The Covid inquiry restarts its live hearings this week, after senior staff in the NHS revealed just how close some hospitals were to collapse

People in war-torn Gaza are already struggling with a deep humanitarian crisis but now they fear it will get much more difficult.

Parties agree 23 February vote after chancellor torpedoed the coalition government by sacking finance minister.

We have already gotten a major success in foreign policy with Donald Trump’s election. The minute Trump got elected Iran’s currency collapsed to an all-time low. Iranian Rial fell to an all-time low of 703,000 rials to the dollar. This decline comes as Donald Trump runs for U.S presidency again, exacerbating tensions due to his […]

The post Iran’s Currency Collapses as Soon as Trump Wins the Election appeared first on The Lid.

Two of the worst fake news purveyors, MSNBC and CNN, both suffered ratings bloodbaths since Donald Trump won his historic victory last week. And it couldn’t happen to any more serving networks. Let’s take the extremist, left-wing MSNBC. Take a look at this delicious drop in ratings: Major Nielsen ratings plunge at MSNBC since Trump […]

The post Fake News MSNBC, CNN Ratings Collapse after Trump’s Massive Win appeared first on The Lid.

Sports are important to young people on many levels. When participating, they experience teamwork, self-discipline, following rules, and just plain fun. Often, children see role models in professional athletes. But professional sports can provide an introduction to history, depicting the times in which they are played. Also like the world we live in, games have evolved over time to respond to events and social changes.

Author, poet, aviator and adventurer par excellence, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is one of the most well-known French writers in contemporary history. This year marks the 80th anniversary of his most famous publication, Le petit prince (The Little Prince) published in 1943. Le petit prince is translated into over 250 languages with adaptations into radio plays, films, ballets, operas, musicals, children’s board books, and even an animated film. You can find a copy in Yiddish or the Burundian language of Kirundi.

A Minnessota maker named Caleb Olson built the Poopcopter, an autonomous drone that seeks out dog-doo and retrieves it for disposal.

He describes it as the "world's first aerial bound self-guided dog poop removal system." See it in action below.

"The Poopcopter is capable of scanning areas defined by a user, your backyard for example, and as it scans it's performing real-time computer vision using the camera which is inside the drone," Olson says. — Read the rest

The post The Poopcopter is a DIY autonomous drone that finds and collects dog-doo appeared first on Boing Boing.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen the next director of the CIA. Trump tapped former Texas congressman and director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe for the job. According to a statement […]

The post 'Warrior for Truth': Trump Has Chosen His Next CIA Director, Crediting Pick for 'Exposing Russian Collusion' Hoax appeared first on The Western Journal.

Richard Moeckel and Richard Montgomery
J. Amer. Math. Soc. 38 (), 225-241.
Abstract, references and article information

Water, Ecosystems and Energy in South Asia: Making Cross-Border Collaboration Work Research paper sysadmin 29 June 2016

A new paper sets out the factors that have made previous cross-border projects in South Asia successful, arguing that cooperation around water is feasible despite the region’s political differences and economic assymetries.

• The countries of South Asia share some of the world’s major river basins – the Ganga (or Ganges), the Brahmaputra and the Indus. These rivers and their tributaries flow through seven countries, support more than 1 billion people, irrigate millions of hectares of land and are of cultural importance to many of those who rely on them.
• River management presents common challenges across the region. These include physical factors such as droughts, flooding, cyclones and climate change, as well political and institutional factors impeding the development of solutions and policies to improve resource management and reduce vulnerability. Water is increasingly seen as a source of competition, with population growth, industrialization and urbanization exacerbating the pressures on supply.
• Although South Asian examples of regional cooperation in general are limited, there is a clear positive trend. In areas such as disaster response and cross-border power trading, regional and bilateral engagement is beginning to take place. Multilateral official arrangements exist for trade and other economic issues, but there is none on water or ecosystems. However, as the benefits from cooperation become proven, its desirability is likely to gradually enter mainstream policy thinking on water issues.
• This research paper sets out the factors that have enabled cooperation, and the processes adopted, in previous successful cross-border projects. It focuses on four categories of cooperation: development of early-warning systems for natural disasters, in particular floods; protection of cross-border ecosystems; sharing of learning, through the showcasing of innovative approaches in one country that can be adopted by others; and power trading, in particular the development of hydropower in Bhutan and its export to India.
• The paper argues that cooperation around water in South Asia is feasible despite political differences and economic asymmetries. Different forms of collective action, and common understanding of both the threats and the shared benefits from cooperation, are required to foster more partnerships within the river basin states.

SVB collapse shows interest rate financial stability threat Expert comment LJefferson 15 March 2023

Governments must resist pressure to relax post-financial crisis regulation, while central banks should moderate their attack on inflation if financial stability is at risk.

The collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on 10 March has triggered a wave of volatility in global bank equity prices, raised questions about whether US bank regulation and its tech industry funding model are fit for purpose, and forced a rethink on the extent and pace of monetary policy tightening appropriate for the US and other advanced economies.

SVB was the US’s 16th largest bank with total assets of $212bn at the end of 2022 and a presence in eight countries around the world, including the UK. Since it was founded 40 years ago, it has maintained a strong focus on the technology sector, claiming recently that nearly half of all US venture-backed technology and life science companies banked with it. Partly as a consequence, some 95 per cent of its deposits came from corporates and hedge funds, far higher than the one-third typical of similarly sized banks.

What led to SVB’s collapse?

Ironically, SVB’s failure did not result from its core business model of serving a relatively high-risk and fast-growing sector, but rather from a dramatic failure in liquidity management. During the pandemic, SVB saw a very large inflow of corporate deposits. But rather than disincentivizing depositors or investing the funds attracted in assets of matching maturity, it chose to invest them in low credit risk, but long maturity bonds attracted by a small pick-up in return over shorter-term assets. 

When US interest rates began to rise rapidly in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the value of SVB’s long-term bond portfolio declined sharply. It was left facing a large capital loss of some $15bn, roughly equivalent to its total shareholder funds. The management attempted to repair SVB’s balance sheet last week by crystalizing some of the loss and raising new capital.

But when this failed, the US supervisory authorities had no choice but to step in and close the institution.  This action was quickly followed by emergency action from other regulators vis-a-vis SVB subsidiaries and offices around the world.

The US entity has formally been taken over by the FDIC and a bridge bank established. All depositors have had their funds guaranteed, going beyond the normal federal deposit insurance limit of $250,000 per customer. However, bond holders and equity holders have been wiped out. The authorities have said that any loss will be covered by the industry as a whole via the FDIC.

In the UK, the Bank of England was able to sell the ring-fenced UK subsidiary of SVB to HSBC for £1 over the weekend, so that all its depositors and other liability holders have effectively had their funds guaranteed. In contrast to previous Bank of England rescues (such as Johnson Matthey Bank in 1984, the ‘small banks’ crisis in 1991 and the global financial crisis in 2008-9) no public money has been put at risk.

Four key questions

SVB’s rapid collapse raises four central questions:

First, how was it that the bank was able to take on such a risky interest rate maturity mismatch in its US operations? Maturity transformation is standard banking industry practice, but it is usually closely monitored by regulators who place limits on the extent of interest rate maturity mismatch and require liquidity buffers to offset the risk of deposit flight and forced asset sales.

SVB’s very high concentration of corporate deposits as compared to ‘sticky’ retail deposits, means that the risk of deposit flight was unusually high and so the bank should have been more, not less, cautious in its liquidity policy. SVB was classed as a regional bank in the US which means that it did not have to meet international regulatory standards under Basle III. And in 2018, the Trump administration approved legislation removing the post-financial crisis requirement that banks with assets under $250bn submit to stress testing and relaxing liquidity buffer requirements.

But it is still hard to understand why regulators allowed SVB to commit such a classic banking error. On Monday, the Federal Reserve ordered an inquiry into what it has correctly described as a regulatory failure. This should look at the role played by all the elements of the oversight system including the auditors, KPMG.

Second, does SVB’s failure reflect a much bigger underlying risk in the US banking sector, and potentially other banking systems around the world, built up over the prolonged period of ultra-low interest rates? SVB’s collapse was followed by the failure of the $110bn Signature Bank in New York, as well as sharp falls in US regional bank stock prices – by close of play on 14 March, the S&P Regional Bank Index was down 22 per cent on a week before, with some individual bank stocks seeing much sharper falls.  

To the extent that banks have been covered by international bank regulatory requirements, the risk of a much broader problem should be limited because stress testing and other regulatory tests would have looked at precisely the scenario that has happened. Even where large market losses have been incurred, capital buffers should be sufficient to cover them. But as SVB has shown, there are some large banks that are seemingly not required to follow international rules, while the latest developments at Credit Suisse indicate that market concerns may still arise when other factors are in play.

Third, how far, in the light of the potential vulnerability in banking systems, should central banks in advanced countries moderate their efforts to squeeze out inflationary pressures? While inflation already appears to have peaked in many economies and the pace of interest rate rises was expected to slow, inflation is far from vanquished, as recent data in the US has demonstrated.

Fourth, does the failure of SVB tell us something new about the financial risks facing the high technology sector?  It was remarkable that a single (and not particularly large, by international standards) financial institution could have played such a central role in the tech sector in both the US and UK. 

Why was this the case and does it reflect special features of the tech/start-up sector (e.g. the need for substantial cash deposits to cover relatively large negative cash flows in the early years of operation, or the need for highly specialized lending expertise). If so, should governments take steps to mitigate such risks, given the outsized importance of this sector in many national economic strategies? 

firehouse.ie posted a photo:

firehouse.ie posted a photo:

The assembly of the postsynaptic transmitter sensing machinery at inhibitory nerve cell synapses requires the intimate interplay between cell adhesion proteins, scaffold and adaptor proteins, and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) or glycine receptors. We developed an in vitro membrane system to reconstitute this process, to identify the essential protein components, and to define their mechanism of action, with a specific focus on the mechanism by which the cytosolic C terminus of the synaptic cell adhesion protein Neuroligin-2 alters the conformation of the adaptor protein Collybistin-2 and thereby controls Collybistin-2-interactions with phosphoinositides (PtdInsPs) in the plasma membrane. Supported hybrid membranes doped with different PtdInsPs and 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-{[N-(5-amino-1-carboxypentyl)iminodiacetic acid]succinyl} nickel salt (DGS-NTA(Ni)) to allow for the specific adsorption of the His6-tagged intracellular domain of Neuroligin-2 (His-cytNL2) were prepared on hydrophobically functionalized silicon dioxide substrates via vesicle spreading. Two different collybistin variants, the WT protein (CB2SH3) and a mutant that adopts an intrinsically 'open' and activated conformation (CB2SH3/W24A-E262A), were bound to supported membranes in the absence or presence of His-cytNL2. The corresponding binding data, obtained by reflectometric interference spectroscopy, show that the interaction of the C terminus of Neuroligin-2 with Collybistin-2 induces a conformational change in Collybistin-2 that promotes its interaction with distinct membrane PtdInsPs.

Ion mobility separates molecules in the gas-phase based on their physico-chemical properties, providing information about their size as collisional cross-sections. The timsTOF Pro combines trapped ion mobility with a quadrupole, collision cell and a TOF mass analyzer, to probe ions at high speeds with on-the-fly fragmentation. Here, we show that on this platform ion mobility is beneficial for cross-linking MS (XL-MS). Cross-linking reagents covalently link amino acids in proximity, resulting in peptide pairs after proteolytic digestion. These cross-linked peptides are typically present at low abundance in the background of normal peptides, which can partially be resolved by using enrichable cross-linking reagents. Even with a very efficient enrichable cross-linking reagent, like PhoX, the analysis of cross-linked peptides is still hampered by the co-enrichment of peptides connected to a partially hydrolyzed reagent – termed mono-linked peptides. For experiments aiming to uncover protein-protein interactions these are unwanted byproducts. Here, we demonstrate that gas-phase separation by ion mobility enables the separation of mono-linked peptides from cross-linked peptide pairs. A clear partition between these two classes is observed at a CCS of 500 Ų and a monoisotopic mass of 2 kDa, which can be used for targeted precursor selection. A total of 50-70% of the mono-linked peptides are prevented from sequencing, allowing the analysis to focus on sequencing the relevant cross-linked peptide pairs. In applications to both simple proteins and protein mixtures and a complete highly complex lysate this approach provides a substantial increase in detected cross-linked peptides.

RICHLAND, Wash.—Some computing challenges are so big that it’s necessary to go all in. That’s the approach a diverse team of scientists and computing experts led by the Department of Energy’s […]

The post PNNL-Microsoft Collaborate on Cloud Computing for Chemistry, More to Come appeared first on HPCwire.

Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia and Miami lead the first edition of the 2024-25 College Football Playoff rankings, the selection committee announced.

BEAVERTON, Ore., Sept. 10, 2024 — The Ethernet Alliance, a global consortium dedicated to the continued success and advancement of Ethernet technologies, today announced details of its exhibit at stand #A3 […]

The post Ethernet Alliance to Feature Cross-Industry Collaboration at ECOC 2024 Exhibit appeared first on HPCwire.

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 24, 2024 — Ansys and TSMC today announced a successful pilot with Microsoft that significantly speeds-up the simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components. Together, the companies achieved […]

The post TSMC Collaborates with Ansys and Microsoft to Accelerate Photonic Simulations appeared first on HPCwire.

LONDON and TORONTO, Sept. 30, 2024 — Alphawave Semi, a global leader in high-speed connectivity and compute silicon for the world’s technology infrastructure, has unveiled the availability of the industry’s […]

The post Alphawave Semi and TSMC Collaborate on 3nm UCIe Die-to-Die Subsystem for AI and HPC appeared first on HPCwire.

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Nov. 8, 2024 — IonQ, a leader in the quantum computing industry, has announced a partnership with NKT Photonics, a subsidiary of Hamamatsu Photonics, to procure next-generation laser […]

The post IonQ and NKT Photonics Collaborate on Next-Gen Laser Tech for Quantum Data Centers appeared first on HPCwire.

It’s a wrap! The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin welcomed more than 100 participants for the 7th annual TACC Symposium for Texas Researchers (TACCSTER). The event exists […]

The post Research Insights, HPC Expertise, Meaningful Collaborations Abound at TACCSTER 2024 appeared first on HPCwire.

A recent collaboration among researchers from HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Hungary and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), along with industry collaborators SandboxAQ and […]

The post Collaboration Speeds Complex Chemical Modeling appeared first on HPCwire.

A Rhode Island man with a passion for caffeine earned a Guinness World Record for his collection of 1,019 energy drink cans.

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 22, 2024 — Ansys and Intel Foundry have collaborated to provide multiphysics signoff solutions for Intel’s innovative 2.5D chip assembly technology, which uses EMIB technology to connect the […]

The post Ansys, Intel Foundry Collaborate on Multiphysics Analysis Solution for EMIB 2.5D Assembly Tech appeared first on HPCwire.

Nov. 8, 2024 — This month, over 100 academics, researchers, industry experts, and national lab staff gathered at Berkeley Lab’s Artificial Intelligence Science Summit (BLASS) to explore AI’s potential to drive […]

The post Berkeley Lab AI Science Summit Fuels Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

SURREY, British Columbia, Nov. 12, 2024 — Today, the Quantum Algorithms Institute (QAI) announced a partnership with Canadian companies, AbaQus and InvestDEFY Technologies, to solve common challenges in training machine learning […]

The post Quantum Algorithms Institute Drives Predictive Model Accuracy with Quantum Collaboration appeared first on HPCwire.

Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry, the choreographic duo known as JA Collective, give a performance of dance and visual arts, alternating between abrupt and fluid, tense and dreamlike.

Marc Tucker reviews David Driscoll's new book, 'Commitment and Common Sense', and describes how the Massachusetts reforms are comparable to those in top performing education systems around the world.

A measure now before Virginia's governor would let teachers bargain with local boards over wages and working conditions if a local board authorizes it.

Former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam announced the Tennessee Tutoring Corps, which will recruit college students to tutor children in an effort to prevent learning loss after extended school closures.

A read of California's news outlets makes clear that the state is not going to accept President-elect Donald Trump's policies without a fight, particularly those on immigration.

Five California educators last week filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the state's top teachers' union from collecting dues through mandatory paycheck deductions.

Research from REL Midwest examines the student characteristics associated with early college success in Indiana, with a focus on financial aid.

A state leader shares how research helped raise important considerations for increasing college success and completion in Indiana.

St. Louis led 2-0 after two periods, was outscored 3-0, allowed game-winner to Pastrnak with 1:47 remaining

The Bulldogs are the first team out of the 12-team playoff after Week 11.

Nothing has changed at the top of the second 2024 College Football Playoff rankings.

The latest update of the College Football Playoff rankings was officially released Tuesday night on ESPN, with the Alabama Crimson Tide seeing some movement as a result of their dominant 42-13 road win over the LSU Tigers on Saturday. In the rankings

The second College Football Playoff rankings were released, with the big questions surrounding who would be No. 3 and where the SEC teams would land.

No. 1 Oregon will travel to Madison this weekend to take on the Wisconsin Badgers at Camp Randall Stadium.

The second College Football Playoff poll of the 2024 season was released Tuesday. Check out the Top 25 and where Tennessee ranks.

After Lane Kiffin's Ole Miss football team beat Georgia, the Rebels moved up in the latest College Football Playoff rankings released Tuesday night.