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The iPhone isn’t selling as well as Apple expected. Tim Cook blames China’s cooling-down economy, but a lot of users say it’s because the phone are too expensive for the features they offer.


Apple shares plummeted after CEO Tim Cook revealed that the iPhone maker expects a drop of up to $9bn in revenue compared to its November report. More affordable battery replacements are to blame, among other things.

Apple stated that it now expects a revenue of approximately $84 billion in the first quarter of 2019, down from its previous estimate of $89bn to $93bn. Markets have reacted swiftly to the news, sending Apple shares into a 7.5-percent nosedive.

Explaining the causes behind the revision, Cook almost squarely blamed the expected drop in sales on the economic slowdown in mainland China, a key emerging market for Apple smartphones.

It is a pristine specimen, preserved as it was formed. Other similarly shaped objects have been modified over time due to their closer proximity to the Sun. Learn more about this distant object explored by our New Horizons spacecraft: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190102


Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game.

The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.

It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.

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Dan Shechtman has the rare honour of possessing a Nobel Prize for ‘nonsense’.

It’s been nearly four decades since he set out to convince the chemist community of a discovery most considered impossible – a material called a quasicrystal. Now we have just observed a brand new variety of these once ‘impossible’ materials for the first time, one based on a single unit.

Chemists from Brown University have described the successful creation of a self-constructing lattice structure based on a strangely shaped quantum dot.

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Drive an hour north of Google’s headquarters up to Oyster Point, south San Francisco, and you will find the office of Calico Labs. The steel and glass building has none of the showmanship of its sister company, with its colourful, attention-grabbing Googleplex campus.

Its name is an acronym for “California Life Company” but its lifeless exterior makes it easy to imagine it being named after another Calico – an abandoned mining town further down the Pacific Coast. The company, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now five years old, but its operations remain highly secretive.