China is forecast to become the world's biggest electric car market this year, with sales estimated at 220,000 to 250,000 vehicles, the official news agency Xinhua said on Sunday, quoting the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

America won't be the world's biggest electric car market pretty soon - Business Insider

"On a phone, you want answers on the go, you don't have time to wade through screens. You want quick answers on the go. That's the first shift. "The second shift ... unlike desktop, where the search engine was synonymous with finding information ... phones are about getting stuff done. [It's] About playing music through Spotify, or calling a cab using Uber ... In some sense it's not about getting answers, it's about getting stuff done. "The third shift, which is closer to my heart on Google Now ... because [the phone is] such a partial attention device, you want the information to find you, not just for you to find the information. And that's a big shift. It's a big shift certainly for new companies, and it's a big shift for Google as well."

Google director Aparna Chennapragada discusses the future of smartphones - Business Insider

I've read that it's a bit smaller than an iPhone, but thicker. Frankly, the MP01 looks exceptionally compelling for all the things it isn't. It's a two-color device: black and white. The screen has no touch functions. The battery probably lasts for days. It answers every complaint about smartphones without bothering to address them.

Someone has finally created a cool minimalist phone that I want to try

Detractors caution that a basic income would remove people's incentive to work and lead to higher unemployment. Those in favour point to previous experiments where a basic income has been successfully trialed. The Canadian town of Dauphin experimented with a basic income guarantee in the 1970s and the results - both social and economic - were largely positive.

Finland is considering giving every citizen €800 a month - Telegraph

This week Tom Hanks was quoted on his wife’s cancer. “One thing I have noticed through this,” he said, echoing the complaints of many of us civilians, here on dry land, “is that there are people out there in the world who, when they find out you have cancer, they will immediately try to make money off you … They are dealing in false hopes. It is astounding the amount of that that goes on. They’re predators.”

Homeopathy won’t cure you – unless you have a little faith | Life and style | The Guardian

Marine Le Pen swept 55pc of the working class vote, stealing the Socialist base from under their noses with radical Left policies

Euro regime is working like a charm for France's Marine Le Pen - Telegraph

Against the ECB’s bazooka lies a solid wall of obstacles. The first is an impaired banking system, muddling through €1tn of bad loans with balance sheets still three times as large as the eurozone economy. The second problem is a lack of corporate investment, which remains insensitive to lower interest rates. The third is shallow capital markets, a bottleneck against ECB liquidity trickling down to small and medium businesses, responsible for 80 per cent of job creation.

Why ECB’s quantitative easing won’t work and how it can be fixed - FT.com

Deutsche Bank has launched a computerized investment advisory service, seeking to keep up with other asset managers who have started introducing "robo advisers" to help certain clients create portfolios inexpensively. Deutsche Bank's tool, dubbed AnlageFinder, uses questionnaires and algorithms to put together individual equities portfolios for customers of its branded online investment platform and was developed in cooperation with financial technology company Fincite, Deutsche Bank said on Monday.

Deutsche Bank launches 'robo adviser' for equities investors | Reuters

Let's get this out of the way right up top: Sikur's GranitePhone is not for you. Security as a feature is nothing new -- BlackBerry's entire existence rests upon it at this point -- but the GranitePhone takes security to another level. While the phone is based on Android, it runs a forked version called GraniteOS that is startling in its simplicity. You can make secure, encrypted voice calls and use Sikur's encrypted chat and messaging service. There's also support for standard GSM calls and SMS messages, and you can take photos or add standard Exchange, POP or IMAP email accounts. But that's it.

Consumers are buying a super-secure phone that's not meant for them

Say hello to Vincent the cat. Due to a congenital defect, Vincent was born without rear tibias and likely would have died had he not been rescued and surrendered to an Iowa animal shelter. Once adopted, he caught the attention of Dr. Mary Sarah Bergh, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Iowa State University's Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center. She worked with 3D printing firm Biomedtrix to create a custom pair of extruded titanium peg legs for the feline, enabling him to walk for the first time.

Cat gets cutting-edge prosthetic legs

After just 10 weeks, the effects were already visible. The mice exposed to the air pollution showed greater volumes of body fat, both around the belly and around the internal organs; at the microscopic level, the fat cells themselves were around 20% larger in the mice inhaling a fine mist of pollutants. What’s more, they seemed to have become less sensitive to insulin, the hormone that signals to cells to convert blood sugar into energy: the first step towards diabetes.

BBC - Future - The air that makes you fat

It warned that the "potential for spillovers" to emerging markets from higher US interest rates was larger now than it was during the so-called "taper tantrum" in 2013. BIS data show the stock of dollar denominated debt rose to $9.8 trillion (£6.5 trillion) in the second quarter of 2015, with dollar credit to borrowers in emerging markets doubling since 2009 to more than $3 trillion.

'Uneasy' market calm masks debt timebomb, BIS warns - Telegraph

Almost three years ago I wrote The Future's so Bright .... In that post I outlined why I was becoming more optimistic. Last year, 2014, was the best year for employment since the '90s, and 2015 will be the 2nd or 3rd best year since the '90s. It time for another update!

Calculated Risk: The Future's so Bright ...

Concluding that there had been some disagreement in the European Central Bank’s governing council over the need for further easing, Goldman said it remained convinced that the trend of the euro’s fall would resume over time, “but regrettably that time is not now”.

Currency market divided over euro outlook - FT.com

But what if guns worked only after recognizing shooters' fingerprints? That's just one technology already being used to keep guns away from unauthorized users. Other so-called smart guns rely on radio-frequency identification, or RFID. These guns can only be used when they're near, say, a watch that's sending out the correct radio waves.

Smart guns: One answer to the mass-shooting epidemic? - CNET

It was one of the greatest sales pitches the music industry has ever heard. In March 2014, Robert Diggs, better known as RZA, the producer and de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, the iconic rap group, announced that the Clan would create only one copy of its next album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and sell it to the highest bidder. “We’re about to put out a piece of art like nobody else has done in the history of music,” RZA told Forbes. “We’re making a single-sale collector’s item. This is like someone having the scepter of an Egyptian king.”

Pharma’s Bad Boy Exec Paid $2 Million for Wu-Tang Clan’s New Record - Bloomberg Business

PayPal, for example, saw 40% year-on-year growth in mobile transactions last quarter, while over a billion transactions, or a quarter of the total, came from mobile last year.

PayPal CEO on shift to mobile payments - Business Insider

That security screwup was discovered with the help of Censys, a search engine aimed at helping security researchers find the Internet’s dirty little secrets by tracking all the devices hooked up to it. Launched in October by researchers at the University of Michigan, it is likely to produce many more hair-raising findings. Google is providing infrastructure to power the search engine, which is free to use. “We’re trying to maintain a complete database of everything on the Internet,” says Zakir Durumeric, the University of Michigan researcher who leads the open-source project.

Search Engine Censys Knows the Internet’s Dirty Little Security Secrets | MIT Technology Review

"The economic situation is deteriorating fast. And meanwhile the Fed seems to want to raise interest rates into that, which I think is a bit of a policy mistake and I think the market is getting more and more concerned from not understanding why they're doing it," Pal told CNBC's "Fast Money" last week.

US economy recession odds '65 percent': Investor

College-educated men and women are more likely to stay married than those without a four-year degree, according to a new report by the Pew Research Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Some 78% of women with a bachelor’s degree are likely to stay married for 20 years if it’s their first marriage, versus just 40% of women in a first marriage with a high school degree or less; while 65% of men with a bachelor’s degree who are married for the first time are likely to stay married for 20 years versus 50% of men with a high school diploma or less.

Why some American couples stay married - MarketWatch

Goldman expects that global economic growth will accelerate in the year ahead, rising to 3.5% from 3.2% in 2015 on the back of "stabilisation of hard-hit EM economies and a small acceleration in Europe and Japan." For the US, still the world's largest economy, growth is predicted to slow to 2.3% from 2.5%. China, closing in on the top spot despite roiling markets for much of 2015, the bank expects growth will slow to 6.4%, down from the 6.9% level likely to be achieved this year.

Goldman Sachs 2016 outlook - Business Insider

One of Wall Street's most beloved theories of how equities can thrive amid the end of the decadeslong bull market in bonds has been way overblown, according to Goldman Sachs. "We believe rising interest rates in the U.S. will have a limited impact on overall asset allocation between equities and bonds," wrote David Kostin, chief U.S. equity strategist at Goldman Sachs. In other words, the 'Great Rotation' that many strategists have long been calling for, in which funds flow from fixed income to stocks as yields rise, won't be a game-changer.

Goldman Sachs: There's Nothing Great About 'The Great Rotation' - Bloomberg Business

As corporate America engages in an unprecedented buyback binge, soaring CEO pay tied to short-term performance measures like EPS is prompting criticism that executives are using stock repurchases to enrich themselves at the expense of long-term corporate health, capital investment and employment.

Special Report: Buybacks enrich the bosses even when business sags | Reuters

The editorial in the latest Red News, United’s oldest fanzine, puts it another way. “It felt like the players would run through a brick wall for [Sir Alex] Ferguson. With Van Gaal, it feels like the players are running into one and we, the fans, are watching one for 90 minutes.”

If Louis van Gaal is a genius why are Manchester United so bland? | Daniel Taylor | Football | The Guardian

In keeping with a preliminary report posted over the summer, NHTSA says that the total number of traffic fatalities dipped slightly in 2014, falling from 32,719 in 2013 to 32,675 last year. That in itself is encouraging, but the 44 fewer deaths recorded in 2014 don't tell the entire story.

Auto fatality rates - Business Insider

The bigger issue, Piegza told Business Insider, is that economic data does not support an interest rate hike. Chief among her concerns was that inflation is too low. "Everyone, including the Fed, can agree that inflation is not meeting the stated goal of 2%," Piegza said. "No matter what measure you use, it's just not there."... The second part of the Fed's mandate, full employment, hasn't been reached either said Piegza. "If [the economy] was at full employment, there would be much more upward pressure on wages," Piegza said. "You just don't see that." Piegza's argument is simply that if the pool of workers had really dried up enough to say the US was at full employment, businesses would have to raise wages to attract workers. So far, hourly wages have stayed around 2%, which Piegza said is not nearly enough to indicate the mandate has been met.

Why one economist thinks the Fed shouldn't hike rates - Business Insider

A new gene therapy technique is able to modify prostate cancer cells so that a patient's body attacks and kills them, US scientists have discovered. The technique causes the tumour cells in the body to self-destruct, giving it the name 'suicide gene therapy'. Their research found a 20% improvement in survival in patients with prostate cancer five years after treatment.

'Suicide' gene therapy kills prostate cancer cells - BBC News

The good news is that outperformance isn't as hard as it may seem as we roll forward into 2016. In fact, simply avoiding the wrong stocks might be a bigger contributor to making gains this year than picking the right ones. To stay a step ahead of the market this winter, we're turning to the charts for a technical look at five big-name stocks that are starting to look toxic.

Why You Need to Sell These 5 Toxic Stocks: Starbucks (SBUX), Equity Residential (EQR), Nike (NKE), Walmart (WMT), 3M (MMM) - TheStreet

After passing a file attached to the e-mail to security experts, M learned that she and her coworkers had been targeted with Remote Control System (RCS), a sophisticated piece of spying software developed by a small Italian company called Hacking Team. Later, she would find out that it was being used against her by her own government, which likely objected to her reporting. M spoke on condition of anonymity because she fears further reprisals.... RCS can infect both PCs and mobile devices. It can copy files from your hard drive, listen in on Skype calls and instant messages, read e-mails before they’ve been encrypted, capture passwords typed into a Web browser, and turn on the microphone and camera to watch or listen to you.

How Italy’s Hacking Team Discovered the Future of Surveillance | MIT Technology Review

German startup Toposens has developed a lightweight and low-cost 3D sensor system that performs ultrasound echolocation and turns the acquired signal into tangible 3D scenery mapping, for either humans or robots to interpret.

Bat-inspired ultrasound 3D mapping could equip drones - Electronics Eetimes

We used to think that high labor mobility was a good thing for currency unions, because it would allow the union’s economy to adjust to asymmetric shocks — booms in some places, busts in others — by moving workers rather than having to cut wages in the lagging regions. But what about the tax base? If bad times cause one country’s workers to leave in large numbers, who will service its debt and care for its retirees?

Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Fed officials believe that the solid job growth of the past couple of years ... will continue even if rates go up..., those officials could be right, in which case waiting to raise rates could mean some acceleration of inflation. On the other hand, they could be wrong, in which case a rate hike could end the run of good economic news. And this would be much more serious than a modest uptick in inflation, because it’s not at all clear what the Fed could do to fix its mistake.

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: The Not-So-Bad Economy

The questions for this quiz were inspired by questionnaires developed by Delroy Paulhus and Daniel Jones (Assessment, vol 21, p 28). Our quiz was designed solely for entertainment, and the results should not be considered a scientific measure of your personality. If you would like to learn more about Paulhus’s personality research and his serious explorations of the dark triad, read our profile “The man who studies everyday evil”.

BBC - Future - How dark is your personality?

Models have urged MPs to consider tougher rules for the fashion industry, describing catwalks full of models with advanced eating disorders, some surviving solely on popcorn.

Ban underfed and underage models in fashion, MPs urged | Fashion | The Guardian

Andre wrote of his father rustling up matches for his son all over Las Vegas, often getting action on the contests. Once, Mike bet former NFL star Jim Brown $5,000 that his then nine-year-old boy could beat the running back in tennis. Andre won. It was good that he did because Mike could be intimidating.

The Joy of Six: athletes' pushy parents | Sport | The Guardian