Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica said Tuesday that it extended a partnership with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta to develop smart-eyewear products after producing glasses that let users make calls, capture images and listen to music.
The world’s top eyewear maker and the US tech giant, which have been collaborating since 2019, launched the first Ray-Ban Meta glasses, equipped with artificial intelligence, last year.
Paris-based EssilorLuxottica said in a statement that the two companies had entered into a “new long-term agreement, under which the parties will collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products”.
“We have the opportunity to turn glasses into the next major technology platform, and make it fashionable in the process,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.
EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said its work with Meta was “still in its early stages” so far and had been “an important milestone in our journey to making glasses the gateway to the connected world”.
EssilorLuxottica acquired Ray-Ban in 1999 for around $640 million.
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Midea’s IPO is the biggest in Hong Kong since 2021.
Shares in Chinese electronic appliance maker Midea closed nearly eight percent higher on its Hong Kong debut Tuesday, having raised around US$4 billion in the city’s biggest initial public offering for more than three years.
The firm closed at HK$59.1 following early exchanges where it spiked to HK$60.0, up from its HK$54.8 list price, which was at the top of the range indicated in its prospectus.
Midea’s bumper listing fueled hopes that the Hong Kong bourse can attract more top Chinese firms and regain its crown as the world’s top venue for IPOs.
The Chinese finance hub has suffered a steady decline in new offerings since a regulatory crackdown by Beijing starting in 2020 led some Chinese mega-companies to put their plans on hold.
The city saw just 30 IPOs in the first half of this year, compared with more than 100 annually between 2013 and 2020.
“If this manages to hold on to gains for the week, it would definitely create a better IPO environment, paving the way for more to come,” Rockpool Capital’s chief investment officer Benjamin Wong told Bloomberg News.
Midea’s IPO has eclipsed the combined valuation of all of Hong Kong’s new listings so far this year, and is the city’s largest since JD Logistics and Kuaishou Technology in the first half of 2021.
The Foshan-based company last week expanded the number of shares on offer by around 15 percent to 566 million—an indicator of strong demand.
In a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Monday it said the international portion of the IPO was subscribed by more than eight times, before taking into account the adjustment to the offer size.
Midea chairman Paul Fang called the listing “a strategic step forward in the company’s globalization”, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
Cornerstone investors, including a subsidiary of Cosco Shipping Holdings and part of UBS Asset Management Singapore, agreed to buy Midea stocks worth US$1.26 billion.
Founded in 1968, Midea has become one of the world’s largest sellers of home appliances such as washing machines and air conditioners and it also owns the German industrial robot maker Kuka.
Last month it reported a 14 percent rise in net profit in the first half of 2024 despite weakening consumer spending due to China’s economic slowdown, while revenue hit US$52.7 billion.
The company’s shares in Hong Kong were offered at a 20 percent discount compared to its stock price in Shenzhen, where it has been listed since 2013.
Hong Kong’s stock exchange received a boost earlier this year after Chinese regulators unveiled measures to support the city’s status as a finance hub.
The bourse operator will also change its policy this month to keep trading through typhoons and heavy storms, in a bid to raise competitiveness.
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Intel has delayed two mega chip-making factories in Germany and Poland.
Chip-making giant Intel on Monday said it was delaying its plans to build two mega chip-making factories in Germany and Poland as the company faces lower demand than anticipated.
The announcement will come as a major blow to the German and Polish governments that have heavily subsidized the projects and touted them as a boost to their national industry.
Intel also said it would pull back on its projects in Malaysia, but said that its US plans would remain unaffected.
In Germany, construction work on the Intel project was due to begin in 2023 but it stalled after the Ukraine war sent inflation soaring.
German officials and the company were then locked in talks on financing for months, but both sides finally signed a deal in June 2023, which included increased subsidies.
Germany stepped up its subsidy to launch the 30-billion-euro ($33 billion) factory project to almost 10 billion euros, some three billion more than first offered.
“We recently increased capacity in Europe through our fab (or factory) in Ireland, which will remain our lead European hub for the foreseeable future,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a statement.
“We will pause our projects in Poland and Germany by approximately two years based on anticipated market demand,” he added.
In Poland, Intel had received $1.8 billion to set up a semiconductor factory near Wroclaw.
EU countries are seeking to boost production of semiconductors, used in everything from fighter jets to smartphones, and reduce reliance on Asia after pandemic-induced shortages hit some industries, and Russia’s war on Ukraine brought home the risks of over-dependency.
On Monday, Intel also said it would receive up to $3 billion in direct funding from the US government, to boost its manufacturing of semiconductors for the US military.
This is part of efforts to “secure the domestic chip supply chain,” according to an Intel statement.
The company also said it would work with the Department of Defense to improve the resilience of US technological systems.
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Meta threat reports indicate Russia has been the leading source of covert influence campaigns disrupted at the social networking giant’s platform.
Meta late Monday said it is banning Russian state media outlets from its apps around the world due to “foreign interference activity.”
The ban comes after the United States accused RT and employees of the state run agency of funneling $10 million through shell entities to covertly fund influence campaigns on social media channels including TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube, according to an unsealed indictment.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets,” Meta said in response to an AFP inquiry.
“Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.”
RT was forced to cease formal operations in Britain, Canada, the European Union and the United States due to sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to the indictment unsealed in New York,
US prosecutors quoted an RT editor-in-chief as saying it created an “entire empire of covert projects” designed to shape public opinion in “Western audiences.”
One of the covert projects involved funding and direction of an online content creation company in Tennessee, according to the indictment.
Russia is the biggest source of covert influence operations disrupted by Meta at its platform since 2017, and such efforts at deceptive online influence ramped up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to threat reports released routinely by the social media giant.
Meta had previously banned the Federal News Agency in Russia to thwart foreign interference activities by the Russian Internet Research Agency.
The US Department of State in September said it is engaged in diplomatic efforts to inform governments around the world about Russia’s use of RT to conduct covert activities and encourage them to take action to limit “Russia’s ability to interfere in foreign elections and procure weapons for its war against Ukraine.”
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The cave-dwelling mysid shrimp Hemimysis margalefi. Credit: Marie Derrien
Homing is an animal’s ability to navigate towards an original location, such as a breeding spot or foraging territory. Salmon and racing pigeons are famous for homing, but similar behaviors occur in groups as diverse as bees, frogs, rats, and sea turtles. There, homing individuals are known or suspected to rely on landmarks, the Earth’s magnetic field, or the sky’s pattern of polarized light to find their way back.
Another group known to display homing are cave-dwelling mysid shrimp, also known as possum shrimp for the pouches in which females carry their larvae. Results from previous studies suggested that mysids might use chemical cues to navigate to underwater caves, in the same way that coral larvae and coral-dwelling fish can distinguish between healthy and disturbed reefs.
At dusk, they move over hundreds of meters into open water to feed on algae, detritus and other zooplankton. At dawn, they return to the same cave to shelter from predators.
The cave-dwelling mysid shrimp Hemimysis margalefi. Credit: Marie Derrien
Divers sampled seawater from three caves in Calanques National Park off southern France, called “Fauconnière,” “3PP,” and “Jarre.” These lie between 11 and 24 meters underwater, and between 8 and 20 kilometers apart.
The researchers caught hundreds of adult H. margalefi from the Fauconnière and Jarre caves. For comparison, they also collected individuals of another mysid—an unnamed species in the genus Leptomysis—which doesn’t reside in caves but lives in shallow waters near Endoume station.
In each experimental trial, they placed a single shrimp at the origin of a Y-shaped channel. Each arm was connected to a 10-liter tank filled with seawater from one of the caves. This water flowed out of the tanks into the channel at a rate of 50 milliliters per minute, carrying any water-soluble metabolites.
The cave-dwelling mysid shrimp Hemimysis margalefi. Credit: Marie Derrien
Each shrimp was thus given the choice between water flows native to two caves, while time spent per arm was a proxy for their preference. Water from the 3PP cave was always used as the control. Between trials, the channel was emptied and rinsed with control water, after which the tanks were swapped between the arms.
In total, the researchers tested 286 individuals, of which 230 were H. margalefi and 56 were Leptomysis. Trials were conducted in the morning and afternoon, to test for any effects of the time of day on the shrimps’ preferences—but this turned out to have no effect.
No place smells like home
The results showed that H. margalefi strongly preferred water from their own cave. For example, individuals from Jarre cave spent 16 times longer in arms with Jarre water than in arms with 3PP water, while individuals from Fauconnière cave spent three times longer in arms with Fauconnière water than in arms with 3PP water.
The cave-dwelling mysid shrimp Hemimysis margalefi. Credit: Marie Derrien
In contrast, individuals from Jarre cave had no preference for Fauconnière over 3PP water, while individuals from Fauconnière cave had no preference for Jarre over 3PP water. Likewise, the non-cave dwelling Leptomysis never had a preference for one type of water over another.
The researchers used ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-HR-MS) to reveal differences in metabolites between caves. These results showed that the seascape was mainly composed of natural peptides, fatty acids, steroids, and alkaloids, as well as anthropogenic pollutants. The chemical signature of Jarre water was highly distinct from that of Fauconnière water, while that of 3PP water was intermediate between these two.
The researchers hypothesized that sessile organisms like sponges, abundant in these caves and known to produce many specialized metabolites, are major contributors to the local seascape.
The cave-dwelling mysid shrimp Hemimysis margalefi. Credit: Marie Derrien
“This is concerning, because due to global change, mass mortality of sponges and corals are becoming more frequent.”
“We are currently following up on our results by trying to correlate the chemical seascapes from different caves with the biodiversity of sessile organisms living in them, focusing on the role of metabolites from sponges and corals.”
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Possum shrimp use their cave’s special smell to trace their way home, study finds (2024, September 17)
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