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Science

Scientists Blown Away by the Toughest Material on Earth – “Unexpected Transformation”

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Microscopy-generated images showing the path of a fracture and accompanying crystal structure deformation in the CrCoNi alloy at nanometer scale during stress testing at 20 kelvin (-424 °F). The fracture is propagating from left to right. Credit: Robert Ritchie/Berkeley Lab

A new study reveals the profound properties of a simple metal

“In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number.” — Robert Ritchie

The team, led by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published a study describing their record-breaking findings in the journal Science on December 1, 2022.

“When you design structural materials, you want them to be strong but also ductile and resistant to fracture,” said project co-lead Easo George, the Governor’s Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development at ORNL and the University of Tennessee. “Typically, it’s a compromise between these properties. But this material is both, and instead of becoming brittle at low temperatures, it gets tougher.”

CrCoNi is a subset of a class of metals called high entropy alloys (HEAs). All the alloys in use today contain a high proportion of one element with lower amounts of additional elements added, but HEAs are made of an equal mix of each constituent element. These balanced atomic recipes appear to bestow some of these materials with an extraordinarily high combination of strength and ductility when stressed, which together make up what is termed “toughness.” HEAs have been a hot area of research since they were first developed about 20 years ago, but the technology required to push the materials to their limits in extreme tests was not available until recently.

“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 °

“We were able to visualize this unexpected transformation due to the development of fast electron detectors in our electron microscopes, which allow us to discern between different types of crystals and quantify the defects inside them at the resolution of a single nanometer – the width of just a few atoms – which as it turns out, is about the size of the defects in deformed NiCoCr structure.” — Andrew Minor

Using neutron diffraction, electron backscatter diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy, Ritchie, George, and their colleagues at Berkeley Lab, the

The CrMnFeCoNi alloy was also tested at 20 kelvin and performed impressively, but didn’t achieve the same toughness as the simpler CrCoNi alloy.

Forging new products

Now that the inner workings of the CrCoNi alloy are better understood, it and other HEAs are one step closer to adoption for special applications. Though these materials are expensive to create, George foresees uses in situations where environmental extremes could destroy standard metallic alloys, such as in the frigid temperatures of deep space. He and his team at Oak Ridge are also investigating how alloys made of more abundant and less expensive elements – there is a global shortage of cobalt and nickel due to their demand in the battery industry – could be coaxed into having similar properties.

Though the progress is exciting, Ritchie warns that real-world use could still be a ways off, for good reason. “When you are flying on an airplane, would you like to know that what saves you from falling 40,000 feet is an airframe alloy that was only developed a few months ago? Or would you want the materials to be mature and well understood? That’s why structural materials can take many years, even decades, to get into real use.”

Reference: “Exceptional fracture toughness of CrCoNi-based medium- and high-entropy alloys at 20 kelvin” by Dong Liu, Qin Yu, Saurabh Kabra, Ming Jiang, Paul Forna-Kreutzer, Ruopeng Zhang, Madelyn Payne, Flynn Walsh, Bernd Gludovatz, Mark Asta, Andrew M. Minor, Easo P. George and Robert O. Ritchie, 1 December 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abp8070

This research was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The low-temperature mechanical testing and neutron diffraction was performed at the ENGIN-X ISIS Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, led by first author Dong Liu. Microscopy was performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab. The other authors on this project were Qin Yu, Saurabh Kabra, Ming Jiang, Joachim-Paul Forna-Kreutzer, Ruopeng Zhang, Madelyn Payne, Flynn Walsh, Bernd Gludovatz, and Mark Asta.



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Science

This Alloy Is The Toughest Known Material on Earth, And It Gets Tougher in The Cold : ScienceAlert

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An alloy of chromium, cobalt, and nickel has just given us the highest fracture toughness ever measured in a material on Earth.

It has exceptionally high strength and ductility, leading to what a team of scientists has called “outstanding damage tolerance”.

Moreover – and counterintuitively – these properties increase as the material gets colder, suggesting some interesting potential for applications in extreme cryogenic environments.

“When you design structural materials, you want them to be strong but also ductile and resistant to fracture,” says metallurgist Easo George, Governor’s Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.

“Typically, it’s a compromise between these properties. But this material is both, and instead of becoming brittle at low temperatures, it gets tougher.”

Strength, ductility, and toughness are three properties that determine how durable a material is. Strength describes resistance to deformation. And ductility describes how malleable a material is. These two properties contribute to its overall toughness: the resistance to fracture. Fracture toughness is the resistance to further fracture in an already-fractured material.

George and fellow senior author, mechanical engineer Robert Richie of Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have spent some time working on a class of materials known as high-entropy alloys, or HEAs. Most alloys are dominated by one element, with small proportions of others mixed in. HEAs contain elements mixed in equal proportions.

One such alloy, CrMnFeCoNi (chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, and nickel), has been the subject of intense study after scientists noticed that its strength and ductility increase at liquid nitrogen temperature without compromising toughness.

One derivative of this alloy, CrCoNi (chromium, cobalt, and nickel), displayed even more exceptional properties. So George and Ritchie and their team cracked their knuckles and set about pushing it to its limits.

The grain and crystal lattice structures of CrMnFeCoNi and CrCoNi. (Robert Ritchie/Berkeley Lab)

The previous experiments on CrMnFeCoNi and CrCoNi had been conducted at liquid nitrogen temperatures, up to 77 Kelvin (-196°C, -321°F). The team pushed it even further, to liquid helium temperatures.

The results were beyond striking.

“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 Kelvin, [-253°C, -424°F]) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters,” Ritchie explains.

“In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number.”

To figure out how it works, the team used neutron diffraction, electron backscatter diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy to study CrCoNi down to the atomic level when fractured at room temperature and in extreme cold.

This involved cracking the material and measuring the stress required to cause the fracture to grow and then looking at the crystalline structure of the samples.

Atoms in metals are arranged in a repeating pattern in three-dimensional space. This pattern is known as the crystal lattice. The repeating components in the lattice are known as unit cells.

Sometimes boundaries are created between unit cells that are deformed and those that aren’t. These boundaries are called dislocations, and when force is applied to the metal, they move, allowing the metal to change shape. The more dislocations a metal has, the more malleable it is.

Scanning electron microscopy images of fractures in CrCoNi at 293 Kelvin (left) and 20 Kelvin (right). (Robert Ritchie/Berkeley Lab)

Irregularities in the metal can block the dislocations from moving; this is what makes a material strong. But if the dislocations are blocked, instead of deforming, a material can crack, so high strength can often mean high brittleness. In CrCoNi, the researchers identified a particular sequence of three dislocation blocks.

The first to occur is slip, which is when parallel parts of the crystal lattice slide away from each other. This causes the unit cells to no longer match up perpendicular to the slip direction.

Continued force produces nanotwinning, where crystal lattices form a mirrored arrangement on either side of a boundary. If yet more force is applied, that energy goes into rearranging the shape of the unit cells, from a cubic to a hexagonal crystal lattice.

“As you are pulling it, the first mechanism starts, and then the second one starts, and then the third one starts, and then the fourth,” Ritchie says.

“Now, a lot of people will say, well, we’ve seen nanotwinning in regular materials, we’ve seen slip in regular materials. That’s true. There’s nothing new about that, but it’s the fact they all occur in this magical sequence that gives us these really tremendous properties.”

The researchers also tested CrMnFeCoNi at liquid helium temperatures, but it did not perform nearly as well as its simpler derivative.

The next step will be to investigate the potential applications of such a material, as well as finding other HEAs with similar properties.

The research has been published in Science.

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Technology

Android Auto finally gets Material You design

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Last updated: November 29th, 2022 at 11:01 UTC+01:00

Finally, the Material You redesign is arriving to the Android Auto app. The new design settings are now live with the latest Android Auto beta v8.6. As per the Google News Telegram Channel, the new Android Auto Material You redesign isn’t widely available. Moreover, not many will be able to view the changes as the beta channel is currently full.

So, the first thing is that you need to be enrolled in the Android Auto beta program, and second, it seems like this feature is enabled via hidden flags or something rolling out from the server side.

You can see the big, scrollable headers and a round button for the ‘Connect A Car’ option. There are new toggles that are a part of Material Design 3, and it also features a new dark mode. You will also notice that the old header image is now gone, and the settings menu is now clean. Overall, the new design provides a more modern experience, similar to what other Google apps offer their users.

All the options are well organized and grouped together to make navigation much easier. While the Android Auto settings menu isn’t something that you will visit often, when you did, it looked old and dated. Thanks to the new changes, it looks much cleaner and fresh.

The changes were first reported in the Android Auto beta v8.5, but they are now fully functional in the v8.6 beta. This implies that it could arrive in the next stable update, but there isn’t any confirmation about the same. It is nice to see that Google, at last, paid attention to the Android Auto app, which had roughly the same design since 2020.

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Science

New discoveries made about a promising solar cell material, thanks to new microscope

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Visualization of the microscope tip exposing material to terahertz light. The colors on the material represent the light-scattering data, and the red and blue lines represent the terahertz waves. Credit: U. S. Department of Energy Ames National Lab

A team of scientists from the Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory has developed a new characterization tool that allowed them to gain unique insight into a possible alternative material for solar cells. Under the leadership of Jigang Wang, senior scientist from Ames Lab, the team developed a microscope that uses terahertz waves to collect data on material samples. The team then used their microscope to explore methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3) perovskite, a material that could potentially replace silicon in solar cells.

Richard Kim, a scientist from Ames Lab, explained the two features that make the new scanning probe microscope unique. First, the microscope uses the terahertz range of electromagnetic frequencies to collect data on materials. This range is far below the visible light spectrum, falling between the infrared and microwave frequencies. Secondly, the terahertz light is shined through a sharp metallic tip that enhances the microscope’s capabilities toward nanometer length scales.

“Normally if you have a light wave, you cannot see things smaller than the wavelength of the light you’re using. And for this terahertz light, the wavelength is about a millimeter, so it’s quite large,” explained Kim. “But here we used this sharp metallic tip with an apex that is sharpened to a 20-nanometer radius curvature, and this acts as our antenna to see things smaller than the wavelength that we were using.”

Using this new microscope, the team investigated a perovskite material, MAPbI3, that has recently become of interest to scientists as an alternative to silicon in solar cells. Perovskites are a special type of semiconductor that transports an electric charge when it is exposed to visible light. The main challenge to using MAPbI3 in solar cells is that it degrades easily when exposed to elements like heat and moisture.

According to Wang and Kim, the team expected MAPbI3 to behave like an insulator when they exposed it to the terahertz light. Since the data collected on a sample is a reading of how the light scatters when the material is exposed to the terahertz waves, they expected a consistent low-level of light-scatter throughout the material. What they found, however, was that there was a lot of variation in light scattering along the boundary between the grains.

Kim explained that conductive materials, like metals, would have a high level of light scattering, while less conductive materials like insulators would not have as much. The wide variation of light scattering detected along the grain boundaries in MAPbI3 sheds light on the material’s degradation problem.

Over the course of a week, the team continued to collect data on the material, and data collected in that time showed the degradation process through changes in the levels of light scatterings. This information can be useful for improving and manipulating the material in the future.

“We believe that the present study demonstrates a powerful microscopy tool to visualize, understand and potentially mitigate grain boundary degradation, defect traps, and materials degradation,” said Wang. “Better understanding of these issues may enable developing highly efficient perovskite-based photovoltaic devices for many years to come.”

The samples of MAPbI3 were provided by the University of Toledo. This research is further discussed in the paper “Terahertz Nanoimaging of Perovskite Solar Cell Materials,” written by Richard H. J. Kim, Zhaoyu Liu, Chuankun Huang, Joong-Mok Park, Samuel J. Haeuser, Zhaoning Song, Yanfa Yan, Yongxin Yao, Liang Luo, and Jigang Wang, and published in the ACS Photonics.

More information:
Richard H. J. Kim et al, Terahertz Nanoimaging of Perovskite Solar Cell Materials, ACS Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.2c00861

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New discoveries made about a promising solar cell material, thanks to new microscope (2022, November 15)
retrieved 16 November 2022
from https://phys.org/news/2022-11-discoveries-solar-cell-material-microscope.html

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Science

Scientists Astonished by Strange Material That Can Be Made Like Plastic but Conducts Like Metal

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A group of scientists at the University of Chicago has discovered a way to create a material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well. This goes against all of the rules we know about conductivity. Above is an artist’s conception of the lattice. Credit: Illustration by Frank Wegloski

‘Like conductive Play-Doh’: breakthrough could point way to a new class of materials for electronic devices.

The research shows how to make a kind of material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well. It was published on October 26 in the journal Nature.

This goes against all of the rules we know about conductivity—to a scientist, it’s kind of like seeing a car driving on water and still going 70 mph. But the finding could also prove to be extraordinarily useful. Often, on the way to inventing something revolutionary, the process first starts with discovering a completely new material.

“In principle, this opens up the design of a whole new class of materials that conduct electricity, are easy to shape, and are very robust in everyday conditions,” said John Anderson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and the senior author on the study. “Essentially, it suggests new possibilities for an extremely important technological group of materials,” said Jiaze Xie (PhD’22, now at Princeton), the first author on the paper.

‘There isn’t a solid theory to explain this’

If you’re making any kind of electronic device, whether it be an iPhone, a solar panel, or a television, conductive materials are absolutely essential. Metals, such as copper, gold, and aluminum, are by far the oldest and largest group of conductors. Then, about 50 years ago, scientists were able to create conductors made out of organic materials, using a chemical treatment known as “doping,” which sprinkles in different atoms or “impurities” throughout the material. The fact that these materials are more flexible and easier to work with than conventional metals makes them attractive, but the problem is that they aren’t particularly stable and may lose their conductivity if exposed to moisture or if the temperature rises too high.

However, fundamentally, both organic and traditional metallic conductors share a common characteristic. They are made up of straight, closely packed rows of atoms or molecules. This means that electrons can easily flow through the material, much like cars on a highway. In fact, scientists thought a material had to have these straight, orderly rows in order to conduct electricity efficiently.

Illustration of the structure of the material. Nickel atoms are shown in green, carbon atoms in gray, and sulfur atoms in yellow. Credit: Illustration by Xie et al

Then Xie began experimenting with some materials that were discovered years ago, but largely ignored since. He strung nickel atoms like pearls into a string of molecular beads made of carbon and sulfur, and began testing.

To the scientists’ astonishment, the material easily and strongly conducted electricity. What’s more, it was very stable. “We heated it, chilled it, exposed it to air and humidity, and even dripped

To the scientists’ astonishment, the material easily and strongly conducted electricity.

The scientists are excited because the discovery suggests a fundamentally new design principle for electronics technology. Conductors are so important that virtually any new development opens up new lines for technology, they explained.

One of the material’s attractive characteristics is new options for processing. For example, metals usually have to be melted in order to be made into the right shape for a chip or device, which limits what you can make with them, since other components of the device have to be able to withstand the heat needed to process these materials.

A group of scientists from the University of Chicago has discovered a way to create a material that can be made like a plastic, but conducts electricity more like a metal. Above, members of the Anderson lab at work. Credit: Photo by John Zich/University of Chicago

The new material has no such restriction because it can be made at room temperature. It can also be used where the need for a device or pieces of the device to withstand heat, acid or alkalinity, or humidity has previously limited engineers’ options to develop new technology.

The team is also exploring the different forms and functions the material might make. “We think we can make it 2D or 3D, make it porous, or even introduce other functions by adding different linkers or nodes,” said Xie.

Reference: “Intrinsic glassy-metallic transport in an amorphous coordination polymer” by Jiaze Xie, Simon Ewing, Jan-Niklas Boyn, Alexander S. Filatov, Baorui Cheng, Tengzhou Ma, Garrett L. Grocke, Norman Zhao, Ram Itani, Xiaotong Sun, Himchan Cho, Zhihengyu Chen, Karena W. Chapman, Shrayesh N. Patel, Dmitri V. Talapin, Jiwoong Park, David A. Mazziotti and John S. Anderson, 26 October 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05261-4

Other authors on the paper include University of Chicago graduate students Norman Zhao, Garrett Grocke, Ram Itani, Baorui Cheng, Tengzhou Ma (PhD’21, now at Applied Materials), Simon Ewing (PhD’22, now at Intel) and Jan-Niklas Boyn (PhD’22, now at Princeton); postdoctoral researcher Xiaotong Sun; UChicago Director of X-ray Research Facilities Alexander S. Filatov; Himchan Cho (formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, now at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology); UChicago Profs. Shrayesh N. Patel, Dmitri V. Talapin, Jiwoong Park, and David A. Mazziotti; and Zhihengyu Chen and Prof. Karena Chapman of Stonybrook University.

Funding: Army Research Office, a directorate of U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory; U.S. Department of Energy; National Science Foundation.



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Health

Scientists create a self-repairing material from a tiny but mighty natural force

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With just an incubator and some broth, researchers can grow reusable filters made of bacteria to clean up polluted water, detect chemicals in the environment, and protect surfaces from rust and mold.

I am a synthetic biologist who studies engineered living materials — substances made from living cells that have a variety of functions. In my recently published research, I programmed bacteria to form living materials that can not only be modified for different applications but are also quick and easy to produce.

From living cells to usable materials

Like human cells, bacteria contain DNA that provides the instructions to build proteins. Bacterial DNA can be modified to instruct the cell to build new proteins, including ones that don’t exist in nature. Researchers can even control exactly where these proteins will be located within the cell.

Because engineered living materials are made of living cells, they can be genetically engineered to perform a broad variety of functions, almost like programming a cellphone with different apps. For example, researchers can turn bacteria into sensors for environmental pollutants by modifying them to change color in the presence of certain molecules. Researchers have also used bacteria to create limestone particles, the chemical used to make Styrofoam and living photovoltaics, among others.

Living organisms can be used to “grow” materials to make clothes and furniture.

A primary challenge for engineered living materials has been figuring out how to induce them to produce a matrix, or substances surrounding the cell, that allows researchers to control the physical properties of the final material, such as its viscosity, elasticity, and stiffness. To address this, my team and I created a system to encode this matrix in the bacteria’s DNA.

We modified the DNA of the bacteria Caulobacter crescentus so that the bacterial cells would produce on their surfaces a matrix made of large amounts of elastic proteins. These elastic proteins have the ability to bind to each other and form hydrogels, a type of material that can retain large amounts of water.

When two genetically modified bacterial cells come in close proximity, these proteins come together and keep the cells attached to each other. By surrounding each cell with this sticky, elastic material, bacterial cells will cluster together to form a living slime.

Furthermore, we can modify the elastic proteins to change the properties of the final material. For example, we could turn bacteria into hard construction materials that have the ability to self-repair in the event of damage. Alternatively, we could turn bacteria into soft materials that could be used as fillers in products.

The living material advantage

Usually, creating multifunctional materials is extremely difficult, due in part to very expensive processing costs. Like a tree growing from a seed, living materials, on the other hand, grow from cells that have minimal nutrient and energy requirements. Their biodegradability and minimal production requirements allow for sustainable and economical production.

The technology to make living materials is unsophisticated and cheap. It only takes a shaking incubator, proteins, and sugars to grow a multifunctional, high-performing material from bacteria. The incubator is just a metal or plastic box that keeps the temperature at about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius), which is much lower than a conventional home oven, and shakes the cells at speeds slower than a blender.

Transforming bacteria into living materials is also a quick process. My team and I were able to grow our bacterial living materials in about 24 hours. This is pretty fast compared to the manufacturing process of other materials, including living materials like wood, which can take years to produce.

As shown in this video of Caulobacter crescentus colonizing a surface, bacteria multiply very quickly and very easily.

Moreover, our living bacterial slime is easy to transport and store. It can survive in a jar at room temperature for up to three weeks and be placed back into a fresh medium to regrow. This could lower the cost of future technology based on these materials.

Lastly, engineered living materials are an environmentally friendly technology. Because they are made of living cells, they are biocompatible, nontoxic, biodegradable, or naturally decomposable.

Next steps — There are still some aspects of our bacterial living material that need to be clarified. For example, we don’t know exactly how the proteins on the bacterial cell surface interact with each other, or how strongly they bind to each other. We also don’t know exactly how many protein molecules are required to keep cells together.

Answering these questions will enable us to further customize living materials with desired qualities for different functions.

Next, I’m planning to explore growing different types of bacteria as living materials to expand the applications they can be used for. Some types of bacteria are better than others for different purposes. For example, some bacteria survive best in specific environments, such as the human body, soil, or fresh water. Some, on the other hand, can adapt to different external conditions, like varying temperatures, acidity, and salinity.

By having many types of bacteria to choose from, researchers can further customize the materials they can create.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Sara Molinari at Rice University. Read the original article here.

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Business

Bank of England intervenes in bond markets again, warns of ‘material risk’ to UK financial stability

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The Bank of England raised rates by 0.5 percentage points Thursday.

Vuk Valcic | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

LONDON — The Bank of England on Tuesday announced an expansion of its emergency bond-buying operation as it looks to restore order to the country’s chaotic bond market.

The central bank said it will widen its purchases of U.K. government bonds — known as gilts — to include index-linked gilts from Oct. 11 until Oct. 14. Index-linked gilts are bonds where payouts to bondholders are benchmarked in line with the U.K. retail price index.

The move marks the second expansion of the Bank’s extraordinary rescue package in as many days, after it increased the limit for its daily gilt purchases on Monday ahead of the planned end of the purchase scheme on Friday.

The Bank launched its emergency intervention on Sep. 28 after an unprecedented sell-off in long-dated U.K. government bonds threatened to collapse multiple liability driven investment (LDI) funds, widely held by U.K. pension schemes.

“The beginning of this week has seen a further significant repricing of UK government debt, particularly index-linked gilts. Dysfunction in this market, and the prospect of self-reinforcing ‘fire sale’ dynamics pose a material risk to UK financial stability,” the bank said in a statement Tuesday.

U.K. 10-year index-linked gilt yields rose by 64 basis points on Monday, representing a massive 5.5% fall in price. Meanwhile 30-year index-linked gilt prices were down 16% on the day, with yields now at around 1.5%, having been at -1.5% just six months ago. Yields move inversely to prices.

Moves of this magnitude are highly unusual in developed world sovereign bond markets.

“These additional operations will act as a further backstop to restore orderly market conditions by temporarily absorbing selling of index-linked gilts in excess of market intermediation capacity,” the Bank said Tuesday.

“As with the conventional gilt purchase operations, these additional index-linked gilt purchases will be time-limited and fully indemnified by HM Treasury.”

On Monday, the Bank set the upper limit of its daily gilt purchases at £10 billion ($11 billion), of which up to £5 billion will be allocated to conventional gilts and £5 billion to index-linked gilts.

The size of auctions will remain under review, the Bank said, and all purchases will be “unwound in a smooth and orderly fashion once risks to market functioning are judged to have subsided.”

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US

Justice Dept. appeals judge’s rulings on classified material in Mar-a-Lago case

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The Justice Department asked a federal appeals court Friday night to override parts of a judge’s order appointing a special master to review documents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and club, arguing that some of the terms hamper a critical national security investigation.

The appeals court filing comes a day after U.S. District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon appointed another federal judge, Raymond J. Dearie, to serve as special master and review the almost 11,000 documents seized in the FBI’s Aug. 8 search.

The new filing from the Justice Department notes that it disagrees with that decision but for the time being is asking the appeals court to intercede on two parts of Cannon’s ruling — one barring criminal investigators from using the seized material while the special master does his work, and another allowing the special master to review the roughly 100 classified documents seized as well as the nonclassified material.

The government filing asks for a stay of “only the portions of the order causing the most serious and immediate harm to the government and the public,” calling the scope of their request “modest but critically important.”

It’s unclear how long the special master review, or the appeals, might take, but the new filing asks the appeals court to rule on their request for a stay “as soon as practicable.”

Cannon ordered Dearie to complete his review by Nov. 30. She said he should prioritize sorting through the classified documents, though she did not provide a timeline as to when that portion must be completed.

The Justice Department had asked in a previous court filing for the review to be completed by Oct. 17. And Trump’s lawyers had said a special master would need 90 days to complete a review.

Dearie, 78, was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan (R) after serving as a U.S. attorney. Fellow lawyers and colleagues in Brooklyn federal court describe him as an exemplary jurist who is well suited to the job of special master, having previously served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees sensitive national security cases.

The appeals court filing also argues that the very premise of Cannon’s order, as it relates to the classified material, makes little sense because classified documents are by definition the property of the government, not a former president or a private club.

Trump “has no claim for the return of those records, which belong to the government and were seized in a court-authorized search. The records are not subject to any possible claim of personal attorney-client privilege,” prosecutors wrote, adding that Trump has cited no legal authority “suggesting that a former President could successfully invoke executive privilege to prevent the Executive Branch from reviewing its own records.”

The Justice Department contends that Cannon’s instruction for intelligence officials to continue their risk assessment of the Mar-a-Lago case, while criminal investigators could not use that same material in their work, is highly impractical because the two tasks are “inextricably intertwined.”

That order “hamstrings that investigation and places the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) under a Damoclean threat of contempt should the court later disagree with how investigators disaggregated their previously integrated criminal-investigative and national-security activities,” the filing argues. “It also irreparably harms the government by enjoining critical steps of an ongoing criminal investigation and needlessly compelling disclosure of highly sensitive records, including to” Trump’s lawyers.

Prosecutors have also said the judge’s restriction on further investigation prevents them from determining if any other classified documents remain to be found — a potential ongoing national security risk — and the appeals filing says it also makes it harder for the FBI to determine if anyone accessed the documents they did recover.

“The court’s injunction restricts the FBI … from using the seized records in its criminal-investigative tools to assess which, if any, records were in fact disclosed, to whom, and in what circumstances,” the new filing says.

Similar arguments did not sway Cannon, who repeatedly expressed skepticism about the Justice Department claims, even on the question of whether the roughly 100 documents at the core of the case were classified. In her ruling Thursday, she rejected the argument that her decision will cause serious harm to the national security investigation. Evenhanded application of legal rules “does not demand unquestioning trust in the determinations of the Department of Justice,” the judge wrote.

Cannon, a Trump appointee confirmed by the U.S. Senate just days after Trump lost his bid for reelection, added that she still “firmly” believes that the appointment of a special master, and a temporary injunction against the Justice Department using the documents, is in keeping “with the need to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under unprecedented circumstances.”

The Justice Department is investigating Trump and his advisers for possible mishandling of classified information, as well as hiding or destroying government records — a saga that began last year when the National Archives and Records Administration became concerned that some items and documents that were presidential records, and therefore government property, were instead in Trump’s possession at his Florida club.

After months of discussions, Trump aides turned over about 15 boxes of material to the archives, and a review of those boxes turned up what officials say were 184 documents with classification markings, including some that were top secret.

After the FBI and Justice Department opened a criminal investigation, a subpoena was sent in May seeking the return of all documents marked classified. In response, a lawyer for Trump turned over 38 additional classified documents, and another Trump aide signed a document claiming they had conducted a diligent search for any remaining sensitive documents, prosecutors said.

“The FBI uncovered evidence that the response to the grand-jury subpoena was incomplete, that classified documents likely remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that efforts had likely been undertaken to obstruct the investigation,” the filing says in describing the decision to get a court order to search Mar-a-Lago.

That search, officials said, turned up roughly 100 more classified documents, including some that were at the highest level of classification.

Two weeks after that search, Trump’s lawyers filed court papers seeking the appointment of a special master to review the seized material and hold aside any documents covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.

Executive privilege is a loosely defined legal concept meant to safeguard the privacy of presidential communications from other branches of government, but in this case Trump’s legal team has suggested the former president can invoke it against the current executive branch.

The government’s appeals argument also tries to demolish the suggestion that Trump may have declassified the material while he was president, noting that his legal team has never claimed he did so at any point in the long months of negotiating the return of the documents, and since the raid has only suggested he might have or could have declassified them.

In buying that reasoning, Judge Cannon “erred in granting extraordinary relief based on unsubstantiated possibilities,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote.

Judge appoints fellow judge Dearie as special master in Trump Mar-a-Lago case

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US

Material on foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities seized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago

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A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

But such documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, with uncertain security, more than 18 months after Trump left the White House.

Deep inside busy Mar-a-Lago, a storage room where secrets were kept

After months of trying, according to government court filings, the FBI has recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago this year: 184 in a set of 15 boxes sent to the National Archives and Records Administration in January, 38 more handed over by a Trump lawyer to investigators in June, and more than 100 additional documents unearthed in a court-approved search on Aug. 8.

It was in this last batch of government secrets, the people familiar with the matter said, that the information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness was found. These people did not identify the foreign government in question, say where at Mar-a-Lago the document was found or offer additional details about one of the Justice Department’s most sensitive national security investigations.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately comment. Spokespeople for the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is conducting a risk assessment, to determine how much potential harm was posed by the removal from government custody of hundreds of classified documents.

Trump and the Mar-a-Lago documents: A timeline

The Washington Post previously reported that FBI agents who searched Trump’s home were looking, in part, for any classified documents relating to nuclear weapons. After that story published, Trump compared it on social media to a host of previous government investigations into his conduct. “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more. Same sleazy people involved,” he wrote, going on to suggest that FBI agents might have planted evidence against him.

A grand jury subpoena issued May 11 demanded the return of “all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings,” including “Top Secret,” and the lesser categories of “Secret” and “Confidential.”

The subpoena, issued to Trump’s custodian of records, then listed more than two dozen sub-classifications of documents, including “S/FRD,” an acronym for “Formerly Restricted Data,” which is reserved for information that relates primarily to the military use of nuclear weapons. Despite the “formerly” in the title, the term does not mean the information is no longer classified.

One person familiar with the Mar-a-Lago search said the goal of the comprehensive list was to ensure recovery of all classified records on the property, and not just those that investigators had reason to believe might be there.

Investigators grew alarmed, according to one person familiar with the search, as they began to review documents retrieved from the club’s storage closet, Trump’s residence and his office in August. The team soon came upon records that are extremely restricted, so much so that even some of the senior-most national security officials in the Biden administration weren’t authorized to review them. One government filing alluded to this information when it noted that counterintelligence FBI agents and prosecutors investigating the Mar-a-Lago documents were not authorized at first to review some of the material seized.

FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search followed months of resistance, delay by Trump

Among the 100-plus classified documents taken in August, some were marked “HCS,” a category of highly classified government information that refers to “HUMINT Control Systems,” which are systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources, according to a court filing. A partially unsealed affidavit said documents found in the boxes that were sent to the National Archives in January related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. There was also material that was never meant to be shared with foreign nations.

The investigation into possible mishandling of classified information, as well as possible hiding, tampering or destruction of government records, grew even more complex Monday when a federal judge in Florida granted Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the material seized in the Aug. 8 search and weed out documents that may be covered by executive privilege — a legal standard that, as applied to former presidents, is poorly defined.

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen M. Cannon ruled the special master also will sift through all of the nearly 13,000 documents and items the FBI took to identify any that might be protected by attorney-client privilege, even though Justice Department lawyers have said a “filter” team has already completed that task.

Cannon’s ruling could slow down and complicate the government’s criminal probe, particularly if the Justice Department decides to appeal over the unsettled and tricky questions of what executive privilege a former president may have. The judge ruled that investigators cannot “use” the seized material in their investigation until the special master concludes his or her examination.

A special master has yet to be appointed; Cannon has asked Trump and the Justice Department to agree on a list of qualified candidates by Friday. Legal experts noted that the Justice Department can still interview witnesses, use other evidence and present information to a grand jury while the special master examines the seized material.

In her order, Cannon said the appointment of a special master was necessary “to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances presented.”

Justice Dept. filing points to new legal peril for Trump, his lawyers

She also reasoned that a special master could mitigate potential harm to Trump “by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public,” suggesting that knowledge or details of the case were harmful to the former president, and could be lessened by inserting a special master into the document-review process.

“As a function of Plaintiff’s former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own,” Cannon wrote. “A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude.”

While the FBI search has drawn strong condemnation from Trump and his Republican allies, who accuse the Justice Department of acting with political malice against a past president who may seek the office again in 2024, some Republicans have said the action might have been necessary.

In an interview that aired Friday, former Trump attorney general William P. Barr said there is no reason classified documents should have been at Mar-a-Lago after Trump was out of office.

“People say this was unprecedented,” Barr told Fox News. “But it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?”

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Sports

Skull Session: Marcus Freeman Gains Bulletin Board Material, Eddie George Won’t Let His Son Play for Michigan and Tyler Friday is a Great Leader

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Four days. That’s it. That’s the introduction.

Before we dive into the good stuff, look at these cleats:

 BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL. There’s an old sports saying, “Good teams win. Great teams cover.” That means Ohio State will need to be 18 points better than Notre Dame on Sept. 3 to be considered great, as week-of odds are set at 17.5 points in favor of the Buckeyes.

Now I’ll offer some pushback to that adage. The Buckeyes don’t need to beat the Irish by 18 points to be called one of the best teams in college football. Simply adding a number in the win column should suffice. This is a top-five matchup in the season opener at Ohio Stadium – the first of its kind for the Buckeyes.

However, there’s also been a lot of noise surrounding this matchup all offseason, which would make a big win over Notre Dame even more significant for Ohio State.

From Marcus Freeman insinuating in The Players Tribune that he’d chosen the wrong school when he played college ball for Ohio State, to his critical comments about his alma mater’s academic standards (which he later claimed was a misquote), Buckeye fans would love to see their team cover the spread.

As more fuel for an Ohio State supporter’s fire, Freeman added another storyline in a press conference on Monday when a reporter told him several oddsmakers set the point spread favoring the Buckeyes in the matchup. Freeman’s response?

“I didn’t know that,” he said. “I’m gonna write that down. You said 17.5 points, right? We’ll use that in a team meeting today. That’s good to know.”

 EDDIE’S A BUCKEYE FOR LIFE. Eddie George’s Ohio State roots still run deep, and so does his hatred for Michigan. The Heisman Trophy winner and current Tennessee State head coach reminded Buckeye fans of that fact over the weekend when he discussed his son Eriq’s future in college football.

Eriq is a defensive lineman in the class of 2023 from Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. He has offers from Tennessee State, Eastern Kentucky, Marshall and UT Martin, among others. He’ll likely receive more during and after his senior season of high school ball.

However, Eddie said he doesn’t want Eriq to play for two schools at the next level. He wouldn’t want Tennesee State’s rival Jackson State to show interest, and – as you can imagine – he won’t let his son accept any calls from the Wolverines should they come knocking.

“He can’t go to Jackson State,” Eddie told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger after his son’s game in Nashville. “He’s not going there or to that team up north. But I tell him to see all that’s out there and ultimately to trust your intuition, trust your gut.”

Eddie understands that his recruiting pitches to his son must always be part Buckeye, part coach and most importantly, part Dad.

“This is his deal, his process, his career,” Eddie George said. “He knows what I’m doing (at Tennessee State). He’s around me every day, and he knows how he’s going to get coached (if he chooses TSU). I tell him to go and see what’s out there. Go where your heart’s desire is.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine Eddie George being all that excited about his son ever wearing maize and blue with a winged helmet in Ann Arbor. That would make Thanksgiving and the following days after that a little awkward.

 O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! There will come a time when Ohio State runs out of these kinds of videos to post for its captains. According to my calculations, the Twitter account has covered Cade Stover, C.J. Stroud, Kourt Williams and now Tyler Friday, leaving Tommy Eichenberg and Kam Babb as the final Buckeye captains without a video.

As has become custom for the Skull Sessions, when those videos are posted, you’ll know where to find them, and that’s right here.

Friday’s video features the fifth-year defensive lineman and his position coach Larry Johnson telling Friday’s parents that he had been named a team captain for the 2022 season. As was the case with the parents in the previous clips, Friday’s mother and father were overwhelmed with excitement for their son.

Johnson said during preseason camp that Friday has been a fantastic leader in the program since he arrived on campus in 2018. Johnson also said Friday was on track to become a captain last year before he suffered a season-ending ACL tear in summer workouts.

“We thought Tyler had great leadership skills before he got hurt. I mean, he was really emerging as a leader. I think he turned the table when he got hurt and how hard he worked in the rehab to get back to where he was.” Johnson said on Aug. 16. “If you saw him every morning, every day grinding to get himself back. That was impressive to a lot of kids. It set the bar for who he was as a young man. I think that’s why his teammates voted him captain.”

 OLYMPIC VILLAGE. Former Ohio State men’s tennis star JJ Wolf secured the first upset of the 2022 US Open in New York City when he defeated No. 16 Roberto Bautista Agut in straight sets (6-4, 6-4, 6-4) to advance to the second round of the event.

Wolf collected 14 aces during the match and used his powerful serve to gain momentum against Agut, a Spanish national with 11 ATP Tour titles and a victory over 21-time Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic in his career.

After Wolf’s win, the former Buckeye leaped and threw his fist in the air to celebrate – something he made a tradition during his playing days in Columbus.

At Ohio State, Wolf was a three-time first-team All-Big Ten honoree. He capped his Buckeye career with a Big Ten Player of the Year award and All-American recognition with a singles record of 35-2 and an 11-0 mark in conference play in his junior season. Wolf turned professional after that season.

As of Aug. 29, Wolf was the No. 87 player on the ATP Tour with a 7-7 record in 2022, and his career record of 9-13 has earned him $678,060 in prize money from singles and doubles tournaments in the professional ranks.

 SONG OF THE DAY. “Free” by Zac Brown Band.

 CUT TO THE CHASE. Tea drinkers enjoy possible health benefits… Princess Diana’s car auctioned for $851,000 days before her death anniversary… NASA’s moon rocket delayed after engine problems surface… A goat ate this police officer’s paperwork… National Cinema Day could bring $3 movie tickets to your local theater this weekend.



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