A solar storm that jammed radar and radio communications at the height of the Cold War could have led to a disastrous military conflict if not for the U.S. Air Force’s budding efforts to monitor the sun’s activity, a new study finds. On May 23, 1967, the Air Force prepared aircraft for war, thinking the nation’s surveillance radars in polar regions were being jammed by the Soviet […]
JERUSALEM — Israeli prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Palestinian employee of the United Nations in the Gaza Strip with providing material assistance to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory, including helping to build a jetty for its military wing. The accusations against the employee, Waheed Al Bursh, came after Israel leveled charges Thursday against a Palestinian employee of World Vision in Gaza, saying he had […]
INTERNATIONAL. Wealth-X today released key highlights from its 2015-2016 Billionaire Census revealing a record number of billionaires, globally. The third edition of this preeminent report indicates that there are 2,473 total billionaires in the world, representing a combined wealth of US$7.7 trillion. These figures illustrate a 6.4% and 5.4% increase since 2014, respectively. Driven by Wealth-X’s unparalleled collection of hand curated dossiers on the ultra high net […]
Eyeing the opportunity to grow its e-commerce sales, Walmart today announced it will shell out $3.3 billion to acquire the online retailer Jet. Since launching a year ago, Jet has grown rapidly to reach $1 billion in merchandise sales. While Walmart dominates the brick-and-mortar retail ecosystem in the U.S., its online sales trail that of its greatest e-commerce competitor, Amazon. In 2015, Amazon reported net sales of […]
Recently uncovered security flaws could mean trouble for owners of devices that run the Android operating system. Researchers at security firm Check Point recently discovered the vulnerabilities, together labeled Quadrooter, which may affect as many as 900 million Android devices. Speaking about the discoveries last week at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas, Adam Donenfeld, Check Point’s lead mobile security researcher, revealed four new privilege […]
WASHINGTON — The Syrian military was foundering last year, with thousands of rebel fighters pushing into areas of the country long considered to be government strongholds. The rebel offensive was aided by powerful tank-destroying missiles supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia. Intelligence assessments circulated in Washington that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was losing his grip on power. But then the Russians arrived, bludgeoning […]
CAIRO — More than three months of peace talks to end the war in Yemen came to a halt Saturday, leaving in doubt the future of a shaky cease-fire and threatening to deepen what has a become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The United Nations’ special envoy on Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, announced the suspension on Saturday in Kuwait, where the talks were being […]
The fate of billions of dollars in investments in Turkish bonds hangs in the balance as Moody’s Investors Service prepares to reveal whether it’s handing the country a second junk rating on its debt. Moody’s, which put Turkey on review for a downgrade immediately after a failed military plot to oust the government last month, currently ranks the nation’s debt at Baa3, its lowest rung within investment […]
Quantum computing remains mysterious and elusive to many, but USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers might have taken us one step closer to bring such super-powered devices to practical reality. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Information Sciences Institute is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum optimization processors — […]
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that oil prices have probably bottomed out at about $40 per barrel after tumbling more than 20 percent in the past two months into a bear market. “It’s hard for me to imagine it going very much lower, but it could,” he said Wednesday, according to the transcript of a conference call organized by Rock Creek Group, an investment advisory […]
Today, Facebook officially took the wraps off what co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the “biggest and most advanced hardware lab” in the company’s history. Designed for Facebook engineers and designers working on everything from improved data center equipment to virtual-reality cameras, the Area 404 lab covers 22,000 square feet, “the size of half a football field,” at the company’s offices in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg said. […]
BREMEN, Germany — Believing he was answering a holy call, Harry Sarfo left his home in the working-class city of Bremen last year and drove for four straight days to reach the territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria. He barely had time to settle in before members of the Islamic State’s secret service, wearing masks over their faces, came to inform him and his German […]
INTERNATIONAL. New research from Long Finance, sponsored by PwC and conducted by Z/Yen, shows the wholesale insurance* market is enthusiastic about implementing blockchain solutions**. The report is based on interviews with brokers, insurers, reinsurers, regulators and trade bodies from across the global wholesale insurance market. As well as cost reduction and improved efficiency, blockchain could be a transformative technology changing the way the industry operates, enabling revenue […]
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person’s blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device. The device can be worn on the skin and could be used by doctors and police officers for continuous, non-invasive and real-time monitoring of blood alcohol content. The device […]
Ronan the sea lion can keep the beat better than any other animal, a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found out more. Whether it is Mozart, Hendrix, Miles Davis, or tribal drumming, few activities feel as uniquely human as music. And, indeed, for a long time, most scientists believed that Homo sapiens was the only species capable of creating and responding to rhythm and melody. This […]
INTERNATIONAL. – Higher GDP per capita alone does not determine real quality of life. This is according to the Social Progress Index (SPI) 2016 published recently by US-based nonprofit, the Social Progress Imperative. The Index ranks Finland the world’s most socially progressive country, Canada in second place tops the G7 nations. Economic growth is not the sole determinant of quality of life The 2016 Index finds that whist […]
Jack Ma, founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group speaks during the inaugural ”Xin” Philanthropy Conference in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, July 9, 2016. China Daily/via Reuters A Chinese consortium that includes game developer Shanghai Giant Network Technology Co Ltd and e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd founder Jack Ma has agreed to acquire Caesars Interactive Entertainment Inc’s online games unit for $4.4 billion in cash, the […]
Faster, higher, stronger: those are the three qualities captured in the official Olympic Games motto “Citius, altius, fortius”– to which some will want to add “dubious”. With doping seemingly rife in sport generally and the Russian Olympic team in trouble, it’s hard to see the Rio Games as the embodiment of the famous dictum of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, that it’s not the […]
Astronomers at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy’s disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, […]
Bears, wolves and other large carnivores are frightening beasts but the fear they inspire in their prey pales in comparison to that caused by the human ‘super predator.’ A new study by Western University demonstrates that smaller carnivores, like European badgers, that may be prey to large carnivores, actually perceive humans as far more frightening. Globally, humans now kill smaller carnivores at much higher rates than large […]
A worker climbs outside an Apple store in Hong Kong April 10, 2013. Reuters/Bobby Yip/File Photo HONG KONG Apple Inc found itself on the receiving end of a small, short-lived anti-U.S. protest this week in China, the tech firm’s biggest overseas market and a country where foreign firms have suffered damaging boycotts following international spats. A handful of unofficial Apple stores were picketed and social media users […]
INTERNATIONAL. Following the vote to leave the EU, the UK economy is expected to face challenges in the short term, with high levels of uncertainty leading to a slowdown in business investment and lower GDP growth. UK: In light of this, PwC has revised down its main scenario real GDP growth projection for the UK to 1.6% and 0.6% per annum in 2016 and 2017 respectively, down […]
Centipedes move quickly. And when one is coming directly at you, you might not care to spend a moment pondering its agility. So perhaps our lack of understanding about just why centipedes move with such dexterity, even over obstacles, has been related to fear. But undeterred, researchers at Kyoto University have asked precisely this question, and have turned to computer simulations and ultimately robotics to find an […]
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk attends a forum on startups in Hong Kong, China January 26, 2016. Reuters/Bobby Yip/File Photo Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O) chief Elon Musk’s ambitious new “master plan” provided a vision of the company as a leader in sustainable energy, but lacked details on how the plan would be funded and executed. Musk sketched out a plan on Wednesday for an integrated carbon-free energy […]
