Tech companies added fertility features just in time for the culture war

Anti-abortion groups are pushing back against hormonal birth control. | Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images Tech companies picked an interesting time to start including women’s and reproductive health in their products. For years, they sidestepped the issue: Apple didn’t include period tracking in its health app until 2015. Fitbit only added…

Snapchat Plus subscribers can now set their stories to run for an entire week

Snapchat Plus subscribers are getting a host of new features today that won’t be available to those who use the free service. | Image: Snapchat Snapchat is adding some new features today exclusively for its Snapchat Plus subscribers, which include custom notification sounds, colorful camera borders, and the ability to customize story expirations. Snapchat Plus,…

Researchers found what they believe is a 2,000-year-old map of the stars

Parchment from St. Catherine’s Monastery showing the tracings of older writings highlighted in yellow. (Museum of the Bible, 2021/CC BY-SA 4.0). Museum of the Bible Like a plot straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, a map of the stars created by Greek astronomer Hipparchus that has been missing for centuries has possibly been recovered….

9 stunning pictures of the microscopic realm

A tool called a confocal microscope, plus dye stains, captured the biological details of this gecko hand. Grigorii Timin & Michel Milinkovitch/Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Contest Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition celebrates the beauty of what we cannot see—unless we have the help of extreme magnification. The contest, which has been running for nearly 50…

One month after entering the spend management space, Rippling goes after global payroll

When Parker Conrad founded Rippling in 2016, the HR company initially focused on the process of onboarding employees. It has since evolved  to manage all aspects of employee data, from payroll and benefits, to the apps employees use, to a device management platform that enables Rippling’s customers to retrieve, wipe clean and store employee computers…

Battlefield bots

Greetings from the bowels of Moscone Center West. As I type this, Kevin Hart just exited the stage and Serena Williams is presiding over a packed house. No exaggeration: I attempted to make my way to grab a seat in the few rows up front allotted to the TechCrunch staff, but I physically couldn’t get…