Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain...
Astronomers have found evidence of buckyballs - carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls - in the nebula around a distant white dwarf star. The discovery marks the largest molecules known to exist in space. Normally found in chemistry labs, where they are made by vaporizing graphite in the presence of helium, buckyballs were long suspected to form inside stars. "As soon as they were discovered in the lab it was actually suggested they would be very good candidates to be found in space," astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, who led the new study, told SPACE.com. Elusive buckyballs Researchers had searched for buckyballs before in the gas and dust between and around stars, but the evidence was inconclusive. Cami and his colleagues identified buckyball molecules, known as C60 because they are made of 60 carbon atoms each. The buckyballs are abou...