Hi, 3 charts for you today:
Last summer Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos competed in launching themselves into space, with both billionaires experiencing zero-gravity for a brief time, as they marketed their respective "space tourism" projects.
To infinity... and back to Earth
For Richard Branson, reaching 283,000 feet above sea level on July 11th really was the peak — as everything has been downhill for his Virgin Galactic venture since then.
First a report from the New Yorker revealed that a warning light had gone off during the flight. The FAA eventually investigated and cleared the incident, but it was the start of a chain of bad news for Virgin Galactic. The company then announced delays to its commercial flights for "technical reasons", and yesterday the company announced that it was raising another $425m in debt to accelerate the "development of its spacecraft" among other uses, which sent shares down another 20%.
Taking on more debt isn't strictly a bad thing, but in this context it suggests Virgin Galactic might need a bit more funding than it previously thought. When combined with the substantial delays — commercial flights are now expected to start in October this year, way behind the original schedule to have flights start in 2020 — it isn't a great signal to investors.
This week a new study published in the academic journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences revealed that the ocean had absorbed another 14 zettajoules of energy in the last year. A joule is a measurement of energy and a "zetta" is a prefix that saves us from writing the number like this: 14,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.
As one of the authors of the study wrote in The Guardian, that amount of energy is the equivalent of 440 billion toasters (57 toasters per person around the world) running 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Don't boil the ocean
More than 90% of global warming heat eventually ends up in the ocean, which is an excellent store of heat and energy. Warmer oceans can store energy that might otherwise end up in our atmosphere, but they can also mean less sea ice, higher sea levels and disruptions to the all important ocean currents.
This week inflation in the US hit a number not seen for 40 years, as prices rose on average 7% from December 2020 to December 2021.
Not all inflation is created equal
Within that overall measure there is of course a huge range of price changes. We've chosen some of the most important categories from the BLS data, plotting above the raw unadjusted inflation rates for each category.
At the top of the list is "getting around by car", with gasoline prices up almost 50% on this time last year, and used cars and trucks costing on average 37% more than this time in 2020. Utility costs are also up, with gas up 24% and electricity up 6%.
In the food department it's bad news for bodybuilders with proteins like meat, poultry, fish and eggs up on average 12%, and your weekly food shop likely to cost you 6.5% more this year. Eating out, or "food away from home" as the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it, is also up 6%.
There is some good news if you're an accident-prone frequent flyer who drinks a lot of alcohol and milk — your main costs may not have gone up that much. Alcoholic beverages, dairy products, airline fares and medical care commodities have all seen only modest price rises of 1-2% in the last year.
1) Loan servicing giant Navient has agreed to cancel $1.7 billion in student loan debts owed by roughly 66,000 borrowers after agreeing to a settlement with 39 attorney generals.
2)Tesla has delayed production of its Cybertruck to 2023 according to a new report, at least 15 months behind the original schedule. Separately, Elon Musk kept up the Dogecoin joke, announcing that some Tesla merchandise would be purchasable with Dogecoin.
3) More than 1 million fewer students are enrolled in college now, relative to 2019, according to new data released yesterday.
4) NowRx is building the local pharmacy of the future — help them and join the other 3,300+ investors in their Series C round of investment.**
5) Alternative meat company Beyond Meat has become the most-shorted company in the US, with bets against the company piling up after a softening growth outlook and mounting losses.
6) A rancher in Turkey has begun putting virtual reality headsets on his cattle in an effort to lower their stress levels, in the hope they produce more milk — and so far they seem to be. As one user on Twitter put it "they did the Matrix on a cow".
**This is sponsored content.
