There are few things more stressful than a road trip.

For hundreds or thousands of miles, you're stuck in a tiny space that may or may not have adequate air flow. 

Depending on the destination, you might end up in totally new territory, making your navigation tools more than simple luxuries.

And on the longest trips, there's the headache that comes from watching the needle on your gas tank steadily creep towards empty.

A few weeks back, Toyota let me borrow a new, ~$20,000 Corolla S for my road trip from the Bay Area to Southern California to attend the Coachella Music Festival.

I'll be honest, as someone who personally drives an older model of the car as part of my commute, I expected the worst: a bumpy ride in a tight space for ten longs hours each way.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was the car fun to drive, it was also incredibly comfortable — something that can't be said for most cars its size.

From the hills of Berkeley to the desert in Joshua Tree, the Corolla offered a smoother ride than most cars of its size that I've experienced.

It also managed to average about 34 miles per gallon for the trip, beating the combined 32 MPG estimate.

And it did it with more style than you'd expect from a compact sedan. Even covered in sand, the wheels Toyota put on the Corolla S are way better looking than the what you'd normally get on a car like this.

We've all heard the stories about how hot the San Francisco real estate market has grown, but a recent sale in the city's ritzy Pacific Heights neighborhood really drives the point home. 

According to SFGate, this two-bedroom home just sold for $3.4 million, roughly 70% higher than its $1.995 million asking price. Six offers were received, all over the asking price, and the home was sold within a week of being listed. 

"People just fell in love," real estate agent Max Armour, who represented the sellers, said to SFGate. "That it went to where it went to was because it was competitive and love is a very strong catalyst in home buying."

The house was designed by noted Bay Area architect William Wurster in 1941, which certainly adds value to the property. Still, you have to wonder what the home would have sold for in a market that isn't as crazy as San Francisco's is right now. 

The home is located on Gough Street in Pacific Heights. It dates back to 1941.

A quaint garden welcomes you to the home.

Inside, a living room looks out onto a green backyard.

Finnish gaming company Supercell is a $3 billion company largely in part to the success of its game Clash of Clans. 

Clash of Clans and Hay Day are both among the top-ten grossing apps in the iTunes Store, according to AppData. Today, Clash of Clans still reigns supreme in the Apple App Store.

Back in October, Clash of Clans' projected revenue estimate was for a single day was $654,000, according to AppData. That same day, Hay Day had a projected revenue estimate of $413,000.

Overall in 2013, Supercell saw its revenue soar nearly nine-fold, with earnings of $464 million on $892 million in revenue.

Clash of Clans is a strategy game that is free to play, but some people end up paying hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases and upgrades. 

So it's no wonder why Clash of Clans is among the top 10 grossing apps in the iTunes Store, according to AppData.

So what's the appeal behind Clash of Clans?

Clash of Clans is the number two top-grossing iOS game, according to AppData.

In a single day, Clash of Clans brought in about $654,000, according to AppData.

Clash of Clans is a strategy game where players have to build and protect their respective villages.

Apple's App Store is dominated by free and cheap apps. 

But, there are more expensive options in the store, too.

And some are way more expensive.

Some of them show that the App Store can be a really big software market for a number of different industries.

Surprisingly, others are poorly designed gimmicks and don't justify the sky-high price.

Despite that, these apps show the long-term potential of iPhones and iPads to up-end lots and lots of markets. 

$99.99 — Sexy Finger Print Test HD

This gimmicky app lets you find out your "sexy score." It claims it can tell you the perfect time to meet members of the opposite sex, and says you should use it once a day to get results in 30 seconds.

Price:$99.99

$199.99 — G-Map U.S. West

G-Map is a voice-prompted turn-by-turn navigation system, and you don't need Wi-Fi or an internet connection to use it. It includes goodies such as 3-D view and text-to-speech, but with Google Maps and Apple Maps, there's no real reason to drop this much money on an app that does practically the same thing.

Price:$199.99

$219.99 — Water Globe

Water Globe is just a set of interactive screen toys. You can play around with globes and make them snow, change gravity, and snowflake size. We're not sure why anyone would pay more than $200 for this app, when you can probably get a real snow globe for way cheaper. 

Price:$219.99

Pinterest has become a popular tool for people looking to plan a vacation.

After introducing Place Pins less than six months ago, the photo-sharing network already has nearly one billion places pinned on more than 100,000 Place Boards. 

When Pinterest mined this data to find the places most frequently added to people's travel wish lists, it found that most of those destinations were in the U.S. and Canada.

But there were also some unexpected destinations, like a famous lagoon in Iceland and "The Most Magical Place on Earth."

10. Four Corners National Monument at the border of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico

Source: Pinterest

9. Brooklyn Bridge in New York City

Source: Pinterest

8. Yosemite National Park in central California

Source: Pinterest

YouTube can be a big moneymaker for anyone with a big idea, a camera, and some basic video editing skills. 

You may have heard of some of YouTube's biggest stars, like Bethany Mota, who's best known for her charming shopping videos, or Jenna Marbles, whose videos on life as a woman have millions of fans. 

But it turns out there are tons of people out there whose channels are getting millions of subscribers and views, even though most people have never even heard of them. 

They're raking in a lot of money from ad revenue, too. Video ad buying software company TubeMogul helped us crunch numbers to find out just how much each of these YouTube stars could be making each year. Even when you subtract Google's 45% cut, it's a lot of money.

These 10 stars are huge on YouTube, but you probably don't know them.

Classically trained pianist Valentina Lisitsa used YouTube to revive her music career.

The Ukrainian-born pianist started uploading videos of herself to YouTube six years ago when she hit a bump in her career. It wasn't long before she had millions of hits, a record deal, and sold-out shows.

Subscribers: 138,400

Views: 72,588,649

Estimated annual channel revenue**: $42,735

**Estimated annual channel revenue comes from TubeMogul, YouTube's flagship partner for buying video ads. 

Cassey Ho is an enthusiastic pilates instructor with millions of fans.

On Ho's channel, "Blogilates,"  you'll find intense pilates workouts set to upbeat pop music. She also keeps her blog filled with helpful recipes, workout calendars, and other forms of healthy living inspiration. 

Subscribers: 1,323,503

Views: 108,501,571

Estimated annual channel revenue**: $92,240 

**Estimated annual channel revenue comes from TubeMogul, YouTube's flagship partner for buying video ads. 

The guys of Dude Perfect do trick shots for a living.

Dude Perfect was born after five guys who met at a Bible study at Texas A&M uploaded 20 of their best trick shots to YouTube. Five years and 263 million views later, Dude Perfect is one of YouTube's most valuable brands. They've even come out with a book and their own iPhone game.

Subscribers: 2,594,299

Views: 263,464,428

Estimated annual channel revenue**: $175,039

**Estimated annual channel revenue comes from TubeMogul, YouTube's flagship partner for buying video ads. 

When you're a venture capitalist investing in startups, it takes about seven years to know if you're doing a good job or not. That's how long it generally takes for a startup to exit and for you to know if you made a great investment or put money into a major flop.

There are a bunch of 20-somethings in Silicon Valley who are helping source deals for their firms. They're taking board seats and being handed millions of dollars to find the best new companies around.

A few 20-somethings have left traditional firms and raised tens of millions of dollars for their own funds.

We rounded up a list of people who have already accomplished a lot in the Silicon Valley startup scene. If they keep at it, they could become the next Ron Conways, Fred Wilsons, and Bill Gurleys. Who'd we miss? Leave names in the comments.

Kanyi Maqubela

Age: 28

Title: Venture Partner, Collaborative Fund

Deals led and more info: Maqubela has recently worked on the following deals for Collaborative: Assembly, InVenture, Earnest, Walker & Company, Guild and Upstart

Richard Kerby

Age: 27

Title: Senior Associate, Venrock

Deals led and more info: Board Observer at BetterFinance, Burner, and 6Sense and worked on investments in Nest, Zenefits, and Trumaker.  At IVP where Kerby previously worked, he aided investments in Dropbox, Shazam, PopSugar, Yext, Buddy Media, AddThis, Fleetmatics and Klout.

Nikhil Basu Trivedi

Age: 25

Title: Associate, Shasta Ventures

Deals led and more info: Basu Trivedi co-sponsored investments in ClassDojo, Doctor on Demand, Jack Erwin, Swipely, and three that are not yet formally announced.

When the photographer Thomas Ball first heard of the supposed medical condition electrohypersensitivity, he was highly skeptical that people could actually be allergic to radiation from cellphones, WiFi systems, and other devices.

People who claim to suffer from electrohypersensitivity experience symptoms ranging from headaches to nausea to heart palpitations that they attribute to electromagnetic fields produced by new technology. This isn't a recognized medical condition, and some research suggests the symptoms are psychosomatic or due to a nocebo effect (meaning they are caused by either a psychological issue or negative expectations, rather than a physical illness).

Regardless of their cause, the symptoms these people experience are disruptive.

After reading more about the subject, Ball began working with a few organizations in the U.K. to find people who believe they have electrohypersensitivity. He eventually met Tim Hallam, who says he suffers from a particularly extreme case of EHS.

Hallam, who is 36, began experiencing symptoms 20 years ago that he identified two years ago as attributable to EHS . A graduate of Cambridge University, Hallam drives a van delivering food for a supermarket. He lives in a house with several flatmates and works shifts that allow him to be in the house when others are not, so their WiFi and cellphones don't affect him.

Hallam has insulated his room with metal foil to create a “Faraday cage,” which keeps out most types of electromagentic radiation. He sleeps in a metallic mesh sleeping bag embedded with silver to block out radiation. While Ball did not do scientific testing on the sleeping bag, he did find his cellphone lost its signal if he wrapped it in the mesh.

When Hallam created his “Faraday cage,” he photographed the process so he could share it with others on Electrosensitivity U.K, just one of many support groups dedicated to people who say they have EHS.

While the number of purported EHS sufferers in the world is relatively small (the World Health Organization found it to be roughly a few people per million), they’ve drummed up enough noise that scientists and medical researchers have conducted numerous studies on the subject. The results haven’t been encouraging for those who believe they have EHS. 

The majority of provocation studies, where participants are exposed to a substance to provoke a response, have found EHS sufferers can't predict the presence of electromagnetic fields with any more accuracy than those without the condition. In addition, studies have shown that symptoms were not correlated with electromagnetic field exposure, according to the World Health Organization.

Dr. James Rubin of King's College Institute of Psychiatry reviewed studies on the subject and concluded the condition is psychosomatic. While he didn't find any evidence that people faked their symptoms, he also found no uniformity in the type or severity of the symptoms.

Ball, who withholds judgement on whether EHS is legitimate, said those he interviewed suffered a wide range of symptoms. Some, according to Ball, have to live in the countryside to avoid feeling sick from the signals, while others live in the center of London comfortably. One schoolteacher he interviewed reported feeling sick the moment she stepped within range of a WiFi router, while many others reported that EHS comes on more gradually, like an allergic reaction.

Sufferers of EHS have challenged the legitimacy of the provocation studies. As most were jointly funded by telecom companies and the government, they say there is an inherent conflict of interest. One of Ball’s subjects, Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, told the Guardian that provocation studies don’t pay attention to the way that most people with EHS report being affected.

While many scientists are skeptical, there are some who believe electrohypersensitivity is a real condition. Dr. Andrew Marino, a professor at LSU Health Sciences Center, conducted a two-week study focusing on a single sufferer, testing which wavelengths affected her. The results, which have been published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, suggested that the condition “can occur as a bona fide environmentally neurological syndrome.”

More about Ball's project is available on his website here, or you can check out his short film on the subject below:

Electrosensitive: Outliers in a Wireless World - Extended Preview from Thomas Ball on Vimeo.

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Zuck is turning 30 today!

In honor of the Facebook founder's birthday, we decided to take a look back through Mark Zuckerberg's life in quotes. When "TheFacebook" was starting to bud, Zuckerberg was just a teenager. Eleven years later, the CEO is markedly more mature and collected.

It is officially time to say goodbye to those "30 under 30 lists."

"When I reflect on the last 10 years, one question I ask myself is: why were we the ones to build this? We were just students."

Zuckerberg posted this quote in an open letter on Facebook in February.

It's crazy to think back on the 19-year-old just starting up this novel idea called The Face Book.

"I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded."

Zuckerberg said this gem to ABC News' Diane Sawyer in 2010, explaining how The Social Network, the film that told the story of Facebook's early days, was far more exciting than the truth.

"I don't know why ... they 'trust me' ... dumb f---s."

Back when Zuckerberg was still more of a kid, he bragged to a friend over IM about all of the personal information he was collecting.

The messages surfaced in 2010 and did not help Facebook build trust with its users.

With globalization, climate change, and social and economical challenges, today’s world cities need to adapt like never before.

The IESE Business School in Spain is out with its annual Cities in Motion Index (ICIM), which ranks the world’s best ("smartest") cities — those that have the highest levels of innovation, sustainability, and quality of life. This year, Tokyo came in first with its impressive public management, technology, economy, and the ability to attract talent from all over the world.

To establish the ranking, researchers studied 135 cities across 55 countries, and based their results on over 50 indicators along 10 different dimensions including governance, public management, urban planning, technology, environment, international outreach, social cohesion, mobility and transportation, human capital (ability to attract talent), and economy. (You can read more about the categories and methodology here.)

Of the top 20 cities, 10 are European (London, Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Zürich, Basel, and Geneva), six are in the U.S. (New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Baltimore), three are in Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, and Osaka), and one is Oceanian (Sydney). Below is the full list of the top 20 cities:

1. Tokyo
2. London
3. New York
4. Zürich
5. Paris
6. Geneva
7. Basel
8. Osaka
9. Seoul
10. Oslo
11. Philadelphia
12. Los Angeles
13. Dallas
14. Copenhagen
15. Eindhoven
16. Amsterdam
17. Sydney
18. Stockholm
19. Chicago
20. Baltimore

Out of all 135 cities researched, Barcelona is the metropolis that made the best progress overall, moving from 63rd to 51st place in only two years, according to IESE. Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic ranked last, mostly due to low ratings in transportation, technology, human capital, and economy. 

After Santo Domingo, the bottom cities were mostly in Brazil, including Fortaleza (133), Recife (132), Brasilia (131), Belo Horizonte (129), Porto Alegre (128), and Salvador (127). Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, was ranked 134, La Paz, Bolivia, was ranked 130, and Caracas, Venezuela, was ranked 126 to round out the bottom 10 cities.

You can also see an interactive map of the cities in each country by going to the IESE Cities In Motion Index 2014 website.

SEE ALSO: The 25 Best Neighborhoods For Young People

DON'T FORGET: Follow Business Insider's Life on Facebook!

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"I think that because I am rich, handsome and a great player people are envious of me. I don't have any other explanation."

That's Cristiano Ronaldo talking about why people hate him.

While other soccer players date models and appear in underwear ads too, no one's lifestyle gets under the skin of soccer fans like Ronaldo's.

He's one of the biggest stars at the 2014 World Cup, and also one of the most polarizing.

He earned $44 million last year, making him the ninth highest-paid athlete on earth.

Source: Forbes

He recently signed a contract that'll pay him $23 million per year until 2018 — making him the world's highest-paid active player.

Source: Marca

He makes almost that much ($21 million annually) in off-field endorsements.

Source: Forbes

Success isn't always about being more talented, luckier, or working harder than everybody else. It can come from thinking a little differently about the way you do business.

This is a theme we've heard from some of the most successful people across industries — from entrepreneurs and executives to famous artists.

With this in mind, we've put together some of the most amazing insights we've found on how successful people think differently than everyone else.

Instead of leaving unproductive policies in place, they change them.

When Donna Morris joined Adobe in 2002 as a senior director of global talent management, she noticed that the annual performance-review process wasn't serving anybody in the company. 

"We fundamentally believed people were our most important asset," she tells Business Insider, "yet once a year we had a process that pitted person against person." 

So she soon abolished it. Goodbye annual performance review, hello regular check-in.

Reflecting on the experience, she says that "people should have the courage to disrupt a process that might no longer be providing the company with value."

Instead of just having a job, they have a craft.

If you spot popular talk-show host and comedian Bill Maher on a plane or in the back of a car, he'll be scribbling on a yellow notepad. This is his craft, he says, the incremental work of perfecting a joke. 

The craft is in "moving one word around, from the middle of the sentence to the end of the sentence," he says. "It's moving one joke that works pretty good over here, moving it behind this other joke, and now it's a giant laugh."

He compares his approach to comedy as that of making violins — a profession that takes decades to master.

Instead of trying to change everything about a company, they focus on one important factor that ripples out.

When Paul O'Neill became the CEO of aluminum manufacturing giant Alcoa, he stepped on stage before a crowd of Wall Streeters and decreed that the company would have a newly committed focus. Not on revenues or R&D but safety. 

"If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing," he said, "you need to look at our workplace safety figures."

O'Neill's emphasis didn't just increase safety; it changed the company. Over his tenure, Alcoa dropped from 1.86 lost workdays to injury per 100 workers to 0.2. A year after O'Neill's speech, profits hit a record high, and when he retired 13 years later, the company's annual net income was five times higher than when he started.

"I knew I had to transform Alcoa," he says. "But you can't order people to change. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company."

While climate change is affecting every corner of the planet in different ways, the most striking evidence of a warming world is often captured by images of shrinking glaciers and the widespread disappearance of snow and ice.

Scientists are most concerned about how the dramatic loss of Antarctic land ice contributes to global sea level rise.

Researchers reported on Monday that the West Antarctic ice sheet is now in a state of irreversible collapse and could raise sea levels by as much as 4 feet by the end of the century.

The rapid retreat of the West Antarctic ice sheet is anecdotal of climate change-related impacts on ice around the world. Most glaciers have thinned and retreated during the last century. Some of this change is the result of natural ice dynamics, but warmer water flowing up from the deep ocean speeds up the rate of melting.

The comparison images that follow show significant changes to glaciers that have occurred over times periods that range from months to decades. The photos were collected by NASA for their "State of Flux" series and generally document effects that are related to increasing temperatures.

Pine Island glacier is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in Antarctica. Scientists worry that this will have a major impact on sea level rise. A 2012 image shows a major break forming along the western edge of the glacier.

Source: NASA

The crack continued to widen over the next year and in November 2013 a chunk of ice six times the size of Manhattan finally broke off. These calving events happen about every five or six years but this iceberg was about 50% larger than previous ones in the area.

Source: NASA

A series of images shows the retreat of the terminus of Bear Glacier in southern Alaska between 1980 and 2011. As the glacier has melted, chunks of ice have broken off the main mass and formed icebergs in the water.

Source: NASA

Nearly one-third of the world's crops are dependent on honeybees for pollination, but over the last decade the insects have been dying at unprecedented rates both in the United States and abroad.

A new study strengths the evidence linking pesticides to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, but the decline of managed honeybee populations has also been blamed on a combination of disease, parasites, poor weather, and the stress of being trucked from orchard-to-orchard to pollinate different crops.

We have few planned defenses against a honeybee disaster. The Farm Bill passed last June allocates less than $2 million a year in emergency assistance to honeybees. 

"The bottom line is, if something is not done to improve honeybee health, then most of the interesting food we eat is going to be unavailable," warned Carlen Jupe, secretary and treasurer for the California State Beekeepers Association.

Honeybees as a species are not in danger of extinction, but their ability to support the industry of commercial pollination, and by extension, a large portion of our food supply, is in serious danger.

Here we take a hypothetical look at how the human diet and lifestyle would change if honeybees and other bee pollinators disappeared from our planet one day. A world without honeybees as a stable source of pollination would mean a world without fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. 

This is the worst case scenario. It's possible that human ingenuity and alternate pollinators can mitigate some of these outcomes, but not necessarily all of them.

If their cultivated bees continue to die out, beekeepers who make their living by managing bee colonies will go out of business.

Without commercial beekeepers, farmers will not be able to scrape together enough bees to pollinate their fields.

If the farmer does not provide fields or orchards with enough honeybees for pollination, the whole harvest can fail.

All 32 teams at the 2014 World Cup redesigned their uniforms for this summer's tournament.

Some teams with iconic kits (Brazil, Croatia) only made small tweaks, while others got radical overhauls (Mexico's lightning-bolt shirt).

Here are the home and away kits for 31 of the 32 teams. Bosnia-Herzegovina has (somehow) yet to release its uniform with a few weeks to go to the World Cup, but we'll update this post when they do.

Some of these are pretty great (Ghana's away kit rules), others are really bland (England).

Algeria, home (left) and away (right)

Argentina, home

Argentina, away

Once upon a time a corporate data center included software and hardware from a handful of big-name companies and no one else.

But there's a major revolution going on. Companies are shipping more and more apps into the cloud and they are revamping their own data centers to be faster, more efficient, using new forms of databases, building what is known as "private data centers."

The result is a wide-open door for startups offering fresh technology.

With that in mind, we sifted through the buzz to come up with this list of hot companies. They offer interesting technology, or they've attracted big funding, or they have amazing founders ... or they have all of the above.

Rex Computing: Low-power servers built by a child prodigy

Company: Rex Computing

Funding raised: Unknown, but Rex Computing's cofounder, Thomas Sohmers, is a member of Peter Thiel's startup accelerator, the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. The accelerator grants $100,000 to kids to skip college and focus on their work.

Why it's hot: At the age of 17, Sohmers dropped out of high school to start this company with cofounder Kurt Keville. The two of them built a very powerful computer server using low-power ARM chips, the kind that run tablets and smartphones. ARM servers are a huge future trend for the data center.

Rex's servers were also designed for Facebook's game-changing hardware project known as the Open Compute Project. OCP is a project where big companies like Facebook and Microsoft have shared their hardware designs and opened the door for startups like Rex to sell to them.

CloudGenix: Stealthy Cisco networking startup

Company: CloudGenix

Funding raised: $9 million from Charles River Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

Why it's hot: CloudGenix, founded in 2013, is still in super stealth mode. But we know that it's working on a new form of networking that will make it faster to share data between data centers and offices.

CEO founder Kumar Ramachandran is a 13-year Cisco veteran who previously worked with Cisco's wide-area networking products. Instead of competing with Cisco, his startups tech can be bolted on top of Cisco products, giving him a huge market of companies that want to keep their Cisco networking equipment while making it better.

Splice Machine: A new kind of Hadoop database

Company:Splice Machine

Funding raised: $19 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures, InterWest Partners.

Why it's hot: The 2-year-old Splice is trying to do what those in the know said couldn't be done: turn the popular big data storage technology, Hadoop, into a kind of database that competes directly with Oracle (in geek speak, a SQL RDBMS on Hadoop).

Hadoop was always billed as a new kind of big data technology that collected the kind of stuff that wouldn't be put in a traditional database (photos, tweets, documents). It was never intended to replace the traditional database that stores precise rows and columns of data.

But this month Splice releases software to turn Hadoop into a regular database, with 15 beta customers already trying it out, it said.

CEO cofounder Monte Zweben has a long history in the tech industry. He started at NASA working with artificial intelligence and the Space Shuttle. He also founded two pre-Internet bubble companies, Red Pepper Software and Blue Martini.

When the Oculus Rift made its Kickstarter debut in 2012, gamers were convinced that this could finally be the gadget that would make virtual reality take off.

Now, two years and a $2 billion acquisition later, the device is being used for much more than video games.

The Oculus Rift, created by Oculus VR, is a virtual reality  3-D headset that uses 360-degree head tracking to make it feel like you're inside a different world.

For example, looking to the left or right will automatically pan the scene in either direction, making it feel as natural as looking around in reality. The eyewear also provides  parallel images for each eye, which is the same way your eyes perceive images in the real world. 

The company already generated a ton of buzz after its Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded, but the startup really broke into the public eye when Facebook acquired it for $2 billion in March. 

Palmer Luckey, the 21-year-old Oculus VR founder, said that the Oculus Rift was made specifically for gaming when it was initially introduced. Today, however, people are using the  headset to drive tanks in the military and explore the human body, among other fascinating applications. 

To help a dying grandmother walk outside again

Roberta Firstenberg had been battling cancer in April when her granddaughter Priscilla used the Oculus Rift to ease her pain. Firstenberg loved being outside, especially gardening, but her condition restricted her from doing so. After writing a letter to Oculus VR relating the situation, the company sent Priscilla a developer version of the Rift, which allowed Firstenberg to roam around a Tuscan villa. 

To fly like a bird

A machine developed by the Zurich University of the Arts uses the Oculus Rift to create a realistic flying experience. The device, called Birdly, uses its motor to translate hand movements from a simulator into the flapping of virtual wings. The Oculus Rift headset provides a virtual bird's-eye view that makes it feel like you're actually soaring. 

To see through the eyes of a robot

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab created a device that would allow the user to see through the eyes of a robot avatar. The device also uses a Kinect to pick up the Oculus wearer's movements, while the goggles provide a first-person perspective from a remote robot's point of view. In the image above, a user is moving his arm while wearing the Oculus Rift to move the robot's arm. 

Tim Cook says that when Steve Jobs picked him to be CEO, Jobs said, “I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what’s right.” 

This is a great quote, and a great guiding principle, but is really true? 

For the most part, Apple today feels the same as it did when Jobs was alive and running the company. It still has, essentially, the same products at the same prices. It still has the same focus on, um, focus, and simplicity.

But below the surface, Cook has indeed followed Jobs' advice, and he has changed the company to fit his idea of what is right. We've assembled some of the biggest moves Cook has made as CEO to illustrate the changes. 

Apple is more charitable now.

One of Tim Cook’s first acts as CEO was to implement matching charitable donations from employees by Apple up to $10,000. In 2012, Cook said Apple gave $50 million to Stanford hospitals, and $50 million to Project Red. Apple also recently donated $500,000 to SF Gives, which is an anti-poverty initiative. This never happened under Jobs, who was regularly criticized for his lack of public philanthropy. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Cook explained his philosophy saying, "My own personal philosophy on giving is best stated in a [John F.] Kennedy quote, 'To whom much is given, much is expected.' I have always believed this."

Google Maps and YouTube were tossed from the iPhone as default apps.

Reportedly, Apple had another year with Google Maps, but decided to move early to break up with Google. Apple launched its own maps, and it didn’t go so well. Tim Cook had to apologize to consumers, and recommend other applications.

Apple introduced the iPad Mini, made the iPhone screen bigger, and is reportedly going to make the iPhone even bigger this fall.

These aren't huge changes, but the iPad Mini in particular is interesting because Steve Jobs once went on a rant about how small tablets are garbage. The iPad Mini is a little bigger than the typical 7-inch Android tablet, but it's still small compared with the bigger iPad. Apple was willing to ignore what Jobs said to expand its tablet line.

Alex Rodriguez was at the very top of our list of the 25 highest-paid baseball players in history but Derek Jeter was right behind him having made $265.2 million in his career.

While Jeter is a no-doubt Hall of Famer, he was also a bit lucky to end up making so much, and he'll retire this year with plenty of money for a very comfortable life.

Let's take a closer look at how Jeter was the right player in the right place at the right time and made more than a quarter of a billion dollars in his career.

Derek Jeter got lucky right off the bat when 5 smaller-market clubs passed on him in the 1992 draft, including Houston, Cleveland, Montreal, Baltimore, and Cincinnati.

Instead, Jeter was drafted by a team that loves to hand out big contracts. Of the 11 highest-paid players of all time, 8 played at least part of their career with the Yankees.

Jeter also got drafted at the perfect time, playing most of his career with the Yankees under the free-spending George Steinbrenner, but after Steinbrenner's suspension which allowed others to build a contender.

New York City has the highest paid babysitters in the nation.

A new report from babysitter booking site UrbanSitter found that in NYC, the average babysitting rate for one child was $15.34 an hour. That’s more than the national average for a babysitter, which is $14.97 per hour for one child, $17.12 for two children, and $18.27 for three children, according to UrbanSitter.

In Denver, which had the least expensive babysitters of the cities UrbanSitter looked at, sitters average $10.84 an hour for one child. 

This means babysitting can be pretty lucrative, especially compared to other hourly gigs, like those in fast food, where the average hourly wage is $8.69.

UrbanSitter also polled 7,500 families across the country on their babysitting needs. The site found that more than a quarter of parents hire a babysitter at least once a week, 70% tip their sitter, and almost half of spend more than $1,000 on babysitter each year. 

The map below shows the average babysitter prices for 10 major UrbanSitter markets, for one, two, and three children. 

SEE ALSO: The Best Fast Food In America

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