The falling cost of intelligent robots may help repatriate some car manufacturing work away from low-cost locations like China back to factories in Germany and North America, Donald Walker, Chief Executive of auto supplier Magna told Reuters.

Cheap robots may shift car making from China to U.S.: Magna CEO - Yahoo Finance

It sounds like a cruel experiment: what happens if you put a cripplingly shy young man in an invasive reality-TV show that stages a succession of blind dates? Oddly, the answer is that it radically improves his life, boosts his self-confidence and creates a social media hero. Since Louis Gill, a former English language teacher from Oxford, appeared on Channel 4’s First Dates a week ago, the 26-year-old has been hailed as a modern model of gentlemanly behaviour and self-effacing charm, despite nerves often preventing him from speaking.

First Dates: Louis couldn’t find a girlfriend but the nation fell in love with him | Television & radio | The Guardian

A seminal paper by Sala-i-Martin and Sachs (1991) shows that even in the United States, where market flexibility is substantially larger than in the EMU, transfers from booming states to states in crisis account for almost 50% of the reaction to asymmetric shocks.

EMU Troubles: The Narrow Way Out | Sparse Thoughts of a Gloomy European Economist

Today on In Case You Missed It: A 23-foot tall HEPA filter that looks like a building is running in Rotterdam, costing $1,000 a year to operate while cleaning up to 1 million cubic feet of air per hour.

ICYMI: Giant air purifier, true invisibility cloak and more

Pillemer writes on Quora that he had expected "big-ticket items" like affairs, bad business deals, or addiction as his experts' biggest regrets. But over and over again he heard versions of "I would have spent less time worrying" and "I regret that I worried so much about everything."

How to avoid the greatest regret in life - Business Insider

The US Federal Reserve would have been mad to raise interest rates in the middle of a panic over China and an emerging market storm, and doubly so to do it against express warnings from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Fed is the world’s superpower central bank. Having flooded the international system with cheap dollar liquidity during the era of quantitative easing, it cannot lightly walk away from its global responsibilities - both as a duty to all those countries that were destabilized by dollar credit, and in its own enlightened self-interest.

Fed is riding the tail of a dangerous global tiger - Telegraph

Studies show that moderate alcohol consumption of any kind pumps up levels of "good" HDL cholesterol by increasing the rate it is transported through the blood.

Science of the French paradox: How wine can be healthy - Tech Insider

Google is testing Expeditions, a way of sending students to places like the Great Barrier Reef, where they can virtually scuba dive as part of a lesson on marine biology and ocean acidification. Similar approaches may enhance professional training. By donning a pair of goggles, a neurosurgeon could navigate brain structures before surgery; a chemist could step inside a drug to understand it on the cellular level; an architect could walk through a building she’s designing.

Google Cardboard, Faceshift, and the Future of Virtual Reality - The Atlantic

Some Keynesians dismiss helicopter money as a needless complication when governments can rely on old-fashioned fiscal policy, and borrow the money instead. But fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus are not equivalent. "There are limits out there on how much debt the markets will accept," said Lord Turner. Overt monetary financing raises the growth rate of nominal GDP, eroding the real burden of the debt stock. The US Treasury used a variant of this trick in the late 1940s and early 1950s to whittle down the legacy debts from the Second World War. Japan pursued the opposite course after the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990, relying almost entirely on fiscal spending until Shinzo Abe ordered the central bank to start meaningful QE in 2013. As a result, its public debt has spiralled to 250pc of GDP. As the International Monetary Fund has warned, Japan is at the mercy of a bond crisis at any moment.

Jeremy Corbyn's QE for the people is exactly what the world may soon need - Telegraph

More than 3 million people die prematurely each year from outdoor pollution and without action deaths will double by 2050

More people die from air pollution than Malaria and HIV/Aids, new study shows | Environment | The Guardian

This thread used to go under the header "Remarkable!" And indeed, the following thoroughly deserves that:

Lewandowski scored more league goals in nine minutes than... Liverpool, Newcastle and West Brom have this season Six of Bayern's Bundesliga rivals have managed Anyone in the bottom half of La Liga Seven Serie A sides (league leaders Inter have only matched his nine-minute haul) Wayne Rooney has in 2015 Mario Balotelli did in his season at Liverpool Nicklas Bendtner has in over three years

BBC Sport - Robert Lewandowski: More goals in nine minutes than Liverpool

Robert Lewandowski's fifth goal was his 10th touch of the game - and three of those were for his hat-trick goal

BBC Sport - Robert Lewandowski: More goals in nine minutes than Liverpool

Lewandowski scored the quickest Bundesliga hat-trick (four minutes). Then set a new record for four goals in the same match. And then did likewise for five, too. He became the first Bundesliga substitute to score more than a hat-trick. The Pole scored the fastest five-goal haul in a major European league since Opta started recording stats.

BBC Sport - Robert Lewandowski: More goals in nine minutes than Liverpool

The Big Apple is the most expensive city in the world, when you look at the prices of commonly consumed goods and services, as well as rents in the area, according to the Prices and Earnings 2015 report, released by UBS on Tuesday. While prices are high in New York, it’s the rent that landed New York in the No. 1 spot — with a furnished two-room apartment costing an average of $4,620 (for the cost of one month’s rent in New York, you could rent an apartment for 17 months in Sofia, Bulgaria).

10 most outrageously expensive cities on earth - MarketWatch

The difference between Europe today and Japan in the 1990s has become more pronounced than it was a few months ago… A Japan-type dynamic could be defined as a situation in which private sector deleveraging is slow and is not accommodated by either aggressive fiscal nor monetary policy. As a result, the credit impulse (i.e. the pace of deleveraging) never reverses, and domestic demand remains under pressure. Ultimately, the economy converges to a situation in which inflation is negative and the output gap is widening while real interest rates are too high. This is not happening in Europe.

Europe (still) not Japan, charted | FT Alphaville

A range of companies now produce eye-wateringly priced loudspeakers like these. Take the £130,000 ($200,000) Magico M Project units, for instance – or the space age-style Transmission Audio Ultimate system that sells for over £1m ($1.5m). Are such units really worth the money? To find out more, BBC Future decided to take a closer look at the engineering decisions that go into making one of these high-end loudspeaker designs, as well as the exotic ways they are tested – using everything from lasers to strange, noise-free chambers.

BBC - Future - Why are the world’s best loudspeakers so expensive?

Scientists create and discover new materials all the time. But few are so jaw-droppingly cool that they deserve to be recognized.

The coolest chemicals ever created by humans - Tech Insider

The argument that zero rates are unhealthy and impure is to let Calvinist psychology intrude on the hard science of monetary management. The chorus of demands – and just from ‘internet-Austrians’ – that rates should be raised in order to build up reserve ammunition in case they need to be cut later, is a line of reasoning that borders on insanity.

Fed is riding the tail of a dangerous global tiger - Telegraph

Contrary to much noise, China is not in fact collapsing. It had a recession earlier this year as a result of a triple shock: a fiscal cliff from a botched reform of local government, a monetary squeeze that went too far, and the sharpest appreciation of its trade-weighted exchange rate of any country in the world. There was also an equity crash on the Shanghai and Shenzhen casinos, though this is of no relevance beyond puncturing the illusion that the Chinese authorities known what they are doing. Self-evidently they do not. These shocks have been absorbed. The recession touched bottom in April. Credit is growing at the fastest pace in two years. Fiscal spending is back on track. House prices are shooting up again in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Bond issuance by local governments is soaring.

Fed is riding the tail of a dangerous global tiger - Telegraph

Pay hasn't budged in years. It's a problem that goes far beyond those earning minimum wage and fighting for $15 an hour. The middle class is stagnating too. American household income is just shy of $54,000. It's barely moved from where it was 20 years ago.

Unemployment keeps going down. So why aren't wages going up? - Sep. 21, 2015

Daniel Carder, an unassuming 45-year-old engineer with gray hair and blue jeans, appears an unlikely type to take down one of the world's most powerful companies. But he and his small research team at West Virginia University may have done exactly that, with a $50,000 study which produced early evidence that Volkswagen AG was cheating on U.S. vehicle emissions tests, setting off a scandal that threatens the German automaker's leadership, reputation and finances.

Meet the man who uncovered Volkswagen's lie

Sharp has announced that it will begin selling its 8K televisions from this October. While this is exciting for the future of TV, it's a treat reserved for the rich. The 85-inch Sharp LV-85001 8K television will cost a hefty $133,000 which is about £86,000 to buy. It offers a resolution that’s 16 times that of 1080p.

Putting the Sharp in TV, 8K screens coming this October - Pocket-lint

Giant house spiders have invaded a Cheshire town as millions of Britain's largest creepy-crawlies look set to overrun homes across the country. Residents of Macclesfield have reported finding spiders as big as mice and fear they are looking for a spot to lay hundreds of eggs.

Invasion of giant house spiders after Britain's wet summer - Telegraph

Workers of the world are about to get their revenge. Owners of capital will have to make do with a shrinking slice of the cake. The powerful social forces that have flooded the global economy with abundant labour for the past four decades years are reversing suddenly, spelling the end of the deflationary super-cycle and the era of zero interest rates. "We are at a sharp inflexion point," says Charles Goodhart, a professor at the London School of Economics and a former top official at the Bank of England. As cheap labour dries up and savings fall, real interest rates will climb from sub-zero levels back to their historic norm of 2.75pc to 3pc, or even higher.

Deflation supercycle is over as world runs out of workers - Telegraph

"They take drugs that have largely been underpriced before—or that's the way they'd call it," Gal said in a telephone interview. "They buy a drug that does not have good alternatives and they raise the price sky-high. And because it's very hard to say no to those patients; because there's no alternative, people cover this." Gal pointed to three examples: Jazz Pharmaceuticals' drug Xyrem, Questcor's Acthar and Mylan's EpiPen.

Drug prices: Which companies may be the next targets?

Volkswagen’s very survival may now be on the line. That’s because the huge legal fines the automobile giant faces because of its emissions cheating scandal could be just the tip of the iceberg. One academic study of the average company involved in fraud, for example, found that the financial punishment imposed by the market was 7.5 times greater than its legal penalties.

Volkswagen scandal may put car maker’s survival on the line - MarketWatch

The scandal surrounding Volkswagen's emissions data has raised fears that damage may not be limited to the automaker. There could be another casualty: Germany's hard-won reputation for reliability, efficiency and trustworthiness is at stake.

VW scandal: Germany’s reputation on the line

America doesn’t run on Dunkin', it runs on drugs. Just look at the best-performing exchange-traded funds of the past decade. Topping them all, in any sector, industry, or country, is the PowerShares Dynamic Pharmaceuticals Portfolio (PJP), up 420 percent over the past 10 years. A pair of biotech ETFs are a distant second and third. Here are the leading ETFs, their 10-year returns, and their total assets in millions of dollars.

This Is the Best ETF of the Past 10 Years - Bloomberg Business

With PCI-Express 3.0 x4 and NVMe support, the 950 Pro SSD outperforms traditional SATA SSD drives by almost 400% in some applications. The 512GB version delivers read/write speeds of up to 2,500MB/sec and 1,500MB/sec, with random read performance hitting up to 300,000 IOPS and write speeds of 110,000 IOPS. Samsung has put security and longevity at the forefront of the 950 Pro SSD, with AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption to protect data and Dynamic Thermal Guard incorporated to protect the drive at temperatures ranging from 0 to 70 degrees Celsius.

Samsung launches NVMe M.2 950 PRO SSD for the masses

But as we have noted previously with the S&P 500 having lost 80% of its value relative to Treasuries over the last 15 years (and even more so for the DAX and the Nikkei relative to their domestic bond markets) there is an argument that we are approaching the end, not the beginning of a dark period for stocks relative to bonds, and that we should be wary of reinventing the deflationary ghosts of the past decade.

Hugh Hendry suffers losses in August - Business Insider

Yet, as Nesvetailova observes, it may be Russia’s complex and increasingly financialised economy — including its connections to an offshore nexus — which may prove a greater threat for the country’s stability than just low oil prices. According to Nesvetailova, financial channels which once underpinned the success of Putin’s Russia now work as crisis transmission mechanisms instead.

Unravelling Russia’s offshore financial nexus | FT Alphaville

Researchers demonstrate a wearable system for tracking chemicals in saliva that may correspond to fatigue and other health issues.

Fitness Tracking Expands to Saliva with Mouthguard Sensors | MIT Technology Review

The 1996 welfare reform had a carrot and a stick. The carrot was that, by expanding work-related aid — most importantly the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — it dramatically improved government benefits for the working poor. In fact, the U.S. spends much more on poverty relief today than it did before the reform. But as a stick, the country's cash welfare program was eliminated and replaced with a much less generous one, one that provided benefits for only a limited time and required recipients to find jobs. The reform did what it was supposed to. In the wake of the law, aided by a booming economy, previously non-working welfare recipients flooded into the workforce. Child poverty dropped and never returned to its previous peak; the EITC today lifts 3 million children above the poverty line. Even what the government calls "deep poverty" — half the poverty line — fell among never-married mothers.

Those Welfare Reform Left Behind | RealClearPolicy

Printed batteries, posters capable of detecting touch, WiFi-blocking and noise-absorbing paper, these are just a selection of innovations brought together by the ‘Paper Evolutions: Exploring digital and physical paper futures’ exhibition hosted by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland on September 9th in Finland.

The future of print and paper: digital hybrids - Electronics Eetimes

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego announced Tuesday that they had developed a proof-of-concept wireless transmission system that is both more efficient and more secure than Bluetooth. It works by sending data signals through your body's natural magnetic field instead of over the air and could lead to a new class of ultra-low power wearables.

Bluetooth alternative sends signals through the human body