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Michael Barry and Robert Hutchinson have joined Sterne, Agee & Leach’s depositary investment banking group. Barry will be based in New York and Hutchinson in the Boston office. Barry joined Sterne Agee as MD and head of M&A for depository investment banking. Most recently, he was with Stifel Nicolaus Weisel where he was head of FIG M&A. Hutchinson joined Sterne as MD and head of Northeast coverage for depository investment Banking. He is also from Stifel Nicolaus Weisel where he spent more than 15 years in depositary investment banking.

PRESS RELEASE

Sterne, Agee & Leach, Inc., one of the oldest and largest privately-owned investment banking and brokerage firms in the country, recently announced the expansion of its Depository Investment Banking Group with the addition of Michael F. Barry, based in Sterne Agee’s New York Office and Robert P. Hutchinson, based in the Boston office.

Barry joined Sterne Agee as Managing Director and Head of M&A for Depository Investment Banking. Most recently, he was with Stifel Nicolaus Weisel where he was Head of FIG M&A. Before Stifel, Barry spent more than 13 years at Merrill Lynch where he was head of the US Depository Group. He has also held senior M&A positions in the Financial Institutions Groups of both Banc of America Securities, managing the overall M&A effort related to depository institutions, and Lehman Brothers.

Hutchinson joined Sterne Agee as Managing Director and Head of Northeast Coverage for Depository Investment Banking, also from Stifel Nicolaus Weisel. He has spent more than 15 years in depository investment banking, serving as the head of the depository practice for Sterne Agee, as well as Managing Director for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Hutchinson also worked as an associate at RBC Capital Markets where he worked in an investment banking capacity on financial institutions.

“Michael and Bob represent the latest in the build out of Sterne Agee’s depository investment banking practice. The depth of their individual experience and success with providing strategic advice and raising capital for the financial sector will be a great benefit to our existing and future clientele,” said Ryan Medo, Executive Managing Director of Equity Capital Markets.

“Michael’s more than 25 years of M&A experience in the depository space makes him ideal to spear head our efforts in that area. Meanwhile, Bob brings the requisite leadership, experience and wide range of relationships in the Northeast to round-out our commitment to depository investment banking,” said Daryle DiLascia, Senior Managing Director and Head of Depository Investment Banking. “In addition, Michael and Bob will also partner on Northeast coverage, and will assist on our larger cap relationships around the country.”

With decades of experience calling on depository institutions, advising on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, restructuring and recapitalizations, defense and public and private debt, as well as capital raising transactions, Barry has advised on more than 80 announced depository M&A transactions with a total value north of $165 billion. In addition, he has worked on more than 70 public and/or private debt or equity transactions, raising more than $55 billion in the aggregate. He holds an AB (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Princeton University and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hutchinson brings more than 15 years-experience specializing in M&A, equity offerings, debt offerings and mutual to stock conversions. He served four years as an Officer in the United States Marine Corps and holds an MBA with a concentration in finance from the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. He earned a BA in English Literature from Boston College.

Along with the addition of Barry and Hutchinson are two new vice presidents, Andrew Stager and Lorenzo Zefferino. Stager joined Sterne Agee as a vice president for investment banking in the financial institutions group. Prior to his position with Sterne Agee, he served as both an associate with Stifel/Keefe, Bruyette & Woods and an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Zefferino also joined Sterne Agee as a vice president for investment banking in the financial institutions group. Preceding Sterne Agee, he was a vice president with Stifel/Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

Speaking about Stager and Zefferino, DiLascia offered additional comments, saying, “Andrew and Lorenzo represent a crop of talented professionals with an unmatched understanding of the financial services industry; we couldn’t be more excited to have them in our financial institutions group.”

About Sterne Agee

Founded in 1901, Birmingham, Alabama-based Sterne Agee is one of the oldest and largest privately-owned investment banks in the nation. The firm offers comprehensive financial services to a diverse client base, including corporations, municipalities and high-net worth individuals. Through its family of wholly-owned subsidiaries, Sterne Agee custodies over $21 billion in client assets, and has more than 1,500 employees in 59 offices across 22 states. The Sterne Agee family of companies has prospered for more than 100 years by always putting client interests first and consistently delivering excellent financial services. Sterne Agee is the trade name used by Sterne Agee Group, Inc. and affiliates, including Sterne, Agee & Leach, Inc., member of NYSE, FINRA and SIPC. Visit www.sterneagee.com.

The post Barry, Hutchinson Join Sterne, Agee & Leach appeared first on peHUB.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Apple’s cloud-based services are experiencing some issues. On Tuesday morning, some users woke up to find they couldn’t access GameCenter, iTunes, iCloud or create a new Apple ID account. As of this writing, only GameCenter and Apple ID are continuing to experience issues; the rest appear to have been fixed, according to Apple’s systems status dashboard:

The outage began just after 4 a.m. PT on Tuesday. Apple is only saying that “some users” were affected, but it’s not clear how many people that actually means. I live in the northeast and I didn’t experience a total outage of services, but downloading apps from the iTunes Store this morning took about four minutes longer than usual — which is to say, they usually take about 15 seconds to download. 9to5Mac gathered tweets from users in various countries who seem to have experienced some problems.

This particular outage is the second multi-hour problem Apple’s online services have experienced in the last two weeks. Earlier this month iMessage, a far more regularly used and popular service than GameCenter, suffered a five-hour outage.

Update: Apple’s system status dashboard shows that as of 10:28 a.m. PT all services are back online.

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Gone are the days where food delivery consisted only of pizza or Chinese food. Restaurants over the past decade have begun offering a wide selection of cuisines that can be delivered right to customers’ doors.

Now, even fast food restaurants, which have relied on drive-thru service for decades, are getting in on the delivery act. Burger King today announced that it is expanding its delivery service, racing ever closer to the day that “did somebody order a Whopper?” will become a porn cliche.

Burger King will now deliver in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The fast food restaurant already delivers in New York, Miami, Houston, and Washington D.C.

“‘BK Delivers’ is already performing well in New York, Miami, Houston and greater Washington, D.C.,” said Alex Macedo , president of the North America division at Burger King Worldwide. “As its popularity has grown, we have seen an increasing demand for the program in other markets. Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago have some of our most loyal guests and the Burger King brand is excited to offer them the opportunity to enjoy the food they love, delivered to them in the comfort of their home, dorm, or office.”

Burger fans in those cities can order Burger King delivery by phone or through the BK Delivers website. Those who aren’t in the current delivery cities can request that delivery come to their zip code on the same website.

Viira, the productivity app based on David Allen’s book Getting Things Done is now available for BlackBerry 10. The app works in conjunction with an Outlook plugin to bring actionable elements, contexts, projects and day tasks to keep staff on the task at hand and remain productive.

The native BlackBerry 10 app features free updates for all the new features they plan to roll out in the future as well as free device migration should you upgrade or change platforms. The app is designed to support all the key concepts of the Getting Things Done system allowing you to ditch your pen and paper.

New features coming to Viira this year are deeper BlackBerry 10 integration as well as cloud syncing with the desktop client.

Click here to download the Viira free trial for BlackBerry 10.

Click here to buy Viira for BlackBerry 10 for $19.99, 33% off for a limited time!

More clues about the next generation HTC DLXPLUS devices have been discovered in some OTA testing information. The DLXPLUS codename is used by HTC for a line of phones normally marketed as either the HTC Butterfly or DROID DNA depending on the market and carrier. The OTA information indicates at least three different versions of the device are being prepped, including:

• DLXP_U – this version includes GSM and WCDMA antennas and would likely end up as a global version of the phone;
• DLXP_UL – this model is LTE-enabled, so obviously it would be intended for carriers offering LTE service;
• DLXP_WL – this version of the device is geared toward a CDMA2000 network, which could point to this being a Verizon specific version that may become the DROID DNA 2.

Sources believe a fourth version of the phone exists with the codename DLXPLUS_J that would be marketed as the successor to the HTC J Butterfly for the Japanese market.

source: GSM Insider

Come comment on this article: Next gen HTC Butterfly spotted in OTA information?

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the storage industry:

SGI Unveils InfiniteStorage Gateway. SGI introduced the InfiniteStorage Gateway, a virtualized data management solution, which reduces the runaway costs and complexity organizations face when managing exponential data growth. While creating a virtualized storage fabric that can include disk, tape, object and cloud storage the gateway provides a way for users to see and access all the data all the time, no matter what might be happening to the storage infrastructure in the background. Because the storage infrastructure is virtualized, as requirements change, the type of storage deployed can also evolve, with no interruption to users. SGI InfiniteStorage Gateway includes up to 276 terabytes of onboard capacity, and is deployed as a factory-integrated solution in the 4U SGI MIS storage server, powered by Intel Xeon processors. ”As data growth has continued to sky-rocket, IT organizations increasingly face the problem of infrastructure fragmentation, and the fact that their most expensive primary storage arrays are often used to house mostly inactive data,” said Laura DuBois, program vice president, IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions. “Data management is not only about the performance of active data today. It also must provide a seamless long-term strategy for all data that keeps costs at a minimum and reduces IT administrative burden without impacting users.”

Violin Flash Memory Arrays Certified with SAP Sybase. Violin Memory announced that its 6000 Series Flash Memory Arrays are now certified for interoperability with SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP Sybase ASE), delivering reliability and accelerated performance across a range of enterprise applications. Violin Memory is now an SAP software solution and technology partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program. “The Violin Flash Memory Arrays integrated with SAP Sybase ASE are a key solid-state storage component for the acceleration of business-critical applications from SAP,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Business Development and Ecosystem Innovation, SAP.   “The certification process showed that the arrays can deliver significant performance improvement over traditional disk-based systems, delivering substantial value to customers. In fact, during preliminary internal testing, we have seen 10x improvement in the performance of SAP Sybase ASE running on Violin Flash Memory.”

LSI Flash Accelerates IBM Servers. LSI announced that IBM is now offering new versions of its High IOPS Modular Adapters family based on LSI Nytro WarpDrive technology. The new models join IBM’s growing stable of PCIe Flash cards and are designed to be used with the IBM System x server series to help clients speed Big Data analytics. The adapters will support capacity options ranging from 300GB to 800GB of SLC and MLC Flash memory for IBM System x servers. “Rapid data growth and rising application performance requirements have exposed the limitations of today’s aging storage architectures,” said Gary Smerdon, senior vice president and general manager, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI. “IBM System x servers deployed with LSI Nytro WarpDrive technology can provide customers with a powerful, cost-effective performance boost for storing, accessing and analyzing data and, ultimately, give users the power to innovate the next generation of data centers.”

For more on storage news and trends, bookmark our Storage Channel.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, the expansion to last year’s criminally underrated RPG, launches today. As such, Capcom has seen fit to release one more trailer before adventurers take on the challenges on Bitter Black Isle.

The launch trailer for Dark Arisen doesn’t show us anything that we haven’t seen already, but it does show us more. We get a good look at the new bosses that populate Bitter Black Isle as well as the new enemy types that will no doubt kill players again and again.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen is available in North America today, and will launch in Europe on April 26. We can only hope that it finds the audience that it so rightly deserves this time around.

Last time we checked in with Chicago’s Boomerang they were one of a growing number of social gifting companies looking trying to distinguish themselves by centering on local businesses. But in the last year, Lightbank-backed Boomerang has decided to change course, shifting its focus from consumers giving gifts to the merchants and publishers supplying the gift cards.

What Boomerang realized was that standing in the middle of consumer-to-consumer gift transaction was not the greatest business model, CEO Zach Smith said. It depends on massive scale, and other companies like Sweden’s Wrapp and Facebook’s Karma were coming to dominate the market while Boomerang tried to scale its local-merchant strategy.

“There’s a huge opportunity in social gifting, but it’s not in selling gift cards to consumers,” Smith said. “It’s in building viral ads.”

Smith discovered that businesses loved the idea of gift cards for spreading their brand awareness and luring in new customers, but they wanted communicate with customers directly, not just be an option in growing menu of gift peer-to-peer gift ideas, Smith said. So Boomerang has been increasingly obliging them. It hasn’t abandoned its peer-to-peer gifting engine, but it’s using it primarily as a redistribution system for direct-to-consumer gift-card promotions.

Here’s an example: A customer like chocolatier Ghirardelli will send out an e-mail to its customer list embedded with a stylized $5 gift card redeemable on the company’s site or at one of its stores. If customers accept, they click a link where they’re taken to Boomerang’s site and given an electronic or printable gift card. Customers are then given the option to share that card with, say, five friends through Boomerang on Facebook.

There are some compelling reasons why brands like this approach, Smith said. First, one in five customers who receive a Boomerang promotion from a partner redeems their gift cards on the spot to buy goods online. “What other ad unit on the planet gets a 20 percent engagement rate?” Smith said.

Then there’s the viral distribution platform. People who receive the initial promotion re-gift the card on average to 3.1 friends. Though engagement rates can fall after that first wave, customers can spread a practically compelling gift card well beyond their initial friendship circles, creating what amounts to an ad hoc viral marketing campaign across a social network, Smith said.

The key is getting those gift cards into consumers hands (or inboxes), rather than depending on a consumer to initiate peer-to-peer transaction. To that end, Boomerang has been looking for more avenues to distribute those cards. It’s been working with a few online market research and promotion companies like Lab42 and Jebbit to make Boomerang gift cards rewards for completing questionnaires or engaging with their marketing content. This week Boomerang took the Rewards program out of beta, offering it to all comers.

One casualty of Boomerang’s new strategy, however, has been its initial focus on local business. National brands allow Boomerang to scale nationally. And while consumers say they like the hipness and flexibility of giving gift cards to a local bakery or coffee shop, Smith said, 90 percent of the gifts they actually give are for national brands like Starbucks(sbux) and Fandango.

Boomerang still offers gifts FOR about 100 local businesses in four cities, though most of them are in hometown Chicago. While Smith said it would continue to support those customers, it’s not pursuing any new ones. The startup has found that there is budding market for paid gifts — where customers actually buy a gift card rather than pass on a free promotion. But Smith said it’s not a business Boomerang will likely pursue for the simple reason that daily deal companies like fellow Chicagoan and Lightbank prodigy Groupon (see disclosure) have that premium coupon market locked down. Having raised $1 million in July, Boomerang is still a small operation, working out of the Lightbank collective co-located in Grouping’s Chicago HQ building. Last month it had 300,000 unique users, but thanks to its new viral marketing approach, the company is growing quickly, adding some big national brands to its roster, including the Gap, Barnes & Noble and Wine.com.

Disclosure: The author’s spouse is employed by Groupon.

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Paris-based Sush.io, which will soon reveal its financial analytics app for small businesses, has picked up $325,000 in seed financing ahead of the launch. The app, which is due to be “launched” on Thursday ahead of availability next month, plugs into accounts for the likes of Paypal, Github, Amazon Web Services, Google AdWords and even mobile phone operators, so that the user can get an overview and analysis of their total spending.

Sush.io is pitching itself as “Mint.com meets IFTTT” and — as the list of services that can be plugged into the app attests — it’s very much targeting tech startups at this early stage.

Here’s how co-founder Thomas Guillaumin explained the focus of the app to me:

“The problem is collecting all these services and having a top down view of your finances – how much cash you have, what’s your burn rate… that can really help you run a business better.”

Another indicator of Sush.io’s tech startup focus is the fact that it’s launching with an OS X desktop app first. But, as Guillaumin told me, versions for other desktop and mobile platforms will be out by the end of the year.

The investors in this seed round include Kima Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon (the founder of online flash sale pioneer Vente-privee), the 50 Partners accelerator and Mediastay co-founder Jonathan Zisermann. According to Guillaumin, the cash will be used for the launch and also to hire three more staff members, taking the total (including founders) to five.

Guillaumin said the Sush.io service will operate on a freemium model, with the paid subscription kicking in depending on the number of services you want to add. This will cost between £30-£50 ($46-$76) a month – cheaper than paying a CFO, certainly. Right now the company is hawking its wares in the European startup hubs of Paris, London and Berlin, but in June it intends to push into the U.S., too.

That said, Guillaumin sounds quite wary about the American market due to potential competitors there – namely the Geckoboard-Zapier partnership and even IFTTT itself, on the chance that IFTTT integrates an analytics dashboard at some point.

He added that, once it’s gotten off the ground, Sush.io may develop into a more fully-fledged business intelligence product that adds more KPIs (key performance indicators) to its current financial focus.

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A photo of a Boston police officer has gone viral after the police department tweeted about it over the weekend.

Officer John Bradley went above and beyond the call of duty when a Boston neighborhood was put on lockdown during the search for bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday when he offered to go buy milk for a family with a baby. The child’s father, Kevin Wells, snapped a photo of Bradley returning to the house with milk in hand, and since it was shared it’s gone viral, sweeping the web as a visual representation of the strength and kindness Bostonians want to emphasize during such a difficult time.

“It just meant the world that he literally went out and got two gallons of milk,” McKenzie Wells, the baby’s mother, said. “We wanted to pay him, but he wouldn’t take money from us. He was just so generous.”

The family posted the picture on their Facebook page but took it down once it began to spread, fearing it would upset Bradley or the police department.

“The fact that it went as viral as it did was kind of crazy,” Wells said. “We kind of thought we were going to get in trouble at first, so we pulled it off. We just didn’t want to upset the officer, but we didn’t think it would be everywhere.”

Brookline Police Department tweeted the photo once it gained popularity, however, and it took off from there. Bradley has declined to comment, but a spokesperson from the department has said that he was simply happy to help.

The sun. We see it nearly every day, and yet most of us spend a considerable amount of time trying to keep it out of our eyes or off our skin.

NASA, on the other hand, has been staring straight into the sun for years now. The agency launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 2010 to capture images of the sun, which it does every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. Scientists are using the SDO to learn more about the sun and to improve predictions for solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can affect satellites orbiting Earth.

In the three years since its launch, the SDO has observed the sun as it ramps up to “solar maximum,” which is the peak of the star’s 11-year solar activity cycle. To demonstrate this increase in the sun’s activity, NASA this week released a video that puts together many of the images taken by the SDO. The time-lapsed video shows two images of the sun per day for three years. It also has some nice background music (“A Lady’s Errand of Love” by Martin Lass).

TED, THNKR, SoulPancake, The Switch and Henry Review have all been nominated for The Webby’s People’s Voice Award in the category Online Film & Video Variety. Last week, both Kid President and Candace issued rousing calls on YouTube, asking for their fans’ help in catching up to us in the vote — which closes April 30.

We adore SoulPancake — heck, we’ve even posted a talk from Kid President on our site. So we’re sort of pleased to see that their campaign has changed the tide. SoulPancake currently has 58% of the vote to our 35%. That said, we like to win Webbies. Who doesn’t?

So who does the TED staff think should win this important race? We asked in the video at the top of this post …

Benchmark data isn’t sexy stuff, but occasionally the numbers reveal surprising findings. Who, for instance, would have guessed that global NGOs spend nearly 80% more to track their finances and employ nearly twice as many finance staff as comparable for-profit multinationals?

This hardly seems right given that multinationals are thought to be awash in money and NGOs have the image of cash-strapped, waste averse organizations — which they are. But the data, gathered in our new study “Stop Starving Scale” and compared against benchmarks from APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center), hint at a little-known story: most global NGOs today struggle to master the complexities of managing efficient, integrated operations in large part due to restrictions placed on them by funders.

In that regard, NGOs find themselves facing the same issues that vexed multinational corporations as they began to master globalized operations several decades ago. While their missions couldn’t be more different, the organizational challenges are strikingly similar.

As globalization began to shift into high gear in the 1980s, corporations grew by opening international outposts to access new markets. But they soon realized that dotting the globe with factories and staff led to fragmentation that begged for better integration and coordination. In time, corporations learned to build the administrative and technical infrastructure needed to manage their sprawling operations.

Today, NGOs are struggling to do the same — with one key difference. Multinationals are masters of their own fate when it comes to investing in people and infrastructure. By contrast, NGOs rely on the generosity of funders who, for the most part, restrict their investments to specific programs, leaving NGOs starved for general operating support.

This fixation on program-based funding results in a patchwork of fragmented, short-term engagements across countries and continents. While successful in appearance, it’s a pattern of growth that starves the operational core. Like multinationals in the early days of globalization, many NGOs today struggle to grow the essential management capabilities and systems required to effectively manage their operations and growth.

Decentralized, program-focused operations also squander precious dollars. Hence, the comparatively high cost of NGOs’ bookkeeping operations. Perversely, funders view such high costs as proof that NGOs already spend too much on administration, apparently oblivious to their role in pushing up the very costs they question.

The absence of efficient financial management systems reflects comparatively low spending on information technology. In fact, the benchmark data revealed that NGOs spent less than half as much on IT systems as comparable for-profit companies, resulting in slower and less comprehensive reporting capabilities at a higher cost.

Just as telling, the NGOs surveyed reported spending one-third as much on program monitoring and evaluation as is generally recommended by evaluation experts. This all but eliminates NGOs’ ability to talk about what really matters — impact per dollar.

The path out of this starvation syndrome is easy to see but difficult to tread. Just as multinationals before them, NGOs need to invest in core administrative and technical capabilities to manage global scale.

For funders, this means a change in attitudes and actions. They need to come to grips with the unintended consequences of starving NGOs of the resources needed to invest in leadership, management, program evaluation, and integrated systems.

NGO board members, especially those with corporate backgrounds who understand the importance of investment, must change the mindset that equates success with revenues and views low overhead as a proxy for organizational effectiveness.

And NGO leaders need to stop playing the low-overhead-is-good game and lead the charge for adequate general operating support. “This issue is one of my pet peeves,” says Rich Stearns, CEO of World Vision US, the largest affiliate of a $2.8 billion NGO with operations in 97 countries. “Asking about an organization’s overhead rate is the wrong question,” he continues. “The right question to ask is what impact the organization is having per donated dollar? Because when we ask the wrong question, we punish the organization that’s investing enough (in administration) to have real impact.”

Not surprisingly, Foursquare plans to announce Monday that it has made tweaks and improvements to its desktop listings for local businesses, highlighting once again that the company has moved beyond convincing people to become mayor of something and is doubling down on local search.

“You don’t need to check in to use Foursquare. Over the past few months, we’ve seen Explore use double,” the company wrote in a press release. “With billions of data points, we can always help you find the best places to go.”

The updates coming to Foursquare.com on Tuesday primarily reorganize the information on the business listing pages, making them easier to digest and putting important information like photos and hours more centrally located. The pages will include which of your friends have checked into locations (if you’ve logged in), suggest other places to go in the area, and share locations you’ve found with friends.

With Foursquare still struggling to find its footing several years and funding cycles down the road, it’s clear from the most recent mobile update that its best path to making money will come by challenging Yelp in the realm of local search. And if you’re going to challenge Yelp, you need a solid desktop presence.

Many people might be unfamiliar with Foursquare’s desktop site at all, but it’s actually been around for a while now, and the company said it gets more than 50 million visitors per month. Most of the changes to the business listings this Tuesday are design improvements, but as a Foursquare representative noted, the company hasn’t re-designed the listings since November 2011, when it launched Foursquare.com; they’re due for an update.

Here’s an example of the new desktop listings on the left and the old version on the right (click to enlarge):

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As a child, I had a friend with a lazy eye. I was super jealous of him at the time because he got to wear a pirate-themed eye patch. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see why being forced to wear an eye patch isn’t exactly the greatest thing in the world. Thankfully, new research may have found a way to help cure lazy eyes without needing patches.

In a new study to be published in Current Biology, McGill University in Quebec found that playing Tetris for an hour a day for two weeks helped strengthen lazy eyes in adults far better than the traditional eye patch method. The game, with the help of special goggles, makes the patient’s eyes work together in unison to strengthen both.

The special goggles work together with Tetris to ensure that both eyes see separate things while playing the game. One eye will only see the falling blocks while the other will only see the blocks that have accumulated on the ground. This forces both eyes to work together to successfully clear rows of blocks.

After this test, the researchers had another group of adults with lazy eyes play Tetris while wearing the same goggles, but these participants had their good eye covered the whole time. They found that playing Tetris with only the lazy eye didn’t lead to any significant improvement. They did find, however, that this group saw significant improvement once they moved to the aforementioned method of having both eyes work together to play the game.

The researchers say that playing Tetris, or any other game that makes both eyes work together, could help cure lazy eyes in adults. The researchers now want to test the same treatment on children. It could prove to be a better alternative to the traditional eye patch that must be incredibly embarrassing to some children not lucky enough to get a pirate-themed eye patch.

[h/t: BBC]

A woman in Salina, Kansas got the shock of her life when she left the festivities at the circus she was attending to use the restroom: when she opened the door, she found a tiger standing a couple feet in front of her.

Jenna Krehbiel was enjoying a day with her family at the Isis Shrine Circus at the Bicentennial Center when she decided to take a bathroom break, and unfortunately she wasn’t alone.

“I went in to use the bathroom, and a lady came in to get her daughter out and said there was a tiger loose,” Krehbiel said. “I didn’t know it was in the bathroom, and I walked in the [open] door, which closed right after I had walked in. I saw the tiger; it was at most 2 feet in front of me, and I turned around calmly and walked back toward the door. Someone opened the door and said get out.”

Apparently, the tiger escaped shortly after performing, and staff members were in the process of blocking off the bathroom once they realized there was a jungle cat inside, but Krehbiel didn’t realize what was going on. Luckily, the tiger was captured and no one was hurt.

“Once she saw the tiger, I’m sure she knew to go the other way,” Bicentennial Center manager Chris Bird said. “Overall, it was a scary, surreal moment. I am glad no one was hurt or injured.”