Famous U.S. treasure hunter, Tommy Thompson found a trove of gold coins and bars on the floor of the Atlantic ocean back in 1988. The treasure came from the SS Central America, which sank to the bottom of the sea during a hurricane in 1857, along with at least three tons of California gold and its 425 crewmembers. The gold lay on the ocean floor for 180 […]
Apple’s competitors have clearly got a bit of an obsession with the MacBook Air. Following the ASUS ZenBook UX330UA, which blatantly copied the fruity ultraportable’s design, Acer has now released the TravelMate X349-M, a more affordable alternative with a similarly familiar look about it. With prices starting at less than £600 (inc. VAT), the TravelMate X349 inevitably lacks some of the finer features and superior performance of […]
It’s been a big month in theme parks in the UAE, with the official opening of Dubai Parks & Resorts in Dubai Sunday, news that IMG Worlds of Adventure are opening yet another venue, Legends, and Miral announcing that SeaWorld is coming to Abu Dhabi. By the time the Expo comes to the UAE in the year 2020, almost every popular movie and animation brand you can […]
A series of big events shaped financial markets in 2016. Here is a selection of FT analyses and commentary, alongside charts, highlighting a tumultuous year. The new year rout January proved brutal for investors. After just 10 trading days, global equity markets had lost more than $4tn of value, with sentiment hammered by fears about China’s economic slowdown and a depreciating currency. In turn, bond markets were […]
Digitizing analog processes can have steep learning curve. Robin Harris Even as a kid, I could see the visual difference between TV sitcoms – shot on videotape – and films. Video had a jarring sharpness that, paradoxically, made the picture less real. Films, with much higher resolution than video, looked more real, even though the motion blur and background softness – among other artifacts – are a […]
Our round-up of the week’s best comment and analysis from the Financial Times focuses on expectations of a Trump-presidency stimulus and the danger of complacency. The selection is taken from our Markets Insight and Smart Money columns, written by industry contributors and FT commentators. Wall Street might be too complacent about Donald Trump’s corporate tax stimulus and are not pricing in an upsurge in volatility, argues the […]
A new concept in energy harvesting could capture energy that is currently mostly wasted due to its characteristic low frequency and use it to power next-generation electronic devices. In a project funded by electronics giant Samsung, a team of Penn State materials scientists and electrical engineers has designed a mechanical energy transducer based on flexible organic ionic diodes that points toward a new direction in scalable energy […]
Google Home just got more conversation actions, gaining new tricks that now allow users to order pizza, search WebMD for matters of the health, get the latest news and more. This follows the Netflix and Photos integration from earlier this month, adding to the versatility of Google Home and allowing users to handle more tasks with voice commands. Conversation actions for Google Home are somewhat similar to the […]
If you are thinking of buying a new computer from Apple, now is the best time to do it since the company debuted several new models in October. Unlike the iPhones, which are regularly updated every year, Apple’s line of computers usually stay put for the next couple of years before they get an update. Compared to Windows computers, Apple’s lineup has always been pretty much straightforward […]
Microsoft is building out a number of “graphs,” or data indexes, across the company. There’s the Bing knowledge graph, the Office Graph, and now, the LinkedIn professional graph. This week, the company announced plans to add another graph to its stable: A “world graph.” It’s partnering with HERE, TomTom, and Esri to build this geographic data index. The data in the coming world graph isn’t just about […]
The array of LG smartphones that will make a splash in the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has already been leaked. Now, it is the turn of LG’s monitors and they are getting headlined by an HDR-compatible 32-inch UHD 4K monitor. In a press statement, the South Korean company claims that with the 32UD99 4K HDR monitor, it will effectively push the industry to the next […]
By EconMatters We discuss a preview of January`s Earnings releases and how massive the gap down in most of these stocks will be when they report in a month. There have already been two earning`s guide downs from industrial companies this past week in UTX, and HON. But with the run up in financials and energies for the last month we are going to experience big $5 […]
Christmas is coming: an event as exciting for the toymakers hoping to fill stockings with this year’s hottest new playthings as it is for the children who will open them on December 25. Expectations of a bumper festive period have brought early Christmas presents for investors in companies such as Spin Master, Hasbro and Nintendo — manufacturers behind some of the biggest hits — that have all […]
The smart home is gaining ground, but it’s still a muddle of confusing standards, competing platforms, and gadgets that don’t do what you might expect. But the promise of products that can make your life a little easier is hard to resist, so I’m here to answer the inevitable questions that arise. Whether it’s figuring out the best connected door lock to assembling the right […]
To do otherwise, he said, would have required the United States to be “all in and willing to take over Syria.” Continue reading the main story The recent developments in the Syrian conflict send a message to autocratic leaders in the region and elsewhere that force works — and brings few consequences, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. The lesson […]
BP will take a 10 percent stake in Abu Dhabi’s ADCO onshore oil concession for 40 years under a deal signed on Saturday with Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Petroleum Council and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the latter said. Under the deal signed in Abu Dhabi, BP agreed to issue new ordinary shares representing approximately 2 percent of its issued share capital (excluding treasury shares) which […]
Credit: American Chemical Society Electronic-skin prototypes are stretchy, thin films that can sense temperature, pressure and even monitor blood oxygen or alcohol levels. But most of these devices are missing a key feature of real skin that allows us to feel a wider range of conditions: hair. Now researchers have combined hair-like wires with electronic skin to make a more versatile sensor for robots, prosthetics and other […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
‘You can’t put a price tag on anybody’s life’ Two years after the overdose that killed her 21-year-old son, Terri Bartlett traveled to Illinois’ state capital to champion an unlikely cause: revamped painkillers. Bartlett’s son Michael became hooked on Vicodin and later graduated to heroin. In emotional testimony last year, she urged lawmakers to support a bill that would prioritize the new harder-to-crush pills, saying she believed […]
Earlier in the day, Kaler said in a statement that the suspensions were the result of an “Athletics Department decision based on values” — and not a direct consequence of the 10 players’ violation of the university’s code of conduct. Continue reading the main story “A bowl game is a wonderful reward for an excellent football season,” Kaler said. “It is my hope that our eligible football […]
Toronto worker Kristy Milland looks for data jobs that she can pick up to make ends meet. Image: Sam Santos/George Pimentel Photography This article originally appeared on TechRepublic. Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, […]
Kuwait’s foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to demand the release of four Kuwaiti nationals detained in the western Ahvaz region of Iran, it said in a statement published by state news agency KUNA on Friday. The ministry was coordinating with Iranian security authorities to press for visits to the men and to facilitate their release, the statement said. It did not elaborate on who the men […]
Low-frequency mechanical energy harvesting could provide as much as 40 percent of the power requirements for next generation smartphones and tablets. Credit: Wang Lab/Penn State A new concept in energy harvesting could capture energy that is currently mostly wasted due to its characteristic low frequency and use it to power next-generation electronic devices. In a project funded by electronics giant Samsung, a team of Penn State materials […]
There’s a great scene in The Big Short, the movie of Michael Lewis’ book about the mortgage crisis, where two shiny-suited brokers brag about how many loans they’ve been producing — for big commissions — to unsuitable borrowers. “We call those loans ‘Dorothys’ ‘cause they’re magic,” grins the one in black. “No credit, no income, no problem: just tap your shoes together three times and say ‘There’s […]
