Sounds like trouble

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LINGUISTIC disorders of speech or of comprehension are awkward for anyone who suffers from them. For children, who are just beginning to make their way in society, they can be disastrous. Teasing, bullying, lack of friends and poor school performance may all follow from an inability to talk or listen normally. Early intervention and therapy, though, can make a big difference—if diagnosis comes quickly enough.

Often it does not. In America, 60% of such disorders go undiagnosed until a child goes to school. But Jen Gong and John Guttag of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hope to change that. As they outlined at the Interspeech Conference in San Francisco in September, they have devised a method that, when refined, may yield an automated test which can spot the subtle clues, such as pauses during speech, that indicate a disorder to a professional ear but may not be obvious to parents.

Ms Gong and Dr Guttag, both computer scientists, wondered whether they could teach their machines to distinguish the speech of children with disorders from that of children without them. To this end, they first wrote an algorithm they hoped might do…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Summoned by screams

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THE botanical kingdom is rife with deceivers. Carrion flowers mimic the smell of rotten meat in order to attract scavenging beetles and flies and then cover them in pollen. Passion vines, beloved by some butterflies as food for their caterpillars, have yellow spots on their leaves that make them look as if they have already had an egg-laying visit from a gravid female. And numerous carnivorous plants lure insects with sweet odours, only to devour them. Now Stefan Dötterl and Annemarie Heiduk, of the Universities of Salzburg and Bayreuth respectively, think they have uncovered yet another form of deception. As they describe in Current Biology, a vegetable called the parachute plant uses chemical signals to trick carnivorous flies into believing the insects those flies prey on are lying wounded inside it.

At first sight parachute plants, which have cone-shaped flowers (see picture) decorated inside with needlelike inward-pointing hairs, look as though they might be carnivorous themselves. They are not, though they come close to it. Insects that enter a parachute-plant flower fall into…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Elevated intelligence

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Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for chemistry goes to three nanotechnologists

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BIGGER is not always better. Anyone who doubts that has only to look at the explosion of computing power that has marked the past half-century. This was made possible by continual shrinkage of the components from which those computers are made—and that success has, in turn, inspired a search for other areas where shrinkage might also yield dividends.

One such, which has been poised delicately between hype and hope since the 1990s, is nanotechnology. Though what people mean by this has changed over the years—to the extent that cynics might be forgiven for wondering if it is more than just a fancy rebranding of the word “chemistry”—nanotechnology did originally have a fairly clear definition. It was the idea that machines with moving parts could be made on a molecular scale. And this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three researchers, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa, who have never lost sight of that original definition.

Dr Sauvage’s contribution was to link atoms together in a new and potentially useful way. Conventional molecules are held together by bonds in which electrons…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for physics goes to three unexpected recipients

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YOU cannot have half a hole. That is the essence of topology, a branch of geometry which deals in “invariants”, such as holes, that can exist in geometric shapes only in discrete, integer numbers. This year’s Nobel prize for physics has gone to three researchers who have applied topology to materials science, and have come up with theoretical explanations about the behaviour of unusual states of matter as a result.

The winners are David Thouless of the University of Washington, in Seattle, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University, in New Jersey, and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. All three are products of the 20th-century “brain drain” that saw British-born researchers head west to the larger salaries and better laboratories of America.

Dr Thouless, who takes home half of the SKr8m ($930,000) prize, collaborated with Dr Kosterlitz, who shares the other half with Dr Haldane, in the 1970s, when both were still in Britain. The fruit of their collaboration was to overthrow the idea that superconductivity (a phenomenon in which the resistance of an electrical conductor vanishes, usually when it…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for medicine goes to biological recycling

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LONG before the green movement existed, evolution discovered the virtues of recycling. Cells cannot afford to waste materials, so they disassemble worn-out components for reuse. This happens in subcellular structures called lysosomes, which are bubble-like vesicles filled with digestive enzymes and surrounded by fatty membranes.

Moreover, in an emergency, even components that are still working may be recycled in this way to provide energy needed to keep a starving cell alive, rather as someone facing extremely cold weather may choose to burn his furniture rather than freeze to death. The process is called autophagy (from the Greek for “self-eating”), and the elucidation of its details has been the life’s work of Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (pictured above), who is the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

Before Dr Ohsumi’s studies, biologists knew that autophagy was a two-step process. First, the cellular components to be recycled are enclosed in a fatty membrane to create another type of vesicle, an autophagosome. Then the autophagosome merges with a lysosome, and the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The 2016 Nobel prize for medicine goes to work on biological recycling

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LONG before the green movement existed, evolution discovered the virtues of recycling. Cells cannot afford to waste materials, so they disassemble worn-out components for reuse. This happens in subcellular structures called lysosomes, which are bubble-like vesicles filled with digestive enzymes and surrounded by fatty membranes.

Moreover, in an emergency, even components that are still working may be recycled in this way to provide energy needed to keep a starving cell alive, rather as someone facing extremely cold weather may choose to burn his furniture rather than freeze to death. The process is called autophagy (from the Greek for “self-eating”), and the elucidation of its details has been the life’s work of Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (pictured above), who is the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

Before Dr Ohsumi’s studies, biologists knew that autophagy was a two-step process. First, the cellular components to be recycled are enclosed in a fatty membrane to create another type of vesicle, an autophagosome. Then the autophagosome merges with a lysosome, and the…Continue reading
Source: Economist