Just two weeks after fleeing his home with barely more than the clothes on his back and the phone in his pocket, 23-year-old Ashot Gabriel is at a tech conference promoting one of the last things he has left: his startup. He is one of more than 100,000 ethnic Armenian refugees who were forced out of Nagorno-Karabakh in late September when Azerbaijani forces retook control of the breakaway enclave. Alongside his two brothers – who evacuated in a single car with their parents and a grandparent on 28 September – Gabriel is now attempting to start a new life from temporary accommodation in Armenia’s capital of Yerevan. “We lost our property, but we also lost ourselves,” he says. “We have lost our previous lives. We are starting everything from scratch.” His online marketing startup, Brothers in Business (BIB), was offered a last-minute stand at the DigiTech Expo, with organisers hoping that technology will help offer a solution for the country. As a landlocked nation lacking the natural resources of its historically hostile neighbours, Armenia’s nascent tech industry is seen as a way to achieve sovereignty and future stability in the long term, while also assisting with the humanitarian crisis in the short term. The country was once a tech hub in the region – one of the world’s first computers was built in Armenia – but much of Armenia’s talent left following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. A new scene emerged when émigrés returned to the country after finding success in Silicon Valley, establishing the country’s internet network and providing a foundation for startups to emerge. There are now an estimated 300 pre-seed-stage startups in Armenia, and around 100 seed-stage startups, in fields ranging from quantum computing to electric bikes. “We have this vision: Tech is the ultimate direction that will help Armenia to succeed,” says Narek Vardanyan, CEO of Prelaunch.com, whose company acts as a platform to help local startups establish themselves on the market. “We are landlocked, we have no natural resources. All we have is talent. And our only way we can develop is technology,” he says. “We don’t have a backup plan. There is no Plan B. We are betting everything on technology.” Armenia’s most successful startup so far is Picsart, an online photo editor that has grown to become the country’s only unicorn – a company with a valuation north of $1 billion. Picsart is among those offering their resources to help refugees, fast-tracking the launch of an educational program that will be offered for free to refugees and war veterans, training and reskilling them in everything from machine learning to graphic design. Hayk Sahakyan, a creative director at Picsart, says there has been a “huge number” of people interested so far, including children. This idea of building up Armenia’s tech industry through education can be found through two privately funded initiatives that are providing free courses in STEM subjects to tens of thousands of young people throughout the country. The first is TUMO, which provides free supplemental education to 12-18 year olds in creative technologies, ranging from game development to music. Since the first TUMO centre opened in Yerevan in 2011, dozens of centres have sprung up throughout Armenia and the rest of the world, including hubs in Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles. One of its six core centres and three smaller “Box” centres had to be abandoned during the Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh last month. “External circumstances can literally kill us. But whenever anyone asks me whether Armenia has a future, it’s here,” says Zara Budaghyan, head of communications at TUMO. “Technology has the potential to provide a more stable economy, but also better lives. International support has been lacking. We need to rebuild by ourselves. We are broken. But this gives us something to believe in.” The second educational initiative is a network of technology, science and engineering laboratories set up in rural communities, offering children from 10-18 free after school classes. Established by UATE – a business association that also runs the DigiTech Expo – several of the labs in Nagorno-Karabakh also had to be shut down in September. UATE chief executive Sargis Karapetyan, who grew up in the region, says around 200 of his relatives were among the refugees. Karapetyan considered cancelling the DigiTech conference, saying there is still a deep distrust of Azerbaijan. There are fears that the annex was only part one. The next stage, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken believes could happen “within weeks”, could be an invasion to establish a land corridor between the two parts of Azerbaijan. When asked what prompted the decision to persevere with the tech conference despite personal tragedy and the threat of further chaos, Karapetyan replies: "Technology will save the world.” Read More Scientists receive powerful ‘radio burst’ that travelled billions of years Mark Zuckerberg uses Meta’s new AI Ray-Bans to braid daughter’s hair Solar energy is set to eclipse fossil fuels as world passes ‘tipping point’ Scientists receive powerful ‘radio burst’ that travelled billions of years Mark Zuckerberg uses Meta’s new AI Ray-Bans to braid daughter’s hair Solar energy is set to eclipse fossil fuels as world passes ‘tipping point’

A gauge of Australia’s technology shares has advanced 20% so far in the second quarter, outperforming peers in

It feels like this year, more than any other, we’re seeing a stream of science stories that continue to blow our minds. Every day is a school day online in 2023, and a host of studies, research papers and headline-making breakthroughs have completely changed our understanding of the world around us at every turn. There have been missions to the moon and findings about our planet which could turn everything we thought we knew on its head – not to mention baffling hearings on UFOs taking place in the US congress. These are the biggest science stories so far this year that have caught our attention in a big way. 'Alien corpses' unveiled in Mexico divide conspiracy theorists Christmas has come early for UFO watchers, with the alleged corpses of real-life aliens displayed for the world to see. The startling revelation came during a congress hearing in Mexico City on Tuesday, titled the Public Assembly for the Regulation of Unidentified Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (UAP). During the session, which was streamed online, Mexican ufologist Jaime Maussan presented what he claimed were two perfectly preserved “non-human entities”. Read more here. Buy now , Massive ocean discovered beneath the Earth's crust containing more water than on the surface People are only just realising that there’s a massive ocean hidden under the Earth’s crust. It turns out there’s a huge supply of water 400 miles underground stored in rock known as 'ringwoodite'. Scientists previously discovered that water is stored inside mantle rock in a sponge-like state, which isn’t a liquid, solid or a gas, but instead a fourth state. Read more here. Buy now , Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

South Africa is setting up an office to facilitate private investment in the water industry in a bid

The Windows XP activation algorithm has been cracked offline using Linux, The Register reports. According

Fans can participate in the Modern Warfare 3 live event by loading into a limited-time playlist in Warzone Season 5 on Aug. 17.

KFW, the German development bank, has offered a €200 million ($214 million) loan to South African power utility

Karpowership won environmental authorization for one of three ship-mounted power plants it wants to connect to the South

With Elon Musk’s Twitter suffering yet another catastrophic outage (which has seen the Tesla and SpaceX founder implement temporary limits on how many tweets we can view in a day), users are once again looking for a rival platform to evacuate to. Previously it was the likes of Post and Mastodon - the latter of which Musk hated so much he restricted users from linking to their new accounts on Twitter - but now it’s the turn of Bluesky to get all the hype. Backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the platform claims to offer “an open and decentralised standard for social media” – “decentralised” meaning users don’t have an account under one ‘centralised’ company owned by one particular company, but can instead sign up to individual servers and communities owned and managed by other people. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It's already proven popular, with surreal social media poster Dril and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already signed up. In fact, after Twitter’s latest blunder, invite codes to Bluesky became so lucrative and sign-ups became so intense that they had to temporarily pause new registrations (they’ve reopened them now, though, if you fancy a try). And while others are considering whether to jump ship to the rival site, or desperately hunting for the code which will let them in, some Twitter users were reminded of a legendary rock band thanks to the platform’s choice of name: Yep, for a handful of individuals, the hit track from Jeff Lynne and his Electric Light Orchestra (or ELO) came to mind – and it’s perhaps made all the more amusing considering one of “Mr Blue Sky’s” lyrics is the rhetorical question, “where did we go wrong”. If Musk were to ask that question, we’d probably say firing almost half of Twitter’s workforce and therefore making it almost impossible to deal with the demand is part of the problem. And if you were wondering, a few searches on Bluesky appear to suggest that neither Lynne or ELO are on the platform. Indy100 has approached Lynne’s representatives for a statement, but they said the musician was unavailable for comment. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

WROCŁAW, Poland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 16, 2023--

Sister Sledge was right, we are family. It's well-known that all humans share a common ancestor but according to researchers almost all Europeans can trace that back to one guy. That guy is Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. In 2013, scientists Peter Ralph and Graham Cooper published a study indicating that all Europeans are descendants from the same people, mainly from the ninth century. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Charlemagne, who lived during the 800s allegedly produced eighteen children with seven different women. By number standards, this means that people of European decent are most likely related to Charlemagne in some way. Celebrities like Bill Hader and Brooke Shields have revealed that they share the common ancestor. Even Sir Christopher Lee is a descendant of the Holy Roman Emperor. And if you're European, you probably are too. According to Scientific American, "because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him." Some Europeans who take a DNA tests can see even their lineage directly traced back to the common ancestor. But before you jump at the chance to see for yourself, more than likely it won't pop up- even if you are a descendant of the Roman Emperor. This is because bloodlines have been diluted and not all genes are passed on from parent to child. So while you may be vaguely related to Charlemagne, you may not carry any of the same genes. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government will on Wednesday approve a top-up of Germany’s special Climate and Transformation Fund by