Latest news with #Evans
Powys County Times
9 hours ago
- Automotive
- Powys County Times
Powys town plays host to successful Nicky Grist Rally Stages
DALE Furniss helped Meirion Evans to second place at last weekend's Nicky Grist Stages in Builth Wells. The Llanrhaeadr co-driver partnered Evans in his in his Toyota GR Yaris Rally2 which ended two seconds behind rally winner William Creighton. The pair lost 12 seconds with a spin on the opening stage, with the majority of the time lost thanks to the car failing to engage reverse gear. The duo suffered had a puncture between SS2 and 3 and with grip levels compromised they arrived at mid-distance service in third place, 16.6 seconds behind the leaders. Evans enjoyed a good clean run in the afternoon and set fastest time on three of the afternoon's four stages, which moved him from third to second to give the Castrol MEM Rally Team a superb one-two result at the top of the podium. Osian Pryce got his preparations for an assault on the Roger Albert Clark Rally at the end of the year off to the best possible start with an outstanding performance. Driving a Ford Escort RS1800 Mk2 built and supplied by Wales Motorsport for the first time, the 2022 British rally champion from Aberangell was the fastest 2WD competitor throughout the 45-stage mile event held in the mid Wales forests in and around the Mynydd Epynt military range. Builth Wells mayor Mark Hammond flagged the cars away from the start of the Quinton Motor Club organised event from outside Strand Hall. Taking no risks and driving well within himself, Pryce and co-driver Phil Pugh won the hotly contested Historic section of the event by more than a minute, won the BTRDA Silver Star section, finished third in the overall Welsh Rally Championship section and came home first two-wheel drive in a magnificent 12th position overall. 'This was my first gravel rally for nine months and my first in an Escort since the RAC Rally in 2023, so I'm very happy with both our performance and our result,' said Pryce. 'I'm shocked that we won the Historic section by over a minute. I'm not sure if others had problems, but I've been driving at seven and eight tenths all day. Maybe that helped in the hot and abrasive conditions, because in some stages I backed right off to manage the tyres and the times were still good. 'I had a good clean run with no mistakes, nailed all the lines and the car's been fabulous all day. 'To just jump into a new car and drive it, without a single issue, has been an absolute pleasure. It really showcases how good Wales Motorsport is at building and running a car. 'For my first event back preparing for the RAC Rally, it could not have gone any better.' Pryce is supported by The Leading Edge, Demon Tweeks, Hills Ford, Bell, Haddo Energy, Superfast Properties, Red Kite Glass, Diogel Events, Gorsaf Betrol TyMawr, and his own family-run specialist building firm G+M Pryce.
South Wales Argus
15 hours ago
- Politics
- South Wales Argus
Newport has ‘lost out' over university investment promises
Newport has missed out on around £3 million of investment since a university merger and the closure of Caerleon Campus, a councillor has claimed. Cllr Matthew Evans said student numbers in the city have plummeted in the past 15 years, and criticised 'broken' promises to invest in higher education. The University of South Wales (USW) was created in 2013 when the University of Newport, Wales merged with the University of Glamorgan – two years after a new city-centre campus for business and media opened on Usk Way. The university's campus in Caerleon was eventually closed down in 2016, despite opposition, and most of the site has been redeveloped for housing – except for the main block and some other listed buildings, which later found fame in the Netflix series Sex Education. Speaking at a council meeting this week, Cllr Evans, the leader of the opposition Conservative group, alleged the only university students apparently living in Newport these days are 'a few from Bristol' – a far cry from the 10,000 he said the city welcomed in 2010/11. Cllr Evans raised a recent claim that 'when the Caerleon campus was sold for £6.2 million, there was an initial promise that all of this would be spent in the city'. On the university merger, he added: 'Promises were made that there would not be any campus closures, which were then broken.' The development of a so-called Knowledge Quarter in central Newport was meant to safeguard higher and further education, but Cllr Evans questioned the progress to date, and urged Cllr Dimitri Batrouni, the council leader, to 'ensure that this much-needed investment in the city centre materialises'. Cllr Batrouni said he had held 'honest and robust' discussions with USW's chancellor and vice-chancellor on the university's 'current status and future' in Newport, but described the sector as being 'in real trouble'. 'I think if we're all being candid with each other, not just in Wales but across England, higher education [and] universities are facing a financial crisis,' said Cllr Batrouni, who understands USW has 'no contractual obligation… to commit that money here'. 'I can also raise those matters directly with them next time I meet them – but I wouldn't hold our breath on that,' he added. Cllr Evans said public documents, published around the time the redevelopment of Caerleon Campus was decided, suggested 'the university intended to reinvest proceeds into the Newport Knowledge Quarter'. 'Yet again, we appear to have lost out,' he claimed. 'Apparently they have spent £3.2 million in Newport but that still leaves a shortfall of £3 million.' Cllr Evans called that spending a 'pittance' when compared 'to the £40 million they've just spent on a building in Treforest'. 'They promised us money,' he added. 'I do think it's important… we try and get some of this money back or at least buildings here.' Cllr Batrouni defended the Knowledge Quarter project as 'a beacon for this city' and said there were 'definitely students there' during his visit to the city-centre campus. He also noted several USW investments in Newport, including a 'state of the art' research and innovation centre, and a cyber centre 'which has won four national awards for cyber excellence, beating all the Russell Group universities'. 'I always want more, I always ask them for more and you know, if I can get more there, I will,' added Cllr Batrouni, with a note of caution that he could not 'sit here and promise' anything because the Covid-19 pandemic had 'decimated' higher education. USW was approached for comment.
Winnipeg Free Press
17 hours ago
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Historical society announces Top 10 endangered buildings
The Manitoba Historical Society is getting the word out about some of the province's most threatened historic buildings before they fall further into neglect. The society released its annual Top‑10 Endangered Structures list on Wednesday, a selection of provincial sites plagued by vacancy, decay or redevelopment pressures. Gail Perry, chair of the society's historic preservation committee, said the main goal of releasing the list is to educate Manitobans about the under-maintained buildings that are historically important. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS The Peck building at 33 Princess Street in Winnipeg is on the Manitoba Historical Society's annual list of the Top 10 endangered structures in Manitoba for 2025. The buildings are considered historically significant landmarks that face uncertain futures due to neglect, development pressures, or lack of awareness. 'An engaged community is always a better community,' said Perry. 'If people become aware and learn more about these structures, perhaps they will want to help preserve them so others can enjoy the stories that these structures tell.' Each structure in this year's edition represents a different building type that displays a different aspect of Manitoba architecture, Perry said, adding they tell stories about Manitoba's past, present, and future. The Peck Building, a six‑storey landmark on Princess Street in the Exchange District has been empty for years. Perry noted that is often the clearest sign a building's future is uncertain or in danger, as unoccupied structures miss out on day‑to‑day upkeep and become more susceptible to fire, trespassing, or simply being forgotten. Built in 1893 by architect Charles Wheeler, the Peck's first four floors exhibit Romanesque styling, complete with rounded arches, richly detailed brickwork, and decorative carved faces. Fourteen years later, John D. Atchison added two more storeys using similar materials and window alignment. St. Peter Dynevor Anglican Rectory, at 1147 Breezy Point Rd., in the RM of St. Andrews is listed as the No. 1 endangered building. Also included on the list are the Canadian National Railway turntable in Dauphin and the town hall in Hartney, southwest of Brandon. Bruce Evans, reeve of the RM of Grassland, where Hartney is located, said he is not surprised the town hall is featured. 'It's in a pretty bad state right now,' said Evans. 'The roof is suspect, and the other thing is that it was deemed to have asbestos in it.' Evans said the building hasn't been in use for several years and that there's been some chatter in the community about revamping it, but it's such a significant project that the municipality doesn't have the money for it. Last year, the society included Holy Trinity Anglican Church on Smith Street in downtown Winnipeg on the endangered list. It may have contributed to the decision by CentreVenture Development Corp. to invest in a feasibility study to revamp the iconic building. The church was built in 1883-84 without a foundation, a common practice at the time. It will cost in excess of $7 million to repair it. Wednesdays Sent weekly from the heart of Turtle Island, an exploration of Indigenous voices, perspectives and experiences. Perry said none of the buildings on this year's list faces immediate threat, but their long‑term survival depends on public attention today. She encouraged all Manitobans to pay more attention to the architecture around them and reach out to elected officials, heritage groups or simply spark conversations within their communities if they notice a potentially endangered building. 'Don't be afraid to stop and look around, and you'll appreciate what's there, because if you look a little bit closer, you'll see things that you didn't quite notice,' she said. The Winnipeg Architecture Foundation offers tours of the city's popular landmarks and structures, which are free of charge. More details on this year's Top‑10 list are available on the society's website.
Scientific American
a day ago
- Science
- Scientific American
The LIGO Lab Is Pushing the Boundaries of Gravitational-Wave Research
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Today we're leaving the podcast studio to take you on a field trip to the LIGO Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We're going to chat with Matthew Evans, MIT's MathWorks professor of physics, all about the hunt for gravitational waves. You'll notice that the sound quality isn't up to our usual standard, but that's because we were right there in the lab, surrounded by big, loud science machines. If you want to see all that cool stuff for yourself, head over to our YouTube channel for an extended video version of this episode. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Here's our conversation with Matt. Thanks so much for joining us. Matt Evans: Thank you for having me. Feltman: So a few years ago we heard a lot about gravitational waves all of a sudden—many of us had not heard of them before that. Evans: Mm-hmm. Feltman: Could you remind us what they are and what happened that was so exciting? Evans: Yeah, so I guess that was almost 10 years ago now, so ... Feltman: Well, that's wild. I don't want to think about that [laughs]. Evans: [Laughs]2016 was when the announcement was made; 2015 was the discovery. And that was the first time that we had detected gravitational waves, despite the fact that we'd been working for many years on the detectors. That was the moment when we were upgrading to the Advanced LIGO detectors, and our first detection of gravitational waves was back in 2015. Feltman: And what is a gravitational wave? Evans: What is a gravitational wave? Well, the, the, like, really concise answer is: it's a ripple in spacetime. And then one could ask, 'Why would we care about a ripple in spacetime? How can we even detect such a thing?' You don't think of your life as going around measuring spacetime. But it turns out that for us that just means th at things move around, and so our detectors are made with big mirrors, which are heavy masses, and when these gravitational waves pass by they move the mirrors in our detectors. So fundamentally, it's a wiggling of, of space, a wiggling of our detector, that we don't explain by anything else going on around. Feltman: And so what is LIGO? How did it make it possible for us to finally detect gravitational waves? Evans: So LIGO is an interferometer. It's based on a concept from, what, the 1800s of interferometry, where you can make a very sensitive measurement of the position of some object by using light waves, and the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors are basically gigantic interferometers. And what we're interfering, in our case, are two laser beams, and they look for a change in the position of the mirrors that are far away from a beam splitter—so far away in this case is two and a half miles, or four kilometers—and a passing gravitational wave will move our mirrors around, and we're looking for that motion. So we start out with a laser, which is at our corner building—it's sort of the, sort of central location of LIGO—and we send that laser down to two buildings that are far away; these are the end stations. They're each two and a half miles away from the corner, and they're L-shaped, like this vacuum system you see behind us. Those two laser beams return back to the central station, and the two laser beams are made of electromagnetic waves, and those waves interfere on a beam splitter when they meet on that mirror. This mirror reflects half of the light in this direction and half of the light in that direction. And depending on the relative phase, or relative timing, of these two waves, the light will either go that way or go this way. And we're just detecting the amount of light that comes out one side of our detector, and that's our interferometer allowing us to measure the distance, but that measurement is on the scale of the wavelength of light, so micron scale. Feltman: And so what are we in front of right now? Evans: Yeah, so this is a prototype here, here at MIT, where we test components before they go to the LIGO observatories, and this is like a little mini LIGO here. So we have a large chamber for putting our isolation systems and our mirrors; that's where we test out the first suspension systems. These tubes [are] where we propagate our laser beams. We have a smaller chamber down there, which you'll see is not very small, but it's for testing the smaller suspension systems where we hang mirrors. Our suspensions and isolation systems are all to keep our mirrors from moving by the ground shaking, essentially, 'cause we want them to be as still as possible so that when they do move we'll know that it's from a gravitational wave and not from a truck or the Red Line or whatever else. Feltman: Yeah, can you give us a sense of how sensitive these instruments need to be to avoid picking up noise and actually find gravitational-wave ripples in spacetime? Evans: Yeah, so the answer is mind-blowingly sensitive, and I'll try to put this in, in scale. So the LIGO detectors should be able to measure a motion of the, the mirrors that are four kilometers away from the central building on a scale of about 1,000th the size of a proton, so this is—10 -18 meters is roughly the, the scale here. And it's beyond microscopic; it's [a] subatomic level of measurement. The only way that we get away with that is [we're] measuring a large surface of the mirror and we're averaging over many, many atoms, and that's how we can measure the average position to a level that's much smaller than the atomic size. Feltman: And the MIT LIGO is not the only LIGO. Can you remind us why that is? Evans: Ah, yeah, so, so first, just to be super clear, this is a place where we prototype stuff ... Feltman: Right, yeah. Evans: We don't detect gravitational waves here. So the same sort of operation is at Caltech; there's the Caltech LIGO Lab. And it's where a lot of the engineering and administrative staff are. They also have a big research staff there. And again, the idea is to build up systems, which then get delivered to the observatories. There are two of those: one is in Washington State, and one is in Louisiana. Feltman: So speaking of prototypes, what has LIGO been up to since that big detection news 10 years ago? Evans: So the big detection happened after we had gotten—some of the things you see here are the prototypes that went in to make Advanced LIGO possible, and that's what made that first detection possible. Since then we've been working on—I think the highlight for MIT is quantum technologies, so we've been working on squeezed light sources. And the idea here is that if we modify the quantum state of our interferometer, we can lower the noise at the readout and detect gravitational waves from more distant sources. Feltman: Cool, and what would that allow us to do? Evans: The farther away you can detect a source, like a binary black hole system coalescing, the more of them you can see. And we have this feature that our detection rate goes with the volume of space we're sensitive to, so if we make the detectors twice as sensitive, they also see twice as far, which gives us eight times larger volume, and we get a lot more events to look at. So right now we're at roughly an event per week, whereas when we first started we were at one event, if you're lucky, in a year. Feltman: And so for, you know, the average person who's maybe interested in space but doesn't know a ton about gravitational waves, why is it important that we look for these events? Evans: So we are detecting, right now, binary systems, and these can be pairs of, of black holes, pairs of neutron stars or a mix-and-match black hole-neutron star system, so a mixed pair. And the interesting thing about these sources is that these are the remnants of big stars ... So large stars that have burned their fuel and collapsed make neutron stars and black holes. And we can detect individual sources from very far away, so 'high redshift' in astro-speak. And with future detectors we'll be able to get really to the edge of the known universe in terms of our ability to detect these sources. These are essentially the stellar graveyard—so the place where big stars go to die. And by detecting these sources, individual sources, we can actually learn about the stellar graveyard and in, in that way about the stars that exist and existed in the universe. Feltman: Very cool. So what's next for LIGO? Evans: So LIGO is working on the next upgrade. We upgrade these detectors regularly; it's really still a new technology—it's only 10 years since the first detection. And we work on making the detectors better as a matter of course. We're always trying to make them better. The next upgrade will be to put in better mirrors. Essentially, again, we're averaging over the surface, over the mirror, to make this measurement. We need a really good surface, and that comes down to the coatings we put on the mirrors, so we're putting in better mirrors with better coatings. That's the next thing. We'll be working on improving our squeezed light source to lower the quantum noise in the detector. So basically incremental improvements to the current detectors. We'll then be working on a relatively large upgrade on a timescale of five years from now and from there incremental upgrades, essentially, for the lifetime of those detectors. And that lifetime is really until we get a next-generation detector going. Feltman: Mm. Evans: And I'm wearing the shirt of Cosmic Explorer here, which is the—our idea for the next generation of detectors. Feltman: Yeah, tell me about Cosmic Explorer. What's gonna be different about those detectors? Evans: Well, over 10 years ago now—and this is in 2014—we realized that we were never gonna be clever enough to really do everything we wanted to do with the current facilities ... Feltman: Mm. Evans: And we were going to have to build bigger detectors at some point. And so over the last—a little more than a decade we've been developing the idea of what these new, bigger detectors would look like, and that's developing this thing called Cosmic Explorer. It's like a supersized LIGO—factor of 10 larger, so 25 miles [about 40 kilometers] on a side. Feltman: Wow. Evans: And as things go roughly a factor of 10 more sensitive. With these detectors we could detect events from throughout the universe. Feltman: Wow, and what's ... Evans: Yeah, wow [laughs]. Feltman: The timeline looking at [laughs]—looking like for that? Evans: At this particular moment in history it's hard to say. Feltman: Sure. Evans: I will go ahead and be optimistic, and I'll say early 2030s we could be building and mid- to late 2030s we could be detecting. And we hope that the LIGO detectors will still be operating and turning out great results into sort of 2040 ... Feltman: Yeah. Evans: So we'd have a, a good handoff to the new detectors as they come online in the late 2030s. Feltman: What's on your wish list for, you know, the kinds of science that might become possible with Cosmic Explorer? Evans: So once we're detecting sources out to high redshift—so we really get a sample of everything that's out there in the universe—we get to learn about how, you know, stars have evolved not just around us, the local universe, but even at the peak of star formation, so z of 2, and then farther out towards the beginnings of star formation, when the first stars were being formed. The heaviest of stars came from those times. So we really get to have a kind of cross section of the evolution of the universe going back in time. And in astronomy there's always this feature that the farther away you look, the farther back in time you're looking. Feltman: Yeah. Evans: So we get to look back towards the beginning of the universe, in some sense, with gravitational waves as we look at these sources that are farther and farther away. With Cosmic Explorer we'll have not just one or two but hundreds of thousands of sources from the distant universe. So it's a really exciting way to explore the universe as a whole by looking at this stellar graveyard. Feltman: And for you personally, you know, what questions really motivate you? Why are you so curious about this? Evans: So my history is instrument science. I've always worked with the lasers and the electronics and the mechanical systems; that's where my love of the thing began. And I see Cosmic Explorer as really an extension of our first attempt. The LIGO detectors are the first attempt—first successful attempt, at least to detect gravitational waves, and Cosmic Explorer is the natural [next] iteration of that, where we get to apply all the lessons we've learned from these detectors to make the next generation, which is a much better detector technologically and, and incorporates now decades' worth of, of learning in—on, on the instrument side ... Feltman: Yeah. Evans: And of course, I'm also excited about the astrophysics we do, but for me the first love of that is really the instrument side. So it's a natural extension of everything we've learned over the last decade. Feltman: Yeah, well, and speaking of, you know, the instrument side, the data, the astrophysics, one of the things that I remember most about that initial gravitational-wave detection were just how many people were involved in the paper tied to the announcement—I think there were more than 1,000 co-authors of, of that paper. How many people are, are working on LIGO, on average? Evans: So it's a very interesting question 'cause if you go to the, the number of people you saw on the author list of that first paper, that's the LIGO Scientific Collaboration ... Feltman: Right. Evans: And also Virgo, so the detector in, in Italy. And you get a, a large group of, of scientists—the whole community, essentially, of gravitational-wave scientists is really a global affair, and we're at something like 2,000 people now in that community, depending on how you draw the, the boundaries. The, the people working on the LIGO detector is a smaller group , maybe about 200 people, and many of those are at MIT or Caltech. So the next cut-down would be: 'How many people are actually at the observatories?' And there you get an even smaller number, maybe 50 at each observatory. Feltman: Mm. Evans: And then you say: 'Who's really, like, in the control room, turning the screws, making it better, doing the instrument science in the observatories?' Oftentimes those are graduate students and postdocs. Feltman: Yeah. Evans: So there you get to an even smaller number—five or 10. And of course, all the rest of the community is necessary for that work to be fruitful, but the number of people who are, are there actually with their hands on the machine is relatively small. And I, I point this out because often people think that the—you know, the graduate students will come in and say, 'What can I ever do that's impactful in such a large organization?' Feltman: Yeah. Evans: Well, the truth is that our students and our postdocs are very impactful, and, and they're the ones who are often the ones there, you know, really with their hands on the machine doing the work. Feltman: That's really cool. So obviously, it's really exciting to think about, you know, detecting more of the kinds of phenomena we've seen, seeing them farther out. Is there also any hope of detecting stuff we've never seen before? Evans: Yeah, so let me first say that I'm super excited about the stuff that we already know exists, and we can calculate rates for them, and for every binary black hole system we detect we find some interesting feature. And as we go from 100 detections to 100,000 detections there'll be really fun corner cases that we get to explore, so there will be new things even in our current population. Of course, we also would love to detect something that we've never seen before, but I have no idea how often they happen out in the universe, right? Maybe these are, you know, some strange kinds of supernova that admit copious gravitational waves or cosmic strings or any number of other things that we have not observed. I don't know what the rate will be, but they're very exciting sources, and we'd love to detect them. Feltman: So for folks who are like, 'I'm down here on Earth; what are these gravitational waves and their detection gonna do for me?' Evans: Mm-hmm. Feltman: Are there any exciting things that we might be able to learn from gravitational waves that'll have applications on Earth, besides just the awesome science we're figuring out? Evans: Yeah, so I'm, I'm sad to say we won't be making your cell phones better anytime soon, and I don't think that we'll be transmitting or receiving gravitational waves from your radio devices or using them for wireless or anything like that. However, first, I would say: learning about the universe is, in and of itself, for me, a great objective, and I think that's true for a lot of people ... Feltman: Sure, yeah. Evans: That learning about the universe is a, is a wonderful thing in its own right. However, we also do look at the, the spin-offs that could come from our technology. And we do work on high-precision lasers; we have helped companies develop higher-precision lasers that we then use, but they're used in other applications. Our squeezed light sources are sort of broadly applicable in quantum information and quantum computing. And so we see these spin-offs as interesting things, which are not our primary objective, but yeah, there are technological spin-offs that come from the development we do to make our detectors better. Feltman: Well, thank you so much for sitting down to chat with us and for showing us around. This has been really cool, and I'm really excited to, you know, see what happens when we can look back to the beginning of the universe. Evans: Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this really exciting science. Feltman: That's all for today's episode, but it doesn't have to be. We've posted an extended version over on our YouTube channel, so take a few minutes to go check that out. We'll be back on Friday with an episode I'm super excited to share with you. It's all about Dungeons and Dragons—and also science, I promise. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you on Friday!
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Kepler Capital Sticks to Their Buy Rating for Novartis AG (NOVN)
Kepler Capital analyst David Evans maintained a Buy rating on Novartis AG on July 14 and set a price target of CHF106.00. The company's shares closed yesterday at CHF96.06. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. According to TipRanks, Evans is a 2-star analyst with an average return of 0.1% and a 55.72% success rate. Evans covers the Healthcare sector, focusing on stocks such as Roche Holding AG, Novartis AG, and Novo Nordisk. Novartis AG has an analyst consensus of Moderate Buy, with a price target consensus of CHF102.20, a 6.39% upside from current levels. In a report released on July 4, Deutsche Bank also maintained a Buy rating on the stock with a CHF115.00 price target. Based on Novartis AG's latest earnings release for the quarter ending March 30, the company reported a quarterly revenue of CHF13.62 billion and a net profit of CHF3.61 billion. In comparison, last year the company earned a revenue of CHF12.12 billion and had a net profit of CHF2.69 billion
