I actually read those other articles. There's no "Reliable source problem here".
The "healing" story looks to be perfectly valid research on a previously undiscovered mechanism that takes place in sterile fetal tissue. The tissue around the wound contracts, effectively contracting the size of the wound. Then other healing mechanisms kick in to fully close the wound. This isn't going to provide scar-free plastic surgery, at least not in the foreseeable future.
The Cosmology story, I'll start out by saying that when a headline says scientist says "x MAY y", I take that as a blatant tag that we're talking about a speculative new idea. I don't see a problem with a story on speculative science ideas when reported as speculative. It looks like some scientists wrote up an interesting new idea to explain the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and which appears to fit well with certain other observations. However as the article notes, there's a serious problem/hole in the theory. It was an interesting read, if you're into that sort of thing, but the hole in the theory is almost certainly going to turn out to be fatal.
Anyway, their claim is that, based on Zipf's law, there must be some "long tail" of unknown small financial institutions which have vast but uncounted assets. No way.
"No way" is right. That's not what it says at all.
They said that the collection of all companies follows Zipf's law, and they get the "shadow banking value" from the abnormally deflated HEAD of the curve, NOT the long tail.
They're not saying there's some "unknown small financial institutions which have vast but uncounted assets", they're saying the biggest corporations are underreporting. And it's a known fact that they are underreporting. They merely came up with a way to calculate the size of the known underreporting.
"It is in the nature of markets to move money from the many to the few."
That point is mentioned in the story, and it it is in fact a crucial part of how they obtained their result. The biggest corporations, the ones most closely engaged in working the money market itself, are vastly underreporting just how much they have worked the market to move ~100 Trillion dollars from the many to the few.
Examining the graph it looks like this figure is attributable, almost entirely, to the 16 largest corporations in the world. And if they are right about the size of these unreported assets, the underreported value is greater than the entire global GDP.
And another point jumps to my mind. Large corporations have been gaming the system to avoid taxes. Capturing even just ONE PERCENT of this figure would completely solve the entire US budget deficit. I realize that these are not exclusively US companies, but certainly much of this value is U.S. based. Capturing about 2.5% of this figure, spread across the relevant countries, would pretty much solve everyone's deficits.
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