Makeover for mobile phones

AFTER years of hot air and hyperbole, the fifth generation (5G) of mobile-phone technology has entered its final phase of testing, in preparation for its debut around the world. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an industry group for mobile phones, has still to sign off on a 5G reference design that satisfies all its members. But that has not stopped manufacturers from introducing 5G chip-sets and modems for wireless carriers to test. The hope is to get 5G mobile networks up and running in time, at least, for the winter Olympics in South Korea in February 2018. Japan has its own plans for the technology when it hosts the summer Olympics in July 2020. Expect wireless carriers to start rolling out their 5G networks in earnest shortly thereafter.

The race to launch 5G is reminiscent of the rush to do likewise with Wi-Fi in the 1990s, when equipment makers hurried out interim gear both in order to influence emerging standards (and thus lock in their own particular patents) and to get a foot in the door ready for when the technology took off. Which it duly did. Many believe 5G could be an even bigger change. Hype aside, the technology is more than just a faster,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Having secrets is not a problem. Thinking about them is

KEEPING a secret is hard work, as both common sense and past studies confirm. Omitting pertinent information from a conversation, or even intentionally misleading an interlocutor, requires nimble thinking. How much of a burden, though, is merely possessing a secret, rather than trying to defend it against a nosy questioner? The catharsis that often accompanies confessing guilty secrets suggests it may be quite large. But, until now, no one has examined the matter scientifically.

In a study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Michael Slepian of Columbia University, in New York, attempts to correct that omission. He and his colleagues presented a set of volunteers with a list of 38 sorts of things surveys suggest people commonly keep secret about themselves. Examples included infidelity, theft, poor performance at work, sexual orientation, having undergone an abortion and drug taking. Some of Dr Slepian’s volunteers participated over the internet. Some, recruited in New York’s biggest public space, Central Park, participated face to face. All remained anonymous—and, within statistical limits, both groups responded…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Using fluorescent bacteria to find landmines

BATTLEFIELDS strewn with mines are one of the nastiest legacies of war. They ensure that, long after a conflict has ceased, people continue to be killed and maimed by its aftermath. In 1999, the year the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty came into force, there were more than 9,000 such casualties, most of them civilians. Though this number had fallen below 4,000 by 2014 it is, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, an international research group, rising again as a consequence of conflicts in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

These days most mines have cases made from plastic. Only the firing mechanisms include any metal. That means mines are hard to find with metal detectors. Many ingenious ways to locate and destroy them have been developed, ranging from armour-plated machines that flail the land, via robots equipped with ground-penetrating radar, to specially trained rats that can smell the explosives a mine contains. Such methods have, though, met with mixed success—and can also be expensive. Flails, for instance, scatter shrapnel and explosive residue around a minefield, making it hard to confirm that no undetonated devices remain. Minehunting rats, meanwhile,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble

UTTER 160 or so French or English phrases into a phone app developed by CandyVoice, a new Parisian company, and the app’s software will reassemble tiny slices of those sounds to enunciate, in a plausible simulacrum of your own dulcet tones, whatever typed words it is subsequently fed. In effect, the app has cloned your voice. The result still sounds a little synthetic but CandyVoice’s boss, Jean-Luc Crébouw, reckons advances in the firm’s algorithms will render it increasingly natural. Similar software for English and four widely spoken Indian languages, developed under the name of Festvox, by Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, is also available. And Baidu, a Chinese internet giant, says it has software that needs only 50 sentences to simulate a person’s voice.

Until recently, voice cloning—or voice banking, as it was then known—was a bespoke industry which served those at risk of losing the power of speech to cancer or surgery. Creating a synthetic copy of a voice was a lengthy and pricey process. It meant recording many phrases, each spoken many times, with different emotional emphases and in different contexts (statement, question,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Crayfish may help researchers understand drunkenness

I’m not as thunk as drinkle peep I am

HUMANS are not the only species to enjoy a snifter. Myriad experiments on other animals, from rats and monkeys to bees and fruit flies, show that they also get drunk, will seek out alcohol given the opportunity and may even develop a dependence on the stuff. But alcohol promotes conviviality as well as drunkenness, and that relationship is less well explored. In particular, there are few studies of whether the link is reciprocal—whether conviviality, or at least a sociable environment, affects susceptibility to alcohol. This question has, however, now been looked into. In a paper just published in Experimental Biology, Matthew Swierzbinski, Andrew Lazarchik and Jens Herberholz of the University of Maryland have shown that a sociable upbringing does indeed increase sensitivity to alcohol. At least, it does if you are a crayfish.

The three researchers’ purpose in studying drunken crayfish is to understand better how alcohol induces behavioural changes. Most recreational drugs, from cocaine and heroin to nicotine and caffeine, have well-understood effects on known receptor…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A 3D-printed key that can’t be copied

Hidden depths

KEYS have been around for a long time. The earliest, made from wood, date back 4,000 years, to the ancient Egyptians. The Romans improved them a bit by making them from metal. But there, more or less, they have stayed. Electronic card-keys aside, a key is still, basically, a piece of metal sporting a series of grooves, teeth and indentations which, when inserted into a keyway, line up to move pins and levers to lock or unlock a mechanism.

Such keys are made with conventional manufacturing techniques, such as cutting and stamping. But now there is a new way, in the form of 3D printing, to craft metal objects. And keys are about to succumb to it, to the great benefit of keyholders.

A 3D printer works by melting together layers of material that are added successively to the object being created. It can thus make something from the inside out, as it were, by printing intricate internal features and then covering them with a solid layer. Features shielded from view are extremely difficult to copy, let alone reproduce using normal machine tools. What better way to reinvent the key, reckoned Alejandro Ojeda, a mechanical engineer who…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The mesopelagic: Cinderella of the oceans

FEW have heard of the mesopelagic. It is a layer of the ocean, a few hundred metres below the surface, where little light penetrates, so algae do not live. But it is home to animals in abundance. There are bristlemouths: finger-sized fish with gaping maws that sport arrays of needle-like teeth. They number in the quadrillions, and may be the most numerous vertebrates on Earth. There are appendicularians: free-swimming relatives of sea-squirts a few millimetres across. They build gelatinous houses several times their body-size, to filter food from the water. There are dragonfish (pictured). They have luminescent spotlamps which project beams of red light that they can see, but their prey cannot. There are even squid and swordfish—creatures at least familiar from the fishmonger’s slab.

And soon there will be nets. Having pillaged shallower waters, the world’s fishing powers are looking to the mesopelagic as a new frontier. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reported in 2002 that the fish-meal and fish-oil industries would need to exploit this part of the ocean in order to feed fish farms. In the past nine months Norway has issued 46 new licences for vessels to fish…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The quickest way to break the ice is by submarine

ARCTIC sea-ice is melting. For many that is a source of alarm. But for others, the ice is still not melting fast enough. They would like to give it a helping hand. Clear lanes through the Arctic ocean would permit commercial and naval shipping to travel quickly between the Atlantic and the Pacific. These lanes might also assist the search for oil and gas.

The Russian authorities seem particularly keen on the idea. Last year they launched Arktika, the first of three giant, new nuclear-powered icebreakers intended to help open such routes. But some people think this approach—bludgeoning through the ice with what is, in essence, an armour-plated knife—is old-fashioned. They believe the job could be done faster and more elegantly using a piece of physics called flexural gravity-wave resonance. If they are right, the icebreakers of tomorrow might be submarines.

Resonance icebreaking was discovered in 1974 by Canada’s coast guard, when it began using icebreaking hovercraft able to operate in waters too shallow for conventional icebreakers. At low speeds, these craft work much as icebreaking ships do, by forcing sections of pack-ice in front of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Penicillin changes the behaviour of young mice

THE symbiosis between human beings and the bacteria dwelling in their guts is a delicate thing. When it works well, both sides benefit. The bugs get a comfy home. The hosts get help with their digestion, making more food available than otherwise would be. If relations are upset, though, bad consequences may flow. Both obesity and malnutrition can be exacerbated by the wrong gut bacteria. Illnesses such as asthma and eczema are linked to a lack of certain bugs from an infant’s intestines. And there is evidence, from experiments on mice, that an absence of gut flora affects the development of the brain. Such absence weakens the blood-brain barrier, which normally helps to keep foreign material out of that organ. It also seems to make animals less sociable than would otherwise be expected.

The experiments which show these brain and behavioural changes have, though, either been done on mice raised in sterile conditions or on ones that have had their alimentary bacterial ecosystems “nuked” with antibiotics in high dose—far higher, pro rata, than would be administered to a human for medical reasons. The next stage is to test whether anything similar happens to mice fed…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How shoelaces come undone

ENGINEERING brings great benefit to humanity, from aircraft to bicycles and from bridges to computer chips. It has, though, had difficulty creating a shoelace that does not accidentally come loose. At least in part, this is because no one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. But that crucial gap in human knowledge has just been plugged. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Christopher Daily-Diamond, Christine Gregg and Oliver O’Reilly, a group of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have now worked out the mechanics of shoelace-bow disintegration.

A shoelace bow is a type of slip knot that has, at its core, a reef knot. Like conventional reef knots, bows can be mistied as “granny” knots, which come undone more easily than a true reef does. But even a shoelace bow with a true reef at its core will fail eventually, and have to be retied.

Walking involves two mechanical processes, both of which might be expected to exert forces on a shoelace bow. One is the forward and back movement of the leg. The other is the impact of the shoe itself hitting the ground. Preliminary experiments carried out by Mr Daily-Diamond, Ms Gregg and Dr O’Reilly showed that neither of these alone is enough to persuade a bow to unravel. Both are needed. So they had to devise experiments…Continue reading
Source: Economist