WEEKLY BUSINESS ROUNDUP

Meme stocks continued their wild price swings on Friday, with AMC Entertainment falling 6.7% but still surging more than 80% for the week, while BlackBerry slipped 12.7% Friday to trim its weekly gain to 37%. Although the NFP headline number fell short of the expectations, with a strong 559k job additions — this not too hot not too cold growth was just right for investors who may feel that the Federal Reserve will be more measured in tapering its purchases of government bonds as the economy continues to strengthen.

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury is hovering around 1.5%…

CYBERSECURITY BULLETIN

Just in case, you don’t recognize the ‘DarkSide’ ransomware, the notorious group of hackers was behind the high-profile cyberattack on the Colonial pipeline recently. Ironically enough, all of these damaging cybersecurity incidents could have been avoided, had it not been the public declaration of the antivirus company Bitdefender — who first identified a flaw in the ransomware that the gang was using to infect systems.

As reported, back on January 11, the antivirus company declared publicly that it had found a flaw in the ransomware being used by the ‘DarkSide to freeze computer networks of dozens of businesses in the…

ANCIENT SPIRAL GALAXY

By now, we should all be accustomed to curveballs that deep space throws at us every now and then. These discoveries keep challenging the conventional theories of galactic formation, among other things. Last year, I wrote about how astronomers were able to solve the mystery of ‘X-galaxies’. The latest discovery led the astronomers to better understand when and how spiral galaxies formed in the Universe.

Why is this important, you may ask? Well, the spiral galaxies account for more than 70% of the total galaxies in the known Universe — including our very own Milky Way. Also, the latest observations…

HEALTH TECH BREAKTHROUGH

It may sound clichéd, but nothing excites me more than technology being used for the good of humanity. We are now entering an era where health tech applications are moving out of the labs to solving real-world problems. One such example is Optogenetic therapy — first developed in 2000, this advanced technology drove major discoveries about the inner workings of our brains. Actively researched in academic settings, the futuristic tech had yet to be move beyond animal trials, until now.

In an international collaboration between scientists from Paris, Pittsburgh, and Basel, Switzerland — they are now reporting the first-ever case…

PRIVACY TECH

Cybersecurity continues to be an ever-pressing challenge in the tech world. Security researchers seem to be in a race against time to patch the vulnerabilities that keep popping up ever so often these days. And they seem to be losing the game, as was evident from the recent cyberattack on JBS — the largest meat producer in the world. Although the company seems to be resuming operations after the ransomware attack, it saw the Brazil-based meat processor’s various plants in the U.S, Canada & Australia go offline. And the culprit was yet again a Russian-speaking gang called REvil.

The spate…

INTANGIBLE CRYPTOS

One of the biggest criticisms that Bitcoin and the associated cryptocurrencies face from the skeptics is that they have no physical presence (intangible). How can something which only exists as a computer code have such value — one BTC costing $38k at the time of writing. It’s even harder for some to believe that cryptos can be used as a monetary exchange mechanism when they can’t see it like paper money.

That may be true for someone who uses cash only for transactions but many of us have already moved to digital transactions with the use of credit cards, debit…

PROSTHETICS

Augmentation of the human body with cutting-edge technology has given way to groundbreaking inventions recently. I talked about one of these revolutionary prosthetic tech devices developed last year. The international collaboration between researchers was termed as one of the world’s most integrated interfaces between a human and a prosthetic hand. More recently, I wrote about an armband that combined wearable biosensors with artificial intelligence for better prosthetic control.

All these examples point to the fact that prosthetic tech research has turned from an academic curiosity to something with real-world implications. And the research we are going to talk about today…

JUPITER ANAMOLY

Although the gas giants in our solar system are mysterious on their own, there are certain features on these planets that are more intriguing to astronomers than the rest. Saturn’s rings are one of them. And Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is another one, which has been studied for many decades.

First discovered in 1831 by amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, the storm has existed for at least 150 years. Some in the community even speculate that astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini was referring to it when he wrote about a “Permanent Storm,” in 1665.

Astronomers who have been regularly observing the…