Bright explosion on moon visible from Earth, NASA says -

Bright explosion on moon visible from Earth, NASA says - 



A meteoroid struck the surface of the moon recently, causing an explosion that was visible on Earth without the aid of a telescope, NASA reported Friday. But don't be alarmed if you didn't see it; it only lasted about a second.
"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," said Bill Cooke, of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.
NASA astronomers have been monitoring the moon for the past eight years, looking for explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. It's part of a program to find new fields of space debris that could hit Earth. NASA says it sees hundreds of detectable lunar meteoroid impacts a year.
Meteor lights up East Coast and social media
None however can match the size of the explosion they say they saw March 17. NASA says the meteoroid was about 40 kilograms and less than a meter wide, and it hit the moon's surface at 56,000 mph. It glowed like a 4th magnitude star, NASA says, thanks to an explosion equivalent to 5 tons of TNT.
"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," said Ron Suggs of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Cooke says Earth was pelted by meteoroids at about the same time, but they hit the moon because it has no atmosphere to protect it.
Opinion: Meteor shows why it's crucial to keep an eye on the sky
"We'll be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-moon system passes through the same region of space," Cooke said.
If you're wondering how there can be an explosion on the moon, without oxygen, NASA has the answer for you. It says the flash of light comes not from any type of combustion -- as we typically think of explosions -- but rather by the glowing molten rock at the impact site.

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http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/18/tech/moon-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Markets are on a crazy, sugar-fuelled journey - 'When the music stops, things will get complicated”. -

Markets are on a crazy, sugar-fuelled journey - 'When the music stops, things will get complicated”. - 



The then chief executive of the US banking giant Citigroup was admitting that growing concerns about sub-prime loans could ultimately shatter what we now know was “irrational exuberance” on global financial markets.
“As long as the music is playing, though, you’ve got to get up and dance,” Prince continued. “And we’re still dancing.”
There’s a “we’re still dancing” mood on global markets today, just as there was six years ago in the run-up to what turned out to be the disastrous market meltdown of September 2008.
Rather than the securitisation of recklessly extended commercial credit providing the music, the beat now comes from “quantitative easing”, courtesy of the world’s leading central banks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 15pc since last September, after the Federal Reserve launched QE3, its third round of money-printing. The eurozone’s Stoxx 50 has soared also, gaining 30pc since July, when European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi vowed to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro.
The Nikkei 225 has rocketed 44pc since late December, after the election of a new government committed to forcing the Bank of Japan to crank up its QE antics. The UK’s FTSE 100, too, has gained 20pc in six months, riding a wave of Bank of England largesse — and, crucially, the prospect of more to come.
The Western world is yet to stage a meaningful recovery from the sub-prime debacle. The fundamentals remain awful. The eurozone economy, we learnt last week, contracted 0.9pc during the first quarter and has now been shrinking since late 2011 — Europe’s longest post-war recession. The UK is still enduring its slowest recovery since records began. Yet Western stock indices have been setting repeated all-time highs.
As financial markets dance, though, lost in the QE trance music, massive questions now loom. The ECB has expanded its balance sheet 150pc during the five years since the sub-prime collapse. The Fed has overseen a 220pc ballooning of base money.
“Extraordinary measures” on this scale may be unprecedented but both look moderate compared to the Bank of England, which has implemented balance sheet growth of 370pc since the credit crunch began in earnest — the vast majority of it, in a bizarre form of circular financing, being used to buy government bonds.
How will these vast balances be unwound? What will happen to sovereign bond prices once governments stop self-buying? That will truly determine, rather than any “forward guidance”, just how long our central banks can keep interest rates “ultra-low”. And what will the reaction of currently spaced-out Western equity markets be once the sugar rush fades, reality hits and the money-printing ends? What happens when the QE music stops?
Some of us have posed such uncomfortable questions for years now — and been derided for our trouble. In recent weeks, the now vast scale of QE, and its broader collateral damage, have forced such issues into mainstream discourse. Flickering signs of returning Western growth have also brought official recognition that such measures may soon be hard to justify and that, to paraphrase Chuck Prince, things could indeed “get complicated”, when the lights come up and the QE party is over.
Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acknowledged that, having strayed into “uncharted waters”, central banks will find the QE exit “difficult to control”. The world’s leading economic watchdog recognised, in an official paper, that long-term interest rates could spike as investors demand higher yields to fund cash-strapped governments, with commercial credit risks also rising as higher rates make it harder for borrowers to service loans.
Presenting his final quarterly Inflation Report before his July retirement, the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, also warned that post-QE complications mean that rates “may rise faster than current market expectations” of no increase until late 2016. The IMF also nodded to “diminishing returns” in continuing with QE. That states the case rather mildly. QE and the related slashing of interest rates to deeply negative real-terms levels has not only hammered pensioners and other savers but stored up a world of future inflationary pain.
With many large Western banks still moribund, and massive undeclared losses on their balance sheets, QE hasn’t resulted in more growth-generating working capital being extended to credit-worthy firms and households. It’s gone instead into asset markets, bidding up not only shares but also oil and basic foodstuffs on global exchanges.
That’s pleased the City and Wall Street but done serious real world damage. Expensive energy has made Western recovery much tougher, while soaring food costs have led to a wave of unrest across the developing world, arguably sparking the Arab Spring.
And, while we’re at it, QE has also deeply annoyed the governments of powerful Western creditors like China and Brazil. By inflating their currencies, our money-printing has harmed their exports. It’s also debased the dollar, pound and euro, so lowered the real value of what we owe.
That’s a principal reason why the World Trade Organisation is in turmoil, with the increasingly strident emerging powers in open revolt and the world economy suffering the first failure of a multilateral trade negotiation since the 1930s. So, yes, you could say that QE now has “diminishing returns”.
Given the massive regulatory mistakes that had already been made, no one is arguing that central banks shouldn’t have provided extra liquidity in the dark days of early 2009. Had they not, the Western financial system would have collapsed, causing economic and social chaos.
Yet that extra liquidity should have been strictly limited, heavily conditional and used as a buffer, allowing us to flush out the rotten banks, implement root-and-branch reforms and move on.
Instead, QE has become an open-ended life-support mechanism for living-dead “zombie banks”, a mask to cover up financial wrongdoing. It’s also become a comfort blanket for politicians, allowing most of them to delay the really tough fiscal decisions.
Money printing on the scale we’ve seen has gone way, way beyond a necessary palliative and been transformed from legitimate temporary emergency measure into lifestyle choice — the economic equivalent of crack cocaine.
File the IMF’s calibrated hair-splitting nonsense in the historical dustbin and read instead a brave and important speech given last week by Jaime Caruana of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an umbrella group for the world’s central banks.
“Monetary policy can buy time to implement the necessary balance sheet repair and structural reforms,” thundered Caruana. “But it cannot substitute for them.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. “After five years of buying time, one has to ask if that time has been — or will be — used wisely.”
Asking aloud if “ever more monetary action” is “really justified”, Caruana observed rightly that ongoing QE “gives borrowers, financial institutions and policymakers an incentive to keep kicking the can down the road”.
Tackling the myth that governments and firms really have been tightening their belts, the BIS boss reported that since the end of 2007, the total public and private debts of the world’s leading economies have risen by more than $30,000bn.
Challenging Western politicians to finally shake out the banks, and impose supply-side reforms, Caruana concluded by asking: “What monetary policy can substitute for balance sheet repair by banks and borrowers … or remove impediments to a worker moving from an overbuilt sector to a more promising one?”
The speech was an onslaught of common sense, a tour de force. So sensible was it, in fact, that it’s destined to be ignored.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10066060/Markets-are-on-a-crazy-sugar-fuelled-journey.html

'Crazy ants' a threat in southern U.S. -

'Crazy ants' a threat in southern U.S. - 



Researchers at the University of Texas are warning that the invasive species from South America has the potential to change the ecological balance in the southeastern United States, largely because the ants can wipe out colonies of what's been widely considered the insect villain of the region, the fire ant.
The crazy ants, officially called "Tawny crazy ants," are omnivores that can take over an area by both killing what's there and starving out what they don't kill, said Ed LeBrun, a research associate with the Texas invasive species research program at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory in the College of Natural Sciences.
"Perhaps the biggest deal is the displacement of the fire ant, which is the 300-pound gorilla in Texas ecosystems these days," LeBrun said in a press release. "The whole system has changed around fire ants. Things that can't tolerate fire ants are gone. Many that can have flourished. New things have come in. Now we are going to go through and whack the fire ants and put something in its place that has a very different biology. There are going to be a lot of changes that come from that."
Beyond the troubles they cause for the environment, the crazy ants can be a big headache for people because their populations are so dense, LeBrun said.
The crazy ants nest in walls, crawl spaces, house plants or empty containers in the yard, researchers said.
"They don't sting like fire ants do, but aside from that they are much bigger pests," he said. "There are videos on YouTube of people sweeping out dustpans full of these ants from their bathroom. You have to call pest control operators every three or four months just to keep the infestation under control. It's very expensive."
The crazy ants are going so crazy, in fact, that some people want their fire ants back, LeBrun said.
"Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound," he said.

Scientists are unsure how far the ants, which are native to Argentina and Brazil, may spread in the U.S. Since being first seen in Houston in 2002, they've been found mostly in wetter environments with mild winters in parts of Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
And while they can quickly overwhelm a small area, the reproductive members of the species don't fly, so to move over large distances, they have to hitchhike -- in your stuff.
"If people living in or visiting invaded areas are careful and check for the crazy ants when moving or going on longer trips, they could have a huge impact on the spread," LeBrun said.

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http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/17/us/crazy-ants/index.html?hpt=hp_t5