When Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko hit the big screen in the 1987 film Wall Street, it caused a sensation. Gekko’s slick bravado and “greed is good” mantra were appallingly entrancing. But something else captivated audiences: the convincing way the movie captured the underbelly of ’80s cash-fueled gluttony. Twenty-three years later, a sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (September 24), and Gekko still fascinates—as do the real-life insider-trading crimes committed by Wall Street titans. Here, eight of the most famous cases to make headlines.
The chart below compares baseball teams’ payroll spending over the last decade with their won-loss record. Several teams with modest payrolls have done well this season, but over the last decade as a whole, the relationship between salaries and wins has been strong.
If you’ve been hankering for a multi-terabyte USB thumb drive, you may be in luck: IBM scientists have developed a technique that could — eventually — help increase data-storage densities by orders of magnitude.
The breakthrough, announced Friday, allows researchers to measure how long a bit of information can be retained in an individual atom. It does so by capturing, recording, and visualizing the magnetic properties of that atom in real time.