Saturday, July 31
Persistent Inflation
The subject is presently dividing the funding neighborhood, which has been busy considering whether or not a current surge in shopper costs is right here to keep.
In the U.S., the patron worth index got here in at 5.4% in June — the quickest tempo in virtually 13 years. In the U.Ok., the inflation rate reached 2.5% in June — the best stage since August 2018 and above the Bank of England’s goal of two%.
For probably the most half, the Washington-based establishment sees these worth pressures as transitory.
For probably the most half, the Washington-based establishment sees these worth pressures as transitory.
“Inflation is expected to return to its pre-pandemic ranges in most countries in 2022,” the Fund stated in its newest World Economic Outlook replace launched Tuesday.
However, it warned that “uncertainty remains high.”
“There is however a risk that transitory pressures could become more persistent and central banks may need to take preemptive action,” the IMF stated. READ MORE
However, it warned that “uncertainty remains high.”
“There is however a risk that transitory pressures could become more persistent and central banks may need to take preemptive action,” the IMF stated. READ MORE
Housing Boom Over
Since the onset of the crisis, median home prices are up a staggering 24%.
But much of that government aid and support is about to go away. The foreclosure moratorium, which prevents foreclosures of federally-backed mortgages, will come to an end on July 31.
But much of that government aid and support is about to go away. The foreclosure moratorium, which prevents foreclosures of federally-backed mortgages, will come to an end on July 31.
Then on Sept. 30, the mortgage forbearance program, which allows some borrowers to pause their payments, will lapse. Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 7 million homeowners have been enrolled in the forbearance program.
However, as the economy has improved that number has fallen. As of July 11, there are still 1.75 million borrowers, or 3.5% of U.S. mortgages, enrolled in the forbearance program.
The foreclosure crisis following the 2008 housing crash was so bad, in part, because tens of millions of financially strained homeowners were underwater (meaning a borrower's remaining mortgage balance is greater than the home's value) and had no choice but foreclosure.
The foreclosure crisis following the 2008 housing crash was so bad, in part, because tens of millions of financially strained homeowners were underwater (meaning a borrower's remaining mortgage balance is greater than the home's value) and had no choice but foreclosure.
That's unlikely to be the case for financially strapped homeowners this year. These homeowners are likely sitting on sizable home equity (home value minus the outstanding mortgage), and if they can't repay the mortgage they can simply sell into the currently red-hot housing market. READ MORE
New Species Found
It has taken five years to confirm that this species had not been discovered before and that it was unique. Indian scientists spent half a decade sequencing the plant's DNA and comparing it to other known plants.
Indian polar-biologist Professor Felix Bast, working at the Bharati research station, discovered this dark green moss species at Larsemann Hills, overlooking the Southern Ocean.
Indian polar-biologist Professor Felix Bast, working at the Bharati research station, discovered this dark green moss species at Larsemann Hills, overlooking the Southern Ocean.
Biologists based at the Central University of Punjab have named the species Byrum bharatiensis. The research station and the moss take their name from the Hindu goddess of learning.
The research station Bharati is a permanently staffed station that has been in operation since 2012. This is India's third Antarctic research facility, and one of two still operational along with the Maitri station which was commissioned in 1989. India has had a scientific presence on the continent since 1983-1984.
The research station Bharati is a permanently staffed station that has been in operation since 2012. This is India's third Antarctic research facility, and one of two still operational along with the Maitri station which was commissioned in 1989. India has had a scientific presence on the continent since 1983-1984.
But this is the first time that a new plant has been discovered by Indian scientists working in the region. READ MORE
Friday, July 30
Naval Ship Destroyed
The sailor was a crewmember at the time and was charged with aggravated arson and the willful hazarding of a vessel, Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a U.S. 3rd Fleet spokesperson, said according to ABC News.
Robertson did not give any details as to what evidence was found or what the motive was. The name of the sailor has also not been disclosed.
The amphibious assault ship was nearing the end of its two-year $250 million upgrade when the fire broke out on July 12, 2020. More than 60 sailors and civilians were treated for relatively minor injuries resulting from the fire.
The ship, which can act as a mini aircraft carrier, burned for more than four days. The fire left the ship with extensive structural damage and was later scrapped with estimates that it will cost up to $4 Billion to replace it. READ MORE
OLYMPICS: Transwomen
Woke IOC Declares ‘Transwomen are Women’ as Transgender Kiwi Readies for Weightlifting Debut
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) reaffirmed its full support of transgender athletes Friday when medical director Richard Budgett declared “transwomen are women” and should be included in women’s sport “when we possibly can.”
“After 100 years of promoting women’s sport, it’s up to each of the international federations to ensure that they try and protect women’s sport,” he told a briefing in Tokyo. “Science will help, experience will help, and time will help.” READ MORE
Aircraft Carrier Turned Yacht
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We’re used to seeing aircraft carriers in their ready-for-combat mode, with fierce fighter jets waiting on the deck. What if, instead of that, we would see a completely different picture? Not just a peaceful-looking one, inviting passengers for total relaxation and pure indulgence, but even more daring than that.
Dutch Mitsi Studio created a jaw-dropping concept – the Noah Twins Carrier would not be just the world’s first aircraft carrier turned into a yacht, but it would be built with interchangeable decks, right out of a movie-like fantasy.
As the Studio puts it, the design would be like a Swiss Army knife, with the possibility of swapping between a landing strip and a golf course. Yes, a landing strip would still be there, but for a helicopter and air-taxis instead of fighter jets. And the nine-hole golf course could also change into a ski slope with artificial snow, because why not? READ MORE
Missing Microbes
There was no reason for microbial ecologist Noah Fierer to expect that the 204 soil samples he and colleagues had collected near Antarctica’s Shackleton Glacier would be any different.
A spoonful of typical soil could easily contain billions of microbes, and Antarctic soils from other regions host at least a few thousand per gram.
So he assumed that all of his samples would host at least some life, even though the air around Shackleton Glacier is so cold and so arid that Fierer often left his damp laundry outside to freeze-dry.
Surprisingly, some of the coldest, driest soils didn’t seem to be inhabited by microbes at all, he and colleagues report in the June Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
Surprisingly, some of the coldest, driest soils didn’t seem to be inhabited by microbes at all, he and colleagues report in the June Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
To Fierer’s knowledge, this is the first time that scientists have found soils that don’t seem to support any kind of microbial life. READ MORE
Brains and Consciousness
PLANET EARTH
MIND
Brains Might Sync As People Interact — and That Could Upend Consciousness Research
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.
By Conor FeehlyJul 26, 2021 7:00 PM
(Credit: Katya Kovarzh/Shutterstock
People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. We subconsciously match our footsteps when we walk. During conversations, we mirror each other's postures and gestures.
To that end, studies have shown that people synchronize heart rates and breathing when watching emotional films together. The same happens when romantic partners share a bed. Some scientists think we do this to build trust and perceive people as similar to ourselves, which encourages us to behave compassionately.
Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness. READ MORE
Thursday, July 29
Hear What We Want to Hear
Humans depend on their senses to perceive the world, themselves and each other. Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality. During the last 20 years, neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.
A team of neuroscientists of TU Dresden headed by Prof Katharina von Kriegstein presents new findings that show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.
For their study, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses of 19 participants while they were listening to sequences of sounds. The participants were instructed to find which of the sounds in the sequence deviated from the others. Then, the participants’ expectations were manipulated so that they would expect the deviant sound in certain positions of the sequences. The neuroscientists examined the responses elicited by the deviant sounds in the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body. Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.
These results can be best interpreted in the context of predictive coding, a general theory of sensory processing that describes perception as a process of hypothesis testing. Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.
Dr Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: "Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. Decades of research in neuroscience had already shown that the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is most developed in humans and apes, scans the sensory world by testing these beliefs against the actual sensory information. We have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."
These new results open up new ways for neuroscientists studying sensory processing in humans towards the subcortical pathways. Perhaps due to the axiomatic belief that subjectivity is inherently human, and the fact that the cerebral cortex is the major point of divergence between the human and other mammal's brains, little attention has been paid before to the role that subjective beliefs could have on subcortical sensory representations.
Given the importance that predictions have on daily life, impairments on how expectations are transmitted to the subcortical pathway could have profound repercussion in cognition. Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception. The new results could provide with a unified explanation of why individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the perception of speech, and provide clinical neuroscientists with a new set of hypotheses on the origin of other neural disorders related to sensory processing.
Three "D" Printing
An isotropic helicoid must experience the same amount of drag from a fluid regardless of its orientation, like a sphere, but also rotate as it moves through the fluid. So if you dropped an isotropic helicoid into a tank of a viscous liquid, it should spin as it sinks, similar to the way a propeller turns.
Greg Voth at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his colleagues 3D printed five different shapes that should be isotropic helicoids, each a little more than a centimetre across, and dropped them into a tank of silicone oil. They were unable to detect rotation in any of them, meaning the predictions for an isotropic helicoid may be wrong.
“You’ve got to guess that somebody else has tried this in 150 years – in Kelvin’s original paper, it even sounds like he tried it,” says Voth. “I suspect that people have tried to fabricate these particles, but they were limited by defects in the fabrication so they simply didn’t publish, so the hypothesis of this behaviour has stayed with us.”
Upon delving into the hydrodynamic effects in play, the researchers calculated that there was almost certainly a link, or coupling, between the movement and rotation of their particles, meaning they fulfilled Kelvin’s criteria. But this was far too small to have any detectable effect.
“The coupling is tiny, but it still exists,” says Voth. He and his team are now working on building an isotropic helicoid where that coupling could be measurable, which would finally vindicate Lord Kelvin’s idea. READ MORE
Wild Trees
Paul Cappiello
Many years ago when I was a University of Illinois grad student, a local resident wrote to the department’s Cooperative Extension office with a question. After a bit of a preamble, the question emerged ... “How long do I need to compost fresh cricket manure before using it to fertilize my plants?”
Well, those of us self-appointed to the horticultural glitterati had a good laugh. I mean I had completed a four-year college curriculum in horticulture and a whole year of grad school. These silly people and their silly questions. ... Obviously, the letter writer had spent too much time in the sun. Of course what she meant to ask about was chicken manure (not an uncommon organic fertilizer), not cricket manure. Who on earth would ever amass enough cricket manure to have to worry about composting it before using it as fertilizer? READ MORE
French Press Coffee
Over time, I've unriddled a few secrets to a better French press brew. I always start with whole-bean coffee, which I coarsely grind. I like using filtered water, and I always steep the grounds for exactly five minutes.
Seeking some more professional tips, I called on Bailey Manson, innovation manager at Chicago-based Intelligentsia. I did so sheepishly, knowing that Manson is a pourover-coffee lifer who's dedicated his career to unearthing impeccably extracted brews. I also knew for those very reasons that there might be no one better to ask. READ MORE
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