- Ukraine war latest: Zelensky says military coming up with plans to ‘move forward faster’ and strike Russia ‘unexpectedly’ Yahoo News
- Russia-Ukraine war: European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen meets Zelensky | WION Pulse WION
- Tensions grow in Kyiv over status of war, as Zelensky insists conflict with Russia is not at a ‘stalemate’ CNN
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Tag Archives: unexpectedly
Zelenskyy says Ukraine plans to strike Russia ‘unexpectedly’ – Business Insider
- Zelenskyy says Ukraine plans to strike Russia ‘unexpectedly’ Business Insider
- Tensions grow in Kyiv over status of war, as Zelensky insists conflict with Russia is not at a ‘stalemate’ CNN
- Russia-Ukraine war: European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen meets Zelensky | WION Pulse WION
- Ukraine war latest: Zelensky says military coming up with plans to ‘move forward faster’ and strike Russia ‘unexpectedly’ Yahoo News
- Zelenskiy denies Ukrainian general’s claim war is at stalemate The Guardian
- View Full Coverage on Google News
German economy unexpectedly shrinks in Q4, reviving spectre of recession
BERLIN, Jan 30 (Reuters) – The German economy unexpectedly shrank in the fourth quarter, data showed on Monday, a sign that Europe’s largest economy may be entering a much-predicted recession, though likely a shallower one than originally feared.
Gross domestic product decreased 0.2% quarter on quarter in adjusted terms, the federal statistics office said. A Reuters poll of analysts had forecast the economy would stagnate.
In the previous quarter, the German economy grew by an upwardly revised 0.5% versus the previous three months.
A recession – commonly defined as two successive quarters of contraction – has become more likely, as many experts predict the economy will shrink in the first quarter of 2023 as well.
“The winter months are turning out to be difficult – although not quite as difficult as originally expected,” said VP Bank chief economist Thomas Gitzel.
“The severe crash of the German economy remains absent, but a slight recession is still on the cards.”
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said last week in the government’s annual economic report that the economic crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine was now manageable, though high energy prices and interest rate rises mean the government remains cautious.
The government has said the economic situation should improve from spring onwards, and last week revised up its GDP forecast for 2023 — predicting growth of 0.2%, up from an autumn forecast of a 0.4% decline.
As far as the European Central Bank goes, interest rate expectations are unlikely to be affected by Monday’s GDP figures as inflationary pressures remain high, said Helaba bank economist Ralf Umlauf.
The ECB has all but committed to raising its key rate by half a percentage point this week to 2.5% to curb inflation.
Monday’s figures showed falling private consumption was the primary reason for the decrease in fourth-quarter GDP.
“Consumers are not immune to an erosion of their purchasing power due to record high inflation,” said Commerzbank chief economist Joerg Kraemer.
Inflation, driven mainly by high energy prices, eased for a second month in a row in December, with EU-harmonized consumer prices rising 9.6% on the year.
However, analysts polled by Reuters predict annual EU-harmonized inflation will enter the double digits again in January with a slight rise, to 10.0%. The office will publish the preliminary inflation rate for January on Tuesday.
Reporting by Miranda Murray and Rene Wagner, editing by Rachel More and Christina Fincher
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Coyotes Unexpectedly Killed a Human in 2009. Scientists Now Know Why
In 2009, Taylor Mitchell was attacked by a pack of coyotes while hiking at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada. The 19-year-old folk singer was just about to start the popular Skyline Trail when climbers in the area saw the animals close in, unprovoked. Onlookers called 911, and Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, but 12 hours later, she died from her injuries.
This marked the very first documentation of a coyote attack in North America that resulted in a human adult fatality (in 1981, 3-year-old Kelly Keene was killed by a coyote on her family’s property), raising questions about whether it’s no longer safe to co-exist with these furry mammals.
“We didn’t have good answers,” Stan Gehrt, a professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and leader of the Urban Coyote Research Project, said in a statement.
But after conducting a multi-year investigation into the incident, Gehrt appears to have offered some insight into the situation at last.
According to a paper published last month in the Journal of Applied Ecology, he along with a crew of wildlife researchers found that coyotes in the region of Mitchell’s attack have adopted an unusual dietary change. Rather than rely on smaller mammals like rodents, birds and snakes for food, they seem to be hunting moose for their meals due to extreme climate conditions forcing the former to move away.
As such, the team believes it’s possible these coyotes learned to attack larger mammals, like humans, and are therefore more prone to killing people.
“We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,” Gehrt said. “And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.”
Stan Gehrt with a captured coyote being tagged and fitted with a tracking device.
Stan Gehrt
Coyote forensics
Before and after the 2009 tragedy, Gehrt’s project noticed a few dozen less-severe human-coyote incidents in the park as well. He and colleagues even fitted them with what are basically GPS trackers so they could document the animals’ movements and better understand why they were behaving in such surprisingly vicious ways.
“We had been telling communities and cities that the relative risk that coyotes pose is pretty low, and even when you do have a conflict where a person is bitten, it’s pretty minor,” he said. “The fatality was tragic and completely off the charts. I was shocked by it — just absolutely shocked.”
To arrive at their conclusions — that coyotes in Cape Breton National Park were feasting on large moose – the team first collected whiskers of both the coyotes implicated in Mitchell’s death and those related to other more minor incidents between 2011 and 2013. They then collected fur from a wide range of potential coyote prey such as shrews, southern red-backed voles, snowshoe hare, moose and even humans — for humans, they gathered hair from local barber shops.
Seth Newsome, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and corresponding author of the study, performed an analysis of specific carbon and nitrogen isotopes within all the samples.
Eventually, Newsome confirmed that, on average, moose constituted between half and two-thirds of the animals’ diets, followed by snowshoe hare, small mammals and deer, according to the press release. Plus, the researchers analyzed coyote droppings, which confirmed the isotope findings further.
Here’s what it looks like to put on one of the GPS collar types, as done in this study.
Urban Coyote Research Project
Interestingly, they also only found a few examples of individuals having eaten human food, debunking any claims that coyotes’ attraction to human food might’ve been a factor in Mitchell’s attack.
“These coyotes are doing what coyotes do, which is, when their first or second choice of prey isn’t available, they’re going to explore and experiment and change their search range,” Gehrt said. “They’re adaptable, and that is the key to their success.”
From those movement devices, the team tested to see whether coyotes in the park were just familiar with people. However, patterns showed that the animals largely avoided areas of the park frequented by people. Instead, they preferred walking around at night.
“The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,” Gehrt said. Or as the paper puts it, “our results suggest extreme unprovoked predatory attacks by coyotes on people are likely to be quite rare and associated with unique ecological characteristics.”
Coyotes Unexpectedly Attacked a Human in 2009. Scientists Now Know Why
In 2009, 19-year-old folk singer Taylor Mitchell was attacked by a pack of coyotes while hiking at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada. She was just about to start the popular Skyline Trail when climbers in the area saw the animals close in, unprovoked.
Onlookers called 911, and Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, but 12 hours later, she died from her injuries.
This marked the very first documentation of a coyote attack in North America that resulted in a human adult fatality (in 1981, 3-year-old Kelly Keene was killed by a coyote on her family’s property), raising questions about whether it’s no longer safe to co-exist with these furry mammals.
“We didn’t have good answers,” Stan Gehrt, a professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and leader of the Urban Coyote Research Project, said in a statement.
But after conducting a multi-year investigation into the incident, Gehrt appears to have offered some insight into the situation at last.
According to a paper published last month in the Journal of Applied Ecology, he along with a crew of wildlife researchers found that coyotes in the region of Mitchell’s attack have adopted an unusual dietary change. Rather than rely on smaller mammals like rodents, birds and snakes for food, they seem to be hunting moose for their meals due to extreme climate conditions forcing the former to move away.
As such, the team believes it’s possible these coyotes learned to attack larger mammals, like humans, and are therefore more prone to killing people.
“We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,” Gehrt said. “And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.”
Stan Gehrt with a captured coyote being tagged and fitted with a tracking device.
Stan Gehrt
Coyote forensics
Before and after the 2009 tragedy, Gehrt’s project noticed a few dozen less-severe human-coyote incidents in the park as well. He and colleagues even fitted them with what are basically GPS trackers so they could document the animals’ movements and better understand why they were behaving in such surprisingly vicious ways.
“We had been telling communities and cities that the relative risk that coyotes pose is pretty low, and even when you do have a conflict where a person is bitten, it’s pretty minor,” he said. “The fatality was tragic and completely off the charts. I was shocked by it — just absolutely shocked.”
To arrive at their conclusions — that coyotes in Cape Breton National Park were feasting on large moose – the team first collected whiskers of both the coyotes implicated in Mitchell’s death and those related to other more minor incidents between 2011 and 2013. They then collected fur from a wide range of potential coyote prey such as shrews, southern red-backed voles, snowshoe hare, moose and even humans — for humans, they gathered hair from local barber shops.
Seth Newsome, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and corresponding author of the study, performed an analysis of specific carbon and nitrogen isotopes within all the samples.
Eventually, Newsome confirmed that, on average, moose constituted between half and two-thirds of the animals’ diets, followed by snowshoe hare, small mammals and deer, according to the press release. Plus, the researchers analyzed coyote droppings, which confirmed the isotope findings further.
Here’s what it looks like to put on one of the GPS collar types, as done in this study.
Urban Coyote Research Project
Interestingly, they also only found a few examples of individuals having eaten human food, debunking any claims that coyotes’ attraction to human food might’ve been a factor in Mitchell’s attack.
“These coyotes are doing what coyotes do, which is, when their first or second choice of prey isn’t available, they’re going to explore and experiment and change their search range,” Gehrt said. “They’re adaptable, and that is the key to their success.”
From those movement devices, the team tested to see whether coyotes in the park were just familiar with people. However, patterns showed that the animals largely avoided areas of the park frequented by people. Instead, they preferred walking around at night.
“The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,” Gehrt said. Or as the paper puts it, “our results suggest extreme unprovoked predatory attacks by coyotes on people are likely to be quite rare and associated with unique ecological characteristics.”
A Coyote Unexpectedly Killed a Human in 2009. Scientists Now Know Why
In 2009, 19-year-old folk singer Taylor Mitchell was attacked by a pack of coyotes while on a hike at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada. She was just about to start the popular Skyline Trail when climbers in the area saw the animals close- in, unprovoked.
Onlookers called 911, and Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, but 12 hours later, she died from her injuries.
This marked the very first documentation of a coyote attack in North America that resulted in a human adult fatality (in 1981, 3-year-old Kelly Keene was killed by a coyote on her family’s property), raising questions about whether it’s no longer safe to co-exist with these furry mammals.
“We didn’t have good answers,” Stan Gehrt, a professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and leader of the Urban Coyote Research Project, said in a statement.
But after conducting a multi-year investigation into the incident, Gehrt appears to have offered some insight into the situation at last.
According to a paper published last month in the Journal of Applied Ecology, he along with a crew of wildlife researchers found that coyotes in the region of Mitchell’s attack have adopted an unusual dietary change. Rather than rely on smaller mammals like rodents, birds and snakes for food, they seem to be hunting moose for their meals due to extreme climate conditions forcing the former to move away.
As such, the team believes it’s possible these coyotes learned to attack larger mammals, like humans, and are therefore more prone to killing people.
“We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,” Gehrt said. “And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.”
Stan Gehrt with a captured coyote being tagged and fitted with a tracking device.
Stan Gehrt
Coyote forensics
Before and after the 2009 tragedy, Gehrt’s project noticed a few dozen less-severe human-coyote incidents in the park as well. He and colleagues even fitted them with what are basically GPS trackers so they could document the animals’ movements and better understand why they were behaving in such surprisingly vicious ways.
“We had been telling communities and cities that the relative risk that coyotes pose is pretty low, and even when you do have a conflict where a person is bitten, it’s pretty minor,” he said. “The fatality was tragic and completely off the charts. I was shocked by it — just absolutely shocked.”
To arrive at their conclusions — that coyotes in Cape Breton National Park were feasting on large moose – the team first collected whiskers of both the coyotes implicated in Mitchell’s death and those related to other more minor incidents between 2011 and 2013. They then collected fur from a wide range of potential coyote prey such as shrews, southern red-backed voles, snowshoe hare, moose and even humans — for humans, they gathered hair from local barber shops.
Seth Newsome, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and corresponding author of the study, performed an analysis of specific carbon and nitrogen isotopes within all the samples.
Eventually, Newsome confirmed that, on average, moose constituted between half and two-thirds of the animals’ diets, followed by snowshoe hare, small mammals and deer, according to the press release. Plus, the researchers analyzed coyote droppings, which confirmed the isotope findings further.
Here’s what it looks like to put on one of the GPS collar types, as done in this study.
Urban Coyote Research Project
Interestingly, they also only found a few examples of individuals having eaten human food, debunking any claims that coyotes’ attraction to human food might’ve been a factor in Mitchell’s attack.
“These coyotes are doing what coyotes do, which is, when their first or second choice of prey isn’t available, they’re going to explore and experiment and change their search range,” Gehrt said. “They’re adaptable, and that is the key to their success.”
From those movement devices, the team tested to see whether coyotes in the park were just familiar with people. However, patterns showed that the animals largely avoided areas of the park frequented by people. Instead, they preferred walking around at night.
“The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,” Gehrt said. Or as the paper puts it, “our results suggest extreme unprovoked predatory attacks by coyotes on people are likely to be quite rare and associated with unique ecological characteristics.”
A Coyote Unexpectedly Killed a Human in 2009. Scientists Now Know Why
In 2009, 19-year-old folk singer Taylor Mitchell was attacked by a pack of coyotes while on a hike at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada. She was just about to start the popular Skyline Trail when climbers in the area saw the animals close- in, unprovoked.
Onlookers called 911, and Mitchell was airlifted to a hospital in Halifax, but 12 hours later, she died from her injuries.
This marked the very first documentation of a coyote attack in North America that resulted in a human adult fatality (in 1981, 3-year-old Kelly Keene was killed by a coyote on her family’s property), raising questions about whether it’s no longer safe to co-exist with these furry mammals.
“We didn’t have good answers,” Stan Gehrt, a professor in Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources and leader of the Urban Coyote Research Project, said in a statement.
But after conducting a multi-year investigation into the incident, Gehrt appears to have offered some insight into the situation at last.
According to a paper published last month in the Journal of Applied Ecology, he along with a crew of wildlife researchers found that coyotes in the region of Mitchell’s attack have adopted an unusual dietary change. Rather than rely on smaller mammals like rodents, birds and snakes for food, they seem to be hunting moose for their meals due to extreme climate conditions forcing the former to move away.
As such, the team believes it’s possible these coyotes learned to attack larger mammals, like humans, and are therefore more prone to killing people.
“We’re describing these animals expanding their niche to basically rely on moose. And we’re also taking a step forward and saying it’s not just scavenging that they were doing, but they were actually killing moose when they could. It’s hard for them to do that, but because they had very little if anything else to eat, that was their prey,” Gehrt said. “And that leads to conflicts with people that you wouldn’t normally see.”
Stan Gehrt with a captured coyote being tagged and fitted with a tracking device.
Stan Gehrt
Coyote forensics
Before and after the 2009 tragedy, Gehrt’s project noticed a few dozen less-severe human-coyote incidents in the park as well. He and colleagues even fitted them with what are basically GPS trackers so they could document the animals’ movements and better understand why they were behaving in such surprisingly vicious ways.
“We had been telling communities and cities that the relative risk that coyotes pose is pretty low, and even when you do have a conflict where a person is bitten, it’s pretty minor,” he said. “The fatality was tragic and completely off the charts. I was shocked by it — just absolutely shocked.”
To arrive at their conclusions — that coyotes in Cape Breton National Park were feasting on large moose – the team first collected whiskers of both the coyotes implicated in Mitchell’s death and those related to other more minor incidents between 2011 and 2013. They then collected fur from a wide range of potential coyote prey such as shrews, southern red-backed voles, snowshoe hare, moose and even humans — for humans, they gathered hair from local barber shops.
Seth Newsome, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and corresponding author of the study, performed an analysis of specific carbon and nitrogen isotopes within all the samples.
Eventually, Newsome confirmed that, on average, moose constituted between half and two-thirds of the animals’ diets, followed by snowshoe hare, small mammals and deer, according to the press release. Plus, the researchers analyzed coyote droppings, which confirmed the isotope findings further.
Here’s what it looks like to put on one of the GPS collar types, as done in this study.
Urban Coyote Research Project
Interestingly, they also only found a few examples of individuals having eaten human food, debunking any claims that coyotes’ attraction to human food might’ve been a factor in Mitchell’s attack.
“These coyotes are doing what coyotes do, which is, when their first or second choice of prey isn’t available, they’re going to explore and experiment and change their search range,” Gehrt said. “They’re adaptable, and that is the key to their success.”
From those movement devices, the team tested to see whether coyotes in the park were just familiar with people. However, patterns showed that the animals largely avoided areas of the park frequented by people. Instead, they preferred walking around at night.
“The lines of evidence suggest that this was a resource-poor area with really extreme environments that forced these very adaptable animals to expand their behavior,” Gehrt said. Or as the paper puts it, “our results suggest extreme unprovoked predatory attacks by coyotes on people are likely to be quite rare and associated with unique ecological characteristics.”
Earth’s Oxygen Came From an Unexpectedly Deep And Hot Source, Study Suggests : ScienceAlert
The amount of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere makes it a habitable planet.
Twenty-one percent of the atmosphere consists of this life-giving element. But in the deep past – as far back as the Neoarchean era 2.8 to 2.5 billion years ago – this oxygen was almost absent.
So, how did Earth’s atmosphere become oxygenated?
Our research, published in Nature Geoscience, adds a tantalizing new possibility: that at least some of the Earth’s early oxygen came from a tectonic source via the movement and destruction of the Earth’s crust.
The Archean Earth
The Archean eon represents one-third of our planet’s history, from 2.5 billion years ago to 4 billion years ago.
This alien Earth was a water-world, covered in green oceans, shrouded in a methane haze, and completely lacking multi-cellular life. Another alien aspect of this world was the nature of its tectonic activity.
On modern Earth, the dominant tectonic activity is called plate tectonics, where oceanic crust – the outermost layer of the Earth under the oceans – sinks into the Earth’s mantle (the area between the Earth’s crust and its core) at points of convergence called subduction zones.
However, there is considerable debate over whether plate tectonics operated back in the Archean era.
One feature of modern subduction zones is their association with oxidized magmas.
These magmas are formed when oxidized sediments and bottom waters – cold, dense water near the ocean floor – are introduced into the Earth’s mantle. This produces magmas with high oxygen and water contents.
Our research aimed to test whether the absence of oxidized materials in Archean bottom waters and sediments could prevent the formation of oxidized magmas.
The identification of such magmas in Neoarchean magmatic rocks could provide evidence that subduction and plate tectonics occurred 2.7 billion years ago.
The experiment
We collected samples of 2750- to 2670-million-year-old granitoid rocks from across the Abitibi-Wawa subprovince of the Superior Province – the largest preserved Archean continent stretching over 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to far-eastern Quebec.
This allowed us to investigate the level of oxidation of magmas generated across the Neoarchean era.
Measuring the oxidation-state of these magmatic rocks – formed through the cooling and crystalization of magma or lava – is challenging. Post-crystallization events may have modified these rocks through later deformation, burial, or heating.
So, we decided to look at the mineral apatite which is present in the zircon crystals in these rocks.
Zircon crystals can withstand the intense temperatures and pressures of the post-crystallization events. They retain clues about the environments in which they were originally formed and provide precise ages for the rocks themselves.
Small apatite crystals that are less than 30 microns wide – the size of a human skin cell – are trapped in the zircon crystals. They contain sulfur. By measuring the amount of sulfur in apatite, we can establish whether the apatite grew from an oxidized magma.
We were able to successfully measure the oxygen fugacity of the original Archean magma – which is essentially the amount of free oxygen in it – using a specialized technique called X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure Spectroscopy (S-XANES) at the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Creating oxygen from water?
We found that the magma sulfur content, which was initially around zero, increased to 2,000 parts per million around 2705 million years. This indicated the magmas had become more sulfur-rich.
Additionally, the predominance of S6+ – a type of sulfur ion – in the apatite suggested that the sulfur was from an oxidized source, matching the data from the host zircon crystals.
These new findings indicate that oxidized magmas did form in the Neoarchean era 2.7 billion years ago. The data show that the lack of dissolved oxygen in the Archean ocean reservoirs did not prevent the formation of sulfur-rich, oxidized magmas in the subduction zones.
The oxygen in these magmas must have come from another source and was ultimately released into the atmosphere during volcanic eruptions.
We found that the occurrence of these oxidized magmas correlates with major gold mineralization events in the Superior Province and Yilgarn Craton (Western Australia), demonstrating a connection between these oxygen-rich sources and global world-class ore deposit formation.
The implications of these oxidized magmas go beyond the understanding of early Earth geodynamics. Previously, it was thought unlikely that Archean magmas could be oxidized, when the ocean water and ocean floor rocks or sediments were not.
While the exact mechanism is unclear, the occurrence of these magmas suggests that the process of subduction, where ocean water is taken hundreds of kilometers into our planet, generates free oxygen. This then oxidizes the overlying mantle.
Our study shows that Archean subduction could have been a vital, unforeseen factor in the oxygenation of the Earth, the early whiffs of oxygen 2.7 billion years ago and also the Great Oxidation Event, which marked an increase in atmospheric oxygen by two percent 2.45 to 2.32 billion years ago.
As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the solar system – past or present – with plate tectonics and active subduction. This suggests that this study could partly explain the lack of oxygen and, ultimately, life on the other rocky planets in the future as well.
David Mole, Postdoctoral fellow, Earth Sciences, Laurentian University; Adam Charles Simon, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan, and Xuyang Meng, Postdoctoral Fellow, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Crypto founder Tiantian Kullander unexpectedly dead at 30
The finance world has been rocked by the sudden and unexpected death of a young crypto founder at the age of just 30.
Tiantian Kullander, the co-founder of Hong Kong-based digital asset company Amber Group, died in his sleep on November 23, with the news confirmed on the company’s website “with the deepest sadness and a heavy heart”.
Kullander, known affectionately as “TT,” launched Amber in 2017 with a group of finance insiders, including former Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley workers.
Before that, he worked as a trader at both finance giants, and in 2019 earned a coveted spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, which recognizes the most talented emerging entrepreneurs and leaders.
Earlier this year, the start-up reached a staggering $3 billion valuation after scoring a $200 million funding round.
Earlier this month, it was revealed the company was in the process of raising around $100 million, with the firm describing him as “instrumental to the founding of Amber and a pillar of our success.”
“He put his heart and soul into the company, in every stage of its growth. He led by example with his intellect, generosity, humility, diligence and creativity,” the company statement reads.
“TT was a respected thought leader and widely recognized as a pioneer for the industry. His depth of knowledge, his willingness to collaborate and his desire to always help others benefited countless start-ups and individuals.
“His insights and creativity inspired many projects, people and communities.”
The statement added that besides co-founding Amber and “building it into a multi-billion fintech unicorn,” TT also sat on the Board of Fnatic – one of the world’s most successful e-sports organizations – and founded KeeperDAO – the first on-chain liquidity underwriter.
“We lost a great partner and a true friend in TT and words cannot express our sorrow at this time,” the statement continues.
“TT’s legacy will live on and we will work even harder to make Amber the category-defining leader of our industry, as this was TT’s ambition and dream.
“TT was a devoted husband, a loving father and a fierce friend. His passing is a tragedy and our thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
The finance sector has flocked to pay tribute to Kullander, with many insiders taking to social media to express their shock and sadness at his passing.
Arthur Cheong, founding partner of DeFiance Capital, was one of many to honor Kullander online, posting on Twitter that the “industry lost a young, bright and most importantly, a good soul.”
Kullander is survived by his wife and young son.
SwiftKey is unexpectedly back on iOS
Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard has unexpectedly returned to the App Store. The company officially discontinued support for the keyboard and removed it from the App Store in October, but now it’s available for iOS users once again.
“Based on customer feedback, SwiftKey iOS has been relisted on the Apple App Store,” Microsoft’s Caitlin Roulston said in statement to The Verge. “Please visit Support.SwiftKey.com for more information.”
Despite the return, SwiftKey’s latest update is still from August 11th, 2021. It’s unclear if or when it will be updated — users had complained about issues ahead of the discontinuation — but it seems like there will be some changes to look forward to. Vishnu Nath, Microsoft’s VP and GM of OneNote and the Office product group, encouraged fans to “stay tuned to what the team has in store.” Pedram Rezaei, Microsoft’s CTO of its maps and local services division, said that the company will be “investing heavily in the keyboard.”