USELESS CONTRARIAN PARTY

Alberta's relaxed gathering restrictions will escalate Omicron risk, doctors warn

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Indoor gatherings now permitted to include

unvaccinated adults

KENNEY SAYS LET ZOMBIES COME OVER FOR XMAS

Wallis Snowdon · CBC News · Posted: Dec 15, 2021

Alberta is making changes to testing, booster shots and gathering restrictions as it braces for an increase in cases of the more transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press)

Alberta's decision to permit unvaccinated adults to attend holiday gatherings will allow the Omicron variant to spread rapidly, say doctors on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis.

"It's a big risk, and I think that it's potentially setting us up for a rapid rise in cases over the holidays like we saw about a year ago," Edmonton emergency physician Dr. Shazma Mithani said Wednesday.

"To me, there is no logical explanation as to why the province would start to allow people who are unvaccinated to gather indoors."

Earlier Wednesday, the province announced changes to gathering restrictions. Unvaccinated adults are now permitted to attend private indoor gatherings of up to 10 adults. 

• Unvaccinated adults can attend indoor holiday gatherings, Kenney says

Under the previous rule, people who were unvaccinated could not attend any private indoor gatherings. The new rules lift a restriction that limited indoor gatherings to people from two households.

The province also announced it will expand rapid testing while increasing the availability of vaccine booster shots.

WATCH | Alberta's chief medical officer of health discusses new rules:

"I cannot overstate the importance of having learned from that experience and the need to be extremely cautious as we learn more about the Omicron variant," says Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta's chief medical officer of health, says the province. 2:49

Premier Jason Kenney defended the relaxed restrictions as a "reasonable, very modest change." 

He said the increased availability of rapid testing kits will allow more families to safely gather over the holidays, and that Alberta's vaccination rate means it is well-positioned to handle the variant.

As of Wednesday, 85 per cent of Albertans aged 12 and older have received at least two doses of vaccine. That equates to 72.3 per cent of the overall population.

Changes send wrong message, experts say

The province's approach demonstrates a failure of leadership in responding to the health crisis, said Dr. James Talbot, Alberta's former chief medical officer of health.

The changes send the wrong message about the dangers of COVID-19, especially with Omicron's ability to evade vaccines and spread rapidly, Talbot said.

It's not really the time to be making tweaks that suggest that this is over.- Dr. James Talbot

"You really want people to stay the course and protect themselves over the holidays. It's not really the time to be making tweaks that suggest that this is over." 

The province has not learned from its past mistakes, Talbot said.

"In July, they basically declared it the 'best summer ever' and now there are now 960 Albertans for which it was the last summer ever.

"We now have another variant out there and instead of holding the line or increasing the amount of protection we have, the message they are giving is that it's OK to let your guard down." 

• 20 more omicron cases reported as Alberta records 250 new COVID-19 cases, 8 new deaths

• THE LATEST
  Everything you need to know about COVID-19 in Alberta on Wednesday, Dec. 15

Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency physician in Calgary, said the regulatory changes set the stage for a powerful fifth wave.

WATCH | Provinces sound the alarm over holiday plans as Omicron cases rise:

With cases of the Omicron variant confirmed in all 10 provinces, officials are rolling out restrictions, rapid tests and booster shots to try to curb its spread. But Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is loosening restrictions, saying residents may not follow new measures. 3:41

While increased rapid testing and vaccine boosters will be powerful tools in curbing the spread, cutting back on public health restrictions was ill-timed, Vipond said.

"At a time when we should be tightening restrictions, we're loosening them," he said.

We have not yet learned from our mistakes in this province.-Dr. Joe Vipond

The province should be considering proactive measures to clamp down against Omicron, he said.

"The way to deal with exponential growth is to act early and act hard, and that way you avoid having to put in those stringent restrictions later for longer," he said.

"We have not yet learned from our mistakes in this province." 

Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist and associate professor at the University of Alberta, questioned whether rapid testing will be enough to protect Albertans who choose to gather.

• 'Now is not the time': Federal government warns against travel abroad as Omicron spreads

• Be 'ready to pivot' domestic holiday travel plans amid rapidly spreading Omicron variant, medical experts say

The tests are less reliable on people who are not showing symptoms, Saxinger said.

"I wouldn't bet the bank on just doing rapid tests and thinking that's enough to prevent transmission," she said. "I would always see the test as an added layer of protection, not replacing anything." 

'Make the selfless decision'

The number of Omicron cases in the province spiked Tuesday, with 60 cases now detected. 

Mithani expects that number to rise over the coming weeks. 

Rapid tests come with the risk of false negatives, she said, and variants pose an increased risk of breakthrough infections.

She said the unvaccinated should get immunized or accept the consequences of their choices.

"I would encourage them to, you know, make the selfless decision not to engage with other individuals throughout the holiday season, even though the rules allow them to." 

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Column: Trump's latest deal could set a high water mark for investment scams


Michael Hiltzik
Tue, December 14, 2021

Donald Trump in 2019. (Associated Press)

For a while there, it seemed that the SPAC boom had run out its string. Then came Donald Trump.

Already confused?

Let's start with first principles. SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, are shell companies that collect funds from investors on the expectation that they'll find a private company to merge into within a given period of time, usually 24 months.

It is never a good idea to invest in a SPAC just because someone famous sponsors or invests in it or says it is a good investment.

Securities and Exchange Commission

The wrinkle is that the SPAC doesn't have a target in mind at the outset, so these are the blindest of blind pools.

The SPAC boom built through 2020 and through the first quarter of this year, peaking at some 300 deals in that quarter alone.

Many were associated with big names in sports and entertainment such as Shaquille O'Neal and Jay-Z, or political and business luminaries such as Paul Ryan and Sam Zell, the onetime owner of The Times.

By mid-year, the thrill appeared to be over. Since the end of the first quarter, only about 300 more SPACs have come to market, according to SPAC Research.

More saliently, investors have been pulling their money out of SPACs at an increasingly high rate. In the SPAC model, investors can bail, or "redeem" their investments, once a target has been identified. The average redemption rate in the latest quarter exceeded 50%, up from 10% at the start of the year. That's a sign that investors are growing more skeptical of their returns from SPAC mergers.

Enter Trump. On Oct. 20, a SPAC named Digital World Acquisition Corp. announced that it had found a merger target in Trump Media & Technology Group. Trump Media claims to be a business that aims to challenge what it calls the "tech monopoly" in media, which it asserts aims to silence conservative voices, like Trump's.

Despite Trump Media not having issued a discernible financial plan or explained how it intends to go about this task, interest in Digital World went stratospheric, with its shares soaring from about $10 (the standard IPO price for pre-merger SPACs), to $175 in the two days after the announcement.

Since then, Trump Media has missed a self-imposed deadline of November to launch a beta version of Truth Social, a social media platform that would supposedly be an alternative to Twitter (which has banned Trump). The world is still waiting. The problem may have been that a very early iteration of the site was compromised into oblivion by a tidal wave of trolls expressing anything but admiration for Trump.

On Dec. 6, Trump's company did disclose that it has hired a chief executive: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), who will quit Congress to take the job, never mind that he has never run a media company before, but he has shown a sedulous devotion over the years to Trump.

Nunes hasn't explained his decision to leave Congress, though it's reasonable to assume that it has something to do with the prospect that his district will become more Democratic in the pending redistricting.

The Trump SPAC deal has attracted the attention of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has devoted her career to outing financial phonies. In a Nov. 17 letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, Warren used the deal to underscore that SPACs are inadequately regulated.

The deal, Warren said, appears to be "a textbook example of a SPAC misleading shareholders and the public about materially important information."

She was referring to alleged undisclosed contacts between DWAC and Trump associates, which contradicted DWAC's consistent claims that it had not "initiated substantive discussions, directly or indirectly, with any business combination target." Under federal law, Warren observed, those discussions were required to be publicly disclosed.

Warren also expressed concern that "DWAC’s acquisition of Trump Media and Technology may reignite the market" for SPACs. That's troubling, she indicated, given signs that SPACs have a tendency to disadvantage small investors compared to promoters.

As it happens, the SPAC market has shown modest signs of life lately, starting around the time of the DWAC announcement about Trump.

Many investors who may have been enticed into Digital World by the magic of Trump's name, such as it is, may have already had their heads handed to them, as the shares have fallen from their peak of $175 to $50.49 at Monday's close.

That has reinforced the impression that SPACs are made to fatten the wallets of promoters and their insider friends at the expense of credulous small investors, especially when they have little going for them other than a celebrity name.

"These newer SPACs increasingly feel like an inside joke for the super-rich and a way for celebrities to monetize their reputations,” Jim Cramer, the stock trading guru at CNBC, told listeners in March. “Believe me, you don’t want to invest in someone else’s inside joke."

Cramer was seconding the SEC, which issued an investor alert around the same time, warning, "It is never a good idea to invest in a SPAC just because someone famous sponsors or invests in it or says it is a good investment."

As I reported in March during the frenzy, the SPAC system hid numerous pitfalls for unwary small investors, who may have been lured by the notion that SPACs enabled hidden gems among private companies to go public more cheaply than through an initial public offering.

“Costs built into the SPAC structure are subtle, opaque, and far higher than has been previously recognized,” law professors Michael Klausner of Stanford and Michael Ohlrogge of New York University reported in a paper in November 2020. (Their paper was titled “A Sober Look at SPACs.”)

In other words, for investors and startups alike, SPACs present nothing new under the sun. They just look new.

So what about this Trump deal? It didn't last for more than a few days before raising eyebrows among financial regulators. As Digital World disclosed on Dec. 6, in late October it received an inquiry from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, a Wall Street self-regulatory body, about suspicious trading in its shares ahead of the announcement.

The disclosure states that in early November, the SEC asked for information about "certain ... communications between DWAC and TMTG," among many other things. Neither FIRA nor the SEC has said that any wrongdoing has been established thus far.

As for Trump Media & Technology Group, it's not what you would call a solidly established business enterprise. The investor presentation Digital World filed with the SEC on Dec. 6 is devoid of business information. It's heavily devoted to Trumpian grousing about "Tech Monopoly Censorship" and to airy claims about the enterprise's "market opportunity."

The latter is pegged at 457 million potential users generating $35 billion in annual revenue. Trump conjured up those figures by adding together the market reach and revenues of Netflix, Twitter and the radio and podcast firm iHeartMedia.

A couple of other aspects of the presentation are bound to raise smiles. It calculates Trump's "historic social media following" at 146 million, although the figure is the sum of his followers on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, which may have overlapped, and although his current following on Twitter is zero because he's been banned from the platform.

The slide deck lists 30 executives and other members of Trump Media's "technology team," presumably to bolster the notion that it's a serious tech company.

But the team members are identified only by their first names and initials of their last names — i.e., "Josh A." and "Tom M.," like peripheral characters in a 19th century Russian novel. The deck notes, "personnel subject to change," so if you were basing your investment on, say, "Steve E." serving as VP, engineering, you may be disappointed.

The entire deck is attributed to the firm of E.F. Hutton. This isn't your father's or grandfather's E.F. Hutton, the brokerage renowned for its "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen" ad campaign of the 1960s. That E.F. Hutton got absorbed by Shearson Lehman Bros. (remember them?) in 1988 after an enormous fraud scandal and was owned by American Express and Citigroup in the course of a series of mergers.

The brand name was evidently controlled by one Stanley Hutton Rumbough, grandson of the original Edward Francis Hutton, who ceded it to Kingswood Capital Markets, an investment bank, which rebranded itself to evoke the "rich history, successful legacy and long-recognized value" of the old name, never mind the fraud scandal. Anyway, Kingswood seems to be the investment bank associated with Trump Media.

There isn't much more to say about this SPAC deal, at least until Trump and his new CEO actually do something media-like. The deal has followed the SPAC model to the point of arranging a $1-billion cash infusion from outside investors known as a PIPE, for "private investment in public equity."

The PIPE investors appear to be getting a good deal in that they are assured of buying shares in the merged company at a steep discount to the shares' public price. That assures them almost certainly of being able to flip their shares at a profit the moment the merged company goes public. In the estimate of Bloomberg financial columnist Matt Levine, the goal is indistinguishable from encouraging them to find "some retail rubes" to foist the shares on.

That's particularly true in light of the fact that Trump Media has yet to demonstrate that it is a genuine company. What it has is a business pitch derived from Trump's epic resentments, a CEO with no apparent experience, and a management team that can't be identified.

It also has Trump's name, which has been known in the past to attract investors and lenders to a purported university, a failing casino, and other businesses hawking vodka and steaks. To anyone who wants to play in this sandbox, we can only say: "Good luck, suckers."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

'This is weird and murky.' Trump SPAC deal values firm at more than $10 billion despite red flags

By Matt Egan, CNN Business
Tue December 14, 2021


New York (CNN Business)Former President Donald Trump's new media venture has no known revenue or product.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) posted an investor presentation last week that appears to contain errors and seems to have been partially copied and pasted from the internet. Bizarrely, one slide defines a user as a "sales representative who travels to visit customers," a definition that makes little sense given that this is a media company, not a sales platform.

TMTG's incoming CEO, Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, has no business experience in technology or social media. And federal regulators are investigating the deal to bring the media venture public.

Despite these red flags, TMTG is creating enormous buzz among at least some investors and has achieved an implied valuation above $10 billion, according to Renaissance Capital.



Federal regulators are investigating the Trump SPAC deal

"This is weird and murky," Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management LLC, told CNN. "I've never seen anything like this before. And I probably never will again."

TMTG, chaired by the former president, simultaneously revealed a deal to go public through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., which is a type of a shell company known as a SPAC, or a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. SPACs raise money that must be used to acquire and bring public private firms. Essentially they are blank-check firms that exist solely to find suitable merger partners.

SPACs have become very popular on Wall Street, in part because they can save time and money compared with traditional initial public offerings. Celebrities including Alex Rodriguez, Larry Kudlow and Shaquille O'Neal have gotten involved in SPACs, prompting regulators to warn investors not to invest in a SPAC just because a celebrity is involved.

Implied valuation above $11 billion

The Trump SPAC instantly set off a frenzy on Wall Street -- even though little was known about the new entity. Shares of Digital World skyrocketed as much as 1,657% in the days after the deal was announced before eventually retreating.

"This is now the meme stock of all meme stocks," said Tuttle, whose firm issues ETFs, including several that focus on the SPAC market. "Take all of the buzz going around about AMC and GameStop in January and February and multiple it by a million and that's what this is."

Based on Digital World's Monday closing price of $50.49, the SPAC deal implies a valuation on TMTG at about $10.5 billion, according to Renaissance Capital, which provides IPO-focused ETFs and pre-IPO research. That implied valuation includes warrants, private placements and a deal to raise $1 billion upon the completion of the SPAC merger.

Exclusive: Elizabeth Warren blasts Hertz for $2 billion stock buyback while jacking up rental car prices

Tuttle, who said his firm briefly owned shares in Digital World before they skyrocketed, called the valuation "somewhat frightening" and "ridiculous."
"Treat this like a gamble, because it definitely is," said Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital. "It seems like a lot of the valuation is based on hype and the personal popularity of Donald Trump. That's not a sound investment rationale."

'It didn't really make sense'

One of the many unusual aspects of the Trump SPAC is that the parties initially released very little concrete information about the fundamentals of the business.

New documents were released last week, but they raise more questions than answers.
A 38-slide presentation filed by TMTG includes a page titled "Infrastructure" that defines a user as a "person, or organization, or system that has one or more roles that initiates or interacts with activities." It goes on to say that includes a "sales representative who travels to visit customers."

That definition is hard to reconcile with the fact that TMTG is supposed to be a conservative media company, not a platform that caters to traveling salespeople.
"It didn't really make sense," Kennedy said. "A better example of a user would be 'US residents with internet access' or 'one of the 89 million followers of Trump's former Twitter account.'"

Judd Legum, who writes the political newsletter Popular Information, flagged the definition of a "user" in a Twitter thread over the weekend. Legum pointed out that the language on the infrastructure slide is just "cut-and-pasted from other sites."

Indeed, the slide's description of database servers matches what is written on a page last updated in 2016 on Techopedia, a website that includes a tech jargon dictionary. The definition of load balancer matches what is listed on a page on the website of Citrix.
Likewise, the definition of a client matches what is found on the website of Cloudflare.
"In other words, not only does this company not have any technical infrastructure," Legum wrote, "it could not be bothered to even write its own slide of what the infrastructure will be."

TMTG did not respond to requests for comment.

'Serious errors'

But these are not the only oddities in the investor presentation.
Kennedy, the Renaissance Capital strategist, notes that slide 5 shows the PIPE (private investment in public equity) potentially converting into 13.7 million shares, even though other filings indicate the minimum is actually 29.8 million. Another line in the same slide appears to have another error about the number of shares to be held by TMTG stockholders, Kennedy said.

Another unusual element of the presentation is that slide 21 in the deck lists first names and last initials only of the members of TMTG's technology team.
"I believe they're moving very quickly to capitalize on the current share price, so that could explain some of the errors, inconsistencies and other abnormalities," Kennedy said.

TMTG is not the only company in a SPAC deal to have typos and errors in filings. Kennedy said in the last year, he's noticed more of these issues creeping into investor presentations.

"This is a bit more. It's an error regarding the valuation and very fundamental components of the deal. These are more serious errors than we normally see," he said.

Projecting just $1 million in revenue next year

The slide deck lists an array of financial projections, including that Truth Social could reach 81 million users by 2026 and generate $13.50 in average revenue per user. The presentation states that TMTG+, the planned streaming app, is projected to reach 40 million total subscribers by 2025 and generate $9 in average monthly fees per user.

"TMTG aspires to create a media powerhouse to rival the liberal media consortium and fight back against the 'Big Tech' companies of Silicon Valley, who have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America," TMTG says in the presentation.
The company said TMTG+ could deliver a price point close to that of Netflix "given President Trump's highly enthused base."

Yet the presentation also concedes that the business doesn't amount to much at the moment.

'A surreal moment': Fired employees share what it was like on that mass-firing Zoom

One slide indicates management projects to generate just $1 million in revenue next year, based solely on Truth Social.

"This is extremely high risk. It is really buying a pig in a poke," said Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law School. "But apparently a lot of people seem to believe that something can be made of this because the valuation really is soaring."

TMTG recently announced a deal to raise $1 billion upon the completion of its SPAC agreement.

However, the company did not disclose who the investors committing $1 billion are, other than to say they are a "diverse group" of institutional investors.

Renaissance's Kennedy said the terms of the $1 billion investment are "unusually favorable" to the investors, granting them preferred shares that convert to common shares at a steep discount.

SEC and FINRA are investigating

The Trump SPAC is also the subject of regulatory scrutiny.

Last week, Digital World said in a filing it received a document and information request from the Securities and Exchange Commission in early November. Among other items, Digital World said the SEC request sought documents and communications between Digital World and Trump Media and Technology Group.

Digital World also said Wall Street's self-regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, is looking into trading prior to the deal's announcement.

In late October, the New York Times reported that Trump began discussing a merger with Digital World long before the blank-check company went public and before such talks were disclosed to investors.

That prompted Senator Elizabeth Warren to call for the SEC to investigate whether any laws were broken by Digital World because the company repeatedly told shareholders that it had not held substantive talks with a target company.

Devin Nunes is the new CEO

Trump's own role in the SPAC deal is unclear. The filings do not clearly indicate the former president's role, beyond describing him as the chairman of TMTG. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

TMTG reached a deal to go public in October despite not having a CEO. That vacancy has since been filled by Nunes, the California Republican who recently announced he will leave the House to join the Trump social media firm.

Yet Nunes, a former cattle and dairy farmer, does not appear to have any business experience in social media or technology. His Congressional website says he has a bachelor's degree in agricultural business and a master's in agriculture. Nunes did not respond to requests for comment.

The fact that TMTG won't be run by an executive with a proven track record in technology or social media adds to the risky nature of the venture. Countless startups with far more experienced executives have tried and failed to crack this market.
"It's difficult to build a social media company. Even after Twitter generated hundreds of millions of users, there were doubts about the company," Kennedy said. "You can throw money at these projects, but it's hard to build a sticky platform."

Physicists create new state of matter from quantum soup of magnetically weird particles

Scientists have spotted a long hypothesized, never-seen-before state of matter in the laboratory for the first time.

© Provided by Live Science The new material works by forming triangles out of an atom's spin states.

Ben Turner

By firing lasers at an ultracold lattice of rubidium atoms, scientists have prodded the atoms into a messy soup of quantum uncertainty known as a quantum spin liquid.

The atoms in this quantum magnetic soup quickly became connected, linking up their states across the entire material in a process called quantum entanglement. This means that any change to one atom causes immediate changes in all of the others in the material; this breakthrough could pave the way for the development of even better quantum computers, the researchers said in a paper describing their findings Dec. 3 in the journal Science.

"It is a very special moment in the field," senior author Mikhail Lukin, a professor of physics at Harvard University and the co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative, said in a statement. "You can really touch, poke, and prod at this exotic state and manipulate it to understand its properties. It's a new state of matter that people have never been able to observe."

First theorized in 1973 by the physicist Philip Anderson, quantum spin liquids emerge when materials are cajoled into disobeying the usual rules that govern their magnetic behaviour.

Electrons have a property called spin, a type of quantum angular momentum, that can point either up or down. In normal magnets (like the ones people put on the fridge), the spins of neighboring electrons orient themselves until they all point in the same direction, generating a magnetic field. In non-magnetic materials, the spins of two neighboring electrons can flip to oppose each other. But in either case, the tiny magnetic poles form a regular pattern.

In quantum spin liquids, however, the electrons refuse to choose. Instead of sitting next to each other, the electrons are arranged into a triangular lattice, so that any given electron has two immediate neighbors. Two electrons can align their spins, but a third will always be the odd one out, destroying the delicate balance and creating a constantly switching jumble of agitated electrons.

This jumbled state is what the researchers call a "frustrated" magnet. As the spin states no longer know which way to point, the electrons and their atoms are instead thrown into a weird combination of quantum states called a quantum superposition. The ever-fluctuating spins now exist simultaneously as both spin up and spin down, and the constant switching causes atoms all the way across the material to entangle with each other in a complex quantum state.

The researchers couldn't directly study the ideal quantum spin liquid, so they created a near perfect facsimile in another experimental system. They chilled an array of 219 trapped rubidium atoms — which can be used to minutely design and simulate various quantum processes — to temperatures of roughly 10 microkelvins (close to absolute zero or minus – 273.15 degrees Celsius° Celsius).

Occasionally one of the electrons in an atom is in a much higher energy level than the others, putting the atom in what is known as a Rydberg state. Much like with spin states, the spooky rules of quantum mechanics ensure that an atom does not want to be in a Rydberg state if its neighbor is. By firing lasers at certain atoms within the array, the researchers mimicked the three-way tug-of-war seen in a traditional quantum spin liquid.

Following the creation of their quantum Rydberg soup, the researchers conducted tests on the array and confirmed that its atoms had become entangled across the entire material. They had created a quantum spin liquid.

The scientists then turned their attention to a proof of concept test for its potential application: designing the qubits, or quantum bits, of a quantum computer. While ordinary computers use bits, or 0s and 1s to form the basis of all calculations, quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in more than one state at once. Qubits, however, are incredibly fragile; any interaction with the outside world can easily destroy the information they carry.

But the special nature of the quantum spin liquid's material-wide entanglement, however, could allow for far more robust information storage. That's because instead of encoding quantum information into just one qubit, it could allow for information to be contained in the shape — or the topology — that the entangled spin states make throughout the material itself; creating a "topological qubit." By encoding information in the shape formed by multiple parts rather than one part alone, the topological qubit is much less likely to lose all of its information.

The researchers' proof of concept created only a tiny topological qubit, just a few tens of atoms long, but in the future, they hope to create much larger, more practical ones.

"Learning how to create and use such topological qubits would represent a major step toward the realization of reliable quantum computers," co-author Giulia Semeghini, a quantum physicist at Harvard University, said in the statement. "We show the very first steps on how to create this topological qubit, but we still need to demonstrate how you can actually encode it and manipulate it. There's now a lot more to explore."

Originally published on Live Science.

 

Size doesn't matter: Rock composition determines how deadly a meteorite impact is

by University of Liverpool

Comparison of meteorite impact stratigraphy and extinction intensity of well-resolved 

marine genera. (a) Impact database of the 33 largest and best-dated impacts in the past

 600 myr (Coldwell and Pankhurst 2019). Transient crater diameters ≥10 km with age 

precision better than ±8 myr are shown as colored circles: circle size scaled to crater

 diameter, and color the KFF factor. Updated from Coldwell and Pankhurst (2019) using

 revised age data (Schmieder and Kring 2019) and plotted by size and the K-feldspar 

factor (color) of the target rocks. Fifteen of 33 ejecta blankets correlate with mass

 extinction events. (b) Extinction intensity for the entire duration of multicellular life

 highlights times of global environmental crises. The timing of the Acritarch Crisis also

 shown. Extinction intensity is expressed as the percentage of marine genera in their last

 appearance. Each K-feldspar-rich ejecta blanket corresponds to an Earth crisis and 

accounts for the majority of severe spikes in extinction intensity, including almost all since

 c. 250 Ma, when both records are most complete. Credit: DOI: 10.1144/jgs2021-055

A new study has found that the minerology of the rocks that a meteorite hits, rather than the size of the impact, determines how deadly an impact it will have.

The earth has been bombarded by meteorites throughout its long history. Meteorite impacts generate atmospheric dust and cover the Earth's surface with debris and have long been considered as a trigger of mass extinctions through Earth's history.

A multidisciplinary research team from the University of Liverpool and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables, Tenerife with expertise in paleontology, asteroid stratigraphy, mineralogy, cloud microphysics and climate modeling, sought to explore why some meteorites have caused mass extinctions, for example the K/Pg Chixulclub impact that killed off dinosaurs, yet many which are larger in size have not.

They analyzed 44 impacts over the past 600 million years using a new method: assessing the mineral content of the dust ejected into the atmosphere upon impact.

Their findings, published in the Journal of the Geological Society of London, reveal that meteorites that hit rocks rich in potassium feldspar (a common and rather benign mineral) always correspond with a mass extinction episode, irrespective of size.

Potassium feldspar is non-toxic. However, it is a powerful ice-nucleating mineral aerosol that strongly affects cloud dynamics, which makes them let through more solar radiation. This in turn warms up the planet and changes the climate. The atmosphere also becomes more sensitive to warming from greenhouse gas emissions, such as large volcanic eruptions.

Liverpool sedimentologist, Dr. Chris Stevenson, from the University's school of Earth, Ocean and Ecological Sciences co-authored the study.

He said: "For decades scientists have puzzled over why some meteorites cause mass extinctions, and others, even really big ones, don't.

"It's surprising when we put together the data: life carried on as normal during the 4th largest impact with a crater diameter of ~48 km, whereas an impact half the size was associated with a mass extinction only 5 million years ago.

"Many kill mechanisms have been proposed, such as large volcanic eruptions, but just like meteorites, these don't always correlate with mass extinctions.

"Using this new method for assessing the mineral content of the meteorite ejecta blankets, we show that every time a meteorite, big or small, hits rocks rich in potassium feldspar it correlates with a mass extinction event.

This opens up a whole new avenue of research: what exactly kills off life during these episodes, and how long do the potassium feldspar effects last? Until now, only meteorites have changed the aerosol regime of the climate. However, present day human activities represent a similar mechanism with increasing emissions of mineral aerosols into the atmosphere."

The paper, "Meteorites that produce K-feldspar-rich ejecta blankets correspond to mass extinctions," is published in the Journal of the Geological Society.

Earth's meteorite impacts over past 500 million years

More information: M.J. Pankhurst et al, Meteorites that produce K-feldspar-rich ejecta blankets correspond to mass extinctions, Journal of the Geological Society (2021). DOI: 10.1144/jgs2021-055

Journal information: Journal of the Geological Society 

Provided by University of Liverpool 

 

Einstein finally warms up to quantum mechanics? Research team redefines energy to explain black holes

by Kyoto University

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Einstein was no stranger to mathematical challenges. He struggled to define energy in a way that acknowledged both the law of energy conservation and covariance, which is general relativity's fundamental feature where physical laws are the same for all observers.

A research team at Kyoto University's Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics has now proposed a novel approach to this longstanding problem by defining energy to incorporate the concept of entropy. Although a great deal of effort has gone into reconciling the elegance of general relativity with quantum mechanics, team member Shuichi Yokoyama says, "The solution is shockingly intuitive."

Einstein's field equations describe how matter and energy shape spacetime and how in turn the structure of spacetime moves matter and energy. Solving this set of equations, however, is notoriously difficult, such as with pinning down the behavior of a charge associated with an energy-momentum tensor, the troublesome factor that describes mass and energy.

The research team has observed that the conservation of charge resembles entropy, which can be described as a measure of the number of different ways of arranging parts of a system.

And there's the rub: Conserved entropy defies this standard definition.

The existence of this conserved quantity contradicts a principle in basic physics known as Noether's theorem, in which conservation of any quantity generally arises because of some kind of symmetry in a system.

Surprised that other researchers have not already applied this new definition of the energy-momentum tensor, another team member, Shinya Aoki, adds that he is "also intrigued that in general curved spacetime, a conserved quantity can be defined even without symmetry."

In fact, the team has also applied this novel approach to observe a variety of cosmic phenomena, such as the expansion of the universe and black holes. While the calculations correspond well with the currently accepted behavior of entropy for a Schwarzschild black hole, the equations show that entropy density is concentrated at the singularity in the center of the black hole, a region where spacetime becomes poorly defined.

The authors hope that their research will spur deeper discussion among many scientists not only in gravity theory but also in basic physics.Studying cosmic expansion using methods from many-body physics

More information: Sinya Aoki et al, Charge conservation, entropy current and gravitation, International Journal of Modern Physics A (2021). DOI: 10.1142/S0217751X21502018

Provided by Kyoto University 

Astronomers peer deeper into Milky Way's heart than ever before with new telescope images

Tereza Pultarova 

SPACE.COM

Astronomers have captured the deepest and sharpest images of the Milky Way's center ever, enabling scientists to estimate the mass of the giant black hole at our galaxy's heart with unmatched precision.

Stars orbiting close to the Sagittarius A* black hole at the center of the Milky Way captured in May this year.

The Milky Way observations, made with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, also revealed a previously unknown star orbiting close to our galaxy's mysterious central black hole, called Sagittarius A*.

The Very Large Telescope is one of the world's most advanced optical space observatories. Consisting of four main telescopes, each 27 feet in diameter (8.2 meters), and four auxiliary telescopes, 6 feet in diameter (1.8 m), the observatory can detect stellar objects four billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.

A technique called interferometry enables astronomers to combine the light coming through the four main telescopes into a single image. Astronomers have been using interferometry for years, but its latest iteration provides a jaw-dropping 20-fold improvement in sharpness and detail compared to the images obtained by the individual telescopes, researchers said.

Related: Milky Way's galactic core overflows with colorful threads in new panorama

"The VLTI gives us this incredible spatial resolution and with the new images we reach deeper than ever before," Julia Stadler, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, who led the imaging campaign, said in a statement. "We are stunned by their amount of detail, and by the action and number of stars they reveal around the black hole."

Since the black hole in the Milky Way's center emits no light, it cannot be directly observed. Astronomers can only learn about its properties by studying the motions of the stars in its vicinity.

"Following stars on close orbits around Sagittarius A* allows us to precisely probe the gravitational field around the closest massive black hole to Earth, to test general relativity, and to determine the properties of the black hole," Reinhard Genzel, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 for his decades-long research of Sagittarius A*, said in the statement. Genzel is also a co-author of the new study.





The measurements, conducted between March and July 2021, revealed that Sagittarius A* has a mass of 4.3 million suns and sits at a distance of 27,000 light-years from Earth. Both of these figures are the most precise estimates of their kind to date.

During the campaign, the astronomers observed the star S29, the closest known star to Sagittarius A*, zooming by the black hole at a distance of just 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers). That is only about 90 times the distance from Earth to the sun. During this close pass, the star travelled at a record-breaking speed of 5,430 miles per second (8,740 kilometers per second).

But the observations also discovered a completely new star in this dense region close to the galaxy's heart. Named S300, the star's discovery is a promising development for further research into this intriguing part of the galactic system.

The research is part of an international project called GRAVITY, which is developing new techniques for analyzing images of the Milky Way's galactic center with the goal of mapping the surroundings of Sagittarius A* in the greatest possible detail. The astronomers hope that in the future, they will be able to detect stars much fainter than S29 and S300 and orbiting even closer to the black hole. The orbits of these close stars may reveal information about the black hole's rotation. The astronomers hope to make major leaps after the completion of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, which will become the world's largest optical space observatory when it comes online in about 2025.

"With GRAVITY and the ELT's powers combined, we will be able to find out how fast the black hole spins," Frank Eisenhauer, an astronomer at MPE and principal investigator of the GRAVITY project, said in the statement. "Nobody has been able to do that so far."

The new research is described in two papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Tuesday (Dec. 14).

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. 

Geologists uncover 'treasure trove' of dinosaur tracks in Poland

WARSAW (Reuters) - Hundreds of dinosaur footprints, so well-preserved that even the scaly skin can be seen, have been found in Poland, giving an insight into a complex ecosystem around 200 million years ago, geologists said.

Described by the Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute as a treasure trove, the fossilised tracks and bones were found in an opencast clay mine in Borkowice, 130 km (80 miles) south of Warsaw.

"In the traces left by dinosaurs, you can read their behaviour and habits... we have traces left by dinosaurs running, swimming, resting and sitting," said geologist Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki.

The largest footprints of carnivorous dinosaurs are 40 cm long and in many cases the skin can be seen in detail.

"In order for such a state of preservation to be possible, a very special sequence of events had to take place in a short time," geologist Grzegorz Pienkowski said in a statement.

Several hundred dinosaur tracks, representing at least seven species, have been found and geologists say they are likely to find more. They have also discovered bone fragments from animals and fish.

(Writing by Alan Charlish and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Stanford Researchers Test Physics of Coral as an Indicator of Reef Health

 

Video by Farrin Abbott

New research shows that physics measurements of just a small portion of reef can be used to assess the health of an entire reef system. The findings may help scientists grasp how these important ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.

BY DANIELLE TORRENT TUCKER

Vast amounts of energy flow around the ocean as waves, tides and currents, eventually impacting coasts, including coral reefs that provide food, income and coastal protection to more than 500 million people. This water movement is foundational to reef success, bringing nutrients and food and removing waste, yet far less research has been focused on the physics in comparison to the biology of these living communities.

New research shows that physics measurements of just a small portion of reef can be used to assess the health of an entire reef system. The findings may help scientists grasp how these important ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.

Stanford scientists recently addressed this imbalance by demonstrating that measuring the physics of just a small portion of reef with a single instrument can reveal insights about the health of an entire reef system. The findings point to low-cost methods for scaling up monitoring efforts of these enigmatic living structures, which are at risk of devastation in a changing climate. The results appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans Dec. 14.

“This approach is like building a weather station for coral reefs,” said lead study author Mathilde Lindhart, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering. “If we have a couple of weather stations around, we can then determine the weather everywhere on the reef.”
Limited resources

For decades, marine scientists have often relied on a single instrument to calculate the flow around reefs because the measurements must be made with limited time and costly tools that can only be anchored in certain locations. As a result, they have had to assume that one measurement is representative of flow over the entire reef. This new work confirms that assumption is correct, bringing renewed credibility to previously collected data.

“Replication is the foundation of our ability to trust science,” said senior study author Rob Dunbar, a professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “Our results are building a solid foundation for other studies of coral reef physics.”

The study authors tested a suite of current meters, which send out sound waves that scatter off the currents and suspended particles, including sediment and plankton, then return with a shift in frequency that translates into flow velocities. They measured the fluid dynamics at different resolutions, with ranges from about 3 to 40 feet, depending on the instrument.

“Marine biologists that do research on specific fish or corals or other organisms need to measure the flow,” said study co-author Alexy Khrizman, a PhD student in Earth system science. “It’s very important to know that the choice of the instrument is not going to affect the research. It’s also important that we get the flow and turbulence work correct, otherwise our calculations of production and calcification will not be correct.”
Serendipitous science

The researchers conducted field work in different locations within the Salomon Atoll in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, south of the Maldives. They were collecting data about a reef off Île Anglaise as part of a larger initiative to study the British Indian Ocean Territory Marine Protected Area when they realized they were prepared to test the assumption that one instrument would provide enough information to understand the flow of the entire reef.

“We were sort of testing our toolbox,” Lindhart said. “We had all these instruments in the water already and were actually looking for something else – it’s rare that you have the opportunity to measure the same thing, but in different ways.”

The researchers used the data they collected to construct a three-dimensional model of the reef and its flow, bringing new clarity to the life of these underwater cities.

“This is the first three-dimensional construct that tells us how the roughness and its variability from place to place impacts water flow over the reef,” Dunbar said. “There’s a direct correlation between the roughness of the coral reef and the biodiversity of the reef.”
Fundamental insights

Through their research, the study authors aim to answer foundational questions about how these incredibly complex structures interact with incoming energy.

“There are so many ways to study reefs, what we sometimes call the currency by which you’re going to see what’s going on. For most people, it’s fish or the corals themselves,” Dunbar said. “What’s really new is that our currency is different – this paper is about using the physics of moving water as currency.”

They also hope the findings will be useful to conservation managers. Coral reefs are like “super-efficient cement factories,” according to Dunbar, producing architectures and buildings that are self-healing. Although they comprise less than 1 percent of the surface area of the ocean, reefs are home to about 25 percent of all marine life.

“In order to make any kind of projection about climate change, we need to know how they are working right now,” Lindhart said. “The beautiful thing about physics is that it’s the same everywhere – once we’ve established some principles, you can take them and use them somewhere else.”

Dunbar is the W.M. Keck Professor at Stanford Earth and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Study co-authors include Stephen Monismith, the Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, and David Mucciarone, lab manager in the Department of Earth System Science.

This research was supported by the Bertarelli Program in Marine Science, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship and National Science Foundation grant OCE-1948189.

Ontario researchers create chemical compounds that can neutralize COVID-19, some variants

Christy Somos

CTVNews.ca Writer
 Tuesday, December 14, 2021

This undated electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus causes COVID-19. The sample was isolated from a patient in the U.S. (NIAID-RML via AP)

Ontario researchers have created chemical compounds that can neutralize SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as several of its variants.

Detailing their findings in a recent paper published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, researchers at the University of Toronto (UofT) created “D-peptides” that can neutralize the virus and stop infection of cultured human cells.

D-peptides, also known as “mirror-image peptides” are chemical compounds that have properties that allow them to be developed into low-cost antiviral therapeutics, according to a release.

“Our peptides act similar to antibodies that block the virus from entering the cells, but there are certain advantages in that they are cheaper to make [and] they have long stability,” said UofT professor and senior study author Philip Kim on CTV’s Your Morning Tuesday.

Generally, peptides are rapidly broken down inside the body by enzymes that attack harmful bacteria and pathogens. However, mirror peptides are resistant to degradation.

Kim’s team designed several D-peptides that mimic the portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike that binds to the surface of cells, via the ACE2 receptor. The peptides bind to the receptor before the virus makes contact with the cell, preventing infection.

Two high-security labs in South Korea confirmed the experiment with cultured human cells, and the peptides working against the infection of the Alpha, Beta and Gamma COVID-19 variants.

Kim is confident that the peptides can be formulated to work against the Omicron variant as well.

“Based on the testing we have done over the past week or two, we believe it would be effective against Omicron and updating our compound to be effective against Omicron would be very straight forward,” he said.

Kim said that since D-peptides can be used to fight diseases in highly targeted ways, his technology could be used against Alzheimer’s, cancer or any future coronaviruses.

Kim and his team have partnered with a Boston biotech company called Decoy Therapeutics to commercialize his research, but Kim said there was no reason why it couldn’t be produced in Canada.

“It will be at least two years before it is available to the public,” he said.

BREAKING: 

Carlsen Might Only Defend Title Vs. Firouzja

Did Magnus Carlsen play his last title match? 

Photo: Maria Emelianova/

PeterDoggers
Updated: Dec 14, 2021
Chess.com

GM Magnus Carlsen might be letting go of his world title in classical chess unless GM Alireza Firouzja will be his opponent for the next match. "If someone other than Firouzja wins the Candidates Tournament, it is unlikely that I will play the next world championship match," the world champion said in a podcast on Tuesday.

The Candidates Tournament is scheduled for June 2022, and the next world championship is tentatively planned for early 2023. The reigning champion might not be part of it.

At the final press conference after game 11, Carlsen already seemed to be hinting at this possibility when he gave a slightly puzzling answer to the question of whether he expects to eventually let go of his title on his own terms or by losing to a new challenger. "First of all, that's a very good question. I cannot answer it right now," he said.

Four days later, Carlsen provided more details in a new podcast for sponsor Unibet with his good friend Magnus Barstad, recorded in Dubai (also covered by VG). The bomb has been dropped: Carlsen feels he only wants to defend his title in another match if Firouzja will win the 2022 Candidates.



"If someone other than Firouzja wins the Candidates Tournament, it is unlikely that I will play the next world championship match," Carlsen said. "Then I think I can say that I am happy."

At the closing ceremony in Dubai, the Norwegian superstar mentioned that his motivation for the match hadn't always been at its highest. In the podcast, he said that the joy of winning was "not close to" what he envisioned.

In general, Carlsen wasn't as motivated as before: "It has been clear to me for most of the year that this world championship match should be the last. It does not mean as much anymore as it once did," he said, adding: "I have not felt that the positive has outweighed the negative. I want to quit when I am at my best."

In the podcast, Carlsen noted that Firouzja's fast rise to the top somewhat changed his mind. He repeated what he had said at the final press conference: "I have to say I was really impressed with his performance in the Grand Swiss and in the European Team Championship, and I would say that motivated me more than anything else."

Is Alireza Firouzja the only player with a chance to play Carlsen in 2023? 

Photo: Maria Emelianova/Chess.com.

The world champion emphasizes that he does not intend to quit chess in general. For example, he is very motivated to defend his rapid and blitz titles in Warsaw (Dec. 26-30).

"I will continue to play chess; it gives me a lot of joy. Already in the middle of the world championship here in Dubai, I started to look forward to playing the world rapid and blitz this Christmas."

And it seems we don't need to worry about losing Carlsen for classical chess either as he has set a new goal: that of breaking 2900 Elo.

"I have never had it as a goal before because I felt that it was too difficult. I have improved my rating again a bit now, to 2865, and it is at least a goal you can set. It does not feel completely impossible, but at the same time, I know that I have to be on top every time I play. There is no room for error. It is something to motivate oneself for."

If Firouzja fails to win the Candidates, we might see a repeat of the scenario in 1975, when the chess world got a new world champion without the reigning champion losing a match. The 11th world champion Bobby Fischer forfeited his title after failing to agree with FIDE on the details for a match against Anatoly Karpov, who was then awarded the title.

As the Norwegian GM Jon Ludvig Hammer points out, this time around we might see a match between the winner and the runner-up of the Candidates.

Magnus Carlsen may opt against world chess defence due to lack of motivation

Carlsen retained world championship title in Dubai

‘It doesn’t mean as much any more as it once did’

Magnus Carlsen insists he has other priorities outside of the world championship. 

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images


Sean Ingle
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 14 Dec 2021 

Magnus Carlsen says he is ready to shock the chess world by giving up his world championship title – because defending it no longer motivates him. The five-time world champion retained the classical title in emphatic style in Dubai last week, crushing his Russian challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi 7½-3½, but now says he has other priorities.

“It’s been clear to me for most of the year that this world championship should be the last,” he said. “It doesn’t mean as much any more as it once did. I haven’t felt that the positive outweighs the negative.


Carlsen’s epochal world title triumph proves an antidote to perfection

“For those who expect me to play the world championship next time, the chance that they will be disappointed is very great.”

The 31-year-old said the only thing likely to persuade him to keep defending his title would be if his next opponent was the brilliant 18‑year‑old Alireza Firouzja, who recently broke Carlsen’s record as the youngest 2800-rated player and is now ranked world No 2.

However, Firouzja still has to qualify from an eight-man candidates tournament to earn the right to play Carlsen.

“It is important for me to say that I do intend to play chess,” said Carlsen, who has hinted before that he is unhappy with the format of the classical world championship, which he thinks should have shorter time controls. “I will continue to play chess, it gives me a lot of joy. But the world championship has not been so pleasurable.”


How Magnus Carlsen won chess back from the machines

Speaking to the Løperekka podcast for his sponsor Unibet, Carlsen said: “If someone other than Firouzja wins the candidates tournament it’s unlikely I will play the next world championship match.”

Instead Carlsen, who is already the highest ranked chess player in history, has set his sights on becoming the first man to break the 2900 barrier.

“There is so much more I can try to do,” he said. “I am very motivated to get the rating to 2900. I have never had it as a goal before, because I felt it was difficult. I have raised the rating a bit again now, to 2865, and it is at least a goal you can set. It does not feel completely impossible.”