The world is not enough

“I’D LIKE to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Elon Musk has never been shy about his reasons for founding SpaceX, a rocketry firm that has become the flag-carrier for a buccaneering “New Space” industry. Although two recent rocket explosions have dented its halo, its launch prices are among the lowest in the world. It has pioneered the technology of returning expended rocket stages to Earth for later reuse, landing them back on special pads or on ocean-going barges, which should cut costs still further. As a result, it has a thick book of orders from private firms and the American government to fly satellites into orbit and cargo—and, eventually, astronauts—to the International Space Station.

But building better rockets has never been the real point. Mr Musk, who grew up on a diet of science fiction and video games, sees the various companies he has founded as ways to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Tesla, an electric-car maker, and Solar City, a solar-power firm, were set up to encourage a switch to cleaner forms of energy. SpaceX’s goal is loftier. Mr Musk has repeatedly said that he believes that human beings must learn how to live on…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Interplanetary travel

Source: Economist

The other global drugs problem

All around the world, drug-resistant infections are on the rise. They now kill more than 700,000 people a year. In 2014 nearly 60% of samples of Escherichia coli, a common gut bacterium, collected from patients in hospital were strains that could not be treated with penicillins. About 25% were resistant to one or both of two other commonly used sorts of antibiotics.

The main reason for this resistance is overuse of antibiotics by people, both on themselves and on their animals. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of standard doses of antibiotics used increased by 50%. By 2050 drug-resistant infections could cost between 1.1% and 3.8% of global GDP, according to a report published on September 19th by the World Bank.  

Two days later, the United Nations held a meeting of heads of state to mull the matter over—only the fourth occasion that the General Assembly has debated a health problem. The assembly did not adopt any targets to curb the use of antibiotics, as some scientists have urged it to do. But its members did promise to draw up and pay for national plans to tackle the issue. There is no time to waste: on…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Rehydration therapy

MAKING vaccines often involves growing bugs—and these days the bugs in question are frequently genetically modified. There are, with good reason, strict regulations about the use and transport of such modified organisms, for fear that something bad might escape and thrive in the wild. And this has led to vaccine-producing bugs being grown in secure, centralised “foundries”, whence their products are distributed to the wider world.

That works well when the relevant bits of the wider world have decent infrastructure for handling vaccines—particularly networks of reliable refrigerators, known as cold chains, to keep them stable. But this is not always so, especially in certain parts of the tropics, where vaccines are often needed most. So it would be nice to have a safe and robust way of making vaccines on site in such places, thereby shortening the cold chain. And, as he reports in Cell, James Collins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks that he may have developed one.

The fear of an engineered bug escaping and thriving does not extend to bits of bugs, since these cannot reproduce by themselves. Dr Collins…Continue reading
Source: Economist

In a whole new light

Once upon a time

FLICKERING lamps are normally a headache-inducing nuisance. But if the flickering happens millions of times a second—far faster than the eye can see or the brain respond to—then it might be harnessed to do something useful, like transmitting data. That, at least, is the idea behind a technology dubbed Li-Fi by its creators.

Li-Fi works with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), an increasingly popular way of illuminating homes and offices, and applies the same principle as that used by naval signal lamps. In other words, it encodes messages in flashes of light. It can be used to create a local-area network, or LAN, in a way similar to the LANs made possible by standard, microwave-based Wi-Fi.

Such LANs would, Li-Fi’s supporters believe, have two advantages over standard Wi-Fi. One is that light does not penetrate walls. A Li-Fi LAN in a windowless room is thus more secure than one using Wi-Fi, whose microwave signals pass easily through most building materials and can thus be listened to by outsiders. The other advantage is that light does not interfere with radio or radar signals in the way that…Continue reading
Source: Economist

That’s the way to do it

IN FEBRUARY the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s national police force, took Apple, a tech giant, to court. At issue was an iPhone that had belonged to Syed Farook, a terrorist who, with his wife, had shot and killed 14 people in California the previous December. Farook was subsequently killed.

The FBI wanted Apple to write a special operating system to let it bypass the phone’s security and get at any data stored inside. Apple objected, on the ground that doing so would undermine the security of its own products and that, once created, such a digital “skeleton key” would pose a risk to every iPhone in existence. The FBI, for its part, insisted there was no other way into the iPhone in question.

Security experts were dubious about the bureau’s argument. A paper published by Sergei Skorobogatov, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, proves that they were right to be sceptical. Farook’s phone, it seems, could probably have been cracked in two days, using off-the-shelf electronics equipment, for less than $100.

The problem the FBI faced was that the phone was encrypted, as are all iPhones. It was also locked with a PIN….Continue reading
Source: Economist

A climate of change

Source: Economist

Why bad science persists

IN 1962 Jacob Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He had analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical “power” (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.

Wind the clock forward half a century and little has changed. In a new paper, this time published in Royal Society Open Science, two researchers, Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Merced, and Richard…Continue reading
Source: Economist

TV dinners

ON THE Dancing Crow farm in Washington, sunflowers and squashes soak up the rich autumn sunshine beside a row of solar panels. This bucolic smallholding provides organic vegetables to the farmers’ markets of Seattle. But it is also home to an experiment by Microsoft, a big computing firm, that it hopes will transform agriculture further afield. For the past year, the firm’s engineers have been developing a suite of technologies there to slash the cost of “precision agriculture”, which aims to use sensors and clever algorithms to deliver water, fertilisers and pesticides only to crops that actually need them.

Precision agriculture is one of the technologies that could help to feed a world whose population is forecast to hit almost 10 billion by 2050. If farmers can irrigate only when necessary, and avoid excessive pesticide use, they should be able to save money and boost their output.

But existing systems work out at $1,000 a sensor. That is too pricey for most rich-world farmers, let alone those in poor countries where productivity gains are most needed. The sensors themselves, which probe things like moisture, temperature and acidity in the soil, and which are…Continue reading
Source: Economist

You say potato…

IN ENGLISH, the object on your face that smells things is called a “nose”, and, if you are generously endowed, you might describe it as “big”. The prevailing belief among linguists had been that the sounds used to form those words were arbitrary. But new work by a team led by Damian Blasi, a language scientist at the University of Zurich, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that may not be true—and that the same sounds may be used in words for the same concepts across many different languages.

Dr Blasi was struck by the fact that, although the idea that sounds were arbitrary was firmly entrenched, there was strikingly little evidence for it. So along with his team, which combined skills in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, history and statistics, he decided to examine as many languages as possible to see if it was true. They analysed word lists derived from 4,298 of the world’s 6,000-odd languages, which accounted for about 85% of its historical linguistic diversity.

They focused on words for 100 basic concepts, including the names of body parts, such as “bone” and…Continue reading
Source: Economist