• Bridesmaids spend an average of $1,900 being part of a bridal party, according to The Knot.
• A 2019 study found a third of bridal party members went into debt to cover related expenses.
• One bridesmaid told The Cut she is spending $3,200 on her friend's wedding this summer.

It's not unheard of these days for a wedding to cost as much as a down payment on a home — but what about the people attending or standing up in the nuptials?

A study by The Knot found that wedding guests in 2023 spent an average of $580 to attend a wedding, while a 2019 study found a third of people who were part of a bridal party went into debt to cover all the related expenses.

According to data compiled by The Knot, the average amount spent on being a bridesmaid was $1,900, which included the costs of a bridal shower gift, the bachelorette party, the bridesmaid dress, wedding gift, and hair and makeup.

Three bridesmaids who say they are going into debt just to be part of their friends' weddings shared their stories with The Cut this week.

Deena, a 28-year-old manager at a nonprofit, told the outlet she's expecting to spend $3,200 to be a bridesmaid at the destination wedding of a college friend whose family is wealthy.

"I'm drowning aside from this wedding, too — I have $19,000 of other debt from student loans and credit cards and medical bills. If I spent everything that Ally wanted me to, I'd probably have to move," she said, referring to the bride.

Deena told The Cut the expenses included a $550 bridesmaid dress, $1,200 hotel stay, and flights that are unlikely to cost less than $380 — and that was just for the wedding.

When she learned the bachelorette party would be another $750 just for her share in the rental home, she told the organizer she couldn't afford it.

"Finally, we worked out a plan where I'm paying in increments. And everyone is treating me like a charity case who's also a bad friend and making everything difficult," she told The Cut.

Deena said she's getting shamed for not being able to afford everything, and that another bridesmaid even asked her, "What if you give up takeout for a month?"

The other two bridesmaid stories shared with the outlet were just as jarring. One said she spent $2,000 and put it on her credit card. The other said her total expenses for being in a friend's wedding were $6,000, or about 10% of her take-home pay.

"How much to spend on your own wedding is your business, of course," Charlotte Cowles, the financial advice columnist at The Cut, wrote. "But before you rope your dearest friends into your vision, maybe take a moment to consider what they can afford."

• Google Pay is a digital payment platform that uses your credit and debit cards to make purchases.
• You can use Google Pay with the Google Pay or Google Wallet app.
• Google Pay is safe, due to tokenized transactions and your phone's passcode and facial or touch ID.

Google Pay is Google's digital payment service that you can use to make mobile payments using your phone, watch or tablet. It's connected to your Google account and lets you securely use your existing credit cards to pay for purchases at stores or online. 

And while Google Pay is the name of the payment platform, you have a choice of which app you want to use to actually make mobile payments — Google Pay or Google Wallet. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Pay's redesign in 2020, saying the app made it "simpler to pay securely, organize finances, save money + more."

Here's everything you need to know about using Google Pay.   

Getting started with Google Pay

To get started with Google Pay, you need to install either the Google Pay or Google Wallet app. Android users should choose Google Wallet; it offers a lot of additional features, such as the ability to store ID cards, loyalty cards, event tickets and passes, transit cards, and more. Not unlike Apple Wallet on iOS devices, it's a convenient way to store almost anything you'd carry in a traditional wallet right within your mobile device. 

Google Pay, on the other hand, is focused exclusively on letting you make mobile payments. The Google Pay app is being discontinued on June 4, 2024, so you should probably just go directly to the more useful Google Wallet. That said, Google Wallet isn't yet available for iOS users. So for now, if you have an iPhone, you need to stick with the Google Pay app.

How to use Google Pay

After installing Google Pay or Google Wallet, you need to log into your Google account and then add one or more payment methods, like a credit or debit card. 

Once you've added at least one card to your Google Pay account, you can make mobile payments in stores. At the store's checkout, look for signs that the terminal accepts Google Pay or tap-to-pay credit cards. Then unlock your phone, hold it near the payment symbol, and wait for the confirmation that the payment has been made — you don't even have to start the app.  

If you have more than one payment method set up in Google Wallet, you can choose which one to use at checkout. To do that, start the app when you reach the checkout and swipe through the cards until you reach the one you want to use. Then hold the phone to the payment terminal as usual to complete the transaction. 

You can also use Google Pay to scan barcodes and QR codes — the app uses Google lens, and you can use it to look up price information or make an online payment.

You can also allow people to search and find you in Google Pay to pay you — and you, in turn, can search for people or businesses with a Google Business Profile.

Google Pay is free

The good news is that Google Pay is free to use. The Google Pay and Google Wallet apps are free to download, and there's no subscription or service fee to use the service to make mobile payments. 

Of course, that doesn't mean that purchases you make with Google Pay are completely free. Google Pay lets you make payments through your credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts, so if you would ordinarily pay interest or a fee when using a card, you'll still pay that fee when using it through Google Pay. You simply won't pay anything additional for the privilege of using Google Pay.

Google Pay is safe

Surprisingly, Google Pay is safer and more secure than using a credit card, and for a number of reasons. First and foremost: Google Pay purchases are tokenized, which means that the service sends your credit information using a unique code for each purchase. If the information could be intercepted, it would not be useful to a thief or hacker, because your credit card information isn't present. 

Perhaps even more important, though, is the physical security that Google Pay offers. If your actual credit card is lost or stolen, it can potentially be used to make purchases, at least until you notify the credit company and cancel the card. But when using Google Pay on your phone, your credit card information is protected behind a passcode or biometrics like facial recognition. 

The pros and cons of using Google Pay

One advantage of Google Pay is that it's integrated with a number of other popular Google products. For instance, Google Flights offers a price guarantee where Google will pay you the difference if the price of your flight drops after you book it — you just have to have a Google Pay account.

The bottom line is that there are both pros and cons to using Google Pay. Not only is Google Pay a safe and secure payment system, but it's broadly compatible with many retail stores — just look for the Google Pay or tap-to-pay symbol at checkout. And via the Google Wallet app, Google Pay does a lot more, letting you store transit cards and boarding passes, loyalty cards, and more all in one place. 

Even so, there are some disadvantages to Google Pay as well. As pervasive as Google Pay is at retailers, especially in large cities, it's far from ubiquitous. Especially in smaller locales and at independent stores, you might have trouble using Google Pay to make purchases. That means you still need to carry a physical credit card, at least as a backup, which can defeat the purpose of using Google Pay to begin with. 

With the forthcoming end of the Google Pay app, Google is also leaving Apple users out in the cold. That means Google Pay could be an Android-only service starting in June 2024, unless Google releases a Google Wallet app for the iPhone. 

• Grace Sun, a 16-year-old from Kentucky, won $75,000 for her research on biomedical devices.
• She took home the top prize at the ISEF — the "granddaddy of all science fairs."
• Her work on organic electronic devices aims to make medical implants safer and more effective.

Grace Sun can't drive yet. Unlike many 16-year-olds, getting her license hasn't been her top priority. Instead, she's been busy working on a project to revolutionize biomedicine.

The high schooler from Lexington, Kentucky, developed a new technique to improve organic electronic devices. The technology could someday make medical implants significantly more compatible with human bodies and far less invasive. It could also lead to new early-diagnosis tools for a wide variety of diseases.

On Friday she won $75,000 for her research.

"They called my name. I thought they got the wrong person. I was like, is there another Grace up here?" Sun told Business Insider backstage at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) awards ceremony.

Her hands were trembling and a huge smile beamed across her face. Just minutes before, rainbow confetti had exploded behind her on stage in front of hundreds of her peers, while lights flashed and peppy music boomed over the audience. She suddenly held a trophy in her hands.

"I'm in disbelief because of how good everyone else is," she said.

Despite the exhilaration, though, Sun easily slipped into a calm and authoritative demeanor to explain her research, which focused on organic electrochemical transistors, or OECTs.

"They have performance issues right now," she said of the devices. "They have instability in the body. You don't want some sort of implanted bioelectronic to degrade in your body."

But OECTs have huge potential. Compared to other devices made of silicon, they're soft and flexible. That makes them a better fit for heart and brain implants.

"They're so much more accurate, their speed is higher, their performance is higher because they consider signals in the body that previous electronics haven't considered. They're also safe because they're made of organic materials," she said.

She hopes that her work improving their performance can be a first step to commercializing them and getting them into wide use, within the next two decades.

Sun won the Olympics of science fairs

ISEF is the world's biggest pre-college STEM competition, run by the Society for Science. It's like the Olympics of science or the "grandaddy of all science fairs," said judging chair Christopher Gould.

Nearly 2,000 students spent the week in Los Angeles attending talks, mingling, and defending their research to judges. The event doled out $9 million in awards this year — its largest purse yet. But Sun took home the biggest sum with the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award.

"This was our number one project, without a shadow of a doubt," Ian Jandrell, a judging co-chair for the materials science category at ISEF, told BI about Sun's research. He oversaw hours of discussion among the materials-science judges.

"It was crystal clear that that room was convinced that this was a significant project and worthy of consideration for a very top award because of the contribution that was made," he said.

Research at ISEF is not peer-reviewed, so it's not held to the standard that studies published in journals like Nature or JAMA must meet. Instead, ISEF encourages students to learn about the scientific process by doing it themselves and defending their work.

Jandrell said the judges were impressed by "the sophistication and the diligence" of Sun's research and her ability to explain it and respond to questions on the spot.

"It's the whole package," he added.

Long days in a university lab

Sun has been working on her project for over six months. It took long hours, and much of it needed to be done in a lab at the University of Kentucky. The devices she worked on were tiny, small enough to fit on your thumb.

For a few weeks, she left school three hours early to work in a lab for another five hours. Luckily, her teachers were understanding about why she needed extensions on some of her assignments.

Sun engineered a new technique to improve the devices' performance and take them closer to commercial use. In the research that snagged the five-figure award, Sun tried "doping" the OECTs — introducing chemical impurities to see how they affected the device's electrical properties — with a series of organic salts.

She found that one salt, called tetrabutylammonium chloride, was especially effective because it improved the device's amplification abilities, sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, and switching speed.

These qualities are important because they improve overall performance, which could one day help create biomedical devices capable of detecting early hints of disease in your body's biochemical makeup.

The salt that Sun tested improved amplification performance by 97% and switching speed by 77%, Sun found. "These are significant numbers," Jandrell said.

Sensitive OECTs could detect proteins or nucleic acids that correspond with the disease long before traditional symptoms appear. Sun imagines OECTs embedded in clothing to monitor swea or used to accurately test blood-alcohol levels before you drive.

Eventually, OECTs could lead to new technologies that replace invasive implants like pacemakers.

As for Sun, she sees a future for herself in chemical engineering to help improve medicine.

"Hopefully I can make some sort of commercializable breakthrough, like what I'm trying to do now with these devices," Sun said. "If possible, I do want to start a business so that I can get them into the real world in industries to impact more people directly."

• Commercial ships have diverted from the Red Sea over the Houthi missile threats. 
• The Houthis showed in late April they can strike ships in the Indian Ocean.
• "By disrupting shipping, the Houthis can impose costs on the global economy," a naval expert said.

Houthi militants showed in late April that they can expand their war on international shipping far beyond the Red Sea.

The container ship MSC Orion came under a drone attack on the night of April 26 as it was steaming in the Indian Ocean southeast of the Horn of Africa, the continent's eastern-most tip. The attack only caused minor damage and did not harm any crew. But the distance involved was unprecedented.

The Houthis have wreaked havoc against international shipping in the Red Sea with ballistic missiles and exploding drones, and threatened in March they could menace ships that avoided this route by going around Africa's southern Cape of Good Hope, a much longer and more expensive voyage.

"The Houthis have drones that can travel more than 1,000 nautical miles, such as the Shahed series of propellor-driven drones," Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and expert on naval operations, told Business Insider. "Their ballistic missiles have ranges of more than 600 [nautical miles]."

The long-range attack on the Orion appears to have been a one-off but is still unprecedented, an expert on drone warfare said.

"The attack was different in the fact it was achieved over a greater distance than previous attacks on international shipping," James Patton Rogers, the executive director of the Cornell Tech Policy Institute, told Business Insider. "This shows advances in range, command and control, and accuracy, all of which are occurring despite US-UK efforts to degrade the group."

Rogers believes the Houthis may have used a long-range Shehab drone in the attack.

"Until now, the Shehab drones have proven vulnerable to air defense and unreliable," Rogers said. "As such, if Shehab drones were used in the strikes, which the video evidence appears to show, then it would mark an increase in the reliability and destructive precision of these drone systems."

He noted that the Shehab's reported range of 990 miles puts it "well within range" of international shipping. The US and EU have stood up naval task forces to guard ships in the Red Sea, but merchant ships far outside of these air defense umbrellas have no defense against an attack drone.

"Yet these are not the only systems available to the so-called' axis of resistance' groups," Rogers said. "The Samad (1500km/932 miles) and potentially the Shahed (2000km) family of drones all have the range to strike these targets."

Searching and targeting ships in international waters is also another escalation from the group's attacks near the Red Sea. The Houthis are most likely exploiting the self-reporting of merchant ships to target them.

"The Houthis appear to be using AIS (Automatic Identification System) data to geolocate their targets and use GPS to guide their drone to the approximate area," Clark said. "Reportedly, drones like the Shahed series have anti-radiation seekers they can use to drive into emitting targets like air defense radars."

The Orion stopped transmitting its AIS after the April 26 attack, likely to prevent the Houthis from tracking the ship for a second strike. Clark also believes ships like the Orion may opt for "going dark" for segments of their voyage to avoid being tracked. Ships smuggling Russian oil have done this since the start of the current Ukraine war in 2022.

There are some ways these ships can evade such attacks or, if necessary, physically fend them off.

"They could turn off their AIS and radar, which would make them hard to find in the open ocean of the Eastern Mediterranean," Clark said. "Once they enter the Red Sea, though, ships can be tracked by spotters ashore or on boats or using mobile Houthi radars ashore. In that case, shotguns or high-power microwave counter-drone weapons would be needed."

Ships may opt for alternative or longer routes to avoid these attacks, and while this may reduce the number of attacks, that would also have a disruptive impact on shipping of the kind the Houthis would welcome.

"The easiest, although more expensive, way to address this threat is to avoid it," Clark said. "Unfortunately, that is what the Houthis want. By disrupting shipping, the Houthis can impose costs on the global economy and put pressure on Israel."

US forces targeting the Houthis in February encountered an undersea drone for the first time and successfully struck it.

"There are few details about the Houthi's underwater drone capacity, but what there is suggests the drones are slow-moving and more useful against stationary targets, ships vulnerable in dock," Rogers said. "Nevertheless, with the rate of Houthi advances, and increases in speed, control, and maneuverability in-transit, international shipping could soon prove vulnerable."

Clark doesn't see undersea drones posing much of a threat to ships on the high seas.

"Undersea drones are really only a threat in narrow waters like the Red Sea where the range to shore is short," Clark said. "Undersea drones can only travel a few knots and therefore cannot catch up to a cargo ship. The drone has to intercept the target, which requires knowing where the target is going, such as in a narrow waterway."

Rogers believes the broader implications of the Orion attack are already clear.

"Violent non-state groups are not only able to strike shipping hundreds of miles from shore, but they are able to pass this technology on to other groups allied with the cause or willing to pay a price," Rogers said.

"In essence, we have reached a stage where the proliferation of this capacity is uncontrolled and unchecked, potentially bringing international shipping and global supply chains under increased threat globally."

• Reports of a slim iPhone arriving in late 2025 are emerging.
• An analyst's note and a report from The Information suggest an "iPhone 17 Slim" is in the works.
• Apple launched its thinnest iPad last week, while the iPhone 16 is expected to launch in September.

Apple is reportedly slimming down the iPhone in 2025.

The Information reported Friday that five people knowledgeable about the project said a thinner iPhone could debut alongside the iPhone 17 in September 2025.

The project, internally called D23, is said to be a "major redesign" that will cost more than the iPhone Pro Max, which is priced at $1,200, The Information reported. Meanwhile, the full iPhone 16 lineup is still yet to be announced, but it is expected this September.

Rumors of a slim iPhone, based on a research note from analyst Jeff Pu of Hong Kong-based investment firm Haitong that was viewed by 9to5Mac, have swirled since the beginning of May.

One of the supposed models in the rollout could be called "iPhone 17 Slim," MacRumors reported. The device's display would measure between 6.12 inches diagonally — the size of the standard iPhone — and 6.69-inch screen of the Pro Max models, according to The Information.

Another notable difference on this prospective skinny iPhone is that the back camera would be located at the top center of the phone instead of the top left corner, The Information's sources said.

At its "Let Loose" event on May 7, Apple launched a new iPad Pro that it touted as thinner than an iPod Nano at 5.1 millimeters. So far, reviewers have reacted positively to the new ultra-thin OLED display.

Tech review channel JerryRigEverything went viral for its durability test of the 13-inch iPad Pro. The slim iPad's OLED display held up against several attempts to bend and break it.

Reviewer Zack Nelson said the iPad's "central spine" helped it remain functional after being bent.

The tech giant faces stiff competition from other smartphone makers. iPhone revenue for Apple's fiscal Q2 was $45.96 billion, down 10% year over year.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin plans to launch a crewed rocket for the first time in nearly two years.
• The New Shepard rocket was grounded for months after a failed uncrewed launch in September 2022.
• The delay has let space tourism competitors like Virgin Galactic catch up. 

Jeff Bezos' private space company, Blue Origin, recently announced its plans to launch a crew of six aboard its New Shepard rocket this Sunday.

If all goes well, this will be the company's first crewed rocket launch in nearly two years. The last crewed flight was in August 2022 and included Sara Sabry, who became the first Egyptian person and Arab woman in space.

This weekend's scheduled launch will be a major milestone for the company; marking its return to crewed suborbital spaceflight and the multi-millions in revenue that comes with it.

Still, late last year, Jeff Bezos told Lex Fridman on Fridman's podcast that "Blue Origin needs to be much faster."

Here's why Blue Origin is lagging behind competitors like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.

Why Blue Origin's upcoming launch took 2 years

Blue Origin was on a roll in 2021 and the first half of 2022, completing about one New Shepard launch every two months — the most in the company's history.

But then one of its uncrewed rockets failed on September 12, 2022.

About one minute into the flight, Blue Origin lost the first-stage booster due to a faulty nozzle in the booster's engine. The first-stage fell from the skies and crash-landed in a Texas desert. No people, buildings, or other properties were harmed.

What was damaged, however, was the space company's momentum.

Afterward, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded New Shepard until Blue Origin addressed 21 corrective actions, including redesigning some engine and nozzle components to prevent a similar mishap.

The space company went more than 400 days before another launch. That gave one of Blue Origin's competitors, Virgin Galactic, time to catch up after suffering its own setbacks in the early 2020s.

Blue Origin's suborbital business

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are both in the suborbital space tourism business. They fly people to suborbital space, about 60 miles high, where they can experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning.

In 2023, Virgin Galactic completed half a dozen crewed launches with its SpaceShipTwo vehicles. These launches included the company's first commercial service flight with Italian Air Force members in June 2023 and its first flight carrying a private astronaut in August of that same year.

The company was grounded in February, however, after a small part fell off the mothership of its space plane on Virgin Galactic's latest space tourism flight. So, this Sunday's launch may be Blue Origin's chance to catch back up.

However, the cost of a ticket on Blue Origin's rocket versus Virgin Galactic's space plane is worth noting regarding the companies' competitiveness.

Prices vary widely, and Blue Origin won't release what it charges per seat on New Shepard. However, Quartz reported that a seat on Blue Origins' last crewed launch in August 2022 cost about $1.25 million. That's nearly three times the cost of a $450,000 seat on Virgin Galactic.

Blue Origin's orbital dreams and delays

While suborbital tourism can be lucrative, the real money is in orbital spaceflight.

Private companies, including SpaceX (founded in 2002), United Launch Alliance (founded in 2006), and Rocket Lab (founded in 2006), have been doing this for years.

Getting to orbit requires bigger, more powerful rockets that are more costly and time-consuming to build. But the major benefit is that there's a much larger market for companies who want to send a satellite or other technology into orbit than for floating in a spaceship for a few minutes.

Over their lifetimes, SpaceX has launched more than 300 rockets to orbit, ULA has launched 155, and Rocket Lab has launched over 45. Blue Origin, by comparison, has yet to launch one rocket to orbit — though its New Glenn orbital rocket is scheduled for its first launch later this year.

Bezos' company announced it was building New Glenn in 2016, with an inaugural launch scheduled for 2020. However, the company has suffered a series of setbacks, delaying lift-off.

These delays have cost Blue Origin potentially millions of dollars in service flights that companies are willing to pay to get their tech to orbit. ULA, for example, states on its website that its rockets have "placed more than $70 billion of satellite assets into orbit."

That said, Blue Origin has contracts with NASA, the US Space Force, and Amazon for its New Glenn rocket once it's ready to fly.

Bezos says Blue Origin's culture isn't fast enough

Part of Blue Origin's sluggish pace is its work culture, which Bezos aims to change.

"We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk and making those decisions quickly, being bold on those things and having the right culture that supports that," Bezos told Fridman.

Sunday's scheduled launch is a step in the right direction for Blue Origin. It may be playing catch-up now, but Bezos wants to kick the company into high gear, telling Fridman that's one of the reasons he left his role as Amazon's CEO.

"I turned the CEO role over, and the primary reason I did that is that I could spend time on Blue Origin, adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster, and we're going to," he said.

Blue Origin did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.