That’s the way to do it

IN FEBRUARY the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s national police force, took Apple, a tech giant, to court. At issue was an iPhone that had belonged to Syed Farook, a terrorist who, with his wife, had shot and killed 14 people in California the previous December. Farook was subsequently killed.

The FBI wanted Apple to write a special operating system to let it bypass the phone’s security and get at any data stored inside. Apple objected, on the ground that doing so would undermine the security of its own products and that, once created, such a digital “skeleton key” would pose a risk to every iPhone in existence. The FBI, for its part, insisted there was no other way into the iPhone in question.

Security experts were dubious about the bureau’s argument. A paper published by Sergei Skorobogatov, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, proves that they were right to be sceptical. Farook’s phone, it seems, could probably have been cracked in two days, using off-the-shelf electronics equipment, for less than $100.

The problem the FBI faced was that the phone was encrypted, as are all iPhones. It was also locked with a PIN….Continue reading
Source: Economist

In a whole new light

Once upon a time

FLICKERING lamps are normally a headache-inducing nuisance. But if the flickering happens millions of times a second—far faster than the eye can see or the brain respond to—then it might be harnessed to do something useful, like transmitting data. That, at least, is the idea behind a technology dubbed Li-Fi by its creators.

Li-Fi works with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), an increasingly popular way of illuminating homes and offices, and applies the same principle as that used by naval signal lamps. In other words, it encodes messages in flashes of light. It can be used to create a local-area network, or LAN, in a way similar to the LANs made possible by standard, microwave-based Wi-Fi.

Such LANs would, Li-Fi’s supporters believe, have two advantages over standard Wi-Fi. One is that light does not penetrate walls. A Li-Fi LAN in a windowless room is thus more secure than one using Wi-Fi, whose microwave signals pass easily through most building materials and can thus be listened to by outsiders. The other advantage is that light does not interfere with radio or radar signals in the way that…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A climate of change

Source: Economist

Why bad science persists

IN 1962 Jacob Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He had analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical “power” (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.

Wind the clock forward half a century and little has changed. In a new paper, this time published in Royal Society Open Science, two researchers, Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Merced, and Richard…Continue reading
Source: Economist

TV dinners

ON THE Dancing Crow farm in Washington, sunflowers and squashes soak up the rich autumn sunshine beside a row of solar panels. This bucolic smallholding provides organic vegetables to the farmers’ markets of Seattle. But it is also home to an experiment by Microsoft, a big computing firm, that it hopes will transform agriculture further afield. For the past year, the firm’s engineers have been developing a suite of technologies there to slash the cost of “precision agriculture”, which aims to use sensors and clever algorithms to deliver water, fertilisers and pesticides only to crops that actually need them.

Precision agriculture is one of the technologies that could help to feed a world whose population is forecast to hit almost 10 billion by 2050. If farmers can irrigate only when necessary, and avoid excessive pesticide use, they should be able to save money and boost their output.

But existing systems work out at $1,000 a sensor. That is too pricey for most rich-world farmers, let alone those in poor countries where productivity gains are most needed. The sensors themselves, which probe things like moisture, temperature and acidity in the soil, and which are…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Feed a virus, starve a bacterium

WHETHER it is best to feed a fever and starve a cold, or vice versa, varies with the grandparent being asked. Medicine has decided that it is always a bad idea to deny food to the ill. Now a new study suggests that by ignoring such old wives’ tales, medics may have missed a trick. A paper just published in Cell by a team of researchers led by Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University suggest that force-feeding mice infected with influenza keeps them alive—but doing the same to mice with bacterial infections is fatal.

Dr Medzhitov was inspired by experiments conducted not by medics, but by zoologists. Most animals instinctively respond to infection by cutting back on food, and a slew of studies in recent years have shown that when diseased animals are force-fed they are more likely to die than if they are allowed to abstain. But Dr Medzhitov wondered whether that held true for all types of disease.

To investigate, he and his team infected one group of mice with a murine influenza virus, and the other with Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. Some mice in each group were force-fed rodent chow,…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A mystery no more

A YEAR ago, most people would have drawn a blank if asked about Zika. Since then, an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus that began in early 2015 in Brazil has spread to more than 60 countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands (see chart). A study published on September 1st in the Lancet estimates that 2.6 billion people live in areas to which Zika could eventually spread. 

At first, scientists knew little more than anyone else. Zika is not new; the virus was first isolated in Africa in 1947. But it was obscure, and therefore little studied. Only during the present outbreak did it become clear that infection among pregnant women was associated with birth defects and neurological problems in babies. But there has been much progress, and scientists now know far more about the disease than they did when the outbreak began.

Start with transmission. The vast majority of…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Flight response

Just relax and enjoy the view, Captain

ON JUNE 1st 2009, an Air France airliner travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris flew into a mid-Atlantic storm. Ice began forming in the sensors used by the aircraft to measure its airspeed, depriving the autopilot of that vital data. So, by design, the machine switched itself off and ceded control to the pilots. Without knowing their speed, and with no horizon visible in a storm in the dead of night, the crew struggled to cope. Against all their training, they kept the plane’s nose pointed upward, forcing it to lose speed and lift. Shortly afterwards the aeroplane plummeted into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board.

French air-accident investigators concluded that a lack of pilot training played a big part in the tragedy. As cockpits become ever more computerised, pilots need to keep their flying skills up to date. But pilots are also in short supply. In July Airbus predicted that 500,000 more will be needed by 2035 to keep pace with aviation’s expected growth. That means there is pressure to keep aircrew in their cockpits, earning money, rather than in the simulators, taking…Continue reading
Source: Economist

You say potato…

IN ENGLISH, the object on your face that smells things is called a “nose”, and, if you are generously endowed, you might describe it as “big”. The prevailing belief among linguists had been that the sounds used to form those words were arbitrary. But new work by a team led by Damian Blasi, a language scientist at the University of Zurich, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that may not be true—and that the same sounds may be used in words for the same concepts across many different languages.

Dr Blasi was struck by the fact that, although the idea that sounds were arbitrary was firmly entrenched, there was strikingly little evidence for it. So along with his team, which combined skills in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, history and statistics, he decided to examine as many languages as possible to see if it was true. They analysed word lists derived from 4,298 of the world’s 6,000-odd languages, which accounted for about 85% of its historical linguistic diversity.

They focused on words for 100 basic concepts, including the names of body parts, such as “bone” and…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Distant languages have similar sounds for common words

IN ENGLISH, the object on your face that smells things is called a “nose”, and, if you are generously endowed, you might describe it as “big”. The prevailing belief among linguists had been that the sounds used to form those words were arbitrary. But new work by a team led by Damian Blasi, a language scientist at the University of Zurich, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that may not be true—and that the same sounds may be used in words for the same concepts across many different languages.

Dr Blasi was struck by the fact that, although the idea that sounds were arbitrary was firmly entrenched, there was strikingly little evidence for it. So along with his team, which combined skills in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, history and statistics, he decided to examine as many languages as possible to see if it was true. They analysed word lists derived from 4,298 of the world’s 6,000-odd languages, which accounted for about 85% of its historical linguistic diversity.

They focused on words for 100 basic concepts, including the names of body parts, such as “bone” and “ear”, and natural phenomena,…Continue reading
Source: Economist