Permanent TSB say they hope to raise €400m on Irish Stock Exchange
Bank expected to mark its return to the ISE four years after it was de-listed.
Permanent TSB is expected to launch a public share offering on Tuesday to raise €400 million, marking its return to the main Dublin stock exchange four years after it was delisted.
The lender last week secured approval from the Irish government, which owns 99% of the bank, to raise up to €400 million in equity, but it did not specify whether the shares would be sold via a public or private offering.
A spokesman for the bank declined to comment.
Ireland’s third-largest domestically-owned bank has said it plans to raise a further €125 million by selling bonds to fill a capital shortfall identified in European stress tests last year.
The additional tier one bonds would convert into equity or be written down if the bank’s capital levels fall below a certain level.
Ireland’s GPs divided on under sixes free scheme
One of the country’s two GP representative bodies has rejected the deal agreed last week which will provide for free GP care for all under sixes to be introduced this summer.
The National Association of General Practitioners (NAGP), which claims a membership of 1,200 GPs, has rejected the deal, ‘based on the information currently available.’
The proposals were rejected by the NAGP’s 23 member council, with the NAGP union claiming that the agreement does not serve the interests of patients or doctors.
The NAGP says the under sixes scheme will result in ‘medical apartheid’, as it will provide free GP care for under sixes from relatively well-off families while others on low incomes and with special needs are denied medical cards.
Meanwhile, the largest doctors’ union, the IMO, at its AGM in Kilkenny at the weekend, discussed the new under sixes deal it recently agreed with the Government.
Speaking to the meeting, incoming IMO President Dr Ray Walley described the new agreement as a ‘first step on the road back to a sustainable and viable general practice system’.
He stressed that the deal would see additional investment of over €75 million in general practice through the under sixes contract and the special GP care programme for patients with Type II diabetes.
Under the new agreement, GPs will receive a yearly fee of €125 per child under six – an increase of 82% on the current rate, according to the IMO. Including additional payments and supports, the total payment to GPs per patient under six in future will be €216.
The agreement also includes provisions for additional payments for patients over the age of 2 with Asthma and payments for GPs undertaking a “cycle of care” programme with patients with Type II Diabetes.
The latter programme is designed to encourage an increasing number GPs to treat patients with diabetes on a regular basis and thereby make these patients less reliant on overstretched hospital services.
While many GPs at the AGM welcomed the new agreement, there were concerns expressed about its workload implications and concerns about the damage caused to general practice through years of under-resourcing and fee cuts.
While at this stage it is expected that a majority of GPs will take part in the under sixes scheme, there are fears that a significant minority will opt out, meaning that parents of children under six would not be able to avail of the free care scheme with their current GP.
In these circumstances, patents, either private patients or medical card holders, would have the option to move their children and themselves to other practices, where feasible.
In these circumstances, GPs who opt out of the under sixes scheme would stand to lose significant income.
A PERSONAL LIFE SURVIVAL STORY:
Lord Henry Mountcharles reveals how he felt ‘suicidal’ during treatment for lung cancer
Lord Henry Mountcharles pictured above at Slane Castle.
Lord Henry Mountcharles now reveals how he felt ‘suicidal’ whilst receiving chemotherapy for lung cancer last year.
The 62-year-old owner of Slane Castle was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013 and had the lower lobe of his right lung removed before facing three and a half months of chemo and six weeks of radiation.
Speaking to John Murray on The John Murray Show on RTE Radio 1, he said he found the treatment “pretty tough”.
“With chemo, it affects everyone differently, how they deal with it is different, and one thing I say to people who are going through it, or have gone through it, is to keep reminding themselves it’s toxic stuff they’re putting into you. So if you go into a tunnel keep telling yourself it’s the drugs that are doing it. It’s not where you are.” he said.
He said the depression he experienced during chemo was “pretty savage” and that he sometimes considered taking his own life.
“That deep darkness was pretty savage at times and I hate to admit it but I did feel pretty suicidal,” he said.
“But what in a sense was wonderful about it was coming out of it, just like looking at this ray of sunlight you knew was there. The frightening thing was not always being able to see it.”
Lord Henry has since been given one all clear and is poised for another CAT scan tomorrow, April 14, after which he hopes to have more good news.
Since his illness, he says, he has a new appreciation of life. Having taken a break from Slane last year, he’s poised to host Foo Fighters, Kaiser Chiefs, The Strypes and Hozier at the Meath venue on Saturday May 30 this year.
“I have a sort of lightness in my step and at times i feel almost a little giddy,” he said. “I look forward to things with a more acute sense of excitement.”
Of this year’s Slane line-up, he enthuses, “I wanted to go back to the roots and what better way to do that than with a guy who started off his music career as the drummer in Nirvana,” he said.
“That appealed to my sensibilities. We’ve built a really good bill around it.”
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, contact the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90 (UK) or 116 123 (ROI)
Very soon, condoms to feel like the ‘real thing’
Soon, condoms to feel like the ‘real thing’.
Scientists are designing ultra-durable condoms they claim could feel like the “real thing” and even better than nothing at all.
Scientists at the University of Wollongong in Australia are working with an ultra-tough material called hydrogel that could be used to create condoms that actually feels good.
Hydrogels are strong and flexible solids that have been used for decades, but have more recently been engineered to have a range of different properties. One of the most promising was the fact they could be made to feel and act like human tissue, and are already being widely used in prosthetics to create things such as blood vessels and even eye implants.
But the Australian team, led by materials scientist Robert Gorkin, decided to take things one step further, and investigate whether hydrogel could replace latex to create condoms that people actually want to use.
Hydrogels could be engineered to perform all kinds of different functionalities, such as self-lubrication, topical drug delivery, biodegradability and even electric conductivity.
Researchers hoping to design the product to accommodate for around the cultural and social needs for birth control.
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of liquid water on Mars
Curiosity’s landing site of Gale Crater was once home to a lake
Nasa’s Curiosity rover has found that water can exist as a liquid near the Martian surface.
Mars should be too cold to support liquid water at the surface, but salts in the soil lower its freezing point – allowing briny films to form.
The results lend credence to a theory that dark streaks seen on features such as crater walls could be formed by flowing water.
Scientists think thin films of water form when salts in the soil, called perchlorates, absorb water vapour from the atmosphere.
The temperature of these liquid films is about -70C – too cold to support any of the microbial life forms that we know about.
Forming in the top 15cm of the Martian soil, the brines would also be exposed to high levels of cosmic radiation – another challenge to life.
But it’s still possible that organisms could exist somewhere beneath the surface on Mars, where conditions are more favourable.
Evaporation cycle:- The researchers drew together different lines of evidence from the suite of instruments carried by the Curiosity rover.
The Rover Environmental Monitoring System (REMS) – essentially the vehicle’s weather station – measured the relative humidity and temperature at the rover’s landing site of Gale Crater.
Scientists were also able to estimate the subsurface water content using data from an instrument called Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN). These data were consistent with water in the soil being bound to perchlorates.
Finally, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument gave the researchers the content of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Gale Crater once hosted a lake with conditions that could have been favourable to lifeCuriosity’s Mast and deck where REMS sensors are located
The results show conditions were right for the brines to form during winter nights at the Martian equator, where Curiosity landed. But the liquid evaporates during the Martian day when temperatures rise.
Javier Martin-Torres, a co-investigator on the Curiosity mission and lead scientist on REMS, told BBC News the detection was indirect but convincing: “What we see are the conditions for the formation of brines on the surface. It’s similar to when people were discovering the first exoplanets.
“They were not seeing the planets, but they were able to see the gravitational effects on the star.
“These perchlorate salts have a property called deliquescence. They take the water vapour from the atmosphere and absorb it to produce the brines.”
He added: “We see a daily water cycle – which is very important. This cycle is maintained by the brine. On Earth we have an exchange between the atmosphere and the ground through rain. But we don’t have this on Mars.”
Streaks known as recurring slope lineae may be caused by seeping watercientists see a daily water cycle maintained by the brines
While one might think that liquid water would form at warmer temperatures, the formation of brines is the result of an interaction between temperature and atmospheric pressure. It happens that the sweet spot for formation of these liquid films is at colder temperatures.
The fact that the scientists see evidence for these brines at the Martian equator – where conditions are least favourable – means that they might be more persistent at higher latitudes, in areas where the humidity is higher and temperatures are lower.
In these regions they might even be present all year round.
Dark streaks on slopes seen by orbiting spacecraft have long been thought to be the product of running water seeping from the Martian soil. But this interpretation has been contested.
“It’s speculation at this point… but these observations at least support or go in this direction,” said Dr Martin-Torres.
Astronomers find distant exoplanet with hot windy ‘Inferno’ Atmosphere
This distant planet has an atmosphere hot enough to melt iron, astronomers say. Winds high above the planet blow at 500 mph, they find.
Astronomers say they’ve managed to make highly accurate measurements of the atmosphere of a distant planet, and “hot and dry” doesn’t begin to describe it; how about 500-mph winds and temperatures of 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit?
Extrasolar planets were discovered during the 1990s as a result of improved telescope technology, such as CCD and computer-based image processing along with the Hubble Space Telescope. Such advances allowed for more accurate measurements of stellar motion, allowing astronomers to detect planets, not visually (the luminosity of a planet being too low for such detection), but by measuring gravitational influences upon stars.
In addition, extrasolar planets can be detected by measuring the variance in a star’s apparent luminosity, as a planet passes in front of it. Besides the detection of at least 80 planets (mostly gas giants), many observations point to the existence of millions of comets also in extrasolar systems.
Researchers are describing turbulent upper levels of the atmosphere of exoplanet HD 189733b as truly “infernal.”
Astronomers from two Swiss universities in Geneva and Bern used a spectrometer to study spectrographic lines of sodium, an element in the exoplanet’s atmosphere, to gather data on winds and temperatures, and also came up with theoretical models to support the observations.
The spectrograph, known as the HARPS instrument, has been mated to a relatively small telescope at the European Star Observatory in Chile.
Scientists had theorized in 2000 that sodium would be an ideal source of a clearly recognizable signal in any planet possessing an atmosphere, and the first observations confirming that in an exoplanet were made 2 years later by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Now the sodium data is helping astronomers study the gas giant planet HD189733b, located about 60 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula, the “little fox.”
The data gathered suggests the atmosphere’s temperature changes with altitude, reaching temperatures in its upper levels high enough to melt iron, they say.
The results of the spectrographic observations are also supported by a theoretical study by University of Berne astrophysicist Kevin Heng, which produced a formula to estimate temperatures, pressures and densities in an exoplanet’s atmosphere based on its size.
“Previous formulae assumed the atmosphere to have only a single temperature, but we know that this is probably too simplistic even for faraway exoplanets for which we have limited information,” explains Heng.
“Our motivation was to derive new and simple formulae that took into account the changing temperatures and were specifically designed to interpret sodium lines,” he says.
The HD 189733b observations along with Heng’s theoretical work should lead to better methods of exploring exoplanet atmospheres, astronomers say, and a way to provide any question about such atmospheres with “a quick and relatively robust answer without crunching numbers in a computer,” Heng says.
Even relatively small ground-based telescopes can provide characterizations of remote exoplanetary atmospheres using the new techniques and theoretical formulae, astronomers say.
Previously, detecting sodium in the atmospheres of exoplanets to make assumptions about conditions there required either the Hubble telescope or very large ground-based instruments in the 25- to 30-foot range. “Sometimes, simple is better,” Heng says.
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