The Warner Brothers/DC film Birds of Prey "is proving not to be the February box office success industry observers had hoped," according to The Wrap: After grossing $13 million on Friday from 4,236 screens, the film is now estimated to earn an opening weekend of $34 million, which would be the lowest start for a DC Comics adaptation since the $5.3 million opening of the box office bomb Jonah Hex in 2010. Heading into the weekend, trackers had been projecting an opening weekend of $55 million while Warner Bros. was more conservative with a $45 million start... Reports on the budget for "Birds of Prey" have varied but have tended to be around $85-95 million.
"Oof. That's not what was wanted or expected," writes Cinema Blend. First of all, the title probably didn't help... Second, Birds of Prey is rated R. Suicide Squad, which gave Margot Robbie's Harley her big showcase, was rated PG-13. As Deadline noted, a lot of young Harley fans -- who loved the animated series and Suicide Squad -- may have been shut out by that rating...

People are also comparing Birds of Prey to Deadpool, which opened to $132,434,639 in February 2016. It may seem like apples to oranges, but they are both R-rated comic book movies opening in February.
Here's a humorous sidenote. At one point in the film, Harley Quinn asks herself what she could've done to offend Ewan McGregor's narcissistic character -- with one possible reason appearing for a split-second on the screen: "Voted for Bernie."

"We just snuck it in there," director Cathy Yan told the Washington Post.

Boeing confirmed that it has stopped building 737 Max airplanes in Renton, Washington, as it waits to get permission for the plane to fly again following two deadly crashes that killed 346 people. CNN reports: Boeing will not furlough or lay off workers because of the shutdown, but pain will ripple through its supply chain and could hurt America's economic growth. Boeing would not release a headcount for people who had been working on the plane. The company said the employees will be reassigned to other duties during the shutdown, and there are a number of reasons for that.

The 737 Max has been grounded since March following two fatal crashes that killed all 346 people on board. Although Boeing couldn't deliver the 737 Max planes to customers, the company continued to build the jets, albeit at a slightly reduced pace of 42 a month. It now has about 400 completed jets parked in Washington and Texas, waiting to be delivered to airlines around the world. The company hoped that the plane would fly again before the end of 2019. But in December Stephen Dickson, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, announced approval would not come until some time in 2020. Shutdown plans were announced a week later.

Yves Behar doesn't really need any introduction. The world-renowned Swiss designer is a frequent creative artist in the gadget realm. He's designed iconic devices like the OLPC, Jawbone Jambox, Herman Miller SAYL chair, and many more. From an interview, where he also talks about his smart lock company August: Input: What is your favorite gadget right now that's not the new August smart lock?
Yves: My funnest, latest gadget is my electric bicycle. It's kind of changed the way I think about mobility and getting around. I think that both scooters and electric bicycles really make you not hesitate to go somewhere. Instead of going in a car, you just are outside and you can go on a hike, you can go pick up something, and so those are my two latest acquisitions and fun things to use.
Input: What is the one piece of tech you're most excited for? Whether that's autonomous cars or like anything that's far-flung?
Yves: I live in San Francisco so solving city-level transportation is the most interesting opportunity. It's an opportunity to reshape the landscape of a city. To take back streets, to put more people, more housing, more density in cities, which I think is very important both from a human standpoint and environmental standpoint. So I'm really excited about both individual cars and public transportation being autonomous, being on-demand, and clearing the street of all that parking and all those cars.
Input: As a designer, what is your favorite material to work with? What material really challenges you or you love working with?
Yves: Over the span of my career, I'm not one of these designers who is known for making everything in white or black or having a singular material.
Input: Haha, mmm, that guy [Jony Ive] is no longer at that company [Apple].
Yves: [Laughs] What I've always been interested in is sustainability and I think, today, with what we see with plastics and packaging, and the environment -- we really need to move towards bioplastics. Materials that will not only be recycled, but that will be beneficial for the Earth when they decompose. So whether you're doing packaging or doing products, I think we need to move towards that and there aren't enough new materials. There's research being done, but at scale, currently, what we really need is some environmentally sound material that can be used and reused, and can help us move away from the sort of environmental disasters that we're experiencing.

A "city killer" asteroid whizzed past earth Thursday that "would have hit with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima," according to one astronomer professor.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared a Washington Post story that begins with a reaction from Alan Duffy, lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia: "I was stunned," he said. "This was a true shock."

This asteroid wasn't one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from "out of nowhere," Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 metres wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometres (45,000 miles) of Earth. That's less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers "uncomfortably close...."

The asteroid's presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said. "It shook me out my morning complacency," he said. "It's probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years."

So how did the event almost go unnoticed?
Scientists have spotted 90% of asteroids that more than half a mile wide -- but this asteroid was smaller, faster, and had an unusual orbit.

"It should worry us all, quite frankly," one scientist told the Post. "It's not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger."

In an effort to gain an elusive trading edge, some of the world's biggest hedge funds have been snapping up large swaths of alternative data from Fitbits, Rokus, Teslas and employment websites like Glassdoor. Bloomberg reports: Spotting trends and patterns in consumer habits is big business, part of a global market for big data, that a JPMorgan Chase report said could reach more than $200 billion by next year. Still, there's no guarantee all that information will lead to riches. It needs to be scrubbed, organized and aggregated to be of any use. WiFi and Bluetooth connections have become so ubiquitous they're often taken for granted. But hedge funds have become keenly interested in tracking devices that connect to the internet.

Capturing signals they emit can show "when and where new things appear in the world,"; said Hugh O'Connor, director of data sourcing and partnerships at Eagle Alpha, which gathers alternative data for the finance industry. Firms can keep tabs on the number of Roku video-streaming devices or Fitbit fitness trackers being used, the length of time consumers spend on them and their approximate locations. Similarly, if you buy a Tesla Model 3 car and use its Bluetooth-enabled media, a data provider can capture when your new ride is hitting the road. There's been "incredible demand" from some of the world's largest asset managers for this type of information. Hedge funds are also pulling data from mobile phones as they can reveal, in real time, the number of people carrying devices at a particular location. "This can shed light on how many -- or few -- people are frequenting a retailer, supermarket or fast-food joint," the report says. They're also scraping the web to create bespoke collections of public data. "Some examples include pricing trends on airline flights or hotels, inventory figures for products offered on coupon website Groupon, or sales posted for merchandise on Amazon.com," reports Bloomberg.

Additionally, social media sites and credit card data help shed some light on what consumers are thinking. Employment data is also very insightful. "If a tech giant suddenly starts seeking talent from the health-care industry, for example, that could suggest it has a new product or service in the works," reports Bloomberg. "A spike in the removal of job postings from a company's website could signal corporate distress."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Sony is quietly launching a chip that could change how e-bikes, cars, street lamps and all kinds of other connected devices can relay information. The module, when installed on any IoT object, will allow it send data to Sony's proprietary low-power wide area (LPWA) ELTRES network launching this fall. It can transmit up to about 60 miles and work in noisy urban environments on objects moving at high speeds, opening up a lot of new applications in security, monitoring, tracking and more. Sony's ELTRES LPWA network harnesses low-power wireless technology to transfer low-bit data across a wide area, with lower power consumption, making it feasible to connect a wide range of devices.

The CXM1501GR chip transmits signals in the 920MHz band to Sony's ELTRES network, and is also equipped with GPS/GNSS sensors to obtain time and position data. Sony said it'll work in a "broad range of IoT devices, aiming to develop various services making the most of stable wireless communications over long distances and while moving at high speeds, thereby creating a new market." In a use case document, Sony said the tech could be used to "help friends find each other at a ski hill," track wildlife, geolocate ships, follow yacht races, monitor bike rentals, while tracking numerous things like drones, rental cars and trains. The chip is limited to Japan for now, but Sony has launched an application program for interested companies and the company does have plans to build out the network.

Driving an electric vehicle in Germany produces more CO2 emissions than driving a diesel vehicle, a new study claims. schwit1 quotes the Brussels Times: When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix -- in which coal still plays an important role -- are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy... The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say. When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example.
Instead the study suggests "Natural gas combustion engines are the ideal technology for transitioning to vehicles powered by hydrogen or 'green' methane in the long term."

Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,759), shares Reuters' report about Michael Sharpe, a medical researcher studying chronic fatigue syndrome, "a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain." Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation... They object to his work, they said, because they think it suggests their illness is psychological. Sharpe, a professor of psychological medicine, says that isn't the case. He believes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a biological condition that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors...

Sharpe is one of around a dozen researchers in this field worldwide who are on the receiving end of a campaign to discredit their work. For many scientists, it's a new normal: From climate change to vaccines, activism and science are fighting it out online. Social media platforms are supercharging the battle. Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analysing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only two had definite plans to continue researching treatments. With as many as 17 million people worldwide suffering this disabling illness, scientific research into possible therapies should be growing, these experts said, not dwindling. What concerns them most, they said, is that patients could lose out if treatment research stalls.
Sharpe says he's no longer researching treatments, because "It's just too toxic." And he tells Reuters that other researchers appear to be reaching the same conclusion.

"Of more than 20 leading research groups who were publishing treatment studies in high-quality journals 10 years ago, Sharpe said, only one or two continue to do so."

Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but they aren't enough, the TV news show 60 Minutes recently proved. The show's producers apparently meant well when they decided to do a segment on women in technology and the gender gap, which aired on March 4. But they ended up punching women in the gut, as the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, puts it in her response to the segment. Ultimately, 60 Minutes featured a man, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. His [tech-backed] organization's mission is to expand access to computer science education in schools.

Women technologists like Saujani who were tapped to appear on the show about a year ago and worked with producers to provide research and interviews, ended up on the cutting room floor while Partovi spoke on their behalf. Here is the cruel irony: As a result, 60 Minutes' segment was accidentally exceptionally effective-it proved that women in tech really can't catch a break. [...] Ayah Bdeir, the founder of STEM learning toy company littleBits, also responded to the episode in a Medium post. She noted that she worked with 60 Minutes for a year, planning interviews, providing research, talking to the producers and reporters, telling her story and that of her organization, which is focused on closing the gender gap in technology. Yet producers wrote to her last August to say that the focus of the segment had shifted and that littleBits would no longer be central in the story. In an email, a producer explained to her, 'It's not that the important points you made in your interview are ignored in the story, or that you didn't make them very effectively, they're just made by others'.

Public health officials Monday said there's a growing epidemic of tobacco products currently used by children -- 4.9 million high school and middle school kids used tobacco products in 2018 up from 3.6 million in 2017 -- mainly due to a growth in e-cigarette usage. From a report: For the fifth year in a row, e-cigs were the most popular product amongst high school students, but in 2018 it reached unprecedented epidemic levels, with the addition of another 1.5 million kids, said Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Current users" are defined as people who've used a tobacco product in past 30 days. "Frequent users" are defined as people who've used the product for more than 20 out of the past 30 days.

UPI reports: Too little sleep. Not enough exercise. Far too much "screen time." That is the unhealthy lifestyle of nearly all U.S. high school students, new research finds. The study, of almost 60,000 teenagers nationwide, found that only 5 percent were meeting experts' recommendations on three critical health habits: sleep; exercise; and time spent gazing at digital media and television... "Five percent is a really low proportion," said study leader Gregory Knell, a research fellow at University of Texas School of Public Health, in Dallas. "We were a bit surprised by that...."

"If kids are viewing a screen at night -- staring at that blue light -- that may affect their ability to sleep," Knell said. "And if you're not getting enough sleep at night, you're going to be more tired during the day," he added, "and you're not going to be as physically active."
Experts recommend a minimum of 8 hours of sleep at night for teenagers, plus at least one hour every day of "moderate to vigorous" exercise.

One professor of adolescent medicine points out that some high school homework now even requires using a computer -- even though too much screen time can affect teenagers' abiity to sleep.

Microsoft cybersecurity expert Chris Jackson recently published a post on the official Windows IT Pro blog, titled "The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser." Jackson urges users that it's time to stop using its old web browser, a product Microsoft officially discontinued in 2015. From a report: In his post, Jackson explains how Microsoft customers still ask him Internet Explorer related questions for their business. The fact of the matter is that while most average internet users have moved on to Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft's Edge, some businesses are still working with older web apps or sites that were designed for Internet Explorer. Instead of updating its tech, many companies have chosen to just keep using the various enterprise compatibility modes of Microsoft's old web browser. But, Jackson says "enough is enough." It's time to event stop calling Internet Explorer a web browser.