Kiran Upadhyay

Well-known tech billionaire Sean Parker suffers from asthma and allergies so severe that he doesn’t know how many times he’s landed in the emergency room just for accidentally eating something that touched a peanut. He tells TechCrunch that at least 14 of those visits have happened since he’s been with his wife. “Nuts, avocados, shellfish, all of it. I was in the ICU for three weeks of my senior year,” he says. Given that there’s a genetic component to allergic reactions and that he’s the proud father of two, this concerns him. Parker is handing over $24 million of his own cash to fund research at Stanford to find the cure. The endowment will be used to build the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford, making this one of the largest private donations to allergy research in the United States. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the global population suffers from one or more allergic conditions. And according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immu...

Following threats from hackers responsible for large-scale server breaches and leaks at Sony, the entertainment studio has made the official decision to cancel The Interview, which was set to be released on Christmas Day. In a prepared statement (below), the company said that it was “deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie” and “extremely disappointed by this outcome.” Earlier today, the top five theater chains in North America (Regal, AMC, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment) announced that they would not be showing the film. This comes on the heels of threats from the hackers, a group calling itself the Guardians Of Peace, who said that people who are at or around a showing of The Interview will “be shown how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to,” and referencing 9/11. Given the severity of the threats and the withdrawal of major theaters from participation with the film, Sony has released a statem...

Why pay E*Trade $8 to buy or sell a stock when you can trade for free on Robinhood? After two years of development, $16 million in funding, and 500,000 waitlist signups, Robinhood finally hits the iOS App Store today. Robinhood lets you track the performance of stocks, and buy or sell them with just a few taps at no cost. The app could attract a younger, less wealthy demographic to the stock market because people can trade smaller amounts without having their potential earnings eaten up by the fees most brokerages charge. Instead, Robinhood makes money through interest on funds you hold with it or when you trade on margin, plus selling trade volume to stock exchanges. During my demo, I found Robinhood to be stylish, and easy to use — uncommon traits for financial apps. Robinhood hopes to onboard the waitlist within two months and then start adding those who signup today. But until then, anyone can use the app to just monitor stocks. Financial tech serial entrepreneurs Vlad Ten...

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile has come under attack from a large number of online trolls who are taking advantage of the opportunity to leave comments, including stickers, photos and other “meme” images, on the Facebook CEO’s public posts. The attackers are largely based in Brazil, and their barrage of comments and jokes have continued for several days now, nonstop. We’ve heard some reports, via tipsters, that the attack started as some kind of protest against the low reach of Facebook Pages, but that remains unclear. The messages and comments currently visible don’t speak to any specific agenda or complaint against Facebook or its founder, but rather seem to be random, and sometimes bizarre, posts typical to spam attacks instigated by trolls. The trolling is taking place on older posts which are further back on Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline. It appears the attacks began in the comments section of a post in May 2012 where Zuckerberg added a “life event” announcing his marriage ...

While this footage isn’t as exciting as I’d like it to be – I’d really prefer a big old gross close-up of a splayed knee joint – what it represents is pretty wonderful. Essentially, doctors at the Columbia University Medical Center have been able to print a knee meniscus using a degradable plastic scaffold and a protein growth system. The body then subsumes the printed object and turns the protein into a knee joint. “At present, there’s little that orthopedists can do to regenerate a torn knee meniscus,” said study leader Jeremy Mao in a release. “Some small tears can be sewn back in place, but larger tears have to be surgically removed. While removal helps reduce pain and swelling, it leaves the knee without the natural shock absorber between the femur and tibia, which greatly increases the risk of arthritis.” The scaffold isn’t just a plastic shell, however. It contains two human proteins, connective growth factor (CTGF) and transforming growth factor β3 (TGFβ3). The scaffold r...

Each year, Google releases a list of the topics we’ve collectively searched for the most over the past 12 months. Each year, I try and see how many I can guess beforehand. This year, I got about half. How many can you get? [Pro tip: remember, people generally search for depressing/scary stuff more than pretty much anything else.] Google released two lists this year — one for US search trends, and one for worldwide search trends. The lists are mostly the same, with just a few differences. US Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines Flappy Bird ALS Ice Bucket Challenge ISIS Ferguson Frozen Ukraine Global Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Flappy Bird Conchita Wurst ISIS Frozen Sochi Olympics The two lists are strikingly similar, save for the global list leaning toward Conchita Wurst and the Sochi Olympics in place of Ferguson and Ukraine. Interesting to note: this is t...

The Internet is like a delicate rainforest ecosystem. You remove one player and the rest suffer and die. That happened in Spain this week when the government there began cracking down on Google. The Spanish government is requiring the company to pay Spanish news providers every time their content appears on the site. The search giant will shut down Google News there in response and no content will be available from the country’s major newspapers including El Pais and La Vanguardia. As you can imagine, this is bad news. While newspapers have long claimed they can survive in the Internet Age without outside support, this is dead wrong. Given that the vast majority of news traffic comes from search – everything from “new laser printer” to “is betty white married” returns information from news sources – I can only imagine how much Spanish newspapers depend on Google for their reach and visitor count. According to the Spain Report, the Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association is now ...