WELL, IT WASN’T the stylus.
After months of silence following a global recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone last October, Samsung disclosed its lengthy findings as to what caused the device’s batteries to overheat and catch fire. Based on the company’s own investigation and independent scientific analysis of the issues by three consulting bodies, the overheating was caused by separate problems in batteries sourced from two different suppliers.
If there was ever a time to give President Obama a standing ovation, today is the day. And GIFs—lots of them—are helping make it happen.
To offer Obama one final thank-you for the past eight years, Deep Focus came up with a way to let everyone give the president a round of applause. The agency created The Standing O, a microsite that collects user-submitted GIFs of people giving Obama a standing ovation that then become a mosaic of Obama himself. So far, thousands of people have submitted videos of themselves applauding the president, resulting in a recreation of the image of Obama that appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in 2008
Attention all businesses: Upgrade from Windows 7 or risk serious security consequences. That’s the message Microsoft is sending this week with the news that extended support for the 8-year-old operating system is set to end in 2020.
In other words, the Windows 7 operating system will stop receiving security patches altogether on Jan. 13, 2020. Companies that haven’t updated to Windows 10 will leave themselves vulnerable to malware attacks that the newer operating system can easily fend off. In fact, Microsoft recently published a report showing that Windows 10 Anniversary Update — the most current iteration of the OS — could neutralize two zero-day security exploits, even without the patches that have been needed to protect Windows 7 and other, earlier versions of Windows.
One of the longest train journeys in the world has just ended.
The first freight train from China to the U.K. rolled into London on Wednesday, more than two weeks after it left the Chinese port city of Yiwu. The journey covered nearly 8,000 miles.
“It is hoped this will further improve trade ties between China and the U.K.,” said Richard Doubtfire, seafreight director at Brunel Shipping & Liner Services, one of two British companies handling logistics for the journey.
The China Railway Express train left Yiwu on Jan. 1. It passed through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France over the course of its 18-day trip before entering the U.K. through the Channel Tunnel.
As first announced back in October, Twitter is about to shut down its looping video app and social network, Vine. The company had originally implied it would pull the Vine app from the app stores, but later said it would transition it to a new, low-maintenance app called Vine Camera instead. Ahead of this, Vine’s website and app were updated to allow you to export your Vines for posterity, if you couldn’t bear to lose them.
Vines can be exported until some point today from the vine.co website, or from the iOS or Android application. The Vine website currently says you can download your Vines “only until January 17, when the apps become the Vine Camera,” but the mobile app’s banner says the app will actually be updated tomorrow.
In any event, you have only hours left to grab your Vines before they’re gone.
JCPenney could close up to 30% of its stores, or roughly 300 of its more than 1,000 locations, within the next two years, according to a Cowen & Co. report.
The department store chain has largely avoided mass store closures in recent years, but the rise of ecommerce is now forcing the company to reassess its store base, Cowen & Co. analyst Oliver Chen told Business Insider following a meeting with JCPenney management.
“They are proactively evaluating everything,” Chen said.
He predicts that in the next one to two years, the company will close 100 to 300 of its 1,014 stores.
JCPenney CEO Marvin Ellison has publicly confirmed that the company is considering closures.
QUANTUM COMPUTING IS real. But it’s also hard. So hard that only a few developers, usually trained in quantum physics, advanced mathematics, or most likely both, can actually work with the few quantum computers that exist. Now D-Wave, the Canadian company behind the quantum computer that Google and NASA have been testing since 2013, wants to make quantum computing a bit easier through the power of open source software.
Traditional computers store information in “bits,” which can represent either a “1” or a “0.” Quantum computing takes advantage of quantum particles in a strange state called “superposition,” meaning that the particle is spinning in two directions at once. Researchers have learned to take advantage of these particles to create what they call “qubits,” which can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. By stringing qubits together, companies like D-Wave hope to create computers that are exponentially faster than today’s machines.
How healthy are people in the U.S.? A new federal report shows that although the country has made progress in some areas, such as increasing how much exercise people get and lowering the number of teens who smoke cigarettes, it’s fallen behind in others, particularly in taking care of mental health.
The new report, published today (Jan. 11) by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), detailed the country’s progress in meeting a set of 10-year national health goals that were set in 2010 as part of an initiative called Healthy People 2020.
The initiative called for improvements in 26 different measures of public health, covering a wide range of areas including access to health care services, mental health, quality of the environment, and rates of injuries and violence
On the 350 acres they farm in Vineland, N.J., Richard Marolda Sr. and his son, Richard Jr., grow 30 different kinds of produce. They raise beets and bok choy, peppers and radishes, four varieties of lettuce and even dandelion greens. But when the Marolda’s phone rang last year, the customer on the other end wanted just one thing: beefsteak tomatoes.
“Lucky for us,” Richard Jr. said, “we had what they wanted, and they wanted what we had.”
The caller was the Campbell Soup Company, located 31 miles north in Camden, and Campbell’s didn’t just want beefsteak tomatoes; it wanted every single beefsteak tomato on the property. The Maroldas combed their fields and found a thousand pounds of tomatoes. Campbell’s bought it all.
Up in Camden, a secret project was in the offing. On a recent trip to the company vault, Campbell’s R&D team had come across the original 1915 recipe for Beefsteak Tomato Soup, and decided to cook up a batch.
The mastermind behind one of the world’s most distinctive SUV brands says gender imbalance is hurting the automotive industry.
Land Rover design director Gerry McGovern, who works on the luxury brand’s newest models, said the industry needs more women.
“I think for a long time we’ve suffered [from] not having enough automotive female designers,” he said.
According to EY, women comprise only a quarter of the auto industry workforce. But they influence almost 80% of decisions to buy a car, according to market research firm Frost & Sullivan.
