By JustForex

The US indices rose on Thursday, thanks to support from growth and semiconductor stocks, as investors watched the Federal Reserve’s conference in Jackson Hole to gain insight into the future outlook for monetary policy. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will give a speech today that will be analyzed for any indication that the economic slowdown may change the Central Bank’s strategy. The US GDP data showed yesterday that the US economy contracted at a more moderate pace in the second quarter than originally thought, as consumer spending partially cushioned resistance to the sharp slowdown in inventory accumulation, dispelling fears that the recession was continuing. Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler said the US economy was showing more signs of strength than weakness.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions in the United States, defines a recession as a significant decline in economic activity that extends throughout the economy, lasting more than several months, usually manifested in production, employment, and real income.

As the stock market closed yesterday, the Dow Jones Index (US30) increased by 0.98%, and the S&P 500 Index (US500) added 1.41%. The NASDAQ Technology Index (US100) gained 1.67%.

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Esther George said yesterday that it is too early to predict how much the US Central Bank will raise interest rates next month because key inflation and labor market reports are still to come. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic also said he has not yet decided whether the Fed should raise interest rates by 50 or 75 basis points at its policy meeting next month. Traders of Fed funds futures contracts estimate a 59% chance that the Fed will raise rates another 75 basis points at its September meeting and a 41% chance of a 50 bps hike.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp forecasts a sharp drop in revenue for the current quarter amid a weakening gaming industry. Analysts believe Nvidia could see further declines in the crypto-mining and data center markets as well.

Equity markets in Europe traded yesterday without a single dynamic. German DAX (DE30) gained 0.39%, French CAC 40 (FR40) fell by 0.08%, Spanish IBEX 35 (ES35) lost 0.15%, British FTSE 100 (UK100) closed on Wednesday at plus 0.11%.

According to July’s ECB monetary policy minutes, most central bank officials agreed to a more aggressive 50 bps rate hike at the next meeting in the context of the recent deterioration in inflation prospects as well as the deteriorating economic conditions in the Eurozone.

Germany’s IFO business climate Index fell to 88.5 points in August from a revised 88.7 points in July. The IFO index is based on a survey of about 9,000 companies in manufacturing, services, trade, and construction. Business confidence in Germany worsened in August as companies became more pessimistic about rising energy prices and the threat of gas shortages.

The situation in the oil market remains uncertain. Oil prices fell yesterday as investors prepare for the possible return of sanctioned Iranian oil exports to global markets and over concerns that rising US interest rates will weaken fuel demand. On the other hand, the prospect that the OPEC+ group of producers may limit oil supplies limits the fall in oil prices.

Asian markets were mostly up yesterday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 (JP225) gained 0.58%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng (HK50) jumped by 3.63%, and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 (AU200) added 0.70% yesterday.

S&P 500 (F) (US500) 4,199.12 +58.35 (+1.41%)

Dow Jones (US30) 33,291.78 +322.55 (+0.98%)

DAX (DE40) 13,271.96 +51.90 (+0.39%)

FTSE 100 (UK100) 7,479.74 +8.23 (+0.11%)

USD Index 108.44 −0.24 (−0.22%)

• – New Zealand RBNZ Gov Orr Speaks at 01:30 (GMT+3);
• – Japan Tokyo Core CPI (m/m) at 02:30 (GMT+3);
• – US PCE Price index (m/m) at 15:30 (GMT+3);
• – Jackson Hole Symposium at 16:00 (GMT+3);
• – US Fed Chair Powell Speaks at 17:00 (GMT+3);
• – US Michigan Consumer Sentiment (m/m) at 17:00 (GMT+3).

By JustForex

This article reflects a personal opinion and should not be interpreted as an investment advice, and/or offer, and/or a persistent request for carrying out financial transactions, and/or a guarantee, and/or a forecast of future events.

By Steven Jones, University of South Florida 

The new movie “Fall” is a survival-thriller about two young women, Becky and Hunter, who are avid rock climbers. To mark the one-year anniversary of Becky’s husband’s death in a climbing accident, they decide to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower.

But a ladder breaks, and they find themselves stranded atop the rusty steel latticework. Ironically, at the top of the communication tower, the climbers are too high in the air to get a phone signal to call for rescue.

Other recent movies have also featured terrifying communication towers.

Take the 2016 film “Cell,” which is based on a Stephen King novel. In it, a cell tower signal turns normal people into zombies, a literal version of the cliché about the effect mobile phones have on users. The 2018 Indian sci-fi blockbuster “2.0” features a gigantic Kaiju monster – akin to Godzilla or Mothra – made of cellphones. It rises to avenge the deaths of millions of birds supposedly killed by cell tower radiation. (Millions of birds do die every year by crashing into towers, but probably because they become disoriented by their lights, not from the radiation they emit.)

Why are communication towers so scary? Why, in “Fall,” is the steel tower somehow more disturbing than the rocky cliff face where Becky’s husband died?

I think it’s about more than fear of heights. As a scholar who studies attitudes toward technology – and who wrote a book on the Luddites and another one on cell towers – I see cell towers, like the radio and TV towers that preceded them, as the focus of deep collective anxieties.

Channeling invisible forces

As anthropologist Shannon Mattern has argued, towers and antennas are visible manifestations of vast invisible networks – mostly wireless or underground – that can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, even as they grow increasingly dependent on them.

They’re a reminder of something that most of us would rather forget: that we’re immersed in an electromagnetic soup of radio waves, walking around every day in what design scholar Anthony Dunne has called “hertzian space.” Those same invisible waves also signal the possibility of ubiquitous surveillance and manipulation.

So a latticework steel tower or a sleek monopole mast with an array of rectangular antenna panels clustered at its top can elicit powerful responses.

On the one hand, there’s denial – you might half-consciously “unsee” them and pretend they’re not there.

On the other hand, they can become a source of paranoia, which sometimes metastasizes into conspiracy theories.

Hidden in plain sight

Cell towers are often designed to hide in plain sight. Some are even disguised as pine trees or palm trees – rather poorly, in most cases. But stealth towers like these aren’t actually meant to pass for the natural objects they imitate.

Like all camouflage, they’re just supposed to distract our attention long enough for us to overlook them. The brown painted “bark” and green plastic “leaves,” or the rows of rectangular antenna panels painted to blend into building façades, are simply prompts to our unseeing – cues to look away. Nothing to see here, they say.

Meanwhile, the towers quietly multiply.

In recent years, 5G antennas have started showing up everywhere, often as unlabeled boxes or cylinders on standalone poles or streetlights.

Known as small-cell networks, these faster and more powerful 5G systems require many more antennas spaced closer together. This greater density has provoked increased fears about potential risks to health and security, along with more paranoid reactions linking cellular radiation to cancer – a link not supported by scientific research. Some people even wrongly blamed 5G for the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of such conspiracy theories, 2020 saw a rash of cell tower arson reminiscent of the Luddites – textile workers in 19th-century England who sabotaged new mechanical looms that were putting them out of work. Two hundred years later, the name Luddite has become synonymous with any reaction against new technology.

Some of the extreme reactions against cell towers may be the result of displaced anxiety about the very real risks of everyday technology.

Most of us sense – though we often prefer to forget – that each steel cell tower or sleek 5G box is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a visible sign of mostly invisible global communication networks, tied to centers of commercial and political power, that are gradually eroding our privacy and autonomy.

No wonder they’re so terrifying.

About the Author:

Steven Jones, Professor of English and Digital Humanities (Ret.), University of South Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Monica Dus, University of Michigan

During the long seafaring voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries, a period known as the Age of Discovery, sailors reported experiencing visions of sublime foods and verdant fields. The discovery that these were nothing more than hallucinations after months at sea was agonizing. Some sailors wept in longing; others threw themselves overboard.

The cure for these harrowing mirages turned out to be not a concoction of complex chemicals, as once suspected, but rather the simple antidote of lemon juice. These sailors suffered from scurvy, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, an essential micronutrient that people acquire from eating fruits and vegetables.

Vitamin C is important for the production and release of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers of the brain. In its absence, brain cells do not communicate effectively with one another, which can lead to hallucinations.

As this famous example of early explorers illustrates, there is an intimate connection between food and the brain, one that researchers like me are working to unravel. As a scientist who studies the neuroscience of nutrition at the University of Michigan, I am primarily interested in how components of food and their breakdown products can alter the genetic instructions that control our physiology.

Beyond that, my research is also focused on understanding how food can influence our thoughts, moods and behaviors. While we can’t yet prevent or treat brain conditions with diet, researchers like me are learning a great deal about the role that nutrition plays in the everyday brain processes that make us who we are.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a delicate balance of nutrients is key for brain health: Deficiencies or excesses in vitamins, sugars, fats and amino acids can influence brain and behavior in either negative or positive ways.

Vitamins and mineral deficiencies

As with vitamin C, deficits in other vitamins and minerals can also precipitate nutritional diseases that adversely impact the brain in humans. For example, low dietary levels of vitamin B3/niacin – typically found in meat and fish – cause pellagra, a disease in which people develop dementia.

Niacin is essential to turn food into energy and building blocks, protect the genetic blueprint from environmental damage and control how much of certain gene products are made. In the absence of these critical processes, brain cells, also known as neurons, malfunction and die prematurely, leading to dementia.

In animal models, decreasing or blocking the production of niacin in the brain promotes neuronal damage and cell death. Conversely, enhancing niacin levels has been shown to mitigate the effects of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s. Observational studies in humans suggest that sufficient levels of niacin may protect against these diseases, but the results are still inconclusive.

Interestingly, niacin deficiency caused by consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol can lead to similar effects as those found with pellagra.

Another example of how a nutrient deficiency affects brain function can be found in the element iodine, which, like niacin, must be acquired from one’s diet. Iodine, which is present in seafood and seaweed, is an essential building block for thyroid hormones – signaling molecules that are important for many aspects of human biology, including development, metabolism, appetite and sleep. Low iodine levels prevent the production of adequate amounts of thyroid hormones, impairing these essential physiological processes.

Iodine is particularly important to the developing human brain; before table salt was supplemented with this mineral in the 1920s, iodine deficiency was a major cause of cognitive disability worldwide. The introduction of iodized salt is thought to have contributed to the gradual rise in IQ scores in the past century.

Ketogenic diet for epilepsy

Not all dietary deficiencies are detrimental to the brain. In fact, studies show that people with drug-resistant epilepsy – a condition in which brain cells fire uncontrollably – can reduce the number of seizures by adopting an ultralow-carbohydrate regimen, known as a ketogenic diet, in which 80% to 90% of calories are obtained from fat.

Carbohydrates are the preferred energy source for the body. When they are not available – either because of fasting or because of a ketogenic diet – cells obtain fuel by breaking down fats into compounds called ketones. Utilization of ketones for energy leads to profound shifts in metabolism and physiology, including the levels of hormones circulating in the body, the amount of neurotransmitters produced by the brain and the types of bacteria living in the gut.

Researchers think that these diet-dependent changes, especially the higher production of brain chemicals that can quiet down neurons and decrease levels of inflammatory molecules, may play a role in the ketogenic diet’s ability to lower the number of seizures. These changes may also explain the benefits of a ketogenic state – either through diet or fasting – on cognitive function and mood.

Sugar, saturated fats and ultraprocessed foods

Excess levels of some nutrients can also have detrimental effects on the brain. In humans and animal models, elevated consumption of refined sugars and saturated fats – a combination commonly found in ultraprocessed foods – promotes eating by desensitizing the brain to the hormonal signals known to regulate satiety.

Interestingly, a diet high in these foods also desensitizes the taste system, making animals and humans perceive food as less sweet. These sensory alterations may affect food choice as well as the reward we get from food. For example, research shows that people’s responses to ice cream in brain areas important for taste and reward are dulled when they eat it every day for two weeks. Some researchers think this decrease in food reward signals may enhance cravings for even more fatty and sugary foods, similar to the way smokers crave cigarettes.

High-fat and processed-food diets are also associated with lower cognitive function and memory in humans and animal models as well as a higher incidence of neurodegenerative diseases. However, researchers still don’t know if these effects are due to these foods or to the weight gain and insulin resistance that develop with long-term consumption of these diets.

Time scales

This brings us to a critical aspect of the effect of diet on the brain: time. Some foods can influence brain function and behavior acutely – such as over hours or days – while others take weeks, months or even years to have an effect. For instance, eating a slice of cake rapidly shifts the fat-burning, ketogenic metabolism of an individual with drug-resistant epilepsy into a carbohydrate-burning metabolism, increasing the risk of seizures. In contrast, it takes weeks of sugar consumption for taste and the brain’s reward pathways to change, and months of vitamin C deficiency to develop scurvy. Finally, when it comes to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, risk is influenced by years of dietary exposures in combination with other genetic or lifestyle factors such as smoking.

In the end, the relationship between food and the brain is a bit like the delicate Goldilocks: We need not too little, not too much but just enough of each nutrient.

About the Author:

Monica Dus, Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By JustForex

At the stock market close yesterday, the Dow Jones Index (US30) added 0.18%, while the S&P 500 (US500) decreased by 0.29%. The NASDAQ Technology Index (US100) gained 0.41%.

The US durable goods orders were unchanged month-over-month in July. Unfinished US home sales fell in July for the sixth time this year to the lowest level since the pandemic began, extending a sharp decline in the housing market. The number of signed contracts was down 22.5% from a year ago. Rising interest rates always negatively affect the housing market, so things will only worsen in the near future.

Today, traders of Fed funds futures contracts estimate a 61% probability that the Fed will raise rates by 75 basis points at its September meeting. The probability of a 50 basis point hike is 39%.

Equity markets in Europe traded yesterday without a single dynamic. German DAX (DE30) gained 0.20%, French CAC 40 (FR 40) increased by 0.39%, Spanish IBEX 35 (ES35) lost 0.33%, British FTSE 100 (UK100) closed on Wednesday down by 0.22%.

The German government is concerned about possible problems with coal supplies for power plants in the fall and winter due to low water levels in the Rhine River and oil supplies in the eastern parts of the country. The price of gas in Europe has exceeded $3100 per 1,000 cubic meters for the first time since early March. Dutch gas prices, the European benchmark, rose again Wednesday as the prospect of an end to supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline kept investors on edge. Russia’s state energy company Gazprom said Friday that Russia would suspend natural gas supplies to Europe via Nord Stream 1 for three days because of unscheduled maintenance.

The Energy Information Administration reported a 3.3 million barrel drop in crude oil inventories for the week through August 19. Also, yesterday it became known that OPEC countries are going to fight with low oil prices, and in case Iranian oil returns to the world market, OPEC countries (in particular Saudi Arabia and Iraq) are ready to cut their production in order not to allow the oil prices to fall significantly.

Asian markets were mostly down yesterday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 (JP225) decreased by 0.49%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng (HK50) ended the day down by 1.20%, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 (AU200) was up by 0.52%.

On Wednesday, Japan’s prime minister said that his country would restart several idle nuclear power plants and study the possibility of developing next-generation reactors. It indicates that Japan (a major energy importer) is looking to bolster its capabilities amid continued uncertainty in global energy markets. Japan is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. According to the “ambitious outlook,” the country’s 6th Strategic Energy Plan calls for renewables to account for 36% to 38% of its electricity generation mix in 2030, with nuclear power accounting for 20% to 22%.

Stats NZ data showed a 2.3% drop in seasonally adjusted retail sales in the last quarter in New Zealand. Economists had forecast a 1.7% increase as consumer spending was expected to rebound after the initial Omicron hit, which reduced retail spending by 1% in the year’s first quarter. Analysts believe the drop in retail spending points to a potential recession.

China announced an additional 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) in stimulus to save the economy from recession. The stimulus measures will include an additional 300 billion yuan, which state banks can invest in infrastructure projects.

S&P 500 (F) (US500) 4,140.77 +12.04 (+0.29%)

Dow Jones (US30) 32,969.23 +59.64 (+0.18%)

DAX (DE40) 13,220.06 +25.83 (+0.20%)

FTSE 100 (UK100) 7,471.51 −16.60 (−0.22%)

USD Index 108.61 −0.02 (−0.01%)

• – New Zealand Retail Sales (q/q) at 01:45 (GMT+3);
• – Eurozone Germany GDP (q/q) at 09:00 (GMT+3);
• – Eurozone Germany Ifo Business Climate (m/m) at 11:00 (GMT+3);
• – Eurozone ECB Monetary Policy Meeting at 14:30 (GMT+3);
• – US GDP (q/q) at 15:30 (GMT+3);
• – US Initial Jobless Claims (w/w) at 15:30 (GMT+3);
• – Jackson Hole Symposium at 16:00 (GMT+3);
• – US Natural Gas Storage (w/w) at 17:30 (GMT+3).

By JustForex

This article reflects a personal opinion and should not be interpreted as an investment advice, and/or offer, and/or a persistent request for carrying out financial transactions, and/or a guarantee, and/or a forecast of future events.