The following infographic is unique in that it shows the top immigrant population in each country. For example, the largest immigrant population in the US comes from Mexico. Similarly, the British are the top immigrants in Canada and Australia.
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Source: Western Union
Chemistry plays a very important in our daily lives.Most the items we use everyday including foods we consume have some form of chemicals in them. I came across the following cool infographic showing the important uses of chemistry in many ways:
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Source: CompoundChem
The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article on why high-speed rail failed in the U.S. using the example of the state of Illinois and its efforts to one route from Chicago to St.Louis. The piece touches on a few points but leaves out many. Some of these were noted by its readers in the comments section of the article. I would discuss some of my thoughts on why hi-speed rail can’t succeed in the U.S. in a future post.
Below is an excerpt from the journal article:
Amtrak’s route from Chicago to St. Louis would seem an ideal place for the U.S. to adopt high-speed rail such as in Europe and Asia, where passenger trains can race along at 200 miles an hour. The stretch in Illinois is a straight shot across mostly flat terrain.
In fact, a fast-rail project is under way in Illinois. Yet the trains will top out at 110 mph, shaving just an hour from what is now a 5½-hour train trip.
After it’s finished, at a cost of about $2 billion, the state figures the share of people who travel between the two cities by rail could rise just a few percentage points.
Behind such modest gains, for hundreds of millions of dollars spent, lie some of the reasons high-speed train travel remains an elusive goal in the U.S.
All Aboard!
The fastest passenger trains are abroad. Top speeds of existing high-speed rail lines, in miles per hour.
Source: High-Speed Rail in the U.S. Remains Elusive: Illinois Shows Why, WSJ, Mar 5, 2019
Illinois didn’t have the money, or the right-of-way, to lay tracks that would be exclusively for a high-speed service. So its fast passenger trains will have to share the track with lumbering freight trains.
“To build the kind of infrastructure that is stand-alone—that is, just for high-speed passenger rail—it is just absurdly expensive and just takes years and years and years to get through the permitting and environmental process,” said Randy Blankenhorn, who was Illinois’s transportation secretary until this year.
“Land acquisition alone [would] take half a decade,” he said. “If we were to have said from the beginning, right off the bat go to 200-mile-an-hour service, we’d still be in the implementing and design phase.”
Illinois settled for weaving improvements along the route and rebuilding an existing single-track line that is owned by freight railroads. In effect, it chose higher-speed rail rather than actual high-speed.
Interested readers may want to read the whole piece.
Biotech stocks are the ultimate speculator stocks. Companies in this industry can soar to astonishing levels in a short period of time or vice versa. It is not uncommon for biotech equities to shoot up by 50% or 100% in a single day. Of course, they are also the other way around where these stocks can plummet even more in one day. We will look at some examples of biotech crashes in another post.
Yesterday Ascendis Pharma(ASND), a Danish biotech stocks listed on the NASDAQ took off like a rocket and ended the day with a gain of 74% as shown in the chart below:
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Source: BNY Mellon
What was the cause of this dramatic ride?
Ascendis shot up because investors cheered the positive trial results of human growth hormone (HGH) replacement therapy drug TransCon HGH. This one piece of good news was enough to push the stock up 74% in one day.
After the market close the company announced a public offering of ADSs for $400 million. From the press release:
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Mar 04, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE via COMTEX News Network) — Ascendis Pharma A/S (ASND), a biopharmaceutical company that utilizes its innovative TransCon(TM) technology to address unmet medical needs, today announced that it has commenced an underwritten public offering of $400,000,000 of American Depositary Shares (‘ADSs’), each of which represents one ordinary share of Ascendis. All of the ADSs are being offered by Ascendis. In addition, Ascendis expects to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional $60,000,000 of ADSs at the public offering price, less the underwriting commissions. The offering is subject to market and other conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering.
Disclosure: No positions
