Oil prices sank to a three-month low on Thursday despite strong U.S. federal data that would have usually been expected to send prices higher. Analysts told Zenger that was because the prevailing sentiment in markets has become negative. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed a drop in commercial inventory levels of crude oil, gasoline and distillates, such as diesel, for the week ending Aug. 13. A drop in inventories tends to indicate increasing levels of market demand. Crude oil inventories, in particular, declined by 3.2 million barrels week-on-week and remain about 6 percent below the five-year range. It…
Author: zenger.news
As analysts continued to project record growth of U.S. natural gas exports this week, environmental groups made renewed efforts to halt the construction of new liquefied natural gas export facilities, pointing their fingers at its “fracking” sources while advocating for the health of nearby residents. Liquified natural gas exports shipped with oil tankers, will beat exports by pipelines — until recently the only way to export natural gas from the U.S. — by 600 million cubic feet a day in 2021, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced on Aug. 16. Monday’s milestone news occurred the day before several environmental groups…
Understanding the relationship between people and technology is the new frontier across almost every aspect of society today. Among those entering into the realm of human-technology interactions is Alex Wolf, an award-winning entrepreneur and “tech philosopher.” Her work involves “studying the nature of how technology changes our environments, changes our behaviors and essentially changes the relationships we have with each other,” Wolf said in a 2019 presentation on YouTube. Wolf uses philosophy, history and marketing to inform how she views the relationship between people and technology, and turned her online presence into an online business called Bossbabe. She was named one of…
While President Joseph R. Biden faults Afghanistan’s leaders and soldiers for their own defeat, Afghan National Army officers, who vainly fought to save Kabul, say their defeat was manufactured in Washington, D.C. As the Taliban reached Kabul’s outer ring of defenses, Zenger reporters in Pakistan and India used their personal networks to conduct a series of interviews with senior Afghan military officers, all of whom were leading active fighting units. Their accounts differ sharply from the White House’s published talking points. Biden said Afghan forces were “not willing to fight for themselves” and critically noted President Ashraf Ghani’s sudden departure…
More than two-thirds of U.S. colleges and universities have scrapped standardized tests for application to the fall 2022 semester, leaving academic observers divided over the results. The debate is whether the move will promote fairness in student enrollment or shift the focus to “gaming” admissions requirements. A report released on July 29 by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, states that “more than 1,600 four-year schools will not require students to submit ACT/SAT scores to be considered for fall 2022 enrollment.” “The coming year’s high school seniors should take advantage of the full range of admissions…
A southern white male rhinoceros, listed as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is now at his new home in a Swiss zoo to breed and continue the species. Twelve-year-old Kimba was born in the Knowsley Safari Park in London and brought to Switzerland on Aug. 5 from the Schwerin Zoo in Germany. After a 10-day quarantine, he has been released to the outdoor enclosures of the Lewa Savannah at the Zurich Zoo. Video shows him sniffing and exploring his new territory. He met female rhinos Tanda and her daughters, Teshi, Talatini and Ushindi on Aug. 18.…
In the past it was leaves on the track or too much rain or snow that was blamed for delayed services on the trains. In the last few years, a whole new problem has emerged — cyberattack. When a cyberattack blamed on an Iranian opposition group in July stopped all passenger and freight trains in the country, the technological assault was far more devastating than bad weather or a late driver. Iran isn’t the only country at risk. In the UK in July, a ransomware attack targeted the self-ticketing terminals at Northern Railway. Other malware, ransomware, DDoS attacks and data…
Israeli digital health companies raised $1 billion in the first half of 2021, exceeding the entire amount invested in all of 2020. This growth reflects the overwhelming interest in digital health investments since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Globally, $20 billion was invested in this sector in the first six months of 2021. Here are key findings from a Start-Up Nation Central report on investments in Israel’s digital health sector: Thirteen rounds exceeded $10 million in the first half of 2021. The median round grew by more than 50 percent compared to last year, reaching $30 million for later-stage rounds and $5…
NANJING, China — Mothers who have diabetes before or during their pregnancy are more likely to have children who may develop eye problems, reveals a study. A team of international researchers analyzed the associations between maternal diabetes before or during pregnancy and the risk of high Refractive Error (RE): conditions in which the eye fails to properly focus images on the retina. The findings of the study were published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]). The research is by Jiangbo Du, State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Medicine, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China, and Jiong Li, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, and colleagues. RE is…
WASHINGTON — Delta variant was no less than a nightmare for many countries, but those who got vaccinated need no stress anymore! The delta variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 is not particularly good at evading antibodies generated by vaccination reveals a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings, published in the journal Immunity, help explain why vaccinated people have largely escaped the worst of the delta surge. The researchers analyzed a panel of antibodies generated by people in response to the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. They found that delta was unable to evade all but one of the antibodies they tested. Other…