The photo made a splash on social media: General Sherman, the majestic 2,000-year-old Californian sequoia tree with a 36-foot circumference, its craggy trunk shining with silvery aluminum foil wrapped all around it to protect from potential wildfires. Like a baked potato in the oven, commenters said.
California-based Firezat, which is currently the only company in the U.S. that sells this…
Read more
Grindr LLC, the dating app that specializes in connections for the LGBTQ+ community, is rolling out new benefits to support employees seeking gender affirmation surgery, joining other companies that are endeavoring to help employees receive care that is sometimes difficult to access.
Under the new benefits, which have been in the works for about nine months and became available to employe…
Read more
China’s steel industry is entering a precarious new era as a worsening property crisis imperils demand and Beijing’s construction-led growth model looks increasingly untenable.
Almost a third of China’s steel mills could go into bankruptcy in a squeeze that’s likely to last five years, Li Ganpo, founder and chairman of Hebei Jingye Steel Group, warned at a private …
Read more
Alison Phillips, an associate professor of psychology at Iowa State University, grew so, so tired of using the elliptical machine in her home, day after day, for over a year during the pandemic. First off, the repetition was aching her feet. But even worse, it hurt her mind. “It’s boring,” says Phillips. “Same thing, all the time.” So two weeks to the day after Phi…
Read more
LONDON — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Tuesday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc’s competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals.
Apple banned app developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app,” said the…
Read more
Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley is stepping down amid a U.K. regulatory probe into how he characterized his ties to the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Staley, 64, is leaving Monday, according to a statement. C.S. Venkatakrishnan, who was promoted last year to run the Barclays markets division and was previously chief risk officer, will replace him as CEO.
<…
Read more
Researchers at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, are working on a new way to understand what’s happening in people’s minds. On August 31, the company announced that research scientists in its AI lab have developed AI that can “hear” what someone’s hearing, by studying their brainwaves.
While the research is still in very early stages, it’s intended…
Read more
The European Union is expected to finalize the details of a 9 billion euro ($9.5 billion) financial package for Ukraine in the coming days to bolster the war-torn nation.
The new macro-financial assistance program for Kyiv would consist of 25-year loans, with a 10-year grace period to reimburse the principal, three E.U. officials said, who added that interest payments would be covered by …
Read more
“The pandemic has had a great deal of impact on everybody. It’s made a lot of people try not to take life so seriously—so they’ve decided to do something impulsively that they maybe wouldn’t even have thought about doing before.”
(Bloomberg) — The skyrocketing price of shipping goods across the globe may hit your pocketbook sooner than you think — from that cup of coffee you get each morning to the toys you were thinking of buying your kids.
Transporting a 40-foot steel container of cargo by sea from Shanghai to Rotterdam now costs a record $10,522, a whopping 547% higher than the seasonal average over…
Read more