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During the worst days of the pandemic, a chip shortage may have stopped you from buying a Ford F-150 or Sony PlayStation. Now some of the $53 billion in federal funds to try to ease the problem could help boost a new chip manufacturing research center in Silicon Valley.Vice President Kamala Harris plans to visit…

Ice floats past the village of Ilulissat in Greenland. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty A staggering 217 billion tons (197 billion metric tons) of meltwater flowed off of Greenland's ice sheet into the Atlantic Ocean this July. The worst day of melting was July 31, when 11 billion tons (10 billion metric tons) of melted ice poured…

US drugmaker AbbVie just announced an agreement to buy pharmaceutical company Allergan for about $63 billion, the latest deal this year in which two big drugmakers are combining in hopes of accelerating growth. AbbVie also highlighted the opportunity for "synergies," or cost reductions, a common feature of big deals intended to maximize profit and reduce…

LaTasha Dennis recently had an 1,000-mile commute for a job. Dennis is a truck driver with 15 years in the industry, and part of that job includes driving "empty miles." These are miles during which the truck has no load and, because of that, the driver isn't getting paid. More than 20% of the miles…

It started with a cold email. Jason Kelly, the CEO of a then-fledgling biology startup called Ginkgo Bioworks, reached out to Sam Altman, the president of the Silicon Valley tech-startup accelerator Y Combinator, to say he appreciated a blog post that Altman had written. In the post, Altman had put out a call for life-science…

Welcome to Dispensed, your weekly dose of the biotech, pharma, and healthcare stories that kept Business Insider's healthcare team busy this week. I just got back from Seattle — stay tuned next week for some stories gathered from my adventures wandering around the city. We unfortunately had some technical glitches last week, so if you…

When SmileDirectClub goes public, it could give a number of investors a reason to grin. The company filed paperwork on Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for its initial public offering. According to the filing, the company is seeking to raise $100 million, though that's a placeholder amount that can change. SmileDirectClub is…

With $15.7 billion in equity funding in its pocket, the San Francisco, California-based ride-hailing company Uber has raised more money than any other tech startup in the country. But California isn't the only state in the union harboring highly-funded tech startups. Upserve CEO Sheryl Hoskins runs the most highly-funded startup in Rhode Island. Upserve In…

GitHub has made its first major update since Microsoft officially acquired the ubiquitous code-sharing service for $7.5 billion: It's giving away unlimited free hosting for private coding projects. With GitHub Free, developers can now host as many private coding projects they want for free. This is a big deal because, in the past, GitHub's free…

As overdose deaths climb, four of the nation's largest health corporations have agreed to a landmark $26 billion payout that state officials say will help ease America's deadly opioid epidemic.