As the sun set over his campsite one evening, author Douglas Preston silently congratulated himself on still being alive.

Preston had spent the last week in a remote jungle in Honduras. In that time, he and a team of researchers had wrestled a venomous snake, nearly drowned in quicksand, and been visited by hungry pumas on the prowl. He details the full experience in the new book "The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story."

All of this was part of an effort to learn about controversial 1,000-year-old ruins that appeared to be the remains of an ancient, legendary "lost city" that had been buried in the rain forest for 500 years. While there, Preston and the team uncovered more about the site, including a literal treasure trove of sacred objects that appeared to have been hurriedly gathered and hidden by the area's residents — before they hastily vanished.

"It was absolutely incredible the things we found," Preston told Business Insider. "We found an untouched city."

A flesh-eating parasite

But in the weeks after they returned from the jungle, Preston and several other members of his team began to develop some worrying symptoms. Some had trouble breathing; others developed skin sores; still others noticed it was harder than usual to swallow.

Concerned they may have contracted something during their time in Central America, Preston and his colleagues were sent to a specialty laboratory led by the National Institutes of Health. There, two-thirds of his team members were diagnosed with leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating, parasitic disease spread by the bite of an infected sandfly.

"We were very popular with the doctors," Preston said. "If you're gonna get a disease and you're a journalist, this is one of the best ones to get. It's so interesting."

One person's "interesting" may be another person's "terrifying" — if left untreated, leishmaniasis can have horrific consequences, and it has no cure.

"It’s a flesh-eating parasite," explained Preston. "And if it gets to your face, it eats away at the skin and it gets your nose and your lips first, and they fall off. Then it starts to eat away at the rest of your skin until you have an open sore where your face used to be. Eventually it eats away at the bones of your face, and there's essentially a hole there, and you die."

Fortunately, there are treatments for the disease— if you can afford them. These typically involve 6-8 hours of intravenous infusions daily, with highly toxic drugs designed to poison the parasite. The treatment typically takes about three weeks, but some people continue to need treatment depending on the progression of the disease. Initially, Preston and his team were all treated at the NIH lab, which Preston said he was "very impressed" by.

Preston was fortunate — he doesn't feel like the illness hasn't affected him too severely. But some of his colleagues have continued to need treatment. In those cases, the drugs simply weren't enough to tackle the parasite. And in the process of trying to kill it, the regimen essentially poisoned its human hosts as well. One person from Preston's trip now has severely damaged liver.

"One of our members is very ill," said Preston. "He will never be the same because of the treatment."

Though Preston responded better, he still regularly visits doctors to check in and keep an eye on any changes.

"It's a wait and see thing," he said.

Where leishmaniasis is found — and where it may spread

Leishmaniasis (of which there are several different forms) isn't seen too often in the United States — for now. It does exist in parts of 90 countries, most of which are in Central and South America, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In those areas, an estimated 900,000 to 1.3 million new cases of leishmaniasis occur each year, according to the World Health Organization. The disease kills 20,000 to 30,000 people annually.

Studiessuggest leishmaniasis is likely to spread. It's a "climate-sensitive" disease, meaning it's highly subject to changes brought about by human-induced global warming.

To help predict how climate change might affect the occurrence of diseases across the globe, researchers frequently create ecological models that combine what we know about trends in the climate with statistical analyses to create a picture of where different parasites or bacterias might flourish in a warmer world.

Right now, leishmaniasis is confined to a pretty limited range of areas in the US, which is one of the reasons it's so rare. But in the next few decades, as regional climates shift, the disease could flourish beyond its present confines. One study published recently in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases predicts exactly that.

"Even in the most optimistic scenario we found that twice as many individuals could be exposed to leishmaniasis in North America in 2080 compared to today," the researchers write.

Another ecological modeling study examined where sandflies (the insects that spread the leishmaniasis parasite) will live in a warmer world, and produced similarly worrying findings that suggest the insects' habitats will spread, increasing human exposure to the disease.

In other words, while the horrific disease Preston and his team caught is not a major health concern at present, it may become a much bigger deal in the coming decades.

"This is really important research that may be important to Americans in the near future," Preston said.

SEE ALSO: Archaeologists are fuming over the alleged discovery of a 'lost city' in the middle of the Honduran rain forest

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This tragic disease killed at least 20 million people 100 years ago — and we’re still at risk

Nintendo Switch, the new hot gaming console, was released on March 3. And it's out of stock at most major retailers.

If you were smart, you pre-ordered it and picked it up at a local store without a problem.

If you were like me, you did not think ahead. And now you have the hard task of hunting for one in a sea of sold-out stores.

I woke up Saturday morning, determined to get my hands on the Switch. It's been years since the last Zelda game came out, and I'm dying to play the new one.

At 10:45, I threw on a sweatshirt and hopped in my car. I traveled to Best Buys, Targets, GameStops and Toys R Us. After 5 hours, a half tank of gas, 20 phone calls, and 10 stores visits, I now have the Switch! 

In the spirit of its IPO this week, I documented my hours-long adventure on Snapchat.

Here's what it took to find a Nintendo Switch without pre-ordering the console.

My morning began in Jersey City, at a Target. Online, it said the store had some Nintendo Switch consoles in stock. Alas, this store did not. So my hunt continued.

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There was a Best Buy right around the corner from the Target. So I drove over and popped in. No Switches available there either.

The next stop was to a GameStop in a nearby mall. No luck there either.

“Billions,” which just started its second season in late February, is back and better than ever.

The Showtime drama series gives viewers a closer look at a hedge-fund manager who's making, well, billions. And it also follows the U.S. district attorney trying to out him for insider trading. Its primary focus is on the corruption of certain Wall Streeters, and the lengths attorneys will go to expose them. The writers take some of the storylines from real life. 

And in season two, they've introduced the first gender-nonconforming charcter on television, plus a timely legal storyline.

Here's everything you need to know about "Billions," the TV show Wall Street is obsessed with:

SEE ALSO: Hollywood stars who rejected their Oscars

It’s got a star-studded cast, with Damien Lewis and Paul Giamatti leading.

You probably remmeber Emmy winner Lewis as Brody from "Homeland." Giamatti is also an Emmy winner, and an Oscar nominee. 

Damien Lewis' character, Bobby Axelrod, is loosely based on a real-life Wall Street guy.

He's inspired by hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen of SAC Capital. In 2012, Cohen was involved in an insider-trading scandal.

On the show, Axelrod comes from a blue-collar backgorund, and was one of the few from his company to surive the terrorist attacks on September 11. While Axelrod gives to plenty of charities and has an excellent public persona, he uses insider trading and bribery to benefit the wealth of his firm.

You might also recognize Malin Akerman.

She plays Axelrod's wife. Back in 2009, she was Silk Spectre II in "Watchmen." And before joining "Billions," she starred on ABC's short-lived family comedy "Trophy Wife" opposite Bradley Whitford. She was also on Adult Swim's "Childrens Hospital."

Unless you own the rights to Marvel characters or you're a streaming giant with endless capital, the best way to make a buck in Hollywood these days is finding a niche but passionate audience for a particular subject, and make the content on the cheap.

Jason Blum and his company, Blumhouse Productions, have done just that, and now they're reaping the rewards.

Known for creating some of the most memorable horror franchises of the past decade, including "Paranormal Activity," "Insidious," and "The Purge," Blumhouse has performed at a profit level in 2017 that has major studios envious.

How 'Split' and 'Get Out' became shockingly huge hits

Jordan Peele's new directorial debut, the racially charged horror movie "Get Out," gave Blumhouse (and the company's frequent partner in its releases, Universal) its second No. 1 movie at the domestic box office this year when it made $30.5 million in its opening weekend — on a $4.5 million budget.

"Split," the second M. Night Shyamalan movie produced by Blumhouse (the first was 2015's "The Visit"), spent three straight weeks at the top of the box office after opening in late January, and it has earned over $195 million worldwide on a relatively tiny $9 million budget and brought some much-needed cachet back to the director once hailed for his blockbusters.

"Split" is, as of this writing, the second-highest-grossing movie of the year in the US, and "Get Out," despite being out for less than a week, is also in the top 10.

"Blumhouse has been the Pixar of horror distribution for some time now," Jeff Bock, the senior box-office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, told Business Insider. "Most horror films take forever to get out of the red — Blumhouse's are usually in the black opening weekend, if not opening day."

Despite the success, Blum doesn't get caught up in his own hype. When Business Insider brought up the $20 million projection for "Get Out" in an interview last week, he lowered the expectations.

"We're projecting high teens," he said.

And yes, he's happy about how his recent releases are doing, but he's the first to acknowledge that good fortune can be a fickle thing in Hollywood.

"I think the movie business is cyclical, and you have a few that work and a few that don't," Blum said. "For some reason they bunch up — I don't know why that is. That's the nature of the business, and it's a lot more fun when the movies are working."

But the truth is it's hard to find something at Blumhouse that's not working. Its genre titles have grossed over $2.2 billion to date (its first movie came out about a decade ago). That's all the more remarkable because the company works on a micro-budget model that shoots for the moon using a souped-up jet instead of a rocket ship.

Blumhouse generally keeps production budgets under $5 million (it goes up to about $10 million for sequels), and it almost never makes a distribution commitment for a project until it's completed and given a good once-over by Blum and his team. The company, with a staff of 45, has built an impressive catalog and fined-tuned development in a way that has nearly assured success across all of its titles.

What Blum learned from Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein

It's a by-the-bootstraps approach that was embedded into Blum early in his career. He was an executive in charge of acquisitions and coproductions for Miramax in the 1990s when it was owned by Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The company was at its zenith — owned by Disney and making blockbuster deals for movies out of Sundance while also producing Oscar winners left and right.

"They really taught me the movie business," Blum said of working with the Weinsteins, particularly Harvey. "There isn't a day that goes by when I don't think, 'What would Harvey do?' Not that I always do it. Sometimes I think, 'What would Harvey do? I'm going to do it differently.' I think if I got one thing from Harvey, it was to just keep busting down the door until you succeed. He really instilled that in me in a very profound way."

That was necessary when Blum went out on his own as an independent producer after leaving Miramax. He describes it as a low point in his career.

"I wanted to be an independent producer when I worked for Harvey," Blum said. "I did it for three or four years and I did not like it. I decided at that time I wanted to build a company, and it took 10 years to do it, but this is absolutely my dream. I do not miss my days of making one or two movies a year. I thought I would love it, and I didn't like anything about it."

Blumhouse Productions' first release was the forgettable 2006 romantic comedy "Griffin & Phoenix," but then Blum came across "Paranormal Activity," a found-footage horror movie made for $15,000 by a video game designer named Oren Peli. After it wowed audiences at a couple of film festivals in 2007, Blum got DreamWorks interested in the movie for remake rights, but he had another plan.

"I came onto the movie, I tried to sell it, everyone said it was a joke," Blum remembered. "But I knew anyone running a studio, if they saw the movie screened with an audience, would distribute the movie. My problem was I couldn't get anyone into a movie theater because I didn't have any clout — I was a nobody. The only thing I got was DreamWorks to agree to remake it, and of course we were never going to remake the movie, but I couldn't say that. So what I said was I will sell you the remake rights to the movie, but, and I put this in the contract: you guys set up and attend a test screening. And I said as long as you do that we'll sell the movie. And I said to Oren, 'I promise you you'll never remake the movie — you don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, it's never going to happen. But this is the only way I can get people who make a decision into a movie theater with people.' That's how we did it, and the rest is history."

The gamble worked. DreamWorks could not argue with the audience reaction and released Peli's original version in 2009. The movie went on to earn an astounding $193 million worldwide (it's one of the most profitable movies of all time, comparing budget to gross) and spawned five sequels.

Blumhouse's golden formula for movie success

Blum had found the formula to create a successful movie company: genre movies, made clever with up-and-coming directors, done with responsible spending.

"Insidious" and "Ouija" followed, and they too turned into profitable franchises. Then in 2014 the company signed a 10-year first-look deal with Universal, which has led to last year's hit "The Purge: Election Year" and the just-released, critically acclaimed "Get Out" — which marks Blumhouse's eighth movie to earn six times its budget on opening weekend — as well as "Split," which could lead to the company's most ambitious franchise yet.

"This is a transformative moment for Blumhouse," Blum put it bluntly. "I consider 'Split' a Blumhouse 2.0 — a new act in the company."

Though Blum would not comment on a sequel, Shyamalan has already hinted on Twitter that he's working on one (warning: spoilers ahead) that will focus on the surprise ending in "Split," which revealed that the James McAvoy character in the movie lives in the same cinematic universe as Bruce Willis' David Dunn from Shyamalan's 2000 movie, "Unbreakable." (Quite a feat seeing as "Unbreakable" is owned by Disney, which will most likely have to team with Blumhouse, along with Universal, on any sequel.)

Then there's the highly anticipated relaunch of the "Halloween" franchise, which Blumhouse is producing with the full support of the franchise's original creator, John Carpenter, who will be executive producing. Director David Gordon Green and actor Danny McBride joined the film, with Green directing and the two sharing screenwriting duties (the movie is set for release in October 2018, and McBride has hinted that it's a continuation of the first two movies in the franchise.)

Green and McBride aren't known for their horror chops, but as Blum showed with Peele's "Get Out," he thinks tweaking the preconceived notions of genres is a good thing.

"I think there's a real connection between scary and funny, and I think [Green and McBride] are incredibly talented," Blum said. "It's very shortsighted to think the only guy who is going to do a good horror movie is the guy who has done a good horror movie before. I think what 'Halloween' needs is an injection of different and present and edgy, and I think those guys are as good as anybody at delivering that."

In an industry that, according to Blum, doesn't change by the day but "by the minute," he believes the only way to survive is by taking calculated risks. He sees the success of "Get Out" as the perfect example of what Blumhouse does best, and it's miles away from the major studios' thinking.

"Jordan's script had been around for quite some time — no one wanted to make it, and I understand why: It's bananas," Blum said. "We did it because I read the script and I thought it would be amazing. If you make something on a respectable budget, you can make weird stuff. Did I know it would be a hit? I had no idea. But I loved how weird it was.

"At studios, filmmakers have to come into a room with comparisons. I don't want that," he continued. "If you can compare it to something, it's less interesting to me. The most excited I get is when someone says, 'I just read something and I've never read anything like it before.'"

SEE ALSO: One photo sums up the baffled audience reaction to the big Oscars best picture screw-up

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Audiences came in droves over the weekend to see Hugh Jackman's final, and most dramatic, performance as Wolverine in "Logan."

The movie took in an estimated $85.3 million, according to Exhibitor Relations, setting the record for the biggest-ever R-rated opening weekend at the box office in March. The movie, a 20th Century Fox release, passes previous record-holder, "300," which opened at $70.8 million back in 2007.

With a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics gushed over the seriousness and long-awaited violence that suited the comic character. After the movie took in a hefty $33.1 million on Friday (plus $9.5 million in Thursday preview receipts), the movie then earned $31.2 million on Saturday — only a minuscule 6% dip in sales.

The $85.3 million weekend total is the 5th highest opening all-time for an R-rated movie, jumping over the 2015 release, "Fifty Shades of Grey" ($85.1 million).

Coming in second place is the Jordan Peele horror "Get Out," which followed its big $33 million opening weekend last week with a $26.1 million second week. That's just a 26% drop, an incredible hold for any movie, but even more so for a horror, which usually flatline after opening weekend. 

"Get Out," released by Universal and produced by horror titan Blumhouse Productions, has earned close to $80 million to date in its theatrical run on a $4.5 million production budget.

SEE ALSO: Why critics are calling 'Logan' the 'best superhero movie ever'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Netflix and Marvel just dropped the first 'Iron Fist' trailer — and it looks incredible

If you were an '80s or '90s kid, you probably have fond memories of school days playing "The Oregon Trail," the pioneering (har har) educational video game about America's westward migration. 

At a talk at this week's Game Developer Conference, "Oregon Trail" co-creator Don Rawitsch took the stage to discuss the history of the game, the sheer impact it's had on entire generations of kids, and how it almost didn't happen at all.

Circa late 1971, Rawitsch was a student teacher in Minneapolis, and given two weeks by the school administration to prepare a unit on the Manifest Destiny era of American history. Figuring a game would engage the students better than any textbook, he set to work designing a board game with dice and spinners.

His roommates Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, more mathematically minded, noted that this school was one of the very few at that point to have a room-sized mainframe machine available for student usage, and suggested that maybe "it would be a lot better on a computer." 

The three men worked around the clock for two weeks, delivering version 1.0 of "Oregon Trail" just in time for the unit to start. And it was an immediate smash hit, he says, with the kids "mesmerized" and other teachers inventing "flimsy excuses" why their students should get to play it, too. 

At the end of the semester, Rawitsch's student teaching gig came to a close, and so he deleted "Oregon Trail" from the school's computers before he went — but not before the three men printed copies of the game's source code, in a series of long printouts that he calls "the sacred scrolls of 'The Oregon Trail.'" 

Legend of the scrolls

Fast forward to 1974, and Rawitsch ended up working for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), a company providing software and computer services to schools. He figured it was the perfect opportunity to revive "Oregon Trail" and bring it to a broader audience.

But remember, at this point, "Oregon Trail" literally only existed as those "sacred scrolls." And so, Rawitsch says, "on one long weekend, I typed in 800 lines of code from my kitchen at home to put 'The Oregon Trail' back up on a computer.”

The rest is history: It became the most popular piece of educational software in Minnesota, and soon, the country, as Rawitsch worked to make the game more historically accurate, even while the MECC team helped update it for the fast-evolving PC market. The original mainframe version gave way to versions for the Apple II and more. 

At one point, Rawitsch says, "The Oregon Trail" accounted for one-third of MECC's revenue, standing out among the hundreds of pieces of software that the company published. It would sustain its popularity all the way through the mid-nineties, with millions of kids growing up with it in the classroom.

As a footnote, Rawitsch says that Bill Heinemann still has his "sacred scroll." And when his son (of unknown age) asked if, perhaps, he was old enough to take stewardship of the scroll, Heinemann had a simple answer: "No."

Historical footnotes

It's too much to go into the full depth of Rawitsch's talk, but here are a few extra highlights:

• The original version of "The Oregon Trail" was accessed through a Teletype machine, which is kind of a computer without a screen. The only sound effect they had access to was a bicycle bell, and hunting was accomplished by typing BANG or POW or KABAM as fast as you could with no typos.
• He once met with the creator of "Organ Trail," a very popular zombie-themed parody of "Oregon Trail." “I met the young man that made this game. They’re sane," he says with a smile.
• Dysentery, the dread disease that so terrified "Oregon Trail" players that it became a meme decades later, wasn't added to the game by the original developers. That was a contribution by the Apple II team.
• He says that he's impressed by "Minecraft," Microsoft's international brick-building phenomenon. It came out of nowhere to become something that's increasingly popular in classrooms, Rawitsch says. "That was surprising to me."

And finally, the life lessons that Rawitsch says he's learned from "The Oregon Trail:"

SEE ALSO: There was one big thing missing from The Oregon Trail, according to the game's co-creator

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NOW WATCH: This 2,000-year-old killer fungus in Oregon is the world's largest living organism

Investors are going crazy for Snapchat parent company Snap, and the stock is up more than 50% since its Thursday IPO, with a market cap of more than $30 billion. 

But Snap is still losing a ton of money — to the tune of $514 million in 2016.

So how is Snap telling its investors it can make money, eventually?

Indications are that Snap doesn't expect to gain the gargantuan scale of Facebook, but rather create a premium product to wring out more money per user.

One big way Snap thinks it can do this is by grabbing TV ad budgets, a shared goal with digital giants like YouTube and Facebook. This money has been slow to move from TV to digital video, but Snap thinks it's in the best position when that accelerates.

That's because Snap considers Snapchat ads already superior to those on television, and way better ads than other digital video competitors, according to the Snap S-1 filing. We previously looked at Snap's argument for why that is, and in the wake of the IPO frenzy, it's a good time to revisit it.

The competition is lacking

In the S-1 filing, Snap tells the story of how it set out to create an "engaging, creative, and fun" ad format for its mobile app.

First, Snap looked at its digital-video competitors and concluded that the existing video ad options were horrible. Here's how the company described it:

"Two of the most popular forms of digital video advertising at the time were pre-roll horizontal video advertisements and in-feed horizontal video advertisements. Pre-roll advertisements played before the content that a user wanted to watch, leaving users feeling like they had been blocked by an advertisement and frustrated that they had to wait to see what they had selected to watch. In-feed advertisements were less obstructive, but they weren't full screen and users often scrolled right past them — just like a banner advertisement on a website."

So the two dominant forms were lacking, according to Snap. But the company found some light in TV ads, which its community of users enjoyed the most "because it was part of the experience, especially when the advertisements were funny, creative, and entertaining" — which sounds suspiciously similar to the ad product Snap wanted to create.

TV, but for teens

TV is where Snap saw an opening.

The demographic that loves Snapchat is also the demographic that is watching less TV, according to Snap — so if the company could recreate TV ads on mobile, it could score big.

"We wanted to figure out how to capture the entertainment and creativity of television advertisements," Snap wrote.

However, Snap made a few changes from TV ads. First, the ads were "vertical video," meant to be viewed when holding your phone vertically. Second, they were skippable to give users the choice of whether to watch them. (To be fair, YouTube pioneered skippable online video ads years ago with its TrueView ad format.)

Like TV, Snapchat showed ads only when users chose to watch a series of videos with sound — a "Story." Ads appeared amid the videos, except in Snapchat you could skip them.

Snap declared its ad product, with this formula, "as good as television."

Swiping and targeting

But Snap wanted to make its ads better than TV by "using some of the unique features of smartphones and Snapchat." 

In the S-1, Snap went over the two main ways it thinks its ads improved on the TV experience:

• Swiping up. "For example, a user who views a Snap ad about a new product can swipe up on the Snap ad to buy the product instantly from the advertiser's website without leaving the Snapchat application."
• Targeting. Snap takes context into account to serve up the ad most relevant to the user.

And there you have it: Snap's thesis for why Snapchat video ads are not only better than those in other mobile competitors, but also better than those on TV.

Hello, TV

There's a good reason Snap, in its S-1, compared its ads with TV ads.

TV ad budgets have been slow to follow video consumption on your smartphone, and there's still a huge pool of money floating around — over $70 billion in ad spending on TV in the US alone, according to eMarketer.

Snap thinks those TV ad dollars are ripe for the taking.

"Worldwide advertising spend is expected to grow from $652 billion in 2016 to $767 billion in 2020," Snap wrote. "The fastest-growing segment is mobile advertising, which is expected to grow nearly 3x from $66 billion in 2016 to $196 billion in 2020. We believe that one of the major factors driving this growth is the shift of people's attention from their televisions to their mobile phones."

If ad budgets move away from TV and toward mobile phones, it makes sense those new dollars would gravitate toward something that feels more like old-school TV. Snap's pitch is that its ads are like TV, only improved.

Advertisers aren't jumping on the Snap bandwagon just yet — the company's revenue in 2016 was $400 million, although Snap is still in the early stages of ramping up its video ad business.

And Snap certainly isn't the only tech company going for these budgets. Facebook's latest quarterly earnings call focused on how its video product was about to get better, specifically more "premium" and more episodic. Sound familiar?  

What remains to be seen is whether TV advertisers will buy it — either from Snap, Facebook, YouTube, or anyone trying to convince them that this is the generation of mobile products that finally make sense for them.

SEE ALSO: Here are the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook's plan to grab TV's ad money

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 details you may have missed in the 'Stranger Things' season 2 trailer

"Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" is a rare treat that comes along every decade or so — a game that moves the entire medium forward.

It's receiving near-universal praise from critics — reviews aggregation site Metacritic lists the game with a 98/100average score, based on 67 reviews. It's being hailed as a "new classic," and rightfully so: It's a tremendously good game. 

Beyond just being really good, "Breath of the Wild" is a truly difficult game. It's also wide open — you can go virtually anywhere in the massive open-world of Hyrule. And that combination of difficulty and openness means that you're likely to want some guidance as you venture into the wild. 

We've got just that guidance below, based on my own experience and that of many other reviewers across the world. Let's begin.

SEE ALSO: The first major game on Nintendo's new console is one of the best games I've played in years

REVIEW: Nintendo's new game console is a fast, competent piece of hardware without enough software

WARNING: THERE ARE MINOR SPOILERS BELOW FOR "THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD!" IF YOU DON'T WANT ANYTHING SPOILED, TURN BACK NOW!

You've set up your Switch — or maybe you just bought this game for the Wii U. Now what?

There's a lot to see in Hyrule, and you're more or less unequipped to go anywhere. You've got no weapons, no shields, no armor, and no food to help you survive. Figuring that stuff out on your own is the easy part. It's the little stuff that you'll need help with.

Ryan Murphy, the producer behind Emmy-winning series "American Horror Story" and "American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson," has a new television series, "Feud: Bette and Joan," which premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. on FX.

The eight-episode series gets into the juicy details of the notorious rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (played by Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, respectively) while shooting the 1962 hit horror film, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

And in doing so, the producers went to great lengths to make sure that the sets were as close to reality as possible.

Heading that huge task was production designer Judy Becker. A Hollywood veteran, Becker's most recent credits include critically acclaimed films "Joy" and "Carol."

"It's an interesting period to design for sure," Becker told reporters of her decision to take on the job during a recent visit to the "Feud" set in Los Angeles.

"It's always fun," she continued, "because we're doing different worlds and different characters. So this is like a Hollywood world and kind of over-the-top characters, and I haven't done that to this degree before. So, it was pretty appealing."

Becker uses all the tools and tricks available to her in order to re-create 1960s Hollywood, from online searches to hiring researchers, perusing prop houses, examining footage, visiting the actual sites, and tapping private collectors.

Here's an inside look at two Hollywood legends' lives from the set of "Feud: Bette and Joan":

SEE ALSO: FX is already renewing Ryan Murphy's new show 'Feud' for a second season about Charles and Diana

DON'T MISS: Watch the first trailer for FX's new show about one of Hollywood's most notorious feuds

Joan Crawford had very expensive, modern (for that time) Hollywood tastes.

"Joan lived in this very grand way, which was very fashionable in terms of design," Becker said of Crawford's home, which took two months to re-create. "She was really keeping up with the times."

"She was fashionable, Hollywood fashionable," she added.

Joan Crawford hired famed interior decorator William Haines to outfit her Brentwood-area, Los Angeles home in Hollywood splendor.

"Joan was very good friends with a well-known decorator of the time, William Haines, who started out as an actor and then became a pretty famous interior designer," Becker said.

Williams Haines' furniture would be "a fortune now" if you could find them.

Becker said that William Haines "designed all the furniture that's in the living room, the kind of tufted furniture. We made those for the show, but they're based on his designs, which cost a fortune now if you can find them."

Last week began with President Donald Trump receiving his highest approval ratings in office after addressing Congress on Tuesday, but it ended with his administration embroiled in another controversy when it was revealed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the election campaign but did not disclose he had done so during his confirmation hearing.

John Oliver dubbed the series of events "stupid Watergate" on Sunday night's episode of "Last Week Tonight."

"A potential scandal with all the intrigue of Watergate, except everyone involved is really bad at everything," Oliver said when defining the phrase.

And Oliver's new term seemed only to hold more water on Saturday, when Trump tweeted the accusation that his predecessor Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, a claim FBI Director James Comey has reportedly said is false.

Congress still says it will investigate Trump's claims, but there was something else Oliver noticed about Trump's latest controversial tweet.

"We are now at a point where the president is so busy hurling destabilizing conspiracy theories around we can't even pause to enjoy the fact that he misspelled the word 'tap,'" Oliver said, referring to a tweet in which Trump spelled the word as "tapp."

Watch the entire Oliver opening below.

SEE ALSO: Jordan Peele: Why Allison Williams is perfect for the "very important character" in "Get Out"

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NOW WATCH: Netflix and Marvel just dropped the first 'Iron Fist' trailer — and it looks incredible

I've been wary of Nintendo's new game console, the Switch, for quite some time.

On paper, there's a lot stacked against it:

• It's underpowered compared with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, both of which cost the same (or less, depending on the model).
• It has a paltry game library compared with the competition.
• Because of its lack of horsepower, major games released on multiple platforms (think: "Assassin's Creed," "Call of Duty," "Grand Theft Auto," etc.) won't ever come to the Switch.

Still, there's something kind of magical about actually using the Switch.

The gimmick of Nintendo's new console is simple: It's both a home console and portable device, with the same game experience at home on a TV or in your hand on the go. But that gimmick is transformative in practice.

Indulge me for a moment while I explain what this means in my daily life:

On Sunday evening, I played a few hours of "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" before dinner. I used the Switch Pro controller to play the game from my couch on my TV. Around 7 p.m., I paused the game and put the console into Sleep Mode (the equivalent of closing a laptop or turning off a tablet screen — "off," but not all the way). I ate dinner with my wife while watching season two of "The Great British Baking Show" and fell asleep a few hours later.

On Monday morning, I woke up, showered, and got ready for work. When it was time to leave my apartment, I grabbed my MacBook and the Nintendo Switch and threw them in my bag. While waiting for the F train, I took the Switch out of my bag and did some in-game errands I wanted to take care of (got that sweet black dye job on my armor).

The train arrived, and I tapped the power button on the top of the Switch, putting it into sleep mode again as I found a seat in the car. The subway left the station, and I started playing "Breath of the Wild" once more. A few moblin fights and one shrine later, I was at the 14th Street stop on the F train and, thus, near Business Insider's main office in Manhattan's Flatiron District.

I put the Switch to sleep once more and put it back in my bag.

I detail this not to brag about my thrilling morning routine, but to depict how the Switch has quickly, easily fit into my life.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. It's incredibly fast to turn the Switch on and off, which is meaningful in the living room and on the go. The faster I can get in and out of a game, the more likely I am to play it.
2. The gimmick of the Switch is legit. It really is as simple as sliding the console in and out of the dock (seen above). No caveats. It's genuinely impressive and seamless.
3. The biggest launch game on the Switch, "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," is an outrageously good game. I'm thinking about playing it right now while writing this (seriously).

There are problems with the Switch, no doubt. It's a far-from-perfect console, but its benefits far outweigh its problems. I wasn't expecting to like the Switch this much — I've outright said that you should wait to buy it until later this year, when there are more games and the system's online service lights up, and I stand by that — but here we are.

The Switch is far more delightful than I expected. I'm so, so glad to have been wrong.

REVIEW: Nintendo's new game console is a fast, competent piece of hardware without enough software

DON'T MISS: The first major game on Nintendo's new console is one of the best games I've played in years

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NOW WATCH: Here's the gorgeous trailer for 'Super Mario Odyssey' — the first Mario game for Nintendo Switch

Jay Z's entertainment company is adding startup investing to its repertoire. 

Roc Nation, which Jay Z founded along with Jay Brown in 2008, is launching a "startup platform" called Arrive to invest in early-stage startups and help those companies build their brands. 

New York-based venture capital firm Primary Venture Partners will be serving as a venture advisor to the fund and GlassBridge Asset Management will be providing "institutional and operational support."

There's no word yet on the size of the fund. 

The news that Jay Z — whose real name is Shawn Carter — and Brown were planning to launch a venture fund was originally reported by Axios' Dan Primack last month.

With Arrive, Roc Nation plans to offer a slew of startup services beyond capital investments, and there are further plans to launch a later-stage fund in the future. Roc Nation also plans to expand its "social impact investing" later this year. 

Carter has been investing in tech startups since at least 2012. Both Carter and Brown invested in Uber's Series B, according to Axios, and Carter has invested in three other startups: the high-tech-luggage maker Away, the nail-parlor company Julep, and the private-jet startup JetSmarter.

Carter is also the co-owner of the music-streaming service Tidal.

SEE ALSO: An 'Uber for private jets' startup just raised $20 million from Jay Z and the Saudi Royal Family

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NOW WATCH: Apple just released this beautiful drone video of its new 'spaceship' campus

On the heels of an Alabama drive-in theater boycotting the release of the live-action remake of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" because it features a gay character, over in Russia, a lawmaker is already pushing for a countrywide ban of the movie.

Russian news outlet Ria Novosti reports that State Duma deputy Vitaly Milon wrote a letter to culture minister Vladimir Medinsky urging that action be taken as the movie is a "blatant, shameless propaganda of sin and perverted sexual relationships," according to Time.

The ban would fall under a 2013 law that prohibits "gay propaganda" among minors.

The ministry has yet to make a ruling on the film.

"Beauty and the Beast" director Bill Condon revealed that Josh Gad's character LeFou, the comic sidekick to antagonist Gaston (Luke Evans), will be Disney's first-ever openly LGBTQ character.

The movie opens in the US on March 17. You can watch the latest trailer below.

SEE ALSO: 20 tips and tricks for conquering the fantastic and surprisingly challenging new "Zelda" game

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NOW WATCH: Netflix and Marvel just dropped the first 'Iron Fist' trailer — and it looks incredible

Hugh Jackman’s new Wolverine movie, “Logan,” is a certified hit, snagging a whopping $237.8 million in its opening weekend.

The R-rated “Logan” is pushing the emotional boundaries of what a blockbuster superhero movie can be, and it comes from veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, who has credits ranging from “Minority Report” to “Get Shorty.”

Though Frank has made classic movies for decades, and likely has a new one with “Logan,” he recently told Peter Kafka on the Recode Media podcast that the business has totally changed over the last few years.

“The economics are different, so the process is different,” Frank said. “Movies now cost a huge amount of money to market …  You may make a movie for $10 million, but if it’s a movie the studio cares about, they’re going to spend over $30 million to market it. So the marketing costs are huge. Marketing has become sort of the church for the business.”

Frank said that as marketing became more and more important, the business fundamentally changed. Where once the creative side of a movie studio would greenlight a movie, and then give it to the marketing folks when they were done, now the head of marketing is a big force in the room when deciding to make or kill a movie.

Another change Frank pointed to is that the foreign business has gone from being a small fraction of the overall business to the main event, in some cases.

The snake that eats its own tail

Frank acknowledged that while he used to rant that the marketing side didn’t know anything about making movies, it’s both amazing and scary that they are usually right about who will show up to see a movie.

But he cautioned that if a studio is too driven by marketing, they start to become formulaic, movies are over-tested, and everything is successful for a time.

“Then it becomes the snake that eats its own tail,” he said. There is a sameness that seeps into your brand.

Frank noted that the best experience he’s ever had creatively has been working with Netflix on an upcoming western miniseries.

SEE ALSO: This founder who sold a startup for $200 million wants to build the next ESPN out of smartphone footage

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NOW WATCH: KELLYANNE CONWAY: Feminism in the classic sense seems 'anti-male' and 'very pro-abortion'

If David Letterman could have held on for another year in late night, he would've had a really good time taking on President Donald Trump.

“If I still had a show, people would have to come and take me off the stage," Letterman told New York Magazine in a new interview. "‘Dave, that’s enough about Trump. We’ve run out of tape.’ It’s all I’d be talking about. I’d be exhausted."

In previous years, Letterman enjoyed having Trump on his show. They went toe-to-toe several times. In fact, Hillary Clinton used a clip from a 2012 "Late Show" interview— in which Letterman called out Trump for having his Macy's clothing line made in Asia — in one of her campaign commercials.

“I always regarded him as, if you’re going to have New York City, you gotta have a Donald Trump," the 69-year-old comedian said. "He was a joke of a wealthy guy. He’d sit down, and I would just start making fun of him. He never had any retort. He was big and doughy, and you could beat him up. He seemed to have a good time, and the audience loved it, and that was Donald Trump.”

But that was before Trump was elected to the presidency. Letterman says he's stopped finding the real-estate mogul funny in that capacity.

“I’m tired of people being bewildered about everything he says: ‘I can’t believe he said that.’ We gotta stop that and, instead, figure out ways to protect ourselves from him," Letterman said. "We know he’s crazy. We gotta take care of ourselves here now.”

When asked about Jimmy Fallon's interview with Trump during the election on NBC's "The Tonight Show," which observers criticized for its lack of tough questions, Letterman offered how he would have behaved in the situation.

"I don’t want to criticize Jimmy Fallon." he said, "but I can only tell you what I would have done in that situation: I would have gone to work on Trump."

And if Letterman had a chance to do just that, he already knows what he'd want to cover with the president.

"I would just start with a list: 'You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon [White House chief strategist] Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.' I think I would be in the position to give him a bit of a scolding and he would have to sit there and take it. Yeah, I would like an hour with Donald Trump, an hour and a half."

Read New York Magazine's entire interview with Letterman.

SEE ALSO: David Letterman: Donald Trump is a 'damaged human,' and I would have 'gone right after him'

DON'T MISS: Jimmy Fallon mocks his Donald Trump interview by gifting Hillary Clinton actual softballs

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NOW WATCH: A hacker explains why Trump using his old Android phone for Twitter could be a huge security threat

Shazam was one of the winners of the early app rush. Its app had a simple function — identifying what song is playing — that's led to 1 billion downloads on iOS and Android so far.

Now Shazam is teaching its users what its app can do beyond song identification. For the past year, the company has been integrating a new technology called augmented reality, which it calls "visual Shazam," a kind of trendy technology that uses the smartphone's camera to overlay computer graphics and games into reality. 

Now, users can scan "Shazam Codes"— similar to a QR code or Snapchat's "Snapcodes" — and unlock deals, games, or other experiences. The first partner is Beam Suntory, the parent company of Jim Beam. 

The new feature has even led Shazam to redesign its app, according to CEO Rich Riley. "We started cautiously, with the camera on the top right corner. Now we've moved it to front and center," Riley told Business Insider.

Soon, he says, "brands will say 'Shazam this'" on print ads and other handouts. The example that Riley showed Business Insider had Wyclef Jean pop out of an invite to a South by Southwest party. 

Post-song recognition 

The Shazam Code integration is part of the company's new revenue strategy. Last year, the company pivoted away from selling songs and toward advertising as its main source of sales, Riley said. That change helped the company achieve profitability last year, he said. 

It's not the only new project the company has taken on in the last year. Shazam integrated with Snapchat in December, allowing users to identify songs in Snaps and stories by pressing down on the screen. 

Riley is thrilled with the consumer reaction. "What is the opposite of troll? That's been the user reaction," he said while scrolling through his Twitter likes and finding genuinely surprised and delighted users. 

Shazam's software will also star in a television show airing on Fox this summer, Riley said. Actor and musician Jamie Foxx will star in "Beat Shazam," a Mark Burnett-produced reality show that has contestants trying to identify hit songs before the Shazam algorithm can.

These partnerships are one way for Shazam to continue expanding its reach and create additional revenue streams as it prepares for a possible IPO, which has been discussed in the past year. Riley dismisses that an IPO is imminent, pointing out that the company's profitability gives it the flexibility to build to a standalone IPO, but also means that it's not necessarily in a rush. 

Shazam might also make sense as an acquisition target for a big company looking for a foothold in music or advertising, Riley said.

SEE ALSO: Fox is making a game show based on an app that will test your song knowledge

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Spotify announced via Twitter that 50 million users now pay for a subscription, a 25% increases over the 40 million announced in September.

This marks the quickest amount of time Spotify has added 10 million paid users, in under six months. Although Spotify did not update total users, the last known figure was over 100 million, reported in June 2016. This could imply that Spotify is doing a better job convincing free users to sign up for premium tiers, which average $10 per month. Here’s how the 50 million compares to other streaming services:  

• Spotify is the clear leader in paid streaming music subscriptions. Spotify has over double the number of paid subscribers than it’s nearest competitor, Apple Music, which had 20 million subscribers as of December 2016. Meanwhile, Pandora has just over 4 million subscribers and Tidal comes in around 3 million, a figure open for debate. SoundCloud and iHeartRadio both have paid tiers less than a year old, and have not yet disclosed subscriber counts.  

This may also bode well for a 2017 IPO as investors like to see strong subscriber growth, but there are two different camps to the IPO-timing argument:

• IPO in 2017: Avoid unfavorable debt terms and piggy-back off Snap IPO. Spotify has very stringent debt terms that are tied to the timing of it’s IPO, and advocates for a “the-sooner-the-better” mentality. The company’s investors will increase their debt-to-equity discount by 2.5 percentage points for every six months that Spotify does not IPO, and the clock began ticking early this year. In addition, Spotify will have to pay higher interest rates on that debt the longer they stay private. Last, Snapchat’s successful IPO debut could suggest a favorable climate and investor appetite for tech offerings.

• IPO in 2018: Provide a roadmap to profitability by renegotiating with music labels. Spotify is unprofitable, and the company may be delaying their IPO until 2018 to improve its margins, according to TechCrunch. One way to do this is by renegotiating licensing agreements with labels to shift from a variable pricing model based on track plays, to a fixed model. Spotify may also leverage their impressive subscriber growth stats to renegotiate debt terms for more leeway on IPO timing. 

Either way, Spotify’s strong paid user metrics are music to their investor’s ears. 

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David Letterman attacked Donald Trump again in a new interview with New York Magazine. The former host of "The Late Show" previously criticized Trump during his campaign, calling him "a damaged human being," and "a person to be shunned." Now, the former late night host is going after Trump's inner circle, including Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon.

Join the conversation about this story »

The new Nintendo Switch game, "Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," is finally here, and it's incredible. But it's also tough. One pro tip is learning how to cook in the game — and learning some of the best, most powerful recipes — with all of the ingredients the game gives you.

When the monsters aren't trying — and succeeding, often! — to kill you, the elements remain persistent. "Breath of the Wild" is the kind of game where you could die from exposure.

Thankfully, there's a simple way to aid in your continued survival: cooking!

Just like the game's massive open world, there are near endless options for cooking in "Breath of the Wild." Some meals imbue Link with bonuses he'll need to survive. Trying to reach that shrine, but the region is too cold for Link to handle? Cook up spicy peppers to grant Link with "low-level cold resistance."

But that's just scratching the surface. There are countless dangers in Hyrule to overcome. So we're channeling our inner Julia Child: We've put together the 10 most important recipes for survival, whether you're trying to beat a tough boss or survive in a lightning storm.

SEE ALSO: 20 tips and tricks for conquering the fantastic and surprisingly challenging new 'Zelda' game

DON'T MISS: The first major game on Nintendo's new console is one of the best games I've played in years

Before you learn any useful recipes, you need to know how to cook: Find a fire with a cooking pot over it! These are all over the place, but you can find them most readily in towns or in moblin camps.

Of note: I found this cooking pot over a stack of wood, unlit. But don't despair if you find as much. By selecting a flint from your inventory, choosing to "hold" it, and then dropping it under the fire, you can restart the fire for cooking. After placing the flint, strike it with any metal weapon — like an ax or a sword — to start a fire.

After finding the cooking pot/fire, you can cook by opening the inventory and selecting Hold on up to five ingredients.

Then, exit the inventory screen and select Cook.

More than half a century after the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the members of a neighboring Central American society suddenly gathered their most sacred belongings, buried them in the center of town, and vanished.

"There's a big question about who these people were," best-selling author Douglas Preston, who visited the remnants of this city, told Business Insider."What happened to this civilization? Why did they abandon this city so suddenly?"

Preston was part of a research mission launched two years ago to explore the ruins of an allegedly lost civilization. He wrote about his recent trip through the Honduran jungle in the new book "The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story."

Some have claimed that the buried remnants correspond with an ancient, legendary "White City" — a town of extreme wealth that vanished some 600 years ago. Since the 1900s, rumors of this forgotten city had danced on the lips of explorers, aviators, and tourists excited by the prospect of uncovering hidden treasure. But no one knew much about the people who once lived there.

Even after some parts of an abandoned village, including remnants of plazas and pyramids, were uncovered in 2012 during first expedition to the area, anthropologists and archaeologists remained stumped.

"In the words of the leading Honduran archaeologist on our expedition, 'What we know about this culture is...nothing,'" said Preston.

Nevertheless, some intriguing theories have emerged. Researchers on the most recent trip found a cache of nearly 500 intricately-carved stone objects inside something Preston described as "a grave — not for a person but for a civilization."

The legend of the 'Lost City' and the discovery that sent archaeologists fuming

The 1,000-year-old ruins — whose timeline coincides with the legendary "White City" — were buried in the rain forest, in a round valley ringed by steep cliffs. Since a team of researchers uncovered them in 2012, they've been revisited by more research teams (including Preston's).

When news outlets picked up the story, most portrayed it as an ancient mystery that had finally been solved. National Geographic ran with the headline, "Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest." NPR announced, "Explorers Discover Ancient Lost City in Honduran Jungle."

There was one problem, though, according to researchers who signed a public letter condemning the news claims: The ruins were not the "lost city" of lore, and worse, they may never have been lost to begin with. The dissenting researchers (including University of Transylvania archaeologist Chris Begley, who has 20 years' experience in the region) said the National Geographic story exaggerated the findings and ignored the region's indigenous people. National Geographic responded to the letter by linking to a statement from the research team that says their story never claimed to have discovered the "lost city," but merely a lost city in the region.

The people who disappeared

Controversy notwithstanding, the teams of researchers and documentarians who visited the site in 2012 and 2015 came away riveted by what they'd seen. Preston and several other archaeologists maintain that they set foot on terrain that had remained untouched for half a century. And they say the clues these people left behind point to a tragic end.

"It's hard to believe that in the 21st century a lost city could still be discovered. But that's exactly what happened," he said. "People hadn’t touched foot there in 500 years. It's absolutely true."

Whoever populated the area deep in Honduras' Mosquitia Jungle did not leave many clues. The team that visited in 2012 was able to date the remains they uncovered to somewhere between 1000 A.D. and 1400 A.D. That places people in the region after the time of the Mayans, whose civilization stretched from southeastern Mexico across Guatemala and Belize and into the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador.

"They grew up near the Mayans, they took on the pyramids, they laid out their cities in a somewhat Mayan fashion but not quite," said Preston. "But it's very mysterious. There's so much we don't know."

What researchers do know is that whoever lived there disappeared suddenly. In addition to rough remnants of their pyramids and plazas, they left behind a series of intricate stone pieces, including what is thought to be part of a ceremonial seat featuring an effigy of a "were-jaguar". So far, researchers have identified nearly 500 of the stone pieces.

"At the base of a pyramid we discovered an enormous cache of beautiful stone sculptures," said Preston. "It appears the people brought their objects, carefully laid them to rest, and then walked out of the city."

Several archaeologists and anthropologists who were on Preston's research team believe the people were felled by disease.

"The evidence is very strong that that's what happened," Preston said. "These were diseases brought by Europeans, specifically smallpox and measles."

Ironically, it's unlikely that any Europeans ever reached this civilization — at least not in person. Instead, their diseases probably found the indigenous populations by way of trade. As goods exchanged hands, so did viruses. And some of these invaders were foreign illnesses against which the indigenous people had no defense.

"This is a fascinating example of how disease can run way ahead of physical contact," said Preston. "Even though this valley was never physically threatened by the Spanish, it may have been laid low and completely wiped out by their disease."

SEE ALSO: A best-selling author reveals what it was like to get a flesh-eating disease while exploring the Honduran jungle

DON'T MISS: Archaeologists are fuming over the alleged discovery of a 'lost city' in the middle of the Honduran rain forest

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NOW WATCH: Harvard researchers say they can bring the Woolly Mammoth back from extinction