Teck Resources Ltd closed lower Thursday, dropping $0.03 or 0.48% to $6.25. Over the last five days, shares have lost 14.62% and are down 60.64% for the last year to date. This security has under performed the S&P TSX by 54.13% during the last year.
Source: Stock Quote – The Globe and Mail
Scientists have observed three species of wasps evolving into three new species, an intriguing case of rapid evolution in action.
Understanding how new species form, a process termed “speciation,” is a central question in biology. Scientists typically study speciation with respect to how populations of a single species diverge to form two distinct species.
However, Glen R. Hood, a doctoral researcher in the lab of Jeffrey Feder, a professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Biological Sciences, notes that speciation may not be an isolated process, as the origin of one species could open up new niche opportunities for associated organisms in higher levels of the food chain, leading to the sequential origin of many other new species.
In a new paper, Hood and colleagues from Rice University, the University of Iowa and Michigan State University show that this is true for three species of parasitic wasps attacking Rhagoletis fruit flies, including the apple-infesting host race of R. pomonella formed from hawthorn flies within the last 160 years.
“As the fly shifts and adapts to new host plants, forming new species, the wasps follow their fly hosts and diverge in kind, resulting in a rapid multiplicative increase of diversity as the effects of natural selection cascade through the ecosystem from fly to wasp,” Hood said. “Furthermore, the same physiological and behavioral mechanisms that adapt flies to their respective host plants and reduce gene flow between diverging populations are the same mechanisms that adapt wasps to their respective fly hosts. Biodiversity therefore can beget increasing levels of biodiversity, termed ‘sequential divergence’ or ‘cascading” speciation.’”
Previous research in the Feder lab had documented both genetic signatures of, and the ecological mechanisms promoting, sequential divergence of one wasp species (Diachasma alloeum) attacking Rhagoletis fruit flies. However, Hood wanted to know the frequency at which these sequential divergence events occurred in this system. In other words, how many new species would form in this manner? He began the project back in 2009 when he first joined the Feder lab as a doctoral student. Now, six years later, he finally has the answer: Sequential divergence not just linearly, but multiplicatively, amplifies biodiversity across the food chain for three different wasp species in the parasite community.
The new research has the potential to impact our understanding of evaluation. Typically studies of the relationship between ecology and speciation are “one-dimensional within ecosystems,” Hood says. “The focus of attention is largely on how genetic and phenotypic variation within a population is transformed by natural selection to create genetic and/or phenotypic differences between species. The consequences of natural selection are therefore usually confined to their effects within a single species. As a result, we now have a good understanding of how natural selection can generate new species.
“However, environmental adaptation also has potential repercussions for the radiation of entire communities,” Hood says.
“Although conditions might not always be optimal for such cascading divergence to occur, the study is the first to confirm its multiplicative action in nature,” Feder adds. “Thus, even if not overly common, sequential divergence still has the potential to make an important contribution to the genesis of biodiversity and could help to explain things such as the restoration of organismal diversity following mass extinctions
The study can be found here: www.pnas.org/content/112/44/E5980.abstract.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he will push his spending and growth agenda when he meets leaders from the G20 and Asia-Pacific on his first trip abroad.
Trudeau departs on his first foreign trip on Friday when he travels to Turkey for the G20 leaders’ summit before moving on to the Philippines next week for the APEC summit.
Trudeau says he campaigned on the need to help the middle class by stimulating growth and he says that’s going to be the focus of his discussions with world leaders at both meetings.
During the federal campaign, Trudeau distinguished himself from his Conservative and NDP opponents by promising to run modest deficits to support an infrastructure program to stimulate growth.
Trudeau will meet leaders from around the globe, including U.S. President Barack Obama, during his first week of international travel.
The prime minister says a decision on when to withdraw fighter jets from the U.S.-led coalition bombing Islamic militants in Syria and Iraq is still days or weeks away and will be done in conjunction with allies.
Source: Trudeau to bring spending message to G20, APEC summits | CTV News
In just a few weeks, world leaders, ministers, officials and observers from 196 countries will converge on Paris to try to nail down the first globally binding deal to reduce climate-damaging emissions.
But on the table will be a controversial proposal put up by New Zealand, which suggests only parts of the deal should be binding.
The aim of the talks is to get all countries to agree to cut their emissions to a level that will keep the warming of the planet to below 2° above the current global average.
The United Nations has estimated that the pledges put in so far would limit warming to 2.7°.
New Zealand agricultural greenhouse gas research centre deputy director Andy Reisinger said he was reasonably optimistic that a deal would be done in Paris, but he was less optimistic about whether it would be enough to slow the global temperature rise.
“I’m not very hopeful that we still have enough time to actually get there, the pledges that we have seen from countries around the world so far simply aren’t in the ball park.
“From all that we know, it’s much easier to get from 4° down to 2.7° of warming than it is to get from 2.7 to 2° of warming.”
If agreed, the new deal would follow on from the Kyoto Protocol – which was not a global deal, as it only required about fifth of UN countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
Many states, non-government organisations and environmental groups want the Paris agreement to bind states to their emissions reduction targets, like Kyoto had.
But, in an effort to get a deal at all, New Zealand has suggested making it binding to reduce emissions, but make the targets unbinding.
Climate Change Minister Tim Groser insisted this was the only way to get the big emitters on board.
“There’s still people in the United States congress that think this is some kind of UN conspiracy to rob the United States of its sovereignty, so to get the United States involved and to get China involved it required a non-threatening compliance mechanism.”
But the Green Party said New Zealand’s proposal was not constructive.
Co-leader James Shaw said the deal had to be completely binding, or else it would do nothing to help the environment.
“Like frankly a number of our trade agreements which contain a lot of fine words about environmental standards, but don’t have any binding and enforceable mechanisms inside them.”
Labour climate change spokesperson Megan Woods said there had to be compulsion on each country to meet their pledge.
“They have to be bound and stand by the number that they have put up and say what they contribute to the global effort.”
The climate change talks kick off on November the 30th with a leaders day, which will include Barack Obama, David Cameron, Xi Jinping and John Key.
The leaders and heads of state are expected to set the groundwork in place and start the momentum for is expected to be a long fortnight of haggling, wrangling and debate.
Source: Controversial NZ proposal at emissions conference | Radio New Zealand News
“Hilliard MacBeth says the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is becoming increasingly serious about sharing the risk of insuring mortgages, but the author and portfolio manager warns that asking lenders to put more skin in the game could be risky for Canada’s already vulnerable housing market.
“I’m sure the CMHC feels like they are walking a tightrope on this one,” said portfolio manager at Richardson GMP and author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash in an interview with BNN.
“They would like to reduce the subsidy to the Canadian banking industry, but the problem is they have to be careful how they do it.”
Macbeth, who has been pounding the table about an impending correction in the Canadian housing market for years, says unwinding this uniquely Canadian arrangement would be an uphill battle, and could ultimately prove negative for a housing market the agency says is becoming increasingly vulnerable. The insurance backstop the CMHC provides is seen as an essential motivator for lenders to offer favourable financing to homebuyers.
“There is no other market in the world where the government, and therefore the taxpayer, takes the full hit on the first 25 percent of the losses. It’s an amazing situation,” said MacBeth, who called for Canada’s housing bubble to burst this past summer.
CMHC revealed the results of its latest stress test for the first time Tuesday, outlining the worst scare scenario for the housing market where prices plunge 30 percent after unemployment spikes by 5-percent, brought on by global economic deflation, a more profound oil shock, or an earthquake on the West Coast.
The fallout would be an eight-fold increase in insurance claims amounting to more than $13 billion over five years. The agency’s $7.5-billion profit would sink to a $2.8-billion loss.
CMHC president and chief executive officer Evan Siddall called the release of the stress test a “next step in our transparency” – openly acknowledging the disproportionate risk exposure he says the CMHC is saddled with.
“These losses are [to be] fully borne by us, with no losses taken by the banks and lenders that originated the loans,” said Siddall in a behind-closed doors speech to a Bay Street audience on Tuesday.
“Insurers would not design a situation this way, if done from the start. Good insurance practice includes skin in the game by the insured to align behavior and incentives and avoid moral hazard. As I said, we are exploring ways to share these risks (and profits and losses) more equitably in the financial system.”
The Crown Corporation insured 175,169 new home loans last year worth $41.7-billion, that’s roughly 54 percent of the market. That number has fallen to about 50 percent in 2015, according to the agency.
“Without that CMHC subsidy, the banks might find it impossible to offer the amount of financing and mortgages that they do now. That could really hurt the housing market,” said MacBeth.
Source: CMHC is “walking a tight rope” on mortgage insurance: Author – BNN News
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 