"I would suggest that the defining financial development of the last year is likely to push things towards more secular stagnation," Summers said this week at the HSBC seminar.

Larry Summers on more secular stagnation - Business Insider

Most fund managers spend a lot of time meeting the management teams of businesses in which they are considering an investment. Jeremy Lang, who runs the Ardevora UK Income fund, is different. He makes a point never to meet company executives, arguing that they are experts in spin and all too often end up “misleading investors”.

Top fund manager: 'I don't meet company bosses - they lie' - Telegraph

Computer malware can often evade antivirus security software if the author changes a few lines of code or designs the program to automatically mutate before each new infection. Artificial neural networks, trained to recognize the characteristics of malicious code by looking at millions of examples of malware and non-malware files, could perhaps offer a far better way to catch such nefarious code. An approach known as deep learning, which involves training a network with many layers of simulated neurons using huge quantities of data, is being tested by several companies.

Antivirus Might Catch More Malicious Code Using Neural Networks | MIT Technology Review

Keyboards, mice, and touch screens all have their uses but have distinct limitations. They’re not particularly good for interacting with 3-D objects, such as those found in virtual reality or design programs. A company called Gest thinks its device, which slides onto the back of your hands and fingers to track their movements, provides a more natural and useful alternative.

Startups Gest Thinks It Has Invented the Best Way to Interact with Virtual 3-D Objects | MIT Technology Review

I have prepared so much pasta in my 26 years on earth that I can now tell, to the second, when my boiling pasta is ready, even if I’m not in the same room. This has led to friends calling me the Pasta Whisperer.

Italy, don’t turn your back on pasta – it’s the best food on earth | Comment is free | The Guardian

In Europe, bonds yielding less than zero have ballooned to $1.9 trillion, with the average yield on an index of euro-area sovereign notes due within five years turning negative for the first time. Worldwide, the bond market’s outlook for inflation is now close to levels last seen during the global recession. And even in the U.S., the bright spot in the global economy, 10-year Treasury yields are pinned near 2 percent -- well below what most on Wall Street expected by now.

Bonds Send Same Ominous Signs No Matter Where in World You Look - Bloomberg Business

You might think that a tincture of tap water would be medically inert. But homeopaths propose that their treatments work because water has a memory. Really. Some homeopathic remedies are sold in pill form. In such cases, transferring the diluted liquid (again, pure water) onto a sugar tablet and then letting it evaporate works because the sugar has a memory of the water that has a memory of the chemical.

One of the most popular alternatives to modern medicine doesn't work - Business Insider

Again, these were only observational studies, but one team decided to put it to a test with a carefully planned intervention, feeding their participants 27%-fat Gouda cheese every day for eight weeks. At the end of the trial, they had lower cholesterol than controls asked to stomach a zero-fat alternative.

BBC - Future - Are any foods safe to eat anymore? Here’s the truth

A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century – so far... It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.

Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away? | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Cold showers may have other health benefits as well. Some researchers even hypothesize that their ability to kick an “overwhelming amount of electrical impulses from peripheral nerve endings to the brain” could serve as a viable treatment for depression.

You're Waking Up Wrong - Bloomberg Business

Smartphones have sidelined digital cameras and other special-purpose devices. Now Google thinks mobile phones will shove virtual-reality headsets like the Oculus Rift into the shadows, too... Current smartphone hardware can’t update the virtual world in close enough synchrony with the movements of your head as you look around, which is what causes motion sickness. The Rift works well in part because it has cut that lag to less than 20 milliseconds, and even then, viewing some kinds of content can still leave some users nauseated. Cardboard’s latency is significantly greater.

Inside Google’s Plan to Make Virtual Reality Mainstream Before Facebook Can | MIT Technology Review

Recently, I started to wonder if my generation’s relationship with alcohol was abnormal. When I looked into the numbers, I realised that it was. I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early 20s. Why us?

BBC - Future - Why do the British drink so much?

If you hate long-haul flights, we’ve got some good news for you. An aerospace company has received over £80 million to build a space plane that travels at 25 times the speed of sound. Reaction Engines, a small company based in Oxfordshire, hopes to use the funding to build Skylon, a super-fast airplane of the future. If successful, RE claims the journey from London to Sydney could be reduced to just four hours.

UK funds ‘Space Plane’ that travels 25 times the speed of sound

An ultrathin, inexpensive wearable patch can give doctors detailed information about crucial markers of health.

Ultrathin, Skin-Conforming Sensors Collect Critical Data about Vascular Health | MIT Technology Review

According to S&P senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt, S&P 500 companies generated 47.8% of 2014 sales overseas. This is why the strong dollar is the No. 1 thing S&P 500 companies have been complaining about. FundStrat Global's Tom Lee estimates the US dollar's strength will have cost S&P 500 companies $93 billion in profits this year.

TOM LEE: US dollar to become profit tailwind - Business Insider

A sharp rise in death rates among white middle-aged Americans has claimed nearly as many lives in the past 15 years as the spread of Aids in the US, researchers have said.

Rising deaths among white middle-aged Americans could exceed Aids toll in US | Science | The Guardian

The charge is that Valeant, a pharmaceutical company that has been one of Wall Street's darlings over the last several years, is a "roll up" — a company that uses aggressive accounting and serial acquisitions to hide its lack of growth. This is a criticism that has been leveled for almost two years by Kynikos Associates founder Jim Chanos, who thinks that Valeant's reliance on debt-fueled acquisitions and price increases (which have also come under fire from politicians), is unsustainable.

Is Valeant an accounting roll-up? - Business Insider

The Cardboard app offers a handful of such experiences, including a version of the Google Earth 3-D map program where you fly over cities or mountain ranges, and a cute animated short by a former Pixar director. Other companies can create mobile apps to display their own content through Cardboard and will take you climbing in Yosemite, freak you out with a short horror movie, or put you on stage next to Paul McCartney’s piano. And this summer, YouTube was upgraded to host what are described as “360-degree videos,” which don’t present your eyes with 3-D imagery but give a sense of being somewhere else by enveloping you with a panoramic video.

Inside Google’s Plan to Make Virtual Reality Mainstream Before Facebook Can | MIT Technology Review

In South Korea, the statistics reveal a truth. The country's unification ministry says that 15% of the defectors who die each year kill themselves - more than three times the suicide rate for the population in general, and this is a country that consistently has the highest suicide rate of all the 34 industrialised countries in the OECD.

Korea's hidden problem: Suicidal defectors - BBC News

Asset prices across the euro zone are not overvalued on average and in any case, monetary policy should not be used to address bubbles, European Central Bank Vice President Vitor Constancio said on Wednesday.

Don't expect ECB to address asset bubbles: Vice President

In 1937, fed up, Landmesser attempted to flee Nazi Germany to Denmark with his family. But he was detained at the border and charged with "dishonoring the race," or "racial infamy," under the Nuremberg Laws. A year later, Landmesser was acquitted for a lack of evidence and was instructed to not have a relationship with Eckler. Refusing to abandon his wife, Landmesser ignored Nazi wishes and was arrested again in 1938 and sentenced to nearly three years in a concentration camp. He would never see the woman he loved or his child again.

German man who refused to give Hitler Nazi salute - Business Insider

A “robot revolution” will transform the global economy over the next 20 years, cutting the costs of doing business but exacerbating social inequality, as machines take over everything from caring for the elderly to flipping burgers, according to a new study.

Robot revolution: rise of machines could displace a third of UK jobs | Technology | The Guardian

During a discussion at the Web Summit technology conference in Dublin on Wednesday, experts warned about the dangers of getting intimate with robots.

Should you have sex with robots? Experts weigh in

Blanchard Cerutti and I look at a sample of over 100 recessions from industrial countries over the last 50 years and examine their impact on long run output levels in an effort to understand what Blanchard and I had earlier called hysteresis effects. We find that in the vast majority of cases output never returns to previous trends. Indeed there appear to be more cases where recessions reduce the subsequent growth of output than where output returns to trend. In other words “super hysteresis” to use Larry Ball’s term is more frequent than “no hysteresis.”

Advanced economies are so sick we need a new way to think about them | Larry Summers

Modern life is packed with things that could reportedly cause cancer: alcohol, excess body fat, pollution, cleaning products, sun exposure, contraceptive pills, plastic tubs in the microwave and close contact with other humans – which increases the risk of contracting certain potentially cancer-causing viruses. But even if you did knock back a chosen group 1 carcinogen all day, every day, there’s no guarantee that you’ll definitely get cancer either. So, is there any point in actively trying to avoid them? The answer is a very definite yes, and no.

How do I ... avoid carcinogens? | UK news | The Guardian

For the first time in half a decade of stagnation, government policy has turned expansionary in the US, China and the eurozone at the same time. Fiscal austerity is largely over. The combined money supply is surging.

I'll eat my hat if we are anywhere near a global recession - Telegraph

OK, at this point someone will point out that Druckenmiller has made billions, and I haven’t. Indeed; in normal times Druckenmiller could doubtless run circles around me in terms of outguessing the market. But here’s the thing: the post-2008 period has been one in which the instincts of master traders, developed in a very different era, have been a poor guide to events. What has worked, instead, is Macroeconomics 101, which is why people like me — or, if you really dislike yours truly, Ben Bernanke — have done pretty well.

Roosting Chickens and Fed-Bashing - The New York Times

Chinese drone maker DJI has partnered with open source Ubuntu OS provider Canonical to release a computer embedded on a drone platform, helping developers turn their drones into intelligent, autonomous machines capable of performing complex computing tasks on their own... Such computing capabilities could enable the drone to sense their surrounding environment but also identify objects and react accordingly.

Vision processing and AI set to take-off, literally - Electronics Eetimes

The United States spends more on health care than any other developed nation. That's one finding from a new report, "Health at a Glance 2015," from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).  We're spending more than twice the amount on health care compared to several other countries including Germany, Canada, and France, where actual health outcomes have been better for years.

OECD health report on health expenditure - Business Insider

There might be much less slack in the labor market than Janet Yellen thinks. That's the prognosis offered by Stephen Williamson, vice president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. In a recent note, the economist examined different metrics that paint varying pictures of the U.S. labor market's strength.

St. Louis Fed Official: Maybe We Shouldn't Count the Long-Term Unemployed as 'Slack' - Bloomberg Business

Researchers found that three glasses of bubbly a day could help ward off brain disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease. They discovered that a compound found in the black grapes, Pinot noir and Pinot meunier, both of which are used for champagne, helps stave off forgetfulness.

Three glasses of fizz a day 'could improve your memory' - Telegraph

Robots will take over 45pc of all jobs in manufacturing and shave $9 trillion off labour costs within a decade, leaving great swathes of the global society on the historical scrap heap.

Robots may shatter the global economic order within a decade - Telegraph

An infant with ‘incurable’ leukemia was the world’s first leukemia patient to be sucessfully treated with the experimental technique of gene editing. Performed at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), the procedure successfully destroyed the cancer cells in the girl, who was afflicted with Infant Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL).

World's first use of gene editing saves life of infant girl | Digital Trends

Processor makers regularly exaggerate the performance of their chips (remember Intel's obsession with clock speed?), but AMD is learning that there are limits around what you can claim. It's facing a class action lawsuit accusing the company of misleading buyers about the number of cores in its Bulldozer-based CPUs. It would advertise that a given processor had eight cores, for example, when it effectively had four -- each core in AMD-speak was really half of a module, and couldn't operate independently.

Lawsuit claims AMD lied about the number of cores in its chips

We are witnessing the worst manmade environmental disaster since the BP gulf oil spill. Huge, out-of-control fires rage through the forests of Indonesia – and the source of many is the practice of deliberately burning the land to clear it for palm oil and paper products.

Setting a country alight: Indonesia's devastating forest fires are manmade | Global Development Professionals Network | The Guardian