The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may not be as peaceful as scientists thought.

Just 3.5 million years ago, the Milky Way's black hole produced a massive explosion that sent cones of radiation shooting through the galaxy and beyond, according to new research. It was recent in galactic terms — ancient ancestors of modern humans walked the Earth at the time.

The explosion, likely caused by nuclear activity, was so powerful that it stretched to the Magellanic Stream, a cosmic river of gas clouds 200,000 light-years outside the Milky Way. 

A study analyzing the explosion's impacts on the Magellanic Stream was posted in the online repository arXiv, which publishes research that has not yet been peer-reviewed. The study is awaiting publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

"These results dramatically change our understanding of the Milky Way," the study coauthor Magda Guglielmo said in a press release. "We always thought about our galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright center. These new results instead open the possibility of a complete reinterpretation of its evolution and nature."

The team analyzed observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to reveal that some clouds in the Magellanic Stream are highly ionized — something removed or added electrons from their molecules to give them an electric charge.

Those ionized clouds are a pivotal piece of evidence for the nuclear explosion that previous findings had only hinted at.

Satellites have detected bubbles of gamma- and X-ray radiation extending up to 50,000 light-years above and below the plane of the galaxy. In 2013, scientists identified changes in the energy levels of hydrogen electrons along the part of the Magellanic Stream that's in-line with those radiation bubbles. They could tentatively attribute those changes to activity in the galaxy's black hole, but this new finding makes the picture much more clear.

The explosion created two cones of radiation that shot through the Milky Way, expanding from a tiny point near the central black hole to impact a vast portion of the Magellanic Stream.

The below video, created by James Josephides, shows the cones (purple) stretching beyond the Milky Way spiral to intersect the Magellanic Stream as it circles the galaxy.

 

"The flare must have been a bit like a lighthouse beam," Joss Bland-Hawthorn, an astronomer who led the research team, said in the release. "Imagine darkness, and then someone switches on a lighthouse beacon for a brief period of time."

The blast lasted about 300,000 years, the researchers estimated. On cosmic timescales, that's a short explosion. On a human timescale, it would have seemed like a permanent fixture in the sky.

Ancient human ancestors may have watched the explosion

At the time of the explosion, one of humans' longest-lived ancestors was spreading across Africa. Australopithecus was a group of primate species that walked on two legs like us but still had the tiny brains characteristic of apes, and sported teeth somewhere in between.

The group encompassed Australopithecus afarensis, a species of early human that lived in East Africa and included the famously well-preserved fossil Lucy.

They might have noticed the galactic explosion looming overhead, but it likely had no effect on them.

"They may well have looked up towards Sagittarius and seen cones of light shooting sideways from the Milky Way, brighter than any star in the night sky," Bland-Hawthorn wrote in The Conversation on Monday. "The lightshow would have appeared as static beams on a human timescale, only flickering on timescales of thousands of years."

The explosion shows how much we don't know about black holes

It's still unclear what exactly would have caused an explosion on such a huge scale. How black holes evolve and influence their galaxies remains "an outstanding problem in astrophysics," the researchers said in their paper.

"We don't understand why this activity is intermittent, but it has something to do with how material gets dumped onto the black hole," Bland-Hawthorn wrote in The Conversation. "It might be like water droplets on a hot plate that sputter and explode chaotically, depending on their size."

In an effort to better understand the nature of that activity, the international team of researchers that took the first photograph of a black hole is turning its telescopes to the center of our galaxy. The team plans to start releasing video footage of the Milky Way's black hole in the next five years.

In the meantime, Earth is safe from flares like this one because we're far from the galactic center, in a backwater of the galaxy.

"This is a dramatic event that happened a few million years ago," Lisa Kewley, director of the Arc Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D, said in the release. "This shows that the center of the Milky Way is a much more dynamic place than we had previously thought. It is lucky we're not residing there!"

Google Groups is a platform where you can bring people together to have discussions, host question and answer sessions, organize emails, and more.

It's great for team projects, classmates, departments, or any other group of people who need to work together in an organized space.

While the feature can be very convenient, if you create a Google Group for a temporary project, you may eventually want to delete it to free up space on your page.

After you delete a group, it will not show up in search results, or in the Google Groups directory. Be careful, however, as once you delete a Google Group, there is no way that it can be restored.

Here's how to delete a Google Group that you no longer need:

How to delete a Google Group

1. Sign in to Google Groups using the Google profile that owns the Google Group you are trying to delete.

2. Click on "My Groups" at the top of the menu on the left side of the screen.

It's always a good idea to have backups. And when it comes to your computer, it's also usually a necessity if you want to make sure that your data isn't lost in the event of a system failure. 

That said, if you have multiple copies of your data, from different points in time, it may be time to get rid of those extra copies to make room for newer ones.

Here's how to get it done on a Mac computer using your external hard drive:

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

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How to delete backups on a Mac using Finder

1. Open the Finder from your Dock or top menu bar.

2. Connect your external hard drive and then wait for it to appear in the Devices section, located in the left sidebar.

3. Go to "Backups.backupdb" within the drive, then go into the subfolder labeled with your Mac's name.

4. A list of subfolders organized by date will appear. Delete the folder associated with the Time Machine backup that you want to get rid of by right-clicking and selecting "Move to Trash."

5. Empty your trash by right-clicking the trash icon in your Dock and then selecting "Empty Trash."

How to delete backups on a Mac using Time Machine

1. Connect your external hard drive to your computer.

2. Click the Time Machine icon in the top menu bar — it looks like a clock with an arrow going around the outside — or search for it using Spotlight, the magnifying glass at the top right corner of your screen.

3. Find the backup you want to delete, then click the gear icon and select "Delete Backup."

4. Agree to the confirmation question and commands, and then enter your password to confirm your choice.

 

Oracle on Tuesday announced it would be hiring 2,000 people for its cloud business in technical and business-operations roles.

Hiring 2,000 people is an interesting reason to put out a press release. With a worldwide headcount of nearly 139,000, another 2,000 employees would grow its headcount by less than 1.5% — which is just about its general rate of employee turnover anyway. For instance, Oracle right now lists 8,000 job openings on its site.

But there are several good strategic reasons why Oracle may have made this announcement. 

For one, earlier this year, Oracle laid off untold thousands of employees, including the issuing of pink slips to a swatch of technical folks who worked in Seattle on its cloud, Business Insider previously reported. Announcing a new wave of hiring is a way for Oracle to signal to the world that it's continuing to invest in a healthy cloud business. 

Read more: As Oracle's growth stagnates, insiders say that its all-important cloud business has suffered layoffs, infighting, and confusion

Another reason: Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison told investors last month that Oracle was growing its cloud "as fast as we can other than building data centers that are empty." In other words, Oracle is focusing its cloud growth to respond to customer demand instead of building out huge data centers first and then trying to sign new clients later.

So calling out these 2,000 job openings is way to underscore Ellison's message last month.

Trim employees there, hire them here

But the news isn't just public-relations fluff.

The scheme to lay off thousands and then hire back 2,000 people for the cloud is a good, strategic one, one former midlevel manager who left the company during that reorganization last summer told Business Insider.

The layoffs earlier this year came after Thomas Kurian, Oracle's longtime head of engineering, left for Google Cloud in 2018. Many disparate business groups, working on a variety of different products, were consolidated under Don Johnson, the vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure product development, this person told us. 

With Kurian gone, Johnson's star is now rising at the company. He was even named by Ellison as a contender on the list of internal candidates who may become co-CEO with Safra Catz should Mark Hurd be unable to return from his recent medical leave.

The layoffs, then, were a way to trim the groups working on less-important products and features and for Johnson to get his arms around a sprawling number of cloud-engineering units.

But Oracle's cloud business was not spared from the layoffs.

We previously reported that, under Kurian, Oracle had created two whole cloud teams building two different clouds — and infighting between them was the norm. The team based in Seattle was building what's known as the Oracle Gen 2 cloud. And they won the war. The older cloud was phased out, with much of the team developing it targeted for layoffs.

But Seattle's team lost some further battles under Johnson, and faced layoffs too.

Why not simply transfer these people to some of those 2,000 new jobs? One reason is the cost. Sources told us that Oracle overhired in Seattle and was paying some of this team very high wages — in the middle to high six figures, including stock options, a source said.

As Oracle's cloud grows, the high Seattle wages and overhead costs were "not sustainable," the former middle manager said. 

A new cloud strategy

More importantly, as Ellison hinted, Oracle has this year settled on a cloud strategy that differs from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and that gives the company a real chance to become an important cloud player for its customers.

Oracle has finally come to terms with the fact that its cloud is many years behind Amazon and the other major players in terms of the number and breadth of features it offers.

The company has now smartly decided to focus on building a cloud specifically optimized for customers of its own on-premises-database and software customers. It wants those customers to move their Oracle apps to Oracle's cloud, rather than let them be scooped up by AWS, a competitor who is encouraging Oracle customers to ditch Oracle's software. 

To that end, Oracle even partnered with Microsoft Azure, its archrival's cloud, and began encouraging its customers to use Azure for needs other than Oracle's apps, making the two clouds work well together.

All of this means that Oracle is choosing locations for its new data centers that are near its most strategic customers, — rather than, as Ellison said, building empty data centers and trying to fill them. So it needs more employees in those specific locations worldwide, rather than a larger group in Seattle.

Beware of the future

The laser focus on its own customers and its own apps is probably the best thing Oracle could do at this stage in the game to stay relevant as cloud computing alters the way companies buy their technology.

But there is one "gotcha," sources told us: Oracle needs to be keeping an eye on the future and investing heavily in next-generation cloud technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, serverless computing, and other new trends.

Over the past few years, Oracle has invested billions more in stock buybacks ($36 billion in its last fiscal year alone) than on R&D spending (about $1.5 billion per quarter last year, according to YCharts).

If Oracle continues to focus more on the needs of today than the tech of tomorrow, it could be just kicking the can down the road as the more advanced clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google look to nab its database customers later on.

Oracle did not respond to our request for comment.

Read more: Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked it

About 4,000 years ago on a remote island in the Arctic, the last woolly mammoth died out.

Elephantine in shape and size, mammoths (official name Mammuthus primigenius) dominated the northern hemisphere during Earth's last ice age for nearly 90,000 years, before changing climates and human hunting drove them to extinction.

Scientists have uncovered mammoth skeletons and frozen carcasses everywhere from Spain to Siberia, and the understanding was that these creatures had wholly disappeared by about 11,000 years ago.

But a handful of mammoth populations survived on two tiny, isolated islands nestled between Russia and Alaska that were cut-off from the mainland by rising seas. Researchers think one of these refuges, name Wrangel Island, became the last mammoth hold-out; these tusked giants outlived their North American and European counterparts by some 7,000 years before going abruptly extinct.

That means mammoths as a species lasted far longer than scientists previously thought. When the last woolly mammoth kicked the bucket, the Great Pyramid of Giza had already been built in Egypt.

According to a new study, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, the Wrangel Island inhabitants didn't die of the same causes as other mammoths. Rather, the study authors argue, the isolated animals started to inbreed, which weakened their genetic diversity. The weakened population was then unable to adapt to extreme weather events, which likely caused the mammoths' sudden, untimely demise.

Read More: Scientists think they finally know why the last woolly mammoths died out

Hello!

Welcome to the Advertising and Media Insider newsletter. I'm Lauren Johnson, a senior advertising reporter filling in for Lucia this week. If you got this email forwarded, sign up for your own here. Send tips or feedback to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

After a year of nearly constant rumors about digital media mergers, the past few weeks have proved that the consolidation trend is real.

In the past couple of weeks, Vox Media acquired New York Media, Vice Media bought Refinery29, and Group Nine Media bought PopSugar. All three deals were all or mostly stock deals.

Lucia dug into the story behind Refinery29 and how it raised $133 million after starting in 2005 as a site to highlight up-and-coming designers and creative types. Lucia's reporting is packed with juicy details, including a meeting where a spaceship was used to symbolize the company's growth, its move into hard news and a distribution strategy heavily reliant on social platforms.

How Refinery29 bootstrapped for 8 years, caught fire, and raised $133 million — only to end up selling to another struggling startup, Vice Media, for mostly stock

Lucia also looked into eBay's ambitions to grow advertising to a $1 billion business by pitching it as an alternative to Amazon. The company has reworked its teams and hired Scott Kelliher, a veteran of publishers like Time and Yahoo, as its first head of brand advertising and partnerships.

eBay is ramping up its sales efforts to take aim at Amazon's giant advertising business

My colleague Tanya Dua reported on content-recommendation company Taboola's merger with longtime rival Outbrain. The companies have paid publishers for years in exchange for sending traffic to sites through sponsored posts that appear at the bottom of article pages. Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda said Outbrain shareholders would receive shares representing 30% of the combined company and $250 million in cash under the combined company.

Taboola and Outbrain, 2 of the biggest content-recommendation companies, are combining to take on Google and Facebook in advertising

Tanya also spoke with Dell CMO Allison Dew about the computer giant's focus on first-party data amid upcoming privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act and its experimentation with an in-house agency.

Dell's CMO Allison Dew talks about how the company was ahead on the direct-to-consumer trend, why dedicated agency units fail, and why advertising may enter 'Mad Men Era 2.0'

I covered ad-tech company Samba TV's newest acquisition: A first-party data firm called Wove. As more ad-tech companies prepare for privacy laws in the US, Samba TV CEO and co-founder, Ashwin Navin, said that the acquisition will let advertisers use first-party data like web visits to target TV ads.

Samba TV is acquiring a startup that helps direct-to-consumer brands like Parachute and Plated swap data to improve TV ad targeting

Meanwhile, agency correspondent Patrick Coffee reported that ad agency FCB ended its partnership with the London International Awards after ousted Droga5 exec Ted Royer gave a surprise talk at a Las Vegas event this week. Attendees at the event said that they felt like they would be penalized and not reimbursed if they chose to not attend Royer's talk.

Ad agency FCB ends partnership with London International Awards after controversy over surprise appearance by fired Droga5 executive

Patrick also got his hands on holding company IPG's internal memo announcing a new mar-tech group called Kinesso. IPG chairman and CEO Michael Roth said it would build on the holding company's $2.3 billion acquisition of Acxiom last year.

Internal memo explains why ad holding company IPG launched app-focused martech business Kinesso

Here are other great stories from media, marketing, and advertising. (You can read most of the articles here by subscribing to BI Prime; use promo code AD2PRIME2018 for a free month.)

Internal memo: Buzzy startup Axios just made a big newsroom hire as it aims for 200 in headcount this year

Exclusive data that predicted Netflix's big Q2 subscriber miss suggests international growth has bounced back

The digital ad business can't police itself. It's time to let the feds do it.

Cannabis e-commerce startup Tokr, which just raised $1 million in seed funding, explains how it plans to broaden its appeal beyond hard core users

How to use YouTube to scale your business and find new customers

Streaming video is shaking up the media industry. Here's where 3 top investment firms are placing their bets to capitalize.

Here's everything we know about WeWork exec exits, huge layoffs, and more as the co-working giant looks to right itself after a failed IPO

 

The most frustrating thing about watching "Gemini Man" (in theaters Friday) is all the pieces are there for it to be a special film.

You have the blockbuster star in Will Smith, some really impressive action sequences, and director Ang Lee going all-in once more with shooting a movie at 120 frames per second. All those things should equal that "experience" audiences crave at the movie theater. Sadly it's missing the most important component: a good story.

Maybe it's because the project has been in development for close to 20 years by countless directors, stars, and studios (it was eventually produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films and Skydance Media with Paramount releasing it), but there is nothing of substance in "Gemini Man."

Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, an aging assassin for the government who is smart enough to realize while on his latest hit that he's losing a step and decides to retire. However, that's not so easy. After finding out that his last hit was on someone who did nothing wrong, Henry tries to figure out why he's been misled (and if it has happened more than once). That leads to Henry becoming a target. And the assassin out to get him is … himself.

Read more: Kevin Smith rekindled his friendship with Ben Affleck thanks to a private jet and getting "ghosted" by Snoop Dogg

A black ops unit known as Gemini cloned Henry years ago and a younger version of himself has been raised by the company's director Clayton Varris (Clive Owen) to become the ultimate soldier.

It's compelling on paper, but the execution of the story is downright abysmal. All of Smith's abilities to be the superstar are tested by a horrific script (some of the dialogue is so bad you can't help but laugh out loud) and puzzling direction by Lee (for some reason he fell in love with the tight shot on this movie). Lee going with POV-heavy bike chases in the movie is a real highlight, however.

The movie does have its strengths.

The crisp 120 fps photography (which Lee did for the movie "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk") and the fact that it was shot for 3D gives the movie a super crisp look that's the sharpest picture I've ever seen in a theater. From the first frame, I was completely in awe. For some it might be a little too sharp, but I have no complaints.

And the visual effects to have old and young Will Smith face off are also flawless. Done by Weta Digital (behind "The Lord of the Rings" movies), it's an incredible achievement that is one of the few things I can say the movie does right.

So even though the story is a complete bore, it's hard to stop you from going to see this movie. But find a theater that has a projector that will show it at 120 fps and in 3D. You will not be satisfied by what you watch, but I assure you it will look beautiful.

The Toyota Supra is just one of those cars. And I'm not simply talking about the now-iconic MK IV Supra, the fourth-generation two-door that, in flamboyant orange, was piloted by Paul Walker in the first "Fast and Furious" movie. No, I'm going all the way back to my own youth, when the MK I Supra, rolled out in 1979 as a snazzier Celica, hit the road.

Over the decades, Supra became a moniker associated with affordable performance and Japanese reliability. But then, in the late 1990s, Toyota dropped the Supra for the US market, discontinuing the nameplate entirely in 2002.

Seventeen years later, an all-new (and long-rumored) Supra reboot hit the floor of the Detroit auto show. There had been teasing concepts for 10 years, and when the revamped Supra was unveiled, the reaction was ... well, rather tepid. We waited all this time for that? Making matters worse, the new Supra would be a cousin to a mechanically similar BMW Z4, with both cars built by contract manufacturer Magna in Austria.

The letdown vanished, however, once folks started driving the Supra. Early reviews were gushing. OK, sure, the innards of the car were suspiciously Bavarian-looking. But all was forgiven once you strapped in and started driving.

I personally had never been a major-league Supra fan, but my curiosity was piqued. And I had driven the new Z4 in early 2019 and come away impressed. That car was a drop-top roadster with a four-cylinder engine, and despite the addition of some BMW M-Sport performance goodies, it didn't carry as much oomph under the hood as the six-cylinder Supra (both engines are BMW-made). 

So I was ready to see if the Supra could do something interesting with the extra power and remain what it had always been: a bang-for-the-buck European sports-car rival.

Read on to see how it went:

Apple Music offers a variety of plans to fit your lifestyle and budget. Options include an individual subscription for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Students also have the option to receive monthly subscriptions for just $4.99.

Like other app subscriptions, you can cancel Apple Music from your phone, but you can also easily cancel or alter your subscription from your Mac computer. 

After launching iTunes, you can access your account details and make any necessary changes. If you have a new Mac, you may need to sign into iTunes first before you can cancel your subscription.

After canceling, you will still have access to Apple Music features for the remainder of the current billing cycle. 

Note that the below steps will apply to Mac computers running macOS Mojave or earlier, as the recently released macOS Catalina has replaced iTunes with separate apps for music, podcasts, and TV. 

That said, here's how to cancel your subscription:

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

MacBook Pro (From $1,299.99 at Best Buy)

How to cancel Apple Music on a Mac computer

1. Open iTunes on your Mac desktop or laptop.

2. Navigate to the top menu bar.

3. Click "Account" and if you haven't signed in yet on your computer or need to switch accounts, click "Sign Out" or "Sign In" from the dropdown menu.

4. After clicking "Account" and signing in, click  "View My Account." This will bring you to your account information page.

5. Scroll down the page to the Settings section.

6. Click "Manage" next to "Subscriptions" — this line will also show the number of subscriptions currently in service. Clicking "Manage" will bring you to your subscriptions page.

Axios made a big hire on the news side, naming Sara Kehaulani Goo as executive editor, a new position, to help with audience and audio expansion. She was hired away from NPR, where she was managing editor, overseeing the newsroom's social media and audience development strategy.

Goo is set to start December 2 and report to Nicholas Johnston, Axios' editor in chief. In a memo, Johnston cited Goo's experience in audience and audio, two new focus areas. Axios has the Pro Rata podcast, covering the intersection of tech, business, and politics.

Read more: High-profile news startup Axios is targeting giant companies with a new service that could put it in competition with Facebook and LinkedIn

Johnston said he and Goo knew each other from The Washington Post, where they both worked as reporters. Johnston said he did his final interview with Goo at the Washington Nationals stadium at the Budweiser Brew House because it was the only time they could meet before sending out a final offer to her.

Goo will also help oversee Axios' expanding newsroom. It's hiring to expand its tech, business, and science coverage, and overall, the company is aiming to get to 200 people by the end of the year, up from 170 now. 

In addition to audio, Axios is in talks to make another news show in addition to its just-renewed HBO series, a knowledgeable source said. The source didn't say who Axios was talking to, but Axios' investors include WndrCo, the investment firm of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who also is hunting for news shows for his forthcoming short-form video service Quibi.

Axios also is preparing to launch a pricey paid subscription service aimed at big companies early next year.

Axios was launched in 2017 by Jim VandeHei, Roy Schwartz, and Mike Allen, who sought to take the rapid-fire reporting model they built at Politico for Beltway professionals and apply it to serve busy professionals with succinct newsletters, designed for mobile devices. They started it with $10 million in funding and have raised $30 million total from investors including Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Emerson Collective, Greycroft Partners, and WndrCo.

Here's Johnston's memo on Goo's hire:

To: Editorial
We have hired an executive editor: Sara Kehaulani Goo, currently the managing editor of NPR. She'll start in December. (Keep this secret until later this afternoon!)

Why it matters: Sara will be a transformative leader in helping meet the grand aspirations of the Axios newsroom. She also has a ton of experience in audience and audio, two new focuses of ours.

I first worked with Sara years and years ago when they were both starting out as Washington Post reporters. Since then Sara has been an editor and manager at the Post, and before joining NPR to oversee their digital strategy, she founded the data reporting group at Pew Research Center.

Bonus moment! I bought a scalped ticket to last weekend's Nats game to do a final in-person interview with Sara at the stadium. It was the only time we could find to chat before the offer went out Monday morning. We met at the Budweiser Brew House in center field. (Double bonus! My last meeting with Margaret Talev before we hired her to be politics editor was at the Irish Times.... )

HUMONGOUS THANKS to Brittney, Mallory and the talent team for managing this process and helping to land this incredible hire.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has an unusual passion project: a neural tech company called Neuralink.

Musk cofounded Neuralink in 2016, and the company remained relatively under the radar until 2017 when the Wall Street Journal broke the news that he had established the company to "merge computers with human brains."

Developing brain chips is a curious side hustle for a man who is simultaneously running Tesla, his space exploration company SpaceX, and The Boring Company, which Musk hopes will dig underground transit systems for cities.

But Neuralink zeroes in on one of Musk's main fears — artificial intelligence. The entrepreneur has frequently been vocal about his worries that AI could one day come to overshadow the human race. He's founded a general-purpose research organization called OpenAI but Neuralink has a much more tangible, futuristic goal of making AI-enabled devices capable of interacting with people's brains.

In July, Neuralink executives and Musk gave a presentation on the technology the firm has developed so far.

The big reveal was a tiny microchip that could, theoretically, be implanted behind a person's ear with tiny threads containing electrodes fanning out into the brain.

The concept isn't new.

Scientists have already created devices capable of both interpreting brain activity and stimulating the neurons in the brain. A memorable demonstration of the technology was in 2012 when paralyzed patients were able to control a robotic arm.

However, Elon Musk doesn't want to stick with what is already possible. He said, in classic Muskian style, that apart from treating neural conditions such as Parkinson's, he hopes that Neuralink could one day facilitate a "symbiosis" between humans and AI. He also excitedly announced that the company had successfully got a monkey to "control a computer with its brain," and that Neuralink hopes to start human testing "before the end of next year."

Business Insider spoke to two neuroscientists to sort the science from the spin.

"There's definitely some bombastic points and some much more realistic aspects of the announcement," said Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California. He came away from Neuralink's presentation with the sense that Neuralink had improved on existing technologies in three significant ways.

1. Floppy wires could move with the brain without causing damage

The wires on Neuralink's proposed device uses Hires thinks could advance the field because of just how floppy they are. "The fact that they're using these flexible wires is a significant innovation, particularly if they're trying to get it into consumers," said Hires. Each wire is slightly slimmer than a human hair and carries electrodes which are both able to detect brain activity and — theoretically — stimulate it.

"Stiff wires in the brain cause a lot of damage because the brain can move around," Hires pointed out, adding that a living brain is very soft, much softer than the specimens you might have seen in jars which have been stiffened with formaldehyde. "It's a lot softer than jello," he said. Floppy wires like the ones Neuralink described could potentially be a better solution for any device that's going to spend a long period embedded in someone's brain because they're less likely to inflame or damage the tissue.

This is not a new technology, but it is recent enough that we don't know if these wires could last more than a couple of years. "The technology's only been out for like a year or two. It could be that these flexible wires are less reliable, less robust, maybe they're gonna break," said Hires.

Dr. Rylie Green of Imperial College London noted that the material used to make the threads is quite a commonly used polymer in the field. She also noticed that the electrodes themselves are made of gold, which she calls a "research-level technology," rather than being ready to put into people's brains.

2. A sewing machine instead of a surgeon

One big problem with floppy wires is they can be difficult to thread into the brain, and for this Neuralink has invented something entirely new. The probes would be inserted into the brain by a device not dissimilar to a sewing machine, which would use a stiff needle to poke the threads into place about 1 millimeter into the outer surface of the brain, or the cortex.

Hires said the idea of this sewing machine is "brand new" and a significant innovation. He has had to perform insertions of similar devices into the brains of mice by hand. "Doing this stuff by hand, these are very fine things… it's very hard to have a steady enough hand to do these things manually," he said.

Specifically Hires was impressed by a feature on the machine which counteracts the fact that the human brain likes to jiggle around. "There's breathing, the heartbeat, and those two factors can move the brain around a little bit," said Hires.

The feature is called online motion correction, and works by taking video of the brain's blood vessels under a microscope and then using a robot to adjust the needle to move with those blood vessels.

3. A super-powered chip which translates brain activity

The final weapon in Neuralink's arsenal is the chip which will interpret the brain activity being picked up by the electrodes.

"There's a problem with getting electrical signals out of the brain, and that is that they're very small. And the farther they have to travel down a thin wire the more they're going to get distorted by noise, because there's always some electrical noise going on in the world around us. You want to be able to amplify and digitize the signal as close to the source as possible," Hires said.

"From what they disclosed in their whitepaper, that chip looks beyond the state of the art... That's going to enable you to record from more places with higher precision," he said. "It's sort of like upgrading your TV to go from standard definition to high definition," he added.

To Dr. Rylie Green, the most exciting thing about Neuralink isn't that any of these three technologies are groundbreaking in and of themselves, but rather that they've been brought together. "All those different aspects have been under development for quite some time, and it's nice to see them all come together in one device," she said.

Don't get too excited about the monkeys

Although Musk was eager to tell the audience at the Neuralink presentation that the technology had allowed a monkey to "control a computer with its brain," neither Hires nor Green were massively surprised or impressed by this.

"The monkey is not surfing the internet. The monkey is probably moving a cursor to move a little ball to try to match a target," said Hires. Musk himself didn't give any detail about Neuralink's primate testing during the July presentation. "This is something you can already do with traditional brain-machine interfaces... I'm not surprised they've been able to achieve that," added Hires.

"Doing it with this device is something that could be considered to be impressive or different based on the sheer size of them being quite small or them using different sorts of materials, but it's to elucidate that unless they've actually written it down [and] shown the data," said Green.

Neuralink's most likely use: Giving robotic limbs the feeling of touch

While Elon Musk is keen to extol the future merging of AI and human consciousness, Hires and Green are more excited by the near-term benefits the technology could bring.

"The first application you can imagine is better mental control for a robotic arm for someone who's paralyzed," said Hires. Green concurred with this, adding it could be used by patients with locked-in syndrome to give them "fine control" over robotic limbs.

Although neural control of robotic limbs has been around since 2012, Neuralink's technology could enable the next big step — touch feedback, sometimes called haptic feedback. Theoretically, this could be possible if Neuralink's chips recorded which areas of the brain are stimulated when we touch and interact with the world, and then the electrodes could use this information to stimulate the brains of people using robotic prostheses to simulate this sensation.

Neuralink's electrons won't necessarily have to perfectly stimulate the right neurons to generate this feeling due to the brain's ability to adapt.

"The hope, and I think it's a reasonable hope... over time the cortex is able to re-learn and re-associate the electrical stimulation patterns. As long as there's a consistent relationship with what you're doing out in the world and what's going on in the brain," said Hires. 

Elon Musk's goal of an AI-human hybrid probably won't happen

Both Hires and Green were more skeptical of Elon Musk's stated aim — that Neuralink will one day facilitate the augmentation of human consciousness with artificial intelligence. However Hires did not rule it out entirely.

"To get to the level of integrating with AI, this is where [Musk] sort of is going off into aspirational fantasy land," said Hires. "But it is hard to predict how technology is going to change twenty years," he added.

According to Hires we would need electrodes precise enough to stimulate individual neurons and, perhaps more importantly, a better understanding of the brain itself. "We don't understand the rules by which the brain re-organizes to learn things," he said.

Green pointed towards the ethical problems which could arise in a world where Neuralink could connect AI to people's brains. "The biggest concern is how you manage to actually protect information in that sort of interface," she said.

She also believes Neuralink's biggest hurdle comes long before it tries to put AI in anyone's brains. "To get any of these devices into your brain... is very, very high-risk surgery," Green said. She said that the idea of a healthy person opting for brain surgery was troubling.

"People do it because they have severe limitations and there is a potential there to improve their life. Doing it for fun is not a great idea," she added.

This doesn't rule out the possibility that Neuralink will become a real, applicable technology. "It could potentially happen in Elon Musk's lifetime," said Hires. 

An excerpt from a book by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower reveals what the firm did that swayed the 2016 elections.

Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, is known for leaking documents to journalists that showed how Cambridge Analytica harvest the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent, using it to inform targeted political advertising. The campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz paid over $5 million each to the firm, Wylie wrote. 

Wylie's newest book, "Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America," details more about the firm's operations.

In an excerpt published in New York Magazine, Wylie says the firm used focus groups and qualitative observation to learn what Facebook users are interested in, including term limits, "draining the swamp," guns, and building walls to keep out immigrants. Wylie says that the firm was already exploring these ideas in 2014, before Trump's campaign. 

Cambridge Analytica came up with ideas for how to best sway users' opinions, testing them out by targeting different groups of people on Facebook. It also analyzed Facebook profiles for patterns to build an algorithm to predict how to best target users.

"Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread," Wylie wrote.

Based on this data, Cambridge Analytica chose to target users that were  "more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens." It used various methods, such as Facebook group posts, ads, sharing articles to provoke or even creating fake Facebook pages like "I Love My Country" to provoke these users.

"When users joined CA's fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them," Wylie wrote. "Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement."

You can read the entire excerpt in New York Magazine here.

The Taiwan flag emoji has disappeared from the latest iPhone versions for users in Hong Kong and Macau, the Hong Kong Free Press's Kris Cheng reports. 

Users on Hong Kong online forums spotted this change. The People's Republic of China claims Taiwan as one of its provinces and does not recognize it as an independent country. 

When Hong Kong and Macau users updated to iOS 13.1.1 or above, the emoji for the Republic of China flag, or Taiwan's flag, disappeared from the emoji keyboard. The iOS 13.1.1 rolled out at the end of September.

Previously, the Taiwan flag emoji was already not present for iPhones in mainland China. An article on the Apple blog Hiraku says that any device model with the "CN" or "ZA" region, meaning China and Hong Kong, will not be able to use the Taiwan flag emoji. The same applies if users have a device from another region but has been set to Hong Kong or Macau. 

Business Insider has reached out to Apple for comment. 

The hardware required to launch three people out to the moon, land two on the lunar surface, and then bring everyone home is monstrous. To that end during its Apollo program, NASA crafted the Saturn V rocket.

Each Saturn V stood about 363 feet (111 meters) tall and 33 feet (10 meters) wide. Such scale is hard to fathom, but it's like filling up a small office tower with enough liquid fuel and oxidizer to level a small town.

The giant machine powered the world's first crewed moon-landing mission — the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the moon on July 20, 1969. Five more moon landings followed, though no one has returned in decades.

Blue Origin, founded by the billionaire Jeff Bezos, is competing for a lunar return with SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk.

On Saturday from Boca Chica, Texas — a relatively remote location at the southeastern tip of Texas, where SpaceX has created an evolving private launch site — Musk revealed the newest design for Starship.

Read more: A stirring new SpaceX animation of Starship launching shows how the rocket company plans to turn Texas into Earth's interplanetary transport hub

Starship is SpaceX's towering and ostensibly fully reusable solution to deep-space travel.

Over the past few years, Musk has shown several versions of the vehicle, which is envisioned as having two fully reusable (and thus absurdly cheap to launch) rocket stages: a 22-story booster, called Super Heavy, and a 16-story spaceship, called Starship.

Musk believes Starship would ferry about 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to Mars at a time starting in the mid-2020s — though he or SpaceX have yet to provide any specific plans for life support systems and other gear that's vital to keeping people alive in space and on another planet.

NASA is also planning to return humans to the lunar surface in 2024 with its own rocket system, called Space Launch System (SLS). But that program is years behind schedule and over budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, so Musk is pitching Starship as a capable alternative.

"This is gonna sound pretty crazy, but ... with an uncrewed vehicle, I believe we could land on the moon in two years," Musk told Time Editor at Large Jeffrey Kluger on July 12. "So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside."

Musk showed off his engineers' newest version of the Starship design on September 28 before an impressive, though rapidly assembled, prototype called Starship Mark 1 (Mk1).

Compared to his most recent presentation about the launch system, in September 2018, the vehicle's height hasn't changed too much. The spaceship shrunk about 16 feet (5 meters) and the booster grew by about as much. Stacked together, a final hypothetical craft would stand about 387 feet (118 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 meters) wide.

To make the booster-and-rocket-ship system a reality, SpaceX is developing and launching prototypes in South Texas. The illustration at the top of this story compares two of those early test beds (at left) with Starship, NASA's Saturn V, and the space agency's planned SLS.

Starhopper, which is not designed to go to space, finished three rounds of demonstration launches from April through August. During its final flight, the rocket soared to about 490 feet (150 meters) into the air, hovered toward a nearby beach, and then landed on a concrete pad. (It has proven an irresistible subject of photographers even after being stripped of its Raptor rocket engine and other equipment.)

The current plan is to make Starship out of stainless steel, which Musk has said would make the launch system more durable and far less expensive.

SpaceX finished the outer hull of the Starship Mk 1 prototype just before Musk's presentation. Musk has said that prototype could fly to 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) high in the next month or so, and possibly reach orbit by the end of the year.

"I think we want to try to reach orbit in less than six months," Musk said over the weekend — though government officials may pump the brakes on those aspirations due to the existence of a nearby hamlet, called Boca Chica Village.

Read more: New documents reveal SpaceX's plans for launching Mars-rocket prototypes from South Texas

If realized, a fully fueled Starship could weigh more than 9 million pounds (4 million kilograms) at the launch pad. That's about 30% heavier than a Saturn V, though Starship would belch out twice as much thrust from its Super Heavy booster rocket.

If SpaceX engineers can achieve fully reusability and minimal refurbishment with Starship, the system stands to topple the existing rocket-launch industry.

Musk calculated that, in an ideal scenario, one Starship system could launch to space and return three times per day, or about 1,000 times a year. Assuming each launch can fly about 150 tons of payload into orbit, that works out to about 150,000 tons per year.

That's more than 333 times the mass of the football field-size International Space Station. Meanwhile, he said, all of Earth's rockets launching today might together deliver no more than 300 tons into space.

"We're talking about something that is, with a fleet of Starships, 1,000 times more than all Earth capacity combined. All other rockets combined would be 0.1%, including ours," Musk said on Saturday. "But you kind of need that if you're going to build a city on Mars. It's gotta be done."

This story has been updated. It was originally published on July 19, 2019.

Even though Apple has spent less on lobbying than the other tech giants, CEO Tim Cook has forged close ties with President Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal's Tripp Mickle reports. 

Since 2017, Apple has spent nearly $18 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In comparison, Microsoft spent $24 million, Facebook spent $32 million, Amazon spent $36 million, and Alphabet spent $47 million.

Still, Cook attends dinners and meetings with Donald Trump, has close ties to Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, and meets regularly with Trump administration officials like economic adviser Larry Kudlow, people close to Apple and the Trump administration told the Journal.

For example, in August, Cook reached out to Kushner to explain how upcoming tariffs would increase iPhone prices and hurt its competition with other phone companies like Samsung. Within days, the Trump administration exempted iPhones, along with other electronics products, from the tariff plan.

A person close to the administration told the Journal that Cook's call with Kushner influenced this decision.

Likewise, Trump refers to Cook as a friend, praises Apple and Cook's business abilities, and even called Cook to wish him a Happy Thanksgiving, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Still, Cook disagrees with Trump on various issues, like immigration and climate change, and 97% of Apple employee donations in the 2018 midterm elections went to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Often, Cook or a member of Apple's public affairs team will alert the White House through Kushner or another senior White House official before publicly challenging Trump's policies, former administration officials told the Journal.

Read more: We checked out the neighborhood where Apple is building a new Seattle campus, just blocks away from Amazon HQ

For example, Cook communicated with Trump over his plan to exit from the Paris Climate Accord after Ivanka Trump called on Cook for help, current and former administration officials told the Journal. Trump didn't change his mind, but Cook later wrote an email to employees criticizing Trump's decision.

Cook's close ties to the administration may explain it's relatively low lobbying costs. 

Netflix's animated fantasy series "Disenchantment," from "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, is catching audiences' attention in its second season, which debuted in late September.

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services. The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance, so a stream or download is a higher expression of demand than a "like" or comment on social media, for instance.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

McDonald's drive-thru wait times keep stretching longer and longer. But, the fast-food giant is willing to invest millions of dollars to reverse the trend. 

Earlier this week, QSR magazine released its annual Drive-Thru Performance Study. Across the industry, drive-thru times had increased by 20 seconds, with customers spending an average of 255 seconds from speaker to order window in 2019.

The average drive-thru time at McDonald's was 284 seconds, or almost five minutes — an increase of almost 11 seconds over last year's average time. 

Read more: Chick-fil-A's drive-thru service is among the slowest in a new survey — here's how 10 major chains rank

The day before, McDonald's had internally announced a new program aimed at preventing these drive-thru waits from getting any longer. In an internal memo dated September 30 and obtained by Business Insider, McDonald's announced a new, optional program intended to encourage franchisees with modernized locations and single-lane drive-thrus to upgrade their drive-thrus. 

"As we continue to look for opportunities to build our drive-thru business and capitalize on the success we've seen in drive-thru this year, we are introducing a new side-by-side drive-thru standalone program," the memo reads. 

The program essentially means that more locations will be encouraged to open a second lane, internally called side-by-side drive-thrus. In recent years, as McDonald's has increasingly emphasized kiosk and mobile ordering sales, locations were required to have 90 cars coming through during peak hours to be eligible for a side-by-side drive-thru; the new program lowers that figure to 70 cars during peak hours. 

McDonald's previously announced a program to encourage franchisees to update their restaurants as part of the company's "Bigger, Bolder Vision 2020" — or BBV 2020 — growth plan. While many franchisees pushed back against investments required by BBV 2020, such as restaurant redesigns, the National Owners Association said in January that drive-thrus were an aspect of the growth plan that "will actually produce a return on investment."

The new drive-thru program's commitment letter and implementation details have not been finalized. However, according to the memo, the new program will be funded similarly to BBV 2020 — franchisees who choose to participate will pay 10% of the costs upfront, then receive a five-year rent reduction equal to 40% of total project costs. 

McDonald's quest to fix drive-thru

McDonald's drive-thru times have been getting longer every year for the last six years, according to QSR magazine.

The slowdown has been part of an industry-wide shift, as wait times across the industry have grown longer, menus have gotten more complex, and executives have focused on in-store innovations such as tablets. Plus, more customers means longer wait times — and QSR found that Chick-fil-A and McDonald's tend to have the most people waiting in line. 

McDonald's declined to comment for this article. However, CEO Steve Easterbrook told investors on an earnings call in June that global directors and other executives decided earlier in the year it was time that the company make a serious effort to improve drive-thru. 

"We kind of had a white-of-the-eyes conversation at the start of March. And we collectively agreed that we were going to renew some emphasis on the drive-thru service times," Easterbrook said. "They've been going the wrong way with most of our markets for three or four years for reasons we can understand, as we've added more to our business, but we knew that wasn't a sustaining trend."

Later in March, McDonald's announced it would acquire artificial-intelligence startup Dynamic Yield in a $300 million deal.

Dynamic Yield's technology will allow drive-thru menus to update instantaneously. For example, if a customer is ordering a coffee, an AI-enabled drive-thru will be able to suggest that the customer add on an order of donut sticks, ideally convincing customers to spend more. McDonald's began testing the technology at drive-thrus in 2018 and plans to roll out the tech at drive-thrus by the end of the year. 

In September, McDonald's announced another acquisition that could assist in drive-thru: Apprente, a voice technology startup. According to a press release from the company, Apprente is "expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking." 

Countless tweaks can cut seconds off drive-thru times

While the acquisitions have been McDonald's most clear-cut drive-thru investments, the fast-food giant has been making many behind-the-scenes tweaks to speed up drive-thru times.

"When you talk about progress in the drive-thru, I mean, frankly, it will improve," Easterbrook said in June. "We want to get incremental improvement week-to-week-to-week. So, each time a customer comes back, say a week or two later, they can notice a few seconds difference." 

Menu simplification has helped speed up service time, according to Easterbrook. In April, news broke that McDonald's was cutting its more expensive Signature Crafted Recipes burgers and sandwiches from the menu and slashing items from its late-night menu. 

Read more: Leaked documents reveal that McDonald's is about to slash items from its late-night menu 

McDonald's is trying to gamify the process with an incentive program that pits locations against each other as they compete for the fastest service times. According to the company, a competition between markets around the US earlier this year helped speed up service times and boost customer counts. 

McDonald's is also rolling out new technology and diagnostic tools that allow workers to have a better handle on what might be slowing down drive-thrus. 

"They can basically decompose the various elements of a drive-thru visit for a customer into its constituent seconds," Easterbrook said in June. "So, how long are we taking to take the orders? How long are we taking to take the payment? How long it takes us to gather the food and present it? How many cars are we asking to pull forward and bring the food later?"

Do you work at McDonald's or another fast-food chain and have a story to share? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

The social media website Reddit is made up of thousands of different forums, called "subreddits," devoted to different topics.

Like any online community that reaches a certain thresh hold of users, space is liable to becoming toxic. Reddit bills itself as "the front page of the Internet," so, unfortunately, it comes with all the problems that plague the rest of the Internet, including racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other things generally upsetting.

Outlets like The Atlantic and Jezebel have reported on how toxic Reddit can be for women, and this applies to just about every marginalized group. The website has a history of deeply offensive subreddits, many of which have been banned, like "FatPeopleHate," premised on being hateful towards people over their appearance, or "Creepshots," where (usually male) users post sexualized images of women without their consent.

Reddit has tried to be vigilant and update its anti-harassment rules, although this hasn't totally eliminated the problem. Even though these specific subreddits were shut down, people who frequented them can still post in other threads, and sexist, racist, homophobic attitudes pop up in other subreddits all the time in my experience.

These kinds of posts can make Reddit basically inaccessible for many people who don't want to face posts that dehumanize them. For survivors of sexual violence, for example, the violent words and imagery can be triggering, and finding fun posts on Reddit is not worth the potential risk of seeing something terrible.

Subreddits exist for nearly every topic you can think of. Some are dedicated to posters asking for advice from the wider Reddit community on a variety of topics. On r/relationships, people post asking for advice on friendships, family, and romantic relationships.

R/AITA, which stands for Am I the A--hole, is a place for users to lay out a sometimes one-sided scenario, and hopefully get validation that they were not, in fact, the jerk in the situation. The legal advice subreddit is, as you'd expect, a place for people to ask for answers to their legal questions from members who don't always claim to be legal experts.

Some of the posts on these subreddits can be genuinely hilarious, the kind of thing you send in all your group chats. The problem comes in when you have to wade through sad, offensive, or just annoying posts to get to the good stuff. For every funny but benign relationship post, there are a few that have been upvoted to the top of the page that seem too outlandish to be real or have genuinely upsetting details that only a professional would be qualified to comment on.

Well, what if there was a way to get a curated feed of only the best posts on these and your other favorite subreddits?

Enter: Twitter.

Each of these subreddits has Twitter accounts that almost exclusively tweet posts from the forums. But these aren't bots, uncritically reposting everything. Instead, the people running these accounts handpick the best of the best. It's not a perfect system — someone still has to read through the whole subreddit to find the posts worth sharing — but it saves most of us from reading through depressing post after depressing post. 

You might think the millions of followers that popular social-media influencers have come from expensive equipment and years of experience.

But some of the internet's top creators say one of the best tools to use, especially starting out, is simply your smartphone. 

Although many smartphones today, like some of the latest Apple iPhones at an upwards of $1,000, can cost as much as a fancy DSLR camera, 81% percent of Americans already own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center. And it's likely the smartphone you already own is good enough to start with. 

We spoke to top influencers ranging from Benji Travis, who has been creating content online for over a decade, to recent internet stars like Jennelle Eliana Long, who rose to fame in just under a month, on what tools they used to get started.

They debunked the misconception that you need tons of money to begin and shared their personal experiences building a business empire online.

From using the camera on your phone and a $30 video editing app to get started on YouTube, to utilizing popular apps like Instagram to get in touch with your favorite brands and build a potential sponsorship, here's how to start an influencer career from your smartphone. 

To read the full posts, subscribe to Business Insider Prime.

Read the full post here: How to start a YouTube career without spending tons of money, according to a creator with millions of subscribers

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins is the most recognizable professional gamer in the world, and on August 1, he announced that he would be leaving his 14 million Twitch followers behind for an exclusive streaming deal with Microsoft's Mixer.

The move was seen as a major gamble, since Twitch is by far the most dominant platform for video game streaming, and Mixer has struggled to find a foothold in the industry since its launch in 2016. After a well-publicized debut, Ninja has managed to earn more than 2.3 million followers on Mixer, making him the platform's most popular content creator by far.

Since Ninja arrived, Mixer has also seen a large influx of new streamers giving the platform a chance. According to data from Newzoo, total hours of gaming content streamed on Mixer increased to 32.6 million during the last three months, a 188% increase from the three months prior.

Read more: Jessica Blevins, the 27-year-old manager and wife of the most popular video-game player in the world, reveals the inside story of Ninja's move to Microsoft's Mixer

However, the excitement among streamers hasn't translated into more viewers. Mixer saw a 10.6% decrease in total hours watched during the last three months, according to Newzoo. Data from StreamElements shows that Mixer had less hours watched in September (29.6 million), a month after Ninja arrived, than it did in July (37.7 million), the month before his exclusive deal began.

Newzoo notes that Mixer has more than doubled its viewership since last year, but the situation demonstrates just how hard it is to wrestle viewers away from Twitch. Closing the gap between Twitch and Mixer will take more than just one popular channel, even if its a superstar streamer like Ninja.

"One thing worth noting about Mixer's signing of Ninja is that regardless of his impact on hours watched, it was a smart move to promote the Mixer brand, especially with Ninja doing extensive interviews about it." StreamElements CEO Doron Nir said.

Amazon's streaming juggernaut had 777.6 million hours watched during September, meaning Twitch had more than 20 times the viewership of Mixer. YouTube Gaming's streaming content was in a distant second place in terms of viewership with 175 million viewers in September.

This likely means that Ninja will struggle to reach the same sort of viewership he saw on Twitch in the near future, but the exclusive deal with Microsoft has other benefits. Ninja's manager and wife Jessica Blevins told Business Insider that he chose to leave Twitch so he could expand his brand beyond streaming. Since joining Mixer, Ninja has released a book, announced an apparel deal with Mixer, and appeared on an episode of Fox's "The Masked Singer."

Some streamers who supported Ninja's decision on social media felt it was important for creators to be able to build an audience across different platforms, and for Twitch to have more competition. While none of the potential challengers are currently a threat to Twitch's dominance, having viable alternatives is essential for streamers to leverage their popularity and earning power.