Charted: Hong Kong’s housing market suddenly has echoes of the SARS era

Hong Kong’s housing sales hit a 25-year low in February.

in February. The March figure, which came in early this month, doesn’t look good either. The 2,369 residential homes that sold in March represent a 45% drop from a year ago, according to datafrom the government’s land registry.

Prices are plummeting too. Centaline Property’s Centa-city Leading (CCL) Index, which tracks used-home prices in Hong Kong, has dropped 13% from September’s historical peak to its lowest level since 2014.

That’s not to say things are cheap—Hong Kong remains the world’s least affordablehousing market, when based on income of local residents, thanks to buyers from mainland China, who continue to see Hong Kong property as a safer bet than stock markets, yuan, and property at home.

But this flow of money has been slowing, following Beijing’s crackdown on corruption and overseas investment—and it may never come back. Analysts at CLSA predict Hong Kong’s housing prices will drop another one-fifth in 2017.

There is no sign of a recovery in Hong Kong’s home prices this year, and the “best expectation” is that the CCL Index will fall to 120 points in the second quarter, down another 6% from the current position, said Wong Leung Sing, senior associate research director at Centaline.

The Hong Kong government—despite a weak economy both locally and in mainland China—appears to have no intention of relaxing certain policies to boost sales, Wong said. One example is the transaction tax, implemented at the end of 2012 in order to curb speculation. Under it, home buyers must pay up to 8.5% of a home’s value if they’re Hong Kong residents, and up to 15% if they’re not.

Sales of small and medium units are worse than those for luxury homes, because the economic slowdown hit the middle class harder than the super rich, Wong added.

New home sales will continue to gain market share, Standard & Poor’s Esther Liu wrote in a February research note, because there is “ample supply in the pipeline” and developers are cutting prices to get rid of inventory. New home sales accounted for 29% of total sales in Hong Kong’s home market in 2015, the highest since the SARS epidemic decimated the city’s housing market in 2003.

Making the market even weaker, developers in Hong Kong have been on a building spree despite signs the market is weakening. Some 87,000 private housing units will become availablein the next three to four years, the highest level since 2004, according to Hong Kong’s housing bureau. About 20,000 new units will go on sale in 2016, Ricacorp Properties estimates. This compares with total sales of 17,000 units in 2015 and 16,900 in 2014, Liu noted.

Centaline Property’s estimates are slightly lower, but still signal a lot of property coming on in a weak market:

“Home prices are right at the starting point of decline,” said Karman Lee, an agent with Ying Lok Property, which represents mostly used homes in Hong Kong’s western Sai Ying Pun neighborhood. The average price of used homes in the region dropped nearly 10% since the start of this year.

Property developers desperate to sell their homes have been offering big discounts since last July, said Ken Lee, a sales director at Centaline.

A new housing development at Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong Island. (Quartz/Wanxia Lin)

Lee is in charge of the sales at a property development launched this month in Hong Kong’s eastern Tseung Kwan O area. The project, which includes both luxury homes over HKD$10 million and small units priced at HKD$5 million, sold 211 out of 228 units in six days, thanks to the developer’s promotion, which covers 70% of the double “stamp duty,” or double transaction tax, for those who already own a home, and entirely wipes out the buyer stamp duty for dozens of units.

“The truth is, developers are more impatient to sell out new properties than before,” Lee said. “They are accelerating.”

Oil prices are plummeting again because big oil states failed to freeze their production

More evidence of mayhem among oil drillers has triggered a selloff in the market: Oil prices are down more than 5% in Monday trading in Asia, with no clear barrier to a continued plunge.

in the market: Oil prices are down more than 5% in Monday trading in Asia, with no clear barrier to a continued plunge. The bloodletting came within hours of a failed effortby members of OPEC and Russia to stem the 22-month oil market glut. Meeting April 17 in Doha, the petro-states couldn’t even agree to freeze current sky-high production, much less cut it.

When Asian markets opened Monday, traders bid down the price of Brent as low as $40.10 a barrel, and the US-traded benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, to $37.61. Ahead of the Doha meeting, traders, confident that the oil producers would freeze production, had bid up oil prices more than 30% from their lows in the current glut.

The producers—Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait, and other OPEC members, but not including Iran—met all day but broke up toward evening without a deal. Saudi Arabia insisted that there could be no agreement unless Iran froze production, too. But Tehran, which is just starting to recover from three years of oil sanctions, did not show up at all, refusing to go along unless it was permitted to first return to pre-sanctions production levels of 4 million barrels of production a day, roughly a million barrels more than now.

“Without Iran there was little hope of a real agreement,” said Jamie Webster, a Washington-based oil analyst. Like many analysts, Webster suggests that the era of OPEC controlling oil prices may be over. “The days of agreeing to rejigger supply through agreements and deals seems to be receding for now.”

Oil prices have been in a spiral for almost two years as Saudi Arabia, intent on halting the US shale oil revolution, refused to step aside and make room in the global markets for American oil drillers by cutting its own production levels.

In June 2014, the Saudis effectively declared war on shale by lowering their oil price and raising production. At the time, oil sold as high as $115.71 a barrel, and while Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC expected prices to fall a bit, no one expected them to decline as low and as long as they have.

When fellow OPEC members suggested that the Saudis cut their production to help stem the oil price slide, Riyadh said such a reduction would have no effect because the US would just keep producing, and, worse, grab market share itself.

The freeze that had been on the table at Doha was technically meaningless, because no one, except Iran, can produce much if any more than they already do. Indeed, the entire oil complex has been producing oil at maximum levels in a desperate effort to hold on to market share. Russia is at a three-decade high of 10.9 million barrels a day; Saudi Arabia has been producing 10.1 million.

However symbolic, though, a freeze would have been a signal to the market that the producers are trying to enforce some discipline.

Yet, a lot of traders were taking no chances and hedged heavily in the event this occurred.

#DohaTalks #Oiltraders bought lots of downside protection (put options) on Friday $WTIopens in less than 6 hours pic.twitter.com/RbMDVdNnMF

— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas2) April 17, 2016

Feminism’s greatest obstacle in the digital age is the commodification of women’s bodies

“SEND NOODZ.” Thirteen-year-old boys are real artists with their text messages.

“SEND NOODZ.” Thirteen-year-old boys are real artists with their text messages. What brevity! What charm! This all-caps imperative sets the tone for Nancy Jo Sales’s alarming new book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers .

Sales spent two and a half years interviewing over 200 teenage girls across 10 states about their online experiences. While heralded by many reviewers as a “harrowing” window into the teenage mind, Sales’ book is actually an early look at thingification–one of feminism’s greatest obstacles in the digital age.

By thingification, I mean the making of ourselves into “things”–commodities for others’ consumption. By turning our lives into a series of images, and attempting to be desired or “liked” by everyone, we end up in a state of alienation–both from others and from ourselves.

This state of being is at odds with the goals of feminism, which is at its core defined by “self-respect, and respect for others,” as Sales observes in her conclusion. It’s only by engaging with people IRL—in real life and in the flesh—that we can truly treat them as human beings, rather than as objects. One issue is the dehumanizing effect of screens, which create distance between people and frequently foster cruelty. But the larger problem is our constant need to reduce people to inanimate objects in order to easily categorize and describe them. “People wan[t] other people to be things so that they c[an] be dealt with,” writes the late lesbian feminist critic Barbara Johnson in her collection of essays Persons and Things . “Treating people as things [is what] we normally do, and that reassures us.”

“Everything’s about the likes”

“I guarantee you,” a 17-year-old girl named Teresa tells Sales, “every girl wishes she could get three hundred likes on her pictures. Because that means you’re the girl everybody wants to fuck. And everybody wants to be the girl everybody wants to fuck.”

Social media is an economy of the self—hence the rise of the “selfie.” Sharing a selfie has become a type of transaction. It is the price girls pay for attention. And attention is incredibly important to the girls Sales interviews.

“I think we have to think about whether that’s a healthy endeavor,” Sales contends in a recent interview with Teen Vogue, “to constantly be subjecting yourself to validation from others for ‘likes.’ Why give up your power to others to validate you?Why ask others, ‘Here I am, tell me how great I am, please? Like me, please?’ You’re giving others the power to say whether or not you are worthwhile, and very often it’s based on what you look like in a picture, because it’s all image-driven. It’s a false valuation of self-worth that I think girls are being drawn into.” Sharing a selfie has become a type of transaction. It is the price girls pay for attention.

At the same time, Sales acknowledges that it is unfair to chastise young women for being “drawn into” this sexualized economy. Their agency, she notes in her critique of “ choice feminism,” is circumscribed by a patriarchal power structure that equates women’s value with sex appeal. Furthermore, as Elspeth Reeve asserts in a piece at The New Republic, attention is a basic human desire. “Why is it bad that teenage girls want attention? American Girls does not say. I think it’s shorthand for a whole set of sexist assumptions … Everyone wants attention—from the fleeting acknowledgment of mere existence to the aching desire to be known, loved, and remembered after you’re gone.”

In this context, it makes sense that women would actively participate in the economy of the selfie. As 19-year-old Maya explained to Sales, “It got old to be the victim. For girls, it’s not getting us anywhere. It’s not building our case. It’s not getting us any more respect. So it’s like,” she says, referring to young women who sexual objectify young men on social media, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

In other words, if you can’t take the heat, go offline. Many young women want to play the game, however. They want to be power players in their society, just like their male counterparts. For this reason, they often see social media as empowering. Framed in the language of “choice,” this argument holds that young women can and should be able to project themselves across a variety of social media platforms in whatever way they please. Their body, their selfie.

Is empowerment power?

It’s unclear whether this kind of digital empowerment is truly effective. Take, for example, the recent debate over the nude selfies Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram. The reality star penned a letter calling her photo an act of empowerment. “I am empowered by my body,” she wrote. “I am empowered by my sexuality. I am empowered by feeling comfortable in my skin. I am empowered by showing the world my flaws and not being afraid of what anyone is going to say about me. And I hope that through this platform I have been given, I can encourage the same empowerment for girls and women all over the world.”

Not everyone agrees. As feminist critic Jill Filipovic points out in an essay for Cosmopolitan, “feeling ‘empowered’ is not the same as real, actual power.” “‘Empowerment’ is an empty catchphrase, a term used to salve over the near-total lack of power held by women and girls.” “‘Empowerment’ is an empty catchphrase, a term used primarily to salve over the near-total lack of power held by women and girls around the world, a kind of head-pat to keep us satisfied with subservience,” Filipovic explains. “‘Empowerment’ is apparently not about equitable allocation of resources, or influence in politics and policy, or really power at all. It’s shorthand for ‘I wanted to do this and it made me feel good.’”

Sales encounters a 19-year-old Hunter College student named Jenna who expresses similar skepticism about how we’re defining empowerment these days. “[My feminist class was] talking about how girls sending nudes of themselves through Tinder… most of the people in my class said that it’s totally cool to send nudes, because we have a choice to show our bodies to whomever we want—which is true, but everyone thought I was an asshole for objecting and saying, yeah, but it’s for a man’s benefit. Like, guys don’t see nudes and think, Wow, what an empowered woman, good for her for being comfortable with her body. They go like, Great, boobs; or like, She’s a slut for sending me pictures but, like, I’ll still sleep with her.”

If we’re not careful, our willingness to buy into thingification may result in the loss of a part of our humanity. These selfie skirmishes showcase the level of influence that the internet has over feminism in 2016. Democratic forums like Facebook and Twitter have given voice to the voiceless and visibility to the invisible. But while the internet is a productive conduit of communication, it is also an alienating one. Technology, from social media platforms to the smartphone and selfie stick, has become the tool we use to validate our existence to the world. If we’re not careful, our willingness to buy into thingification may result in the loss of a part of our humanity.

“Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people,” wrote German philosopher Theodor Adornoin 1951. At the dawn of a new, war-free world, Adorno was ruminating about the rapid societal changes caused by the intersection of capitalism and technology. So many years later, these thoughts encapsulate the paradox of life today–specifically in the multi-universes of social media.

Innovation has collapsed the space between people. We connect with one another through a click or a swipe. And yet because we feel like strangers to each other, it’s easy for us to treat each other as things. In fact, the erasure of interpersonal distance is what produces this estrangement. As Sales’ book shows, feminism’s concern should not lie with the moral indictment of young women for their participation in social media. Rather, feminism’s task in the digital age is to subvert the thingification of our lives.

Follow Marcie on Twitter at @MarcieBianco. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Beverly Hills is creating its own fleet of self-driving cars

It wants on-demand autonomous vehicles to transport the rich and famous.

Image credit: Jean-Pierre Lescourret via Getty Images

Jean-Pierre Lescourret via Getty Images

Picture the streets of Beverly Hillsand you probably imagine seas of ultra-luxurious cars piloted by celebrities or their chauffeurs. However, you may have to get used to a new sight in the future: hordes of vehicles with no drivers at all. The city's council has votedto produce a fleet of self-driving cars that would provide on-demand shuttle service around town. The system would lean on a city-wide fiber optic network, already in the design stages, to keep these driverless rides talking to the neighborhood and each other. The first phase of the resolution would have Beverly Hills forming partnerships with autonomy-minded car brands like Googleand Tesla, so this would be more of a collaboration than a from-scratch project.

There's no concrete timetable for the fleet, but Beverly Hills is potentially very well-suited to an experiment like this. The burg is both very small (just 5.7 square miles) and wealthy -- it can afford to blanket its entire area with self-driving service in a way that would be impractical for most any other metropolis, at least in the next few years. If Beverly Hills' plan works reasonably well, though, it could serve as a template for larger-scale autonomous driving efforts in other parts of the world.

Apple's Recycling Program Netted $40 Million in Gold Last Year

Over the last year, Apple processed 90 million pounds of electronics that were unwanted or broken.

Over the last year, Apple processed 90 million pounds of electronics that were unwanted or broken. It turns out they were nearly worth their weight in gold—a substance which is used heavily in electronics for its conductivity and resistance to corrosion.

As stated in Apple’s environmental report, about two thirds of that 90 million pound scrapheap was composed of reusable materials, with steel, cobalt, aluminum, copper, and silver among them. 2,204 pounds of the spent or abandoned Macs and iDevices were gold, which is approximately $40 million worth of the stuff.

What do you get for recycling with Apple instead of selling your old or completely non-functioning Macbook on Craigslist? Besides the satisfaction of reducing e-waste and a gift card, you’ll also get these exclusive iOS wallpapers, which apparently are not very exclusive at all.

Advertisement

[ Applevia CNN]

This Radio Soap Opera Isn't Your Typical Tearjerker

High school students in Tanzania gather in a Mental Health Listening Club — first comes the soap opera, then the chance to ask questions about topics like depression.

Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco for Farm Radio International hide caption

toggle caption Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco for Farm Radio International

High school students in Tanzania gather in a Mental Health Listening Club — first comes the soap opera, then the chance to ask questions about topics like depression.

Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco for Farm Radio International

Imagine this. You're a 15-year-old student in a remote village with maybe a couple of hundred residents, miles from the nearest town. There's no TV. Cellphone service is spotty. The dirt road to your village floods regularly. Your link to the outside world is the family wind-up radio.

You crank up the radio one afternoon to hear the latest music but instead catch the first chapter of a 5- to 7-minute soap opera. The lead character is a young woman, 16 years old. Over the course of 30 episodes, she gets pregnant and finds out her boyfriend is a drug user. She's ashamed by the pregnancy, her parents even more so. The stress and depression get so bad she thinks about suicide.

This soap, called Bahati (that's the main character's name) doesn't just tell the story. After each episode, a local host talks about how depression factors into the characters' lives and talks about what can be done to make things better.

Depression is little known and little understood in parts of east Africa, says psychiatrist Stan Kutcherof Dalhousie University in Halifax. He's worked with Canadian charity Farm Radio International, which for years has brought agricultural news to remote areas in Africa, to design the project, which is also supported by teenmentalhealth.org. The first show hit the airwaves in Malawi and Tanzania a year and a half ago.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disabilityamong adolescents around the world. In poor countries with little access to mental health services, it's particularly important to address this issue, says Kutcher: "We know that early identification and early effective treatment make a huge impact not only at the time of treatment but throughout the lifespan." Kutcher presented the details at a meeting on global mental health this week in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the World Bank and the World Health Organization.

The radio soap opera, with scripts authored by local writers and teenagers, deals with the stresses and strains faced by young people. There's usually a character or two battling depression and sometimes suicidal feelings as well. The episodes are often played at school-based radio listening clubs, where teens discuss the latest installment with each other and their teachers. The radio show hosts know what resources are available in the villages and towns where people listen. During and right after the segment, teens can text or call in questions.

Teens have written in wanting to know what to do about not being so sad they can't get out of bed. Or they've been raped and they've lost all interest in the things they used to enjoy.

All told, half a million teens and young adults live in the areas where the soap operas are carried, and, says Kutcher, "surveys show they're the most popular shows on the radio."

Depression is something people just don't talk about in these communities. In Malawi, there was no word for depression in the local language. The health providers and trainers who designed the project literally invented a term for depression — nkhawa — which basically means "disease of worries."

Kutcher and others involved in the project tested local knowledge before the programs started airing a year and a half ago. At the beginning, "few knew what depression was or knew about the concepts of mental health and mental illness," he says. People often thought symptoms of depression or other illnesses were caused by spells cast on them; many believed that nothing could help.

In the post-soap opera discussions, listeners learn there are ways they can help themselves. Get enough sleep. Exercise. Talk to a sympathetic family member or friend. They learn about talk therapy and where it might be available. And they hear about medications that can treat depression. The project includes training for health care workers to recognize and treat depression and it also works with the governments in both countries to make medications available to youth who need them.

The project developers did a mobile phone survey of 4,000 young people in Malawi and Tanzania before the radio shows started and repeated the survey after the soap operas had been on the air. More teens understood at least something about depression and said they'd seek help if they felt depressed.

And the teens? Project manager Heather Gilberds says many of them have said they didn't realize that it was okay to talk about the thoughts in their heads, and they hadn't realized that anything could be done about the pain.

The Wright Brothers' Plane Patent Was Lost For 36 Years Due to Clerical Error

Credit: National Archives and Records Administration
The patent for the Wright Brothers’ “flying machine,” the invention that gave birth to modern aviation as we know it, was returned to the National Archives earlier this week.

The patent for the Wright Brothers’ “flying machine,” the invention that gave birth to modern aviation as we know it, was returned to the National Archives earlier this week. What’s strange is that it was never missing in the first place.

While it’s fun to imagine Orville and Wilbur’s plans as the centerpiece of an Oceans Eleven -style heist, the truth about its absence is far more pedestrian: someone simply misplaced it.

In 1978, the patent—along with several other documents of historical importance—were lent to the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum for the 75th anniversary of the Wrights’ first successful flight. The patent was marked as returned but it was filed incorrectly back at the National Archives. Due to this clerical error, it took over three decades for someone to find. Given how much is stored at the National Archives (269 million pages worth), it’s hard to blame them.

Advertisement

High-tech scalpel makes brain surgery less risky

It can differentiate between tumors and healthy brain tissue.

The "smart scalpel" developedby a researcher named David Oliva Uribein Brussels, Belgium doesn't look or even work like a conventional scalpel. It has no edge, has a sensor-rich sphere at the tip, and instead of having the capability to cut people open, it can differentiate between cancerous tumors and normal brain tissue. A surgeon simply has to swipe it across the brain's surface to get a visual or an auditory result about the tissue's status in half a second. The tool's especially useful when locating early stage tumors, which still look similar to healthy tissue.

"Although imaging techniques such as an MRI and an ultrasound locate a tumor accurately before the surgery, during the cranial opening and throughout the surgical procedure there are many factors that can lead to the loss of this position, so the resection (the removing of the tumor) depends on the experience, as well as the senses of sight and touch of the surgeon."

His scalpel has only been tested on pigs' brains and artificial tumors thus far, so it could take many years (and numerous clinical/human trials) before it's used in operating rooms. If it passes those trials in flying colors, it could be tweaked for use in other areas of the body, such as the stomach and the intestine. Uribe isn't the only scientist developing a tool that can make cancer surgery and removing tumors less risk. Back in 2013, researchers from London's Imperial College created a " smart knife" that can distinguish cancerous from healthy tissues as it cuts.

The Epidemiologist Who Gave CNN Sass For Asking A Stupid Question

Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press
Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press
When they wouldn't hire her because she was a woman, she threatened her superiors.

When they wouldn't hire her because she was a woman, she threatened her superiors. When the media asked her a stupid question, she gave them sass. And when she thought she had HIV/AIDS, she said, "if that's what happened, that's what happened."

Don't mess with the tenacious Dr. Mary Guinan. A 40-year veteran of epidemiology, she was one of the first female physicians to work on smallpox eradication at the Centers for Disease Control and one of the first doctors to work on the AIDS epidemic. She did all of this during a time that did not favor women in the medical field.

In a new memoir, Adventures of a Female Medical Detective, Guinan tells stories of her experiences in controlling outbreaks, researching new diseases and caring for patients with untreatable infections around the world.

Guinan, based in Reno, Nevada, is a professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Las Vegas' School of Community Health Sciences. This interview with NPR's Michel Martin has been edited for length and clarity.

You started your career at a time when only 10 percent of medical graduates were women. What attracted you to this?

I really wasn't attracted to epidemiology. I was an internal medicine resident, and I thought I was going to be a hematologist. But I started to get worried that I didn't want to do that. I read about a wonderful new program to eliminate smallpox in the world. This would be the first time in history that a disease would be eradicated [by] the design of people. I wanted to be part of that.

The Centers for Disease Control was the agency liaison with the World Health Organization in the U.S., so the people volunteering for the smallpox eradication program were at the CDC and most of them were coming out of this program called the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

I applied to be an EIS officer and I was accepted in the Class of 1974. I was the only woman physician in a class of 39 physicians, then volunteered for the smallpox eradication program and eventually got accepted and went to India.

In fact, you had applied many, many times and they wouldn't take you.

They told me first that the WHO wasn't taking women, and then I said, "Well, can I appeal? They said, "It's a done deal. Women aren't being taken by the WHO."

They kept asking volunteers to go to India, it's really important, we need to wipe out smallpox in India. I applied again and they said, "It's really not the WHO that's keeping women out, it's India. India says no women in the smallpox program." I said, "Can I speak with the director of the EIS program?"

I asked him, "You know the prime minister of India is a woman. Does she know you're banning women American physicians from entering the smallpox eradication program?" And he said nothing. I said, "Well, should I write to Indira Gandhi directly, or should I write to the embassy of the United States and ask them to rescind this ban?" He said, "I'll get back to you."

The next week without any explanation, I was accepted into the smallpox eradication program.

Would you talk a little bit about your time there? What stands out?

It was unbelievable. Where we were was a remote area with a 99 percent illiteracy rate, up near Nepal and Uttar Pradesh. The women had never seen a foreign woman before.

People would come out and stare at me. The women always wanted me to come out to their mud huts and talk to them. Unfortunately, I had a male interpreter with me all the time, and they wouldn't allow him in the hut. They insisted I come in anyway, and they would pat my stomach and ask me where my babies were. It was so sweet. I always knew the women would be cooperative with me [about smallpox vaccinations] because they found me interesting.

You were working with the sexually transmitted disease unit in the early days of the AIDS outbreak. Did you feel that there was a stigma to that work back then?

I can tell you it was unusual for a woman to be working in the area of sexually transmitted diseases. People would say to me, why would you do that? Why would you be in such a specialty? Do you have this interest in looking at people's genitals? Well, is that what you would say to OBGYNs? To urologists? Why would you think they were perverted?

What did your mother think of your line of work?

My mother was very proud of me at the CDC. She didn't know I was working in sexually transmitted diseases.

I was asked to be interviewed by 60 Minutes , and I refused to go on there because I thought it would be another crazy interview where people would accuse me of doing something unusual or something that perhaps was a little off-base for a physician. They called the White House and asked, "Why is Mary Guinan not going on our program? [Is she] covering up the herpes epidemic?" — which is what I was working on at the time.

The head of CDC called me and said, "Mary, you know I understand that you have refused to go on 60 Minutes , but I think you should think that over again," so I said I would go on.

I told my mother I was going to be on 60 Minutes , and she told everyone at her church, our relatives in Ireland. I started worrying and sweating about not what 60 Minutes might do to me but what my mother would think!

The opening question was, "Dr. Guinan, what venereal disease would you least like to have?" It went downhill from there. I talked about syphilis and gonorrhea and oral-genital sex and a number of other things. After the show, I got a phone call from my mother and she said, "Congratulations dear, your hair looked very nice."

Well, that's wonderful!

She said, "[You] go girl," as far as I was concerned. So if my 70-year-old mother could deal with me as an STD expert, I didn't care what anyone else really thought after that.

Were you ever afraid?

I received an AIDS needle stick at one point in my life and thought I had AIDS. But fortunately, I did not.

Weren't you terrified? This was at a time when doctors weren't sure about how AIDS was spread. Two years later, you found a lesion in your arm where you were stuck by the needle. You had just given birth. When your assistant heard you had HIV, she quit on the spot. How did you deal with all of that?

It was a very difficult time. In the early days, when I spoke to anyone about AIDS, people might take two steps backward.

At the CDC, the STD division was unusual in that we had clinical practice, so I saw patients on a regular basis. I saw what everyone was going through. I said to myself, "If that's what happened, that's what happened." But my greatest fear was that my child might be infected, and fortunately, he wasn't.

One of the interesting things about the book is your low opinion of the news media, at least in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. You talk about the price of misinformation.

For example, CNN called to ask your opinion on the controversy of women workers at an insurance company in Chicago. They were picketing the company because they had to use a bathroom with only one toilet, and the women believed that one of their coworkers had AIDS. They were convinced that they were at risk of contracting AIDS from using the bathroom.

CNN persisted and the CDC wanted you to talk to them even though you didn't want to. Do you remember what you said when the reporter asked if you were sure you couldn't catch AIDS from a toilet seat.

Yes I do: "The only way that I know you can get AIDS is if you sit on it before someone else gets up."

You said you never saw the news clip, but you've often seen that quote in a slide in medical meetings. Someone said that line would be your epitaph. But if you could pick, what would you want your epitaph to be?

"She was right about public health."

Why Gifted Latinos Are Often Overlooked And Underserved

Humberto Araujo (center) is a second-grader who was identified as gifted at Echo Mountain Primary School in Arizona.

Humberto Araujo (center) is a second-grader who was identified as gifted at Echo Mountain Primary School in Arizona. If he went to a school across the state, it's possible he would never have been noticed. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Humberto Araujo (center) is a second-grader who was identified as gifted at Echo Mountain Primary School in Arizona. If he went to a school across the state, it's possible he would never have been noticed.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Three million school children in the U.S. are identified as gifted. That's roughly the top 10 percent of the nation's highest achieving students.

But Rene Islas, head of the National Association for Gifted Children, says tens of thousands of gifted English language learners are never identified. We sat down with Islas and asked him why.

He started out by explaining that there are several different measures for identifying gifted children. The most common in schools is recognizing achievement, above grade level work. But that poses a problem for English language learners, or ELLs, he says.

Is that because not being fluent in English masks their giftedness?

I can give you some personal experience about this. My mother, a single mom in Tucson, Ariz., worked hard to put me in the best school she could afford. I was labeled ELL. That meant a watered down curriculum and not being exposed to learning opportunities. It wasn't until she moved me to a more affluent, white neighborhood school that educators recognized that I had more potential than people at my previous school recognized.

Humberto and his mother, Zaira Yanez, pose for a portrait outside his school. Not knowing english, she says, sometimes keeps her from helping Humberto more. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Humberto and his mother, Zaira Yanez, pose for a portrait outside his school. Not knowing english, she says, sometimes keeps her from helping Humberto more.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Even when schools identify ELL students as gifted, y ou say the impulse is not to place them in accelerated programs, despite evidence that they benefit from more challenging work while they're learning English.

It's leaving talent on the table when you have these high performing students but you're restraining them. Gifted [ELL] students are actually harmed if they're held back. To me, the real issue is, how many geniuses are being hidden within their school system?

What about the process for identifying gifted ELLs? When schools test ELLs for giftedness, they often rely on observation and prompts consisting of symbols, manipulatives, spacial relationships and patterns. Are these non-verbal tests effective?

The assumption is that if you take away the language barrier, you can make a neutral assessment. We're finding out that's not true and this is a barrier for Spanish speaking students. The consensus out there is that you need multiple measures [verbal and non-verbal] to identify gifted students with language disadvantages.

What about IQ tests?

It's one identification model often used, even though it's difficult to measure true IQ because of language barriers.

Humberto is always curious, always asking questions, says his mother. He also gets things very quickly, especially math, says his teacher. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Humberto is always curious, always asking questions, says his mother. He also gets things very quickly, especially math, says his teacher.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

In fact, you argue that schools' over-reliance on IQ tests is one reason gifted programs are so racially and ethnically homogeneous. The research, meanwhile, shows that all gifted kids, including ELLs, share an important trait — advanced academic ability.

Researchers have found that a gifted child often knows 60 percent or more of the curriculum that'll be presented in a full [school] year. So imagine if you knew almost two thirds of the content the first day of school.

What about children of immigrant parents who are recent arrivals or are in the U.S. illegally? If their child is gifted and bored to death in school, how likely is it that they'll demand that their child be tested or placed in a more challenging academic program?

There's fear involved when it comes to Hispanic students in particular. There's [also] a high premium on assimilating, fitting in. These are disincentives to go out and apply for a gifted and talented [program]. Our association, NAGC, is often the first stop for parents who encounter those barriers

An office administrator embraces the exuberant Humberto in a rare moment of calm during recess. Elissa Nadworny/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Elissa Nadworny/NPR

An office administrator embraces the exuberant Humberto in a rare moment of calm during recess.

Elissa Nadworny/NPR

Other than NAGC's advocacy for these students, aren't there laws that protect the rights of gifted ELL's the way the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — IDEA — protects students with learning disabilities?

Federal law does not require support for gifted students.

On a final note, under the new federal education law — Every Student Succeeds Act — states for the first time will be required to break down and disclose gifted students' achievement data. School districts will also have to show that teachers who work with gifted students are getting the training they need. It's unclear though what the consequences are if they don't.

Why the US Government Says It Doesn’t Need to Regulate This Mutant Mushroom

White button mushrooms.

White button mushrooms. (Image: Böhringer Friedrich/CC BY 2.5.)

A mushroom that’s resistant to browning has become the first CRISPR-edited food to get green lit by the US government. Here’s how this mutated fungus managed to escape USDA oversight—and why this agency needs to upgrade its regulatory guidelines.

Penn State geneticist Yinong Yangcreated the browning-defying mushroom ( Agaricus bosporus ) by targeting the family of genes that encodes an enzyme that makes it turn brown as it ages. Using the CRISPR/cas9gene-editing tool, he managed to knock out a bunch of base pairs in the mushroom’s genome, reducing the enzyme’s activity by upwards of 30 percent. It was addition by subtraction; unlike many GMOs, this new fungus doesn’t contain genetic information derived from another organism, or what’s called transgenes.

Back in October, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) was asked to consider the new mushroom. Half a year later, it released its decision in a letter: “APHIS does not consider CRISPR/Cas9-edited white button mushrooms as described in your October 30, 2015 letter to be regulated.” This means the mushroom can be grown and sold without any further oversight. As Nature News explained, the reason has to do with a certain loophole:

Advertisement

Yang’s mushroom did not trigger USDA oversight because it does not contain foreign DNA from ‘plant pests’ such as viruses or bacteria. Such organisms were necessary for genetically modifying plants in the 1980s and 1990s, when the US government developed its framework for regulating GMOs. But newer gene-editing techniques that do not involve plant pests are quickly supplanting the old tools.

This isn’t the first time a genetically tweaked organism has escaped regulation. The mushroom is now one of about 30 GMOs that have evaded regulation in the past five years. What makes this particular food unique is that it’s the first to be modified by CRISPR, the current cause célèbre of the biotech world. Previous plants have been modified with pre-existing genetic tools, including ZFNand TALENS.

The problem with the USDA’s current set of guidelines is that it doesn’t consider the end product, but rather the processes used to make the product. Just because a modified crop doesn’t contain any transgenes doesn’t mean it should be immune to questions about its safety and efficacy. As this particular mushroom attests, sometimes novel function can be imbued by the removal of genes. What’s more, CRISPR is extremely versatile, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do.

Sponsored

“The regulation of gene-edited crops is a work in progress right now, [because] the technology has moved faster than the regulatory aspect has,” said Joyce Van Eck, an assistant professor at Boyce Thompson Institute.

The USDA is reviewing its guidelines, known as the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology. But until they fix this regulatory problem, labs around the US will undoubtedly try to take advantage of the loophole to accelerate the development of new foods.

“The mushroom is likely to be the first of an ongoing pipeline,” said Rodolphe Barrangou, a food scientist at North Carolina University. “I would be surprised if the number of labs looking to develop CRISPR food products wasn’t well into the hundreds. Everyone I talk to who is doing any genetics research is using CRISPR. The first instance is always compelling, but in six months the number will be much higher.”

Advertisement

For Sale: One Used Internet Company Called Yahoo

Noah Berger/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Noah Berger/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Yahoo goes on sale Monday.

Yahoo goes on sale Monday. At least some of you reading this are thinking, "Yahoo? Are they still around?"

Yes, this company founded in 1994, is ancient by Internet standards, but, according to the measurement company comScore, Yahoo sites are the third-most trafficked on the Internet. Among its properties are Yahoo Finance, News, Search, Mail, Tumblr and Flickr.

Why is Yahoo on sale? Despite having a billion monthly unique visitors — as the company claimed in its 2014 report— Yahoo just hasn't been able to make its investors happy.

Over the last decade, six different CEOs have passed through its doors. The latest, Marissa Mayer, is a talented computer scientist who was one of Google's earliest employees and played a crucial role in its success. But Yahoo is a puzzle that, after nearly four years, even Mayer can't solve.

"It's not like Yahoo doesn't have revenue coming in, they do," says analyst Rob Enderle. "They just don't have enough revenue coming in to cover the costs."

When Yahoo was founded, the Internet ad business was small and Yahoo was popular. It seemed like it could be a big player as the Internet grew up. But now, Facebook and Google have eclipsed Yahoo, with sophisticated algorithms that target the ads to the most-interested eyeballs.

Yahoo, for its part, is expected to capture more than $2.6 billion in worldwide digital ad revenues, according to eMarketer. But that's only 1.5 percent of the online ad market. Google and Facebook control 40 percent.

Though CEO Mayer has made some high-profile content acquisitions, such as the blog site Tumblr and talent like David Pogue and Katie Couric, she and her predecessors have spent a lot of time trying to make Yahoo search better.

Yahoo may be the number three search engine in the United States, but that only amounts to less than 13 percent of the market share. Google has nearly 65 percent and Bing has the rest.

Yahoo's Board Debates Selling Company's Core Business

Embed

Embed < iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/458427103/458427104" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player">

Enderle thinks Yahoo instead should have tried to be a social site more like Facebook. "Facebook is incredibly profitable," Enderle says. "They should have focused more on making the communities their center of power than the information."

We asked some Yahoo users what has kept them loyal to the company. Yahoo Finance, for example, has garnered praise from many people who like its tools for learning about stocks and companies.

Many of the people who responded to the NPR inquiry said they stay on certain Yahoo sites because they've been there for a long time.

"Yahoo itself has never been anyone's favorite," says Jen DeMayo, who co-founded a listserv for parents in the Washington, D.C., area with 6,500 subscribers. "It's just sort of the platform where it started and no one's moved it anywhere."

There's been debate over which companies are going to bidfor Yahoo. The sale is not expected to include Yahoo's most valuable assets, namely its share in the Chinese online retailer Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

Potential buyersof Yahoo's other properties include Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. These companies have a way to reach people over the Internet, but ownership of Yahoo might give them a better relationship with consumers and a lot of that precious stuff called "user data" which will help them further understand tastes and demographics.

What will the sale mean for those tens of millions of people who still use Yahoo products? It's not clear. Whoever buys Yahoo may try hard to keep its users — or not. Or it could mean the end of the Yahoo brand and with it, an era of Internet history.

Boaty McBoatface Won the Poll to Name a $300 Million Research Ship

Image Credit: NERC/PA
Last month, the Natural Environment Research Council opened a poll, asking internet strangers what they should name their new boat.

In case you needed more evidence that the internet, left unfettered, is awful: Boaty McBoatface has now won the pollto name an upcoming polar research vessel.

Last month, the Natural Environment Research Council opened a poll, asking internet strangers what they should name their new boat. Rather than going with a shortlist of options, they made it wide open—so predictably, the internet rallied behind Boaty McBoatface.

The option collected 124,109 votes, four more times than second-placed RRS Poppy-Mai. Honorable mention goes to RRS It’s bloody cold here, which rolled in fourth, with 10,679 votes. Before you get too excited, remember that the final naming decision does rest with the NERC.

Advertisement

It’s been a good year for the internet: first a bunch of hockey fans sent an enforcer to the NHL All-Star game(and won him a car); now a major scientific research project is getting a dumb (if endlessly hilarious) name suggestion.

What about the former BBC presenter who started the whole thing? Well, he’s doing an admirable job of not gloating.

Sponsored

Everyone Should Be Able To Explain Quantum Computing Like Justin Trudeau

Image: Perimeter Institute
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau schooled a journalist on the basics of quantum computing yesterday, I was initially as charmed and delighted as everyone else.

When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau schooled a journalist on the basics of quantum computing yesterday, I was initially as charmed and delighted as everyone else. But then a niggling sense of dismay set in. Why should this be such a singular newsworthy event? How come so few of us can do what Trudeau did, when science plays such a central role in almost every aspect of our daily lives?

Trudeau made the remarks during a press briefing at the Perimeter Institutein Waterloo, Ontario, announcing $50 million in fundingto continue its world-class cutting-edge research in fundamental physics—including quantum information, a theoretical cornerstone of quantum computing. (Perimeter is one of a handful of institutions that make up Canada’s “Quantum Valley.”) A journalist in the audience jokingly said, “I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing, but.... haha...” The subtext: We are all too dumb to really grasp this esoteric thing—that is only for really smart people with PhDs .

The Prime Minister didn’t join in the hilarity. Instead, he brought down the house with this little spiel:

Advertisement

As off-the-cuff explanations go, this is remarkably clear and concise, outlining the bare minimum of facts without getting too deep into the weeds—in other words, it was pitched perfectly for a general audience. But the swooning response also reveals just how little we expect of our political leaders when it comes to basic scientific literacy. And we expect even less from ourselves. As physicist Jon Butterworth observed in The Guardian this morning:

Sponsored

It is the kind of thing any sufficiently engaged politician could pick up from a decent briefing, given expert help. Such help is available in abundance at Perimeter, and available anywhere to any suitably senior politician who wants it. Kudos to Trudeau for being clever, interested and confident enough to do this . [Emphasis mine.]

That’s the source of my dismay, because every single one of us has ready access to this kind of information, 24/7, on this glorious thing we call the internet. There are news articles, explainers, videos, and online gamesand tutorials. Yet the vast majority of the population can’t be bothered, avoiding most science like the plague —hard sciences like physicsand mathin particular.

We don’t need to understand every last technical nuance, but quantum mechanics has been around for nearly a century now. It’s behind every single piece of modern technology that we now take for granted. Is there really any excuse not to know that light and matter have both particle and wave aspects; that the more you know about a particle’s position, the less you know about its momentum (a.k.a. the Uncertainty Principle); or the alive-and-dead superposition of states at the heart of the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox? And we should certainly know the basics of how our computers work.

Earlier this year, Gizmodo featured a fantastic videoof actor Paul Rudd doggedly taking on Stephen Hawking in a game of quantum chess, with a little help from Keanu Reeves, texting from the year 2716. The underlying message: “Anyone can quantum!” It’s not just for really smart people with PhDs.

Our tagline at Gizmodo is “We Come From the Future.” Well, my vision of the future is one where basic scientific literacy is not the exception, but the norm. Justin Trudeau’s impromptu response is a perfect example of what that future could look like. Let’s all do our part to make it happen.

Advertisement

What do you do if you’re Paul Rudd and itching to speak at a Caltech event about quantum mechanics? … Read more Read more

About Gizmodo

We come from the future.

Masthead

Tip your editors: tips@gizmodo.com
Phone: 832-449-8477

(For tech support, please email help@gawker.com )

Advertisement

Editor-in-Chief:

Katie Drummond

Deputy Editor:

Alex Dickinson

Sponsored

Technology Editor:

Michael Nunez

Reviews Editor:

Alex Cranz

Advertisement

Science Editor:

Jennifer Ouellette

News Editor:

Adam Clark Estes

News Editor:

Mario Aguilar
Email| Twitter

io9 Editor:

Charlie Jane Anders
Email| Twitter

io9 Deputy Editor:

Rob Bricken
Email| Twitter

Paleofuture Editor:

Matt Novak

Sploid Editor:

Casey Chan

Senior Writer:

Kate Knibbs

Senior Writer:

Germain Lussier

Senior Writer:

Darren Orf

Senior Writer:

Alissa Walker

Contributing Editor:

Andrew Liszewski
Email| Twitter

Contributing Night Editor:

Jamie Condliffe
Email| Twitter

Contributing Night Editor:

Chris Mills

Contributing Editor:

George Dvorsky

Staff Writer:

Maddie Stone

Staff Writer:

Ria Misra

Staff Writer:

Esther Inglis-Arkell

Staff Writer:

Bryan Lufkin

Staff Writer:

James Whitbrook

Staff Writer:

Katharine Trendacosta

Staff Writer:

Cheryl Eddy

Staff Writer:

Sophie Kleeman

Image Curator:

Attila Nagy

Contributors:

Bryan Menegus

David Nield

Andrew Liptak

Art

Art Director: Jim Cooke

Staff Illustrator: Sam Woolley

Media Requests:
Subscribe

Follow Gizmodo on:
Twitter
Facebook

RSS:
Excerpts Feed

Nextbit Robin Cloud-Based Smartphone India Launch Set for April-End

Nextbit last year started shipping its cloud-based Robin smartphone, with an option to ship to India , and now the company will finally be launching the handset in the country by the end of this month.

, and now the company will finally be launching the handset in the country by the end of this month. The US-based company however has not yet mentioned the exact launch date for the smartphone in India.

The Nextbit Robin was launched in the US last year starting from $399 (roughly Rs. 26,000), and would currently cost you another $70 (roughly Rs. 4,600) to get it shipped to India.

Nextbit, a startup that boasts of veterans from Apple, Google, and HTCon its team, has given the Robin top-of-the-line hardware specifications, and addresses the limited storage issue in smartphones with a cloud-based storage solution. It automatically backs up photos and other data that you haven't used recently to the cloud to free up space on your device.

( Also see: Life on the Cloud? I'm Staying Offline Where I Can)

The Nexbit Robincomes with a 5.2-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) display which is embedded in a funky plastic body. It is powered by Qualcomm's hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor coupled with 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of inbuilt storage that can't be expanded using a microSD card - instead there is 100GB of free cloud storage space. The device also comes with a fingerprint sensor.

Other features of the Nextbit Robin include a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, a 2680mAh battery, and a USB Type-C charging port. The single-SIM capable device supports LTE, 3G, Wi-Fi and other connectivity options. On the software side, the device will ship with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The company noted that the Robin is completely carrier unlocked. The bootloader of the device is unlocked too, which essentially means that one could flash their own favoured custom Android ROMs on the handset. The handset comes in two colour variants: Mint and Midnight.

10 Famous Celebrities Who Have Major Debt

The entertainment world and the public in general received some astonishing news on Feb.

By Andrew DePietro, Contributor

The entertainment world and the public in general received some astonishing news on Feb. 13, when Kanye West revealed that he was $53 million in debt. The announcement made it clear that no one, including platinum-selling, millionaire celebrities, are immune to debt. Including Kanye West, click through to see 10 celebrities in major debt.

Former star of the successful CBS sitcom " Two and a Half Men," Charlie Sheen has gone from a staple of prime-time television to just one of many celebrities with major debt. Despite his $150 million net worth, the actor is reportedly $12 million in debt, citing mortgages, legal fees and taxes as the main sources. Sheen also has to pay monthly child support for his 6-year old sons to ex-wife Brooke Mueller -- $55,000 a month, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Ash, Dust From 1912 Novarupta Eruption Cancels Alaska Flights

Strong northwest winds blew ash and dust from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta over parts of Kodiak Island on Thursday, limiting visibility and prompting some airlines to cancel flights.

The ash and dust mainly traveled over the southern and western parts of Kodiak Island after being carried roughly 100 miles from the Alaska Peninsula and across Shelikof Strait, said Mitch Sego, meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Alaska Aviation Weather Unit.

"It actually is light enough and fine enough where it can travel very long distances," Sego said of the material.

The Sad Legacy of Compromise Democrats

The most common way to follow the money in today's economy and track winners and losers is with the Gini Index.

The most common way to follow the money in today's economy and track winners and losers is with the Gini Index. It measures the degree of income disparity, where higher numbers represent wider gaps from rich to poor. As shown in the chart below, Gini has been on a steady rise since 1967. This rise has largely persisted through Republican and Democratic administrations.

To bring the picture into sharp relief, I take a different tact. Now I calculate change in Gini for each administration, and sort them with the best administration on the far left (Johnson) and the worst administration on the far right (Reagan).

Hillary Tells it Like it Is ...

Abraham Lincoln took the same risk, nay, an even greater risk, in his historic Cooper Union speech in New York City in February, 1860, when he was a low-odds candidate for the Republican presidential nomination against Stephen Douglas who, three months earlier, had already soundly defeated Lincoln in their run for the Illinois senate.

Abraham Lincoln took the same risk, nay, an even greater risk, in his historic Cooper Union speech in New York City in February, 1860, when he was a low-odds candidate for the Republican presidential nomination against Stephen Douglas who, three months earlier, had already soundly defeated Lincoln in their run for the Illinois senate. He took a controversial stand against the "immorality of slavery," and posed a direct challenge to the 40 percent of US voterswho resided in the 15 slave-owning states, along with many others who favored expanding it to the territories: "... you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional rightof yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution."

These are the kind of courageous, honest stands that make America what it is today, rare as they are. Lincoln was putting a divided nation at risk, and risking his opportunity to become president, with his position. But he prevailed, although at a dear cost: a mere five weeks after he took office the first shots were fired at Ft. Sumpter, igniting the Civil War, which led 650,000 Americans to their death before the north prevailed, and Lincoln was able to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

But he was right, wasn't he? Yes, he was. At the end of the Civil War nearly four million fellow humans held in bondage, were eligible for freedom.

These Are the 5 Big If's of the March 15th Primaries #MegaTuesday

So, today is yet another big voting day in the 2016 presidential election.

chokkicx via Getty Images

5 states are voting, and how they vote will definitely help determine who wins the nominations and goes on to run in the general election.

Number of March 15th #MegaTuesday states : 5

WATCH: Honest Abe Lincoln Says "Never Give Up"

Follow HooplaHa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HooplaHa

More: Inspiration Dreams Abraham Lincoln Hooplaha Presidents Day

What SpaceX's Landing Means for Commercial Space Travel

They tuned in by the tens of thousands, crowding around their screens the way residents of the Florida Space Coast once jammed the beaches to witness rocket launches at the dawn of the Space Age.

But the audience watching SpaceX's live web broadcast of its launch from Cape Canaveral on Friday was treated to a show that until just a few years ago was widely discounted as impossible - the vertical landing of the Falcon 9 rocket, which used its engine thrust to slow down and touch softly on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean.

On Sunday morning, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft caught upto the International Space Station. Flying at 17,500 mph, the spacecraft pulled up alongside the orbiting laboratory, and at 7:23 a.m., European astronaut Tim Peake grabbed it using a robotic arm.

"It looks like we caught a Dragon," he said.

While the main mission was to deliver food and cargo to the station, it was the landing at sea that was hailed as a breakthrough.

President Barack Obama, whose administration followed through with controversial plans to retire the space shuttle and contract out missions to the space station, tweeted his congratulations. And employees at SpaceX, which earlier had made four unsuccessful sea landing attempts, went wild, thrilled at pulling off yet another feat.

Buzz Aldrin cheered on SpaceX. So did Lori Garver, a former Nasadeputy administrator who helped spearhead the effort within the agency to help stand up a new commercial space industry by awarding lucrative contracts to help companies develop their spacecraft.

They understood the significance of the landing for the commercial space industry: that being able to recover rockets - instead of discarding them into the sea, as was the practice for decades - could help to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight and eventually open it up to the masses. In December, SpaceX landed its first stage on a landing pad it had built at Cape Canaveral.

But this time, the event - and that extra bit of daring by landing it on a boat - reverberated well beyond the space community. Actress Mia Farrow and director Jon Favreau tweeted their congrats. On her MSNBC broadcast, Rachel Maddow started off the segment by saying, "So here's an incredible thing that happened today. You just kind of have to see it. It's amazing."

Other journalists were publicly rooting for the achievement, just as Walter Cronkite did while watching John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. "Go, baby!" he cheered during the CBS broadcast, as the rocket soared into the sky.

Years later, he would say he "dropped my impartiality for a moment. Well, it just burst out."

The launch to the space station was SpaceX's first since its Falcon 9 rocket blewin June. While the company investigated the failure, its rockets were grounded for months. Now it has a lot of catching up to do to work through a backlog of commercial and government launch orders. At a news conference after the launch on Friday, CEO Elon Musksaid SpaceX plans to launch every two to three weeks later in the year.

And it will continue to try to perfect the art of the first-stage landing, either on the drone ship, as it calls its autonomous boat, or at its landing zone on the cape.

"We'll be successful, ironically, when it becomes boring," Musk said. "When it's like, 'Oh, yeah, another landing. No news there.' "

Later this year, SpaceX also plans to fly its newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which would have 27 engines, or three times as many as the Falcon 9. But Musk's main goal is to fly to Mars. And later this year, he plans to provide some details on the space vehicles that would ultimately take humans there.

Along with Boeing, SpaceX has a Nasa contract to fly astronauts to the space station. First flights are scheduled for next year. If successful, those flights would represent an even greater achievement: the first manned missions to space from US soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

© 2016 The Washington Post

Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge Review

Last year's Samsung Galaxy S6 launch was a huge departure for a company that had begun to take for granted that its name was synonymous with Android.

Last year's Samsung Galaxy S6 launch was a huge departure for a company that had begun to take for granted that its name was synonymous with Android. After years of doing pretty much anything it liked and still staying at the top of global sales charts, Samsung was starting to see signs that plastic phones with bloated software and thoughtless design weren't going to cut it anymore, especially when the rest of the industry was beginning to ship phones that felt luxurious and slick.

Naturally, we all took notice when Samsungditched nearly all of its long-held traditions and launched the gorgeous metal-and-glass Galaxy S6( Review| Pictures). Moreover, it made its debut with a sibling, the Galaxy S6 Edge( Review| Pictures), a truly unique device that just oozed cutting-edge style, but of course at a premium. Not all was right, though - users complained that the Galaxy S6's makeover was a step too far, and lamented the loss a removable battery, microSD card slot, and water resistance.

It's been a year since then, and now even sub-Rs. 10,000 phones can boast of metal bodies and most of the features that used to set flagship phones apart. The Androidmarket, especially in India, is a lot more crowded than it used to be, and Samsung is not untouchable at the topanymore.

Samsung, therefore, has multiple challenges when it comes to its Galaxy S7 family: the phones have to outdo their predecessors, appeal to purists without taking any steps backwards, and most importantly, feel like they're worth spending a lot of money on when the next best options are good enough. We're going to see whether or not the Samsung Galaxy S7and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edgedeliver on all these counts.

Look and feel
Samsung has differentiated the Galaxy S7 and its curved sibling a bit more than it did last year. Buyers of the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+( Review| Pictures) might be a little miffed, since the S7 Edge effectively replaces it as well. The S7 Edge is certainly a handful, but it isn't totally unmanageable. The biggest problem with it is that the glass is so slick and the metal edges so narrow that we didn't always feel that we had a secure enough grip on it.

The more vanilla Galaxy S7, however, seems to fit perfectly in the hand. The curved back and flat sides gave us more than enough control. The glass front is still a bit extruded and has gently rounded edges, which meet the metal as if flowing into it.

When it comes to the choice between a flat and a curved display, each has its own appeal. Using the Galaxy S7 after having spent time with the S7 Edge feels almost constricting. You become very aware of the hard rectangular screen border, whereas the S7 Edge feels boundless. However, content does wrap around the edges, so it's sometimes hard to hit buttons on the curved screen, and you lose a little bit of the picture when playing games and watching movies. As we noted with the Galaxy S6 Edge, the curved glass will pick up reflections no matter how you hold it, and that can become annoying when trying to focus on content.

The displays of the two phones are different in more ways than just shape and size. We found that at least for our review units, the Galaxy S7 looked a little darker and crisper, while the S7 Edge didn't have as much contrast and in fact had a slightly more yellow colour tone. None of this would be apparent if you didn't hold the two side by side; they're both very impressive screens, befitting their status as flagship device displays.

In most other respects, the two siblings are identical. Everything is in the same place on both: a physical home button with integrated fingerprint reader below the screen, capacitive Back and Recents buttons, a power button on the right, and volume buttons on the left. The physical ones on the S7 Edge are a little narrower, but no more or less easy to use.

For some reason, Samsung decided not to jump on the USB Type-C bandwagon, as nearly every other company already has. Both phones have standard Micro-USB ports on the bottom, with a 3.5mm audio socket to the left and a small speaker grille to the right. A tray on the top can hold either two Nano-SIMs or one Nano-SIM and one microSD card. While we're never happy to see hybrid slots which force users to choose, it is at least a step above the Galaxy S6 series which dispensed with storage expansion and didn't give users any choice in the matter at all.

Another interesting thing about the phones' SIM trays is that they have rubber flanges to protect against ingress. Both phones are rated IP68 for water and dust resistance, and they have achieved this without flaps covering the ports - one of the most polarising features of the Galaxy S5( Review| Pictures).

Samsung has managed to shave down the camera bumps on the rear so that there's barely more than a protective ring around the lens on both phones. Each one has an identical module to the right, comprised of the flash and a heart rate sensor. There's a shiny silver Samsung logo lower down, and only if you look really hard will you see the incredibly light regulatory text near the bottom.

We received test units of both the Galaxy S7 and the S7 Edge in Black Onyx, which is actually a little grey. We couldn't help but see faint echoes of the Space Grey iPhone 6 in the dull metal frames of both these phones. The other colour options are Gold Platinum and Silver Titanium - it seems the bright jewel colours of the Galaxy S6 series haven't been carried over.

The phones do seem durable, though of course falls onto hard surfaces will leave dents and dings. However, one thing that became apparent within days of using them is that the surfaces of Home buttons get scuffed really, really easily. We didn't do anything rougher than carrying these phones in our pockets, but both buttons got scratched up virtually overnight. It was especially apparent given the pristine glass surrounding them.

Specifications
Other than screen size and battery capacity, the Galaxy S7 siblings share a lot of the same guts. The Galaxy S7 has a 5.1-inch screen while the one on the S7 Edge measures 5.5 inches diagonally. Both are Super Amoled panels, and both have the same resolution of 1440x2560 pixels, or Quad-HD. While the smaller of the two has a 3000mAh battery, the bigger one has enough space to accommodate 3600mAh unit.

Samsung sells these phones with its own Exynos 8890 SoCin India and some other countries, while others get Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820. The Exynos 8890 has eight CPU cores, four of which are a custom in-house design called Mongoose and run at up to 2.6GHz, while the other four use ARM's Cortex-A53 design and run at 1.5GHz. It also features integrated ARM Mali -T880 graphics, and LTE Cat 12/13 support. These are all cutting-edge specs and performance should be equivalent to that of the Snapdragon 820 - though proprietary features such as Qualcomm's Zeroth AI platformdon't seem to be accounted for either way.

There's also 4GB of RAM, and 32 or 64GB of fixed storage (though the 64GB versions of both phones are not yet available in India). MicroSD card support goes up to 200GB and USB-OTG is available as well, which might be why there's no 128GB option. You get Wi-Fi b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, ANT+ and GPS, but Infrared has been dropped, so you lose the Galaxy S6's handy remote control feature.

Samsung boasts of a whole new camera system, with 12-megapixel primary sensors and optical image stabilisation for both phones. The megapixel count might seem low, but Samsung promises bigger physical pixels that capture much more light, improving autofocus speed and performance in dark conditions.

Software
While we were relieved to see Samsung scale back on its bloat with previous incarnations of TouchWiz, it still has a relatively heavy hand when it comes to Android skinning in the Marshmallow era. The homescreens are a little cluttered, but you can get rid of Samsung's promotional "Galaxy Essentials" widget which offers apps and themes for download.

Interestingly, you can switch to a single-layer UI which dispenses with an app drawer and moves all icons to the home screens. This is buried in the Settings under a Galaxy Labs section, which lets you try and vote on "experimental" features. Either way, The left-most homescreen is a Flipboard-powered news reader, very much like HTC's BlinkFeed. There's also a Theme Store with free and paid options in case you don't like the default icons and wallpapers.

We particularly liked the Always-On Display feature, which takes us back to the days of Nokia's S60 phone screensavers. Thanks to the way Amoled screen technology works, it takes very little battery power to light up individual pixels, and so Samsung can display the time, battery status and notifications in simple white on black whenever the phone is in standby. You can have a subtle image behind the text, and you have a few choices of clock style. Honestly, it's a little disconcerting to see the screen lit up all the time, and we wish we could have controlled the brightness - it can only be turned off completely.

The Galaxy S7 Edge has a few unique touches, such as being able to flash a specific colour for a few designated contacts, and a clock that you can see at night if you're lying down. The most notable though is its Edge Panels. Pull the floating white tab on the right inwards to reveal a series of vertical strips - one for app shortcuts, one for shortcuts to common functions within the default apps, one for people, and one for news. You can flip through these by swiping a thumb, and you can download more from Samsung or third parties.

Many of these extras are free, but others cost around Rs. 100 each, which seems a bit pointless for panels that just duplicate existing functions such as the quick settings and call log. Much like the similar implementation on BlackBerry's Priv( Review), we wound up largely ignoring the Edge Panels after the novelty wore off. We also couldn't see anything about this feature that explicitly requires a curved screen - it could work just as well on the flat Galaxy S7.

Common to many of Samsung's Galaxy phones is split-screen view. This works with most of the preloaded apps, and the S7 series phones have enough screen space that you can use two apps comfortably. All you have to do is long-tap the Recents button, or use the control visible on thumbnails in the app switcher. You can also shrink apps down to smaller windows, though you can't drag and arrange them on screen.

Samsung has preloaded quite a few of its own apps as well as several from Microsoft, Facebook, and of course Google. They're all sorted haphazardly - Word is on the homescreen, but Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are in a folder called Microsoft Apps. Skype is also in this folder, but WhatsApp and Instagram are in a different folder called Social. Several of the preloaded apps can't be uninstalled but can be "turned off" which removes all visible traces of them till you turn them back on through the Settings app.

Similar to Apple and the Watch app, Samsung gives us its Gear watch manager whether we need it or not, along with S Health and S Voice. Galaxy Apps is a storefront that offers a variety of apps, at least some of which seem useful and not spammy. Many of the apps that Samsung would at one time have forced on users, such as S Note and S Translator, can be found here. This is also where S7 Edge users will find more Edge Panels.

Yet another app called My Galaxy contains shopping offers and is also the gateway to Samsung's Concierge services for S7 buyers in India - you can book an appointment at a service centre, schedule a pickup and drop, or chat with a representative for tech support. When we tried it, we found it was too easy to accidentally book an appointment, and no way to cancel it. There were also no agents available for live chat support, but that will likely change when the phone is available to the general public.

Cameras
Most of the hardware and material quality of last year's flagship-class phones can be found in today's mid-range ones - or at least enough that the margin of difference doesn't matter. One of the only things that you can still get only with the traditional idea of a top-level phone is a really, really good camera. Samsung promises it has outdone itself yet again, and we have no reason to doubt it - we've been thoroughly impressed with the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series thus far.

Samsung's camera app is simple but there are lots of controls and features beneath the surface. Motion Photo is a feature like Apple's Live Photos - a few seconds' worth of video is constantly buffered and saved when you press the shutter button, giving you a bit of spontaneity. One of the most useful features of both phones is that you can double-tap the Home button anytime from within any app or even the lockscreen to jump straight into the camera app.

There are ten modes including a Pro mode with presets for the various controls, and Virtual Shot which lets you circle around an object to do a 360-degree shot without a turntable. Selective Focus, Slow Motion, Hyperlapse, and even Food round out the options, but more such modes can be downloaded, including Rear-cam Selfie, Animated GIF, and Dual Camera. There's a section for paid downloads but nothing in it so far.

(Shots taken with the Samsung Galaxy S7. Tap to see full size)

Nearly all the photos we took came out looking phenomenal. There really is no difference between the two in terms of quality and capabilities. Subtle details such as the texture of a rope or flecks of rust on a pipe came through in vivid detail. Frames with shadow and light were handled perfectly, with almost nothing lost. Macros taken against distant backgrounds looked the best of all, as they tend to do with all phone cameras.

Where both phones really shone was in low-light situations. This is quickly becoming the most important parameter for phone cameras, and we were honestly amazed with some of the things the Galaxy S7 siblings could do. They aren't capable of night vision when it's pitch black, which is understandable, but they can work wonders with even tiny amounts of ambient light. Photos taken on the road at night, with only ordinary city streetlamps casting light, came out sharp and vivid although with a heavy amber colour cast. Some of the samples here will look like they were taken with a floodlight or studio equipment just outside the frame, but that was simply not the case.

(Shots taken with Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. Tap to see full size.)

You can record video at up to 4K with the rear camera and 1440p with the front camera, which is unusual but definitely not unwelcome. Videos are just as crisp as we expected, and we have no complaints at all.

We did notice with both phones that there is no cue on screen as to when focus is or isn't locked. When taking a few shots in quick succession, it often seemed that giving the phone just a second or two more would result in a much sharper picture - especially at night. Other times, the shutter button just didn't do anything till we repositioned the phone and allowed it to refocus, which was frustrating. A few photos came out shakier than they should have despite the camera having OIS. All of these little things seem to be software issues, and we hope Samsung issues updates to take care of them.

Performance
We had a great time with both, the Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 Edge, but we wound up preferring the vanilla S7 in terms of ergonomics and usability, though your mileage may vary. While the S7 Edge is undoubtedly gorgeous, it's a bit unwieldy, in our opinion, and full pages of text are usually less easy to read on screen.

It should go without saying that pretty much every app we threw at these phones worked well, even games. Heavy video files also played very well. Sound from both phones' speakers was loud and didn't distort, but immersiveness was lacking. We didn't notice any heating except when the phone was plugged in. Samsung says this is normal, and you have the option to disable fast charging for this very reason.

Our Samsung Galaxy S7 seemed to have trouble latching on to 4G networks indoors, often showing only Edge reception. It also threw up occasional errors, such as telling us that background data had been disabled - even immediately after a factory reset. The S7 Edge had no such problems, so we hope they were down to a problem with the specific unit we received for testing.

Benchmark scores were all absolutely phenomenal, reaching levels we've never seen before. The Galaxy S7 pushed out 128,140 in AnTuTu and 55,642 overall in Quadrant. Geekbench's single-core and multi-core scores were 2,086 and 6,431 respectively. BrowserMark gave us a result of 3,309 points. As far as graphics go, 3DMark's Ice Storm Unlimited run threw out an eye-melting score of 27,830, while GFXBench ran at 53 fps.

The Galaxy S7 Edge did just as well. All scores recorded by both phones were within reasonable margins of each other, with perhaps only a very slight advantage going to the S7 Edge - the only possible explanation would be less aggressive thermal throttling due to its larger body. We saw 128,769 in AnTuTu, 53,784 in Quadrant, 2,087 and 6,518 in Geekbench, 3,274 in BrowserMark, 28,677 in 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, and exactly the same 53fps in GFXBench.

Battery life was a different story, with the Galax y S7 Edge's 20 percent capacity advantage largely wiped out by its bigger screen. It lasted 17 hours, 49 minutes in our video loop test. The smaller Galaxy S7 lasted a relatively more efficient 16 hours, 26 minutes. With regular use involving lots of 4G data use and a bit of gaming and videos, both phones lasted at least a full day and through the next morning. Quick charging worked perfectly well - it's the kind of thing you can't live without after getting used to it.

Verdict
Clearly, the Galaxy S7 siblings are excellent smartphones, and do pretty much everything that their predecessors can do, but better. If you want bragging rights and money is no object, these are two very compelling options. You'll be certain to dazzle your friends by taking incredible pictures at night and in dark places. You also get health monitoring and the Concierge services to show off - things that don't come with just any old phone, at least not yet.

When it comes to deciding between these two phones, it really comes down to which size you're more comfortable with, and whether or not you think the curved screen is worth paying a significant premium for. You lose nothing in terms of features by sticking with the more conservative Galaxy S7, but the S7 Edge offers a kind of thrill and satisfaction that no other company can match as of now.

However, there's a whole other perspective to look at these two devices from. The difference between Rs. 15,000 phones and Rs. 50,000 phones has narrowed considerably over the past year. There are also quite a few offering happy compromises of capabilities and cost savings at every price point in between. Then there are the assorted members of the Galaxy S6 family, which aren't all that much worse on any count. At the very least, nobody with a Galaxy S6 phone should feel the slightest need to upgrade.

What we're really looking for now are next-generation use cases that give us a reason to want to buy a super-expensive phone again - things that new, top-end phones can do that nothing else can. That's something that every company in this space, including Apple, needs to think about. The Gear VR headset is a good example of how Samsung has started thinking about this, but it's hardly an everyday accessory. What else can it tempt us with? There needs to be something big, if not this year than certainly by the time the Galaxy S8 is ready - otherwise no matter how beautiful and powerful its top-end phones are, there just won't be place in the world for them.

No Collateral, No Problem? The Pros and Cons of Unsecured Business Loans

Sure, this type of loan does not require any collateral, meaning you won't have to risk your personal or business assets to secure the loan.

For small-business owners, unsecured business loanscan be a double-edged sword.

Sure, this type of loan does not require any collateral, meaning you won't have to risk your personal or business assets to secure the loan. But there's a downside: Unsecured business loans come with high costs and large payments. Borrowers should carefully weigh the negatives of unsecured business loans against the positives.

Here are the main pros and cons of getting a business loan without collateral and some tips on how to get funded.