Baltic Dry Index. 4201 +54 Brent Crude 70.70
Spot Gold 1793
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 25/08/21 World 214,007,833
Deaths 4,465,549
The goal of socialism is communism.
Vladimir Lenin.
In the stock casinos, it’s a perfect world. What’s not to like?
Well, to this old dinosaur trader from a bygone age, I think just about everything. See today’s Global Inflation Watch section.
In the real world, very little is now real.
We are deep in an age of self-delusion.
I feel like Noah probably felt when he began predicting a flood. Time to start building an Ark, or at least its modern equivalent, reducing exposure to stocks and bonds.
Below, more self-delusion in Asia.
Chinese tech stocks in Hong Kong erase some gains; Australian mining stocks rise
SINGAPORE — Asia-Pacific stocks were mixed on Wednesday, as optimism continued to drive U.S. stocks, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq reaching record highs overnight.
Chinese stocks were subdued in the morning. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index slipped 0.39% after jumping earlier.
Chinese tech stocks listed in Hong Kong pared morning gains, losing steam after their Tuesday rally. Tencent shares edged down 0.13% after jumping 3% earlier. Food delivery giant Meituan was up 2.52%, JD.com popped 3.36%, while Alibaba lost over 2% reversing morning gains.
The Shanghai composite was up 0.34%, and the Shenzhen component was down 0.28%.
On Tuesday, the country’s cybersecurity regulator said Chinese companies that wish to go public — including those planning to list overseas — must comply with two main aspects of a wider set of regulations. Those remarks come as policy uncertainty this summer has essentially halted Chinese listings in the U.S., after a surge in overseas offerings earlier this year.
Other Asia-Pacific markets rise
The Nikkei 225 in Japan was just under the flatline, while the Topix rose marginally.
Over in South Korea, the Kospi dipped 0.31%.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 was up 0.18%.
Iron ore prices soared, giving mining stocks a boost. They shot up almost 9% on Tuesday, according to Vivek Dhar, commodities analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Mining stocks in Australia jumped in the morning. Rio Tinto jumped 3%, and Fortescue Metals was up 2.88%. BHP rose 1.56%.
Meanwhile, Covid fears continue to dominate Australia as Sydney’s cases hit a new daily record on Wednesday putting parts of the health system under “severe pressure,” officials said, according to Reuters.
Optimism from the full Food and Drug Administration approval of the Pfizer Covid vaccine continued to lift U.S. markets overnight.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 30.55 points, or less than 0.1%, to 35,366.26. The S&P 500 added 0.1% to a new closing high of 4,486.23. The Nasdaq Composite gained 0.5% to 15,019.80, also a new closing high.
Chinese stocks led the Nasdaq as investors gain more clarity on China’s regulatory outlook and buy shares of names that have taken a beating lately.
“Markets are still basking in the glow of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine having received regulatory approval on Monday, which is paving the way for organisations to mandate vaccines for workers and thus lift vaccination rates higher,” Tapas Strickland, director of economics and markets at the National Australia Bank, wrote in a note.
“China’s delta outbreak also appears to be under control with two consecutive days of no new domestic cases ... while the PBoC vowed to boost credit support for smaller businesses and the real economy,” he said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/asia-pacific-stocks-sp-500-nasdaq-jump-to-record-highs.html
In Afghan news, it’s August 31 or bust. More likely August 31 or war with the Taliban and all comers.
But just how long can the Afghan economy and currency hold up? How long before economic collapse sets in?
Biden holds to Kabul Aug. 31 deadline despite criticism
U.S. President Joe Biden declared Tuesday he is sticking to his Aug. 31 deadline for completing a risky airlift of Americans, endangered Afghans and others seeking to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The decision defies allied leaders who want to give the evacuation more time and opens Biden to criticism that he caved to Taliban deadline demands.
“Every day we’re on the ground is another day that we know ISIS-K is seeking to target the airport and attack both us and allied forces and innocent civilians,” Biden said at the White House, referring to the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, which is known for staging suicide attacks on civilians.
He said the Taliban are cooperating and security is holding despite a number of violent incidents. “But it’s a tenuous situation,” he said, adding, “We run a serious risk of it breaking down as time goes on.”
----Biden said he had asked the Pentagon and State Department for evacuation contingency plans that would adjust the timeline for full withdrawal should that become necessary.
Pentagon officials expressed confidence the airlift, which started on Aug. 14, can get all Americans out by next Tuesday, the deadline Biden had set long before the Taliban completed their takeover. But unknown thousands of other foreign nationals remain in Afghanistan and are struggling to get out.
The Taliban, who have wrested control of the country back nearly 20 years after being ousted in a U.S.-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks, insist the airlift must end on Aug. 31. Any decision by Biden to stay longer could reignite a war between the militants and the approximately 5,800 American troops who are executing the airlift at Kabul airport.
In Kabul, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference the U.S. must stick to its self-imposed deadline, saying “after that we won’t let Afghans be taken out” on evacuation flights. He also said the Taliban would bar Afghans from accessing roads to the airport, while allowing foreigners to pass in order to prevent large crowds from massing.
At the Pentagon, spokesman John Kirby said Aug. 31 leaves enough time to get all Americans out, but he was less specific about completing the evacuation of all at-risk Afghans. He said about 4,000 American passport holders and their family members had been evacuated from Kabul as of Tuesday.
Finally, poor Europe. With winter 2021-2022 approaching, late summer early autumn is normally a time of natural gas inventory rebuilding for Europe. So, what went wrong this year? Nord Stream 2?
Does going “green” mean turning blue in Europe each winter?
Russia is pumping a lot less natural gas to Europe all of a sudden — and it is not clear why
Published Tue, Aug 24 2021 5:03 AM EDT
LONDON — Russia has slowed the delivery of piped natural gas to Europe in recent weeks, according to analysis from ICIS, a commodity intelligence service, raising questions about the potential causes behind the drop and its implications for global gas markets.
It comes shortly after German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to ease long-running concerns about the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, saying further sanctions may be imposed if Moscow used gas “as a weapon.”
The controversial project is designed to deliver Russian gas directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine and Poland.
Critics argue the pipeline is not compatible with European climate goals, increases the region’s dependence on Russian energy exports and will most likely strengthen Russian President Vladimir Putin’s economic and political influence over the region.
Some analysts have suggested Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant, may be limiting its delivery of discretionary natural gas supply to Europe to support its case in starting flows via Nord Stream 2.
“That’s because Gazprom is readying itself for starting Nord Stream 2 and it is hoping to exert an element of leverage in terms of trying to make sure that when all the regulatory t’s get crossed and i’s get dotted, that that process is as swift as possible,” Tom Marzec-Manser, lead European gas analyst at ICIS, told CNBC via telephone.
“If there is less gas around than normal and the price is high then it may streamline that process,” he added.
When approached for comment, Gazprom referred CNBC to a statement published on its Telegram account on Aug. 16. The company described August as “another ‘winter’ month on the gas market,” according to a translation.
An increased load on the gas supply system had coincided with the traditional season of scheduled preventive maintenance and preparation for the fall to winter period, “which cannot be paused,” Gazprom said.
“The practice of the last few years both in Russia and in Europe suggests that the winter period has also shifted to the spring month of March. Therefore, now, in the summer, the priority is to pump gas into underground storage facilities,” the company said. “This is also very well understood by our European colleagues.”
More
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston
Churchill.
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
House passes $3.5T Biden blueprint after deal with moderates
WASHINGTON (AP) — Striking a deal with moderates, House Democratic leaders have muscled President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar budget blueprint over a key hurdle, ending a risky standoff and putting the party’s domestic infrastructure agenda back on track.
The 220-212 vote Tuesday was a first move toward drafting Biden’s $3.5 trillion rebuilding plan this fall, and the narrow outcome, in the face of unanimous Republican opposition, signaled the power a few voices have to alter the debate and the challenges ahead still threatening to upend the president’s agenda.
From the White House, Biden praised the outcome as “a step closer to truly investing in the American people.” He said at a news conference that he had called to congratulate House leaders for the work.
More
https://apnews.com/article/house-passes-budget-blueprint-0a1258e07b1a8b9aeddb69980093c838
German consumers, state spending drive second quarter economic recovery
Published Tue, Aug 24 2021 3:38 AM EDT
The German economy grew more than expected in the second quarter as the easing of COVID-19 curbs spurred consumers to dip into record savings piled up during the winter lockdown and the state pressed on with a huge debt-financed stimulus push.
Gross domestic product grew an adjusted 1.6% on the quarter, the Federal Statistic Office said on Tuesday, up from its previous estimate of 1.5% and following a revised first quarter contraction of 2%.
On the year, Europe’s largest economy expanded by a calendar-adjusted 9.4% in the second quarter, leaving economic activity 3.3% below the pre-crisis levels of the fourth quarter of 2019.
Private consumption grew by 3.2% between April and June, contributing 1.6% percentage points to overall growth and pushing the savings rate down to 16.3%.
In the first quarter, when shops, bars and restaurants were closed under Germany’s lockdown, that rate hit a record high of 22%.
Public consumption expanded 1.8%, contributing 0.4% to the overall growth rate.
State spending to cushion the impact of the coronavirus crisis, financed with unprecedented new borrowing, blew a 80.9 billion euro ($95 billion) hole in the public finances in the first half of the year, the statistics office said.
This equated to a public sector deficit of 4.7% of GDP, the largest in 26 years and what Carsten Brzeski from ING Bank termed “the downside of the rapid economic recovery.”
The stimlus should help lift the economy back to pre-crisis levels before the end of 2021 but will leave the government that emerges from next month’s federal election with a heavy burden to shoulder, Brzeski said.
Germany’s quarter-on-quarter GDP growth compared with a second quarter euro zone average of 2% and growth of 0.9%, 2.7% and 2.8% respectively the bloc’s next biggest economies, France, Italy and Spain.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/german-consumers-state-spending-drive-q2-economic-recovery.html
UK retail sales surge in August, price pressures up too - CBI
August 24, 20211 1:18 AM By William Schomberg
LONDON (Reuters) - British retailers reported the biggest surge in spending in almost seven years this month and orders hit a new high but stocks fell to the lowest levels on record, putting pressure on prices, industry data showed on Tuesday.
The Confederation of British Industry’s measure of the volume of sales compared with a year earlier soared to +60, the highest since December 2014, from +23 in July. A Reuters poll of economists had pointed to a fall to +20.
Alpesh Paleja, a CBI economist, said consumer demand was spurring an economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis but spending was expected to settle down later in the year.
“Furthermore, there are signs of operational challenges still biting, with stock levels reaching another record low and import penetration falling,” he said.
“Disruption is being exacerbated by continued labour shortages, with many retailers reliant on younger employees currently awaiting their jab.”
However, the relaxation of self-isolation rules for fully vaccinated people who had been in contact with others with COVID-19 had eased the some of the staffing squeeze on many retailers.
The Bank of England is watching how much Britons spend from savings they built up during the lockdown.
It is also looking at whether bottlenecks in supply caused by the pandemic - such as dwindling stocks in the retail sector - will lead to longer-term inflation pressures.
The CBI said retailers reported that selling prices in the three months to August increased at the fastest pace since November 2017 and the picture for the next quarter looked similar.
More
IMF's $650 billion reserves distribution is 'shot in arm' for global economy - Georgieva
August 23, 2021 6:23 PM By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The IMF will distribute about $650 billion in new Special Drawing Rights to its members on Monday, providing a “significant shot in the arm” for global efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.
The International Monetary Fund’s largest-ever distribution of monetary reserves will provide additional liquidity for the global economy, supplementing member countries’ foreign exchange reserves and reducing their reliance on more expensive domestic or external debt, Georgieva said in a statement.
“The allocation is a significant shot in the arm for the world and, if used wisely, a unique opportunity to combat this unprecedented crisis,” she said.
The IMF underscored its concerns about diverging trends in the global economy and said the new SDR allocation would allow richer countries to help those hit hard by the pandemic, while improving the outlook for the global economy.
Countries can use the SDR allocation to support their economies and step up their fight against the coronavirus crisis, but should not use the fiscal space to delay needed economic reforms or debt restructuring, the IMF said in separate guidance document.
IMF member countries will receive SDRs -- the fund’s unit of exchange backed by dollars, euros, yen, sterling and yuan -- in proportion with their existing quota shareholdings in the fund.
Georgieva said about $275 billion of the allocation will go to emerging market and developing countries, with some $21 billion to flow to low-income countries.
The Fund last week suspended Afghanistan’s access to IMF resources, including this SDR allocation, due to a lack of clarity over the country’s government after the Taliban seized control of Kabul.
A lack of clarity among the international community over official government recognition in Venezuela kept Caracas locked out of the current allocation.
Though calls had been made to limit Belarusian access to SDRs, Alexander Lukashenko’s hardline government has not been disavowed by enough IMF members and the Fund is allowing access.
More
U.S. Crops Wither Under Scorching Heat
Inventories of grains world-wide are dwindling, further pushing up already high prices for corn and wheat
Aug. 24, 2021 5:30 am ET
Drought is blistering key U.S. cash crops, further elevating prices for staples including corn and wheat.
The punishing dynamics of a torrid summer were evident this month on the Pro Farmer Crop Tour, an annual event in which farmers visit key growing areas across the grain belt to gather data on the coming harvest. Driving along state Route 14 outside of Verdigre, Neb., Randy Wiese turned to see a farmer harvesting hay. The piles were small.
“That farmer is sick to his stomach,” said Mr. Wiese, who farms 800 acres of soybeans and corn in Lake Park, Iowa.
He isn’t alone. Farm incomes have been hit hard over the past two years, first when Covid-19 shutdowns hammered prices and afterward when hot, dry weather reduced output, limiting farmers’ capacity to cash in on rising demand and higher prices.
Extreme heat is baking most of the U.S. North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska all contain areas of extreme drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. North Dakota and Minnesota, in particular, are experiencing near-record lows in soil moisture, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As a result, many crops planted this spring are wilting. Some 63% of the U.S. spring wheat crop is in poor or very poor condition, versus 6% at this time last year, according to Agriculture Department data.
The poor weather has caused the USDA to scale back its expectations for U.S. crop production in 2021—which, in turn, is causing domestic inventories to dwindle. In the USDA’s latest monthly supply and demand report, the agency pegged ending stocks for corn, wheat, and soybeans all at their lowest level since 2013.
----Brazil’s second crop of corn, grown in the winter, has been greatly diminished due to drought. The winter crop is projected by the country’s crop agency to be 60.3 million metric tons, down from 75.1 million tons at this time last year.
Wheat crops in Russia are also suffering due to drought, causing forecasters to cut their outlook for wheat production there. In its latest agricultural supply and demand report, the USDA pegged its forecast for Russian wheat at 72.5 million metric tons, down 12.5 million tons from its estimate in July and below estimates provided by other firms tracking the region.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-crops-wither-under-scorching-heat-11629797401
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
Ronald Reagan.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Sydney’s hospitals under strain as coronavirus cases hit new daily record
Sydney’s Covid-19 cases rose to a new daily record on Wednesday, putting parts of the health system under “severe pressure,” officials said, as they urged an increase in vaccinations to help curb the rate of hospitalizations.
Despite two months of lockdowns, New South Wales (NSW) state reported 919 new cases amid a growing delta variant outbreak, taking Australia’s daily case numbers to a new pandemic high just below 1,000. A total of 113 people in the state are in intensive care, with 98 of those unvaccinated.
“This highlights ... the fact that vaccination is the key. We need to increase those vaccine coverage levels,” state Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant told a briefing.
Australia, grappling to control a third wave of the coronavirus, has locked down more than half of its 25 million population, including its largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and is accelerating an initially sluggish vaccine rollout.
Around 31% of people above 16 have been fully vaccinated, while 54% have had at least one dose.
“We have made the point that the most important figure moving forward is the rate of vaccination and that remains the case,” NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney, the state capital.
“There is no doubt that parts of the hospital network are under severe pressure when most of the cases, 80% of cases are coming out of the same region,” she added, pointing to the high case numbers in Sydney’s southwestern suburbs.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/sydneys-hospitals-under-strain-as-coronavirus-cases-hit-record.html
$15 drug gets COVID patients off oxygen support in under week – study
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN AUGUST 23, 2021 22:02
Fourteen out of 15 severe COVID-19 patients who were treated in an investigator-initiated interventional open-label clinical study of the drug TriCor (fenofibrate) didn’t require oxygen support within a week of treatment and were released from the hospital, according to the results of a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem study.
Fenofibrate is an FDA-approved oral medication. The results were published on Researchsquare.com and are currently under peer review.
Specifically, the team that was led by HU’s Prof. Yaakov Nahmias carried out the study at Israel’s Barzilai Medical Center in coordination with the hospital’s head of the Infectious Disease Unit, Prof. Shlomo Maayan, and with support from Abbott Laboratories.
The 15 treated patients all had pneumonia and required oxygen support. They were also older with multiple comorbidities, ranging from diabetes and obesity to high blood pressure.
In addition to standard of care, the patients were given 145 mg/day of fenofibrate for 10 days.
“The results were dramatic,” Nahmias told The Jerusalem Post. “Progressive inflammation markers, which are the hallmark of deteriorative COVID-19, dropped within 48 hours of treatment. Moreover, 14 of the 15 severe patients didn’t require oxygen support within a week of treatment.” The 15th patient was off oxygen within 10 days.
When looking at the data on other similar severe patients, less than 30% of them on average are removed from oxygen support within a week. In other words, fenofibrate could dramatically shorten the treatment time for severe COVID patients.
“We know these kinds of patients deteriorate really fast, develop a cytokine storm in five to seven days and that it can take weeks to treat them and for them to get better,” Nahmias said.
“We gave these patients fenofibrate and the study shows inflammation dropped incredibly fast. They did not seem to develop a cytokine storm at all.”
---- FENOFIBRATE WAS approved by the FDA back in 1975 for long-term use and is considered safe. Moreover, it is an inexpensive pill, Nahmias said. It costs less than $1.50 a day, meaning the entire treatment per patient was around $15.
Nahmias has been studying the use of fenofibrate for treating COVID-19 almost since the start of the pandemic. He first ran a pre-clinical trial and then a multi-center retrospective study, both of which supported the effectiveness of the drug.
“Viruses are parasites,” Nahmias explained. “They cannot replicate by themselves. They have to get inside a human cell and hijack their machinery to replicate.”
Working with collaborators in the United States, Nahmias demonstrated that the coronavirus prevents the burning of fat in lung cells, resulting in large amounts of fat accumulating inside lung cells – a condition the virus needs to reproduce. Fenofibrate, he hoped, would reverse that effect, and eliminate virus replication.
More
Risk for global pandemics higher than previously thought, study finds
Aug. 23, 2021 / 4:28 PM
Aug. 23 (UPI) -- The COVID-19 pandemic may be the deadliest viral outbreak since the Spanish flu in 1918-19, but these events may not be as rare as previously thought, according to an analysis published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The assessment of new disease outbreaks over the past 400 years found that the probability of a pandemic with similar impact to COVID-19 in a given year is about 2%, the data showed.
This means that a person born in 2000 had about a 38% chance of experiencing a major outbreak by now, the researchers said.
That probability is only growing, highlighting the need to adjust perceptions of pandemic risks and expectations for preparedness, they said.
"The most important takeaway [of our study] is that large pandemics like COVID-19 and the Spanish flu are relatively likely," study co-author William Pan said in a press release.
Understanding that pandemics aren't so rare should raise the priority of efforts to prevent and control them in the future, said Pan, an associate professor of global environmental health at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
For this study, Pan and his colleagues, led by Marco Marani of the University of Padua in Italy, used new statistical methods to measure the scale and frequency of disease outbreaks for which there was no immediate medical intervention.
Their analysis covered the plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus and various influenza viruses and found considerable variability in the rate at which pandemics have occurred in the past, they said.
However, they also identified patterns that allowed them to describe the probabilities of similar-scale events happening again in the future, according to the researchers.
For example, in the case of the deadliest pandemic in modern history, the Spanish flu, which killed more than 30 million people between 1918 and 1920, the probability of an event of similar magnitude occurring ranged from 0.3% to 1.9% per year over the 400 years studied.
More
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2021/08/23/pandemics-frequency-risk-study/3841629741769/
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
How ions get their electrons back
What happens when ions are passing through solid materials? It is nearly impossible to observe this directly, but scientists at TU Wien found a way to overcome this problem.
Date: August 19, 2021
Source: Vienna University of Technology
Summary: Very unusual atomic states are being produced: Ions are created by removing not just one but 20 to 40 electrons from each atom. These 'highly charged ions' play an important role in current research. For a long time, people have been investigating what happens when such highly charged ions hit solid materials. This is important for many areas of application in materials research. Therefore it is crucial to know how the charge state of the ions change when they penetrate a material -- but this is exactly what has been impossible to observe directly until now. New measurements at TU Wien (Vienna) show that the ions obey remarkably simple laws.
Probing materials layer by layer
When highly charged ions penetrate a solid material, they can retrieve the missing electrons from the material and thus become electrically neutral. But how and where this happens exactly is difficult to investigate, because it happens inside the material.
"We knew that this process must be very fast, because even a fairly thin layer of material is enough to completely neutralise ions," says Anna Niggas, first author of the present study. She is currently working on her dissertation in Prof. Richard Wilhelm's group at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien.
Visually observing the processes inside the material may be nearly impossible, but novel 2D materials such as graphene, which consists of only a single layer of carbon atoms, now give scientists a chance to get to the bottom of these phenomena for the first time: "Graphene layers can be stacked on top of each other, so that thicker and thicker samples are created -- you can assemble a solid body layer by layer," says Richard Wilhelm. "We have studied single, double and triple graphene layers. That way, we can see step by step, atomic layer by atomic layer, how the highly charged ions change."
In this way, you can study a transition, from a single atomic layer to an ordinary three-dimensional material. Graphite, the material pencil leads are made of, is nothing more than a large number of graphene layers stacked on top of each other.
---- Dynamics with great significance
In order to study the dynamics of the electron capture, one must first prepare the samples very carefully. Dr. Bernhard C. Bayer from the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien succeeded in precisely characterising the atomic layers using high-resolution microscopy -- a great challenge when only very little material is available for the investigation in the atomically thin layers.
The new findings are important for many areas of research: On the one hand, very fundamental phenomena can be studied in this way that are difficult to access with other methods. On the other hand, the interaction between ions and solid materials is also important for very practical applications -- for example in materials analysis, where ions are used to study the properties of new types of materials in detail, or in semiconductor technology, where ion beams are used to structure circuits.
The research described was funded by the FWF, the "Innovative Projects"-Programme of TU Wien and the Doctoral College TU-D.
Finally, in response to a question on yesterday’s Great Game update. There weren’t/aren’t really any rules, and the object isn’t to actually win by “owning” Afghanistan.
It’s always been, since the days of the Great Game played between the British Empire in India and the Russian Empire, to prevent the other player from owning it.
No one actually wants Afghanistan, except maybe Alexander the Great a very long time ago. Although way back then Afghanistan didn’t actually exist, it was created by the British in roughly 1820-1840 in a series of errors.
There aren’t really any Afghanis to have a “stan,” i.e. “the land of the.” Just a loose jumble of many tribes.
A large part of what was once “Afghanistan” is now in Pakistan centered around Peshawar, and we’ll not go near what “Pakistan” might mean.
Whether the latest round of The Great Game will develop any rules or a meaningful end point, is an open question, but I suspect we are all about to find out over the rest of the decade.
How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
Ronald Reagan.
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