Environment

• They’re just one visible part of a web of regulations that aim to keep workers and the environment safe while shipping hazardous waste.
• Transporting hazardous materials such as dangerous gases, poisons, harmful chemicals, corrosives and radioactive material across the country is risky.
• But because approximately 3 billion pounds of hazardous material needs to go from place to place in the U.S. each year, it’s unavoidable.
• With all the material that needs to cross the country, hazardous material spills from both truck and rail transportation are relatively unavoidable.

Who regulates hazardous material?

• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulates the proper handling of hazardous materials where they’re either manufactured or used.
• The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration regulates the transportation of hazardous materials by truck, rail, pipeline and ship.
• In the air, the Federal Aviation Administration regulates hazardous materials.

Key regulations

• Two essential regulations govern the handling and transportation of hazardous materials.
• In 1975, the EPA published the Hazardous Material Transportation Act, which protects people and property from hazardous material transportation risks.
• The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration oversees hazardous materials regulations that apply to everything from packaging and labeling to loading and unloading procedures.

• Trucking companies transporting hazardous materials need to use specific vehicles and qualified drivers to comply with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations.
• The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s and the Federal Railroad Administration’s regulations for rail shipments require that rail cars fit physical and structural specifications.
• Both truck and rail companies must follow regulations that require the proper classification, packaging and labeling of hazardous materials.
• The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s security regulations prevent theft or sabotage of hazardous materials.

Michael F. Gorman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• This has led to some anxiety among space scientists, who view the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission as a cornerstone of plans to explore the Solar System.
• But when you consider what’s at stake, scientifically and politically, it seems highly likely that Nasa will push ahead with the mission to make it a success.
• One key conclusion of the Nasa review is that MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedules.
• Esa is also unlikely to want to lose the scientific investment it has already made in MSR.

Huge scientific importance

So why does the space science community regard MSR as so important? Partly because the technologies are a stepping stone to future human exploration. For instance, the mission needs an ascent vehicle to launch the samples into orbit for capture by another spacecraft.

• That capture in Mars orbit of a football-sized return capsule is one of the key technical challenges of MSR.
• Esa is taking a major part in this and leads the return orbiter development.
• This stage will deploy the very best equipment that we scientists have in laboratories across the world.
• But these financial savings come with a scientific cost.

Chinese rivalry

• The Apollo programme was given impetus by cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union.
• The Chinese Space Agency wants to launch in 2028, with separate lander and ascent vehicle launches.
• In 2020, I argued that an era of new Chinese collaboration with the west could be possible.

John Bridges receives funding from the UK Space Agency for NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return planning groups tasked with identifying the best techniques to analyse returned samples, and the closest terrestrial analogues for these samples.

• But are the British really bad at learning foreign languages?
• This comparatively short period of formal language learning is likely to have a substantial impact on language attainment amongst school leavers.
• Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have native languages which are taught both as second languages and through bilingual or immersion schooling.
• UK students’ learning of these native languages shows that when given significant exposure to a language, they can achieve fluency.

Choosing to learn

• Another factor to consider is why students learn languages, and how this affects their achievement.
• There will certainly be young people who feel that language learning is something they have to do, rather than something they want to take part in.
• However, other students are motivated to learn languages which they feel a personal connection to or see personal value in.

• English has become a global lingua franca, and consequently Anglophones can feel like foreign language skills are less needed.
• This also means that English language skills are a useful extra for many people around the world and allow them to get by in many countries – that’s a strong motivation to learn.
• Read more:
  The UK is poorer without Erasmus – it's time to rejoin the European exchange programme

  There is no evidence that British young people have an inability to learn foreign languages.

Abigail Parrish does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Abstract
  We evaluate the effects of contagion and common exposure on banks? capital through
  a regression design inspired by the structural VAR literature and derived from the balance
  sheet identity.
• Contagion can occur through direct exposures, fire sales, and market-based
  sentiment, while common exposures result from portfolio overlaps.
• First, we document that contagion varies in time, with the highest levels
  around the Great Financial Crisis and lowest levels during the pandemic.
• Our new framework complements
  traditional stress-tests focused on single institutions by providing a holistic view of systemic risk.
• While existing literature presents various contagion narratives, empirical findings on
  distress propagation - a precursor to defaults - remain scarce.
• We decompose systemic risk into three elements: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk, all derived from banks? balance sheet identities.
• The contagion factor encompasses both sentiment- and contractual-based elements, common exposures consider systemic
  aspects, while idiosyncratic risk encapsulates unique bank-specific risk sources.
• Our empirical analysis of the Canadian banking system reveals the dynamic nature of contagion, with elevated levels observed during the Global Financial Crisis.
• In conclusion, our model offers a comprehensive lens for policy intervention analysis and
  scenario evaluations on contagion and systemic risk in banking.
• This
  notion of systemic risk implies two key components: first, systematic risks (e.g., risks related
  to common exposures) and second, contagion (i.e., an initially idiosyncratic problem becoming
  more widespread throughout the financial system) (see Caruana, 2010).
• In this paper, we decompose systemic risk into three components: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk.
• First, we include contagion in three forms: sentiment-based contagion, contractual-based
  contagion, and price-mediated contagion.
• In this context,
  portfolio overlaps create common exposures, implying that bigger overlaps make systematic
  shocks more systemic.
• With the COVID-19 pandemic starting
  in 2020, contagion drops to all time lows, potentially related to strong fiscal and monetary
  supports.
• That is, our
  structural model provides a framework for analyzing the impact of policy interventions and
  scenarios on different levels of contagion and systemic risk in the banking system.
• This provides a complementary approach to
  seminal papers that took a structural approach to contagion, such as DebtRank Battiston et al.
• More generally, the literature on networks and systemic risk started with Allen and Gale
  (2001) and Eisenberg and Noe (2001).
• The matrix is structured as follows:
  1

  In our model, we do not distinguish between interbank liabilities and other types of liabilities.

• In other words, we can and aim to estimate different degrees
  of contagion per asset class, i.e., potentially distinct parameters ?Ga .
• For that, we build three major
  metrics to check: average contagion, average common exposure, and average idiosyncratic risk.
• N i j

  et ,
  Further, we define the (N ?K) common exposure matrix as Commt = [A

  (20)

  et ]diag (?C
  ?L

  such that average common exposure reads,
  average common exposure =

  1 XX
  Commik,t .

• N i j

  (22)

  20

  ? c ),

  The three metrics?average contagion, average common exposure, and average idiosyncratic risk?provide a comprehensive framework for understanding banking dynamics.

• Figure 4 depicts the average level of risks per systemic risk channel: contagion risk, common exposure, and idiosyncratic risk.
• Figure 4: Average levels of contagion (Equation (20)), common exposure (Equation (21)), and idiosyncratic risk
  (Equation (22)).
• The market-based contagion is the contagion due to
  investors? sentiment, and the network is an estimate FEVD on volatility data.
• For most of
  the sample, we find that contagion had a bigger impact on the variance than common exposures.