Making a fiery climb into a foggy sky Saturday over California’s Central Coast, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket dispatched NASA’s InSight lander on a 301-million-mile voyage to Mars with a package of European-built instruments to probe the inside of the Red Planet. The billion-dollar robotic mission took off at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 […]
A Wisconsin man who since 2016 has held the Guinness World Record for the most McDonald’s Big Macs consumed has reached another milestone after eating his 30,000th Big Mac on Friday. Don Gorske, 64, ate the record-extending double-patty sandwich at a local McDonald’s restaurant and says he’s eaten so many simply because he loves hamburgers. […]
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have known each other 27 years, enjoy playing bridge together and rallying in ping pong at the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting. But the billionaires’ friendship has its boundaries: Buffett will never buy Microsoft stock. “It just would be a mistake for Berkshire to buy Microsoft,” […]
A healthy diet is just as important before pregnancy as during it. Women who eat more fast food and those who eat very little fruit take longer to get pregnant than women who include several portions of fruit in their daily diets, according to a study published Friday in the journal Human Reproduction. Those who […]
NASA’s next Mars mission almost didn’t happen. A slow leak in the vacuum container surrounding the seismometer instrument on the InSight Mars lander — which launches no earlier than Saturday (May 5) — forced mission managers to call off its initially scheduled launch more than two years ago, in March 2016. And fixing the problem […]
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk acknowledged on Friday that it was “foolish” of him to snub analysts on a conference call earlier in the week, but further needled Wall Street with a series of accusatory tweets. In a post-earnings call on Wednesday, Musk refused to answer questions from analysts on the electric […]
It’s that time of the year again. On Saturday, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, +2.30%) shareholders will pile into an arena in Omaha that holds 18,300, where they’ll watch Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger for about five hours. It’ll be ample time for the investing titans to cover a broad swath of topics, […]
Scientists think they’ve stumbled upon a newly discovered mechanism that could explain why some people’s hair turns gray and others become afflicted with patches of unpigmented skin, a rare, stigmatized condition called vitiligo. Their research, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, suggests a gene that regulates the natural pigment melanin also keeps our immune system from […]
Australia is set to announce the country’s first space agency. Although the emphasis will apparently be on the commercial utilization of space, researchers are hoping there will be purely scientific efforts as well. The government plans to provide AU$38 million in “seed money” to get the agency up and running, Australian media reported today. Officials […]
Twitter wasn’t hacked, but it still really wants you to change your password. On Thursday, the company announced it had found and fixed a “bug” that stored user passwords internally without adequate security. Twitter played down the incident and said there’s no evidence any passwords were used for nefarious purposes. But it appears to be […]
A federal grand jury has indicted ex-Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn and five other former company executives on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and violation of the Clean Air Act for their alleged involvement in the diesel car scandal that has engulfed the automaker. The indictment, unsealed in Detroit, details the plot to fraudulently rig […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported this week that illnesses from tick, mosquito and flea bites have tripled over the past several years. More than 640,000 patients came down with diseases transmitted by bites from these three types of insects between 2004 and 2016. Dr. Lyle Peterson, the report’s lead author, fears […]
