In the tech industry, the merger-and-acquisition market seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff.

The total value of tech deals fell to its lowest level in five years in the second quarter and the number of deals declined from the first quarter, according to an upcoming report by accounting and consulting firm PwC. It's a stunning drop, not least because it comes immediately after the first quarter's record-breaking dealmaking in terms of the total value of deals.

The results are some of the highlights from PwC's report on second-quarter M&A activity. The firm plans to release the full report later this week, so we don't have all the details yet.

But an email to the press promoting the report cited various reasons for the sharp halt in tech deals. High valuations was listed as the primary inhibiting factor for tech deals, but regulatory uncertainties and the emerging trade war the US is waging against China and other countries also appears to have dampened the appetite for tech deals. Because those factors persist the outlook for tech M&A activity for the rest of the year is cloudy at best.

The freeze in tech M&A is sure to raise questions about how isolated the situation is to the tech sector, where products that have access to user data is especially sensitive, and whether it could be a harbinger of a broader change in the business climate.

The booming economy and the new tax law, which allowed corporate giants including Apple and Google to bring home their overseas cash at a much reduced tax rate, were supposed to boost merger-and-acquisition activity, and they seem to have done so earlier this year. But the Trump administration, which pushed through the tax reduction, has helped muddy the waters for M&A.

Earlier this year, the administration blocked Broadcom's proposed acquisition of Qualcomm on national security grounds, leading to growing uncertainty about what deals involving foreign companies might also be barred. The administration's implementation of tariffs on a slew of goods has led to concerns that other countries, particularly China, might block acquisitions of their companies by US firms.

The holographic display of the future is here and you can have one on your desk for under $600.

Ever since I saw Princess Leia appealing to Obi Wan that he was her only hope when I was 11, I’ve wanted a holographic display. Movies like Minority Report and Back to the Future II (do you remember the shark hologram that ate Marty?) have consumed thousands of people’s lives over the past few decades. But until now, no one has been able to make a scalable device that would let groups of people, unaided by a VR or AR headset, see and touch a living and moving 3D world.

That’s changing today with the launch of the Looking Glass, a new type of interface that achieves that dream of the hologram we’ve been promised for so long. The Looking Glass is technically a lightfield and volumetric display hybrid, but that’s pretty nerdy-sounding. I like to just call it a holographic display.

It’s a technology at the Apple II stage, designed for the creators and hackers of the world — specifically 3D creators in this case. If you’ve ever played with a MakerBot or Form 2, have a Structure sensor in your backpack, know what volumetric video is, or have 3D creation programs like Maya, Unity, or Blender on your computer, then you should get a Looking Glass. You can holographically preview 3D prints before you print them, experiment with volumetric video recording and playback, or create entirely new and weird applications in Unity that can live inside of the Looking Glass. And when I say weird I mean it — the founders Shawn and Alex put a 3D scan of me inside and gave me some new dance moves.

Check out this video on their Kickstarter page. I’ve seen this in person and what is shown in the video is real. There aren’t any camera tricks going on – it really looks that good (actually a little better) in real life. The Looking Glass is indistinguishable from magic the way the best of technology strives to be.

I don’t know of many people who genuinely want the dystopian future of everyone in VR all day long. Ok, I do know a few. But while VR may play a role, I think most people don’t want this 1984 vision of the future, where everyone is geared up 16 hours a day.

The team behind the Looking Glass is fighting against that all-headset future with this new class of technology. Join us!

Also published on Medium.

Amazon made a bleak prediction about Brexit in a behind-closed-doors meeting with the UK government last Friday, according to The Times.

Douglas Gurr, Amazon's UK country manager, told a meeting of business leaders that if Britain crashes out of the European Union without a trade deal, it will spark "civil unrest" within two weeks.

The meeting was convened by Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, and The Times said Gurr's comments "stunned those present," with some disagreeing with his assessment.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. The company told The Times: "Like any business, we consider a wide range of scenarios in planning discussions so that we're prepared to continue serving customers and small businesses who count on Amazon, even if those scenarios are very unlikely.

"This is not specific to any one issue — it's the way we plan for any number of issues around the world."

The chances of Britain leaving the EU without a trade deal with the bloc have increased over the past two weeks as Prime Minister Theresa May has struggled to sell her Brexit vision to her own party. It has sparked a wave of resignations, including that of Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary.

May has consistently said that no deal is better than a bad deal, and Raab said this weekend that the UK is making preparations for leaving the EU without a trade agreement in place.

It would mean the country crashes out of Europe on World Trade Organization terms, which could create chaos in terms of Britain's food and medicine supplies, as well as people's ability to travel to countries in Europe by plane.

Amazon has consistently said it remains committed to the UK after Brexit. Only last month, Gurr said Amazon will create 2,500 jobs in Britain this year, taking its total workforce in the country to 27,500. This includes 650 head office roles.

"The UK is a fantastic place to do business," he said a press briefing, according to The Guardian. "We are trying to make sure all the businesses that work with us can continue to operate effectively … We don't yet know exactly what the rules [on trading after Brexit] are going to be. We will wait and see what happens and adapt as necessary."

Amazon's supply chain could be impacted by a no deal Brexit and any downturn in consumer spending would impact the company negatively. Amazon could also be well positioned, however, potentially benefiting from customers looking for cheaper goods.

Promising never to make killer robots is a good thing.

That's what tech leaders, including Elon Musk and the cofounders of Google's AI company Deepmind, did last week by signing a pledge at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

They stated that they would never develop "lethal autonomous weapons," citing two big reasons. Firstly, that it would be morally wrong to delegate the decision to kill a human being to a machine.

Secondly, they believe that the presence of an autonomous AI weapon could be "dangerously destabilizing for every country and individual."

Swearing off killer robots is missing the point

Business Insider spoke to Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo of the Oxford Internet Institute, who expressed some concerns about the pledge.

"It's commendable, it's a good initiative," she said. "But I think they go in with too simplistic an approach."

"It does not mention more imminent and impactful uses of AI in the context of international conflicts," Taddeo added.

"My worry is that by focussing just on the extreme case, the killer robots who are taking over the world and this sort of thing, they distract us. They distract the attention and distract the debate from more nuanced but yet fundamental aspects that need to be addressed."

Is AI on the battlefield less scary than in computers?

The US military makes a distinction between AI in motion (i.e. AI that is applied to a robot) and AI at rest (which is found in software).

Killer robots would fall into the category of AI in motion, and there are already states which deploy this hardware application of AI. The US navy received a self-piloting warship, and Israel has drones capable of identifying and attacking targets autonomously, although at the moment they require a human middle-man to give the go-ahead.

The Sea Hunter is an autonomous drone warship, capable of detecting enemy submarines and spending months at sea without a crew onboard.US Navy/John F. Williams

But AI at rest is what Dr Taddeo thinks needs more scrutiny — namely the use of AI for national cyber defense.

"Cyber conflicts are escalating in frequency, impact, and sophistication. States increasingly rely on them, and AI is a new capability that states are starting to use in this context," she said.

The "WannaCry" virus which attacked the UK's health service (the NHS) in 2017 has been linked to North Korea, and the UK and US governments collectively blamed Russia for the "NotPetya" ransomware attack, which took more than $1.2 billion.

Dr Taddeo said throwing AI defense systems into the mix could seriously escalate the nature of cyberwar.

"AI at rest is basically able to defend the systems in which it is deployed, but also to autonomously target and respond to an attack that comes from another machine. If you take this in the context of interstate conflict this can cause a lot of damage. Hopefully, it will not lead to the killings of human beings, but it might easily cause conflict escalations, serious damage to national critical infrastructure," she said.

There is no mention of this kind of AI in the IJCAI pledge, which Taddeo considers a glaring omission. She thinks that AI at rest garnering less media attention, meaning it has slipped under the radar with little discussion.

"AI is not just about about robotics, AI is also about the cyber, the non-physical. And this does not make it less problematic," Taddeo said.

AI systems at war with each other could pose a big problem

At the moment AI systems attacking each other don't cause physical damage, but Dr Taddeo warns that this could change.

"The more our societies rely on AI, the more it's likely that attacks that occur between AI systems will have physical damage," she said. "In March of this year the US announced that Russia had been attacking national critical infrastructure for months. So suppose one can cause a national blackout, or tamper with an air control system."

"If we start having AI systems which can attack autonomously and defend autonomously, it's easy that we find ourselves in an escalating dynamic for which we don't have control," she added. In an article for Nature, Dr Taddeo warned of the risk of a "cyber arms race."

The question of Russian cyberattacks on the 2016 American election caused a major rift in US politics. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

"While states are already deploying this aggressive AI, there is no regulation. There are no norms about state behaviour in cyberspace. And we don't know where to begin."

In 2004, the United Nations assembled a group of experts to understand and define the principles of how states should behave in cyberspace, but in 2017 they failed to reach any kind of consensus.

She still thinks the agreement not to make killer robots is a good thing. "Do not get me wrong, it's a nice gesture [but] it's a gesture I don't think it will have massive impact in terms of policy making and regulations. And they are addressing a risk and there's nothing wrong with that," she said. "But the problem is bigger."

Tall Poppy’s co-founders

Twitter algorithm changes will hide more bad tweets and trolls

At one point, Alex Binello was working part-time at GameStop to pay the bills while he pursued a career as an independent game developer. Now, he finds himself at the head of one of the largest video game phenomenons you've never heard about.

Under the handle Alexnewtron, Binello is the co-creator and public face of "MeepCity," a free-to-play game with 15 million monthly active players, — 100,000 or more of whom are playing at any given time. Those numbers put "MeepCity" in a league with "Pokémon Go," "Candy Crush Saga," and other popular free-to-play games.

"The game has blown out what I ever imagined it could do," Binello told Business Insider via the phone on Thursday. "I feel like it's a real company now."

If you've never heard of "MeepCity," there's a pretty good chance that you're over 18. It's a role-playing game where players drive cars around, decorate their in-game homes, collect the titular Meep mascots, and even attend high school classes. It's pretty chill, and it's very popular with kids.

Notably, "MeepCity" is one of the biggest things going on in Roblox, a video game platform with 64 million users that's giving its mostly-younger fanbase a path into entrepreneurial opportunity, even turning a select few teens into millionaires. If you want to play "MeepCity," it's only on Roblox.

The Playground, the hub area of "MeepCity." Roblox

Unlike "Minecraft," "Fortnite," or other gaming phenoms, Roblox is entirely generated by its users. It boasts 4 million developers, who have collectively created 40 million games on the platform, including "MeepCity." On Friday, Roblox announced that it's on track to pay out $70 million total to those developers this year, up from $30 million in 2017.

The heart of the Robloxian economy are Robux, a premium currency that the company sells to users for real money. If a player chooses to spend their Robux in a game, the game's developer takes a cut. "MeepCity," for instance, charges Robux for premium features like an in-game boom box, or bonus decorations for your virtual home.

Binello declines to go into too much detail about how much he's made from "MeepCity." He does, however, say that he's making enough that he was recently able to relocate his mother and brother from Las Vegas to be closer to him in the San Francisco Bay Area, and to support all three of them fully.

More importantly for the future of "MeepCity," Binello has also hired two of his Roblox friends and collaborators as full-time employees, with a base salary and bonuses tied to the performance of the game. That's in addition to a few contract programmers and artists. Now, it's his ambition to turn "MeepCity" from a smash-hit Roblox game into a genuine media empire.

"I have a long-term vision," says Binello.

Self-taught

Notably, Binello is "definitely self-taught," he says — he joined Roblox in 2007, when he was about 12 years old, and the game was only available for PC.

He started fiddling around with Roblox Studio, the included tools for building virtual objects in the game world, and eventually came up with a simple multiplayer game in the style of Pictionary. It was a reasonably big hit in the early days of the platform, and his Alexnewtron alter ego became a fixture of the Roblox community. Late last year, "MeepCity Racing" launched, bringing a full-fledged go-kart racing title into the core "MeepCity" game. Screenshot/Matt Weinberger

When he graduated high school, he decided that college just wasn't for him. Instead of getting a formal education in programming or computer science, he would continue to try to hone his skills as an independent developer.

"I'm not really a school person," says Binello.

Since then, he says, he's learned a lot, from the basics of game design to building his own servers and matchmaking system to supplement those provided by Roblox.

The "MeepCity" story

At the time, circa 2012 or so, Roblox didn't yet offer the Robux revenue split. In search of a way to make a living from his Roblox skills, Binello decided to try his hand at smartphone games. "Pears to Pairs," a take on the classic family game "Apples to Apples," racked up 50,000 downloads, he says, but failed to develop into a real business.

Luckily for Binello, Roblox came through in 2013 with its new revenue-split model. Binello was drawn back to Roblox, with the idea that his familiarity with the platform would give him a leg up.

"I knew I needed to succeed with the platform," says Binello.

Eventually, he won the attention of Roblox headquarters in Silicon Valley, which invited him to intern at its Silicon Valley campus in the summer of 2015 — providing enough income that he could quit his job at GameStop.

During that internship, Roblox encouraged him to develop new game ideas, and the germ of the idea for "MeepCity" was born, which came to fruition in 2016. It was an instant smash hit — at first Binello had to institute a queuing system to deal with a larger-than-expected crush of players, who found the title without any marketing or ads.

"That showed me the potential of what I was making," says Binello. It's only grown since, going from 10 million monthly active players around the start of 2018 to 15 million today.

The MeepCity Fisherman action figure — pictured in the foreground — confers in-game advantages to anyone who buys it. Roblox

Binello praises the "modularity" of "MeepCity" as what kept bringing players in: The game has gotten loads of new content over time, and last year even extended into a new genre with the launch of "MeepCity Racing," a full-fledged go kart racing game within the existing game world, designed to bring in older players.

Indeed, that's how he views the future of "MeepCity."

Now that he's officially gone into the "MeepCity" business by hiring on employees, Binello envisions it expanding into a veritable video game empire. Just like with "MeepCity Racing," he sees his team as bringing the existing game to new audiences by adding new modes and features. Another internship with Roblox, in the summer of 2017, gave him even more ideas for where to take the game, he says, and inspired him to move to the San Francisco area to be closer to HQ.

"MeepCity" can go beyond video games, too, Binello says. Last year, Roblox got into the action figure business by licensing characters from top games on the platform, including "MeepCity." Anyone who bought the MeepCity Fisherman action figure got a unique in-game hat, plus 10,000 coins in "MeepCity" itself.

The promotion was successful, and Binello believes it could be a sign of things to come as he looks to future opportunities, in merchandising and beyond.

"'MeepCity' feels like a brand unto itself," says Binello.

Huge swaths of Earth are in for a special astronomical treat in late July: the longest total lunar eclipse in roughly 100 years.

During the evening of July 27 and into the early morning of July 28, Earth will pass between the sun and the moon to cast a shadow on our 4.5-billion-year-old satellite.

Earth's shadow isn't a dull gray, though.

It ranges from orange to an eerie blood-red hue if you're right in the middle, which is precisely where the moon will be this time around.

Here's that works.

How a total lunar eclipse colors the moon red

A total lunar eclipse and a total solar eclipse are similar, if not the reverse of one another, but their appearances are significantly different.

During a solar eclipse, the moon passes between Earth and the sun to cast its shadow on our planet. The shadow is colorless because the moon has no atmosphere to scatter or refract any sunlight.

Earth, of course, is a different story.

What a total lunar eclipse would look like from the moon.NASA

Our planet's nitrogen-rich atmosphere takes white sunlight, a mix of all colors of the spectrum, and scatters around the blue colors. This makes the sky appear blue during the day and the sun yellow.

Around sunset and sunrise, the light reaching our eyes has been more throughly scattered, so much that blues are nearly absent. This makes the sun and its light appear more orange or even red.

Roughly 240,000 miles away at the moon, the Earth would look quite stunning as the same air, like a big lens, refracts that tinged light toward the full moon.

"If you were standing on the moon's surface during a lunar eclipse, you would see the sun setting and rising behind the Earth," David Diner, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a blog post. "You'd observe the refracted and scattered solar rays as they pass through the atmosphere surrounding our planet."

A diagram of the Earth, moon, and sun during a total lunar eclipse or "blood moon." Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

This is why lunar eclipses are orange-red: All of that colored light is focused on the moon in a cone-shaped shadow called the umbra.

The moon is also covered in ultra-fine, glass-like rock dust called regolith, which has a special property called "backscatter." This bounces a lot of light back the same way it came from, in this case toward Earth (Backscattering also explains why full moons are far brighter than during other lunar phase.)

So, when we're looking at the moon during a total lunar eclipse, we're seeing Earth's refracted sunset-sunrise light being bounced right back at us.

A total lunar eclipse on September 28, 2015. Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The red color is never quite the same from one lunar eclipse to the next due to natural and human activities that affect Earth's atmosphere.

"Pollution and dust in the lower atmosphere tends to subdue the color of the rising or setting sun, whereas fine smoke particles or tiny aerosols lofted to high altitudes during a major volcanic eruption can deepen the color to an intense shade of red," Diner said.

This total lunar eclipse will also happen during what's called a "micro" moon, or the opposite of a super moon. This happens because the moon's orbit isn't perfectly circular, so it appears larger at times and smaller at others during its roughly 29-day-long orbit around Earth. (In this case it will look a bit smaller.)

Where and when to see the total lunar eclipse

North America will be out of luck this year, since the moon will be below the horizon. You can still watch on a live webcast, though, if you're located there.

But if the weather cooperates, most of eastern Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia should see the full and total lunar eclipse. Scientists in Antarctica should also have a great view.

Europe, eastern Asia, Australia, Indonesia, and other regions will enjoy a partial lunar eclipse, where the moon passes partly through Earth's shadow.

A map of locations where the total lunar eclipse of July 27 and 28, 2018, will be visible.Fred Espenak/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The partial eclipse begins when the moon first touches the penumbra or outer shadow of Earth. According to NASA, that should happen at 17:14 Universal Time on July 27.

The total eclipse — when the moon is fully inside the red-hued umbra of Earth — starts at 19:30 UT and ends at 21:13 UT. That's a full 1 hour 43 minutes, which is just four minutes shy of the longest total lunar eclipse possible, according to EarthSky.

The partial eclipse will resume immediately afterward, as the moon passes out of Earth's shadow, and the whole event will be over at 23:28 UT (early on July 28, depending on where you live).

Business Insider was given the chance to control lights using nothing but the activity of our brains.

We wore a headset that uses a method of recording electrical activity in the brain called Electroencephalography (EEG).

The headset sent the signals to a light rig hanging above our head. Certain actions triggered different brain frequencies, by opening our eyes we were able to make the lights blue, which represents increased activity in the brain. This is because we are taking in more visual information for our brains to process.

By closing our eyes the lights change to red, this now represents a less active brain due to the lack of visual stimuli.

The University of Nottingham created the demonstration to show how our brains work, but the team are working on a new, more accurate method of scanning the brain.

They have designed a new Magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner that is an alternative to traditional MRI scans. Traditional MRI scans require patients to sit still, which can be difficult for children and those with mobility issues. The new scanner they are developing is worn on the head like a helmet and allows patients to move freely.

It is still in an early stage of development and only two scanners exist in the UK, but the team aim to have it widely available within the next 10 years.

Produced and filmed by David Ibekwe. Original Reporting by Isobel Hamilton. Special Thanks to the University of Nottingham.