Why upgrade to Windows 10?

TIME is running out for PC users who have delayed taking advantage of Microsoft’s free offer to upgrade their computers from Windows 7 or 8.1 to the latest all-singing-and-dancing version of the Redmond company’s operating system. Doughty souls who have stuck with Windows 8 will first have to upgrade to Windows 8.1 before being able to participate in the deal. However, come July 29th, anyone wishing to upgrade to Windows 10 will have to pay upwards of $119 for the privilege. To avoid the expense, registered users of Windows 7 or 8.1 (Windows XP or Vista do not qualify) should download a free copy of Windows 10 from microsoftstore.com before the cut-off date. Alternatively, they can finally respond to the pop-up message that has been nagging recalcitrant users to do so for the better part of a year.

The question is, should they? As this column has argued before, upgrading any PC or tablet running Windows 8.1 to the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system is a no-brainer. Windows 10 is everything (and more) its ill-conceived predecessor should have been in the first place.

But that is not necessarily true for Windows 7. Over the years…Continue reading
Source: Economist

How earthquakes help capture carbon dioxide

LONG before people started dumping large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, the planet was producing—and managing—such emissions rather well all on its own. Volcanic eruptions release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, putting even the dirtiest smokestacks in the shade. According to new research, another terrifying natural phenomenon plays a role in storing carbon.

Geologists have long known that CO2 from big volcanic eruptions has in the past triggered a greenhouse effect which raised temperatures, drove evaporation, increased rainfall and then dropped rain that is rich in carbonic acid onto surface rocks, resulting in much of the carbon from the droplets getting locked away as layers of carbonate in the ground. They suspected that earthquakes made things worse, by causing landslides that destroy large amounts of trees and vegetation. The carbon stored in dead plant tissues would then escape into the atmosphere through oxidation.

Not so, reckons a report in Geology by Zhangdong Jin of the Institute of Earth Environment in China and Robert Hilton of Durham University in England. The pair suspected something else…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Hacked off

Drone alert

A BLACK package suspended in mid-air under a hovering drone is picked up by the CCTV cameras surrounding Wandsworth prison in south London one evening earlier this year. As it moves closer to one of the windows, a prisoner leans out to snare the delivery with a stick and pull it inside. Prison officers later recover the package and find it is stuffed with drugs and mobile phones.

Such events are becoming increasingly common, not just in the use of drones to deliver contraband but in all sorts of other nefarious activities, from paparazzi spying on celebrities to burglars casing properties. More worrying still are reports of drones being flown near aircraft. Security experts fret about ways terrorists could use drones to drop bombs or biological weapons.

What is needed, many reckon, are drone countermeasures. These already exist for military drones—including shooting them down with lasers. But that is a dangerous way to deal with small consumer drones flying in public areas. So, other answers are being sought in a challenge organised by MITRE, an American non-profit organisation that runs R&D…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Of bairns and brains

HUMAN intelligence is a biological mystery. Evolution is usually a stingy process, giving animals just what they need to thrive in their niche and no more. But humans stand out. Not only are they much cleverer than their closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, they are also much cleverer than seems strictly necessary. The ability to do geometry, or to prove Pythagoras’s theorem, has turned out to be rather handy over the past few thousand years. But it is hard to imagine that a brain capable of such feats was required to survive on the prehistoric plains of east Africa, especially given the steep price at which it was bought. Humans’ outsized, power-hungry brains suck up around a quarter of their body’s oxygen supplies.

Sexy brains

There are many theories to explain this mystery. Perhaps intelligence is a result of sexual selection. Like a peacock’s tail, in other words, it is an ornament that, by virtue of being expensive to own, proves its bearers’ fitness. It was simply humanity’s good fortune that those big sexy brains turned out to be useful for lots of other things, from thinking up agriculture to building…Continue reading
Source: Economist

In the red

CONDITIONS in India are road-meltingly hot: on May 19th residents of Phalodi, a city in the north of the country, had to cope with temperatures of 51°C—the highest since records there began. Records are tumbling elsewhere, too. According to the latest data from America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 13 of the 15 highest monthly temperature anomalies have occurred since February 2015. The average temperature over land and ocean surfaces in April was 1.10°C above last century’s average (see map). The current year will almost certainly be the warmest on record, and probably by the largest margin to date.

A Pacific-wide climatic phenomenon known as El Niño (“The Boy” in Spanish) helps explain the heat. In non-Niño years, trade winds blow warm water to the west, where it pools in the western tropical Pacific. Cooler water is drawn up from the depths to the surface in the Pacific’s east as a result, in a process known as upwelling. Every two to seven years, the pool of warm water sloshes back eastwards when the trade winds weaken or even reverse; this is El Niño in action. The interaction of the Pacific Ocean and…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Correction: The grim prospect

In last week’s briefing on antibiotic resistance (“The grim prospect“), the word “plasmids” was incorrectly rendered as “plastids” on two occasions. Plastids are plant-cell organelles, not found in bacteria. Be assured that we do know the difference.

Source: Economist

The replicator

WHEN great designs are turned into products compromises are made. The beautifully sculpted “concept” cars that regularly appear at motor shows never get built, at least not in the form they left the design studio, because they are inevitably too difficult and expensive to engineer for mass production. For decades this has meant products have had to be “designed for manufacture”, which essentially means their components must incorporate features that can be readily shaped by machines in order to be glued, screwed or welded together by people or robots. Now a combination of powerful computer-aided design (CAD) software and new manufacturing methods is changing the game.

Instead of being created with technical drawings and blueprints, most new products are today conceived in CAD systems in a three-dimensional virtual form. As these systems get cleverer some of the design processes themselves are being automated: algorithms suggest the most efficient shapes to save weight, or to provide strength or flexibility according to the loads and stresses placed upon them. Components and even entire products can be tested in their digital form, often using…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Alloy angels

One printed for the road

ONE of the great advantages of 3D printing is being able to escape the constraints of traditional production processes, and to make things with unique shapes. The powerful computer-aided design programs that are used to run 3D printers help engineers achieve this. Algorithms calculate the most efficient structure required to achieve the lightest weight and yet still handle all the loads and stresses that will be placed upon the object. Often the result is rather like something that nature might come up with—which is hardly surprising as nature has had millions of years of practice in creating highly efficient structures.

The latest example of this bionic design trend is the Light Rider, which is claimed to be the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle. The substantial part of its structure was printed by APWorks, a company based near Munich, using a proprietary material called Scalmalloy, an aluminium-magnesium-scandium alloy that was specially developed for 3D printing by Airbus, a European aerospace group that owns APWorks.

The motorcycle is driven by a 6kW electric motor and battery. It…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Hell’s kitchens

THE “hell cannons” of Aleppo pack a deadly punch. Cobbled together in Syria by militant groups fighting to overthrow the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, they use an explosive charge at the bottom of a pipe to hurl a propane cylinder crammed with 40kg or more of explosives and shrapnel. A finned tail welded to the cylinder shields it from the launch blast and provides stability in flight. The Ahrar al-Sham brigade reckon the cannons can hit targets 1.5km away. Fuses detonate the cylinder upon impact or, using a timer, after it punches into a building. This is all the better to demolish several floors with a single strike.

The use of improvised weapons in conflict has a long and bloody history: from the Irish shillelagh, a walking stick that doubles as a club—especially effective when the knob at the top is loaded with lead—to the Molotov cocktail, as the glass petrol bombs the Finnish army hurled at Russian tanks during the second world war came to be known.

The modern equivalents are more high-tech and, like Aleppo’s hell cannons, far deadlier. This comes from a combination of more sophisticated and easily available…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Best-friend genetics

One man and his dog

DOGS have long been man’s closest animal companion. The story of how they accompanied traders and settlers to every corner of the globe has now been pieced together in an unusual way by a group studying a unique genetic tag associated with a canine cancer. And in the process, this has turned up surprising new evidence about how cancer cells survive.

Transmissible cancers are rare. One of them, canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT), spreads between dogs through the transfer of living cells during mating. The disease, which usually appears as genital tumours in both male and female dogs, is believed to have originated in a single dog some 11,000 years ago and survived by spreading to other dogs. It is now found in dogs worldwide.

Since that founder dog first spawned CTVT, however, the disease has changed its genetic nature, according to Andrea Strakova, Máire Ní Leathlobhair and Elizabeth Murchison of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine and an international team of colleagues. They looked at the DNA of mitochondria in 449 tumours in dogs from 39…Continue reading
Source: Economist