The woes of Windows 10

DESPITE its having been available for 18 months, three out of four PC owners have not bothered to upgrade their computers to the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 10. More than 700m of the world’s 1.5bn or so computers continue to run on Windows 7, a piece of software three generations old. A further 300m users have stuck with other versions—half of them stubbornly (and rashly) clinging to 16-year-old Windows XP that Microsoft pensioned off three years ago. The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10.

That said, some 400m or so copies of Windows 10 are now thought to be in circulation. Normally, such a market penetration, after only 18 months, would be considered a huge success. It is what the warmly welcomed Windows 7 achieved during its first 18 months, and three times that chalked up by Windows XP. However, though XP started slowly in 2001, it went on to become Microsoft’s most successful operating system of all…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Tasting menu

Source: Economist

Searching for particles on a benchtop

THE beams of protons that circulate around the 27km-circumference ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest particle accelerator, carry as much kinetic energy as an American aircraft-carrier sailing at just under six knots. Andrew Geraci’s equipment, on the other hand, comprises a glass bead 300 billionths of a metre across, held in a lattice of laser light inside an airless chamber. The power it consumes would run a few old-fashioned light bulbs. Like researchers at the LHC, Dr Geraci and his team at the University of Nevada, in Reno, hope to find things unexplained by established theories such as the Standard Model of particle physics and Newton’s law of gravity. Whereas the LHC cost around SFr4.6bn ($5bn) to build, however, Dr Geraci’s set-up cost a mere $300,000 and fits on a table about a metre wide and three long.

A century ago these were the normal dimensions for experiments in fundamental physics. The electron, the proton and the neutron were all found using kit this size. (J.J. Thompson and his electron-discovery device are pictured above.) But digging deeper into theories of reality requires more energy, and thus bigger…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Mediocre academic researchers should be wary of globalisation

WHEN politicians in the rich world speak of job losses and stagnant incomes brought about by immigration and foreign competition, they usually have blue-collar work in mind—car manufacturing, steelmaking and the like. But even the cognitive 1% can be adversely affected by foreign competition.

In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Human Resources, George Borjas of Harvard University, and Kirk Doran and Ying Shen of the University of Notre Dame, study the effects of globalisation on a select group of particularly brainy Westerners: professors of mathematics. Distinguishing between cause and effect is always hard in the social sciences. One approach researchers use is to search for a “natural experiment”, and that is exactly what Drs Borjas, Doran and Shen found when they examined what happened to the productivity of American mathematicians after China’s liberalisation in 1978.

Mao Zedong, in power from 1949 to 1976, was not keen on foreign ideas. For most of his rule, Chinese academics had little contact with the West; emigration was largely banned. Between 1949 and 1965, only around 200 Chinese students left for Western universities, with the majority studying foreign languages. Just 21 studied natural sciences.

Chinese education policy changed dramatically after Mao’s death, however. His successor Deng…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A computer program that learns how to save fuel

Charge!

FROM avoiding jaywalkers to emergency braking to eventually, perhaps, chauffeuring the vehicle itself, it is clear that artificial intelligence (AI) will be an important part of the cars of the future. But it is not only the driving of them that will benefit. AI will also permit such cars to use energy more sparingly.

Cars have long had computerised engine-management that responds on the fly to changes in driving conditions. The introduction of electric power has, however, complicated matters. Hybrids, which have both a petrol engine and an electric motor run by a battery that is recharged by capturing kinetic energy as the vehicle slows or brakes, need more management than does a petrol engine alone. Things get even harder with plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from the mains and have a longer electric-only range.

This is where AI could help, reckon Xuewei Qi, Matthew Barth and their colleagues at the University of California, Riverside. They are developing a system of energy management which uses a piece of AI that can learn from past experience.

Their algorithm works by breaking the trip down…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Printed human body parts could soon be available for transplant

Aye, aye! What’s this ear?

EVERY year about 120,000 organs, mostly kidneys, are transplanted from one human being to another. Sometimes the donor is a living volunteer. Usually, though, he or she is the victim of an accident, stroke, heart attack or similar sudden event that has terminated the life of an otherwise healthy individual. But a lack of suitable donors, particularly as cars get safer and first-aid becomes more effective, means the supply of such organs is limited. Many people therefore die waiting for a transplant. That has led researchers to study the question of how to build organs from scratch.

One promising approach is to print them. Lots of things are made these days by three-dimensional printing, and there seems no reason why body parts should not be among them. As yet, such “bioprinting” remains largely experimental. But bioprinted tissue is already being sold for drug testing, and the first transplantable tissues are expected to be ready for use in a few years’ time.

Just press “print”

Bioprinting originated in the early 2000s, when it was discovered that…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Printing parts

Source: Economist

Tests suggest the methods of neuroscience are left wanting

NEUROSCIENCE, like many other sciences, has a bottomless appetite for data. Flashy enterprises such as the BRAIN Initiative, announced by Barack Obama in 2013, or the Human Brain Project, approved by the European Union in the same year, aim to analyse the way that thousands or even millions of nerve cells interact in a real brain. The hope is that the torrents of data these schemes generate will contain some crucial nuggets that let neuroscientists get closer to understanding how exactly the brain does what it does.

But a paper just published in PLOS Computational Biology questions whether more information is the same thing as more understanding. It does so by way of neuroscience’s favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits. Unlike the workings of brains, though, those of computers are understood on every level. 

Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording of Northwestern University, in…Continue reading
Source: Economist

An ancient forest reveals the sun’s behaviour 290m years ago

Down in the forest, something stirred

EVERY 11 years or so, a new sunspot cycle begins. Sunspots are apparent blemishes in the sun’s photosphere, the layer which emits its light. Though still hot (about 3,500°C), they are cooler than their surroundings (about 5,500°C) and thus appear dark by contrast. A cycle starts with spots appearing at mid-latitudes in both northern and southern hemispheres. Over time, the spot-generating areas migrate towards the equator. As they do so, the amount of light and other radiation the sun emits first increases to a maximum and then decreases to a minimum, until the spots vanish and the cycle renews.

On Earth, the increased illumination of solar maxima drives photosynthesis, and thus plant growth. That permits botanists to use trees’ annual growth rings to work out what sunspot activity was like hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of years ago. Determining solar activity millions of years ago, though, has not been so easy. But it is of interest to solar physicists, who wonder how far back into the past the oscillations of the sun’s magnetic field that drive the cycle go, and how…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting

NEUROSCIENCE, like many other sciences, has a bottomless appetite for data. Flashy enterprises such as the BRAIN Initiative, announced by Barack Obama in 2013, or the Human Brain Project, approved by the European Union in the same year, aim to analyse the way that thousands or even millions of nerve cells interact in a real brain. The hope is that the torrents of data these schemes generate will contain some crucial nuggets that let neuroscientists get closer to understanding how exactly the brain does what it does.

But a paper just published in PLOS Computational Biology questions whether more information is the same thing as more understanding. It does so by way of neuroscience’s favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits. Unlike the workings of brains, though, those of computers are understood on every level. 

Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording of Northwestern University, in Chicago, who both have backgrounds in neuroscience and electronic engineering, reasoned that a…Continue reading
Source: Economist