Flight response

Just relax and enjoy the view, Captain

ON JUNE 1st 2009, an Air France airliner travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris flew into a mid-Atlantic storm. Ice began forming in the sensors used by the aircraft to measure its airspeed, depriving the autopilot of that vital data. So, by design, the machine switched itself off and ceded control to the pilots. Without knowing their speed, and with no horizon visible in a storm in the dead of night, the crew struggled to cope. Against all their training, they kept the plane’s nose pointed upward, forcing it to lose speed and lift. Shortly afterwards the aeroplane plummeted into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board.

French air-accident investigators concluded that a lack of pilot training played a big part in the tragedy. As cockpits become ever more computerised, pilots need to keep their flying skills up to date. But pilots are also in short supply. In July Airbus predicted that 500,000 more will be needed by 2035 to keep pace with aviation’s expected growth. That means there is pressure to keep aircrew in their cockpits, earning money, rather than in the simulators, taking…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A mystery no more

A YEAR ago, most people would have drawn a blank if asked about Zika. Since then, an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus that began in early 2015 in Brazil has spread to more than 60 countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands (see chart). A study published on September 1st in the Lancet estimates that 2.6 billion people live in areas to which Zika could eventually spread. 

At first, scientists knew little more than anyone else. Zika is not new; the virus was first isolated in Africa in 1947. But it was obscure, and therefore little studied. Only during the present outbreak did it become clear that infection among pregnant women was associated with birth defects and neurological problems in babies. But there has been much progress, and scientists now know far more about the disease than they did when the outbreak began.

Start with transmission. The vast majority of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Feed a virus, starve a bacterium

WHETHER it is best to feed a fever and starve a cold, or vice versa, varies with the grandparent being asked. Medicine has decided that it is always a bad idea to deny food to the ill. Now a new study suggests that by ignoring such old wives’ tales, medics may have missed a trick. A paper just published in Cell by a team of researchers led by Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University suggest that force-feeding mice infected with influenza keeps them alive—but doing the same to mice with bacterial infections is fatal.

Dr Medzhitov was inspired by experiments conducted not by medics, but by zoologists. Most animals instinctively respond to infection by cutting back on food, and a slew of studies in recent years have shown that when diseased animals are force-fed they are more likely to die than if they are allowed to abstain. But Dr Medzhitov wondered whether that held true for all types of disease.

To investigate, he and his team infected one group of mice with a murine influenza virus, and the other with Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. Some mice in each group were force-fed rodent chow,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Distant languages have similar sounds for common words

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 “ear”, and natural phenomena,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Undermining infection

Source: Economist

Top of the tree

THE five-storey pagoda of the Temple of the Flourishing Law in the Nara prefecture of Japan is one of the world’s oldest wooden buildings. It has withstood wind, rain, fire and earthquakes for 1,400 years. Analysis of the rings in the central pillar supporting the 32-metre structure suggests the wood that it is made from was felled in 594, and construction is thought to have taken place soon after. 

In an age of steel and concrete, the pagoda is a reminder of wood’s long history as a construction material. New techniques mean that wood can now be used for much taller buildings. A handful are already going up in cities around the world. The 14-storey Treet block of flats in Bergen, Norway, is currently the tallest. But Brock Commons, an 18-storey wooden dormitory at the University of British Columbia in Canada, is due to be completed in 2017. That is when construction is expected to begin on the 21-storey Haut building in Amsterdam. Arup, a firm of engineering consultants working on the project, says it will be built using sustainable European pine. Some architects have even started designing wooden skyscrapers, like the proposed Tratoppen…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Domesticated tipple

CATTLE ranchers know that if they want to increase their yields it is best to breed their largest cows with their biggest bulls. The same idea works when trying to improve other livestock, crops and pets. Although less well known, microorganisms can also be bred selectively. Given that yeasts have a long history of being used to ferment food and drink, archaeologists have argued for years that early craftsmen may have selectively bred yeast strains without even realising it.

Now there is evidence to support this idea. Steven Maere of the University of Ghent and Kevin Verstrepen of the University of Leuven, both in Belgium, and their colleagues have been studying the genomes of culinary yeast species. As they report in Cell this week, the researchers have found evidence that people started domesticating yeast strains, particularly those used in beer, some 500 years ago.

Today’s bakers, vintners and brewers have intimate knowledge of yeasts and choose strains that improve their products and grant specific flavours. But until the work of Louis Pasteur in the mid-19th century nobody knew that microorganisms existed. However, a process called…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The comeback of cursive

PARENTS are not the only ones bemoaning the way so many schools have given up teaching children to write longhand. Researchers are also aware that more than mere pride in penmanship is lost when people can no longer even read, let alone write, cursive script. Not being able to exchange notes with the boss or authenticate signatures, for instance, can hurt a person’s chances of promotion. More importantly—and intriguingly—though, learning to join letters up in a continuous flow across the page improves a child’s ability to retain and understand concepts and inferences in a way that printing those letters (and, a fortiori, typing them on a keyboard) does not. It even allows insights gained in one learning experience to be applied to wholly different situations.

Neurophysiologists in Norway and France, for example, have found that different parts of the brain are stimulated when reading letters learned by writing them on paper, rather than by typing them on a keyboard. The movement and tactile response involved in handwriting leaves a memory trace in the sensorimotor part of the brain, which are retrieved when reading the letters involved. Being essentially the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The renaissance of wood

Source: Economist

Tiny light-driven pumps could improve labs-on-a-chip

TINY electronic devices known as a “lab-on-a-chip” are now routinely used to analyse small biological samples, sometimes a few microlitres or less, and to carry out out other tasks such as purifying proteins and DNA. Some even reproduce the functions of a complete organ, like a kidney or lung, so that they can be used to test drugs reliably and cheaply.

Many of these devices, though, end up not so little because of the bulky ancillary parts and chunky bits of tubing required to pump fluids in and out of the chips. This can limit their application. What would be good is a way to make the complete system more portable—or, indeed, wearable so that the devices can be used to test patients regularly. That means shrinking the external paraphernalia down to a size more comparable to the chip itself.

Yanlei Yu at Fudan University in Shanghai and her colleagues think they have found a way to do that. They used fine tubes (pictured) made from a new material that allows small quantities of fluid to be moved around precisely simply by aiming a beam of light at them—in effect creating tiny, light-activated pumps (see video below).

Dr Yu turned to liquid-crystal…Continue reading
Source: Economist