NEW YORK — Private equity company Blackstone Group LP (BX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. ‘Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,’ Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. ‘This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime.’ But the U.S. government is committed to the preservation of financial institutions, he said, and will do whatever it takes to restart the economy. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plans to unfreeze credit markets through a new program that will combine public and private capital in a fund that would buy bank toxic assets of up to $1 trillion. ‘In all likelihood, that will have the private sector buy troubled assets to clean the banks out in terms of providing leverage … so that we can get more money back into the banking system,’ Schwarzman said. He expects the private sector to end up making ‘some good money doing that,’ but added there were complex issues on how to price toxic […]
CORAL GABLES, FL. — Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a ‘spin battery,’ a battery that is ‘charged’ by applying a large magnetic field to nano-magnets in a device called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). The new technology is a step towards the creation of computer hard drives with no moving parts, which would be much faster, less expensive and use less energy than current ones. In the future, the new battery could be developed to power cars. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature and is available in an online advance publication of the journal. The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is ‘wound up’ by applying a large magnetic field –no chemistry involved. The device is potentially better than anything found so far, said Barnes. ‘We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big […]
At the end of February, the orchards of California’s Central Valley are dusted with pink and white blossom, as millions of almond trees make their annual bid for reproduction. The delicate flowers attract pollinators, mostly honeybees, to visit and collect nectar and pollen. By offering fly-through hospitality, the trees win the prize of a brush with a pollen-covered bee and the chance of cross-pollination with another tree. In recent years, however, there has been alarm over possible shortages of honeybees and scary stories of beekeepers finding that 30-50% of their charges have vanished over the winter. It is called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and its cause remains a mystery. Add to this worries about long-term falls in the populations of other pollinators, such as butterflies and bats, and the result is a growing impression of a threat to nature’s ability to supply enough nectar-loving animals to service mankind’s crops. This year, however, the story has developed a twist. In California the shortage of bees has been replaced by a glut. Bee good to me The annual orgy of sexual reproduction in the Californian almond orchards owes little to the unintended bounty of nature. Francis Ratnieks, a professor of […]
NEW DELHI, India — Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge — ‘a national shame,’ in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy. China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent. Malnutrition makes children more prone to illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth for a lifetime. There are no simple explanations. Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here. India’s public expenditure on health remains low, and in some places, financing for child nutrition programs remains unspent. Yet several democracies have all but eradicated hunger. And ignoring the needs of the poor altogether does spell political […]
Concerns about global warming are exaggerated, 41 percent of Americans believe. That’s the highest amount of skepticism ever recorded by Gallup’s annual Environment Survey, which has been going steadily since 2001. Fifty-seven percent said the seriousness of climate change as portrayed in the news media was correct or underestimated, a record low. The two figures each tend to bounce around within a 10-point range, and the previous level of skepticism was recorded in 2004, when 38 percent thought global warming hype was overblown and 58 percent thought news coverage was either fair or not worrisome enough. The opposite trend was visible in 2001 and 2006, when 30 percent of respondents were skeptical and 66 percent either satisfied or even more worried. Reponses broke down predictably this year according to political orientation. Sixty-six percent of self-identified Republicans thought publicized warnings about climate change were exaggerated, as did 44 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats. Age patterns were more complicated. Thirty-one percent of people aged 18 to 29 were skeptical, the same as last year, while 47 percent of those 65 and earlier were - but a year ago, only 33 percent of the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
