I’m on vacation this week, so I’ll keep it short. Next Thursday, August 22, we’ll be discussing the top global healthcare trends from Q2’19.

CBI healthcare analyst Josh Mark (@joshmark2) will cover macro trends in the space, and dig into 7 sub-sectors of the digital health landscape, including clinical trials, women’s health, cannabis, and more.

Have a great rest of the week.


Marcelo
@ballve

P.S. Want to help drive growth as part of CBI's business development team? Good news: we're hiring account executives.

• 97%: WeWork filed its S-1 on Wednesday as it gets closer to going public. The filing revealed that WeWork made revenues of $1.8B in 2018 but lost $1.9B in the same year. It also disclosed that the co-working giant has 527K members globally, up 97% from last year. Take a look at how WeWork makes — and loses — money in our report.

• 22 months: The Dow fell by around 800 points on Wednesday after the “yield curve” inverted — meaning that 10-year US bonds were trading with a lower interest rate than the 2-year variety, in this case 1.623% and 1.634%, respectively. An inverted yield curve has historically been an indicator of a coming recession, on average 22 months later.
   
• 0.003%: Automattic, the owner of online publishing platform WordPress, reportedly agreed to purchase Tumblr from Verizon for less than $3M. Yahoo, now a part of Verizon, had originally bought the blogging site for $1.1B in 2013. In other words, Tumblr is now worth 0.003% of its value just 6 years ago. Tumblr is not the only corporate M&A flop — we take a look at 36 others here.

• 8: Amazon announced that its facial recognition technology has improved its ability to read a person’s emotions. The controversial tech can now determine when an individual is happy, sad, angry, surprised, and more with improved accuracy. The program has also added recognition of a new emotion — fear. But don’t panic (they’ll know). Here are 30+ other companies testing facial recognition technology.
   
• 6%: Two drugs have been shown to be effective at treating Ebola, according to the results of a World Health Organization-sponsored trial in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One of the drugs was able to reduce mortality rates of the often fatal disease to as low as 6% if applied soon after patients became ill. Scientists involved in the study claim that Ebola is now a curable disease. Learn about how tech like AI is affecting clinical trials and could speed up the drug development process.

• 99%: A banana-killing fungus has been found in South America, a key region for sourcing the fruit. The fungus affects the Cavendish variety of bananas, which makes up 99% of banana exports, and has caused concern that there could be massive global shortages. One approach reportedly being considered to combat the threat involves using CRISPR to make bananas more resistant — learn how the gene editing technique works in our explainer.
   
• 300 miles: Multiple lightning strikes were detected within 300 miles of the North Pole — an unusual occurrence that requires warmer, wetter air than is normally found in the region. America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described it as among the northern-most lightning strikes ever recorded.
   
• 40B suns: Astronomers have observed a black hole that is 40Bx more massive than our sun — the largest black hole yet discovered. The enormous celestial object is in a galaxy about 700M light-years from Earth. The researchers say that the galaxy’s unusually dim center may be due to the supermassive black hole eating all the nearby stars.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. To celebrate, over 100 previously unpublished photos of the festival are being released in a new book.

The images were captured by the late photojournalist Richard F. Bellak, who died in 2015. John Kane, an artist and professor, purchased the photos at Bellak's estate sale.

Most of the photos focus on attendees rather than performers. Some include rare nighttime images, which were difficult to capture with cameras at the time.

See some of them here.