On 30 July 2023 a one million tonne rock slope collapse occurred close to Bisisthal in Switzerland. It was captured on several videos, which show the initial pillar collapses and the transition to a rapid rock avalanche.

PACK EXPO Las Vegas 2019, co-located with Healthcare Packaging EXPO 2019, is the year's most comprehensive packaging event on the continent. The shows will offer the latest packaging technologies to help manufacturers improve operations and stay competitive.

With his command of the tournament slipping away, Matsuyama rolled in a 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole to regain the lead and then hit two shots as precise as any he hit all day for one last birdie to win a wild PGA Tour postseason opener at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.

The start of the PGA Tour’s postseason had tense moments at the top of the leaderboard and on the bubble to determine the top 50 players in the FedEx Cup who advanced.

The Panthers will face the Toronto Maple Leafs in the second round.

Dual-Homing Protection for MPLS-TP Pseudowires

Wednesday Cuba was hit by a major hurricane which took down its entire power grid again, this time for about 24 hours, according to CNN: Videos of the aftermath showed power infrastructure turned into a mangled mess and power poles down on streets. Hundreds of technicians were mobilized Thursday to reestablish power connections, according to state media... Operations at two electrical plants were partially restored and parts of eastern and central Cuba had electricity back up by Thursday afternoon, state media reported... The country's power grid has collapsed multiple times, including when Hurricane Oscar hit in October and killed at least 7 people. In the capital of Havana, where 2 million people live, power had been restored to less than 20% of the city by late Friday afternoon, . "Authorities had not yet given an estimate for when power would be fully restored..." Then tonight, CNN reported: A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of eastern Cuba on Sunday, causing material damage in several regions as the island continues to recover from widespread blackouts and the impact of two hurricanes over the past few weeks. The earthquake was reported about 39 km (24 miles) south of Bartolomé Masó before noon local time, about an hour after a 5.9 magnitude quake rocked the area, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. "There have been landslides, damage to homes and power lines," Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said, adding that authorities are evaluating the situation to start recovery efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A devastating microburst hit West Phoenix last Wednesday evening with 77 mph winds, causing a warehouse roof collapse that trapped and killed a 22-year-old worker; it took rescuers three days to locate the body using K-9s, drones, and heavy equipment. 

Mule-Hide's EclipsEdge snap-on fascia simplifies raised roof edge and gravel stop installations, offering wind protection, reduced material costs, and versatility for various roofing systems.

A roof collapse at a railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia, resulted in the deaths of 14 people, with several others injured. Rescue efforts continued throughout the night as crews worked to recover bodies from the rubble and assist survivors.

La mitad del Gobierno de Pradales pondrá en valor el actual Estatuto como base del "autogobierno". Pradales y sus consejeros del PNV se aferran al "incumplimiento" por el Gobierno central para obviar el 25-O. PP y Federalistak, también organizarán actos propios por el Estatuto vasco Leer

En España serán casi las diez menos veinte de la noche del 13 de noviembre, así que no veremos cómo el Sol se esconde tras la Luna. Pero en Australia y otras escasas tierras isleñas del Pacífico Sur será a pleno día, y una vez más los cazadores de eclipses que se han congregado desde todos los lugares del mundo sentirán unos pocos minutos de intensa emoción. Será, como pasa en los eclipses totales de Sol, la noche más corta en pleno día.

Un contrato

Los dos créditos de libre configuración de un encuentro sobre la Sábana Santa vuelven a poner sobre la mesa lo poco que hacen las universidad contra el pensamiento mágico

Violent protests erupt in Serbia after deadly train station canopy collapse

Find some of our favorite resources for the April 8, 2024, solar eclipse, including apps, video explainers, children's activities, and books.

The post Eclipse Apps, Books, Videos: Resources for the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Conviértase en un experto en eclipses para familiares y amigos en un par de minutos

The post Cómos y Porqués De Los Eclipses Solares appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Los fenómenos astronómicos y terrestres que no se debe perder durante el eclipse solar total del 8 de abril de 2024.

The post Qué Buscar y Cuándo Durante un Eclipse Solar Total appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Antes de intentar fotografiar el eclipse con su smartphone, lea el consejo de estos expertos.

The post Como Fotografiar el Eclipse Con un Smartphone appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

As told in the latest episode of our long-running Sky Tour astronomy podcast, this month it’ll be challenging to a special kind of lunar eclipse on March 25th — but easy to spot five of the 10 brightest stars in the night sky.

The post March Podcast: A Barely-There Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

September's partial lunar eclipse will be the first and only time the Moon ducks into Earth's umbral shadow in 2024. The Moon also occults Saturn and hides members of the Pleiades this month.

The post Harvest Moon Takes a Quick Dip in Earth's Shadow for a Partial Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Sonos, known for its wireless speakers, has a plan to earn back trust from its customers after the botched launch of a new app angered its fans as competition with Google, Apple and other companies heats up.

In a surprising twist, the upcoming Netflix series is executive produced by Robert Downey, Jr., who is famously known as Iron Man in Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his wife Susan Downey.

Elipse, el programa para bajar de peso.

And now the signs are everywhere that the corporate media have turned the corner into irrelevance…

The post Nolte: Signs of the Collapse of Corporate Media Influence Are Everywhere appeared first on Breitbart.

Cory Booker Dismisses the accusation

Way to drop a bomb, Pauletta.

1. Germany to hold snap election in February after government's coalition collapse  ABC News
2. The briefcase, the Porsche and the collapse of the German government – podcast  The Guardian
3. Germany set for snap election following collapse of Olaf Scholz’s coalition  The Conversation
4. President calls German early election plan 'realistic'  DW (English)

"For this playlist, I’ve strung together some favorite songs that reflect the subject matter and themes of the stories and that serve as fuel for my creative process."

Shares of the company were down 39% at $1.8 after the bell. The stock has fallen nearly 80% this year, while the S&P 500 passenger airlines index jumped 52%. The ultra-low cost carrier is in advanced discussions with bondholders to hammer out a bankruptcy plan that would have support from a…

When my brother, Thom Atkins, visited last fall, he showed me (and a few quilting buddies) his new method for designing and constructing "scrappy improv wall quilts," a technique that turned out to be a lot of fun for me, especially given my long history with an improvisational, intuitive approach to bead embroidery.

Basically, what we did was to empty our bags or boxes of scraps onto a large table and start pawing through them, pulling out ones that appealed to us at that moment. For me it was all about color - red, magenta, fuchsia, with hints of pink, golden-yellow, orange, lavender, and dark green. All of the fabrics were in my scrap box. We had two days of Thom's demonstrations and guidance. During that time, each of us in our small group produced a unique and very pleasing "piece" or "block," measuring roughly 18 x 21 inches, the size of a fat quarter.

One of my red scraps, cut in a nice arc at one end, was the start of it all because I liked the shape and the color. Next I picked up a small strip of yellow, and held it behind the arc of red. Ooooh! Nice enough to repeat. The scrap of orange/red batik was large enough to cut a similar arc, and the strip of yellow was long enough to go behind that one too. These two arcs formed the basis of my piece.

You can see the two arcs above; the lower right was the first. The yellow strip was only about 3" wide, not enough to go all the way around the arcs, but I cut two shapes that would echo the top of each of the arcs. I layered the remaining scraps from that on top of the arcs along the vertical edges of the design. Then I put a dark green scrap behind the arcs and the yellow, which set them off nicely. The rest was just filling to the edges of the quilt with more scraps, including fussy-cut leaves and flowers.

The next step was to glue it all together along the 1/4" seam overlap, working in layers from bottom to top, and cutting away the excess fabric from the underside after each piece is glued. Cutting away the excess fabric leaves a double layer of fabric only at the seams; the rest is a single layer. The glue is Elmer's School Glue, Disappearing Purple, as shown below. It is an organic stick glue, relatively easy to sew through, repositionable, (in case you change your mind), and purple when first applied, drying to transparent (so you can see where exactly you are putting it).

Thom's method is a type of raw edge applique, typically accomplished with heat-fusible web, such as "wonder under." The typical method, given a complex, layered design such as mine, would have resulted in a thick, stiff, multi-layer surface, which would be difficult to quilt, even with a machine. In Thom's method, there is no web, and in most places only one or two layers of fabric. Like all raw edge techniques, the raw edges must be sewn down, and the resulting quilts are not very suitable for bed quilts unless there is heavy stitching over the raw edges (for example, dense, zig-zag, machine stitching).

After gluing my original (shown above) quilt top, I assembled the quilt, using a spray glue to layer the backing, batting and top. The next step was to stitch along the "seams," the overlapping, glued edge of each piece. From there, it was up to each of us as to how to finish the quilt, perhaps with machine quilting, such as stippling or contour stitches, or perhaps with beading, all of which Thom does on his quilts.

A couple of months went by after getting to the unfinished stage shown above. I liked it, but didn't know what to do with it, until one day when I was at our Senior Center, getting foot care from a trained nurse who comes a couple times a week to help those who need it. Her treatment room, about the size of a walk-in closet, has no windows. Her client faces the door to the room, a plain, wooden door.  "That door needs a quilt," I told her. The rest is history; my scrappy improv quilt, Eclipse,  hangs there now.

Only first I had to finish it. Above is the finished quilt, Eclipse. Below I'll tell you some of the finishing steps and about how I transformed it from looking flat and ordinary to sharp and textured using embroidery embellishments. Please click on the photo so you can see the details!

You might have noticed that the finished quilt is longer (better suited for hanging on a door) than the original piece. That was a challenge, although less than you might expect, because Thom had demonstrated for us how he sometimes extends the size of his quilts. In short, I roughly planned out the addition, the mock-up shown below, then created it using the same process and scraps as the original piece.


I used fusible "tape" made for butt-joining pieces of batting, to add a new piece of batting to the bottom edge of batting on the original (upper) part of the quilt. The horizontal strip of striped fabric overlaps the two parts of the quilt and the joined batting underneath. As you can see below, I added a fussy-cut flower over the striped fabric to break up the horizontal strip and visually join the two parts.


Confession time... I'm not good at machine quilting, and don't even have a proper quilting foot for my old machine (1972 Pfaff). I tried stitching around the fussy cut flowers to secure the glued edges, but failed miserably. What to do? Ah, hand-sew with embroidery stitches and floss? Yes! It took a few tries, but eventually I found stitch and thread combinations that worked.

It looked so good that I decided to add stitching and knots to the yellow arcs next. Wow! That popped the eclipse look! In the photo below, you can see bits of all the embroidery stitches I added. Not only does the embroidery provide embellishment and emphasis, it also further quilts the piece. Click the photo to see the detail and better read the stitch identification.


Here are two more detail photos of the finished quilt (without the text boxes).



Lots of fun, and I like the results! Will I do another one? Well, right now I've finally returned to my hexie project, where I'm likely to remain for many months, but after that, scrappy improv may be just what I need!

Find everything you need for the April 8 total solar eclipse here, including eclipse glasses, event registration links, and educational resources.

In Savings and Trust, historian Justene Hill Edwards tells the story of the Freedman's Bank. Created for formerly enslaved people following the Civil War, its collapse cost depositors millions.

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.

LG’s latest prototype screen is stretchy. Shown off at LG’s Science Park in Seoul, the company demonstrated the new type… Continue reading LG gives glimpse into the future with stretchy display

The post LG gives glimpse into the future with stretchy display appeared first on ReadWrite.

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? 

Jonathan C. Trinidad
Aug 1, 2012; 11:215-229
Research

Mahir Bilen Can and Jörg Feldvoss, editors. American Mathematical Society, 2024, CONM, volume 804, approx. 216 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4704-7090-6 (print), 978-1-4704-7664-9 (online). This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Special Session on Combinatorial and Geometric Representation Theory, held virtually on November...

Infiltration of peripheral immune cells after blood-brain barrier dysfunction causes severe inflammation after a stroke. Although the endothelial glycocalyx, a network of membrane-bound glycoproteins and proteoglycans that covers the lumen of endothelial cells, functions as a barrier to circulating cells, the relationship between stroke severity and glycocalyx dysfunction remains unclear. In this study, glycosaminoglycans, a component of the endothelial glycocalyx, were studied in the context of ischemic stroke using a photochemically induced thrombosis mouse model. Decreased levels of heparan sulfate and chondroitin sulfate and increased activity of hyaluronidase 1 and heparanase (HPSE) were observed in ischemic brain tissues. HPSE expression in cerebral vessels increased after stroke onset and infarct volume greatly decreased after co-administration of N-acetylcysteine + glycosaminoglycan oligosaccharides as compared with N-acetylcysteine administration alone. These results suggest that the endothelial glycocalyx was injured after the onset of stroke. Interestingly, scission activity of proHPSE produced by immortalized endothelial cells and HEK293 cells transfected with hHPSE1 cDNA were activated by acrolein (ACR) exposure. We identified the ACR-modified amino acid residues of proHPSE using nano LC–MS/MS, suggesting that ACR modification of Lys139 (6-kDa linker), Lys107, and Lys161, located in the immediate vicinity of the 6-kDa linker, at least in part is attributed to the activation of proHPSE. Because proHPSE, but not HPSE, localizes outside cells by binding with heparan sulfate proteoglycans, ACR-modified proHPSE represents a promising target to protect the endothelial glycocalyx.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Nov. 4, 2024 — MinIO has announced compelling new optimizations and benchmarks for Arm-based chipsets powering on its object store. These optimizations underscore the relevance of low-power, […]

The post MinIO Optimizes Arm-Based Chipsets for High-Performance AI appeared first on HPCwire.