Category: News and Views

Beyond Meat’s burger drips canola oil not blood | Money CNN

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A new burger is about to hit the market. It looks and cooks like it’s made of beef. But there’s one key difference — it’s entirely plant based.

Beyond Meat, which makes meatless products, claims its latest burger is “the closest thing to meat” that it’s ever created.

The Beyond Burger will be available at one Whole Foods in Boulder, Colorado on Monday and at other stores on the East Coast soon.

It’s the result of over seven years of research that the company undertook to “understand meat” and then “rebuild” the burger in a plant-based form.

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Deloitte report on peer-to-peer lending |Business Insider

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Deloitte just trashed the hype around the online lending industry.

The accountancy and consultancy practice has done a deep dive on the online lending industry, and its conclusions should make for devastating reading for anyone connected to the sector.

Deloitte concludes that marketplace lenders, more commonly called peer-to-peer lenders in the UK, “are unlikely to pose a threat to banks in the mass market,” according to Neil Tomlinson, Deloitte’s head of UK banking. The report concludes that the platforms “will not be significant players in terms of overall volume or share.”

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Scotland Will Be Home To The World’s Largest Floating Wind Farm | Co.Exist

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Offshore wind farms are getting more practical, partly because of a new technology that allows them to float. Scotland, or rather the ocean off Scotland’s coast, will soon become home to the world’s largest installation of the technology.

The Hywind Park will consist of five floating six-megawatt turbines, anchored in water over 330 feet deep, and situated 15-22 miles from land. The project, conceived in 2014 and recently given the go-ahead, has previously been called the “world’s first floating wind farm,” and now is apparently the largest.

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Nokia Is Plotting A Big Comeback to the Phone Business | WIRED

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THAT BRAND YOU like is going to come back in style. Maybe.

Today Nokia announced that it will license its brand to a new Finnish company founded by former Nokia execs. The company, Global HMD, plans to use the Nokia brand to sell Android-based phones and tablets.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, which acquired Nokia’s handset line in 2014, is selling its feature phone line to manufacturing giant Foxconn’s FIH subsidiary for $350 million. These “dumb phones” will also carry the Nokia brand; HMD will sell and market them for FIH (got that?).

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Jail sentence for YouTube pranksters | BBC News

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Four members of the controversial Trollstation YouTube channel have been jailed in connection with fake robberies and kidnappings.

The group were involved in a fake robbery at London’s National Portrait Gallery and a fake kidnapping at Tate Britain in July 2015.

The channel, with 718,000 subscribers, has built a reputation for filming staged pranks around the city.

A fifth member was imprisoned in March following a bomb hoax.

“The hoaxes may have seemed harmless to them, but they caused genuine distress to a number of members of the public, who should be able to go about their daily business without being put in fear in this way.

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uBeam: Ex-engineers doubt it can work | Business Insider

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The idea was audacious from the start.

In 2011, Meredith Perry and Nora Dweck took the stage at a high-profile tech conference and demonstrated how you can charge your phone wirelessly by beaming ultrasonic rays at it.

Since then, the company has amassed over $23 million in venture funding to get rid of the power cord altogether.

The only problem? The company likely won’t be able to deliver on the promise, according to some of its former engineers.

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Microsoft Abandons Controversial Windows Feature that Shared your Wi-Fi Password | Money CNN

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One of Windows 10’s most controversial features is getting kicked to the curb.

Microsoft announced that it will kill off Wi-Fi Sense in an upcoming Windows 10 update. The feature made a lot of folks uneasy because it shared your Wi-Fi password with all of your Facebook friends’ computers, as well as those belonging to your Skype and Outlook.com contacts.

That’s not what undid Wi-Fi Sense, though. Microsoft said it took a lot of manpower to maintain, and customers just weren’t taking advantage of it.

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The Next New York City Breweries Will Be For Recycling Food Waste | Co.Exist

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In 16 years, if all goes as planned, New York City will no longer send any trash to landfills. That includes the million-plus tons of food waste the city generates every year. But, like other cities that are trying to recycle organic waste, New York faces a challenge: there aren’t yet enough places to take it.

The biggest composting facility on the East Coast was closed in 2014 because it smelled so foul, a problem compounded by the length of time it took the food to break down. Composting might work well if everyone had a backyard. But it turns out that it’s a tricky thing to scale up, especially for the amount of food thrown out in a large city.

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