In a scenario straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” a group of NASA scientists working on an experiment in Antarctica have detected evidence of a parallel universe – where the rules of physics are opposite of our own, according to a report.
The concept of a parallel universe has been around since the early 1960s, mostly in the minds of fans of sci-fi TV shows and comics, but now a cosmic ray detection experiment has found particles that could be from a parallel realm that also was born in the Big Bang, the Daily Star reported.
The experts used a giant balloon to carry NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, or ANITA, high above Antarctica, where the frigid, dry air provided the perfect environment with little to no radio noise to distort its findings.
A constant “wind’ of high-energy particles constantly arrives on Earth from outer space.
Low-energy, subatomic neutrinos with a mass close to zero can pass completely through Earth, but higher-energy objects are stopped by the solid matter of our planet, according to the report.
That means the high-energy particles can only be detected coming “down” from space, but the team’s ANITA detected a heavier particle, so-called tau neutrinos, which come “up” out of the Earth.
The finding implies that these particles are actually traveling backward in time, suggesting evidence of a parallel universe, according to the Daily Star.
Principal ANITA investigator Peter Gorham, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Hawaii, suggested that the only way the tau neutrino could behave that way is if it changed into a different type of particle before passing through the Earth and then back again.
Gorham, lead author on a Cornell University paper describing the odd phenomenon, noted that he and his fellow researchers had seen several of these “impossible events,” which some were skeptical about.
“Not everyone was comfortable with the hypothesis,” he told New Scientist.
The simplest explanation for the phenomenon is that at the moment of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, two universes were formed – ours and one that from our perspective is running in reverse with time going backward.
Of course, if there are any inhabitants of a possible parallel universe, they’d consider us as the backward ones.
“We’re left with the most exciting or most boring possibilities,” said Ibrahim Safa, who also worked on the experiment.
TCI files Wirecard complaint with Munich prosecutors
One of Europe’s best-known investors steps up campaign against German payments group
TCI Fund Management has filed a complaint against Wirecard executives in Munich, an escalation of the activist campaign against the German payments group by the short seller Christopher Hohn.
The call from one of Europe’s most successful investors for a criminal investigation into alleged accounting fraud adds to the pressure on the Dax-listed fintech long regarded as one of Germany’s most promising technology companies.
“The KPMG report published by Wirecard on April 28, 2020 as well as public reporting, including that in the Financial Times and Wirtschaftswoche, reveal anomalies that may have criminal relevance,” TCI said in a statement on Tuesday.
Wirecard shares have lost two-fifths of their value since the results of a six-month KPMG special audit were released late last month. The accounting firm said it encountered “obstacles” to its work, and that it was unable to verify that the “lions share” of Wirecard’s operating profits between 2016 and 2018 were genuine.
Prosecutors in Munich confirmed that they received the complaint by TCI “against people responsible” at Wirecard and others.
TCI, which has assets of about $25bn, has sold short 1.5 per cent of Wirecard, which on Tuesday had a €10bn market capitalisation.
According to the prosecutors, TCI is raising the suspicion of embezzlement against Wirecard executives tied to the group’s acquisition of the Indian company Hermes as well as unsecured loans that Wirecard made to third-party business partners.
The prosecution office told the Financial Times that it was evaluating TCI’s complaint. “At this point, further information will not be given,” it said, adding that it wants to avoid “influencing the share price of Wirecard AG.”
Under German law, criminal prosecutors have discretion over how to deal with complaints filed by third parties. They can open a formal criminal investigation if they conclude it is merited or dismiss the complaint.
Wirecard already faces a criminal investigation in Singapore, inquiries by Germany’s financial watchdog, BaFin, and a probe by the accountancy regulator.
The company has denied any wrongdoing and declared the KPMG report a vindication, blaming a second delay to publication of audited full-year figures for 2019 on coronavirus.
In a statement, Wirecard said that it considered TCI’s complaint “to be completely unfounded”, adding that the fund was not a shareholder in the company. “Wirecard therefore regards the filing as a purely tactical manoeuvre of a short seller,” it said.
Sir Christopher, an activist investor known in Germany for previous campaigns at Deutsche Boerse and Volkswagen, has previously called for Wirecard chief executive Markus Braun to be fired or sidelined while a full internal investigation is held.
The KPMG special audit was launched in October last year after the FT published internal documents that appeared to indicate substantial sales and profits at Wirecard units in Dubai were fraudulently inflated.
Wirtschaftswoche subsequently raised a number of questions about the group’s accounting, including figures reported for Hermes, a Wirecard business in India that was acquired as part of a controversial €340m takeover.
KPMG said it was not able to identify the beneficial owners of a Mauritius fund to which Wirecard paid €340m in that 2015 deal.
A highly contagious and fatal virus is spreading in several states. Its victims are rabbits.
A lethal rabbit virus is spreading across the southwestern United States, killing wild rabbits on this continent for the first time and causing concern for some fragile species and the animals that prey on them.
The most recent deaths were reported last week in southern California, where employees at a wind farm happened upon the carcasses of 10 to 20 black-tailed jack rabbits scattered across the desert near Palm Springs. That followed thousands of deaths since March in wild and domestic rabbits in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.
While rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus type 2 can produce symptoms such as seizures or fever, it often causes sudden death, marked by “terminal squeals” and collapse. In wild die-offs, some rabbits have been found with blood near their noses and mouths, “but a lot of the time, the reports are just, ‘dead,’” said Deana Clifford, senior wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “That’s a little bit startling to see a bunch of dead rabbits.”
As the nation struggles to slow the spread of the coronavirus, agriculture and wildlife officials across the southwest are emphasizing the rabbit virus is not linked to the coronavirus or known to be dangerous to humans. But like the coronavirus, the rabbit virus is highly contagious and hard to contain. It can remain viable for months and spreads easily — through contact with infected rabbits or via scavengers, insects, feces, a handler’s clothing or bedding that might line a rabbit hutch.
Vaccines are available in Europe, where the virus has caused significant mortality in wild and domestic rabbits since emerging in France in 2010, but they are not approved for sale in the United States. Some U.S. states, including Nevada — where the virus has killed domestic rabbits at an animal rescue near Las Vegas — are scrambling to help veterinarians obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to import limited numbers of doses.
Those would be administered to domestic animals that are part of what the USDA says is a $2.2 billion rabbit industry that is mostly pet-focused. But they would be of no help to native rabbits and hares, which until March were not known to be susceptible to the virus, known as RHDV2.
“There’s not really much we can do with the wilds,” said Ralph Zimmerman, state veterinarian for New Mexico, where the nation’s first wild rabbit deaths occurred in March. “It’s moving from area to area. We’ve had bigger die-offs in some areas, and we’re still getting reports of dead rabbits — like, hundreds,” at each site, he said.
As of Thursday, the virus had also killed 470 domestic rabbits in New Mexico, Zimmerman said. Nearly 600 others have been euthanized at affected sites that keep rabbits — as pets, or for breeding, meat or pelt — a step the state is requiring to prevent the virus’s spread. About 30 sites are under quarantine, he said. New Mexico received 500 doses of vaccine from France on Wednesday, he said.
Rabbit hemorrhagic disease first emerged in China in 1984, where it may have been introduced by imported angora rabbits, according to a report by Iowa State University. Outside Europe, the newer variant, type 2, has occurred in Australia and Canada, and there have been a few domestic cases in the United States since 2018.
But wildlife officials hoped North America’s native wild rabbits, which are different from European species, might be immune.
So far, the virus has killed four native species, according to the World Organization for Animal Health, to which the USDA reports various animal diseases: desert and mountain cottontails and black-tailed and antelope jack rabbits. Those are all abundant, but wildlife officials say they are worried about more fragile members of the rabbit family, as well as broader ecosystem effects. In Europe, researchers have linked lynx declines in some areas to rabbit die-offs.
In Texas, there is concern for the rare Davis Mountain cottontail but also the possibility lower rabbit numbers could force animals that eat them — among them, coyotes, bobcats and mountain lions — to target other prey, such as the dwindling population of pronghorn antelope. “It could have an effect on those predator numbers as well,” said Bob Dittmar, a wildlife veterinarian at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
In California, a handful of native rabbit species, including the federally endangered riparian brush rabbit, are at risk. It is possible the virus also could infect the pika, a mountain-dwelling mammal that belongs to rabbits’ lagomorph family and is threatened by climate change, Clifford said.
“This has the potential to depress those populations, and if we have depressed prey, then potentially we have predators who often heavily rely on rabbits that may have trouble finding some food,” said Clifford, referring to species including golden eagles and foxes.
Scientists and conservationists already are discussing moving riparian brush rabbits into captivity to prevent their exposure to the virus, Clifford said.
Wildlife officials said the focus is on mitigating the spread in domestic populations, via quarantines and sanitation, and instructing the public to stay away from dead rabbits and report them to authorities. The specter of the virus has already halted some adoptions of domestic rabbits — often the most common animal at shelters after dogs and cats — and rescues by wildlife rehabilitation groups.
“Eventually it might taper off and some of the remaining animals will develop immunity to it,” Zimmerman said. “And then it’s a slow climb back for the population numbers.”
That is little consolation to the American Rabbit Breeders Association, whose members show their animals at more than 4,000 events a year.
“This is probably the most significant issue that has faced the hobby since its inception,” said Jay Hreiz, a North Carolina veterinarian who chairs the group’s health committee and who said he expects the virus to race across the nation. “We are almost irrelevant now that it’s in the wild population. … I just fear the damage is already done.”
The association has asked the USDA to ease restrictions on vaccine imports and pleaded with U.S. companies to release a vaccine, Hreiz said. But “rabbits sit in this weird interstitial space between companion animal and livestock in the United States,” he said. “It boils down to money.”
One good thing, he said, is that the covid-19 pandemic had already forced the association to cancel its spring shows, which would have fueled the virus.
“If there was ever a good time for a deadly rabbit virus to spread through the United States, that time is now,” he said.
Gapping down
In reaction to disappointing earnings/guidance:
- BVN -4.8%, IQ -3.4%, BILI -2%, HD -1.8%
Other news:
- GMDA -19.3% (prices offering of 13,333,334 ordinary shares at $4.50 per share)
- GOSS -13.4% (prices offering of 9,433,963 shares of common stock at $13.25 per share and the pricing of $200.0 mln of its 5.00% convertible senior notes due 2027)
- BLPH -9.3% (prices offerings for an aggregate of 3,076,923 shares of its common stock at a public offering price of $13.00 per share)
- CVNA -7.3% (proposes offering of 5 mln shares)
- CLVS -6.3% (prices 11,090,000 shares of common stock at $8.05 per share)
- NVST -5.4% (prices offering of $450 mln of 2.375% convertible senior notes due 2025 )
- MRNA -5.1% (prices offering of 17,600,000 shares of common stock at $76.00 per share)
- TMUS -3.7% (falls after hours on WSJ report that SoftBank is in talks to sell T-Mobile Shares to Deutsche Telekom)
- HLI -3.3% ( prices offering of 3mln shares of common stock at $63.50 per share)
- NVAX -3.1% (files for sale of up to $250 mln of its common shares)
- TPTX -2.7% (prices offering of 5,416,667 shares of common stock at $60.00 per share)
- CABO -2.6% ($400 mln stock offering)
- SE -2.2% (proposes $1 bln convertible notes offering)
- AVTR -1.6% (offering of 45 mln shares by selling stockholders)
- WST -1.3% (to join S&P 500)
- FSLY -1% (announces follow-on offering of 6 mln shares)
Analyst comments:
- MNK -3% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
- EXPE -1.9% (downgraded to Hold from Buy at Jefferies)
- NOVA -1.7% (downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Credit Suisse)
- CMCSA -1% (downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Guggenheim)
Gapping up
In reaction to strong earnings/guidance:
- BIDU +9%, SINA +7.2%, EXP +6.3%, AAP +5.3%, WMT +3.9%, KSS +2%, DY +1.8%, WB +1.1%
Other news:
- ABUS +44.9% (reports "positive" follow-up data from Phase 1a/1b trial of AB-729 in chronic hepatitis B virus infection)
- DVAX +42.2% (to provide update on early-stage collaborations for COVID-19 vaccine; collaboration partner could commence Phase 1 trial as soon as July)
- DOC +7.6% (to join S&P MidCap 400)
- KRYS +2.6% (prices offering of 2,275,000 shares of its common stock at $55.00 per share)
- SDC +2.2% (files $2.8 bln lawsuit against NBC), HP +1.5% (to join the S&P SmallCap 600)
- IIVI +1.5% (believes that the Commerce Department's new rule will have no to minimal impact on the company's sales or prospects)
Analyst comments:
- WYND +6.1% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
- ALLO +3.1% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at ROTH Capital)
- AYX +3.1% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler)
- BKH +2.9% (upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse)
- BYND +1.7% (initiated with a Buy at BTIG Research)
- ECHO +1.6% (upgraded to Buy from Hold at Loop Capital)
- HAIN +1.6% (upgraded to Outperform from Mkt Perform at Bernstein)
- ATCO +1.5% (upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at BMO Capital Markets)