A blueprint for getting more women into information technology

DESPITE the incoming administration’s vow to bring thousands of well-paid jobs back to America, over half a million posts paying $100,000 a year or more are currently going begging. Labour experts believe the number of vacancies in computing and information technology could easily top a million by 2020. The number of young Americans graduating with qualifications in IT subjects is rising, but nowhere near fast enough to satisfy the burgeoning demand for their skills. Last year, American campuses produced fewer than 56,000 graduates with the sort of qualifications sought by information technology (IT) firms.

Exporting many of these jobs to Asia is likely to continue apace, no matter what Donald Trump may have in mind. The president-elect has threatened to impose a 35% import tariff on goods American companies produce in foreign countries. With its phones, tablets and other items assembled in Asia from components made in China, Taiwan and Japan, Apple is in a particularly sensitive position. The firm’s Asian suppliers employ 1.6m people making Apple products. Mr Trump wants the Californian company to manufacture at least some of its iPhones and iPads in America instead of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Finding micrometeorites in city gutters

ABOUT 4.6bn years ago, a spinning disc of gas and dust began to coalesce into balls of matter. The largest sphere, at the disc’s centre, collapsed under its own gravity to form the sun. Other clumps of dust, scattered around its periphery, became planets and asteroids. In planets, this dust has long-since metamorphosed into rock. But in many asteroids, it is still more or less intact. As a consequence, when asteroids collide, some of it is liberated—and a small fraction of that material eventually falls to Earth as micrometeorites. This micrometeoritic dust arrives at a rate of around six tonnes a day. Spread over Earth’s surface, that amounts to just one particle per square metre each year.

Researchers go to great lengths to gather these grains, because they can reveal details of the solar system’s composition and history. They normally collect them by dredging up ooze from the ocean bed, then sifting and filtering it to find a few precious particles, or by melting tonnes of ice from the Antarctic to see what precipitates. Those two locations have the advantage of being isolated and reasonably free of dust from industrial sources. Now, in a study just published in…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Ancient eclipses show how days are getting longer

AS THE well-known Australian philosopher, Kylie Minogue, once pointed out, it can be a source of comfort to remember that, no matter what else is happening, the world still turns. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. Thanks to the moon’s gravitational tug, the speed at which Earth spins has been slowing since the satellite’s birth about 4.5bn years ago. Physicists can calculate from first principles how big the effect should be. It turns out that the moon should be adding about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of the day with each century that passes. This means, for instance, that 100m years ago, when dinosaurs ruled Earth, a day was nearer 23 than 24 hours.

But that 2.3 milliseconds is only an average. Geological events within Earth can speed the process up, or slow it down. Tracking changes in day length over time is thus of interest. And that requires data. Thanks to the development of super-accurate atomic clocks in the 1950s, and to laser range-finding equipment left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, researchers have plenty of such data from the past half-century. But more information is always welcome. And extra data are exactly what a team led by Leslie…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Ancient eclipses show how days are getting shorter

AS THE well-known Australian philosopher, Kylie Minogue, once pointed out, it can be a source of comfort to remember that, no matter what else is happening, the world still turns. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. Thanks to the moon’s gravitational tug, the speed at which Earth spins has been slowing since the satellite’s birth about 4.5bn years ago. Physicists can calculate from first principles how big the effect should be. It turns out that the moon should be adding about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of the day with each century that passes. This means, for instance, that 100m years ago, when dinosaurs ruled Earth, a day was nearer 23 than 24 hours.

But that 2.3 milliseconds is only an average. Geological events within Earth can speed the process up, or slow it down. Tracking changes in day length over time is thus of interest. And that requires data. Thanks to the development of super-accurate atomic clocks in the 1950s, and to laser range-finding equipment left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, researchers have plenty of such data from the past half-century. But more information is always welcome. And extra data are exactly what a team led by Leslie…Continue reading
Source: Economist

New fossils illuminate the route that led ultimately to human beings

ONE of the most important steps on the journey to Homo sapiens was that made by the first fish to crawl onto dry land. It was both a metaphorical and a literal step, but knowing exactly when it happened is tricky. It depends, for one thing, on the definition of “dry land”. Scrambling over the mud from one pool to another, assisted by fins that had evolved to walk along the seabed in the way modern coelacanths do, was probably going on by 385m years ago. 

By 375m years ago, the descendants of these first-footers had evolved four limbs clearly recognisable as legs. They were no longer fish, but “tetrapods”. Their legs, though, could have as many as eight digits each, and do not look capable of supporting an animal properly when it was out of the water. Some might thus argue that even by this stage, the step onto dry land had not been truly made.

All of these events occurred during a period called the Devonian when, though the oceans teamed with organisms no less varied than today’s, life on the continents was just getting going. Vascular plants (those bigger than mosses and liverworts) had evolved only…Continue reading
Source: Economist

An atlas of where proteins are found in cells

ONE of the most important concepts in biology is compartmentalisation. Different organs do different jobs within bodies. Different tissues do different jobs within organs. Different cells within tissues, likewise. And within cells, different organelles—as subcellular components such as nuclei, mitochondria and Golgi bodies are known—are also specialised for particular functions. Each of these levels of organisation has, over the years, been catalogued in what have come to be known as atlases, beginning in 1543 with Andreas Vesalius’s “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (On the Fabric of the Human Body), the founding text of modern anatomy.

The latest level of detail is to look at different proteins within organelles. Proteins are the molecules that do most of the work within a cell. They range from things like actin and myosin, which collaborate to flex muscle cells—and thus the muscles of which those cells are part—to the enzymes of the Krebs cycle, which disassemble glucose to release the energy therein. The Cell Atlas, a database launched on December 4th at a meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology, records which proteins are found in which…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How clean is solar power?

THAT solar panels do not emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide when they are generating electricity is without question. This is why they are beloved of many who worry about the climate-altering potential of such gases. Sceptics, though, observe that a lot of energy is needed to make a solar panel in the first place. In particular, melting and purifying the silicon that these panels employ to capture and transduce sunlight needs a lot of heat. Silicon’s melting point, 1,414°C, is only 124°C less than that of iron.

Silicon is melted in electric furnaces and, at the moment, most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels. That does emit carbon dioxide. So, when a new solar panel is put to work it starts with a “carbon debt” that, from a greenhouse-gas-saving point of view, has to be paid back before that panel becomes part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Observing this, some sceptics have gone so far as to suggest that if the motive for installing solar panels is environmental (which is often, though not always, the case), they are pretty-much useless.

Wilfried van Sark, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his colleagues…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A dinosaur’s tail preserved in amber

Who was a pretty boy, then?

TWO decades ago palaeontologists were astonished to discover impressions of feathers in rock around the petrified bones of dinosaurs that had clearly, from the anatomy those bones displayed, been unable to fly when they were alive. Astonishment turned to delight with the subsequent discovery of exquisitely preserved examples of these feathers in the petrified tree resin known as amber. Now, a team led by Xing Lida at the China University of Geosciences, in Beijing, and Ryan McKellar at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, in Regina, has uncovered something even more impressive. As they report in Current Biology, they have found, again preserved in amber, part of a dinosaur’s feathered tail.

Their fossil comes from the Hukawng valley amber mines in northern Myanmar, already famous for many spectacular specimens of life dating from 99m years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous period. The tail in question was once attached to a carnivorous dinosaur from a group known as the coelurosaurs, the most famous member of which is Tyrannosaurus. The coelurosaur here,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The Breakthrough prizes attempt to upstage the Nobels

IN 2012 the world of science was stirred by an announcement that nine physicists would each receive the eye-popping sum of $3m for their contributions to such arcane fields as string theory and inflationary cosmology. They were the first winners of Breakthrough prizes—a set of now-annual awards given to the brains behind important recent advances in basic research. The Breakthroughs are both inspired by, and intended to outdo, those willed into existence at the beginning of the 20th century by Alfred Nobel.

Like Nobel, Yuri Milner, the prizes’ creator, is a scientist-turned-businessman (he is a former physicist who has made his fortune as a venture capitalist). Unlike Nobel, however, he has not created an exclusive brand. Anyone with a few million dollars burning a hole in his or her back pocket can join in. The initial awards for physics, for example, were followed by equally munificent prizes in life sciences and mathematics. These were paid for in part by Anne…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How to empty the ketchup bottle every time

FOR anyone (and that is almost everyone) who has shaken and thumped a bottle of ketchup to squeeze the last dollop out of it, or flattened and then rolled up a tube of toothpaste to eject one final squirt onto their brush, help may soon be at hand. For more than a decade Kripa Varanasi and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been creating and studying slippery surfaces for use in industrial equipment such as steam turbines and desalination plants.

More recently, they have found ways to apply their ideas to create internal coatings for containers so that their contents will flow out easily and completely, with no shaking, thumping or squeezing. And now they think they have discovered a way to adapt these super-slippery coatings to steer liquids across flat surfaces, opening up the possibility of pumping fluids around without the need for pipes.

The lotus position

Dr Varanasi’s work started with what are known as super-hydrophobic water-shedding surfaces, a classic natural example of which is a lotus leaf. It repels water so effectively that droplets simply tumble off. The reason is that the leaf’s surface is covered with microscopic structures which contain air pockets. This reduces the surface tension that would otherwise cause a water droplet to cling on. By coating the condensing areas used in…Continue reading
Source: Economist