Snap Is Going Public—Offering Ideas, Not Profits
Snap, the parent company of the messaging app Snapchat, has filed the paperwork required for its initial public offering. It’s thought to be seeking a valuation of up to $25 billion. The company, co-founded by Evan Spiegel, who was one of our 35 Innovators Under 35, is based around the now: capture a moment, share it, and watch it disappear. So far, it’s worked, as the Snapchat app has over 150 million active users. But the IPO paperwork reveals that Snap actually made a loss of $514 million in 2016. Instead of profits, then, it’s offering investors a slice of vision. It will bill itself not as a social media firm, but as a camera company. And it’s pushing new ideas hard: while disappearing messages are its bread and butter, it’s also selling smart glasses, building AR into apps, and developing weird and wonderful new ways to make its experience sticky (read: sell more ads). Whether the market will be won over by such ambitions? That remains to be seen.
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Next-gen Nuclear? Not So Fast
A new kind of safer, simpler nuclear reactor is having a hard time becoming a reality. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear industry decided to introduce more straightforward designs. The result: the generation III+ reactor. These large-scale devices—not to be confused with new small modular nuclear reactors, which may be used to provide localized power—are intended to pump out large quantities of megawatts and ease the route to a renewable future. But projects in France, Finland, and the U.S. are running behind schedule and over budget. And newly committed projects, such as the UK’s Hinkley Point reactor, are proving to be eye-wateringly expensive. What gives? According to Lake Barrett, a former official at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who spoke to Bloomberg: “a near-perfect storm of societal risk aversion to nuclear causing ultra-restrictive regulatory requirements, construction complexity, and lack of nuclear construction experience by the industry.”
Blame Your Brain For Computer Hacks
A new study reveals how the brain reacts to computer security alerts—and the findings could help make our devices safer. Our own Tom Simonite explains that research carried out by Anthony Vance from Brigham Young University used functional MRI scans of people’s brains to reveal the unconscious mechanisms behind the way they perceive security warnings. It turns out that alerts often appear when we’re in the midst of doing something else, which makes us less likely to respond to them, as our brain struggles to handle two tasks at once. The warnings are also boringly consistent, which means that we pay them less attention over time. Instead, specially designed warnings developed in collaboration with Google wait for people to complete tasks and have messages appear in different colors. The upshot: people are more likely to respond. Vance says that Google plans to add the feature to an upcoming version of its Chrome browser.
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