explores

Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment is exploring strategic options including a possible sale of all or part of the company, according to people familiar with the situation, following a wave of similar deals involving independent production firms. The company, whose credits include Oscar-winning films such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight,” has retained boutique investment bank Moelis & Co. to explore a deal, the people said. There is no guarantee that…

Meta Platforms announced a series of new ad formats on Tuesday, aimed at creating new revenue streams for the short video and business messaging products that it has identified as key to growth this year.In a blog post, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram said it was starting tests for a new skippable "post-loop" video ad format to play after its TikTok-like short video product Reels, which it has been promoting heavily.Another new Reels format features horizontally scrollable carousel ads, which can display…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new report published in the journal Scientific Reports sheds light on the current state of democracy in the United States. The research by a…

Lions Gate LGF.B -3.23% Entertainment Corp. is now considering a spinoff of its studio business rather than its Starz premium-cable channel, according to a securities filing. The movie- and television-production company said Wednesday that despite volatile market conditions, it still remains on a path to separate the two segments, as it first disclosed last year. Rather than unloading the Starz business, which it acquired…

Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme has been tasked with releasing reports every few years on the state of the world. The 2021/2022 report — released earlier this month, and the first one since the Covid-19 pandemic began — is titled “Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives.” And unsurprisingly, it makes for stressful reading. “The war in Ukraine reverberates throughout the world,” the report opens, “causing immense human suffering, including a cost-of-living crisis. Climate and ecological disasters threaten…

Developers are getting the chance to test out a new expanded view for widgets feature on the latest Windows 11 preview build as of Wednesday. Microsoft is now rolling out the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25201 to its Dev Channel, which includes the expanded view for widgets feature. The feature is a double-arrow icon located in the upper-right corner of the screen, which allows you to widen the size of your widgets board for easier viewing. Click the icon again to collapse the board back down to its typical…

The White House is assessing how other transportation providers could fill potential gaps in the nation’s freight network as labor unions and railroads continue contract talks to avert a potential labor stoppage this week.Senior administration officials are communicating with ocean-shipping, trucking and airfreight companies among others to determine how to keep goods moving in case of a rail shutdown and what commodities are most likely to face severe disruptions. Food, energy and public-health-related products are among…

a) and b): A large number of nanopores (red arrows) and nanofissures (yellow arrows) developed in the clay layers, which originally adsorbed organic matter and later became the site for hydrocarbon accumulation. c): A larger view of visual b). Credit: Dr. He Wenyuan and Earth Science Frontiers Shale oil, a type of crude oil similar to petroleum, is found between layers of organic-rich shale. It can be refined into petrol,…

Is the search for fusion energy, long dominated by doughnut-shaped devices called tokamaks, about to undergo a shape shift? Just as ITER, the world’s largest tokamak—and at tens of billions of dollars the most expensive—nears completion in the hills of southern France, a much smaller testbed with a twistier geometry will start throttling up to full power in Germany. If the 16-meter-wide device, called a stellarator, can match or outperform similar-size tokamaks, it could cause…

Hundreds of young children in the United States are expelled or suspended daily from child care and preschool classrooms at a rate nearly three times that of kindergarten through 12th-grade students. Despite recent…