Cultural evolution and the mutilation of women

GENES that increase an individual’s reproductive output will be preserved and spread from generation to generation. That is the process of evolution by natural selection. More subtly, though, in species that have the sorts of learnable, and thus transmissible, behaviour patterns known as culture, cultural changes that promote successful reproduction are also likely to spread. This sort of cultural evolution is less studied than the genetic variety, but perhaps that should change, for a paper published this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, by Janet Howard and Mhairi Gibson of the University of Bristol, in England, suggests understanding it better may help to wipe out a particularly unpleasant practice, that of female genital mutilation.

FGM, as it is known for short, involves cutting or removing part or all of a female’s external genitalia—usually when she is a girl or just entering puberty. Unlike male circumcision, which at least curbs the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, FGM brings no medical benefit whatsoever. Indeed, it often does harm. Besides psychological damage and the inevitable risk that is associated with…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The promise of augmented reality

SCIENCE fiction both predicts the future and influences the scientists and technologists who work to bring that future about. Mobile phones, to take a famous example, are essentially real-life versions of the hand-held communicators wielded by Captain Kirk and his crewmates in the original series of “Star Trek”. The clamshell models of the mid-2000s even take design cues directly from those fictional devices.

If companies ranging from giants like Microsoft and Google to newcomers like Magic Leap and Meta have their way, the next thing to leap from fiction to fact will be augmented reality (AR). AR is a sci-fi staple, from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heads-up display in the “Terminator” films to the holographic computer screens that Tom Cruise slings around as a futuristic policeman in “Minority Report”.

AR is a close cousin to virtual reality (VR). There is, though, a crucial difference between them: the near-opposite meanings they ascribe to the term “reality”. VR aims to drop users into a convincing, but artificial, world. AR, by contrast, supplements the real world by laying useful or entertaining computer-generated data over…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Adding to reality

Source: Economist

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

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

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

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

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