The mystery of why some people appear to have healthy lungs despite a lifetime of smoking has been explained by UK scientists. The analysis of more than 50,000 people showed favourable mutations in people's DNA enhanced lung function and masked the deadly impact of smoking. The Medical Research Council scientists say the findings could lead to new drugs to improve lung function. But not smoking will always be the best option, they say.

Rare 'healthy' smokers' lungs explained - BBC News

In the US, affected VW vehicles are putting out up to 40 times as much nitrogen oxide (NOx) as they are supposed to, according to the EPA. While that is most likely a pretty high estimate, it's still a very big deal. For one thing, NOx is a nasty pollutant that, in addition to occasionally contributing to a warmer planet, can exacerbate dozens of health conditions, including asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. But the actual pollution created as a result of VW's swindle may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Volkswagen scandal bad for environment - Business Insider

Volkswagen's own staff and one of its suppliers warned years ago about software designed to thwart emissions tests, two German newspapers reported on Sunday, as the automaker tries to uncover whether its executives knew about the cheating.

VW Emissions Scandal: Staff, supplier warned of cheating years ago

"[The skin] contains high amounts of vitamin B6 and B12, as well as magnesium and potassium. It also contains some fiber and protein," San Diego-based nutritionist Laura Flores told LiveScience... Add a few slices of banana peel to a bucket of water and let the mixture sit for a couple of days. Use this to water your planets. The added nutrients from the banana will keep your plants growing strong.

Benefits of eating banana peels - Business Insider

Lauber’s office said in its statement that the payment by Blatter was “allegedly” for work Platini had done at Fifa between January 1999 and June 2002 – almost nine years before the money dropped in Platini’s bank account. The football world immediately saw alarm in the timing: spring 2011 was when Platini decided not to run against Blatter for Fifa president and instead endorsed Blatter.

Michel Platini must explain all about Sepp Blatter and Fifa’s payment | Football | The Guardian

Demographics can explain two-thirds of everything, University of Toronto professor David K. Foot famously quipped. And according to Charles Goodhart, professor at the London School of Economics and senior economic consultant to Morgan Stanley, demographics explain the vast majority of three major trends that have shaped the socioeconomic and political environments across advanced economies over the past few decades. Those three would be declining real interest rates, shrinking real wages, and increasing inequality.

The Three Major Trends that Shaped the Global Economy for Decades Are About to Change - Bloomberg Business

In a recent note to clients, David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff, pointed out that US consumers alone made up an "economy" that is larger than China's entire economy. And, furthermore, it has more positives than China has negatives.

Bulls excited US Consumers despite China - Business Insider

The basic outline of Parker's argument is that companies like Amazon and Google are changing the way investors need to look at companies. Whether you're calling for corporate profits to revert to a long-term mean or looking at traditional price-to-earnings ratios, the companies that dominate today's stock market don't look like those that dominated 40 years ago.

Morgan Stanley's Adam Parker market outlook - Business Insider

Valuing money and looks over personality may seem a tad superficial -- or not. “I don’t think this is superficial at all,” says Jacqueline Whitmore, the founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach. “Speaking as a woman, most women of a certain age want security, but we also want someone who doesn’t look, act and dress like a troll. A woman must uphold her standards.”

Rich women like rich men, and rich men like slender women - MarketWatch

For the past five to six decades, epigones of Milton Friedman have been emphasizing that the only duty of a corporation is return on investment (regularly ignoring his caveat of doing so within the law and social norms). This lesson, drilled into generations of business school graduates, now drives tsunamis of corporate malfeasance. Data regularly demonstrates that business school students are more likely to cheat on examinations and assignments than their peers, although–and this is of interest for the Volkswagen case–they are closely followed by engineering students.

Business Schools Breed Unethical Businessmen | The New Republic

There's a way to listen to music without speakers. Instead, it's possible to send sound vibrations through bones in your head and directly into the parts of the ear that register sound. It's called bone conduction technology, and a company called StudioBananaThings is planning to use it to make headphones that don't leak sound and don't block outside noise so you can remain aware while listening to music or on a phone call.

Wireless bone conducting headphones - Tech Insider

Automating and networking cars has the potential to make the roads safer. It also figures to remap the automotive industry, putting more power in Silicon Valley’s hands as software and applications become a key differentiator in the driving experience. But as these stories from the MIT Technology Review archives remind us, the technology will create new potential problems. How, for example, can automated cars keep drivers from completely checking out, given that they might be needed to take over on a moment’s notice? In fact, are fully automated cars even possible?

Revisiting the Cars of the Future | MIT Technology Review

I once dreamed I was a grey kitten of perhaps four months of age; in the best part, I jumped from a table onto the distant wooden floor. The soft pads of my paws cushioned my landing in a deeply pleasurable and unexpected manner, and I found myself sashaying around and swishing my tail in contentment. This dream (a favourite, and one I often relive in memory) demonstrated my long-held belief in the many superiorities of cats to humans. The bodies of cats are exquisitely mobile; they can leap huge distances relative to their size; they are fast and alert and elegant; they have long, sensitive whiskers and delicate ears that can focus in any direction they choose. They can purr, communicating a delight that reverberates through their whole bodies. They also sleep half the day! There’s so much to envy there. So much to admire.

BBC - Culture - How cats won the internet

Angelo Torres punches in to work at 5 a.m. each weekday and spends the next eight hours cleaning up debris on Staten Island’s Midland Beach. It’s a grueling job, says the veteran Parks Department maintenance worker, but also a welcome escape from the uncertainty of living on the streets as one of the city’s more than 300 full-time workers who are homeless... Torres earns $33,662 a year but says it’s not enough to find four walls and a roof to call his own in a city where, according to StreetEasy, the median rent is $2,690 a month.

Hundreds of full-time New York City workers are homeless - MarketWatch

Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today. Johnson, a former chief economist to the IMF, described how the financial services industry had effectively engaged in a banana-republic-style takeover of government. And the IMF’s experience of countries that had suffered economics crises due to mismanagement of the ruling oligarchs was that there was one condition that was key to whether reforms stuck: at least some of the ruling group needed to break ranks and be willing to cede power. Clearly, nothing of the kind has happened here.

Simon Johnson Reminds Us That the Banks' Quiet Coup is Still Very Much in Place | naked capitalism

This is the best time to borrow money in recorded history. That’s right: Interest rates are lower today than they were when FDR or Napoleon or Henry VIII or Genghis Khan or Charlemagne or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great or even Hammurabi were around. Or, if you want to put a year on it, lower than at any time since the ancient Sumerians made the first loans, payable in either silver or grain, back in 3000 B.C. That, at least, is what Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane found when he went digging through the historical record.

This is the best time to borrow money. In all of history. - The Washington Post

About five years ago, machine learning reached a point where software could, with guidance from senior lawyers, effectively take over the time–intensive task of legal discovery, in which one party in a lawsuit combs through its documents to determine what it must show to the other side before trial.

Work in Transition | MIT Technology Review

The Dutch drink a lot of milk, eat a lot of cheese, and are now the tallest people in the world. Could there be a connection? The author of a new book on the Netherlands, Ben Coates, explains how the Dutch became not only voracious but also very discerning cheese eaters.

A nation of tall cheese-eaters - BBC News

The fund’s staff highlight the central difficulty in using conventional monetary policy to reduce financial risk: the immediate costs are likely to outweigh the longer-term and uncertain gains, unless the crisis that is thereby forestalled is severe. But crises as big as the one in 2008 are thankfully rare. It would be unwise to direct monetary policy to ward off lesser financial upheavals, in the light of evidence suggesting that even quite large rises in interest rates would make them only a little less likely over the medium term.

Repeat prescription | The Economist

But the immediate effect of higher interest rates would be to intensify financial risk, by raising borrowing costs even as weak demand curbs household earnings and corporate profits. Banks would also become riskier in the short term as asset prices fell and bad debts piled up.

Repeat prescription | The Economist

Net capital flows for global emerging markets will be negative in 2015, the first time that has happened since 1988, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) said in its latest report. Net outflows for the year are projected at $541 billion, driven by a sustained slowdown in EM growth and uncertainty about China, it added.

Emerging markets to post first negative year of net capital flows since 1988

The high level of non-financial corporate debt as a share of GDP is a major, underlying reason for sustained pressure on EM asset prices, pointed out Hung Tran, executive managing director at the IIF.

Emerging markets to post first negative year of net capital flows since 1988

SCARCELY is one Federal Reserve meeting over before the doves and hawks start circling again. The hawks, who hope for a rate increase, had some unlikely companions in their flock in the run-up to the September meeting: central bankers from India, Indonesia, Mexico and Peru.

Global finance: Why some emerging-market leaders say they want the Fed to hike | The Economist

The rapid advances in information processing technology in recent years have created computing devices with formidable powers. These machines have long been better than humans at arithmetic, certain games such as chess, and more recently at advanced pattern recognitions tasks such as face recognition.   But an outstanding questions is: to what extent do these capabilities add up to the equivalent of human intelligence?  Today, we get answer of sorts thanks to the work of Stellan Ohlsson at the University of Illinois and a few pals who have put one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence machines through its paces using a standard IQ test given to humans.

IQ Test Result: Advanced AI Machine Matches Four-Year-Old Child's Score | MIT Technology Review

His opponent had been known to cause seizures, heart attacks, and even death. But Jason McNabb looked remarkably calm as he entered the arena. The whistle blew. Assault came thick and fast – a chaotic rush of watering eyes, swollen lips and perspiration.

BBC - Future - Why pain feels good

We ignore the really important news because it happens slowly, but we obsess over trivial news because it happens all day long. Expanding on my belief that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, here are 50 facts that show we're actually living through the greatest period in world history.

50 Reasons We're Living Through the Greatest Period in World History -- The Motley Fool

Net worth for households and non-profit groups increased by $694.8 billion from April through June, or 0.8 percent from the previous three months, to $85.7 trillion, the Federal Reserve said Friday from Washington in its financial accounts report, previously known as the flow of funds report.

Household Wealth in U.S. Rose in Second Quarter on Real Estate - Bloomberg Business

The UK, France and Germany have been accused of hypocrisy for lobbying behind the scenes to keep outmoded car tests for carbon emissions, but later publicly calling for a European investigation into Volkswagen’s rigging of car air pollution tests. Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show the three countries lobbied the European commission to keep loopholes in car tests that would increase real-world carbon dioxide emissions by 14% above those claimed.

UK, France, Germany lobbied to keep carbon emission loopholes in car tests - Business Insider

Over a decade ago, psychologists John Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie Kruglanski, and Frank Sulloway launched a far-reaching and in-depth analysis of politically conservative belief. Sweeping through the scientific literature, they sought to determine what psychological variables predicted conservatism. Their resulting meta-analysis consisted of 22,818 cases from twelve countries. What they found was intriguing, yet unsurprising. Conservatism was tied to a need for order, structure, and closure as well as intolerance of ambiguity. It negatively correlated with being open to new experiences... One trait in particular led the pack, however, and this one was somewhat surprising. That trait? Death anxiety. That's right. There was no stronger predictor of conservative political belief than a "persistent fear of one's own mortality."

What the Fear of Death Does to Your Beliefs | RealClearScience

As the AFP outlined in a report earlier this week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has now been "painted into a corner" as she deals with a recession, inflation rising sharply, unemployment soaring, and corruption allegations to boot. In short, things are nightmare.

Brazil economy charts - Business Insider

A team of Credit Suisse analysts led by James Sweeney looked at investor appetite for risk and found that it fit the profile of a full-blown panic. The team looked at things such as global growth rates, economic policies, and asset valuation to come to that conclusion. So if it feels as if we're living through something similar to the European sovereign-debt crisis of 2011 or the fall of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, it's because we are.

CREDIT SUISSE: Markets gripped by panic - Business Insider

Some say Apple (AAPL - Get Report) is headed to $200 in a year. Technical analysis says otherwise. In fact, quite the opposite.  Back in July, the decision support engine warned to exit Apple shares while they still enjoyed triple digit pricing status. Within a month, share prices fell from the 125-zone to the August 24 low near 90. They've bounced nicely since, but are not done fulfilling their destiny, which includes a probing of the 75 +/-5 area, with growing probability that 60 +/-5 will be seen.

Why Apple Could Go as Low as $60 - TheStreet

Well, it's not. You can have too little inflation just like you can have too much inflation. That, after all, is why the Federal Reserve doesn't try to keep prices completely stable, but rather growing 2 percent a year. The problem with zero inflation, as a Fed Governor named Janet Yellen pointed out in 1996, is that it makes it harder for the economy to recover from a recession. That's because companies need a little inflation to "grease the wheels," as Yellen put it, of pay cuts.

And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever - The Washington Post

In fact, the difference in lifespan has remained stable even throughout monumental shifts in society. Consider Sweden, which offers the most reliable historic records. In 1800, life expectancy at birth was 33 years for women and 31 years for men; today it is 83.5 years and 79.5 years, respectively. In both cases, women live about 5% longer than men.

BBC - Future - Why do women live longer than men?

Marie and Shaun Langley are just an ordinary Sheffield couple – she’s a childminder, he’s an IT worker. Yet, in an extraordinary tale, their bank, HSBC, has turned them into financial pariahs, banning them from having an account, closing their deposit and Isa accounts, and leaving them unable to pay for food, petrol or life’s other essentials. And every time they try to get sense out of the bank they are met with a point-blank refusal to even discuss the matter.

HSBC has wrecked our lives, say customers frozen out and unable to switch | Money | The Guardian