture professors Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler . But the design was achieved by putting the basic requirements, such as size, the necessi

Fairphone , the Dutch social enterprise dedicated to making consumer electronics (more) sustainable and ethical, including by supporting repairability so that users can hold onto their hardware for longer, has announced public testing of Android 10 for the six-year-old Fairphone 2 . Owners of the modular handset that was first released back in 2015, running Android 5, should expect to be able to upgrade to Android 10 (released date: 2019) in early 2022, Fairphone said today, announcing the beta rollout of the upgrade. Meet the tiny phone company that’s making modularity sustainable Fairphone stopped producing (but not supporting) the Fairphone 2 back in 2018 — going on to release the Fairphone 3 (in 2019); the Fairphone 3+ (in 2020; also available as a modular upgrade to the 3); and, earlier this fall, the Fairphone 4 , its first 5G handset — which it said would be supported until at least 2025. Given the Fairphone 2’s impending update to Android 10 next year — which will

Belkin has a new 3-in-1 wireless charger that’s tailor made for iPhone and Apple Watch owners, and that also provides MagSafe 15W charging speeds for iPhone 12 and 13, along with fast charging for the latest Apple Watch 7 series. Belikin also introduce a new standalone portable fast charger for Apple Watch that includes an integrated USB-C cable and also offers fast charge compatibility for Series 7 models. The Belkin “ BOOST↑CHARGE PRO 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Pad ” which is too much of a mouthful and will henceforth be referred to as the 3-in-1 charger, has a MagSafe 15W wireless charger for your iPhone as mentioned. It also includes a standard Qi-compatible wireless charging pad that you can use to power up your AirPods, and there’s an adjustable Apple Watch charging puck that supports fast charging as mentioned above. The adjustability of the Watch puck is a nice touch, giving you freedom to charge either lying flat or upright in Apple Watch’s ‘nightstand mode,’ and there’s a clev

If you had “my shower head needs a small turbine, a Bluetooth connection, an app and a fine-spray mist” on your 2021 bingo card, congratulations, you win the prize. The prize is knowing that Hai exists — and this fine news story, which will tell you all about how the company raised $6 million to get all up in your biz. And we’ll probably have some good, clean fun — i.e. shower puns — thrown in for good measure. A propos good measure, that, in a nutshell, is kind of the point of Hai. The founders claim that your daily de-grimification routine is one of the biggest users of water in a residential context. A lot of people care about the environment, but how do you know how much water you actually blast through on your way to a haven of godliness-adjacency? The answer is some really expensive electronics, or this (possibly equally expensive) $250 shower head. Hai is designed to be easy to install and remove using just your hands. Aimed in particular at apartment-dwellers who want “a spa

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’ve got lots of them. We’re just starting to roll out this year’s gift guides, so check back from now until the end of December for more!  For this year’s STEM toy gift guide we’ve split out our recommendations by age for easier navigation. The 20+ gift ideas (below) run the gamut from train sets controlled by colorful blocks, to robots that can draw, all the way up to a cute DIY handheld gaming console that’s really an experimental platform for teens to build on. Gifts we’ve selected hit a range of price points — starting at $15 and topping out at just under $550 (for all the educational LEGO your kid could ever need!), with a spectrum of price-points in between. The learn-to-code category as a whole continues to mature, showing a strengthening (and welcome) focus on art and design, not just pure engineering. At the same time, it’s clear that sustaining a business selling educational gizmos/games is chal

Cognixion, a startup designing an intuitive brain-monitoring headset and interface for people with physical disabilities, has raised a $12M A round to pursue its accessibility ambitions. Armed with this funding, it should be able to complete the long list of requirements necessary for any medical or assistive device to be made widely available. The company, which I covered in detail in May, makes a headset that uses electroencephalography to detect certain patterns of brain activity, which are then used to guide a cursor and navigate a full-featured interface. It uses an iPhone as its own “brain” and for a display, and connects to accessories like speakers and accessibility devices so that the user can do everything they need to in a single UI. The advance it’s all built on is a new type of (non-invasive) electrode and a machine learning system that quickly interprets the signals produced by the ones embedded in the headset. While EEGs are useful, they are generally slow and noisy,

Audio processing startup Mimi promises to make a personalized hearing profile for you, meaning that you can hear well without having to crank the volume up too loudly. This both helps prevent hearing loss, and it helps people who’ve already suffered some hearing loss to be able to hear their content better without having to incur additional damage to their hearing. In theory, as a science project, that sounds pretty rad, but as a company, there’s an obvious problem: Unless the technology makes its way to the products we use to listen, it’s all a bit academic. You can’t help people unless the technology is available in products. This week, Mimi announced it has a big-name breakthrough on that front, and announced some major partnerships. The company’s tech making its way into household name audio products is a huge win for the company — and for our collective hearing health. Philipp Skribanowitz, CEO and founder of Mimi, on the TechCrunch Battlefield stage in 2014 Mimi was on the