We’re getting into the colder months of the year (at least in the northern hemisphere). If you haven’t done so already, it’ll soon be time to switch on the heating. Rather than make manual adjustments to the thermostat throughout the day, why not let a smart version take care of the heavy lifting? As luck would have it, Google’s Nest Thermostat is back on sale.
The device . That’s $45 off the regular price but some way off the record low of $61 it dropped to a year ago.
Google
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Google’s Nest Thermostat is on sale for $85. It’s a helpful way to optimize your home’s temperature and save money.
This is a more affordable version of the Nest Learning Thermostat and should do the trick for many people. When you leave your home, the Energy Star-certified Nest Thermostat can automatically adjust the temperature to prevent wasting energy on heating or cooling.
The Nest app allows you to tweak the settings remotely. This can come in especially handy if you’re going to arrive home at a different time than usual. You can delay a temperature change or make it kick in earlier so your home’s at the optimal level of warmth while minimizing energy waste.
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The thermostat can be controlled via Google Assistant and other Matter-certified assistants such as Siri and Alexa. There’s also a Savings Finder feature. This offers suggestions on how to tweak your temperature schedule to keep your costs lower.
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Get an insider’s view of what the judges look for in a viable company as they provide detailed feedback on their evaluation criteria. Don’t miss the chance to learn from their expert insights and discover the crucial traits that lead to startup success, only at Disrupt 2024.
We’re excited to introduce our next set of investors who will evaluate the startups and dive into each pitch with a thorough and probing Q&A session. Stay tuned for our last group of judges to be announced soon!
Galym Imanbayev is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on health tech and services investments. Galym’s interest in health is rooted in his childhood experiences growing up in Kazakhstan following his father on rural medical trips. Galym serves as a board member or board observer on Abridge, Aledade, Ancora, Fathom, Soda Health, and Wheel. Galym also spent time as an investor at Martis Capital. He completed his BA, MD, and MBA degrees at Stanford University, where he served as the graduate representative on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.
Rohan Ganesh, Partner, Obvious Ventures
Rohan is a partner at Obvious Ventures, where he invests in companies at the intersection of science, technology, and healthcare. He supports several companies as a board director or observer, including Inceptive, Inato, Pi Health, Gandeeva Therapeutics, Anagenex, and LabGenius. Prior to joining Obvious, he led venture investments in healthcare technology, biotech, and diagnostics at Verily Life Sciences, a Google spinout, and at Northpond Ventures, a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture firm. He worked as product manager for CompuGroup Medical (leading EMR company in Europe) and in Verily’s computer-aided disease detection and machine learning team.
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Lisa Morales-Hellebo, Founder and Managing GP, REFASHIOND Ventures
Lisa has 28 years experience in tech, design and systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and community building, and has recently added VC to her list of titles as founder and co-managing GP at REFASHIOND Ventures: the Industrial Transformation Fund — a New York-based venture fund that invests as the first institutional check in early-stage startups refashioning industrial value chains across data and AI, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, and next-generation logistics; defensible through economic moats. Lisa is catalyzing the paradigm shift to localized demand chains as CEO and founder of REFASHIOND OS (rOS), which is deploying a unified data layer and control tower across manufacturing value chains. She is also a founder of the Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, an organization that is changing how supply chain professionals learn about, collaborate, and adopt early-stage supply chain innovation around the world.
Andrew Schoen, Partner, NEA
Andrew Schoen joined NEA in 2014 and is currently a partner on the Technology Investing Team focused on AI/ML, fintech, frontier tech, infrastructure software, technically differentiated SaaS, and security. Andrew serves on the board of directors for Aigen, Clarifai, Dandelion, Super, ThreatQ, and Wispr; he also works closely with several other NEA portfolio companies and plays an integral role in the firm’s Asia investing practice. Prior to NEA, he was a member of Blackstone’s M&A Group. Prior to Blackstone, he founded Flicstart, a digital media startup that provided on-demand movie screenings.
Christopher Wan, Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners
Christopher Wan is a vice president in the San Francisco office, where he focuses primarily on early-stage deep technologies. Before joining Bessemer, Chris was at In-Q-Tel and Tusk Ventures, investing in companies at the intersection of technology and government. Chris was also part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, where he researched and wrote policy proposals on artificial intelligence. He began his career as a software engineer on Facebook’s News Credibility team.
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Hurricanes Helene and Milton – which have devastated parts of the south-east United States – have bookended an exceptionally busy period of tropical storms.
In less than two weeks, five hurricanes formed, which is not far off what the Atlantic would typically get in an entire year.
The storms were powerful, gaining strength with rapid speed.
Yet in early September, when hurricane activity is normally at its peak, there were peculiarly few storms.
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So, how unusual has this hurricane season been – and what is behind it?
It was thought that exceptionally warm Atlantic temperatures – combined with a shift in regional weather patterns – would make conditions ripe for hurricane formation.
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So far, with seven weeks of the official season still to go, there have been nine hurricanes – two more than the Atlantic would typically get.
However, the total number of tropical storms – which includes hurricanes but also weaker storms – has been around average, and less than was expected at the start of the year.
After Beryl weakened, there were only four named storms, and no major hurricanes, until Helene became a tropical storm on 24 September.
That is despite warm waters in the tropical Atlantic, which should favour the growth of these storms.
Across the Main Development Region for hurricanes – an area stretching from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean – sea surface temperatures have been around 1C above the 1991-2020 average, according to BBC analysis of data from the European climate service.
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Atlantic temperatures have been higher over the last decade, mainly because of climate change and a natural weather pattern known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
The recipe for hurricane formation involves a complex mix of ingredients beyond sea temperatures, and these other conditions were not right.
“The challenge [for forecasting] is that other factors can change quickly, on the timescale of days to weeks, and can work with or against the influence of sea surface temperatures,” explains Christina Patricola, associate professor at Iowa State University.
Researchers are still working to understand why this was the case, but likely reasons include a shift to the West African monsoon and an abundance of Saharan dust.
These both hampered storm development by creating unfavourable conditions in the atmosphere.
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But even during this period, scientists were warning that the oceans remained exceptionally warm and that intense hurricanes were still possible through the rest of the season.
And in late September, they came.
Starting with Helene, six tropical Atlantic storms were born in quick succession.
Fuelled by very warm waters – and now more favourable atmospheric conditions – these storms strengthened, with five becoming hurricanes.
Four of these five underwent what is known as “rapid intensification”, where maximum sustained wind speeds increase by at least 30 knots (35mph; 56km/h) in 24 hours.
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Historical data suggests that only around one in four hurricanes rapidly intensify on average.
Rapid intensification can be particularly dangerous, because these quickly increasing wind speeds can give communities less time to prepare for a stronger storm.
Hurricane Milton strengthened by more than 90mph in 24 hours – one of the fastest such cases of intensification ever recorded, according to BBC analysis of data from the National Hurricane Center.
Scientists at the World Weather Attribution group have found that the winds and rain from both Helene and Milton were worsened by climate change.
“One thing this hurricane season is illustrating clearly is that the impacts of climate change are here now,” explains Andra Garner from Rowan University in the US.
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“Storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton all strengthened from fairly weak hurricanes into major hurricanes within 12 hours or less, as they travelled over unnaturally warm ocean waters.”
Milton also took an unusual, although not unprecedented, storm path, tracking eastward through the Gulf of Mexico, where waters have been exceptionally warm.
“It is very rare to see a [category] five hurricane appearing in Gulf of Mexico,” says Xiangbo Feng, research scientist in tropical cyclones at the University of Reading.
Warmer oceans make stronger hurricanes – and rapid intensification – more likely, because it means storms can pick up more energy, potentially leading to higher wind speeds.
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What about the rest of the season?
US forecasters are currently watching an area of thunderstorms located over the Cabo Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.
This could develop into another tropical storm over the next couple of days, but that remains uncertain.
As for the rest of the season, high sea surface temperatures remain conducive for further storms.
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There is also the likely development of the natural La Niña weather phenomenon in the Pacific, which often favours Atlantic hurricane formation as it affects wind patterns.
But further activity will rely on other atmospheric conditions remaining favourable, which are not easy to predict.
Either way, this season has already highlighted how warm seas fuelled by climate change are already increasing the chances of the strongest hurricanes – something that is expected to continue as the world warms further.
“Hurricanes occur naturally, and in some parts of the world they are regarded as part of life,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
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“But human-caused climate change is supercharging them and exacerbating the risk of major damage.”
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Memes on the image-hosting service Imgur “containing references to adult humor” will no longer be considered mature, the company announced in a post addressing changes to its content moderation policies.
The changes announced this week could mean that you see spicier memes on the platform more easily. Under the previous rules, memes that were tagged as mature may not have been seen as often because users have to opt in to see mature content on Imgur.
Imgur is making the changes after it collected feedback about its content moderation over the course of this year, including that its policies, “especially surrounding mature content, feel inconsistently applied, too subjective, or just rather confusing as a whole,” according to a post from Imgur product manager Martyn O’Neill. Now, mature content consists “solely of sexualised or ‘lewd’” content.
Following the adjustments, O’Neill says that “warnings / post removals” are down nearly 35 percent month over month. Far fewer posts are being marked as mature as well; that stat has declined by almost 50 percent.
Sports analytics technology company TrackMan was unknowingly exposing sensitive customer data, researchers have warned.
Jeremiah Fowler, a security analyst known for tracking down unprotected databases, revealed new findings he determined belonged to TrackMan.
The database did not have a password, and contained 31,602,260 records – for a total of 110 TB, including sensitive customer data such as names, email addresses, IP addresses, and security tokens – plenty of information to run identity theft, phishing, and other malicious activities.
Ramifications of unsecured databases
After discovering the database, Fowler reached out to TrackMan, who restricted public access the same day. However, we don’t know for how long it was sitting out in the open, or if someone accessed it beforehand. We also don’t know if it’s TrackMan who manages this database, or if it is a third party.
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TrackMan is a technology company specializing in sports analytics, particularly for golf and baseball, with solutions used by the Golf Channel, BBC, and CNN World. It uses radar and imaging technology to track the trajectory and performance of balls and players with high precision. Athletes, coaches, and teams, use TrackMan’s detailed insights to improve performance on things like ball speed, launch angle, or spin rate. Its products are widely used in professional leagues, training facilities, and by broadcasters for enhancing sports analysis and fan experiences.
Unsecured databases remain a top cause of data breaches and leaks. They are often inadvertently exposed to the internet, either due to misconfigurations or oversight during deployment. Without basic security measures like password protection or encryption, they become easy targets for hackers, who can locate them using automated tools and web scanners. The simplicity of accessing these databases, often without needing to bypass any security layers, makes them highly vulnerable to unauthorized entry.
The ramifications of hackers finding such databases are severe. Businesses can experience financial losses, regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust. They can also face lawsuits, compliance violations, and long-term operational disruption.
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