On Cyber Monday, while online shoppers hunt for deals, NASA will be trying to stick its first landing of a robot on the surface of Mars in six years.

The roughly $830-million mission is called InSight, which is short for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport."

NASA rocketed the InSight probe toward the red planet on May 5. The lander, which weighs about 789 lbs, is expected to complete a risky descent sequence around 3 p.m. ET on Monday, November 26. Part of that process is known as the "seven minutes of terror."

If all goes well, the golf-cart-size lander will be the first robot to touch down on Martian soil since NASA's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover, which landed there in August 2012.

Read more: 13 incredible facts you probably didn't know about the red planet

Scientists hope that InSight's two-year mission will probe Mars in ways they've only dreamed of until now.

"All of our past missions have really been surface missions," Robert Braun, NASA's former chief technologist, told Business Insider. "InSight's a very different mission in the sense that it is peering into the past by studying, really, the interior of Mars. In doing so, we're going to learn about Mars, but also about the early history of the Earth."

First, however, InSight will have to get safely to the surface.

How InSight might survive '7 minutes of terror'

An illustration of NASA's InSight Mars probe in the "seven minutes of terror" phase of its descent to the Martian surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Getting to Mars is relatively easy.

That's because modern rockets are safer and more reliable to launch than ever before. In fact, the vehicle that sent InSight toward Mars — an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance — has had only one partial failure since its debut in 2002.

Landing on the red planet, however, is one of the most challenging tasks an aerospace engineer can accomplish. About a third of robots sent there never make it.

"Although we've done it before, landing on Mars is hard, and this mission is no different," Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a video. "It takes thousands of steps to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, and each one of them has to work perfectly."

The Martian atmosphere is about 1% as thick as Earth's. But that's still plenty of air to completely destroy a spacecraft like InSight, which will be moving at about 12,500 mph when it arrives at the red planet.

NASA tries to take advantage of the Martian atmosphere by putting its robots in an entry capsule with a heat shield. This helps reduce the spacecraft's speed while also protecting it from 1,400-degree-Celsius temperatures — hot enough to melt steel — caused by plowing through the thin Martian air.

An animation of NASA's InSight probe attempting to land on the surface of Mars.Lockheed Martin/YouTube

However, striking the atmosphere at anything other than the perfect angle — about 12 degrees, Manning said — can end a mission. Any shallower than this, and an entry capsule will "skip" off the atmosphere and out into deep space. Any deeper, and a robot gets vaporized.

This phase — when an entry capsule detaches from its mothership and descends — is sometimes called the seven minutes of terror. This is because NASA can't "hear" from its spacecraft for roughly seven minutes, and won't know if a landing has succeeded or failed until a radio signal arrives (or doesn't).

This time around, though, NASA is trying something new: It sent two briefcase-size satellites called MarsCubeOne with Insight. Both cubesats are trailing the lander en route to Mars, and they'll help relay landing data home.

"They'll be broadcasting that back to Earth so we know what's exactly happening at each step of the entry, descent, and landing process," Tom Hoffman, the InSight mission's payload manager, said during a press briefing in October.

An engineer tests the solar arrays of NASA's Mars Cube One satellite, or MarCO.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Once InSight plows through enough of the Martian atmosphere to not burn up, its entry capsule will deploy a big supersonic parachute, then discard the heat shield seconds later.

InSight's dangerous journey isn't over at this point. The robot still has to deploy three landing legs and use radar to calculate how close it is to the ground — NASA can't control the robot remotely in real time because it takes light (and radio signals) about 15 minutes to travel to and from Mars.

About a mile above the surface of Mars, InSight will drop out of its protective capsule, fire its retro-rocket engines, and try to touch down without crashing or tipping over.

How InSight will probe the ancient secrets of Mars — and Earth

A cutaway illustration showing what scientists think the interior of planet Mars might look like.NASA/JPL

InSight will try to land in a region known as Elysium Planitia, which is a relatively flat place close to the Martian equator. If the robot safely lands and unfurls its two circular solar panels, NASA will begin its mission in earnest.

Like InSight's nearly identical predecessor mission, the Phoenix Mars Lander, the probe won't move locations. But unlike Phoenix, which dug for water in Martian soil for a few months in 2008, InSight hopes to last for two Earth years.

During that time, it will perform the first "checkup" of the 4.6-billion-year-old planet.

"InSight's goal is to study the interior of Mars and take the planet's vital signs, its pulse, and temperature," NASA said on its mission website. "To look deep into Mars, the lander must be at a place where it can stay still and quiet for its entire mission. That's why scientists chose Elysium Planitia as InSight's home."

NASA plans to land its InSight robot at Elysium Planitia near the Martian equator.NASA; Business Insider

Once InSight is powered up and in communication with Earth, one of its first tasks will be to unfurl a robotic arm.

InSight will use that robotic appendage to place a dome down on the Martian surface. The dome will contain six extremely sensitive vibration-detection devices called seismometers.

Seismometers on the Earth and the moon (Apollo astronauts deployed some on the lunar surface) have recorded earthquakes and moonquakes, which helped scientists figure out the internal structure of those rocky worlds. On Mars, NASA researchers hope to accomplish a similar feat.

Whenever a meteorite strikes Mars, or there's a landslide, or a big blob of magma suddenly shifts, or there's tectonic movement, InSight's seismometer should detect such vibrations. The devices can even record seismic activity from all the way across the planet.

Over time, data about marsquakes could reveal hitherto unknown information about the internal structure of the planet.

One of the most challenging tasks InSight will attempt, though, is drilling a heat probe deep into the ground. The probe will slowly drill down and stop every so often to heat up. Then a sensor will detect how long it takes that warmth to dissipate.

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The probe is expected to dig 16 feet down — far deeper than any previous Mars mission has ever reached with scoops, shovels, or drills.

"When we get down that deep, we'll get away from all of the temperature variations of the surface," Suzanne Smrekar, the mission's deputy principle investigator, said during a press briefing. "That tells us about the heat coming out of the planet — that energy that's available for driving geologic activity."

Back on the surface, InSight will also use a sensitive radio science experiment to see how subtly Mars shifts during its two-Earth-year-long orbit around the sun. Such data should tell researchers what is going on in the deepest parts of the planet's core.

The lead scientists on the InSight mission to Mars, Bruce Banerdt, speaks during a press conference on October 31, 2018.NASA/Bill Ingalls

The ultimate goal is to figure out how Mars formed and what happened to the planet since then. Scientists know that Mars once generated an atmosphere-protecting magnetic dynamo, as Earth still does today. But the Martian core's dynamo eventually shut down and the planet's protective shield faded, which allowed the sun to blow away Mars' atmosphere and oceans of water.

In probing that history, scientists think we're bound to learn about our own planet's origins.

"Earth ... is a big planet that holds a lot of heat, a lot of energy, and it's been very geologically active over its entire history. So most of the record of the early processes that formed the Earth have been erased," Hoffman said. "We'd like to have a planet that's just a little bit calmer and that can retain that that evidence."

Mars, which is similar to Earth but has remained almost frozen in time, is thus the perfect place to go looking.

Get the latest Google stock price here.

Sony isn't wasting any time capitalizing on the success of "Venom."

The studio announced two release dates for yet-to-be-titled Marvel movies on Wednesday: July 10, 2020 and October 2, 2020. The latter is described as an "untitled Sony/Marvel sequel." All signs point to that being a second "Venom" installment, as the movie broke the October box-office record for an opening weekend with $80 million. It's now grossed nearly $780 million worldwide.

Another possibility would be a sequel to the upcoming animated movie, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." It's gotten positive buzz, including from Business Insider's Jason Guerrasio, who called it the "best animated movie of the year" in his holiday movie preview. But even if Sony is confident in the movie, it has yet to be released.

Meanwhile, "Venom" has already shattered expectations at the box office and set the foundation for a sequel in its after-credits scene. It seems inevitable.

READ MORE: 'Venom' gives Sony an edge over Disney in its fight to keep Spider-Man, according to industry experts

Sony's unique deal with Marvel Studios that it struck in 2015 allows the latter to use Spider-Man in its Marvel Cinematic Universe while Sony retains distribution rights and creative control. Sony owns the film rights to hundreds of Spider-Man characters, and can continue making its own movies using those characters (and Spider-Man) under the deal.

"Venom" was Sony's first Spider-Man spin-off since the commercial and critical failure of 2014's "Amazing Spider-Man 2." While reviews tore apart "Venom" (it has a 29% Rotten Tomatoes critic score), its success with audiences revitalized Sony's Spider-Man universe, according to box-office experts.

"If they consistently make films audiences want to see, Disney will have to buy Sony to get 'Spider-Man' back," Exhibitor Relations senior box-office analyst Jeff Bock told Business Insider earlier this month.

That's good news for Sony because it already had several other Spider-Man spin-off movies in development before "Venom" was a hit. The July 10, 2020 release date is likely "Morbius," starring Jared Leto as the vampire Spider-Man villain.

Other possibilities include "Black Cat," based on a frequent Spider-Man love interest, or "Kraven the Hunter," based on another longtime foe of the wall-crawling superhero. But since "Morbius" has already cast its lead actor, that's probably the best bet.

To celebrate the release of "Battlefield V," Microsoft and Electronic Arts partnered to give a Florida veteran a limited-edition Xbox One X bundle, delivered via an outrageous skydiving stunt.

Motorsport driver and stunt performer Travis Pastrana of Nitro Circus dove from a height of 13,000 feet to deliver the first Xbox One X Gold Rush Special Edition "Battlefield V" bundle to retired Navy Corpsman Jeff Bartrom, who lives in Paisley Florida. Pastrana hit a peak speed of 140 mph during the dive, and the jump took less than 55 seconds.

The giveaway was meant to thank Bartrom for his service and coincides with Microsoft's #GiveWithXbox initiative. The company pledged to donate $5 worth of Xbox products for every picture shared to social media with the hashtag showing the importance of gaming. Microsoft will donate up to $1 million to be split between four charities, Child's Play, Gamers Outreach, SpecialEffect, and Operation Supply Drop. The social media campaign is running through December 9th.

Read more:Microsoft finally made an Xbox I actually want to buy

World War II shooter "Battlefield V" officially launched on November 20th and is available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. The Xbox One X version of "Battlefield V" also features enhanced visuals. EA Access members can play a free 10-hour trial of the game on their platform of choice as well.

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here. Current subscribers can read the report here.

Business Insider Intelligence Consumers are finally starting to adopt smart home devices, with nearly 60% owning at least one device. This presents an opportunity for e-commerce companies to enter the smart home and encourage purchasing through the devices.

The smart speaker has become the face of the smart home in many ways, attracting the lion's share of attention as companies look for ways to take advantage of the growing platform. But there's a problem: Consumers aren't using the smart speaker to actually buy products very often.

Instead, one of the clearest opportunities outside of the smart speaker is home goods and grocery replenishment through large appliances. Smart devices in the home — especially appliances — can take advantage of built-in sensors to either tell consumers when they need to buy more of a product, or make that purchase autonomously. This will create an opportunity for appliance manufacturers, e-commerce vendors, and product suppliers to ink supply agreements to meet consumers' needs.

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence examines several areas of opportunity for e-commerce companies to leverage smart home technologies to provide new and better services to their customers. First, we explore how smart appliances, including connected dishwashers and laundry machines, are building on one-click purchasing systems to enable automated replenishment. We then discuss the smart fridge and detail how apps, cameras, and voice assistants are enabling takeout and grocery delivery through these appliances. Finally, we examine the role of the voice interface beyond smart speakers as it relates to purchasing products in the home, and how omnipresent voice will be used to organize and interact with automated services.

The companies mentioned in this report are: Amazon, Blue Apron, Costo, GE, Google, Instacart, Keurig, KitchenAid, LG, Ocado, P&G, Plated, Reynolds, Samsung, Target, Walmart, Whirlpool.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

Tesla's Gigafactory will stay open over Thanksgiving as the company pushes to reach Elon Musk's production goal of 7,000 Model 3s a week.

According to an internal email viewed by Business Insider, most of the Gigafactory workers will be able to observe Thanksgiving Day, but a few "mission critical areas" will remain open, meaning some employees must work.

"For Thanksgiving, we will be working in Model 3 Module and Pack Production. We're asking for volunteers to help us support these areas. Managers will follow up with each critical area to develop the volunteer list," the email, which was sent on November 12, stated.

"All of our hourly and non-exempt team members who work a Tesla holiday will receive 8.0 hours of holiday pay in addition to pay for hours worked on those days. We greatly appreciate everyone who's able to help and in turn will try to make it festive and rewarding for those that volunteer," the email stated.

Tesla posted a profit during the company's third quarter, something it has only done twice before since it's been public.

However, the company failed to reach its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3s a week (It averaged 4,300 Model 3 cars per week during the third quarter).

Now Musk is upping the ante, in part because the company has said it will sell less expensive (and thus lower margin) versions of the Model 3 going forward, so it needs to increase volume.

Musk has also said customers that order their vehicle before the end of November will get their cars before an electric vehicle tax credit for Teslas expires at the end of the year.

In a separate email sent on November 15, Musk stressed how important it was for the company to continue growing production so that it could maintain profitability.

It's extremely important that we achieve a 1,000+ vehicle per day rate on a sustained basis in the next few weeks, both in order to ensure new Tesla owners receive their car this year and that we achieve a financially healthy quarter.

Last quarter was great, but now we need to prove financial sustainability, which is fundamental to achieving our goal of helping the world become environmental sustainable.

Please be laser-focused on achieving a build rate of 7,000+ high-quality Model 3's per week. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know. Note, the build rate will continue to increase in Q1, as we start shipment to Europe and Asia.

Thanks,

Elon

In another email sent to employees, Musk said he'll be walking the entire Model 3 production line "from cells to finished vehicles" on November 27th and 28th to ensure that each and every line is doing 50 units per hour, which would bring Tesla to 1,000 finished vehicles per day.

One Tesla worker who spoke to Business Insider on the condition of anonymity called the goal "hopeless" and said that turnover remains high at the company.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you are a Tesla employee or customer who has a story to share about a car or experience with the company, give me a shout at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The fight over a goat-headed statue that pitted Satanists against media giants has ended.

On Wednesday, Warner Bros. confirmed to Business Insider that it had "amicably settled" a lawsuit brought by The Satanic Temple against Netflix and Warner Bros. earlier this month, which alleged that the "Sabrina" reboot copied its statue of the goat-headed deity Baphomet and implied it stood for evil. Warner Bros. did not comment on the terms of the settlement.

The Temple confirmed the settlement to Business Insider Wednesday, saying "the unique elements of the Satanic Temple's Baphomet statue have been acknowledged in the credits of episodes which have already been filmed," but that "the remaining terms of the settlement are subject to a confidentiality agreement." The Temple had told Business Insider last week that it was "in the process of finalizing an amicable settlement" with Warner Bros.

The Temple had sued Netflix and Warner Bros. for $50 million and accused the companies of "copyright infringement, false designation of original, false description; and forbidden dilution under trademark dilution, and Injury to Business reputation under New York General Business Law."

In the suit, the Temple argued that "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" copied its specific iteration of the "Baphomet with Children" statue, which it created from 2013 to 2014 for $100,000 in response to a statue of the Ten Commandments being donated to Oklahoma City.

The lawsuit cited an interview with Vice in which "Sabrina" production designer Lisa Soper said any resemblance between the show's statue and the Temple's statue was a coincidence. But the Temple argued that "Baphomet has never been depicted with two children gazing reverentially at the Sabbatic Goat head" like its statue depicts the deity.

The Temple said in its lawsuit that it views Satan as a "literary Satan," "meant to be a rebel against God's authority, rather than an evil being." And it stressed the show's implication that the statue stands for evil is in "stark contrast" to that view.

"Among other morally repugnant actions, the Sabrina Series' evil antagonists engage in cannibalism and forced-worship of a patriarchal deity," the lawsuit said.

Below is a comparison provided in the lawsuit:

Satanic Temple's 'Baphomet with Children' statue

Satanic Temple

'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' statue

Satanic Temple/Netflix screenshot

White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump reportedly sent numerous emails related to government affairs using a personal email address, potentially in violation of records laws, according to a Washington Post report published Monday.

The first daughter was found to have sent hundreds of messages from her private email address to numerous White House aides, officials, and assistants, after a public-records lawsuit prompted a White House ethics invesitgation, The Post reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Ivanka took on her unpaid White House role in March 2017. Her spokesman, Abbe Lowell, claimed "sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," according to a statement from a spokesman for Abbe Lowell, Trump's attorney.

Carlos Barria/Reuters

The spokesman asserted that none of the first daughter's emails contained classified information.

Lowell also claimed that Ivanka did not receive "the same guidance" after assuming her role as other government employees have.

Ivanka claimed she was unaware of the White House's email policy, and was found to have not received reminders from the White House forbidding private emails, sources said to The Post.

Her frequent use of her private email address concerned aides, including one former senior official who described her as "the worst offender in the White House."

Some government officials, including Treasury official Dan Kowalski, were reportedly familiar with Ivanka's personal email address, but not her official one.

"I apologize for reaching out to you on your personal email for this, but it is the only email I have for you," Kowalski said in an April 2017 email obtained by government watchdog group American Oversight.

"For future reference my [White House] email is [redacted]," Ivanka Trump said in her reply. "Thanks for reaching out and making this introduction."

The emails were sent using the "ijkfamily.com" domain, which was registered in December 2016, shortly before Donald Trump took office. Emails were checked for security concerns, including viruses, by the Trump Organization, sources told The Post.

Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner's private email accounts were scrutinized after earlier reports suggested Kushner had corresponded with White House officials, prompting congressional investigators to request a retainment of the emails.

It's still early days in cloud computing, the hottest sector in the gigantic business technology market. But the window of opportunity for companies to grab a piece of it is closing fast.

That's the word from Goldman Sachs, which just released its latest quarterly report on the cloud market. The good news, according to analysts Heather Bellini, Heath Terry, Piyush Mubayi, Caroline Liu, Mark Grant, and Ted Lin is that the market for cloud services will continue to grow by at least 20% a year through 2021.

The bad news? A growing percentage of that spending will go to just four players — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba.

"We continue to expect that the public cloud landscape will consolidate into an oligopolistic market structure," the Goldman Sachs analysts said in the report.

Amazon pioneered the cloud computing market when it launched Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Although AWS has grown since then into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth, the overall cloud computing market is still a nascent one, Goldman Sachs said in the report. Many companies still haven't shifted over to the cloud, and the vast majority of enterprise spending is still on traditional services.

The core cloud computing market is expanding rapidly

The analysts focused on the core cloud services — infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where companies such as Amazon offer computing processing power; and platform as a service (PaaS), where Microsoft and other companies offer a kind of cloud-based operating system on which people can build and run applications — and the non-cloud enterprise tech services with which they directly compete. The combined amount companies spend on cloud services and the non-cloud ones that are direct competitors represents the total potential market for cloud services.

As cloud spending expands, it will be doing so in part by eating into money companies used to spend on such things as maintaining and running applications on their own servers.

Last year, spending on cloud services accounted for about 8% of the total potential market. That should jump to about 15% by 2021, Goldman Sachs estimated. In other words, a growing portion of corporate IT budgets will be going to the cloud.

"Our checks continue to suggest that we remain in the early innings of public cloud," the analysts said in their report.

Samantha Lee/BI Graphics

That trend will represent a big move in real dollars as well as percentages. Enterprise companies spent about $47 billion last year on the core cloud services, according to Goldman Sachs. The firm expects that amount to grow to $62 billion this year, and $116 billion by 2021.

But the top four firms are leaving little room for other players

Frequently, with a rapidly expanding market there's room for plenty of competitors to flourish. But that's not what Goldman Sachs expects. The cloud market has already started to consolidate, and that trend is only going to become more pronounced in coming years, the analyst predicted. Basically, only the biggest players — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Chinese giant Alibaba Cloud — have the resources to offer differentiated services and to continue to build out the data server infrastructure needed to compete, they said.

Read this: Google just named a former Oracle exec as the head of its giant cloud business

Last year, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba accounted for about 56% of the core cloud computing market. By next year, their combined share should hit 84%, according to Goldman Sachs' forecast. The three American giants alone will account for 77% of the total market, the analysts said.

"The largest three players (AWS, Azure, Google), will continue to dominate share of the market," the analysts said.

While the biggest players will see their revenue go up, the amount of revenue going to the rest of the players in the cloud market will actually decrease, despite the market's overall expansion. While companies other than the big four pulled in about $21 billion by offering core cloud services last year, that amount will decline to $20 billion this year and just $12 million next year, Goldman Sachs projected.

That could be ominous IBM, Oracle, and other companies that have been trying to edge into the cloud-computing market. If Goldman Sachs is right, they're going to be left fighting for fewer and fewer table scraps left by the cloud giants.

Now read:

Black Friday is still a few days away on the calendar, but in reality, Black Friday is officially here.

At least, that's the case if you head on over to Jet.com. The online retailer has a veritable plethora of deals on everything from kitchen appliances to TVs to video games to drones, and that's ahead of the official Black Friday sale that begins the evening of Wednesday, November 21.

In order to make it as easy as possible for you to spend your hard-earned money (which is to say, reward yourself and your friends and family for a year well done), Jet has launched a Black Friday-specific website, because nothing is quite as annoying as scouring a site to find the sales. So if you're looking for a way to begin the buying and gift-giving process early, this is definitely the place to start.

As of today, you can find the Nespresso VertuoPlus Coffee and Espresso Maker by Breville in white for just $162.47, down from $249.95. The Samsung 75" Class 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV has been discounted by $300, and is now $1,297.99. Similarly, the Samsung 55"Class 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV is now under $400, or $80 less than list price. In fact, the entire Samsung catalogue is now on sale at Jet, where you can buy discounted tablets, smartwatches, sound systems, and of course, television sets. Some discounts are as steep as 50%, but we don't expect these prices to last long.

You can also find great deals on electronics and video games, like the Sony PlayStation VR Creed Bundle, which is down nearly $100 to $250. Also, the Microsoft Xbox One X 1TB Fallout 76 Bundle, which was once $499, is now $429.

For the audiophiles in your life, you can check out Jet's selection of headphones and speakers on sale. Already, you can get the Bose SoundLink AE 2 Black for $199, down from $229. The Bose SoundSport Free Wireless Headphones have been discounted around 15% for just $169, while the Bose Companion 2 Computer Speakers have seen a 10% discount, and are now $224.

If you're looking for a gift that's a bit off the beaten path, you may check out Jet.com's selection of on-sale drones. The DJI Mavic Air Quadcopter Drone Fly More Combo is 10% off at $878.95, while the DJI Mavic Air Quadcopter Drone is now $699, down from $799.

While all the above deals can already be had on Jet.com, for those willing to wait, there's a wider selection still from which to choose.

For example, the 32GB Apple iPad will be $249, which is $55 off its original price. A special-edition Fitbit Versa, on the other hand, is $49 off, and now just under $180. And if you're looking to upgrade the Wi-Fi in your house, one of the better deals on the list is the Linksys Velop Mesh WiFi System, which has been discounted by nearly 50% to just $199.

Then, there are the gifts for the commuters in your life, like the Voyager Electric Scooter in Ion Black, which is 50% off for just $149.

On the smart home front, Jet is offering deals on smart home hubs like the Google Home Hub, which is $50 off its list price for $99. There's also the Dyson V6 Origin Cord-Free Vacuum, which is $40 off its normal price and available for $159. Alternatively, if you'd rather have a robot do all the heavy lifting, you'll find the iRobot Roomba 670 for $100 off its normal price, and less than $200.

All this to say, regardless of what sort of shopping you hope to accomplish over this busy Black Friday season, it seems that Jet.com could be your one-stop shop. And with the added convenience of shopping from your couch, you may just want to keep an eye on your credit card — it could develop a mind of its own.

Available now:

Available starting Wednesday, November 21 at 10 p.m. EST:

Looking for more deals? We've rounded up the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals on the internet.

Facebook is in crisis, yet again.

This time, the issue how the company attempted to attack its critics with smears that have been accused of fueling anti-Semitism, while pushing to downplay the extent of public disclosures about Russian election meddling in 2016 — revelations exposed by a bombshell New York Times investigation.

The company went into panic mode, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg defending his position on a conference call with reporters as further leaks spilled out about his working relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO. So what happens now?

Business Insider spoke to 3 former Facebook employees, and one current worker at the company, to get a feel for what people in the know are expecting Facebook to do next. These insiders warn that employee morale could take a hit — making it harder for Facebook to hire and retain the vital talent it needs to navigate this crisis.

Representatives for Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook's scandals are more personal than ever before

Facebook's current woes aren't like past crises the company has weathered, said some insiders.

"If you look back at the history of the company, there are many times when its been attacked from the outside ... but it's often felt like, internally, the leadership is on top of it," one former employee said. This person cited the company's rocky post-IPO period, and the questions over whether Facebook could effectively transition its business to capitalize on the smartphone boom, as examples of problems that Facebook leadership effectively hurdled.

"This time around ... it's actually a criticism of the leadership. This is a new kind of threat that Facebook has not experienced before ... it is the leadership somehow failing ... [a] crisis of confidence in the leadership," said this former employee.

Another former employee blamed some of Facebook's recent crises on the corporate culture built by Zuckerberg and Sandberg, where good news rose to the top and bad news never made it to the CEO's desk.

"I believe they would definitely have been kept in the dark on these issues as long as possible," this person said. "They built an executive culture that incentivized bringing only good news and deflecting bad."

"They will change something as a result. The external message will be something about some people already being gone from [Facebook], others being redeployed, and a new task force or something about doing this better," the person predicted.

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The relentless drumbeat of crises can hurt employee morale at a critical moment

As the scandals have mounted, the change in attitudes towards Facebook over the last year has been dramatic.

"All of a sudden [it] went from a little bit of a darling to there was no safe haven," another former employee said.

"Government hated us, friends started not liking you, press started talking about the constant corrosive effect ... all the hard things that are going on give new people a lot of pause ... 'does this leadership know how to save the company?'"

Part of the problem is Facebook's rapid pace of growth. At the end of 2017, the company had around 25,000 staff, up from 17,000 at the end of 2016. A year prior to that, it was roughly 12,700, and in 2014 it was just over 9,000.

In other words, most employees simply haven't been at the company very long — and this means they may be less incentivized to stick around to clean up the mess and tackle some of the hardest problems that Facebook has yet had to face.

"Most of the company has not been there more than two years, so they have not been ... through a crisis like this, and they might not be emotionally invested in the company like the first thousand might be," an ex-employee said. They summarised employee perceptions of executive attitudes as "hey, we made a bunch of mistakes, and now it's your job to clean it up."

According to a recent leak, Facebook employee morale has already plummeted, with the proportion of employees who are "optimistic about the company's future" dropping from 84% to 52% over the last year.

Where will the buck stop?

It's not yet clear whether we'll see any major departures as a result of the most recent revelations.

One of the former employees suggested it was unlikely, pointing out that top communications exec Rachel Whetstone left back in August, and Elliot Schrage — head of comms and policy — has already announced his intentions to leave.

"Mark and Sheryl aren't going anywhere, no-one else is really worth getting rid of, so I don't really expect to see heads roll," the former employee said.

A current employee, meanwhile, suggested that Joel Kaplan, Facebook's policy boss in DC, might ultimately exit.

Kaplan is Facebook's policy boss in DC, and is a rare conservative at the famously liberal company, having previously served in the Bush White House. Kaplan drew flack from employees earlier this year after publicly appearing in support of his longtime friend Brett Kavanaugh as the then-Supreme Court nominee testified to Congress regarding allegations of sexual misconduct. According to the Times, Kaplan played a key role in the social network's attempts to downplay to the public the spread of misinformation on its platform.

A former employee said that some of Sandberg's lieutenants and other mid-level executives could leave (or be forced out) amid the turmoil.

Meanwhile, it's almost guaranteed that there will be some kind of discipline for those leakers who spoke to the New York Times.

"There will be firings from that. That team is very good at what they do," the former employee added. "Ironically, if those resources had been looking at external manipulation via Facebook, we may not be where we are today."

If you've ever been interested in the Amazon Echo Dot, now might be the best chance to get the smart home speaker for just a fraction of the cost.

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That means that by combining the deals, you can get the Echo Dot for under $5, so long as you're starting a new Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.

Here are the steps to get the deal working.

The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

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Today only, one of the best pairs of headphones you can buy is going for one of the lowest prices we've seen.

The V-Moda Crossfade wireless headphones are available from Amazon for $114.99— that's 30% off their current normal price of $164.99.

I've been a V-Moda fan for a number of years, ever since I tried one of their earliest pairs of on-ear cans, and the Crossfade headphones are no exception. The headphones offer a seamless wireless sound via Bluetooth, and come with a cable so that you can still connect them to wired-only devices — like an airplane's entertainment system.

These stylish headphones feature dual-diaphragm 50mm drivers that offer excellent warm, accurate sound with a punchy bass that doesn't overwhelm, bright treble, and balanced mids.

V-Moda headphones are known for their build quality, and the Crossfade lives up to that reputation. The headphones feature a steelflex headband that can be adjusted, as well as a steel frame. The included cable features Kevlar and is tested to stay intact no matter how many times you bend, pull, or twist it.

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NASA is building a giant rocket ship to return astronauts to the moon and, later on, ferry the first crews to and from Mars.

But agency leaders are already contemplating the retirement of the Space Launch System (SLS), as the towering and yet-to-fly government rocket is called, and the Orion space capsule that'll ride on top.

NASA is anticipating the emergence of two reusable and presumably more affordable mega-rockets that private aerospace companies are creating. Those systems are the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), which is being built by Elon Musk's SpaceX; and the New Glenn, a launcher being built by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Read more: Elon Musk and SpaceX are building a monster rocket for Mars. Here's how big it is compared to 20 familiar objects.

"I think our view is that if those commercial capabilities come online, we will eventually retire the government system, and just move to a buying launch capacity on those [rockets]," Stephen Jurczyk, NASA's associate administrator, told Business Insider at The Economist Space Summit on November 1.

However, Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, appears to have publicly denied his colleague's statement.

"In case there is any confusion, @NASA will NOT be retiring @NASA_SLS in 2022 or any foreseeable date. It is the backbone of America's return to the Moon with international and commercial partners," Bridenstine tweeted on Monday, following the initial publication of this story on Saturday.

In any case, NASA may soon find itself in a strange position, since the upcoming launch vehicles of SpaceX and Blue Origin may beat SLS back to the moon — and one of them may be the first to send humans to Mars.

The super-size struggles with SLS

Patrick Shea inspects a 1.3% scale model of the NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) in a wind tunnel.NASA/Ames/Dominic Hart

Space Launch System is often called a super-heavy-lift rocket. This means it's designed to heave a payload of more than 55 tons (roughly the mass of a battle tank) into low-Earth orbit.

"We need a [super-]heavy lift launch capability," Jurczyk said. "Without it, we're not going to have a safe, reliable, and affordable architecture and implementation for human exploration."

Several iterations of SLS are planned through the 2020s, and the first is called Block 1. This rocket is expected to stand about 322 feet tall and be able to lift about 70 tons of spacecraft hardware and supplies into orbit.

NASA's hopes to test-launch the first Block 1 rocket in June 2020 on a flight called Exploration Mission-1 (or EM-1). The mission would prove SLS is safe and reliable by flying an uncrewed Orion crew capsule around the moon and back to Earth.

A crewed Exploration Mission-2 (EM-2) would follow several years later.

How NASA plans to pull off its Exploration Mission-2 flight with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spaceship.NASA

It is unknown how much an SLS launch might cost. The same is also true for SpaceX's BFR and Blue Origin's New Glenn, which have yet to announce mission pricing.

The figure for NASA's program depends on the types of missions it pursues, how many SLS rockets are launched and how frequently, and how development costs are accounted for. For example, the space shuttle's per-mission raw cost was about $500 million, but averaging in the entire program's development costs and accounting for inflation brings the per-mission figure closer to about $1.5 billion.

So far NASA has spent about $11.9 billion on SLS, and the agency is projected to need $4-5 billion more than it has planned by 2021. Relatedly, the scheduled launch date for EM-1 in June 2021 is about 2.5 years behind schedule.

An internal audit of NASA's program found that preventable accidents, contract management problems, and other performance issues related to Boeing, the prime contractor, is largely responsible for the cost overruns and delays.

If more hiccups come with the SLS program, NASA may be watching SpaceX beat the agency to the moon with a crewed mission. That's because Musk, the company's founder, is pursuing aggressive timelines to reach the moon and Mars with BFR.

How SpaceX could beat NASA back to the moon

An illustration of the SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, launching into space. Here, the spaceship is shown detaching from the booster.SpaceX

SpaceX employees have been toiling under a tent in Los Angeles to build the top half of the system, called the Big Falcon Spaceship.

Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, have both said the spaceship could be doing short launches called "hops" as soon as late 2019. Musk is also planning to modify his mainstay Falcon 9 rocket into a "mini-BFR ship" to test some of the more challenging aspects of the ship, like blazing-hot reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

The planned dimensions of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket. Olivia Reaney/Business Insider

In 2020 or 2021, he aims to launch a fully integrated version of BFR — a Big Falcon Booster with the Big Falcon Spaceship on top — into orbit around Earth. (Around the same time, Blue Origin is planning to use New Glenn to deliver a lander to the surface of the moon to scout for ice to make rocket fuel.)

If SpaceX's first orbital launch and later uncrewed missions fly without an explosion or other incident, the company intends to fly a Japanese billionaire and a group of artists around the moon in 2023.

It remains to be seen how the space agency would react to such a feat, which is essentially a creative reprise of the Apollo 8 mission of 1968. In fact, 2023 is the same timeframe in which NASA plans to launch EM-2 around the moon.

An illustration of the spaceship of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, flying around the moon.SpaceX

It's also unknown what NASA would do if SpaceX launches its first uncrewed missions to Mars with BFR in 2022, followed by the first crewed missions in 2024. That's several years ahead of when the space agency hopes to land people on the moon, and perhaps a decade sooner than NASA would attempt a crewed Mars landing.

"We haven't really engaged SpaceX on how we'd work together on BFR, and eventually get to a Mars mission — yet," Jurczyk said of NASA's leadership. "My guess is that it's coming."

A US space agency without an American spaceship

Nine astronauts will fly the first four crewed missions inside SpaceX and Boeing's new spaceships for NASA, called Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner, respectively.NASA via AP

Right now, Jurczyk said, the space agency's leadership is laser-focused on test launches for its Commercial Crew Program, a competition for private companies to build and launch American spaceships.

The ultimate goal of Commercial Crew is to revive US spaceflight capabilities that the agency lost when it retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011. (Ever since then, NASA has relied solely on Russia to taxi its astronauts to and from the $150 billion International Space Station.)

Boeing and SpaceX have each designed and built seven-person space capsules, which are each nearing approval for uncrewed and crewed test launches. SpaceX is currently looking to fly first with its Crew Dragon ship.

"Their first uncrewed flight test, right now, is scheduled for January, followed by, not many months later, maybe in the springtime, their first crewed flight test to the space station," Jurczyk said.

Read more: Boeing may have used a lobbying firm to plant a scathing opinion piece about SpaceX in US news outlets. At stake is billions of dollars in NASA contracts.

Once the Crew Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner ships prove they can launch safely and reliably, the agency's leadership should have more energy to contemplate its deep-space future with BFR and Blue Origin's New Glenn.

"How we engage will depend a lot on the pace at which those systems and capabilities develop," Jurczyk said.

The key for NASA is to get as quickly as possible to some kind of super-heavy-lift capability.

"Right now we see the way to do that is through SLS, because we kind of have the head-start and use these legacy technologies and systems," he said, referring to the fact that SLS will use space shuttle engines and other well-understood hardware.

Jurczyk added: "That's kind of where we are. We know we need that kind of BFR — and whatever evolves from New Glenn — heavy-lift capability if we're going to do human exploration of the solar system. We don't think another approach is going to be as safe, affordable, and reliable."

Are you a current or former NASA employee with a story to share? Send Dave Mosher This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or consider more secure options listed here.

This story has been updated to include a response from NASA's administrator. It was originally published on November 17, 2018.

At 9:58 p.m. on a nearly moonless Sunday night, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg stepped into a busy section of Mill Road in Tempe, Arizona, pushing her pink bicycle. A few seconds later, one of Uber's self-driving Volvo SUVs ran into her at 39 MPH and killed her.

Inside the car, Rafaela Vasquez was working alone, as all of Uber's safety drivers did at the time. Her job was to watch the car drive itself, taking control if it had issues. She kept taking her eyes off the road, but not to enter data into an iPad app as her job required. She was streaming an episode of "The Voice" over Hulu on her phone. She looked up again just as the car hit Herzberg, grabbed the wheel and gasped.

These are the details of the March 18 incident according to the preliminary National Safety Transportation Board (NSTB) report, police reports and a video of the incident released by police.

The incident shocked people inside Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, the company's 1,100-person self-driving unit. Employees shared their horror in chat rooms and in the halls, several employees told Business Insider.

Self-driving cars are promoted as being safer than humans, able to see and react with the speed of a computer. But one of their cars had been involved in the first-ever self-driving fatality of a pedestrian.

When employees learned that Herzberg was a jaywalking homeless woman and that her blood tested positive for meth and pot, many seized on those details to explain away the tragedy, several employees told us. (Uber has since settled a lawsuit from her daughter and husband.)

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators examine a self-driving Uber vehicle involved in a fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona, U.S., March 20, 2018. National Transportation Safety Board/Handout via REUTERS

When employees discovered Vasquez was watching Hulu, and was a convicted felon before Uber hired her, they vilified her.

"People were blaming everything on her," one employee said.

But insiders tell us that Vasquez and Herzberg were not the only factors in this death. There was a third party that deserves some blame, they say: the car itself, and a laundry list of questionable decisions made by the people who built it.

Uber's car had actually spotted Herzberg six seconds before it hit her, and a second before impact, it knew it needed to brake hard, the NSTB reported.

But it didn't.

It couldn't.

Its creators had forbidden the car from slamming on the brakes in an emergency maneuver, even if it detected "a squishy thing" — Uber's term for a human or an animal, sources told Business Insider. And the NSTB report said that Uber had deliberately disabled self-driving braking.

The car's creators had also disabled the Volvo's own emergency braking factory settings, the report found and insiders confirmed to Business Insider.

(Read more: Uber lost nearly $1 billion last quarter as the ride-hailing giant's growth slows)

According to emails seen by Business Insider, they had even tinkered with the car's ability to swerve.

Much has been written about the death of Elaine Herzberg, most of it focused on the failings of the driver. But, until now, not much has been revealed about why engineers and senior leaders turned off the car's ability to stop itself.

Insiders told us that it was a result of chaos inside the organization, and may have been motivated, at least in part, to please the boss.

Business Insider spoke to seven current and former employees of Uber's self-driving car unit employed during the time of the accident and in the months succeeding it. We viewed internal emails, meeting notes and other documents relating to the self-driving car program and the incident.

We learned that these insiders allege that, despite many warnings about the car's safety, the senior leadership team had a pressing concern in months before the accident: impressing Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi with a demo ride that gave him a pleasant "ride experience."

These employees and documents paint a picture of:

After the accident on March 18, Uber grounded the fleet. Although the NSTB's final report has not yet been released, (it's expected in April, sources tell us), the company is already making plans to put its cars back on the public roads, according to documents viewed by Business Insider. Uber is trying to catch up to competitors like Google's Waymo and GM, who never halted their road tests.

'Could have killed a toddler'

To some Uber insiders, Herzberg's death was the tragic but unsurprising consequence of a self-driving car that should not have been driving on the open road at night and perhaps not at all.

Uber's self-driving Volvo SUV. Gene J. Puskar / AP

Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, the unit building self-driving vehicles, is currently spending $600 million a year, sources familiar with the matter tell Business Insider, although others have said the budget has been closer to $1 billion a year. And it remains woefully behind the self-driving car market leaders in every measurable way although Uber tells us that the company has "every confidence in the work" the team is doing to get back on track.

At the time of the accident, engineers knew the car's self-driving software was immature and having trouble recognizing or predicting the paths of a wide variety of objects, including pedestrians, in various circumstances, according to all the employees we talked to.

For instance, the car was poorly equipped for "near-range sensing" so it wasn't always detecting objects that were within a couple of meters of it, two people confirmed to Business Insider.

"This could have killed a toddler in a parking lot. That was our scenario. That's the accident that didn't happen, but could have," one software developer said.

Every week, software team leaders were briefed on hundreds of problems, ranging from minor to serious, people told us, and the issues weren't always easy to fix.

For example, the tree branches.

For weeks on end, during a regular "triage" meeting where issues were prioritized by vice president of software Jon Thomason, tree branches kept coming up, one former engineer told us.

Tree branches create shadows in the road that the car sometimes thought were physical obstacles, multiple people told us.

Jon Thomason, the vice president of software at Uber's ATG unit.Jon Thomason/LinkedInUber's software "would classify them as objects that are actually moving and the cars would do something stupid, like stop or call for remote assistance," one engineer explained. "Or the software might crash and get out of autonomy mode. This was a common issue that we were trying to fix."

Thomason grew irate at one of these meetings, another engineer recalls, and demanded the problem be fixed. "This is unacceptable! We are above this! We shouldn't be getting stuck on tree branches, so go figure it out," Thomason said.

An Uber spokesperson denies that the car stops for tree branch shadows. This spokesperson said the car stops for actual tree branches in the road.

Meanwhile, another employee also said that piles of leaves could confuse the car. A third employee told us of other efforts to teach the car to recognize foliage.

Employees also said the car was not always able to predict the path of a pedestrian. And according to an email reviewed by Business Insider, the car's software didn't always know what to do when something partially blocked the lane it was driving in.

On top of all of this, a number of engineers at Uber said they believed the cars were not being thoroughly tested in safer settings. They wanted better simulation software, used more frequently.

Business Insider/Corey Protin

The company started to address that concern before the accident when it hired a respected simulation engineer in February. Recently, Uber has publicly vowed to do more simulation testing when it is allowed to send its cars back on the open road again.

But before Herzberg's accident, "We just didn't invest in it. We had sh--. Our off-line testing, now called simulation, was almost non-existent, utter garbage," as one described it.

Besides simulation, another way to test a self-driving car is on a track.

But employees we spoke to described Uber's track testing efforts as disorganized with each project team doing it their own way and no one overseeing testing as a whole.

This kind of holistic oversight is another area that Uber says it is currently addressing.

Yet, even now, months after the tragedy, these employees say that rigorous, holistic safety testing remains weak. They say that the safety team has been mostly working on a "taxonomy" — in other words, a list of safety-related terms to use — and not on making sure the car performs reliably in every setting. Uber tells us that the safety team has been working on both the taxonomy and the tests itself.

Dara's ride

As employees worked, they were acutely aware of division leadership's plans to host a very important passenger: Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.

Khosrowshahi had taken over as Uber CEO in the summer of 2017, following a tumultuous year in which the company was battered by a string of scandals involving everything from sexual harassment allegations to reports of unsavory business practices. The self-driving car group wasn't immune, with Anthony Levandowski, its leader and star engineer, ousted in April 2017, amid accusations of IP theft.

The unit's current leader, Eric Meyhofer, took Levadowski's place just five months before Khosrowshahi was hired.

Despite Uber's massive investment in self-driving cars, its program was considered to be far behind the competition. News reports speculated that Khosrowshahi should just shut it down.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi Thomson Reuters

None of this was lost on Meyhofer and the senior team, who wanted to impress their new CEO with a show of progress, sources and documents said.

Plans were made to take Khosrowshahi on a demo ride sometime around April and to have a big year-end public demonstration. ATG needed to "sizzle," Meyhofer liked to say, people told us. Internally, people began talking about "Dara's ride" and "Dara's run."

The stakes were high. If ATG died it could end the leadership team's high-paying jobs. Senior engineers were making over $400,000 and directors made in the $1 million range between salary, bonus and stock options, multiple employees said.

Leadership also had their reputation at stake. They did not want to be forever be known as the ones who led Uber's much-publicized project to its death, people close to Meyhofer explained.

Internally, unit leaders geared up to pull off the "sizzle."

'Bad experiences'

As the world's largest ride-hailing company, Uber understood the need to give customers a good experience. If passengers were going to accept self-driving cars, the ride could not be the jarring experience that had made a BuzzFeed reporter car sick during a demonstration.

So, in November, a month after Khosrowshahi became their new boss, Eric Hanson, a member of the product team, sent out a "product requirement document" that spelled out a new goal for ATG, according to an email viewed by Business Insider. (Hanson has since become the director of the product group.)

Business Insider/Corey Protin The document asked engineers to think of "rider experience metrics" and prescribed only one "bad experience" per ride for the big, year-end demonstration.

Given how immature the car's autonomous software was at the time, "that's an awfully high bar to meet," one software developer said.

Some engineers who had been focused on fixing safety-related issues were aghast. Engineers can "tune" a self-driving car to drive smoother easily enough, but with immature software, that meant not allowing the car to respond to everything it saw, real or not, sources explained. And that could be risky.

"If you put a person inside the vehicle and the chances of that person dying is 12%, you should not be discussing anything about user experience," one frustrated engineer hypothesized. "The priority should not be about a user experience but about safety."

Two days after the product team distributed the document discussing "rider experience metrics" and limiting "bad experiences," to one per ride, another email went out. This one was from several ATG engineers. It said they were turning off the car's ability to make emergency decisions on its own like slamming on the brakes or swerving hard.

Their rationale was safety.

"These emergency actions have real-world risk if the VO ["vehicle operator" or safety driver] does not take over in time and other drivers are not attentive, so it is better to suppress plans with emergency actions in online operation," the email read.

In other words, such quick moves can startle other drivers on the road and if there was a real threat, the safety driver would have already have taken over, they reasoned. So they resolved to limit the car's actions and rely wholly on the safety driver's alertness.

The sub-context was clear: the car's software wasn't good enough to make emergency decisions. And, one employee pointed out to us, by restricting the car to gentler responses, it might also produce a smoother ride.

A few weeks later, they gave the car back more of its ability to swerve but did not return its ability to brake hard.

Shayanne Gal/Skye Gould/Business Insider

Final warning

The final warning sign came just a couple of days before the tragedy.

One of the lead safety drivers sent an email to Meyhofer laying out a long list of grievances about the mismanagement and working conditions of the safety driver program.

"The drivers felt they were not being utilized well. That they were being asked to drive around in circles but that their feedback was not changing anything," said one former engineer of Uber's self-driving car unit who was familiar with the driver program.

Business Insider/Corey Protin Drivers complained about long hours and not enough communication on what they should be testing and watching for. But the big complaint was the decision a few months earlier to start using one driver instead of two. That choice instantly gave ATG access to more drivers so the company could log more mileage without having to hire double the drivers.

The second driver used to be responsible for logging the car's issues into an iPad app and dealing with the car's requests to identify objects on the road.

Eric Risberg / AP Now one person had to do everything, employees told us.

This not only eliminated the safety/redundancy of having two drivers, it required the active driver to do the logging and tagging, not keeping their eyes on the road, which some inside the company believed was not safe.

It was like distracted driving, "like watching their cell phone 10-15% of the time," said one software engineer.

If Meyhofer took the angry email from that safety driver seriously — and multiple people told us he'd been reacting with frustration to people he viewed as naysayers — he didn't have a chance to act on it before the tragedy that benched the cars. Uber now says the self-driving car unit plans to return to the two driver system when it sends its cars on the road again.

A 'toxic culture'

Some employees believe that ATG's leaders were pushing for a "ride experience" to make Khosrowshahi believe the car was farther along than it was during that planned demo ride.

But others say mistakes were less conscious than that.

One engineer who worked closely with Meyhofer said the real problem was that under his leadership there was "poor communication, with a bunch of teams duplicating effort," adding, "One group doesn't know what the other is doing."

This engineer said one team would not know the other had disabled a feature, or that a feature didn't pass on the track test, or that drivers were saying a car performed badly.

"They only know their piece. You get this domino effect. All these things create an unsafe system," this person said.

Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group.Uber

Everyone we talked to also described the unit as a "toxic culture" under Meyhofer.

They talked of impossible workloads, backstabbing teammates and poor management.

According to documents viewed by Business Insider, leadership was aware of this reputation, with Thomason confessing to other leaders in a September meeting, "We repeatedly hear that ATG is not a fun place to work" and admitted such feedback was "baffling" to him.

While some people disliked Meyhofer and thought that he could be insecure to the point of vindictiveness if he was challenged, others described him as a nice guy with good intentions who was in over his head.

"He is a hardware guy. He runs a tight hardware ship," one engineer and former employee who worked closely with him told us. But the brains of a self-driving car is software, this person said.

This person says that meant Meyhofer lacked "the understanding and know-how of the software space."

"Imagine a leader that can't weigh two options and decide the best course of action," described this engineer.

Everyone we spoke with agreed that part of the problem is that Uber's self-driving car unit was staffed by teams in two very different locations with two very different engineering cultures.

There was a team in Pittsburgh, anchored by folks from Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center (of which Meyhofer was an alum) and there were San Francisco-based teams.

The San Francisco people complained that the NREC folks were a bunch of academics with no real-world, product-building experience, who retained their high paying jobs by virtue of being Meyhofer's cronies. The NREC team saw the San Francisco engineers as whiny and ungrateful, people described.

On top of the infighting, there was a bonus structure that rewarded some employees for speedily hitting milestones, careful testing or not, multiple sources described.

"At ATG, the attitude is I will do whatever it takes and I will get this huge bonus," one former engineer said. "I swear that everything that drives bad behaviors was the bonus structure."

In its safety report, Uber says some of the ways ATG was measuring the progress of its program before the accident created "perverse incentives."

Specifically, ATG, like everyone in the self-driving car industry, believed that the more miles a car drove itself without help from a human, the smarter it was. But the whole industry now realized this is an overly simplistic way to measure how well a car drives. If management is too focused on that metric, employees may feel pressured not to take control of the car, even when they should.

Uber has since vowed to find other ways to measure improvement and tells us that milestone-based bonuses were limited to just a few people and have recently been eliminated.

Internally, some remain frustrated with the self-driving unit.

If you don't spill the beans, we won't either. You didn't slave over dinner for hours on end, carefully overseeing each component of the meal to ensure that it didn't go over or wasn't underdone, nor did you poke and prod your proteins with a thermometer (at the risk of losing all those precious juices) to ensure the proper finish. No, you sly dog — you discovered sous vide cooking, and if you're the slyest of them all, you probably discovered the Anova Nano.

While equipping your kitchen with the tools to make a five-star meal may have once been outside your budget, that's no longer the case thanks to the Anova and its newest product, the Anova Nano.

This highly anticipated device was first announced last June, when it was made available for pre-order for home chefs looking to add a bit of French technique into their repertoire. But now, the Anova has been made widely available, and for less than $100, widely accessible, too. In all seriousness, that's probably less than half the amount you'd need to pay for a meal at a restaurant utilizing sous vide techniques.

Anova app includes an ever-growing database of recipes and cooking tips, as well as the ability to control your Nano from afar. Amazon

As its name suggests, the Nano is smaller than its siblings, weighing in at a diminutive 1.6 pounds.

That's still not quite as light as the ChefSteps Joule sous vide stick, but still, it's nearly a pound lighter than the Anova Precision Cooker 4.0. Plus, it's just over a foot tall, which is again, much more manageable than the nearly 15-inch original Anova. This new size not only makes it a bit easier to handle once it's in the pot, but also makes for easier storage. After all, if you're at the point in your cooking career that you're adding not just spatulas and whisks but sous vide machines, you probably already have drawers full of culinary tools and appliances.

Unlike the other Anova units, the Nano is entirely made of plastic, which frankly, doesn't really bother me. It allows for a more streamlined aesthetic (a la the Joule), and of course, cuts down on the weight. Moreover, the Nano features a built-in clamp, which makes it a bit easier to attach to pots and water containers.

If you'd rather cook without your smartphone, you can control everything on the Nano with its slightly shrunken display. Amazon

The Nano doesn't have the same Wi-Fi capabilities as the most expensive option in the Anova lineup, but honestly, you won't miss it.

You still have access to the Anova app, which includes the same, ever-growing database of recipes and cooking tips, as well as the ability to control your Nano from afar. It's also a very quiet machine — of course, it's not as though other sous vide sticks sound like blenders, but it is worth noting that with the decrease in size, it seems that Anova has also managed to make the Nano even more whisper quiet than before.

If you'd rather cook without your smartphone (rather than risk dropping it into a precisely controlled pot of water), you can control everything on the Nano with its slightly shrunken display. The LED indicators are still just as useful, and you can still increase times and temperatures from the device itself, but because it's gotten a bit smaller, you may find yourself wishing you had slightly more delicate fingers. Or, maybe it's just a good way to get the kids involved in the actual dinner preparation process, rather than just inviting them in for the finished product.

This new size not only makes it a bit easier to handle once it's in the pot, but also makes for easier storage. Amazon

Otherwise, you can use the new and improved Anova Culinary App, which will come with MultiStep and MultiCook features in a future software update. The former allows you to tell the Nano to raise or lower the cooking time and temperature for different parts of your meal, whereas the latter allows you to keep tabs on multiple Anova Precision Cookers at the same time.

In short, if you're looking to introduce some sous vide into your supper, the Anova Nano is certainly a good place to start.

Buy the Anova Nano Sous Vide Precision Cooker at Amazon for $75 (normally $99) [You save $24]

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