How good is the world’s most expensive fighter-jet helmet?

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“IN THIS style, $400,000.” That price tag for a hat sounds like something out of a tea party attended by Alice. It is actually, though, the expected cost of the world’s most high-tech helmet—one to be worn by pilots of the Lockheed Martin Lightning II, also known as the F-35, which has been developed by America and its allies to replace most of their existing strike aircraft. In the context of a plane costing between $148m and $337m, depending on exactly which model you order, the price of the helmet is, perhaps, trivial. But for that amount you might expect to get something pilots are universally happy with. And they are not.

The helmet is a wonder. Fighter pilots have long been used to a “heads-up” display—an image of cockpit data and targeting information displayed on the windscreen in front them. The F-35 helmet goes much further. Not only does it display that detail, and much else besides, on the helmet’s visor but it also takes video images from six external cameras mounted around the aircraft and shows that as well. This allows the pilot to “look-through” the aircraft at any angle. Want to see what is happening below? Then look down and instead of your…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Putting shots in the locker

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FOREWARNED, the proverb has it, is forearmed. But what happens when there is no warning? That was the case in December 2013, when an outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever began in Guinea. It spread rapidly to Liberia and Sierra Leone and raged on for over a year. Around 29,000 people were infected. More than 11,000 of them died.

The world responded to this crisis, shipping in doctors, nurses and medical equipment. But what it could not ship in, for none existed, was the thing that would most quickly have stopped the epidemic: a vaccine. Such a vaccine was created eventually, but by the time it was ready, the outbreak was all but over. Had it been available from the beginning, things could have been different.

Next time, though, they might be, for on August 31st a new organisation came into being. CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was founded this week in London, at the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, a medical charity. It is the joint brainchild of the Wellcome, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the government of Norway, and its purpose is precisely to forearm the world against…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Blood simple?

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CHRONIC-FATIGUE SYNDROME, or CFS, which afflicts over 1m people in America and 250,000 in Britain, is certainly chronic and surely fatiguing. But is it truly a syndrome, a set of symptoms reliably associated together and thought to have a single underlying cause—in other words, a definable disease?

CFS’s symptoms—debilitating exhaustion often accompanied by pain, muscle weakness, sleep problems, “brain fog” and depression—overlap with those of other conditions. These include fibromyalgia (itself the subject of existential doubt), clinical depression, insomnia and other sleep disorders, anaemia and diabetes. These overlaps lead some to be sceptical about CFS’s syndromic nature. They also mean many people with CFS spend years on an expensive “diagnostic odyssey” to try to find out what is going on.

Scepticism about CFS’s true nature is reinforced by the number of causes proposed for it. Viruses, bacteria, fungi and other types of parasite have all had the finger pointed at them. So have various chemicals and physical trauma. Evidence that CFS truly does deserve all three…Continue reading
Source: Economist