Hydration is having a moment.
As wellness becomes a priority for consumers, electrolyte drinks are booming. Demand for sodas is dwindling. Instead, people are flocking to products designed to quench thirst and replenish nutrients.
Gatorade, PepsiCo’s OG sports drink, is now vying for cooler space alongside BodyArmor (from Coca-Cola) and Electrolit (owned by Keurig Dr. Pepper). A host of electrolyte powder packets are also competing for consumer attention.
They all promise an extra dose of electrolytes, key minerals like sodium and magnesium that maintain the body’s fluid balance and help the nerves function. We lose these nutrients when we sweat, and depleting them too much can risk symptoms of electrolyte imbalance ranging from mild headache to serious, even life-threatening seizures.
The problem is, many electrolyte drinks contain a surprising amount of sugar, sometimes as much as soda. Leading brands have as much as 36 grams of added sugar per bottle — the upper daily limit recommended for adults.
That can be helpful if you’re a pro athlete or practicing an endurance sport, since sugar is a quick way to top up your body’s glycogen stores, the key fuel source.
But most of us aren’t working out for hours at a time, and our typical diets are already loaded with added sugar, which can increase our risks of heart disease and cancer.
Here’s an alternative:
For a healthier option that also saves you some cash, you can make your own sports drink at home using sea salt to provide electrolytes.
Sports dietitian Angie Asche of Eleat Nutrition shared a recipe with Business Insider from her cookbook Fuel Your Body.
To make it, combine:
The fruit juice contributes added nutrients like vitamin C and potassium (another electrolyte) along with carbs for energy, at a fraction of the sugar in a typical sports drink. Coconut water provides other electrolytes like magnesium and calcium.
Depending on where you shop and if you buy in bulk, the ingredients cost just over a dollar per serving.
Asche recommends sticking to a hydration ratio of about three servings of water for every one serving of electrolyte drinks, depending on your activity level and how much you sweat.
Get ready to hear a lot about Jerome Powell.
Remarks from the Federal Reserve chair will likely demand market watchers’ attention this week as investors seek clarity over the central bank’s next interest-rate moves. Powell has been under pressure to produce rate cuts, but recent economic data has put officials in a tough position.
Traders also will be following earnings expected from major retailers, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ross Stores. Investors will watch for signs of tariff-driven inflation and fading consumer sentiment. Housing market data, Fed meeting minutes, and weekly jobless claims also could have an impact on markets this week.
The major U.S. indexes logged gains last week, with the Dow touching an intraday record on Friday.
Read to the bottom for our calendar of key events—and one more thing.
Attention will turn toward the American West this week. At the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Powell is expected to lead a lineup of speakers that includes central bankers, economists, and top officials.
Economists are seeing more likelihood that the Fed will cut interest rates at its next meeting as the central bank faces relentless pressure from President Donald Trump and other administration officials to lower borrowing costs when it next meets in September. The Fed hasn’t lowered rates since last December and now finds itself in a tough position, said BMO Senior Economist Jennifer Lee, with inflation ticking higher while the job market looks weaker than thought.
“Can’t imagine the pressure on Fed Chair Powell ahead of the Jackson Hole gathering,” Lee wrote in a recent blog post.
The minutes for the July meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee will provide a look into the Fed’s view of interest rates and the economy and could add insight about the actions of two committee members who split from their colleagues to vote in favor of a rate cut last month.
Housing market data and jobless claims also will be released this week.
As Trump’s tariffs begin to show some impact on inflation, earnings reports from large retailers will show if the import taxes are hitting their sales.
Walmart’s (WMT) scheduled report on Thursday comes after the retailer said it would look to price increases to help balance the costs of tariffs. Home Depot (HD) has said it was attempting to maintain its pricing structure, with investors getting more details on the hardware retailer with its report set for Tuesday.
Target’s (TGT) expected Wednesday report follows warnings in the prior quarter that sales may move lower than originally projected. Sales also seen softening for T.J. Maxx parent TJX (TJX), which said in the prior quarter that tariffs are expected to impact revenue figures. Other noteworthy retailers scheuled to report this week include home improvement chain Lowe’s (LOW) and discount retailer Ross Stores (ROST).
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Monday, Aug. 18
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Friday, Aug. 22
Social Security celebrates its 90th anniversary this month, but fewer Americans are confident in the program’s long-term financial stability. Investopedia’s Aaron McDade has more on the potential benefit reductions that the program faces.
This summer, Russia’s hackers put a new twist on the barrage of phishing emails sent to Ukrainians.
The hackers included an attachment containing an artificial intelligence program. If installed, it would automatically search the victims’ computers for sensitive files to send back to Moscow.
That campaign, detailed in July in technical reports from the Ukrainian government and several cybersecurity companies, is the first known instance of Russian intelligence being caught building malicious code with large language models (LLMs), the type of AI chatbots that have become ubiquitous in corporate culture.
Those Russian spies are not alone. In recent months, hackers of seemingly every stripe — cybercriminals, spies, researchers and corporate defenders alike — have started including AI tools into their work.
LLMs, like ChatGPT, are still error-prone. But they have become remarkably adept at processing language instructions and at translating plain language into computer code, or identifying and summarizing documents.
The technology has so far not revolutionized hacking by turning complete novices into experts, nor has it allowed would-be cyberterrorists to shut down the electric grid. But it’s making skilled hackers better and faster. Cybersecurity firms and researchers are using AI now, too — feeding into an escalating cat-and-mouse game between offensive hackers who find and exploit software flaws and the defenders who try to fix them first.
“It’s the beginning of the beginning. Maybe moving towards the middle of the beginning,” said Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security engineering.
In 2024, Adkins’ team started on a project to use Google’s LLM, Gemini, to hunt for important software vulnerabilities, or bugs, before criminal hackers could find them. Earlier this month, Adkins announced that her team had so far discovered at least 20 important overlooked bugs in commonly used software and alerted companies so they can fix them. That process is ongoing.
None of the vulnerabilities have been shocking or something only a machine could have discovered, she said. But the process is simply faster with an AI. “I haven’t seen anybody find something novel,” she said. “It’s just kind of doing what we already know how to do. But that will advance.”
Adam Meyers, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, said that not only is his company using AI to help people who think they’ve been hacked, he sees increasing evidence of its use from the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and criminal hackers that his company tracks.
“The more advanced adversaries are using it to their advantage,” he said. “We’re seeing more and more of it every single day,” he told NBC News.
The shift is only starting to catch up with hype that has permeated the cybersecurity and AI industries for years, especially since ChatGPT was introduced to the public in 2022. Those tools haven’t always proved effective, and some cybersecurity researchers have complained about would-be hackers falling for fake vulnerability findings generated with AI.
Scammers and social engineers — the people in hacking operations who pretend to be someone else, or who write convincing phishing emails — have been using LLMs to seem more convincing since at least 2024.
But using AI to directly hack targets is only just starting to actually take off, said Will Pearce, the CEO of DreadNode, one of a handful of new security companies that specialize in hacking using LLMs.
The reason, he said, is simple: The technology has finally started to catch up to expectations.
“The technology and the models are all really good at this point,” he said.
Less than two years ago, automated AI hacking tools would need significant tinkering to do their job properly, but they are now far more adept, Pearce told NBC News.
Another startup built to hack using AI, Xbow, made history in June by becoming the first AI to climb to the top of the HackerOne U.S. leaderboard, a live scoreboard of hackers around the world that since 2016 has kept tabs on the hackers identifying the most important vulnerabilities and giving them bragging rights. Last week, HackerOne added a new category for groups automating AI hacking tools to distinguish them from individual human researchers. Xbow still leads that.
Hackers and cybersecurity professionals have not settled whether AI will ultimately help attackers or defenders more. But at the moment, defense appears to be winning.
Alexei Bulazel, the senior cyber director at the White House National Security Council, said at a panel at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas last week that the trend will hold, at least as long as the U.S. holds most of the world’s most advanced tech companies.
“I very strongly believe that AI will be more advantageous for defenders than offense,” Bulazel said.
He noted that hackers finding extremely disruptive flaws in a major U.S. tech company is rare, and that criminals often break into computers by finding small, overlooked flaws in smaller companies that don’t have elite cybersecurity teams. AI is particularly helpful in discovering those bugs before criminals do, he said.
“The types of things that AI is better at — identifying vulnerabilities in a low cost, easy way — really democratizes access to vulnerability information,” Bulazel said.
That trend may not hold as the technology evolves, however. One reason is that there is so far no free-to-use automatic hacking tool, or penetration tester, that incorporates AI. Such tools are already widely available online, nominally as programs that test for flaws in practices used by criminal hackers.
If one incorporates an advanced LLM and it becomes freely available, it likely will mean open season on smaller companies’ programs, Google’s Adkins said.
“I think it’s also reasonable to assume that at some point someone will release [such a tool],” she said. “That’s the point at which I think it becomes a little dangerous.”
Meyers, of CrowdStrike, said that the rise of agentic AI — tools that conduct more complex tasks, like both writing and sending emails or executing code that programs — could prove a major cybersecurity risk.
“Agentic AI is really AI that can take action on your behalf, right? That will become the next insider threat, because, as organizations have these agentic AI deployed, they don’t have built-in guardrails to stop somebody from abusing it,” he said.
Bitcoin’s price consolidation that started a few days ago continues, as the asset seems stuck at the $118,000 level.
While most larger-cap alts have mimicked BTC’s underwhelming performance during the weekend, some, such as OKB, MNT, XMR, and LINK, have soared by double digits.
The business week started on the right foot for bitcoin as the bulls initiated a leg up that pushed it from $118,000 to just over $122,000 on Monday alone. Although the asset retraced in the following days, it went on the offensive hard on Wednesday and Thursday morning once again.
The culmination occurred in the early hours of August 14, when BTC skyrocketed past its July all-time high and set a new one at just over $124,500. Following this $5,000-$6,000 price pump in hours, though, came the almost inevitable correction that drove BTC down to $121,000.
The worst was yet to come later that day, after the release of the hot PPI data for July. Bitcoin reacted with an immediate price drop to under $118,000, dragging the altcoins with it. Since then, BTC has remained sideways at around $118,000 even though there was a big but disappointing meeting between the presidents of the US and Russia.
For now, its market cap stands still at $2.350 trillion, while its dominance over the alts is down to 57.6% on CG.
As the graph below will show, most larger-cap alts are with minor gains or losses over the past day. ETH, BNB, SOL, DOGE, HYPE, XLM, and SUI are slightly in the green, while XRP, ADA, and TRX have charted insignificant losses.
In contrast, LINK has soared by over 10% in the past day and now sits above $24. XMR and MNT have also charted similar gains, while OKB has stolen the show once again with a 17% surge that has driven it to over $120.
The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has added over $30 billion since yesterday and is up to $4.080 trillion on CG.
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Taipei, Aug. 17 (CNA) Though the government recently raised its 2025 GDP growth forecast to 4.45 percent due to stronger-than-expected AI-driven exports, economists warned that American tariffs and weak domestic consumption could hurt growth momentum in the coming months.
The United States imposed a baseline tariff of 20 percent on goods made in Taiwan that took effect on Aug. 7, higher than the 15 percent tariffs imposed on goods made in Japan and South Korea, raising concern over the tariff’s impact on Taiwan’s economy.
Gordon Sun (孫明德), director of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) Economic Forecasting Center, said U.S. tariff policy remained a major uncertainty for Taiwan’s economy, and the government needed to clearly assess its economic impact.
Sun felt, however, that Taiwan’s exports would remain stable in the coming months because 70 percent of its exports are ICT products, which he said were currently unaffected by the U.S. tariffs.
The other 30 percent are exports of products from non-tech industries, which have come under pressure, Sun said, but most of those exports tend to go to China and Southeast Asia, not the U.S., and therefore should not be too badly affected.
In addition, the government has also introduced support programs for exporters and subsidies for affected industries, which he described as “insurance” to soften the blow.
The bigger economic challenge for Taiwan in the coming months is domestic demand, Sun argued.
Retail sales fell 0.4 percent year-on-year in the first half, and 2.9 percent in June alone, he said, citing data from the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
He cited two reasons for weak consumption — uncertainty over the tariffs, which has delayed car purchases, and a cooling property market after government measures against speculation, which has hurt consumer confidence.
To boost confidence, the government must take more proactive measures, such as universal cash handouts to stimulate demand and monetary easing by the central bank, Sun said.
Dachrahn Wu (吳大任), director of the National Central University (NCU) Research Center for Taiwan Economic Development, warned that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy is aimed at forcing companies to invest and produce in the U.S.
That could squeeze domestic investment and drive high-paying jobs overseas, severely damaging Taiwan’s domestic demand, Wu said.
Reshaping supply chains
Chiou Jiunn-rong (邱俊榮), an economics professor at NCU, argued that businesses must be mentally prepared for a long struggle as tariffs have become the new normal, regardless of U.S. leadership.
He said Trump’s broader tariff war could restructure supply chains and alter global business cycles, slowing growth for years, and while subsidies could help affected industries in the short term, they risked leaving uncompetitive industries stagnant.
In the longer run, Taiwan needs to consolidate its strength in semiconductors and also reinforce sectors less exposed to tariffs, including applications, software and smart systems, to maintain competitiveness amid economic uncertainty, Chiou said.
The scholars’ comments came after the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) Department of Statistics on Friday sharply raised its 2025 GDP growth forecast from 3.1 percent in May to 4.45 percent.
It attributed the upward revision to a surge in exports and private investment driven by strong AI demand.
The DGBAS, however, revised the growth of private consumption down to 0.85 percent. Of the 4.45 percent projected gains in GDP, net external demand contributed 2.71 percentage points of that, while private consumption contributed only 0.4 percentage points, the DGBAS said.