Lifeboat Foundation

• When Uber goes public next week, some early investors in the ride-hailing company stand to make handsome profits.
• Jeff Bezos is among that group — his $3 million stake could be worth $400 million at IPO time.
• Ousted founder and CEO Travis Kalanick is expected to make nearly $9 billion from his 8.6 percent stake.

The rich keep getting richer. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, whose estimated net worth of $157 billion makes him the richest man in the world, is expected to haul in hundreds of millions of dollars from Uber’s anticipated initial public offering next week.

Your package could arrive one day sooner.

Indian authorities are evacuating nearly 1 million people along the country’s east coast ahead of a severe cyclone moving through the Bay of Bengal.

Arsenic is a deadly poison for most living things, but new research shows that microorganisms are breathing arsenic in a large area of the Pacific Ocean. A University of Washington team has discovered that an ancient survival strategy is still being used in low-oxygen parts of the marine environment.

“Thinking of arsenic as not just a bad guy, but also as beneficial, has reshaped the way that I view the element,” said first author Jaclyn Saunders, who did the research for her doctoral thesis at the UW and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading “Arsenic-breathing life discovered in the tropical Pacific Ocean” »

In our final episode of Crash Course Engineering we are going to take all the tools and ideas we’ve discussed throughout this series and try to imagine where we’re headed. We’re going to explore some of the biggest problems that today’s engineers are trying to solve and make some guesses about what the future of the field might look like.

Crash Course Engineering is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1mtdjDVOoOqJzeaJAV15Tq0tZ1vKj7ZV

Continue reading “The Biggest Problems We’re Facing Today & The Future of Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #46” »

But right now, humans are still better merch pickers.

A blog by Jeff Atwood on programming and human factors.

And they’re not the only big company turning to this “fun-gi” packaging.