By Se Young Lee SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. on Thursday reported its worst quarterly profit in two years and flagged uncertain earnings prospects for its key handset business, fuelling worries about its ability to return to growth. The downbeat guidance, as well as Samsung's decision to keep its interim dividend unchanged from last year, put the shares of South Korea's biggest company by market value on track for their worst daily percentage decline in nearly eight months. Samsung expects July-September handset shipments to pick up by 10 percent from the previous quarter and said it planned to release a new premium smartphone employing a new design and material, underscoring efforts by the world's largest smartphone maker to regroup. With its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone outsold by Apple Inc's iPhone 5S in May and its cheaper devices feeling the squeeze from Chinese rivals like Xiaomi, Samsung also vowed to revamp its mid-to-low-tier product lineup with more aggressive pricing and a focus on a smaller set of products.

By Sophie Knight TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Sony Corp warned it doesn't now expect to make money on smartphones this year, citing weak demand, as the consumer electronics maker said restructuring will still help it turn a profit on its TVs after 10 years of losses. As it said April-June operating profit doubled, boosted by its videogames business and a one-off asset sale, Sony on Thursday cut its smartphone sales target this fiscal year by 14 percent. Sony now expects to just break even in the business this year, down from a previous operating forecast of 26 billion yen ($253 million), and is reviewing its mid-term strategy. Samsung Electronics also flagged its own uncertain handset earnings prospects on Thursday, undercut by Chinese rivals like Xiaomi, while Sony said progress by Chinese smartphone makers was a factor in its own sales shortfall.

Xiaomi Inc, the three-year old company known as the Apple of China, has become the world's No.5 smartphone maker by market share while Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's lead has continued to shrink, a report by Strategy Analytics shows. Three out of the world's top 5 smartphone sellers were Chinese manufacturers in the second quarter, Strategic Analytics said, as China's low-cost offerings on the Android operating system whittle away Samsung's market share.

By Sophie Knight TOKYO (Reuters) - Panasonic Corp confirmed on Thursday it would invest in U.S. electric carmaker Tesla Motors Inc's planned $5 billion lithium-ion battery plant in the United States, but said it had yet to decide on the size of its investment. The Japanese company, which already supplies batteries for Tesla, said it was gauging the demand for batteries before deciding on an amount. "We have not yet decided exactly how much we will invest and when," said Chief Financial Officer Hideaki Kawai. "However, Tesla is a very important partner to us and discussions are continuing.

If I could look back now, I would say the whole prospect fell apart after Satan poked me. I joined ReaganBook when I saw it billed earlier this week (admittedly, on liberal sites) as the conservative response to Facebook. Surely a name like ReaganBook — a name devoid of any irony, part of a logo that includes an illustration of the president, cowboy hat adorned, done in the style of the Obama "Hope" image — would be bait to any liberals hoping to while away a few minutes on a fake profile. The site requires no proof of identity (or semblance to reality) to log in, which becomes immediately obvious: everyone seems to be either using real names, the names of famous conservatives, or the names of famous conservatives paired with sex acts.

Until 50 years ago today, we had never seen exactly what the Moon's surface looked like. As the Space Race heated up, NASA launched the first Ranger probe in 1961, intending to capture photographs and scout the way forward for a human landing.

By Maria Sheahan FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Siemens AG will need more time to shake off problems at its energy business that have weighed on profits, its chief executive said on Thursday, indicating investors hoping for a fast improvement will have to be patient. "There is no quick fix for this (energy business) matter," CEO Joe Kaeser told analysts and reporters. Kaeser unveiled a corporate overhaul for Germany's second-biggest company by market value in May, dubbed "Vision 2020", that will simplify the group's structure and aims at making up ground lost to more profitable competitors such as Switzerland's ABB and U.S.-based General Electric. The former finance chief, who got the top job when his predecessor was pushed out a year ago, has also sought to improve the way Siemens handles big risky projects, which led to average annual project charges of 700 million euros in recent years, to improve profitability.

80 days is a fantastical reinterpretation of the Jules Verne classic Around the World in Eighty Days. Here, airships and mechanical men intermingle with more mundane aspects of the 19th century to create an environment that is both familiar and charmingly strange. Much as in the book, the main goal in this interactive fiction game for iOS devices is to traverse the globe within the eponymous time span. A large part of 80 Days is delivered through Meg Jayanth's gorgeous writing, which players interact with via text prompts.

The new space epic from Halo developer Bungie, Destiny just wrapped up an open beta before its upcoming September launch. I managed to get that helmet.

Repeat after me, everyone: Do not try this at home. GoPro has just posted an amazing new video that shows us what it’s like to jump from the roof of a four-story building and live to tell about it. The video was made by professional stuntman Ethan Swanson, who expertly figured out the proper angle and force of his jump that he would need to land on the downward slope of a smaller building’s roof below and slide safely to the ground. In the end, the only damage he sustained was of a torn pants leg. GoPro videos have really taken off this year, as so far we’ve seen some insane footage of tornadoes, car crashes and accidental sky dives. GoPro

Strategy Analytics already has smartphone sales numbers for the second quarter of 2014, with the company revealing that Android gained even more market share during the period, at the expense of all its competitors. Global smartphone shipments for Q2 2014 reached 295.2 million units, 27% more than the same period last year when 233.0 million units were shipped. Of those, 84.6% (249.6 million) were Android smartphones, up from 80.2% during Q2 2013. “Like the PC market, Android is on the verge of turning smartphone platforms into a one-horse race,” Strategy Analytics Executive Director Neil Mawston said. “Its low-cost services and user-friendly software remain wildly attractive to hardware makers, operators and consumers worldwide. Rival OS vendors are going to have to do

Push hard on my skin, and you’ll find that the source is two lumps of glass, metal, and plastic embedded in my right hand: a years-old magnet in the ring finger and a newer NFC chip in my thumb webbing. I first heard about magnet implants in college, but I didn’t seriously pursue one until my colleague Ben Popper got his for the piece that would become "Cyborg America." At a Brooklyn tattoo parlor in 2012, I watched someone cut along the top of my finger, tear open a pocket with a dowel, and slide in a dark rod about half the size of a sunflower seed. I began to catalog sensations: the vicious pinch of picking up a Buckyball, the jitter of using a microwave, the sense of floating when I hovered my hand above another magnet.