Better with bitcoin

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CLINICAL trials are a murky old world. The pharmaceutical industry is keen to get new drugs to market and researchers are just as keen to report positive results. This can produce some rather unpleasant side-effects. Selective reporting of data from trials is rife. In one infamous example, a 2001 study reported that paroxetine, an antidepressant, was safe and effective for treating the illness in teenagers. It later emerged, however, that this was based on new measures of the drug’s effectiveness, introduced only after the drug had failed to show any significant improvement in the outcomes that had been specified when the trial was first drawn up. Later studies showed that the drug increased the risk of suicidal behaviour in children.

How to guard against such things got Greg Irving, a family doctor and a researcher at the University of Cambridge, thinking. He came up with a way to improve the reporting of clinical trials with the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin, a digital currency. The blockchain is a database that acts as a public ledger of all transactions with the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Burning benefits

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THE giant wildfire that raged recently through the Canadian province of Alberta, forcing more than 80,000 people to flee their homes, was caused in part by global warming producing drier conditions. Yet conservation efforts to prevent burning have not helped either, say some experts. Forests can regenerate after being burnt, with much of the tinder-like underbrush being cleared away and dense tree canopies broken up so that young trees can get the sunlight they need to grow. Now a new study finds that fires, whether started naturally or under controlled conditions, can also thwart nasty insect infestations.

Like many useful discoveries, this one came about somewhat by accident. Sharon Hood of the US Forest Service was working with the University of Montana and colleagues on the ecology of a forest in western Montana that had been managed in a number of ways to make it more resistant to fire. They were monitoring areas that had been thinned to open up the canopy, exposed to controlled burns to remove ground growth, or both. To provide a control area for comparison, the team also kept an eye on part of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The fantastic voyage

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ROBOTIC surgery is one thing, but sending a robot inside the body to carry out an operation quite another. It has long been a goal of some researchers to produce tiny robotic devices which are capable of travelling through the body to deliver drugs or to make repairs without the need for a single incision. That possibility has just got a bit closer.

In a presentation this week to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Daniela Rus and Shuhei Miyashita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described a robot they have developed that can be swallowed and used to collect dangerous objects ingested accidentally. The device is based on foldable robot technology that their team of researchers have been working on for years. The basic idea is to make robots that fold up, a bit like origami, into small structures less than a few millimetres in diameter so that they can be swallowed like tablets. Then, once inside the body, the capsules enclosing the robots dissolve, allowing the devices to unfold, reconfigure themselves and get to work.

To test their latest…Continue reading
Source: Economist