A drug used to treat sleeping sickness may also help with autism

MICE are not humans. But they are close enough that many drugs that work in mice turn out to work in people, too. Three years ago Robert Naviaux, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, published a paper suggesting that a drug called suramin could alleviate the symptoms of autism in mice. That was interesting, for despite all the research into autism, few effective treatments are available. Now things have got more interesting still. In a paper just published in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, Dr Naviaux has repeated his experiments on humans, and found that the drug seems effective for them, too.

Nobody is sure what causes autism. But one theory is that it stems from a phenomenon known as the “cellular danger response”. This involves compounds circulating in the blood, known as purines, which command cells to halt their normal activities and brace for an imminent viral attack. That response is normal and, provided it switches off when…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The long, winding road for driverless cars

CARMAKERS like to talk about autonomous vehicles (AVs) as if they will be in showrooms in three or four years’ time. The rosy scenarios suggest people will soon be whisked from place to place by road-going robots, with little input from those on board. AVs will end the drudgery of driving, we are told. With their lightning reactions, tireless attention to traffic, better all-round vision and respect for the law, AVs will be safer drivers than most motorists. They won’t get tired, drunk, have fits of road rage, or become distracted by texting, chatting, eating or fiddling with the entertainment system.

The family AV will ferry children to school; adults to work, malls, movies, bars and restaurants; the elderly to the doctor’s office and back. For some, car ownership will be a thing of the past, as the cost of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft tumbles once human drivers are no longer needed. Going driverless could cut hailing costs by as much as 80%, say optimists….Continue reading
Source: Economist

Using light to fingerprint paper

A PIECE of paper is a complicated product. Trees are felled, stripped of their bark, chipped, mashed, and then mixed with water and churned into pulp. That pulp is washed and refined, before being beaten to a finer slush. Laid out flat, drained of water, then squeezed between large rollers, the slush at last becomes one large, long sheet of paper.

All those machinations introduce a great deal of randomness to the arrangement of fibres within an individual piece of paper. In an article due to be published in Transactions on Privacy and Security, Ehsan Toreini, a security expert at the University of Newcastle, and his colleagues, describe a way to turn that randomness into a “fingerprint” that is unique to any given sheet of paper. (In security jargon a fingerprint is any unique, identifying pattern, not just one from a finger). That could, they hope, help to cut down on fraud.

The researchers are not the first to realise that paper might…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Airports switch to “virtual” control towers

THE 67-metre-tall control tower that opened at San Francisco International Airport in October is a stylish structure that cost $120m. It is supposed to resemble a beacon of the sort used in ancient times to guide ships safely to harbour. Those in the know might be forgiven for wondering if the new control tower is less a beacon than a white elephant. Elsewhere, airport managers are starting to abandon the panopticons that have dominated airfields for decades in favour of remote-controlled versions that promise to be cheaper and safer. Instead, they are housed in ordinary low-rise buildings, in some cases hundreds of kilometres away from the facility they are monitoring.

These remote control towers receive a live video feed from cameras positioned around an airfield. The images are stitched together by computer and displayed on screens (as pictured above) to create a virtual view of the runways and taxiways being monitored. In some cases the screens surround the air-traffic controllers,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Male and female beetles fight over penis spines

Evolution in action

ANTAGONISM is built into the nature of sexual reproduction itself. Members of each sex try to maximise their own reproductive fitness, which is a combination of the quality and the quantity of offspring they are able to raise to the point where those offspring can themselves reproduce. If conflict between males and females is part and parcel of reproduction, some still have it much tougher than others. Spare a thought, in particular, for the females of the cowpea seed beetle.

Males of this species have penises armed with sharp spikes. These can do serious damage to a female’s reproductive tract. And all in the name of male procreative success, for previous research has shown (though the precise mechanism remains obscure) that male cowpea seed beetles with longer penile spines have greater mating success than those with short ones.

Evolutionary theory predicts that it would be in the interests of females to fight back, by…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How to build cheaper smart weapons

A million dollars up in smoke

ON APRIL 7th a salvo of missiles fired by American warships in the Mediterranean scored direct hits on several Syrian aircraft shelters from hundreds of miles away, demonstrating once more the effectiveness of precision, or “smart”, weapons. At $1.3m apiece such missiles are usually reserved for important targets like parked aircraft. They are too pricey to be expended on lightly armed insurgents. (As George Bush junior once memorably put it, he was not prepared to “fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt”.)

Frank Fresconi, who works at the Army Research Laboratory’s Aeromechanics and Flight Control Group, in Maryland, hopes to change that. He is working on something called the Collaborative Cooperative Engagement (CCOE) programme, which hopes to provide the advantages of smart weapons at a fraction of the cost. A new generation of cut-price precision munitions could change the way America’s…Continue reading
Source: Economist

“Disco bacteria” could churn out drugs and useful chemicals

M.C. Escherichia

THE central idea of synthetic biology is that living cells can be programmed in the same way that computers can, in order to make them do things and produce compounds that their natural counterparts do not. As with computers, though, scientists need a way to control their creations. To date, that has been done with chemical signals. In a paper published in Nature Chemical Biology, Christopher Voigt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes an alternative. Instead of chemicals, he and his colleagues demonstrate how to control customised cells with coloured light.

Engineering cells to respond to light is not a new idea. The general approach is called optogenetics, and it has become a popular technique for controlling nerve cells in neuroscience. But Dr Voigt is not interested in nerve cells. In 2005 he altered four genes in a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria, which gave…Continue reading
Source: Economist

WannaCry should make people treat cyber-crime seriously

IN 1933 Britain’s parliament was considering the Banditry bill—the government’s response to a crime wave. The problem was that criminals were using a newfangled invention, the motor car, to carry out robberies faster than the police could respond. The bill’s proposed answer to these “smash-and-grab” raids was to create new powers to search cars and to construct road blocks.

In the end, the Banditry bill was not enacted. Its powers were too controversial. But the problem did not go away; what the bill proposed was eventually permitted, and now seems normal. Since then, the technology of theft has not stood still. Indeed, just as in the 1930s, it remains one step ahead of the authorities.

On May 12th, for instance, security companies noticed that a piece of malicious software known as WannaCry was spreading across the internet, first in Britain and Spain, and then around the world. It would reach 230,000 computers in 48 hours, an unprecedented scale of infection…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The exploits of bug hunters

TO HELP shield their products from ransomware like the recent worldwide WannaCry attack, most big software-makers pay “bug bounties” to those who report vulnerabilities in their products that need to be patched. Payouts of up to $20,000 are common. Google’s bounties reach $200,000, says Billy Rios, a former member of that firm’s award panel. This may sound like good money for finding a programming oversight, but it is actually “ridiculously low” according to Chaouki Bekrar, boss of Zerodium, a firm in Washington, DC, that is a dealer in “exploits”, as programs which take advantage of vulnerabilities are known.

Last September Zerodium’s payment rates for exploits that hack iPhones tripled, from $500,000 to $1.5m. Yuriy Gurkin, the boss of Gleg, an exploit-broker in Moscow, tells a similar story. Mundane exploits for web browsers, which might, a few years ago, have fetched $5,000 or so, are now, he says, worth “several dozen thousand”. Unsurprisingly, Zerodium and Gleg…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How the eggshell got its spots

Unscrambled eggs

COLLECTING wild birds’ eggs is a hobby, once popular, that is frowned on today. In some countries, it is illegal. That, though, makes past collections the more valuable. And one of them, assembled by the splendidly named John Colebrook-Robjent and bequeathed by him, in 2008, to the Natural History Museum’s outpost at Tring, north-west of London, has recently been pressed into service. Its job was to answer questions about the arms races that go on between some birds and the nest parasites (cuckoos and so forth) that attempt to trick them into raising the parasites’ young.

That this behaviour causes parasites’ eggs to evolve to look like those of their hosts, and the hosts’ eggs to evolve not to look like those of parasites, is well established. But Eleanor Caves of Cambridge University and her colleagues wondered if there was more to it. They noted that some nest parasites have sub-groups, known as races, which specialise on different…Continue reading
Source: Economist