WEEKLY BUSINESS ROUNDUP
The state of Financial markets & Economies, Weekly Charts, Business Trends & Statistics
It was another record-making week for the U.S markets, as both Dow and the S&P 500 set all-time highs on Friday. Actually, it was the fifth time in the last six sessions the S&P 500 reached a record. For the Dow, it was the second time last week. The gains were pretty broad-based, with industrial, retail, and tech stocks all chipping in to push the market higher. …
STRANGE COSMIC PHENOMENON
The gigantic plasma structure, known as ‘USS Jellyfish,’ is more than one million light-years & poses some bizarre questions
Space is full of surprises and strange cosmic phenomenon which astronomers discover on a regular basis while charting the vast expanses of the cosmos. One such spectacular find was recently added to the list of discoveries by an Australian-Italian team using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia. The jellyfish-like structure was discovered by a team of astronomers when observing a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2877 (340 million light-years away).
The team observed the above-mentioned cluster for 12 hours at five radio frequencies between 87.5 and 215.5 megahertz. Dubbed as “USS Jellyfish”, the deep space cosmic…
MALWARE ALERT
Dubbed as “FlixOnline”, this Google Play App enticed users by promising free Netflix subscriptions
Seems like 2021 is going to break all records when it comes to Cybersecurity — ransomware, malware, data breaches are all on the rise. In one of the recent articles, I discussed how security analysts believe we are reaching a tipping point in Cybersecurity and if is not made a priority, we might be looking at an already bad situation transform into a complete disaster.
In the same piece, I discussed some of the recent incidents that took place. One of them was a ‘System Update’ Trojan — a giant spyware application, disguised as an Android App, which can steal…
ETHEREUM INVESTING
33.3 million Ethereum were acquired above this level at a total cost of $58 billion
Ethereum just reached its all-time high (ATH) at around $2150 a few days ago. The king of Alt. coins has led their recent resurgence, as Bitcoin has been stuck below its most recent ATH for weeks. Below ETH’s peak price, the next strongest level of observed demand comes in at $1,800 — much stronger support, however, comes in at $1500, according to the cost of acquisition data, by Chainalysis Market Intel. An earlier piece on Bitcoin suggested similar support for BTC coming in at $50k.
This phenomenon basically shows us how much cryptocurrency is held by people who are willing…
GLOBAL ECONOMY
According to the latest World economic report, the IMF sounds the alarm on dangerously divergent recoveries
Pandemic is by now means over as the global community still confronts extreme social and economic strain with the rising human toll & massive unemployment, along with vaccine inequity playing out. Despite all these hard-pressed challenges, continued policy support and ramp-up in vaccination bring hope on the horizon. Scientific & financial authorities had continued to adapt to this new reality, leading to a stronger-than-anticipated rebound across regions.
And that is the reason why the latest World Economic Outlook by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sounds an optimistic tone on the global economic recovery. Upgrading the January forecast, the latest projections…
DATA SCRAPING
A massive trove of data from the professional network is apparently being sold on a popular hacking forum
It’s only been a few days since the news broke out that the user data of 533 million Facebook users was compromised and now we have another massive data scraping incident at our hands. This time, the popular professional networking website LinkedIn seems to be at the receiving end. The data includes IDs, names, email addresses & other personal details of 500 million users.
As reported by CyberNews, data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by the post author…
CRYPTO MARKET
Visualizing BTC dominance over the years (2013–2021), based on the market cap
It has been a year of achievements for cryptocurrencies. 2021 started off where 2020 left off. Mainstream adoption, the DeFi boom, and the recent craze in NFTs have all contributed to the mammoth rally that we have seen in digital assets for the past 12 months. Bitcoin (BTC), the pioneer and the most well-known cryptocurrency has played a major role in making digital assets an established phenomenon. No wonder that more than half of the total market cap of cryptos comes from BTC.
BTC dominance basically highlights the market share of Bitcoin over the total market cap of the digital…
JUPITER AURORAS
Space agency’s Juno mission has detected new auroral emissions on the gas giant, which appear to ripple over the planet’s poles
The exotic light show that we can observe over the Earth’s atmosphere, the closer we get to the poles, has mesmerized us for centuries. And for a long time, we thought of this amazing spectacle as being native to our planet. It appears now that polar lights, northern lights (aurora borealis), or southern lights (aurora australis) are a little more prevalent — even within our own solar system.
Last year, I wrote about how ExoMars Orbiter detected glowing green oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere for the first time. Scientists had been predicting that similar glows can be seen around other planets…
DATA PRIVACY
Personal Data of 533 Million FB users has been published by a hacker for Free
I can’t remember the last time Facebook was not in the news for massive data breaches or anti-trust investigations. The social media giant easily has the worst record when it comes to protecting the personal data of its users. And the most recent data scraping incident brings back memories of the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the analytics firm harvested user data of millions of users without their consent and used it to predict and influence users at the polls.
In the year, following that controversy in 2018, Facebook has been exposed multiple times for not doing enough to…
BRAIN CANCER VACCINE
Recently concluded Phase I human trials showed its efficacy & safety while invoking a strong immune response
We have been so drowned in the news around the pandemic for the past year that other significant breakthroughs in the field of medical science haven’t had much of a chance to be noticed. Cancer takes millions of lives every year globally and we are yet to find a safe and effective cure for the deadly disease. However, some recent endeavors finally seem to be proving fruitful.
Late last year, researchers developed a therapeutic anticancer vaccine that frees suppressed cancer-killing immune cells — thus enabling them to attack and destroy a tumor. …
Faisal Khan
A devout futurist keeping a keen eye on the latest in Emerging Tech, Global Economy, Space, Science, Cryptocurrencies & more
