"The Dark Crystal" is back, this time on Netflix in the form of a prequel TV series, and audiences can't get enough of it. And DC Universe's "Titans" returned on Friday for its second season.

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 (from August 28 to September 3):

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-- Matt

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In Business Insider's latest webinar, Headset CEO Cy Scott walks through how he put together the pitch deck that helped him raise a $12 million Series A. Scott was joined by Poseidon Asset Management partners Emily and Morgan Paxhia, who led the round.

You can watch the full webinar right here.

Finance and Investing

Goldman Sachs' push into private equity is ruffling feathers at Blackstone — and it might be a sign of big client skirmishes to come

Goldman Sachs' latest strategy pivot is already raising hackles with one of its largest clients.

In related news, Marty Chavez, Goldman Sachs' trading chief, this week announced his plans to retire from the Wall Street firm at the end of the year. Dakin talked to him about the bank's tech transformation, why now is the right time for him to step down, and what he's planning next.

Barclays insiders say a hiring freeze is afoot as roles stay unfilled, bonuses get slashed, and senior staff flee

Barclays has raised the bar for hiring outsiders and is leaving vacant roles unfilled — resulting in what some insiders say amounts to an informal hiring freeze for investment banking, FICC trading, and certain back-office roles — according to five sources familiar with the situation.

Investors have triggered a recession signal with a perfect 50-year track record — and one expert says years of 0% market returns could be in store

Since the US yield curve inverted and startled the market, there's been a debate about whether the recession warning sign was for real.

Tech, Media, Telecoms

Here's the pitch deck $1.95 billion ThoughtSpot used to raise $248 million for an AI-powered analytics tool that's challenging Salesforce's Tableau

Founded in 2012, ThoughtSpot offers businesses a way to visually analyze their data in order to make critical decisions faster.

Amazon is rolling out a tool that shows just how much Google and Facebook ads drive people to do their shopping on the e-commerce site

Amazon is trying to grow its nascent ad business by proving it can show advertisers how digital ads drive people to shop on Amazon.

Comcast Ventures has a plan to jumpstart direct-to-consumers companies like Away and Hippo and it's already slashing their customer acquisition costs

With massive growth in venture capital, VC firms are scrambling for the chance to invest in the next unicorn by retooling their business models and looking for ways to differentiate.

Healthcare, Retail, Transportation

Furious Peloton members are skewering the company's delivery partner over broken $2,000 bikes and scratched hardwood floors — and the company is starting to take note

Todd Mitchell loves his Peloton. He didn't love the gummy grape candy that he said ended up stuck to his $4,295 treadmill during the delivery process.

Meet the 11 alt-meat startups vying for a bite of a $200 billion industry

The market for a burger without beef is beginning to sizzle.

There's nothing better than a whodunit mystery movie, but in the hands of a writer-director like Rian Johnson, the enjoyment is heightened.

Coming off directing "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" (and taking a break from building a whole new trilogy for the saga), Johnson has returned to the original storytelling that built him a loyal fanbase before a galaxy far, far away came calling.

With "Knives Out," which had its world premiere Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival (it opens in theaters November 27), Johnson delivers a murder mystery that has all the intrigue and tangled guessing game you would find in an Agatha Christie detective novel mixed with a dark humor that feels a distant cousin of the great 1985 adaptation of the board game, "Clue." And all done with the help of a great all-star cast.

Read more: The director of "Hustlers" describes the 3-year struggle to make her gritty gangster movie, and not let it turn into "'Ocean's 8' with strippers"

Johnson sets the story at the palatial estate of noted crime novelist Harlan Thrombrey (played by Christopher Plummer). Following a party for his 85th birthday on the grounds, Harlan is found dead of an apparent suicide. Police lieutenant Elliott (Lakeith Stanfield) and state trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) show up to question the family. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a noted private investigator who has been hired to find out if Harlan had actually been murdered, tags along.

And there the fun begins as Craig's Blanc takes center stage, talking in a terrific southern accent which just heightens his theatrics as a know-it-all detective.

Chris Evans in "Knives Out." Lionsgate The scenery-chewing performances don't end with Craig. The whole cast is in on the over-the-top fun. There's Jamie Lee Curtis as Linda, the demanding "self-made" daughter of Harlan. Don Johnson plays Richard, Linda's lapdog husband. Toni Collette plays Joni, who was married into the family and has stuck around since her husband's passing. Michael Shannon plays Walt, the son of Harlan and the one who handles the business side of his father's publishing empire. And then there's Chris Evans as Ransom, Harlan's grandson and the black sheep of the family.

Through the story, we learn that each of them could have a motive for killing Harlan, and we go on the trail with Blanc to discover what actually happened.

The big challenge for a movie with such a large (and talented) ensemble is not leaving anyone out of their screen time, and Johnson molds a story where all these actors get their time to shine. But the standout is Craig. The Blanc character is a fun caricature of the detectives we have grown up on, from Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher in "Murder She Wrote" to Christie's Hercule Poirot. What makes him even more entertaining is most of the time you're not actually sure if Blanc has any idea if he's onto something or just biding time until it falls in his lap ("Columbo" style).

If you are looking for a good time at the movies this holiday season (perhaps searching for a way to escape the family for a few hours), "Knives Out" is certainly one you shouldn't miss.

Motorhome maker Hymer and chemical company BASF have partnered to create the VisionVenture, a mobile tiny home built on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis.

The concept car-home was created as a foreshadowing of what travel could be like by 2025, according to Hymer. The home uses modern technology to increase its self-sufficiency, including a solar panel-like photovoltaic system in the inflatable roof and paintwork that regulates the surface temperature and the interior of the home.

"A major source of inspiration for this project was the camper community, who have given us new impetus with their creative ideas and DIY conversions," Hymer President Christian Bauer said in a prepared statement.

Read more: This 'self-charging' electric car has a dashboard filled with dead moss to clean the air

Hymer utilizes many preexisting "tiny home" concepts that allow the compact Sprinter to feel more spacious, according to the motorhome maker.

For example, many elements of the home are multi-purpose, including a lamp that serves as the patio light, ceiling light, and an interior light pendant. The staircase, which leads to the roof, doubles as a storage unit, and the bathroom sink can be tucked away to make room for the shower.

"We are confident that we will be able to introduce some elements from this array of innovative and extremely customer-friendly solutions into series production in the not too distant future," Bauer said.

Take a look at the VisionVenture concept built on the same van Amazon uses to deliver its packages:

New York Fashion Week kicked off on the East Coast this week, and we're wondering what the West Coast — particularly Silicon Valley — is wearing.

Victoria Hitchcock, a fashion "lifestylist" based in Silicon Valley, knows how to dress today's techies. Her clients include tech entrepreneurs, CEOs, professors, scientists, and philanthropists from their 20s to 50s.

Read more: A Silicon Valley stylist reveals which fashion labels her elite clientele are obsessed with

For clients requesting womenswear, Hitchcock has recommendations for sleek suits, up-and-coming handbags, and chunky moccasins.

Check out stylist Victoria Hitchcock's womenswear picks.

If timing is everything, Larissa Rocha should teach a master class. And she might, as the new head of community at buzzy startup Brex.

Rocha holds the coveted title of Employee No. 1 at Silicon Valley's hottest startup, a credit card and banking system for other startups. In its two years of existence and Rocha's two years of employment, Brex has raised more than $316 million in venture funding and is worth $2.6 billion, according to Pitchbook data.

"I don't know what happens after 30 years, but I want to be at Brex for as long as we're building this and I will go wherever Brex takes me. It's my baby and we're here for the long term," Rocha told Business Insider.

Read More: Brex, the credit card for startups, raised $100 million at a $2.6 billion valuation — more than double what it was worth nine months ago

Unlike Brex founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, Rocha took a sensible approach to entrepreneurship. Having grown up in a small town in rural Brazil, she was adamant about finishing her undergraduate degree in economics at Harvard before making the plunge. But she kept in touch with Dubugras and Franceschi, who she said she met while living in Brazil, even after they dropped out of Stanford to join Y Combinator with a new company that would become Brex.

"Henrique and Pedro are definitely a big reason," Rocha said of her decision to come to Brex. "They had that very clear vision of wanting to build something that will improve the world, and that really resonated with me. To have the chance to build that from scratch is so much more exciting and nerve wracking but more fun too."

Since joining Brex in June 2017, two weeks after graduation, Rocha got to work. She said Dubugras and Franceschi tasked her with building spend models for startups at different stages so they could better predict what limits Brex should offer and what the market would allow.

"Even the ones that raised money, they don't want the credit," Rocha said. "They want just a payment instrument. No one was willing to give them one unless the founder was willing to personally guarantee it. And if you're an immigrant like we were, you don't even have that yet. So they said, okay, that's not right."

Rocha was heads down building a business development team when they noticed the startups' engineering team wasn't growing quickly enough. So Rocha stepped in and built a recruitment process for front end engineers.

"I hadn't even heard of that," Rocha said. "It was also a humbling experience in and of itself, trying to recruit for a company in stealth in the Valley."

Rocha said she built her own mentor network to help navigate the ins and outs of recruiting, and eventually hired a top-notch recruiting team to keep up with the growing company's needs. Then she moved to sales full time, and until recently, said the photo on her phone's lock screen was a screenshot of the first sale she closed.

Since then, she's led and built the customer support team in addition to the recruiting and business development teams. She is helping onboard 20 new hires every other week, and has started building Brex's suite of customer offerings as the company plans to expand beyond just corporate credit cards.

"I'm very, very grateful to have gone to school," Rocha said. "Having that opportunity to explore a lot of things definitely helped me to learn how to learn. But I think it's more effective than any MBA for me to have these on the ground experience here."

Advertising has earned a reputation for being less than friendly to working women. In the past two years, the #MeToo movement hit big-name firms like The Martin Agency, Droga5, and Carrot, exposing misogyny in the industry.

Now, the industry has spawned a new group of companies that's carved out a niche working for clients that want to broadcast their sensitivity to female consumers and employees alike.

Read more: Gillette knew that its new #MeToo ad would prompt backlash. Here's why the company still went ahead with it.

This week saw the official launch of Have Her Back, a female-run-and-owned consultancy spun off of PR agency Golin with a minority investment from Golin's parent, holding company giant IPG. The new business, led by former executives from Golin and PepsiCo, says it was "designed to help companies in the post-#MeToo environment ensure that they have the right programs, products, and systems in place to provide environments where women can grow."

A growing number of companies provide cultural diversity consulting

Another example is The Nova Collective, founded by several women who formerly worked at Chicago-area production companies and now say they help clients "harness the power of the total workforce."

The best known of these companies is The 3% Movement, a for-profit started by veteran copywriter Kat Gordon whose name refers to an estimate that, as of 2008, only 3 out of 100 ad agency creative directors were women (today, the company says its own research shows that figure is 29%).

The 3% Movement began as an events company best known for the eponymous conference now in its eighth year. Since 2015, it has sold a trademarked "certification" service that amounts to a voluntary audit for ad agencies looking to prove that they live up to the organization's self-defined standards for culture, leadership, and equal opportunity.

Now, according to a spokesperson, The 3% Movement is looking to expand beyond agencies to tech and other industries.

Business Insider acquired two decks from the organization that lay out its key selling points. The first, a program overview pitch sent to interested agencies, frames the certification process as a way for clients to help win new business and retain talent.

The 3% Movement also gave Business Insider slides from an updated version of its overview deck that shows how it plans to expand its focus beyond gender to company culture in general.

The company still highlights gender-specific services such as the Next Gen Female Creative Leaders Program and the Manbassadors Leadership Initiative, designed to help men better support their female colleagues.

The 3% Movement charges fees starting at $25,000

According to the first deck, The 3% Movement charges agency clients $25,000 to undergo its basic certification process, which was initially pitched as a monthlong audit but which has since expanded to 12 weeks.

One source whose agency underwent the process estimated the total costs, after accounting for 3% employees' travel and other additional fees, at about $40,000, while describing that number as lower than what one might expect to pay a traditional consulting firm for similar services.

The company also sells a higher "platinum certification" for an unspecified cost, saying only that it varies based on the size of the client.

The 3% spokesperson confirmed that only five ad agencies — VMLY&R, 72andSunny, Swift, Possible, and Forsman & Bodenfors — have completed the standard certification since 2015, though an unspecified number have gone through the process and failed.

Businesses earn 3%'s certification by taking steps including improving the ratio of women to men in leadership, reviewing wage equity practices, creating formal mentorship programs for female and minority employees, and improving the depictions of gender on their websites and social media accounts.

No company has earned platinum status, which the most recent deck defines as "well beyond the benchmarks set by 3% for a healthy, prosperous, and inclusive culture." The representative said this is "largely due to the lack of racial/ethnic diversity" at American ad agencies.

Companies that don't pass 3%'s process can reapply, and the spokesperson said the reasons for their failure determine whether they must pay additional fees. Updated maternity leave policies can be a quick fix, for example, while "a broken culture" will require more time and research.

Agencies said the program provides a stamp of legitimacy

The first source whose agency went through the program compared it to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building certification, which allows companies to publicly showcase their dedication to sustainability.

"Our 3% Certification and pay parity in the New York office are slide 2 and 3 of our credentials deck," said Michele Prota, global board member of the agency Forsman & Bodenfors, which completed the process last November.

A representative for that agency believes the certification has helped it win new business, noting that a prospective client recently asked for information about the 3% Movement at the end of a creative pitch that ultimately saw the company award a project to Forsman & Bodenfors. Prota also said that a client recently hired her as a consultant while undergoing internal issues related to gender equity on the basis of the certification.

The executive referenced earlier who went through the certification process said The 3% Movement did not make any specific promises about helping her agency bring on new business or talent. Ultimately, however, she believes the experience provided a valuable outsider's view of the company's inner workings.

"Clients like [third-party] data," she said regarding the organization's stamp of approval. "In a lot of ways it legitimized us."

The second deck is a customized welcome packet detailing the steps ahead for one unnamed agency that signed on. Scroll down to see all three decks.

An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider.

The "personal food computer," a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn't work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Harper is the director of MIT's Open Agriculture Initiative and leads a group of seven people who work on transforming the food system by studying better methods of growing crops.

The food computers are plastic boxes outfitted with advanced sensors and LED lights and were designed to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to grow food, even without soil, Harper has said. Instead of soil, the boxes use hydroponics, or a system of farming that involves dissolving nutrients in water and feeding them to the plant that way.

"We design CO2, temperature, humidity, light spectrum, light intensity, and the minerality of the water, and the oxygen of the water," Harper said.

On Saturday, Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, resigned following a lengthy expose in the New Yorker about the Media Lab's financial ties with late financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein died by suicide while in jail and faced sex-trafficking charges.

Staff placed food grown elsewhere into the devices for demos and photoshoots, they say

Ahead of big demonstrations of the devices with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the employees told Business Insider.

In another instance, one employee was asked to purchase herbs at a nearby flower market, dust off the dirt in which they were grown, and place them in the boxes for a photoshoot, she said.

Harper forwarded an email requesting comment on this story to an MIT spokesperson. The spokesperson didn't provide a comment.

The aim was to make it look like the devices lived up to Harper's claims, the employees said. Those claims, which included assertions that the devices could grow foods like broccoli four times faster than traditional methods, landed Harper and his team articles in outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Wired and National Geographic.

Harper's vision for the personal food computer is bold: "You think Star Trek or Willy Wonka, that's exactly what we're going for," he said in a March 2019 YouTube video produced by the news site Seeker.

Harper's coworkers told Business Insider a different story. They said the devices are basic hydroponic setups and do not offer the capabilities Harper outlines. In addition, they simply don't work, they said.

MIT Media Lab's Caleb Harper speaks at TEDGlobal Geneva. James Duncan Davidson/TED

'They were always looking for funding'

Paula Cerqueira, a researcher and dietitian who worked as a project manager at the Open Agriculture Initiative for two years, told Business Insider that the personal food computers she worked with were "glorified grow boxes."

Cerqueira was part of a team that, on several occasions, delivered the personal food computers to schools. She also helped demonstrate the boxes to big-name MIT Media Lab investors.

During the organization's "Members Weeks" — once-a-semester events that drew donors including Google, Salesforce, Citigroup, and 21st Century Fox — Cerqueira and her coworkers would show investors how the technology worked.

On one occasion, Cerqueira said, her coworkers were told to fetch basil grown from a nearby location and place it into the personal food computers to make it look like it had been grown inside the boxes.

"They wanted the best looking plants in there," Cerqueira told Business Insider. "They were always looking for funding."

Cerqueira said in another instance, she was told by another MIT Media Labs manager to buy edible lavender plants from a nearby flower's market and place them in the boxes for a photoshoot, she said. Before any photos were taken, she carefully dusted off the tell-tale soil on the plants' roots.

The boxes simply didn't work, one employee told Business Insider

The central problem with the personal food computer was that it simply didn't work, Cerqueira and another person with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider.

"It's essentially a grow box with some sensors for collecting data," Cerqueira, a dietitian who worked as a project manager at the Open Agriculture Initiative for two years, told Business Insider. Cerqueira left her post after becoming increasingly frustrated with working conditions at the Media Lab, she said.

The boxes were not air-tight, so staff couldn't control variables like the levels of carbon dioxide and even basic environmental factors like temperature and humidity, Cerqueira and the other person said.

Other team members were aware of these issues, according to several internal emails that Business Insider viewed.

One email, on which Harper is copied, also said that team members weren't given the chance to test the devices' functionality for themselves. Another person with knowledge of the matter also described these issues to Business Insider.

'Of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant'

In the Spring of 2017, Cerqueira was part of a pilot program that delivered three of Harper's devices to local schools in the Boston area. Initially, the idea was for the students to put the devices together themselves. But Cerqueira said that didn't work — the devices were too complex for the students to construct on their own.

"They weren't able to build them," Cerqueira said.

In response, Cerqueira's team sent three MIT Media Lab staff to set up the computers for them. Of the three devices the staff members tried to setup, only one was able to grow plants, she said. That one stopped working after a few days, however.

When Cerqueira and her coworkers would visit the school, students would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers, she said. The pilot ended shortly thereafter.

On another occasion, her team sent two dozen of the devices to classrooms across greater Boston as part of a curriculum being designed by one of MIT Media Lab's education partners.

"It's fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant," Cerqueira said.

No one knew exactly what was wrong, but in general, the team was aware that the devices weren't functioning as they should be. In a last-ditch attempt to make the devices deliver, Cerqueira's team sent new packages of fresh seedlings to the school. When that didn't work, they tried it again. No matter what, the plants just kept dying, according to Cerqueira.

At one point, a representative from the Bezos Family Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation cofounded by Jackie and Mike Bezos, stopped by the school for a visit, Cerqueira said. Harper had been hoping to entice the group to help fund a new foundation that he was just getting off the ground. Even then, the devices wouldn't work.

"It was super embarrassing," said Cerqueira.

Want to tell us about your experience with MIT Media Lab? Email the author at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Facebook's moderation problems spilled over into the realms of satire when the site penalized a parody clickbait outlet for writing too much clickbait.

Founded in 2013, Reductress is a satirical online magazine. It publishes articles parodying clickbait aimed at women, often in a comically surreal fashion.

Recent headlines include: "Eyeliner Smudge Reaches Gulf of Mexico,"4 Things Your Vagina Is Trying To Tell You Ever Since A Witch Cursed Her And She Became Sentient," and "Man Needs More Protein." The site's Facebook account has around 226,000 followers.

On Thursday, editor Sarah Pappalardo said in a Tweet that Facebook had issued them account with a note saying its distribution on the platform had been limited due to "repeated sharing of clickbait."

Pappalardo told the Verge that this is the first time this has happened to Reductress.

"This appears to be a case of just ignorant regulation," they said. Pappalardo added that the lack of transparency surrounding moderation was a frustrating factor.

"You have no idea who is reviewing this content, or if they even bother to research who they are throttling," they said. ("They" is Pappalardo's preferred pronoun.)

Read more: Facebook content moderation firm asked on-site therapists to disclose counseling details with employees, according to report

Facebook was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Facebook has been making concerted efforts to convince the public that it's ramping up its moderation of harmful and spammy content, citing an increased safety workforce and increasingly powerful AI.

This isn't the first time Facebook's moderation processes have misfired, missing nuance in posts. Last year the company's AI automatically took down a post containing excerpts of the Declaration of Independence, on the grounds that it was hate speech.

As the streaming wars heat up, consumers are being bombarded with choice.

Netflix launched the streaming boom, but has faced competition from Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, as well as the rebirth of premium cable channels like HBO, Showtime, and Starz as standalone streaming apps.

And the battle is only going to heat up in the coming months, as companies like Disney and Apple launch their own services.

READ MORE: Netflix is aggressively denying reports that it's shifting its TV release strategy toward a weekly schedule

The volume of choices can be daunting.

So before Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, and WarnerMedia's HBO Max arrive this year and next, Business Insider has taken a look at how each of the current major players stack up against each other in terms of TV and movie selection and price, thanks to data from streaming search engine, Reelgood.

Reelgood provided Business Insider with data for five streaming services: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, and Showtime.

If you're struggling to determine which services you want to keep as new choices appear on the horizon, this guide will help:

The heart of every major galaxy is thought to contain a supermassive black hole — a place where gravity is so strong that anything, including light, gets devoured.

Like all black holes, supermassive ones form when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their life cycles. On average, they're millions of times more massive than the sun.

For years, scientists have struggled to capture a black hole on camera, since the absence of light renders them nearly impossible to see.

But on April 10, a group of scientists from the international Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first-ever photograph of a supermassive black hole to the public. Though the image was fuzzy, it signified a major milestone for space research.

The accomplishment has now earned the team a 2020 Breakthrough Prize, which was awarded on September 5. The prize was started eight years ago by a team of investors including Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, and is often referred to as the "Oscars of Science."

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT) team will collectively receive $3 million, but the money will be divided equally among the group's 347 scientists, giving each person around $8,600.

What the black hole photograph shows

The April image captured a supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about 54 million light-years away from Earth. The black hole in the photo likely had a mass equivalent to 6.5 billion suns.

Black holes are defined by a border called the event horizon: a region of space so dense with matter that not even light can escape its gravity. This creates a circular "shadow," where all light and matter is gobbled up.

Outside the event horizon, supermassive black holes have an accretion disk — clouds of hot gas and dust trapped in orbit. Though scientists can't see beyond a black hole's event horizon, they can detect the gas and dust in that disk, since the material gives off radio waves that can be captured by a high-powered telescope.

This is what EHT scientists captured in their groundbreaking image.

An artist’s impression of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. Key features of black holes are labeled in red.ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser; Business Insider

"As a cloud of gas gets closer to the black hole, they speed up and heat up," Josephine Peters, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, told Business Insider in October. "It glows brighter the faster and hotter it gets. Eventually, the gas cloud gets close enough that the pull of the black hole stretches it into a thin arc."

To capture the image, researchers relied on 8 telescopes

The EHT scientists are stationed all over the world, at 60 institutions across 20 countries.

To capture the photograph, they relied on eight radio telescopes, operating in Antarctica, Chile, Mexico, Hawaii, Arizona, and Spain. They used a network of atomic clocks — extremely precise time-keeping devices that can measure billionths of a second — to sync up the telescopes around the world.

Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

The EHT project began collecting information about black holes in 2006.

The image released in April was the result of observations that started two years prior.

"It feels like looking at the gates of hell, at the end of space and time," Heino Falcke, an Event Horizon Telescope collaborator, said when the photo was published in April.

The controversial data-analytics company Palantir may be pumping the breaks on going public.

On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the Palo Alto, California-based tech firm — most recently valued at $20 billion — was in talks with private investors to raise "significant funding." Previously, Palantir was reportedly targeting an initial public offering in 2020.

Palantir has courted Singapore's Temasek Holdings as well as the Japan-based SoftBank Group and other non-US investors to participate, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Palantir's cofounder and chairman, Peter Thiel, told employees recently that the company would not be going public within the next three years, Bloomberg reported. That could set a Palantir IPO date back to 2022 or 2023.

Palantir did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Palantir, which has never been profitable, had reportedly been making efforts to gear up a public offering, which included hiring its first sales team and eliminating lavish employee perks, like 13-course tasting-menu lunches, that could raise eyebrows among public market investors. Employees were also reportedly no longer allowed to expense last-minute international airfare and at least one person was fired for expensing off-the-wall purchases like lingerie.

Read more: This $20 billion startup is reportedly cutting lavish perks as it tries to kill its employees' 'entitlement syndrome' ahead of a possible IPO

Because of Palantir's work with the US military and government agencies, the data-mining firm has long been subject to scrutiny by outside critics. Most recently, Business Insider learned that Palantir employees themselves were becoming increasingly split over the company's ties to government work — specifically its business dealings with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency involved in detaining and deporting people over immigration violations.

Tuesday might go down as a turning point for the cloud-storage company Box.

According to a regulatory filing, the activist hedge fund Starboard Value purchased 11 million shares of the company, giving it a 7.5% stake. That makes Starboard the third-largest stakeholder in Box, behind Vanguard Group and BlackRock.

Starboard's involvement is poised to put Box's cofounder and CEO, Aaron Levie, in a predicament, several reports note, because the hedge fund has a track record of waging intense proxy battles for company ownership, ousting existing management, and spearheading major acquisitions.

Perhaps most notably, Starboard is credited with helping make it possible for Verizon to acquire Yahoo in 2016, after it successfully negotiated control of four board seats.

Read more: Peloton's CEO once bragged on TV that the company was 'weirdly profitable,' but the startup's IPO filing reveals years of losses

In the filing disclosing its stake, Starboard said only that Box was "undervalued and represented an attractive investment opportunity."

Levie seconded that sentiment Thursday. "In the case of Starboard and many of our investors, there's a belief we're undervalued right now and there's an opportunity to grow that value," he said onstage at the TechCrunch Sessions Enterprise event in San Francisco.

To that end, Business Insider spoke with several analysts, and the consensus appears to be that Starboard's most likely play is to pressure management into improving the company's profit margins. That could force Box to cut costs — which could mean layoffs. Besides that, the analysts said, Box could well end up get gobbled up by a larger tech company.

"Starboard, as a more value-oriented activist, saw a very good product here and a company that was, let's say, still trying to figure it out and maybe hasn't fully adapted to the fact that the growth rate of the business is a lot lower than they expected it to be a couple of years ago," Jason Ader, a cohead of technology equity research for the analyst firm William Blair, told Business Insider.

Amid all of this, Box has had a difficult year on the public markets, even as it continues to compete with cloud behemoths like Google and Microsoft in enterprise cloud storage. At the time of writing, it was trading at about $17 a share. That's up from the $15 or so it was trading at before Starboard announced its stake but well below its 52-week high of about $25.

"The company is in this purgatory between growth investors and value investors right now, which presents interesting opportunities for activism," Ader said. "An activist could really accelerate growth and attract growth investors, or try to accelerate profitability to attract value investors, but I would think it's more the latter with Starboard."

"While we do not comment on interactions with our investors, Box is committed to maintaining an active and engaged dialogue with stockholders," a Box spokeswoman told Business Insider. "The Board of Directors and management team are focused on delivering growth and profitability to drive long-term stockholder value as we continue to pioneer the Cloud Content Management market."

That, too, echoes Levie's comments on Tuesday.

"We're extremely focused on accelerating our growth rate," Levie said. "With Starboard or any other investor, that's what we tend to be focused on."

Here's what we know about Starboard and what its investment may mean for Box's future.

Rosalie Chan contributed reporting to this story.

If you're in the market for a new laptop, but don't want to spend a ton of cash getting one, then Best Buy may have a deal for you. Right now, you can get a new Lenovo 15-inch laptop for an impressively affordable $179.99— which is $120 off its normal price.

There are a few things that make this a great laptop for the price. For starters, while the laptop may not be the most powerful out there, it's pretty good for a laptop in this price range, offering an Intel Pentium 2.3GHz processor, coupled with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of storage — which should be more than enough storage for most. The display on the laptop comes in at 15.6 inches, and it has a resolution of 1,366 x 768. It also comes with a 30-day trial of Microsoft Office 365.

The laptop isn't bad-looking either. It comes in a sleek black color, and measures in at 0.78 inches thick, which is actually very slim. Around the edges, you'll get two USB 2.0 ports and two USB-C ports, along with a headphone jack and a HDMI port to connect the device to external displays. The laptop comes with Windows 10 S, which is the lighter-weight version of Windows 10, and has a battery life of 5.5 hours on a single charge.

Get the Lenovo S145-15IWL laptop from Best Buy, $179.99 (originally $299.99) [You save $120]

Making connections on LinkedIn can help you grow your professional network, and may lead to new opportunities. But sometimes those connections are no longer something you wish to maintain, and removing connections can help you streamline your network.

Removing connections can also help you stay within LinkedIn's network size requirements (if you're somehow getting close to making 30,000 connections).

Here's how to remove connections on desktop and mobile, whether you know who you want to remove by name, or need to find people by searching through all of your connections.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone Xs (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

Google Pixel 3 (From $799.99 at Best Buy)

How to remove connections on LinkedIn on a computer

If you're already on the profile page of the person you want to remove from your LinkedIn connections, you can easily do that by clicking the "More..." button in their introduction card, and selecting "Remove Connection."

You can remove connections right from that connection's profile page. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

But you can still get it done if you aren't sure about their name, as long as you can recognize the name or profile photo of the person you want to remove from your connections.

Here's how to remove a person via the Connections page:

1. Go to linkedin.com and log into your account, if necessary.

2. Tap "My Network" in the top toolbar.

3. Click "Connections" in the left-hand sidebar.

You can click "Connections" to open a full list of the people you've connected with. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

4. Scroll through your contacts list; when you see the person you want to remove, click the three dots to the right of their name and the "Message" button.

Select "Remove connection" to delete them from your list. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

5. Select "Remove connection."

How to remove connections on LinkedIn on the mobile app

Just like the desktop version of LinkedIn, the mobile app allows you to remove connections either via their profile page or the Connections page.

If you know the name of the person you want to cut ties with, you should type that name into the search bar to get to their profile. From there, tap the three dots next to their name and select "Remove Connection," and confirm your choice by tapping "Remove Connection" one more time.

Otherwise, here's how to get it done via the Connections page:

1. Open your LinkedIn app and log into your account, if necessary.

2. Tap the connections icon in the bottom toolbar and select "View Connections" at the top of the screen. If the top of the screen instead reads "My Communities," tap that, and then tap "Connections" in the next menu.

Open your full Connections list. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

3. Scroll through your connections until you find the one you want to remove — once you find that connection, tap the three dots to the right of their name and select "Remove Connection."

Tap "Remove Connection." Devon Delfino/Business Insider

4. Confirm your choice by tapping "Remove Connection" in the pop-up window.

If you're a professional looking to advance in your career field, networking is paramount.

After all, your dream job won't just come along and be dropped in your lap — you have to go out there and take advantage of every available opportunity.

That's why creating a LinkedIn profile and sharing it with your connections and colleagues is such a good idea.

Once you've set up your LinkedIn profile with all the relevant information — your education, work history, skills, interests, and more — it's time to share your profile with those who might be interested in seeing it.

Here's how to do it on the LinkedIn website and mobile app.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone Xs (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

Google Pixel 3 (From $799.99 at Best Buy)

How to share your LinkedIn profile on desktop

1. Go to https://www.linkedin.com and log in using your user name and password.

2. In the menu bar running across the top of your screen, click the Me icon, which appears with a mini version of your profile photo.

3. Click View Profile to be taken to your profile page.

4. In your introduction card — the top box of your profile page which contains your name and a few abridged details about your current employment and education — click "More…"

Click "More..." to share your profile. Jennifer Still/Business Insider

5. From the dropdown menu, click Share Profile. This will launch a menu box in which you can type in the name of the connections you wish to share your profile with, and click Send.

You can now type in someone to share your LinkedIn profile with. Jennifer Still/Business Insider

You can also share another member's profile in the same way. Simply navigate to their profile page and follow the steps above.

How to share your LinkedIn profile on the mobile app

1. Locate the LinkedIn app on your iPhone or Android's home screen and tap to open.

2. Go to the profile you wish to share. To share your own profile from the mobile app, you will have to know your own LinkedIn URL and type it in manually.

3. Click the "More…" button in the introduction card of the profile you're sharing.

4. On iOS, choose Share via private message. On Android, this option will appear as Share Profile.

Select "Share via private message" on your iPhone. Jennifer Still/Business Insider

5. Type the names of the people you wish to share the profile with in the relevant field and hit Send when done.

If you want to share your own LinkedIn profile (or anyone else's) outside of the platform, you can also simply copy and paste the URL of the LinkedIn profile page. For more information, read our article, "'What is my LinkedIn URL?': How to find your LinkedIn URL or change it to a custom address."

New regulatory documents sent to Business Insider provide a glimpse into SpaceX's plan to develop a disruptive new rocket system over the next two to three years.

Every day at Boca Chica — a hot, humid, narrow, and sandy strip of clay at the southernmost tip of Texas — SpaceX workers toil over the rocket company's big project, called Starship.

An illustration of SpaceX's Starship vehicle on the surface of the moon, with Earth in the distance.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, envisions the vehicle as a shiny steel two-stage launch system that may stand nearly 400 feet tall and reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of 100 to 1,000 by having fully reusable hardware.

It may be capable of sending massive payloads into orbit, humans to the moon and Mars, and scores of passengers around the world in half an hour.

Read more: SpaceX is eyeing these 9 places on Mars for its first Starship rocket missions

The new regulatory review, which the Federal Aviation Administration has not yet published to its website, came about after the company substantially changed its vision for Boca Chica. Business Insider was sent PDFs of the files (below) via email from an FAA representative.

The FAA's main document is a 23-page "written reevaluation," which addresses the potential impacts of SpaceX's new plans. It's accompanied by a separate five-page addendum that addresses a large brush fire the company accidentally started during an experimental launch in July.

The two documents follow a years-long environmental assessment that the FAA, SpaceX, the state of Texas, and local authorities hammered out by July 2014. That original corpus of more than 1,600 pages is an exhaustive (though now dated) official review of SpaceX's site that the FAA uses in part to approve or deny the company's launch licenses there.

The new assessment covers SpaceX's shift away from developing a commercial spaceport and confronts its new reality as a skunkworks for Starship.

The FAA reevaluated SpaceX's site after a big change in the company's plans

A May 2014 rendering of a Falcon Heavy rocket at SpaceX's South Texas launch site near Boca Chica Beach. The company ultimately changed its plans and design for the facility.SpaceX via FAA

SpaceX's site is located about 20 miles east of Brownsville, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border, and about half a mile from Boca Chica Beach.

The company originally agreed to build a commercial spaceport by spending about $100 million on the effort, including some $15 million worth of incentives from county and state governments. Space missions were supposed to start launching by the end of 2017, with up to a dozen trips each year.

Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets were to take off from a large launchpad equipped with a flame trench (to redirect hot rocket exhaust), a 250,000-gallon deluge system to flood the pad with water (to suppress sound and cut fire risk), lightning protection towers, and other safety features.

Yet before SpaceX could do anything, it had to go through a gauntlet of filing an environmental impact statement with the FAA. The company spent years studying the site and meeting with local, state, and federal officials.

The resulting EIS captures the potential environmental impacts to the area, and it was finalized in July 2014. For a variety of reasons, though, SpaceX's construction in the area slowed to a crawl almost as soon as it began.

Read more: Elon Musk is building SpaceX's Mars rockets in a tiny Texas hamlet. But getting them off the ground there may be harder than he imagined.

By May 2018, Musk said that SpaceX was dropping its commercial-spaceport plan and instead dedicating the site to building and flying Mars rocket-ship prototypes. The company is now using different launch vehicles (Starship prototypes), different fuel (methane instead of RP-1, a rocket-grade kerosene), and a new rate of launches, as well as switching up construction projects and other details.

A comparison of SpaceX and NASA rocket systems. Yutong Yuan/Samantha Lee/Business Insider

This shift in plans prompted the FAA to step in, reevaluate, and square these new details with the original EIS to see whether there'd be any unaddressed public-safety threats or environmental damage.

The document neatly lays out the crux of SpaceX's experimental test program:

"SpaceX remains committed in its mission to colonize Mars. To achieve this mission, SpaceX is developing a new rocket called the Starship and Super Heavy. A key part of the mission is developing the Starship spacecraft. In order to fully develop the vehicle, an experimental test program is needed. The proposed experimental test program involves testing a spacecraft — the Starship — which would serve as the second stage of the rocket. The objective of the experimental test program is to perform a suborbital space flight from the Texas Launch Site."

Despite SpaceX's substantial evolution of its Boca Chica site, the FAA found few major deviations, at least from an impact standpoint — so it determined a new (and very arduous) supplemental EIS process was not required. If anything, the documents suggest SpaceX's new Starship development would decrease the company's disruption in the area, including noise levels, wildlife effects, and wetland impacts.

"The modifications remain entirely within the property boundary and project area described and analyzed in the 2014 EIS," the FAA said.

SpaceX built its first launch pad within about 1.5 miles, or 2.4 kilometers, of a nearby community called Boca Chica Village. Despite this, and the company's inadvertent brush fire coming within a few thousand feet of the hamlet, the FAA determined "there were no public safety concerns" due to a "pre-established safety zone."

"All mitigation efforts due to the brush fire were controlled by US Fish and Wildlife Fire Management and the Brownsville Fire Department," a SpaceX representative told Business Insider. "The determination that this fire presented no risk to public safety was made by those agencies."

Though the FAA can request public feedback to incorporate into its written reevaluations, a representative for the regulator told Business Insider the document "is final" and "will not have any comment period."

The documents also outline a 3-phase Starship development program

A "Phase 1" construction layout for Starship. (The underground water tank was swapped for three above-ground tanks.) FAA/SpaceX

The main FAA document, which was finalized May 21, contains figures on the amounts of methane, oxygen, water, helium, and other "commodities" SpaceX thinks it needs for Starship testing in Texas. (The company has since built a second Starship development site in Cocoa, Florida.)

The document also lays out a three-phase test program, which it says "would last around 2 to 3 years":

A "Phase 2" layout for Starship's launch site from the Federal Aviation Administration's written reevaluation. FAA/SpaceX

SpaceX's representative said the company had officially ended Phase 1 and was in the midst of Phase 2.

Phase 1 centered on SpaceX's first Starship prototype, called Starhopper. Sections of the shiny steel vehicle were first spotted in social-media photos posted from Boca Chica in late 2018.

The vehicle was mostly completed in February, though its nose cone was quickly blown off by powerful Texas winds. SpaceX decided the nosecone wasn't needed and launched Starhopper as a stubby version of its former, rocket-shaped self. The vehicle flew on short tethered flights in April, a roughly 6o-foot, or 20 meter, "hop" in July, and a flight in August that soared the vehicle to about 490 feet, or 150 meters — a key step described in Phase 2.

Read more: The FAA made SpaceX boost its accident insurance 33-fold, to $100 million, before Starhopper's last launch. Here's why.

During that latest and final flight in August, Starhopper also translated across its launch site and landed on a new concrete slab that matches the layout of the Phase 2 Pad.

Construction of the Starship Mk1 prototype in Boca Chica in April.Dave Mosher/Business InsiderThe FAA document says Phase 3 — SpaceX's most ambitious near-term goal in Texas — had not yet begun, adding that its exact details would depend on how the company's first two phases went.

"SpaceX would be required to submit data and information to the FAA so the FAA can conduct another environmental review before issuing any new or modified licenses or permits to conduct these operations," the FAA wrote of Phase 3.

It's unclear whether the rough Phase 3 plan in the FAA document is still valid. SpaceX is known for rapid shifts in development, and when asked about the phase, the company said only that it was "working directly with FAA to maintain environmental compliance as our testing plans develop."

Phase 3, however, is likely now more ambitious. Based on tweets from Musk, it may entail launching a new, roughly 180-foot prototype known as Starship Mark 1 (Mk1) a dozen miles high and beyond this fall.

"Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter," Musk tweeted on August 28.

Musk added that he would provide an update on the overall Starship development program on September 28. Previously, he said he would deliver that presentation from Boca Chica, Texas — possibly to do so with a fitting backdrop.

"Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time," he said.

This story has been updated.

Harry's set off the wave of direct-to-consumer brands competing against consumer-packaged-goods giants like Unilever and Procter & Gamble. Now it's staffing up to shake up another industry.

The shaving brand recently posted a handful of jobs for a new DTC brand that it is incubating as part of Harry's Labs, the innovation group in Harry's tasked with identifying other categories to disrupt.

According to three job postings on Harry's website, the company is hiring for a new start-up called "NewCo."

"Over the past year, Harry's has identified and vetted an exciting opportunity to create a new brand and business in an underserved CPG (consumer packaged goods) category," read the job postings. "They are now gearing up to launch and looking to hire a team to build and run the business, revolutionize another category and improve the experience of millions of people."

Harry's is advertising three roles for the new DTC brand:

The job postings suggest that Harry's is looking for experienced applicants. The director of growth marketing and creative director positions will report directly to the CEO, for example. The director of growth marketing position requires seven or more years of e-commerce experience, and the creative director role needs at least 10 years of experience at agencies or in-house teams, according to the postings.

The business operations and strategy manager should ideally have four to six years of experience and work on the startup's product launches, commercial strategy and with external partners like vendors and suppliers, according to the postings.

Harry's wouldn't comment on the new team or what kind of product is being planned beyond confirming that the roles would be part of Harry's Labs.

In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, founder and Harry's Labs CEO Jeff Raider said that Harry's was looking to launch one or two new DTC brands this year. Raider said that he looks for categories with high customer dissatisfaction and organizes focus groups to talk with consumers about brands.

For example, Harry's Labs' first brand, Flamingo, a shaving line for women, was based on the idea that women didn't see themselves portrayed in existing brands.

Read more: The cofounder of Warby Parker and Harry's reveals how he decides which industry to disrupt next

"They were portraying women like goddesses," he said. "The products themselves were more expensive than men's products. A quote that really stuck with me was, 'Women would abstain from sex for three months if they could remove all their body hair.'"

Nik Sharma, a DTC consultant that has worked with brands including Hint and Cha Cha Matcha, said that he's heard about recruiters from Harry's VC arm Harry's Ventures reaching out to people for roles at a new DTC company.

Based on how Harry's has already created personal care items for men and women, he said he suspected that the new startup would focus on similar products such as a skin care product or perfume.

He said Harry's also already has many of the resources needed to launch a DTC brand, including negotiated manufacturing and shipping rates and first-party data on its customers. For example, Harry's could slip samples of the new startup into subscribers' boxes or poll them about what other related products they're interested in.

DTC brands like Iris Nova are experimenting with a similar model to Harry's. The beverage brand is known for its Dirty Lemon drinks but is spending $100 million over the next three to five years to build out a portfolio by creating and investing in other beverages.

"It would make perfect sense to build a brand around a consumer persona and almost double-down on the lifetime value of the consumer that they currently have," Sharma said. "They have the proof in the pudding."

A dark video is hardly enjoyable, but it's often hard to tell in the moment that the footage you're recording is too dimly lit to be easily viewed.

Brightening an iPhone video can make it easier to see the action on screen and will make the video more appealing if you upload it to a social media site or webpage.

Unfortunately, the iPhone's built-in camera app does not allow you to brighten videos after you have created them, so you should always try to brighten a video before you start recording.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone Xs (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

How to brighten an iPhone video before or while recording

1. Open the camera app and swipe left to toggle to video.

2. Tap on the screen so that a box with a sun-shaped icon appears.

Tap your iPhone screen and slide your finger up to brighten the video. Steven John/Business Insider

3. Hold your finger on the iPhone screen and slide it upward to brighten the scene before you start recording. You can also do this while you are recording the video at any time.

How to brighten an iPhone video after recording

The free features of the app InShot allow you to brighten an iPhone video after recording, not to mention adding filters, text, cropping, and many other editorial features.

1. Open the InShot app and tap the icon for "VIDEO," then tap "New."

Create a new video on InShot. Steven John/Business Insider

2. Select the video (or videos if you are merging files) you wish to brighten from your iPhone's library.

3. Tap the green circle with the check mark.

4. On the next screen, tap the word "FILTER."

You can brighten the video with filters. Steven John/Business Insider

5. Tap the "Adjust" tab, then using the "LIGHTNESS" effect, move the slider as far to the right as you want to brighten the video.

You can also use the Adjust tab to manually brighten your video. Steven John/Business Insider

You can also play around with other effects, like "WARMTH" and "SATURATION," as increasing these will make some videos appear brighter.