It was not an especially good quarter for Wal-Mart, and one pain point that will continue to hurt the company is a downturn in its large in-store pharmacy business in the US. On a media call yesterday (Aug. 18), executives in part blamed the company’s reduced profit outlook on a change in the way Americans are paying for drugs.
Scientists at Ohio State University say that they’ve grown an “almost fully-formed human brain” in a lab —the equivalent of a five-week-old fetal brain the size of a pencil eraser that has “99% of the brain’s diverse cell types and genes,” the team told The Guardian. The tissue, grown from adult human skin cells, includes a spinal cord, signaling circuity, and even a retina, which is considered part of the brain.
With student loan debt rising and the threat of new education models looming, Purdue University wants to offer a very different way for students to pay for school: private investors will fund their education, and get paid back as a portion of the students’ future income. It’s called an Income Share Agreement (ISA)—if students earn more than expected after university, they pay back more; if they earn less, they pay less.
It takes a good head of steam to spend a Saturday writing a 5,000-plus word response to a New York Times article. But Nick Ciubotariu, an Amazon employee for the past 18 months, was sufficiently outraged by Jody Kantor and David Streitfeld’s piece (paywall) on his employer’s management culture that he felt compelled to put his lengthy rebuttal up at LinkedIn, Medium, and on a personal blog.
The New York Times’ damning account (paywall) of Amazon’s intense work culture, published on Saturday (Aug. 15), took over social media feeds over the weekend. Reporters Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld spoke to more than 100 current and former white collar employees of the e-commerce giant, and described a workplace where people are pushed incredibly hard, conflict is encouraged, mothers and those going through personal difficulties are treated harshly, and there’s rapid turnover and frequent weeping at desks.
We’re in the second year of America’s big tech companies reporting their staff diversity data—and Apple just raised the ante.
This post has been corrected.
Arun Khanna found out the hard way that Facebook doesn’t particularly appreciate it when potential employees reveal embarrassing privacy gaps.
The annual performance review has been a ubiquitous and generally loathed fixture of the corporate world for decades. But haters can rejoice: It’s finally starting to topple. The best part? Even the company that popularized the toughest form of formal annual review is moving away from them.
Google’s announcement that it was reincorporating as a holding company called “Alphabet” came as a near total surprise to observers—and apparently to many employees.
Sundar Pichai just got one of the biggest promotions in Google’s history. As part of the company’s announcement that it will transition into a holding company called Alphabet and split its core internet businesses from R&D efforts like life sciences and driver-less cars, Pichai has been put squarely in charge of what is far and away the biggest and most important part of the company.
Living in poverty is not just something that happens to the other guy in the US. More than 60% of Americans go through serious economic difficulty at some point in their life, according to a new study by Mark Rank at Washington University in St. Louis, highlighted at Wonkblog.
When Gilead paid $11 billion for Pharmasset in 2011, it was seen as a risky move. Now, it’s clearly one of the biggest biotech steals in many years.
Allergan announced today that it would sell its generic drugs business to Israeli off-brand giant Teva in a $40.5 billion megadeal. It’s the 10th biggest pharmaceutical transaction on record, according to Dealogic, and already makes 2015 one of the biggest years ever for dealmaking in the industry.
Apple’s potential entry into the electric car market has provoked fevered speculation, with conflicting reports that the company is making some kind of electric minivan, and that it plans on challenging Google and Uber in making a self-driving car.
Days after its $1.3 billion sale of the Financial Times, Pearson is looking to sell off its portion of the Economist Group as it transitions to being a purely education-focused company, the FT itself reports (paywall). Even though there was a bit of drama with the sale of the FT–rival bidder Axel Springer reportedly didn’t find out it lost out to Nikkei until minutes before the deal was announced–it was a piece of cake compared to what a sale of The Economist would entail.
“Obviously, this is personal for me,” US president Barack Obama said in the opening speech of his official visit to Kenya. “There’s a reason why my name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
Like its competitors Delta and United, American Airlines is raking in cash as fuel prices plummet—a rather preposterous amount of cash, it turns out. From the company’s call today:
Five airlines are being investigated by the US Department of Transportation for price gouging desperate rail commuters after the deadly derailment of an Amtrak train in the Northeast Corridor on May 12. The DOT sent a letter today informing American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United of the investigation.
Anthem has agreed to buy its smaller rival Cigna for $48.4 billion in cash and stock, a deal that would create the country’s biggest health insurance company. The $188 per share offer represents a 22% premium—a slightly sweetened offer from the one Cigna rejected last month.
Yahoo has undergone a major workforce transformation since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in the summer of 2012.
Less than a month after Aetna announced an agreement to buy Humana for $37 billion, we’re getting another health insurance mega-merger: Anthem is reportedly set to close on a $48 billion deal to buy Cigna.
If you want to find aliens, a 13,000-square-mile (37,000 sq km) bit of land in the eastern United States turns out to be one of the best places to look.
Joining a group that already includes Adobe, Microsoft, and Deloitte, consulting firm Accenture will end performance reviews and rankings for its 330,000 employee starting this September, according to the Washington Post. It’s one of the largest companies by headcount to do so.
