Peer review is a thankless job. One firm wants to change that

Publish on a six

AS SCULPTURES go, it is certainly eye-catching. On May 26th a small crowd gathered outside Moscow’s Higher School of Economics to watch the unveiling of a 1.5-tonne stone cube shaped like a six-sided die. Its five visible sides are carved with phrases such as “Minor Changes”, “Revise and Resubmit” and “Accept”. Called the “Monument to the Anonymous Peer Reviewer,” it is, as far as anyone can tell, the first such tribute anywhere in the world.

Peer review underpins the entire academic enterprise. It is the main method of quality control employed by journals. By offering drafts of a paper to anonymous experts, poor arguments or dodgy science can be scrubbed up or weeded out.

That is the theory. In reality, things are murkier. Anonymity makes peer review unglamorous, thankless work. That matters, for these days scientists are under relentless pressure from universities and funding bodies to publish a steady stream of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Cricket’s batsmen get the high-tech treatment

Activate the bat signal

THE signature sound of cricket is the thwack of a willow bat hitting a leather ball. At the ICC Champions Trophy Tournament, though, which started in England and Wales on June 1st, the bats were emitting more than those soothing reverberations. They have been fitted with sensors that enable them to fire off wireless reports that reveal how a batsman played the ball. Spectators were also treated to the slightly less pleasant whine of electric motors, as a drone armed with infra-red cameras performed reconnaissance flights over the pitch.

Both gadgets are the brainchildren of Intel, a chipmaker commissioned by the International Cricket Council (ICC), the sport’s governing body, to find new ways to keep fans entertained. Cricket is no stranger to technology. Until now, though, attention has been focused mainly on the bowler and the ball. A system called “HawkEye” tracks the ball’s trajectory, helping…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Gravity-wave detectors offer a new way to look at the universe

ONE of the biggest bits of science news in 2016 was the announcement, in February, that gravitational waves had been detected for the first time. A prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, theorists had long suspected that such waves—rippling distortions in the fabric of space itself—were real. But no one had seen one. They were eventually revealed by a billion-dollar instrument called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is based at two sites in Louisiana and Washington. LIGO works by bouncing lasers down tunnels with mirrors at each end. A passing gravity wave will stretch and compress space, causing tiny changes in the time it takes a beam to traverse the tunnels.

The waves that LIGO spotted were caused by the joining, 1.3bn years ago, of a pair of black holes, 36 and 29 times as massive as the sun. Such mergers are among the most powerful events in the universe: the coalescing holes briefly pumped out 50 times more…Continue reading
Source: Economist

3D printing and clever computers could revolutionise construction

SET in the heart of Cambridge, the chapel at King’s College is rightly famous. Built in the Gothic style, and finished in 1515, its ceiling is particularly remarkable. From below it looks like a living web of stone (see picture below). Few know that the delicate masonry is strong enough that it is possible to walk on top of the ceiling’s shallow vault, in the gap beneath the timber roof.

These days such structures have fallen out of fashion. They are too complicated for the methods employed by most modern builders, and the skilled labour required to produce them is scarce and pricey. Now, though, new technologies are beginning to bring this kind of construction back within reach. Powerful computers allow designers to envisage structures that squeeze more out of the compromise between utility, aesthetics and cost. And 3D printing can help turn those complicated, intricate designs into reality.

In a factory that makes precast concrete, 16km south of Doncaster, in northern England,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

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

“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

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

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

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