The price of oil jumped to an 11-month high yesterday, moving even closer to record levels hit last summer as fears mounted over shortages in supply. Speculation in the world’s most actively traded commodity, rapidly rising demand and reports that production would slow over the next five years pushed Brent crude up to $77.07 briefly during early-afternoon trading, within $2 of the all-time high of $78.65 set last August. Investors said hedge funds and pension funds were key drivers behind the latest rally. ‘This rally is very much fund driven,’ said Graham Sharp, director at Trafigura, a commodities trading group. ‘The entry of long-only hedge funds into the market is a major factor this time around. We wouldn’t rule out Brent hitting $80 this summer.’ Article continues Maintenance work on oilfields in the North Sea has tightened supplies and helped push Brent, seen as the best indicator of the global market, significantly higher. The unexpected closure of a North Sea pipeline this month cut oil output from at least one group of fields, operator ConocoPhillips said. Chevron’s Erskine field, which produced an average of 10,705 barrels a day in March, has also been affected by the […]
Imagine a building made of water. It features liquid curtains for walls – curtains that not only can be programmed to display images or messages but can also sense an approaching object and automatically part to let it through. MIT architects and engineers have designed such a building, and it will be unveiled at next year’s international exhibition in Spain. The ‘digital water pavilion’ – an interactive structure made of digitally controlled water curtains – will be located at the entrance to Expo Zaragoza 2008, in front of a new bridge designed by Zaha Hadid. The structure will contain an exhibition area, a cafe and various public spaces. ‘To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water,’ explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory. The ‘water walls’ that make up the structure consist of a row of closely spaced solenoid valves along a pipe suspended in the air. The valves can be opened and closed, at high frequency, via computer control. This produces a curtain of falling water with gaps at specified locations – a pattern of pixels created from air […]
BETHESDA, Md. — More low-birth-weight infants are being born but older kids are heavier than ever, according to the federal government’s latest snapshot of child health. In its 10th annual report, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics showed little change in the overall well-being of American children from last year’s numbers, but it revealed a few encouraging as well as a few distressing trends. The report, titled America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007, is a compilation of statistics on children’s health, family life, housing, education, and behavior, gathered from cabinet-level departments plus the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Office of Management and Budget. ‘When we review the health aspects of the report, we see some continuing problems, we see progress, and we see differences by race, by ethnicity and by poverty level or income level,’ commented Edward Sondik, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Health Statistics, in a press briefing. Among the positives, he said are improved immunization rates among toddlers over the past decade, with 81% of children ages 19 to 35 months having received the recommended series of vaccinations, up from 70% in 1994. […]
Drug companies like to say that their most expensive products are fully worth their breathtaking prices. Now one company is putting its money where its mouth is - by offering a money-back guarantee. Johnson & Johnson has proposed that Britain’s national health service pay for the cancer drug Velcade, but only for people who benefit from the medicine, which can cost $48,000 a patient. The company would refund any money spent on patients whose tumors do not shrink sufficiently after a trial treatment. The groundbreaking proposal, along with less radical pricing experiments in this country and overseas, may signal the pharmaceutical industry’s willingness to edge toward a new pay-for-performance paradigm - in which a drug’s price would be based on how well it worked, and might be adjusted up or down as new evidence came in. ‘I think payers will say, ‘If the product works and it creates value, we will reward you for it,’ ‘ said Anthony Farino, a pharmaceutical industry consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. ‘ ‘If not, we won’t reward you.’ ‘ It is far too soon to tell whether such a pricing paradigm can actually work, in particular because it can be difficult in […]
Recent global warming isn’t a result of solar radiation, scientists said, disputing a theory advanced by some researchers as an alternative to the United Nations’ view that temperatures are rising as a result of human activities. The scientists examined historical records of solar activity over the past century, studying measures such as the number of sunspots and the amount of light emitted. They found that the total radiation from the sun peaked in 1985, according to Mike Lockwood, co-author of the paper published today in the U.K. journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A. ‘The sun did a U-turn around 1985, but the temperatures kept on rising,” Lockwood, a solar physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, central England, said late yesterday in a telephone interview. “Everything on the sun that could have affected climate has been going in the wrong direction to cause warming, and we’ve seen continued warming.” The findings contradict scientists who posit that the sun is the main cause of recent warming, rather than human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The discovery also goes against the central arguments of “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a documentary aired earlier this […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
