- Europe steps up fight against deflation risk
CNN June 05, 2014
The European Central Bank unveiled a bold package of measures to boost the economy Thursday, including rate cuts and cheap loans for businesses.
Worried that very low inflation could snuff out Europe's weak recovery and tip the economy into a downward spiral, the ECB cut its main interest rate to a record low of 0.15%.
The central bank also took a step into the unknown by cutting its deposit rate from zero into negative territory -- the first move of its kind by a major central bank.
That means the ECB will now charge banks for deposits they stash with the central bank. In theory, that will provide an incentive to lend the money to firms and consumers instead.
The ECB also announced a series of steps to pump more cheap money into the eurozone. They include a series of new long term loans to banks aimed at boosting lending to businesses, and together could be worth almost 600 billion euros, according to Berenberg economists.
Europe relies heavily on thousands of small and medium sized companies, many of which lack access to other sources of finance.
ECB President Mario Draghi and other officials have spent the past month talking up the likelihood of action, and the moves were widely anticipated.
The central bank stopped short, as expected, of introducing broad based asset purchases along the lines of the quantitative easing program pursued by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but Draghi made clear that option was still on the table.
"Are we finished? The answer is no, if need be ... we're not finished yet," he told reporters.
- Vladimir Putin in D-day peace talks with Ukraine president
Russian president welcomes call from Petro Poroshenko to end bloodshed in east after 15-minute face-to-face meeting
The Guardian 6 June 2014
German chancellor Angela Merkel with Petro Poreshenko (centre) and Vladimir Putin at the D-day events in France. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Vladimir Putin spoke face-to-face with Ukraine's incoming president about ending the violence in the former Soviet state, and Kiev's new leader said talks could begin in earnest as soon as Sunday in a diplomatic breakthrough played out along the battlefield beaches of Normandy.
Friday's 15-minute meeting was followed by a brief exchange between Putin and Barack Obama, who had been keeping the Russian at arm's length over the Ukrainian crisis. Tensions between the two were played out on giant televisions on Ouistreham's Sword beach, with Putin and Obama shown divided by a split screens as they commemorated the 70th anniversary of D-day.
Speaking after his meeting with Petro Poroshenko, who is to be sworn in Saturday as Ukraine's president, Putin called for an immediate cease-fire in eastern Ukraine before any further talks, and said he expected Poroshenko to show "state wisdom" and "good will." Poroshenko later said talks could begin in earnest on his first full day in office.
"All the questions were difficult," Poroshenko said in a statement before returning to Ukraine, "but we will make every effort to achieve the goals we have set ourselves and begin negotiations on Sunday."
Putin said he welcomed Poroshenko's call for an end to the bloodshed and liked his approach to settling the crisis but wanted to wait until the Ukrainian leader could deliver it in detail to the nation.
"If it continues like that, then conditions will be created for developing our relations in other areas, including the economy," Putin said. He specified that Moscow is ready to lower gas price for Ukraine if it pays off its debt for previous supplies, easing fears of a gas shutdown to Europe dependent upon gas pipelines that cross Ukraine.
French President Francois Hollande, who orchestrated the meeting along with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Putin and Poroshenko also discussed howRussia could recognise the Ukrainian elections as well as measures to de-escalate the fighting.
"It didn't last a long time but long enough for the message to be passed on," Hollande told the French network TF1.
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin and Poroshenko also "confirmed that there is no alternative to settling the situation by peaceful political means."
Frozen out of G7 talks on Thursday in Brussels, Putin appeared to be moving incrementally back into the fold of the west following his first direct talks with Poroshenko since the billionaire was elected to lead Ukraine. The previous pro-Kremlin president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted in what Putin said was a coup.
Russia, which had recalled its ambassador from Ukraine, said he will return to Kiev to attend Poroshenko's inauguration. That appeared to be a recognition of Ukraine's election, Hollande said.
- What's behind the Big Bang controversy?
CNN June 6, 2014
NASA's NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.
(CNN) -- Everyone wants to be right. Most of us sure hate being wrong.
But scientists know that new discoveries often change or even invalidate earlier ideas. Being wrong can mean we have learned something new.
This week, a controversy about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe came to light at the American Astronomical Society conference in Boston. In an invited lecture sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel offered a different idea about a discovery made last March, where the BICEP2 Antarctic cosmology experiment reported evidence of a period of rapid "inflation" in the very early universe. Specifically, researchers detected the special pattern of polarization that would be caused by gravitational waves stretching and squeezing space itself during inflation.
Last week, three theorists -- Alan Guth, Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky -- were awarded the prestigious Kavli Prize for astrophysics for their work developing the theory of cosmic inflation. (This prize and the AAS lecture were sponsored by the same foundation but were otherwise completely independent.) Their award may well have been prompted by the BICEP2 discovery, which generated a lot of excitement about early universe cosmology.
But at the American Astronomical Society conference, Spergel argued that the BICEP2 results reported in March could instead be explained by a more pedestrian effect, namely, light scattering off dust between the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. If he is correct, the widely heralded BICEP2 announcement was premature at best and wrong at worst.
This kind of controversy is completely normal in science. It's the way science progresses. You put an idea out there and your colleagues -- many of them good friends and scientific collaborators -- try to shoot it down.
A scientist's first reaction to a new idea is often: "That's wrong because...." To which the proponent replies, "No, you are wrong because..." And so the debate begins.
No matter how much a scientist might hope to be right, nature holds the answer. One theory may be more beautiful than another, or more complicated, or more elegant, but nature doesn't know or care. The job of a scientist is to find out what the real answer is, not to advocate for any one point of view.
We do that by making careful measurements and assessing the accuracy of the result. BICEP2 detected certain polarization patterns in light from the cosmic microwave background, which they believe were created during inflation. David Spergel is instead suggesting the light was polarized by passing through galactic dust near the end of its journey to our telescopes -- indeed, he argued, this dust is expected to create the kind of polarization signal BICEP2 saw.
To support his contention, Spergel cited data from a space experiment called Planck, which like BICEP2 measures polarized light from the cosmic microwave background. Planck's ability to measure light at more wavelengths than BICEP2 gives it an advantage in diagnosing the effects of dust.
- Sleep's memory role discovered
BBC News June 05, 2014
The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists.
The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep.
Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep.
Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.
It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.
Researchers at New York University School of Medicine and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School trained mice in a new skill - walking on top of a rotating rod.
They then looked inside the living brain with a microscope to see what happened when the animals were either sleeping or sleep deprived.
Their study showed that sleeping mice formed significantly more new connections between neurons - they were learning more.
Prof Wen-Biao Gan, from New York University, told the BBC: "Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before.
"We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections."
