The year's spring equinox, also called the March or vernal equinox, falls on Tuesday at precisely 5:58 p.m. ET, according to NASA.

This astronomical event signals the arrival of spring, winter's end, and the trend toward increasingly warm and bright days that come with the pending arrival of summer.

At least, that's the case for people who live in Earth's northern hemisphere, which roughly 90% of all human beings call home. (Blame Earth's shifting land masses for that fun fact.)

For those in the southern hemisphere, the milestone marks the official beginning of fall. The days down under are growing shorter, the weather is cooling off, and sunlight is growing dimmer as winter approaches.

What drives these all-important seasonal shifts? Technically, two things: Earth's tilted axis and the planet's orbit around the sun.

How the spring equinox works

The Earth orbits the sun once every 365 days and 6 hours. Our planet also rotates once per day around a tilted axis.

That tilt is about 23.5 degrees (for now), which means different parts of the world get bathed with various intensities of light over the course of a year. Meanwhile, the planet's rotation keeps the heating even, sort of like a 7,917-mile-wide rotisserie chicken made of rock and a little water.

The spring equinox occurs when the sun's warming rays line up perpendicular to Earth's axial tilt:

An illustration of the spring equinox. Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

If you stand directly on the equator at noon in the Eastern Time time zone, the sun will appear more or less directly overhead. Your shadow will also be at its absolute minimum.

The sun also sets and rises roughly 12 hours apart during the equinox.

But this moment won't last, since the Earth makes its way around the sun at a speed of roughly 66,600 mph.

Uneven seasons

Our planet's orbit is elliptical and its center of gravity slightly offset from the sun, so the time it takes to cycle through the seasons isn't perfectly divvied up.

Read more: The speed of light is torturously slow, and these 3 simple animations by a scientist at NASA prove it

About 92 days and 19 hours after the spring equinox, the Earth will reach its summer solstice — when the most direct rays of the sun reach their northernmost latitude, called the Northern Tropic (or Tropic of Cancer). Another 93 days and six hours later, the fall or autumnal equinox will occur.

Then it's another 89 days and 19 hours to the winter solstice — when the most direct sunlight strikes the Southern Tropic (or Tropic of Capricorn) — and another 89 days to get back to the spring equinox.

An illustration of the spring and fall equinox and the summer and winter solstice. Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

The animation below, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, clearly shows this seasonal progression.

It was created using geosynchronous satellite images taken over Africa; such satellites fly around Earth in a geosynchronous orbit, which means they move fast enough to hover above one spot on the planet.

This creates a great opportunity to photograph the planet over the course of the year and see how the the angle of sun changes. Take a look:

The truth about the egg-balancing trick

That whole business of only being able to balance an egg on-end during a solstice is a myth. You can balance an egg any time you please, thanks to very small pores in its shell.

Those pores create nearly invisible dimples in the shell upon which a (very, very) patient person can stand up the egg.

Don't look for any gravitational interplay between Earth and the sun to help you out either; that's far too weak to make a noticeable difference.

This is an updated version of a story that was originally published on March 19, 2018.

Google took the wraps off its game streaming service on Tuesday with a barrage of fanfare, high-octane demos and a shiny new name and logo.

Meet: Stadia.

As far as names go, it's not bad. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, Stadia is a plural form of stadiums — an apt moniker for a product that aspires to provide virtual arenas for gamers and spectators anywhere in the world.

"One place... where you, and everyone you know, and everyone they know, will all play together," the narrator of Stadia's introductory video explains in a solemn tone.

For me though, the most striking thing about the new name and logo, is how utterly foreign it is to the Google brand. And that's not an accident.

Stadia's giant S looks like it belongs on the chest of a cartoon superhero. There's no mention of its Google pedigree anywhere (other than a brief flash of the letter G at the end of the demo video). And the visual cues (such as the standard color palette) that Google typically uses to tie together its family of products are notably absent.

Take a look at the logos below. All are Google products, but one of them is not like the others.

Google Fi, the company's wireless phone service:

Google

Google Photos:

Google

Google Maps:

Google

And here's Stadia:

Google

Sure, not all Google products mention Google. YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion back in 2006, has preserved its identity as an independent brand.

Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Unlike YouTube, however, Stadia doesn't have a pre-existing brand to preserve.

The Google foundation that Stadia is built on is one of its greatest assets. Google's vast network of data centers and undersea cables will make the games Stadia streams rock solid and lag-free; Google's AI prowess will enhance the gaming experience with integrated features like Google Assistant; Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, even spoke at the event, underscoring the importance of the relationship.

So Stadia's conscious decoupling with Google in its brand identity is worth paying attention to.

We've seen Google do this before. When Google introduced its mobile operating system a decade ago, it wanted the phone industry to embrace it as the answer to the rising iPhone threat. But even though phone companies were worried about Apple eating their lunch, there was distrust of Google too.

Enter Android, a cute little green alien that looks nothing like the rest of Google's brands:

Android Instagram page

Now, as Google barges into another established market, the company is walking a similar tightrope. Google's success in gaming will in large part come down to winning the support of industry incumbents — the game developers and studios that it hopes to offer on its streaming platform.

There's reason for them to be wary. After all, they'll be giving up control over distribution, customer relationships and perhaps even a portion of their revenue to Google. The precedents for these kinds of arrangements, whether in music or publishing, are not feel-good stories.

Google might even one day pose a serious threat to the largest game makers. Stadia Games and Entertainment, the first-party studio that was also announced on Tuesday, is tasked with creating games specifically for the Stadia streaming platform. The story right now is that this will let Google work hand-in-hand with independent game studios to develop experiences that sizzle on the streaming service. But as Google also builds its own games, it runs the risk of building up into the kind of heavyweight that draws audience away from the established players.

That's precisely the kind of arrangement that regulators and politicians are increasingly criticizing. A major pillar of US Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's rationale for breaking up big tech companies is that Google and Apple run marketplaces for apps and other services, while also promoting their own products in those marketplaces.

You can't have both, in Warren's view, especially if you're a giant tech comapny like Google.

Will Google try to use its size and advantages the same way with Stadia? It's too early to know. Right now, Google isn't even revealing the price of the service, which is due to launch sometime later this year.

Until then, the world can only wait and marvel at the beauty of Stadia's gleaming S logo.

On Tuesday, Google unveiled Stadia, its ambitious new platform that promises to stream blockbuster, graphics-intensive video games to almost any device with an internet connection — TVs, smartphones, tablets, you name it.

That's a big promise.

But after spending a reassuring few minutes with a demo of "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" running on Stadia, I'm ready to see what the future holds for the future of game streaming. There's still a lot we don't know, but the foundation of Stadia seems solid enough that I'm looking forward to seeing what Google comes up with next.

Read more:Google just unveiled Stadia, its ambitious attempt to upend the video-game industry and take on Xbox and PlayStation. Here's everything we know.

The whole idea of Google Stadia is that all of the tricky, processor-intensive business of rendering the game's graphics gets done in Google's enormously powerful data centers. The output is streamed back to your device in real-time, almost like watching someone play a game on YouTube or Twitch, but where you're in control. When you push a button on the controller, the signal gets sent back up to Google's cloud, starting the loop all over again.

This means that Stadia can, and will, work on any device, so long as it's capable of running the Chrome browser, or otherwise based on Google's Chrome tech. That means iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, TVs with a Chromecast dongle, Chromebooks, tablets, whatever — they'll all support Stadia.

Still, I was afraid that the reliance on the cloud would result in a high latency between when you push a button and something happening on the screen. Happily, I found that "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" ran smoothly enough to be playable, while still maintaining exquisite graphics and a high frame rate. I definitely got destroyed by an unhappy Athenian foot soldier, but that had more to do with my assassination skills than with Stadia's performance.

At the same time, though, there was a little bit of latency (or, at least, I felt like there was; I didn't have a way to accurately measure). This suggests that Stadia, in its present form, might work great for games like the relatively more subdued "Assassin's Creed," but maybe less great for twitch-based action shooters.

Indeed, GameSpot's Michael Higham got the chance to try the forthcoming "Doom Eternal" running on Stadia, and suggested that the input lag got in the way. It's a good reminder that while the technology for game streaming is very promising, it might not be ideal for every game, at least not at first.

A sort-of bummer about my own experience is that Google wasn't ready to show off the specially-designed controller it's designed for Stadia, which uses WiFi to sync directly with the Google Cloud as a novel method of avoiding the input lag. For what it's worth, Eurogamer seems to have liked the controller.

Instead, Google demonstrated it with an older, generic PC gaming controller made by Logitech, which worked fine.

The silver lining to this cloud (get it?) is that it's an object lesson in one of Google's other major selling points for Stadia: Google says that Stadia will support a huge variety of existing video game controllers, wherever the device itself supports it. That means if you plug an Xbox or PlayStation controller into a computer, it'll work with Stadia there, too.

Unfortunately, Google's nifty new Stadia controller was not on hand for my demo. Google

Ultimately, I came away optimistic: The problems, namely the input lag, seem fixable, and Google almost definitely has crack teams of engineers hard at work. It all ran better than I was expecting, and looked great. That won't be news to anyone who participated in Google's Project Stream beta test last year, where it gave Chrome users the chance to try "Odyssey" running on an earlier version of Stadia, but it was a pleasant surprise for me.

Read more: Google's new video-game streaming service could mark the beginning of the end for gaming consoles

If everything works out perfectly for Google, Stadia could totally upend the video game industry. There's way less of a need to buy a shiny new video game console when even older smartphones can play this year's biggest console hits, after all.

The thing is, though, that there's still a lot that can go wrong. While my experience with Stadia was pretty good, I reckon that will change wildly depending on the quality of the user's internet connection. In places where the internet is unreliable or just plain slow, Stadia may perform badly, if it's usable at all. That's something that's really hard to get a sense for during a short demo on a conference show floor.

Furthermore, we still don't have a great sense of all the games that Stadia will have to offer, apart from "Assassin's Creed Odyssey" and "Doom Eternal." Google says it'll have more to share later, but something like Stadia will live or die based on the quality of its games library, regardless of how good the technology is.

Finally, we still don't know the price of Stadia, or indeed how it will be billed. Will Google price it as a monthly subscription, like Spotify or Netflix? Or will you pay per game, as you would from digital storefronts like Steam or the Apple App Store?

The search giant isn't saying, yet, but promises more details are forthcoming this year.

By several accounts, Elizabeth Holmes carefully crafted and maintained a persona while heading up her blood-testing startup Theranos — including adopting a distinctively deep voice that former employees suspect she fabricated altogether.

Holmes' quirks as a leader of the now-dissolved Theranos have been well-documented: She methodically designed a persona borrowing from Silicon Valley elite, such as her notable Steve Jobs-esque outfits of black turtlenecks and slacks.

But the release of "The Inventor," an HBO documentary on the rise and fall of Theranos, has pushed the mystery of Holmes' voice back into the spotlight.

In making the documentary, HBO filmmakers were leaked more than 100 hours of video footage taken internally at Theranos, including intimate one-on-one interviews with Holmes, giving a new look at the embattled entrepreneur and her company. In the footage, her baritone is on full display.

Her voice is a trademark, as many would-be investors and Theranos employees noted in the book "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup." In the book, many said they were taken aback when first meeting Holmes, thanks to her unexpectedly deep voice and wide, unblinking eyes.

However, former Theranos employees have shared their suspicions that Holmes' deep voice was simply a ruse.

An employee recalled an evening with Holmes during which she "lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman's voice," Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou wrote in his book, published in 2018. The employee noted that the pitch was "several octaves higher than her normal baritone."

The former employee speculates that Holmes depended her voice because she was trying so desperately to fit in and be taken seriously as a young women in the male-dominated Silicon Valley scene.

Read more: A former Apple employee inspired Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes' change from 'frumpy accountant' to her signature Steve Jobs-style black turtleneck

A podcast from ABC News released later in 2018 added more fuel to the rumors that Holmes has faked her signature deep voice. In the podcast, called "The Dropout," former employees said Holmes would sometimes "fall out of character" and revert back to her authentic voice. This happened especially frequently after she had been drinking, employees said on the podcast.

Evidence of Holmes using what could be her natural voice is harder to find. The Cut reports that videos where her vocal missteps can be heard are often taken down from the internet rather quickly, usually within a day or two.

But the release of HBO's documentary has put viewer focus square on Holmes' voice. People on social media have expressed intense fascination with her voice. The documentary is able to show Holmes' full persona in a way that makes the mystery of her voice that much more intriguing.

Holmes has not publicly commented about her voice, or acknowledged whether or not it's authentic. That means we can only guess why exactly she would choose to change her voice, which would require her to dedicate herself to remembering the ruse every time she spoke.

Some say she was taking whatever steps she could to make headway in the male-dominated Silicon Valley. Others wonder if she was trying to further herself as much as she could from upspeak and vocal fry, two terms used to critique and police women's higher voices.

But whether or not the Holmes' voice was authentic, she was successful in convincing Silicon Valley bigshots that she was the real deal. She was able to get high-powered men with deep pockets to invest in her blood testing startup. By signing on successful venture capitalists like Henry Draper and political heavyweights like former Secretary of State Harry Kissinger, Holmes was able to raise more than $700 million in investment capital.

At its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, and Holmes was hailed as the world's youngest female billionaire. Since then, her company has been shut down, and she's facing charges of fraud from the SEC and Department of Justice.

When it comes to Mark Zuckerberg's plan to transform Facebook by emphasizing "privacy-focused" social networking, count Paul Vixie as a skeptic.

The concepts of private and social are, by their nature, at odds with one another, says Vixie, the CEO of Farsight Security. Vixie, who helped create some of the founding technology underlying the internet and has worked for decades on privacy and security issues, is dubious that Facebook will be able to find some middle ground in between them and still be able to have a fast-growing business.

"Private is not social, and social is not private. And so, if you're doing one, you're not doing the other," he said. "Please make up your mind."

"At the moment, the Venn diagram doesn't have any overlapping circles," he continued. "So, I'm not going to say it can't be done, but I will say that I'm not convinced."

Zuckerberg laid out his plans to build a "privacy-focused platform" in a blog post earlier this month. As envisioned by Zuckerberg, the new platform will allow users to interact privately via end-to-end encryption. It will also connect the company's various messaging services, allowing Instagram users to exchange messages with those on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The company plans to reconstruct several of its services with these ideas in mind, he said.

Read this: Facebook says it will move to encrypted, auto-deleting messages — and warns that some countries might decide to ban it

Facebook's CEO didn't explain how the company would make money off the its new privacy-centric services, although he suggested that Facebook will build into them the ability for corporations to connect with consumers and for consumers to be able to purchase goods through them. Ostensibly, Facebook would charge companies for such services.

Right now, almost all of the social-networking company's revenue has come from digital advertising. The ad-targeting machine the company has built has allowed it to build a huge and fast-growing business that has allowed it, along with Google, to dominate the digital advertising industry.

But Facebook may be starting to feel that its advertising efforts are being constrained, Vixie suggested. Under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect last year, companies such as Facebook can't collect or share data from European users without first getting their permission.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to reorient his company's services around privacy. Associated Press Indeed, that law illustrates how the concepts and values of "privacy" and "social" are fundamentally opposed, Vixie said. The law seeks to protect European citizens' privacy by giving them control and ultimate say over their data. In so doing, the law threatens to disrupt the social-networking giant's advertising business.

For that business, Facebook has collected copious amounts of data about its users, both based on what they post on the site and their interactions off of it. It's encouraged users to share ever more data about themselves by introducing new social features and has made itself valuable to advertisers by allowing them to access such data to target individuals or groups of users.

But GDPR could preclude Facebook from iterating on that business by widely rolling out new advertising services or other features, Vixie said. Facebook couldn't offer such features to individual users — at least in Europe — unless and until they agreed, one by one, to allow the company to access and use whatever data it needed for those services, he said.

And it could soon face similar difficulties elsewhere. California last year passed a privacy law that's similar to GDPR, and other governments are looking at it as a model for their own privacy legislation.

If Facebook has to get every user to click "yes" on a checkbox every time it wants to introduce a new feature, "it would mean that they could no longer operate as a hyper-scale company," Vixie said, adding that "hyperscale is what lets them have a share price that is such a high multiple of their earnings."

Got a tip about a startup or other tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of a pure, ice-cold drink of water.

While some Americans get water from the tap, the rest pay for the bottled variety — at a cost of $100 billion a year.

The average cost of a gallon's worth of single-serve bottled water in the US is nearly $9.50, according to FoodandWaterWatch. That's nearly three times more expensive than the average price for a gallon of milk, and almost four times the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline. Bottled water costs nearly 2,000 times more than tap water, which costs less than a cent per gallon.

Many people assume that the higher price tag is justified by the health benefits of bottled water, but in most cases, that's not true.

This year's World Water Day falls on March 22 — the day is meant to draw attention to disparities in clean-water access around the globe. Worldwide, 780 million people don't have access to a source of clean water.

But for the vast majority of Americans, tap water and bottled water are comparable in terms of healthiness and quality. In some cases, publicly sourced tap water may actually be safer, since it is usually tested more frequently, Plus, bottled water is more likely to be contaminated by microplastic particles than tap water.

"It is wrong to assume that bottled water is somehow cleaner, healthier, or safer than tap water in the US," Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told Business Insider.

There are exceptions, however: Water that comes from people's private wells do not see the same rigorous testing as those whose water comes from public sources. And, as was the case Flint, Michigan, some public sources are not properly screened.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of reasons for most people to stop shelling out for bottled water. Here's what to know.

For years, Noah Wasmer worked in the Silicon Valley tech scene before moving to Atlanta. But now, he's made an even bigger move: uprooting to Sydney, Australia, where he can surf at a beach one block away from his house, take the ferry to work, and serve as Atlassian's first vice president of product and head of technical teams.

Since most of the Atlassian's engineering teams and product managers are in Sydney, as well as co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, that's where Wasmer needs to be as well. Wasmer, who joined after serving as a senior vice president and general manager at VMware, has now been working at Atlassian for over two months.

"[Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar] have a real sense of curiosity and learning," Wasmer told Business Insider. "It's something that permeates who Atlassian is and it's something everyone here has. It's why we're really honored to be here, and it's because of that humility and passion for building great software."

In his role, Wasmer reports directly to Farquhar and is responsible for all the software and IT products at Atlassian, including Jira, Bitbucket, Opsgenie, Jira Service Desk, and Statuspage. Atlassian has previously had product leads who reported directly to the CEOs, but Wasmer is the first person serving as vice president of product at the $27 billion company.

"It's a very humbling opportunity," Wasmer said. "There's a lot of passionate people about Atlassian products. We want people to love our software. There's always areas we can improve on. We want to do the very best and this is something they show in the feedback they give us."

The journey to Atlassian

Wasmer said he was drawn to Atlassian because right now, businesses are going through a major transition of working to release code faster and more often.

"One of the things that's important for me is helping people love their work," Wasmer said. "Everything has transitioned to faster, simpler, easier. In our work lives, there's this opportunity to say how do we work in a more agile fashion? Atlassian provides the tools and practices to help businesses go through this major transition."

Read more:Investors are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that startups like PagerDuty, GitLab, and CloudBees can change the way software gets made

Wasmer has used Atlassian for most of his career, so when a mutual colleague reached out and told him that Atlassian was considering hiring someone for this role, Wasmer was open to it and felt the opportunity was too good to pass by. He says that he wants to take what he learned from VMware about mobility and how people work and bring it to Atlassian.

"One of the opportunities I see is really to help business leaders and decision leaders look at how do they embrace these tools and help them become part of that transition," Wasmer said.

Wasmer works directly with Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar, and he calls them "unbelievable visionaries" when it comes to company culture, despite Atlassian's fast growth. He says he could walk down the hall at any given day and see either of the CEOs in a room working with a group or engineers.

"[Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar are] incredible ideas people," Wasmer said. "Every time you sit down with them, they have a finger on the pulse, on how do we make sure we're building the right products for developers."

And it's not just about the product vision. Wasmer recalls that he was supposed to have a meeting with Farquhar in Atlanta, but then he couldn't make it because his wife went into labor.

"He was amazing at understanding family first. That was what really drew me to the company was walking the talk," Wasmer said.

Moving to Australia

Although Wasmer had to relocate across the Pacific and start a new life in Australia with his with his wife and three children, so far, he says Sydney is an "unbelievable place." He can step outside his house and surf, something that he used to do at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.

"It's an incredible hub of talent and diverse people with diverse ideas," Wasmer said. "For my wife and I, it was an adventure that we're exposing our children to being international even though it's an English-speaking country. The global economy is global in nature. We felt that was an important thing for our family."

PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

There were a couple things that surprised Wasmer about Australia. One is that every store he goes to has tap-to-pay for phones and credit cards. The other is that he feels Australia has a culture of responsibility to the overall community, which he feels reflects in Atlassian's culture as well.

"At the beach, they have these little penguins that come to shore," Wasmer said. "There's a sign that says, if you see foxes try to eat penguins, scare the foxes away. There, you have a responsibility to protect these animals. I really like that. That's part of the core DNA of this company, too."

Some challenges Wasmer expects to face are helping the company live up to the expectations of its customers and making sure its products can help them in various use cases. As the new vice president of product, he wants to help customers embrace modern software development.

Read more:The president of $26.6 billion Atlassian explains the 'gnarly problem' that prompted its $166 million acquisition of AgileCraft

"It's one of the most exciting times in technology where we can listen and learn from our customer base and create some powerful ways to reimagine what they've always done," Wasmer said. "There's a hunger for these technologies like I've never seen, and we want to live up to that really high bar of delivering value. We've got a fun task ahead."

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In less than a week, Apple is set to announce a range of services including an all-you-can-read subscription news bundle, and it's causing a lot of angst for publishers already worried about big tech eating media. I talked to publishers who were pitched by Apple, and they say the phone maker is basing the business model on a flawed comparison between news and music.

To date, The New York Times and The Washington Post have not joined, but The Wall Street Journal is having productive talks with Apple and is expected to join, people familiar with its thinking say.

To read most of the articles here, subscribe to BI Prime and use promo code AD2PRIME2018 for a free month. Already a Prime subscriber? Tell us what you think by taking our quick survey here:

Here are other good stories we've been reporting:

'It helps Facebook further fortify its walled garden': Instagram is testing in-app checkout to make shopping more seamless, but experts say it has a bigger agenda Instagram is rolling out a checkout button to make it easier for people to shop from the platform. It shows how Instagram has been making shopping a bigger priority in recent months and is also an attempt by the company to gather more data, experts say. The move could threaten companies like Curalate that have built businesses on bridging the gap between browsing and purchasing on Instagram.

A product Comcast launched 2 years ago was supposed to disrupt AT&T and Verizon's business — now experts see it as something totally different When Comcast launched its Xfinity Mobile cellular service in 2017, Wall Street analysts predicted it would skyrocket, adding more than 2 million customers a year. Two years later, that prediction hasn't materialized, despite a strong launch, according to analysts at Cowen. They examined how Comcast has used Xfinity as a retention strategy rather than a way to grab share from other wireless providers.

New research shows how The New York Times, Economist, New Yorker and other top online subscription publishers stack up As publishers jump on the subscription bandwagon, a new survey by Dynata, formerly Critical Mix, for Business Insider found that three publications hog most of the online news subscriptions: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Most of the respondents who have subscriptions reported they subscribe to just one or two publications. They're pretty happy with their subscriptions, making it unlikely they'll drop them. Our survey shows how 12 publications stack up to each other.

Alamo Drafthouse's movie-ticket subscription plan will launch in all its theaters by the end of the year Movie-ticket subscription services have seen a surge in popularity, and now Alamo Drafthouse is getting ready to join other theater chains in launching its own service, Alamo Season Pass, nationwide at all Drafthouse theaters by the end of the year. The unlimited plan will cost $20 a month in most regions of the country, and you'll also be able to reserve seats.

A tech firm that builds chatbots for big brands like Macy's and Alaska Airlines is acquiring a bot startup to corner the messaging market As more marketers experiment with messaging and chatbots, 10-year-old firm Conversocial is acquiring bot startup Assist. Chatbots have lost some steam as brands have struggled to promote them on the social platforms. But with Facebook putting more emphasis on messaging, Conversocial sees a big opportunity with the acquisition.

Feel free to send tips or thoughts to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Here are other good stories from tech, media, and entertainment:

Google just unveiled its vision for 'the future of gaming' — here's everything it announced

The rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, who started Theranos when she was 19 and became the world's youngest female billionaire before it all came crashing down

Director Alex Gibney looks back on a career of profiling liars and shady characters, from Elizabeth Holmes to Lance Armstrong, and crowns the most despicable

Media agencies are under massive pressure to reinvent themselves. Here's how the biggest ones, including Horizon Media and PHD, are evolving to meet clients' demands.

'Billions' star Asia Kate Dillon on how the show led to a revelation about the actor's own gender identity, and an emotional moment with a fan

Federal regulators have just given the green light to a second new kind of antidepressant this month, after decades of little progress combating the disease.

The US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved an injection branded Zulresso that is made by biotech company Sage Therapeutics. The drug, known as brexanalone, treats people who experience depression after giving birth, a condition known as post-partum depression (PPD).

"This approval marks the first time a drug has been specifically approved to treat postpartum depression, providing an important new treatment option," Tiffany Farchione, the FDA's acting director in the division of psychiatry products, said in a statement.

About two weeks ago, the FDA approved a treatment for severe depression called esketamine from Johnson & Johnson.

In contrast to the past 35 years of depression medications, neither of the new drugs is a pill. One is a nasal spray and the other is an injection.

New approaches to treating depression, a disease that affects 16 million Americans

Two drugs take new tacks to treating depression that have not been seen by other approved medications. Daiana Lorenz/Youtube

Both drugs take new tacks to treating depression that have not been seen by other approved medications. Instead of homing in on the brain's serotonin network — as all the available medications have for the past four decades — the new drugs zero in on unique parts of the brain thought to affect our mood.

Because of that, reviewers hope the drugs will offer faster and longer-lasting solutions — primarily for people who've tried and failed to see benefits with existing medications.

Sage's drug affects the brain's Gaba network, which is believed to play a role in anxiety. It was created for mothers with post-partum depression. PPD is estimated to affect as many as 400,000 Americans each year.

Johnson & Johnson's drug, esketamine, is inspired by ketamine and works on a brain system known as the NMDA system. It's designed to treat severe depression.

One of the biggest potential upsides of Sage's drug is the fact that it would not need to be taken daily like a traditional antidepressant. It also appears to work quickly, taking effect within hours, unlike current depression pills, which can take weeks to start working. The effects of Zulresso may last as far out as 30 days, the period of time researchers analyzed for the company's clinical trials.

The company is also studying a pill version of its new injectable in a broader set of mental illnesses including major depression and bipolar disorder. Analysts expect that drug, known only as Sage-217, to have blockbuster appeal for the 16 million Americans with severe depression unrelated to childbirth.

The official approval for brexanolone follows a favorable vote from outside experts convened by the FDA last fall. In November, the panel voted 17-1 in favor of the treatment, which they decided carried more benefits than risks for patients. Still, the new drug has important risks and side-effects.

Experts are hopeful about Sage's new injectible drug, but they're more excited about its related pill

"We think these two products can live in this market and help create choice for patients," Sage's chief business officer told Business Insider. Shutterstock

Analysts and clinicians said they were hopeful about the new approval for several reasons. They believe it adds options for a disease that currently has no approved medications. They also expect the news to bode well for Sage's related drug — the oral pill called 217 that's in an earlier stage of research but targets the same part of the brain as the injection.

Together, Zulresso and 217 "have the potential to change the treatment paradigm for treating mood disorders," wrote Yatin Suneja, a senior biotech analyst with investment firm Guggenheim, in a report circulated last month. Suneja added that the firm expected the two drugs to generate sales in the range of $3-5 billion across diseases including major depression, PPD, and potentially bipolar disorder.

Assuming that 217 gets approved as well, Sage sees both drugs as helping to provide more options to people with mental illness.

"We think these two products can live in this market and help create choice for patients," Sage's chief business officer, Michael Cloonan, told Business Insider.

Still, there are barriers to Sage's new injectible that are not seen with traditional antidepressants.

Unlike a daily pill, brexanalone must be given to patients by way of an IV, similar to how the anesthetic ketamine is administered for depression. And the dosing for Sage's drug happens over the course of two-and-a-half days — meaning someone would have to come into a clinic and stay overnight while they are monitored by a professional.

Sage's new drug could also have a steep price tag. The company said it will charge $34,000 for one course of treatment, and it's still unclear how much of that insurance would cover.

Sage's new drug can have a serious side effect

Brexanolone also comes with side effects that include headaches, drowsiness, and dizziness. Additionally, out of 140 women given the drug in a clinical trial, six of them temporarily lost consciousness during the treatment, according to data compiled by the FDA in advance of the expert panel convened last fall.

Although a serious potential side effect, the FDA-assembled panel also said it was the only "major safety concern" observed with Sage's drug. To address it, regulators will require patients to visit approved clinics for the drug where they can be monitored for several days.

Wall Street analysts expect the recent approval to also bode well for Sage's oral drug candidate, 217.

Read more: A drug that works differently from all existing depression drugs just got a big boost

Unlike brexanolone, 217 could be taken by mouth without the need for specialty clinics. Plus, 217 is being studied for use in a wider range of brain diseases including major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and insomnia.

"The possibility of having something that impacts the Gaba system is attractive because if you were to launch it tomorrow, there's likely going to be lots of patients who've failed with anything that's available," Paul Matteis, the managing director of biotech research with brokerage firm Stifel, told Business Insider.

And like Sage's injection, the oral pill may act faster than traditional medications and also not require daily dosing. In clinical trials looking at patients who took the drug once, its effects appeared to last as long as four weeks.

That's something that Matteis said sounds like it would be "preferred by most patients [over] having to take something indefinitely."

"We're trying to change the paradigm," Cloonan said. "We want patients to take this medicine when they need it, not when they don't."

To grow its consumer revenue, Forbes is taking a page from the success of video-learning behemoths like MasterClass and Real Vision.

On Monday, the company announced Forbes8, a subscription digital video network that pitches itself as "Entrepreneurial Inspiration to Drive Business." It contains more than 2,000 videos offering tips, information, and advice for budding and established entrepreneurs.

For $1.99 a day, $5.99 a week, or $8.99 a month, subscribers get access to glossy videos of people like Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Pictures, discussing overcoming adversity; Chobani CMO Peter McGuinness talking about making yogurt fun; and author Tim Ferriss on writing books that will go viral. The videos are customizable and organized in tabs "For You," "Inspire," "Launch," "Grow," and "Impact."

"We've been trying to innovate often," said Tom Davis, Forbes' chief growth officer. "A couple years ago, it dawned on me that video storytelling on mobile devices was the way to take Forbes to the next level. The purpose of helping people becoming better business people could be done through video storytelling. We were sitting on a lot of information that wasn't curated appropriately."

Read more: Apple is pitching its new subscription service as a savior to journalism, but publishers say its logic is flawed

Davis said the name Forbes8 grew out of a working title Forbes Infinity. Forbes decided that the infinity sign (a sideways "8") was too hard to type into a browser, so it changed the spelling to Forbes8.

Video education has become a hot area, with companies like 3-year-old MasterClass, which just raised $80 million and offers instructional insights from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and James Patterson; and 4-year-old Real Vision, which had raised $15 million as of last May and provides insights from hedge fund managers. Both cost $180 a year.

Davis acknowledged he looked at other e-learning and entrepreneurial courses but said that Forbes8 was different from MasterClass and other established ones. The network will draw from video created by Forbes' own editorial staff, its events, its BrandVoice advertisers, and licensed content from others such as MasterClass itself.

"We have access to titans of industry and business people who maybe aren't well-known, and startups," he said.

Forbes is working with AW3 Media, a global SaaS technology company led by Amos Winbush III, with a network of 15 telecom companies reaching 2.2 billion mobile phone subscribers. In addition to Forbes8.com and on the Apple Store, the video network will be available through telco companies that will offer subsidized access to their mostly overseas subscribers.

Davis said Forbes has other plans for reader-driven revenue he wouldn't reveal. He wouldn't put a dollar figure on how big of a business he sees Forbes8 becoming, but said he thinks it could be "large and meaningful."

In any case, there's limited downside to the initiative, as Forbes is running Forbes8 using its existing staff.

Forbes isn't the first traditional publisher to get into paid video to supplement its advertising revenue. Late last year, Vox Media launched a $4.99-a-month video membership program to offset the cost of its video production.