Uber stock rose in extended trading on Thursday after the company announced a fourth-quarter loss that was narrower than analysts had expected and moved its EBITDA profitability forecast forward.

The company’s shares spiked as much as 10% after hours when CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on the company’s earnings call that the company was moving its EBITDA profitability target to Q4 2020, ahead of its original promise of profitability in 2021. They’re now trading up about 5% after hours.

Here’s how the company did:

• Loss per share: Excluding certain items, 64 cents, vs. 68 cents as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $4.07 billion, vs. $4.06 billion as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

Uber’s revenue growth accelerated on an annualized basis to 37% from 30% one quarter ago, the company said in a statement. Net loss attributable to Uber for all of 2019 totaled $8.51 billion, primarily because of stock-based compensation.

With respect to guidance, Uber is forecasting a $1.35 billion loss at the middle of the range in terms of in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for 2020. The estimate is less than the FactSet analyst consensus of a $2.83 billion loss.

Uber’s top segment, Rides, including ride-sharing services and fees from drivers, delivered $13.51 billion in gross bookings, up 18% and below the $13.60 billion estimate among analysts polled by FactSet.

Uber attributed growth in Rides to ongoing global expansion, access to pick up and drop off passengers at airports the world over, and higher-priced premium offerings for passengers like Uber Comfort, which uses vehicles with more head- and legroom.

Moving ahead, executives said they planned to grow their core, ride hail business geographically, using tech to improve pricing and driver-to-passenger matching, and through “enterprise” offerings. Uber for Business shouldn’t be expected to drive bookings growth, but should help Uber improve its margins, the CEO said.

The company is also promoting lower-cost rides on its platform, including on JUMP dockless and electric bikes. JUMP recently expanded to Australia, New Zealand and Washington D.C.

Gross bookings from the Eats segment, including payments from restaurant and delivery partners, came in at $4.37 billion, up 71% and above analysts’ $4.13 billion estimate.

Uber is still paying out a massive amount of what it calls “driver referrals and excess driver incentives” to drivers in its food and ridesharing business.

Eats referrals and incentives for drivers cost Uber $1.13 billion in 2019, and $319 million in Q4 alone, according to the filing. Rides driver referrals and excess driver incentives cost Uber $123 million in 2019, with $20 million of that in Q4, the filing said.

In its Q4 release, it also reminded shareholders that it is now the most downloaded app globally in two categories, ridesharing and food delivery on both the Apple App Store, and Google Play Store, according to SensorTower.

‘The year of subscriptions’

Looking ahead, Khosrowshahi said, “2020 is going to be the year of subscriptions at Uber.”

The CEO noted that when an Uber user tries at least two different Uber services, like ridesharing and food delivery, they triple their overall usage of Uber. Subscriptions encourage that increased usage.

While Uber recently sold its food delivery business in India to Zomato, Khosrowshahi said Eats is in “very early innings” and looks promising in other regions. He noted that, in Australia, Uber Eats business on a top line basis is comparable to its Rides business. It’s not close to that on a global business, he said. But “long-term rationalization” for Eats is there.

Executives said self-driving technology would not figure in their business near-term, outside of research and development efforts.

Uber scored a $1 billion in funding to spin out its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in April 2019. Toyota and Japanese auto-parts supplier Denso planned to invest $667 million, while Softbank’s Vision Fund committed to invest $333 million.

Executives on Uber’s Q4 call said that capital pre-funded about 18 months of development work.

Scientists have determined the structure of the protein complex that gives cyanobacteria their unique ability to convert weak, filtered sunlight into useable energy. Their findings could one day be used to engineer crops that thrive under low-light conditions.

Tiny photosynthetic organisms that live virtually everywhere on earth, cyanobacteria helped to create an oxygen-rich atmosphere on earth and continue to provide us with much of the oxygen that we need to survive.

“When cyanobacteria live in low-light conditions, such as beneath a pond surface or under the leaf litter on a forest floor, some are able to switch from using the visible light that is most conducive to their growth and photosynthetic activities to harvesting the weaker, far-red sunlight that filters down to them,” said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology, Penn State. “This novel ability gives cyanobacteria an adaptive advantage over other organisms and is part of why they are responsible for 50 percent of all photosynthetic activity on the planet.”

In its study, the team, which included researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery, investigated Fischerella thermalis, a terrestrial cyanobacterium previously used as a model organism for the study of photosynthesis. Like all species of cyanobacteria, F. thermalis is rich in chlorophyll, the pigment that is responsible for absorbing light. According to Bryant, recent research has suggested that F. thermalis’s usual complement of chlorophyll, called chlorophyll a, is partially replaced under far-red light conditions with a closely related, yet chemically distinct, form of the molecule, known as chlorophyll f.

“So far we have only been able to speculate about how cyanobacteria make the switch to using chlorophyll f because no structural information about the photosynthetic machinery involved has been available for us to see what is going on,” he said.

To understand the phenomenon, Bryant and his colleagues used cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) to solve the structure of F. thermalis’s photosystem I, one of the two protein complexes responsible for photosynthesis that occur in all photosynthetic organisms. Cryo-EM can determine biomolecular structures with near-atomic scale resolution. Using the method, the researchers were able to observe the locations of chlorophyll f molecules present in F. thermalis. Specifically, the team identified four sites where these chlorophyll f molecules can bind and become functional.

“By synthesizing and incorporating around 8% chlorophyll f into their photosystem I complexes, F. thermalis is able to carry out photosynthesis using far-red light of up to nearly 800 nanometers,” said Chris Gisriel, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University who participated in this research while he was a researcher at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery.

The team’s findings appear today (Feb. 5) in the journal Science Advances.

Bryant said that in previous research, he and his colleagues discovered that another protein in the cyanobacterial cells senses the wavelength of incoming light and activates the production of the modified photosynthetic apparatus when far-red light is predominant over visible light.

Gisriel added, “Research suggests that perhaps 25 percent of all cyanobacteria, including common soil organisms, have this capability. This would imply that a significant portion—about one-eighth—of the oxygen on earth comes from organisms with this adaptation.”

The team’s findings suggest exciting possibilities for future applications. For example, crops could potentially be tweaked to control their light absorption properties depending on ambient light conditions. In addition, two crops could potentially be grown together, with shorter crops like alfalfa, extracting far-red light from their shaded locations beneath taller crops, like corn. Such a strategy could produce twice the crop yield per unit area.

February’s full moon marks the first supermoon of 2020. The Super Snow Moon is set to light up the night sky this weekend, visible to skywatchers provided the weather remains clear.

The Snow Moon, so named by Native American tribes for February’s wintery weather, will reach its peak at 2:33 a.m. ET on Sunday, February 9, according to NASA. It will appear full for about three days surrounding its peak, from Friday evening to Monday morning.

The Snow Moon is the most widely-used nickname for February’s full moon, but it has also been known as the Storm Moon, Hunger Moon, Magha Purnima, Magha Puja, the Mahamuni Pagoda Festival Moon, and the Chinese Lantern Festival Moon, NASA said.

It marks the first in a series of supermoons this year. A supermoon occurs when the full moon is closest to Earth in its elliptical orbit, making it appear brighter and larger than normal.

The next full moon, another supermoon, will occur on March 9. There will be two additional supermoons this April and May.

According to NASA, the first week of the month is also a good time to see the planet Mercury, which will be at its highest elevation above the horizon for the year for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere. Viewers can look to the western horizon during clear weather to spot the elusive planet.

On the morning of February 19, Mars will “disappear” behind the moon for about an hour — called an occultation. The spectacle will be visible at night for much of the western half of North America.

The Cadillac Escalade is one of the most-popular chauffer-driven vehicles in the U.S., and the latest one has a part-time chauffer built-in. The 2021 edition of the full-size SUV will feature the latest version of Cadillac’s Super Cruise semi-autonomous driving aid when it goes on sale this summer.

The system uses cameras, radar, GPS and a database of 200,000 miles of highways that have been 3D-mapped using Lidar that allow it to steer a vehicle within a lane, avoid running into cars ahead of it and change lanes in traffic while the driver keeps their feet off the pedals and hands off the wheel.

Unlike competing systems such as Tesla’s Autopilot, Super Cruise uses a facial-recognition system to make sure the driver is paying attention to the road. If not, it will alert them to get their attention before it begins to disengage, by turning on the hazard lights and slowly bringing the vehicle to a stop. Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and other brands require a driver to keep touching the wheel to indicate that they are alert.

Cadillac President Steve Carlisle told Fox News Autos at the new Escalade unveiling in Hollywood that the automaker isn’t aware of any accidents that have occurred while it was in use. His statement was reiterated by GM President Mark Reuss during the company’s Capital Markets Day event at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, when he said that Super Cruse has seen 5.2 million miles of “incident-free” operation in the real world since it first became available on the CT6 sedan in 2017.

That mileage figure is far less than the approximately 3 billion miles Tesla says its owners have driven using Autopilot, which is being investigated by NHTSA after several high-profile fatal accidents. A number of videos have also surfaced over the past few years that appear to show drivers who have fallen asleep with their hands on the steering wheel as their cars continue driving.

According to a report from Tesla in April 2019, the rate of accidents while Autopilot in use was approximately one per every 2.87 million miles driven, compared to one per 1.58 million miles without it. So far, there haven’t been any complaints filed with NHTSA regarding Super Cruise and it hasn’t been implicated in any accidents that have been reported on by the media. However, there was one odd incident the system may have been involved in.

Last May, video surfaced showing a man named Leonard Olsen standing out of the sunroof of a CT6 with his arms spread out as it drove along the I-4 highway near Lakeland, Fla. When police later tracked him down and arrested him on charges of reckless driving, he told them “the car drives itself and has a gigantic computer in it,” WTSP reported.

“I thought it would be a nice way to praise God for a minute, and I thought it would be nice at the time and that’s what I did,” Olsen said.

It was never officially determined if Super Cruise was in use or why it didn’t deactivate if it was, although it is also not known exactly how long Olsen was standing up.

Following the Escalade, Carlisle said Super Cruise will be available on every all-new model the brand introduces, including the upcoming CT5 and CT4 sedans.

Earth is bracing for a solar minimum: a dormant period in which the Sun radiates less energy or heat at our planet than usual. Scientists have warned that as a result of the Sun’s inactivity, Earth is likely to witness a ‘mini ice age’ that could bring extreme winters and chilly cold storms over the next 30 years.

According to NASA, the Sun will reach its lowest activity in over 200 years in 2020. As it further goes into its natural hibernation phase, Earth will experience extremely cold spells which will trigger food shortages across the planet. The average temperatures could drop as much as one degree Celsius in a period lasting about 12 months. That might not sound a lot but a whole degree fall would have a significant impact on global average temperatures.

Solar minimums are part of the Sun’s natural life cycle and occur once every 11 years. However, 2020’s minimum is going to be a special case. That’s because it marks the start of a rare event known as a Grand Solar Minimum, in which energy emitted from the Sun plummets down even more than usual. These only occur once every 400 years or so.

As per Northumbria University expert Valentina Zharkova, the icy spells and wet summers could be around until 2053, when solar activity picks up again. She told The Sun that the onset of the Grand Solar Minimum is already evident in Canada and Iceland, “We will possibly get big frosts as is happening now in Canada where they see [temperatures] of -50 degree Celsuis.”

The last Grand Solar Minimum, according to the report, was the Maunder Minimum which lasted from 1645 to 1715. The cruel cold decades saw the Thames and Amsterdam canals to freeze from time to time, something which is quite unusual today. This cold spell was likely set off by a number of factors including a slew of massive volcanic eruptions. In the forthcoming GSM, scientists are expecting a shift in the global temperatures caused due to human activity like rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Stuck in a sales slump, Macy’s is shrinking to grow.

The department store chain announced Tuesday it plans to shut 125 stores over the next three years and slash about 2,000 corporate jobs, as it closes its Cincinnati headquarters and tech offices in San Francisco.

Macy’s said it plans to exit weaker shopping malls, and instead shift its focus toward opening smaller-format stores in strip centers. Macy’s has shuttered more than 100 stores since 2015.

Still, looking ahead three years from now, even with these changes, growth at Macy’s looks abysmal.

With a smaller base of stores, Macy’s said net sales in fiscal 2022 are expected to be within a range of $23.2 billion to $23.9 billion, while earnings per share, on an adjusted basis, will be between $2.50 and $3.00. Same-store sales, on an owned plus licensed basis, are forecast to be down 1% to flat.

“We are taking the organization through significant structural change to lower costs, bring teams closer together and reduce duplicative work,” CEO Jeff Gennette said in a statement. “The changes we are making are deep and impact every area of the business, but they are necessary. I know we will come out of this transition stronger, more agile and better fit to compete in today’s retail environment.”

Macy’s shares were recently down less than 1% in extended trading, after initially jumping more than 3% on the news. Over the past five years, Macy’s stock has lost well over half its value, and its market value has tumbled to $5.1 billion.

Meanwhile, other retailers, which have focused on value and have provided fast online delivery have grown. Walmart’s stock is up nearly 22% over the past year, while Amazon’s market cap topped $1 trillion Tuesday.

Macy’s planned closures and job cuts come ahead of a meeting with investors in New York on Wednesday, where it is expected to walk through its fresh multiyear plan.

The company has lost market share in core categories like apparel, and its profits have been pressured, as fewer shoppers take trips to malls, and instead are buying on Amazon and other online retailers.

The steps Macy’s is taking are expected to generate annual gross savings of about $1.5 billion, which will be fully realized by the end of 2022. This year, Macy’s expects to save roughly $600 million.

While the company plans to reinvest its savings back into its business, some of the cost cuts will flow to the bottom line this year in order to stabilize its operating margin.

Macy’s said its focus will be on growing its off-price business, known as Backstage, expanding outside of the mall and improving its online business.

Earlier Tuesday, Macy’s had confirmed with CNBC that it was closing its tech offices in San Francisco, consolidating these operations in New York and Atlanta.

As it also shuts its headquarters in downtown Cincinnati, and an office in Lorain, Ohio, the company said New York will become its sole corporate headquarters. It also is closing its Tempe, Arizona, customer contact center.

Macy’s said the 125 stores now planned for closure, which include the roughly 30 it already announced, account for roughly $1.4 billion in annual sales.

Meantime, Macy’s said it is planning to open an additional 50 Backstage stores within its existing department stores, along with seven freestanding Backstage locations, in 2020.

The roughly 2,000 jobs being cut represent about 9% of its corporate workforce, Macy’s said.

Macy’s said it expects the total costs related to these changes to amount to between $450 million and $490 million, the majority of which will be recorded in 2019.

‘A transition year’

Macy’s is calling 2020 a “transition year” and says it expects same-store sales to be negative, “due to the trajectory of the business over the past six months.”

Macy’s said Tuesday it expects revenues in fiscal 2020 to fall because of store closures. It is calling for net sales to be within a range of $23.6 billion to $23.9 billion, with same-store sales, on an owned plus licensed basis, dropping 1.5% to 2.5%. Analysts had been calling for net sales of $24.36 billion, according to a poll by Refinitiv.

While it hasn’t yet reported fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for 2019, Macy’s shared preliminary results ahead of its investor meeting.

Net sales for the fourth quarter, which includes the latest holiday season, are expected to be $8.3 billion, while net sales for fiscal 2019 are expected to be $24.5 billion, Macy’s said. It added it anticipates full-year earnings per share to be near the high-end of a prior outlook, of $2.57 to $2.77.

Same-store sales, on an owned plus licensed basis, are expected to drop 0.5% during the fourth quarter, and drop 0.7% for fiscal 2019, Macy’s said.

Macy’s is set to report fourth-quarter and full-year sales and earnings on Feb. 25.

“We will focus our resources on the healthy parts of our business, directly address the unhealthy parts of the business and explore new revenue streams,” Gennette said. “Over the past three years, we have shown we can grow the top-line; however, we have significant work to do to improve the bottom-line.”

Used in virtually all of the world’s languages, parentese is a speaking style that draws baby’s attention. Parents adopt its simple grammar and words, plus its exaggerated sounds, almost without thinking about it.

But if parents knew the way they speak could help baby learn, would they alter their speech?

A new study from the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, at the University of Washington suggests they would, to baby’s benefit. Researchers examined how parent coaching about the value of parentese affected adults’ use of it with their own infants, and demonstrated that increases in the use of parentese enhanced children’s later language skills.

The study, published online Feb. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that parents who participated in individual coaching sessions used parentese more often than control-group parents who were not coached, and that coaching produced more parent-child “conversational turns” and increased the child’s language skills months later.

“We’ve known for some time that the use of parentese is associated with improved language outcomes,” said Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS co-director and professor of speech and hearing sciences at the UW. “But we didn’t know why. We believe parentese makes language learning easier because of its simpler linguistic structure and exaggerated sounds. But this new work suggests a more fundamental reason.

“We now think parentese works because it’s a social hook for the baby brain — its high pitch and slower tempo are socially engaging and invite the baby to respond.”

Parentese is not what is often called “baby talk,” which is generally a mash-up of silly sounds and nonsense words. Instead, it is fully grammatical speech that involves real words, elongated vowels and exaggerated tones of voice. Spoken directly to the child, it sounds happy and engaged, and helps infants tune in socially to their parents and respond, even if only through babbling.

In a 2018 study, I-LABS researchers tracked use of parentese among adults and their 6-month-old infants, and found that babies whose parents participated in parentese coaching sessions babbled more and produced more words by age 14 months than infants whose parents were not directed in the technique.

The new study focuses on the long-term outcomes of parent coaching and how it led to changes in the parents’ language, in parent-child conversation, and eventually, in the child’s speech at 18 months.

“We had no idea that parents would respond so positively to information about how their own speech to the child affects the child’s language development. Parent coaching gave parents a measurement tool, almost like a Fitbit for parentese, and it worked,” said lead author Naja Ferjan Ramírez, a UW assistant professor of linguistics.

To assess child language output, all families in the study were given a lightweight recorder, which the child wore in a specially designed vest during four separate weekends at ages 6, 10, 14 and 18 months. The device recorded both parent and infant speech over the entirety of two consecutive days, so that researchers could measure parents’ use of parentese, parent-child conversational turns, as well as infant language production — either babbling or actual words. Parent coaching sessions occurred at 6, 10 and 14 months.

For the 48 families randomly assigned to receive coaching, the sessions provided guidance and feedback on specific communication strategies, such as using parentese, speaking directly to the child and engaging the child in back-and-forth exchanges known as conversational turns. In reviewing recordings with parents, researchers played back recordings of parents’ language behaviors and measured them against research-based targets for child language development. Parents were encouraged to include language as part of daily routines and were given language-interaction tips in the form of cards with “brain building” tips from Vroom, a program of the Bezos Family Foundation.

All parents in the study already used parentese at the beginning of the project, but their use varied greatly, the researchers said. Those in the coaching group learned more about the cognitive and social benefits of parentese, when and how to use it to promote interaction with their child, and the positive effects that parentese could have on their child’s language development.

The results show that parent coaching resulted in an increased use of parentese and infant vocalizations that continued to grow after the end of the parent coaching sessions. Between 14- and 18-months, coached families showed a drastic jump in conversational turn-taking and child vocalizations. Children of coached parents produced real words — such as “banana” or “milk” — at almost twice the frequency of children whose parents were in the control group. Parent surveys estimated that the children’s 18-month vocabulary averaged around 100 words among children of coached families, compared to 60 words among children in the control group.

“We know that language skills in infancy predict subsequent stages in language development, so enhancements in language behaviors in infancy could therefore have cascading effects on speech development over time,” said Ferjan Ramírez.

Kuhl added, “Language evolved to facilitate the social communication skills that are essential for survival of the species. In this study, we observe firsthand how parents’ language and social engagement can promote baby’s initial responsive coos, which become words, and then sentences — educating infants in the art of human communication.”

The study was funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and UW I-LABS Ready Mind Project. Sarah Roseberry Lytle, outreach and education director at I-LABS, was a co-author.

A study by British and American scientists revealed that a massive sheet of ice known as the “doomsday glacier” is melting faster than experts previously believed—edging the world closer to a possible sea-level rise of more than 10 feet.

Researchers at New York University and the British Antarctic Survey drilled through nearly 2,000 feet of ice in the Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica, to measure temperatures at the 75-mile wide ice sheet’s “grounding line,” where the ice meets the ocean.

The water just beneath the ice was found to be 32º Fahrenheit—more than 2º above freezing temperature in the Antarctic region.

The findings have “huge implications for global sea level rise,” NYU scientist David Holland said in a statement.

350.org co-founder and author Bill McKibben was among the climate action campaigners who expressed alarm over the new study.

“Oh, damn,” McKibben wrote on social media.

The researchers expressed concern that the water beneath the glacier could be even warmer in other areas.

Scientists refer to Thwaites as the “doomsday glacier” due to the dire implications its rapid melting could have for the planet. Though a 10-foot sea-level rise would likely take years, the melting of the glacier could eventually mean the U.S. would lose 28,800 square miles of coastal land—pushing 12.3 million people currently living in those areas out of their homes.

“Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change,” Holland said.

The Thwaites glacier has lost 600 billion tons of ice over the past several decades, accelerating to as many as 50 billion tons per year in recent years.

“There is very warm water there, and clearly, it could not have been there forever, or the glacier could not be there,” Holland told the Washington Post of the recent findings, suggesting the water has gotten warmer recently.

Scientists are especially concerned about the Thwaites because its configuration is an example of “marine ice sheet instability.”

As Chris Mooney wrote at the Post:

Thwaites gets deeper and thicker from its oceanfront region back into its interior in the heart of West Antarctica. This is known to be an unstable configuration for a glacier, because as the ocean continues to eat away at its base, the glacier becomes thicker, so more ice is exposed to the ocean. In turn, that ice flows outward faster.

BBC released a short video detailing the scientists’ journey to the Thwaites glacier and their findings.

“The ice rises almost a mile from the sea bed and it’s collapsing into the sea at two miles a year,” the narration explains. “If Thwaites melts, it will increase sea levels worldwide by half a meter. But it sits in the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet and there’s three meters more of sea level rise locked up in there.”

“That is really, really bad,” Holland told the Post of the most recent discovery. “That’s not a sustainable situation for that glacier.”

Ryanair (RYA.I) may have to push back its long-term target of flying 200 million passengers per year by as much as two years due to delays in the delivery of Boeing’s (BA.N) 737 MAX jet, Europe’s largest low-cost carrier said on Monday.

Ryanair, one of the biggest customers of the grounded jet, with 210 on order, hopes to have its first 55 jets flying by summer 2021, a year later than originally planned, with 50 more planes per year due for each of the following three summers.

But Chief Executive Michael O’Leary suggested Boeing’s delivery schedule could ultimately be up to two years late – meaning it may hit its long-term 200 million passenger target by March 2026 rather than March 2024.

“What is likely is they will push out that delivery profile with Boeing by at least 12 months,” O’Leary said in a pre-recorded video presentation in which he was asked about the impact of Boeing’s decision to temporarily halt the production of the MAX.

“At best that means we will have to roll forward our plans to fly 200 million passengers per year … by at least 12 months, possibly 24,” he said.

Chief Financial Officer Neil Sorahan, asked by Reuters if there was any risk to its plans to take delivery of 55 planes by next summer, said: “I don’t believe so, but we have been disappointed before.”

Boeing in January said it did not expect the MAX, which was grounded after two fatal crashes, to return to service until mid-2020.

Ryanair, which does not take deliveries during its summer peak of June-August, said on Monday it did not expect to receive the first MAX jets until September or October 2020.

It will take a maximum of eight planes per month, or around 50 deliveries per year, O’Leary said.

The 737 MAX, Boeing’s fastest-selling aircraft, was grounded in March after 346 people died in two crashes attributed to the plane’s anti-stall software.

The executives were speaking after Ryanair reported profit after tax of 88 million euros ($97.63 million) for the three months to the end of December, the third quarter of its financial year, with average fares up 9% and revenue for optional extras like pre-booked seating up 21%.

The release came weeks after Ryanair raised its profit forecast to between 950 million and 1.05 billion euros ($1.17 billion) for its financial year to the end of March, versus the 800 to 900 million euro range it forecast in November, citing a better-than-expected performance over Christmas and New Year.

Analysts said the delay of MAX deliveries has reduced capacity in Europe, pushing up fares.

“The performance was even stronger than we had forecast,” Liberum analyst Gerald Khoo said in a note.

Ryanair said the MAX delays had forced it to close a number of loss-making winter bases, leading to some crew redundancies in Spain, Germany and Sweden, but CFO Sorahan said the number of redundancies was very small.

During a November dig in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave National Park, paleontologists Rick Olson and Rick Toomey made a rare discovery.

They found a fossil of a shark head that was more than 300 million years old — an ancient species called Saivodus striatus that resembles the great white shark in size, according to the New York Post. The discovery marked the first time any presence of sharks had been documented in the area.

The National Park Service is not sharing the location within the cave that the shark fossils were found, as it has experienced fossil theft and vandalism in previous years, USA Today reported.

An Instagram account associated with Mammoth Cave National Park shared photos of the fossils.

Shark fossils, with the exception of teeth, are hard to find because shark skeletons are made of cartilage, which usually decomposes before it can be fossilized, Newsweek reported.

Since the discovery, some members of the original digging team, as well as other paleontologists, have returned to the site. According to CNET, they have found more than 100 additional fossil specimens.