Greg L. (Lake of the Woods, Ontario)
Featuring one of our advisor partners, Lonn Vokey.
This week in charts
Power supply
Supply chain
Mental health
Moody’s warns of ‘serious challenge’ to $1.4tn private credit market
A sharp rise in rates could cause some of these businesses to struggle to afford their interest payments. Moody’s found that the interest coverage ratios on the Ares and Owl Rock funds’ loans — the earnings available to make interest payments — would eventually fall by about half. While Moody’s has sounded a warning, it did not downgrade the ratings or credit outlook of either of the Ares or Owl Rock funds, which are publicly traded lending vehicles called business development corporations. Ares and Owl Rock declined to comment.
This week’s fun finds
Four EdgePointers make the pilgrimage
Claire, Mimi, Patrick and Sarah made their way to P.E.I. for a meeting with advisor partners and took the opportunity to visit the inspiration for Cymbria’s name.
EdgePoint Football Club undefeated in its first two games
A 5-1 win keeps the team near the top of the standings.
Webb telescope just found something unprecedented in the Orion Nebula
A team of scientists found this Holy Grail compound in the Orion Nebula, a baby star nursery about 1,350 light-years away. That may seem absurdly far, but it's actually the closest large star-forming region to Earth.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a preeminent cosmic observatory led by NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, the researchers not only captured a vibrant new picture of the celestial region — blowing the socks off Hubble's version — but found the new molecule lurking in a young star system, known as d203-506. This system has a protoplanetary disk, a sort of Lazy Susan of gas and dust rotating around the core.
Astronomers are on a quest to find signals of carbon compounds in the greater universe because this chemistry is at the root of all life, at least as far as we understand it on Earth. Coincidentally, ancient Mayan culture referred to the Orion Nebula as the cosmic fire of creation.
The mysterious signal turned out to be methyl cation, a molecule that until this week was relatively unknown to the layperson. With the announcement, NASA went so far as to provide a pronunciation guide for the term. (For the record, it sounds like "CAT-eye-on," not the last two syllables of "vacation.") Organic chemists say methyl cation assists with the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules.
Since the 1970s, scientists have predicted this substance was a missing link between simple molecules and more complex organic molecules. But direct evidence of its existence in space had eluded them — until now. NASA likens the role of methyl cation to a train station, where a molecule can remain for a time before routing in one of many different directions to react with other molecules.
"This detection not only validates the incredible sensitivity of Webb but also confirms the postulated central importance of (methyl cation) in interstellar chemistry," said Marie-Aline Martin-Drumel, one of the coauthors on the new study, in a statement.
