Trading houses lured by African growth despite hazards

By Emma Farge

GENEVA (Reuters) - Commodity trading houses are expanding aggressively in Africa as they look to add volume and take on assets that promise to benefit from a continent achieving some of the highest economic growth in the world.

Merchant traders have historically been mostly concerned with shipping Africa's oil onto global markets but are now viewing Africa as a destination market for fuels and are investing in the storage and retail networks the continent needs to develop.

But their growing involvement in a region where several top firms have faced legal problems or payment delays may worry would-be investors at a time when the firms, typically privately owned, are scouting for new forms of capital.

While several firms have ruled out following commodity trading house Glencore in a public listing of shares, some are issuing bonds or partial sales to fund their quest for assets.

Some of the most alluring assets are in Africa's fuel market, which is set to grow by 40 percent by 2020 to 4.3 million barrels per day, according to Ecobank Research.

"If you want to be in Africa, you have to be prepared to invest. Sub-Saharan Africa is growing at a very decent rate and the highest regional area in the world today," said Graham Sharp, co-founder of oil trader Trafigura and a senior adviser to consultants Oliver Wyman.

"There are some great opportunities there, but it's not in the traditional trading business."

Trafigura and commodity firm Vitol have both bought huge networks of oil service stations from oil majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell over the past few years.

Trafigura is now considering floating its subsidiary Puma Energy, an energy distribution company that has invested over $800 million in Africa over the past 10 years.

IMPORT DEPENDENT

One reason the fuel business is so attractive is that African countries have made slow progress in building their own refineries, leaving them increasingly dependent on imported fuels and the traders that can source and deliver them.

Trading houses have spotted this deficiency and, using their newly acquired service stations and storage assets, are extending their reach to landlocked interior countries such as Zambia and Uganda.

"Intra-regional flows of petroleum products in Middle Africa represent a major growth area, particularly with the advent of new oil producing countries ... and the increasing energy demand of Middle Africa's consumer markets," said Rolake Akinkugbe, Ecobank's head of oil and gas research.

Trading houses are also using their growing cash reserves to start exploring and pumping oil, a sector long dominated by listed oil majors.

"They want deals that put more oil on their books to build trading mass, and that's what they've always done," said Gary Still, an executive director at UK consultancy CITAC.

"But we're also seeing trading houses like Glencore and Vitol becoming very interested in the upstream. I think they've got the money for these projects and will go for it," he added.

Glencore has signed a contract to export Chad's oil in 2013 after it agreed to invest more than $300 million in the central African country's Badila and Mangara oilfields to boost oil exports via the Cameroon pipeline. Its warehousing and logistics unit Pacorini has also made its first break into Africa.

Vitol also signed a long-term contract with former French colony Gabon to export its oil.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

In the more traditional business of trading, low margins are pushing traders to seek out higher oil volumes by negotiating for contracts with African governments and state oil firms.

Know-how and connections through local staff or "fixers" can give a firm a competitive advantage.

Jean Claude Gandur, chairman of AOG, stunned the industry when he completed a sale of his upstream business Addax Petroleum to China's Sinopec Group for $7.2 billion in 2009.

Now he plans to invest $400 million in the African oil sector and aims to buy Nigerian acreage. The group's expansion in Nigeria may benefit from having a former executive Afolabi Oladele of state oil company NNPC on its board.

Swiss-based Mercuria also employed a son of the former Nigerian opposition leader Moshood Abiola to help with business development in west Africa.

But deals do not always go according to plan in a region plagued by corruption and oil-fuelled civil strife.

Gunvor, historically strong in Russian oil markets, hired a team of traders from Addax Petroleum in 2009-2010 to expand in west Africa.

It now accuses a former employee of fraud and embezzlement with respect to a Republic of Congo oil contract after Swiss authorities launched a money laundering probe. Gunvor itself is not subject to the investigation and is a plaintiff in the proceedings.

Trafigura, which corporate filings show gets nearly 30 percent of its oil turnover from Africa, was locked in a legal dispute last year after buying a cargo of oil the South Sudanese government said was looted by its northern neighbour.

The proceeds from the cargo, worth around 58 million euros, were later seized by an English court to establish ownership.

A court document dated November 7 and seen by Reuters showed that a settlement had been reached, though some of the details remained confidential. Trafigura declined to comment

Even so, Trafigura has agreed to begin exporting Dar Blend crude, it said on Wednesday.

Glencore was the first to secure an agreement to market newly independent South Sudan's oil, but the deal was later scrapped after opposition from some South Sudanese officials.

In Nigeria, top trading houses like Mercuria and Glencore are owed dozens of millions of dollars for fuel deliveries that in some cases date back over three years.

"Africa can be a minefield," said Akinkugbe at Ecobank.

"You have to do your homework and have a local champion who can help bridge the knowledge gap."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/trading-houses-lured-african-growth-despite-hazards-151044184--sector.html

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New way to lose weight? Changing microbes in guts of mice resulted in rapid weight loss

Mar. 27, 2013 ? Scientists at Harvard may have new hope for anyone who's tried to fight the battle of the bulge.

New research, conducted in collaboration with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, has found that the gut microbes of mice undergo drastic changes following gastric bypass surgery. Transfer of these microbes into sterile mice resulted in rapid weight loss. The study is described in a March 27 paper in Science Translational Medicine.

"Simply by colonizing mice with the altered microbial community, the mice were able to maintain a lower body fat, and lose weight -- about 20% as much as they would if they underwent surgery," said Peter Turnbaugh, a Bauer Fellow at Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Center for Systems Biology, and one of two senior authors of the paper.

But as striking as those results were, they weren't as dramatic as they might have been.

"In some ways we were biasing the results against weight loss," Turnbaugh said, explaining that the mice used in the study hadn't been given a high-fat, high-sugar diet to increase their weight beforehand. "The question is whether we might have seen a stronger effect if they were on a different diet."

"Our study suggests that the specific effects of gastric bypass on the microbiota contribute to its ability to cause weight loss and that finding ways to manipulate microbial populations to mimic those effects could become a valuable new tool to address obesity," said Lee Kaplan, director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at MGH and the other senior author of the paper.

"We need to learn a good deal more about the mechanisms by which a microbial population changed by gastric bypass exert its effects, and then we need to learn if we can produce these effects -- either the microbial changes or the associated metabolic changes -- without surgery," Kaplan, an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, added. "The ability to achieve even some of these effects without surgery would give us an entirely new way to treat the critical problem of obesity, one that could help patients unable or unwilling to have surgery."

While the results were exciting, Turnbaugh warned that it may be years before they could be replicated in humans, and that such microbial changes shouldn't be viewed as a way to lose those stubborn last 10 pounds without going to the gym. Rather, the technique may one day offer hope to dangerously obese people who want to lose weight without going through the trauma of surgery.

"It may not be that we will have a magic pill that will work for everyone who's slightly overweight," he said. "But if we can, at a minimum, provide some alternative to gastric bypass surgery that produces similar effects, it would be a major advance."

While there had been hints that the microbes in the gut might change after bypass surgery, the speed and extent of the change came as a surprise to the research team.

In earlier experiments, researchers had shown that the guts of both lean and obese mice are populated by varying amounts of two types of bacteria, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. When mice undergo gastric bypass surgery, however, it "resets the whole picture," Turnbaugh said.

"The post-bypass community was dominated by Proteobacteria and Proteobacteria, and had relatively low levels of Firmicutes," he said. What's more, Turnbaugh said, those changes occurred within a week of the surgery, and weren't short-lived -- the altered gut microbial community remained stable for months afterward.

While the results may hold out the hope for weight loss without surgery, both Turnbaugh and Kaplan warned that future studies are needed to understand exactly what is behind the weight loss seen in mice.

"A major gap in our knowledge is the underlying mechanism linking microbes to weight loss," Turnbaugh said. "There were certain microbes that we found at higher abundance after surgery, so we think those are good targets for beginning to understand what's taking place."

In fact, Turnbaugh said, the answer may not be the specific types of microbes, but a by-product they excrete.

In addition to changes in the microbes found in the gut, researchers found changes in the concentration of certain short-chain fatty acids. Other studies, Turnbaugh said, have suggested that those molecules may be critical in signaling to the host to speed up metabolism, or not to store excess calories as fat.

Going forward, Turnbaugh and Kaplan hope to continue to explore those questions.

"We think such studies will allow us to understand how host/microbial interactions in general can influence the outcome of a given diet," Kaplan said. "To some degree, what we're learning is a comfort for people who have an issue with their weight, because more and more we're learning that the story is more complicated than just how much you exercise and how much you eat."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard University. The original article was written by Peter Reuell.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. A. P. Liou, M. Paziuk, J.-M. Luevano, S. Machineni, P. J. Turnbaugh, L. M. Kaplan. Conserved Shifts in the Gut Microbiota Due to Gastric Bypass Reduce Host Weight and Adiposity. Science Translational Medicine, 2013; 5 (178): 178ra41 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3005687

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/55s2_HYwLsA/130327144124.htm

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Simulations uncover obstacle to harnessing laser-driven fusion

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

A once-promising approach for using next-generation, ultra-intense lasers to help deliver commercially viable fusion energy has been brought into serious question by new experimental results and first-of-a-kind simulations of laser-plasma interaction.

Researchers at The Ohio State University are evaluating a two-stage process in which a pellet of fusion fuel is first crushed by lasers on all sides, shrinking the pellet to dozens of times its original size, followed by an ultra-intense burst of laser light to ignite a chain reaction. This two-stage approach is called Fast Ignition, and there are a few variants on the theme. In a recent paper, the Ohio State research group considered the long-discussed possibility of using a hollow cone to maintain a channel for the ultra-intense "ignitor pulse" to focus laser energy on the compressed pellet core. Drawing on both experimental results from studies at the Titan Laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and massively-parallel computer simulations of the laser-target interaction performed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus, Ohio, the research team found compelling evidence that the cone-guided approach to Fast Ignition has a serious flaw.

"In the history of fusion research, two-steps-forward and one-step-back stories are a common theme," said Chris Orban, Ph.D., a researcher of the High Energy Density Physics research group at Ohio State and the lead theorist on the project. "But sometimes progress is about seeing what's not going to work, just as much as it is looking forward to the next big idea."

Since the ultra-intense pulse delivers energy to the fuel through relativistic electrons accelerated by the laser interaction, the Ohio State study focused on the coupling of the laser light to electrons and the propagation of those electrons through the cone target. Rather than investigating how the interaction would work on a high-demand, high-cost facility like the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is also based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the largest scientific operations in the world, the researchers considered experiments just across from NIF at the Titan laser, which is much smaller and easily accessible.

Despite its size and despite having lower total energy, for a brief moment the Titan laser is many thousands of times more intense than NIF, which makes it a decent stand-in as a second-stage ignitor pulse. The OSU-led experimental team focused the Titan pulse on hollow cone targets attached at the tip to copper wires and observed the burst of X-ray photons coming from the copper as a measure of the laser energy to relativistic electron conversion efficiency.

The X-ray signal was much lower from the hollow cones with thicker cone walls. "This was strong evidence to the experimental team that the typical approach to cone-guided Fast Ignition wouldn't work, since thicker cones should be more realistic than thin cones," said Orban. "This is because electrons are free to move around in a dense plasma, much like they do in a normal metal, so the thicker cone target is like a thin cone embedded in a dense plasma."

These intuitions were tested in simulations performed at OSC. Whereas earlier efforts to simulate the laser-target interaction were forced to simplify or shrink the target size in order to make the calculations more feasible, Orban used the LSP code to perform the first-ever, full-scale 2D Particle-In-Cell simulations of the entire laser-target interaction using fully realistic laser fields.

These simulations also included a sophisticated model for the pre-heating of the target from stray laser light ahead of the ultra-intense pulse developed by collaborators at the Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago.

"We were delighted to help Chris use the FLASH code to provide realistic initial conditions for his Particle-In-Cell simulations," said Don Lamb, director of the Flash Center. "This is an outstanding example of how two groups can collaborate to achieve a scientific result that neither could have achieved alone."

To conduct the simulations, the Ohio State researchers accessed OSC's flagship Oakley Cluster supercomputer system. The HP-built system features 8,300+ Intel Xeon cores and 128 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Oakley can achieve 88 teraflops, tech-speak for performing 88 trillion calculations per second, or, with acceleration from the NVIDIA GPUs, a total peak performance of 154 teraflops.

"The simulations pointed to the electric fields building up on the edge of the cone as the key to everything," said Orban. "The thicker the cone is, the further away the cone edge is from the laser, and as a result fewer energetic electrons are deflected forward, which is the crucial issue in making cone-guided Fast Ignition a viable approach."

With both the experiment and the simulations telling the same story, the evidence is compelling that the cone-guided route to Fast Ignition is an unlikely one. While other studies have come to similar conclusions, the group was the first to identify the plasma surrounding the cone as a severe hindrance. Thankfully, there are still many other ideas for successfully igniting the fusion pellet with current or soon-to-be-constructed laser facilities. Any future efforts to spark fusion reactions with these lasers using a two-stage fast-ignition approach must be mindful to consider the neutralizing effect of the free electrons in the dense plasma.

"We could not have completed this project without the Oakley Cluster," Orban noted. "It was the perfect combination of speed and RAM and availability for us. And thanks to the profiling I was able to do, the compute time for our production runs went from two weeks in November 2011 to three or four days as of February 2012."

"Energy and the environment is one of the primary focus areas of the center, and this research fits perfectly into that domain," said Brian Guilfoos, the client and technology support manager for OSC. "Many of our systems were designed and software packages selected to best support the type of computing required by investigators working in fields related to our focus areas."

###

The paper describing the study, "Coupling of high-intensity laser light to fast electrons in cone-guided fast ignition," was recently published in Physical Review E, a journal of the American Physical Society.

Ohio Supercomputer Center: http://www.osc.edu

Thanks to Ohio Supercomputer Center for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127477/Simulations_uncover_obstacle_to_harnessing_laser_driven_fusion

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Gut-Microbe Swap Helps with Weight Loss

A bacterial transplant in mice has been shown to provide some of the benefits of gastric bypass surgery without putting the animals under the knife

By Nicola Jones and Nature magazine

Here the taxonomy of gut bacteria in mice that have received gastric bypass (red) is compared to that of mice kept at the same weight (blue) and of others that were not kept on a diet (green). Image: Science Translational Medicine/AAAS

Obese people considering gastric bypass surgery to help trim their fat might one day have another option: swallowing a new supply of gut bacteria. A study in mice suggests that weight loss after bypass surgery is caused not by the operation itself, but at least in part by a change in the amounts of various species of microbes in the gut.

A bypass operation separates off a small part of the stomach and connects that directly to the intestines. Recipients tend to feel less hungry, fill up more quickly and burn more calories at rest, and they often lose up to 75% of their excess fat. Counter-intuitively, this is thought to be caused by a change in metabolism, rather than by the reduced size of the stomach.

Gut microbes are thought to be part of this picture. People who have had bypasses are known to experience changes in the selection of microbes in their guts. Fat people have been shown to host a different selection of gut bacteria from people who are obese, and transferring the gut bacteria of fat mice into thin ones can cause the thin mice to pack on extra weight. But no one knew whether the microbes in bypass patients changed because they got thin, or if the patients got thin because the microbes changed.

Chop and change
To investigate, Lee Kaplan, director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues gave about a dozen obese mice bypass surgery. As expected, the mice lost about 29% of their body weight, and kept it off despite a high-fat diet. New conditions in their bodies ? such as a change in bile acids ? allowed a different set of gut bacteria to thrive.

The researchers then took faecal samples from the mice that had been operated on, and put bacteria from them into the guts of mice specially bred without any gut flora. These mice, which were not obese, lost 5% of their weight without any changes to their diet. The results are reported in Science Translational Medicine.

The effect is impressively large, says Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, particularly given that sterile mice almost always gain weight when given any kind of gut flora. The fact that the mice getting the second-hand bacteria did not lose as much weight as those that had surgery suggests that other factors are also at work; these could include hormonal changes.

The results are promising for obesity treatments, but there are still hurdles to overcome. ?You can?t just take a pill of the right bacteria and have them stick around,? says Seeley. If the gut?s environmental conditions don?t change, then the original microbes come back, he says. Kaplan says that the next steps are to isolate the four bacteria types that the study found to be at play and introduce them into obese mice or people. Antibiotic treatments might help the new bacteria to stick. ?I believe it?s possible,? says Kaplan.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on March 27, 2013.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=b5aeffc26bd0cbb192e4e92698c948d7

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Indians greet with colorful fashion

A Hindu devotee, face smeared with colored powder, leaves the Banke Bihari temple during Holi celebrations in Vrindavan, India, Wednesday, March 27, 2013. Holi, the Hindu festival of colors that also ... more?A Hindu devotee, face smeared with colored powder, leaves the Banke Bihari temple during Holi celebrations in Vrindavan, India, Wednesday, March 27, 2013. Holi, the Hindu festival of colors that also marks the advent of spring, is being celebrated across the country Wednesday. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri) less?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lightbox/india-s-festival-of-colors-slideshow/

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David Petraeus apologizes for conduct, affair

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? David Petraeus apologized Tuesday night to an audience of veterans for the conduct that led to his resignation as head of the CIA following the disclosure of an extramarital affair.

"Needless to say, I join you keenly aware that I am regarded in a different light now than I was a year ago," Petraeus said. "I am also keenly aware that the reason for my recent journey was my own doing. So please allow me to begin my remarks this evening by reiterating how deeply I regret ? and apologize for ? the circumstances that led to my resignation from the CIA and caused such pain for my family, friends and supporters."

Dressed in a civilian's dark suit and red tie, Petraeus gave his first public speech since his resignation to about 600 people, including many uniformed and decorated veterans at the University of Southern California's annual ROTC dinner. The hero of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has remained largely in seclusion since resigning. His lawyer, Robert B. Barnett, has said that Petraeus has spent much of that time with his family.

While the speech was peppered with jokes about USC and UCLA's longstanding rivalry, he mostly talked about getting better treatment for veterans and soldiers, but stopped short of criticizing current practices.

"While our country continues to improve its support and recognition for all of our veterans and their families, we can and must do more," he said.

Petraeus received applause and a standing ovation before he began the evening's program by cutting a cake with a sword in military tradition, a task reserved for the highest ranking person in the room.

The retired four-star general's affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, was discovered during an FBI investigation into emails she sent to another woman she viewed as a rival for his attention.

"I know I can never fully assuage the pain that I inflicted on those closest to me and a number of others," said Petraeus, in a somber tone to the audience that included his wife. He also mentioned their children.

At the time the affair was made public, Petraeus told his staff he was guilty of "extremely poor judgment."

"Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours," he said.

On Tuesday night, Petraeus noted the challenges of transitioning from military life to civilian life, a path he is currently navigating.

"There's often a view that because an individual was a great soldier, he or she will naturally do well in civilian world," Petraeus said. "In reality, the transition from military service to civilian pursuits is often quite challenging."

As the military leader credited with reshaping the nation's counterinsurgency strategy, turning the tide in the U.S. favor in both Iraq and Afghanistan and making the U.S. safer from terrorism, Petraeus had a friendly audience at the ROTC dinner.

At least one expert in crisis communications said that if his apology comes across as heartfelt and sincere, the public will indeed be seeing much more of him.

"America is a very forgiving nation," said Michael Levine who, among dozens of other celebrity clients, represented Michael Jackson during his first child molestation investigation.

"If he follows the path of humility, personal responsibility and contrition, I submit to you that he will be very successful in his ability to rehabilitate his image," he said.

Another longtime crisis communications expert, Howard Bragman, said Petraeus has handled the situation perfectly so far and he expects he'll continue to do so. He noted that unlike former President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Sen. John Edwards and other public figures caught in extramarital affairs, Petraeus didn't try to lie his way out of it, immediately took responsibility and moved on.

"I think the world is open to him now," said Bragman, vice chairman of the image-building company Reputation.com. "I think he can do whatever he wants. Realistically, he can even run for public office, although I don't think he'd want to because he can make more money privately."

Ahead of the speech, Petraeus drew lavish praise from USC's president, C. L. Max Nikias, who called him "arguably the most effective military commander since Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower."

"In our post 9/11 world, Gen. Petraeus' influence on our military is unmatched, and his contributions to the CIA are far-reaching," Nikias said.

While at USC, Petraeus also planned to visit faculty and students at the Price School of Public Policy, which administers the ROTC program, and USC's School of Social Work, which trains social workers in how to best help veterans returning from war.

Petraeus was presented with a gift of silver cuff links by Nikias after his speech.

___

Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/david-petraeus-apologizes-conduct-affair-050721900--politics.html

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Rand Versus Lewis: It?s No Contest (Powerlineblog)

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