Economist Science & Technology

A BOOK with the title “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition” does not sound destined to be a bestseller, particularly at $199 a pop. But DSM-5, as it is known for short, is almost certain to become one. Its predecessor, DSM-IV, which was published in 1994, has sold more than 1m copies. DSM-5, which will go on sale on May 22nd, is likely to do at least as well.The reason is that the DSM series, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), has become the global standard for the description of mental illness. Indeed, the DSM is treated by many people less as a medical handbook and more as holy writ. Insurers use it to decide whether or not to cover ailments. And diagnoses based on it determine whether people get special services at school; whether they qualify for disability benefits; whether they are stigmatised in their careers; even whether they are able to adopt children. Doctors, patients, drug companies and insurers have all thus been waiting for the latest edition of what has become known as the psychiatric bible.The DSM’s purpose is to set strict criteria for identifying mental disorders. This is supposed to make...

Welcome to the world! EVEN in rich countries childbirth is not a tidy affair. On an earthen floor in a dimly lit home in Bangladesh it can be a killer. Bangladesh has nevertheless reduced maternal deaths during childbirth by 40%, from 322 per 100,000 births to 194, during the first decade of this century. It has done so in several ways: by encouraging women to give birth in hospitals and clinics; by giving better training to the women who act as informal midwives for those who give birth at home; and by improving obstetric treatment when things go wrong. When exactly things are going wrong, though, is not always obvious. In particular, the blood of a healthy birth can be hard to distinguish from the blood of a life-threatening haemorrhage.An invention by Mohammad Abdul Quaiyum of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka should help to change that by providing a simple indication of whether a woman who has just given birth is in danger of bleeding to death. This invention is a standardised birth mat.Bangladeshi women often give birth on improvised mats, such as old saris. That gives them some comfort and hygienic...

IF A new and deadly strain of influenza were to arise, putting together a vaccine against it in the least possible time would be a priority. To test how quickly that could be done a group of researchers have just had a race with themselves. They have not quite matched the show sometimes given by workers at the Venetian arsenal, who would assemble a galley in a single day in order to overawe visiting foreign dignitaries. But Philip Dormitzer, Craig Venter and their colleagues did create the crucial component of a flu jab in four days and four hours.Dr Dormitzer, who works for Novartis, a drug company, and Dr Venter, eponymous founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, reported their record-breaking attempt in this week’s Science Translational Medicine. It began with the transmission to them from America’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the sequence data for the haemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes of a (to them) unknown flu virus.The team took this information and used it to make DNA that contained both the gene sequences themselves and the genetic apparatus needed to let a cell read those sequences and produce proteins from them. They then put these pieces of synthetic DNA—which were, in effect, tiny chromosomes—into cell cultures derived from dog kidneys, which have been found particularly effective for this...

CHIPMAKERS dislike quantum mechanics. Half a century of Moore’s law means their products have shrunk to the point where they are subject to the famous weirdness of the quantum world. That makes designing them difficult. Happily, those same quantum oddities can be turned into features rather than bugs. For many years researchers have been working on computers that would rely on the strange laws of quantum mechanics to do useful calculations. They would do this by using binary digits which, instead of having a value of either “one” or “zero”, had both at the same time. That might allow them to do some calculations much faster than non-quantum, “classical” computers can manage.Progress has been slow, but steady. And now it may be possible to see how a certain type of quantum computer performs in the real world. On May 15th, at a computing conference in Ischia in Italy, Catherine McGeoch, a computer scientist at Amherst College in Massachusetts, presented a paper describing the performance of a quantum computer manufactured by a Canadian firm called D-Wave.D-Wave has a colourful history. To much fanfare and press attention (including in The Economist...

Gotcha! PALAEOETHOLOGY, working out how long-extinct animals behaved, is a subject whose practitioners can never, definitively, be proved right. But that does not stop them trying. The latest effort, to be presented later this month to the International Symposium on Pterosaurs in Rio de Janeiro, is an attempt by Michael Habib of the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, and Mark Witton at the University of Portsmouth, in Britain, to work out how one of the most peculiar of the flying reptiles of the Jurassic earned its living.Anurognathus and its relatives have been known for 90 years. They were the size of swifts and until now it had been thought that, like swifts, they chased around the sky after insects—a technique known as hawking. Dr Habib and Dr Witton believe this is wrong. They suspect instead that Anurognathus sat in wait for its prey, and then sallied forth to intercept it like a surface-to-air missile.They came to this conclusion by comparing Anurognathus with 36 birds and 20 bats from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Using a mix of...

Ice. Cubed OF ALL the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything.That is the main reason climatologists are interested in the Earth’s north and south poles. The waxing and waning of the ice provides an unambiguous signal of what is going on—and it is a signal which can be read in rocks a billion years old almost as easily as it can be observed today. But the poles are only two examples. Another would be welcome. And there is one.Though the amount of ice on the plateau of Tibet and its surrounding mountains, such as the Himalayas, Karakoram and Pamirs, is a lot smaller than that at the poles, it is still huge. The area’s 46,000 glaciers cover 100,000 square kilometres (40,000 square miles)—about 6% of the area of the Greenland ice cap. Another 1.7m square kilometres is permafrost, which can be up to 130 metres deep. That is equivalent to 7% of the Arctic’s permafrost. Unlike the ice at the poles, the fate of this ice affects a lot of people directly. The area is known by...

AT NOON on May 4th the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere around the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit 400 parts per million (ppm). The average for the day was 399.73 and researchers at the observatory expect this figure, too, to exceed 400 in the next few days. The last time such values prevailed on Earth was in the Pliocene epoch, 4m years ago, when jungles covered northern Canada.There have already been a few readings above 400ppm elsewhere—those taken over the Arctic Ocean in May 2012, for example—but they were exceptional. Mauna Loa is the benchmark for CO2 measurement (and has been since 1958, see chart) because Hawaii is so far from large concentrations of humanity. The Arctic, by contrast, gets a lot of polluted air from Europe and North America.The concentration of CO2 peaks in May, falls until October as plant growth in the northern hemisphere’s summer absorbs the gas, and then goes up again during winter and spring. This year the average reading for the whole month will probably also reach 400ppm, according to Pieter Tans, who is in charge of monitoring at Mauna Loa, and the seasonally adjusted annual figure will reach 400ppm in the spring...

IN 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley used an interferometer (a device that splits and recombines a beam of waves, to determine whether the recombined beam is still coherent) to measure the speed of light. It was thought at the time that light was the result of vibrations in an invisible “aether” that pervaded the universe. Since the Earth, as it journeyed through space, must move relative to that aether, Michelson and Morley expected that the daughter beams, which took different paths relative to the Earth’s movement, would move at different speeds.But they didn’t. The aether therefore did not exist. And that observational pebble, gathering speed as it rolled downhill, produced an avalanche which swept away classical physics and cleared the field for Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity—one of which, the general theory, encapsulates the modern description of gravity.It is therefore poetic justice that the latest attempt to sweep away Einstein’s version of the world in its turn also relies on an interferometer. This time, though, the beams travelling through it are made not of light, but of atoms.The second big difference, besides relativity, between classical and modern physics, is quantum theory. This depends on all waves also being particles, and all particles waves. So it is possible to make an atomic wave-beam, split it, and recombine it just as if it were...

Piles of profit AT THE beginning of April, Research Councils UK, a conduit through which the government transmits taxpayers’ money to academic researchers, changed the rules on how the results of studies it pays for are made public. From now on they will have to be published in journals that make them available free—preferably immediately, but certainly within a year.In February the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told federal agencies to make similar plans. A week before that, a bill which would require free access to government-financed research after six months had begun to wend its way through Congress. The European Union is moving in the same direction. So are charities. And SCOAP3, a consortium of particle-physics laboratories, libraries and funding agencies, is pressing all 12 of the field’s leading journals to make the 7,000 articles they publish each year free to read. For scientific publishers, it seems, the party may soon be over.It has, they would have to admit, been a good bash. The current enterprise—selling the results of other people’s work, submitted free of charge and vetted for nothing by third...

The way they were ONCE upon a time, according to folklore, a squirrel could travel through America’s chestnut forests from Maine to Florida without ever touching the ground. The chestnut population of North America was reckoned then to have been about 4 billion trees. No longer. Axes and chainsaws must take a share of the blame. But the principal culprit is Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungus that causes chestnut blight. In the late 19th century, some infected saplings from Asia brought C. parasitica to North America. By 1950 the chestnut was little more than a memory in most parts of the continent.American chestnuts may, however, be about to rise again—thanks to genetic engineering. This month three experimental patches will be planted, under the watchful eye of the Department of Agriculture, in Georgia, New York and Virginia. Along with their normal complements of genes, these trees have been fitted with a handful of others that researchers hope will protect them from the fungus.The project has been organised by the Forest Health Initiative (FHI), a quango set up to look into the idea of...

On April 29th Virgin Galactic, a private space firm, lit the engine on SpaceShipTwo, its air-launched suborbital rocketplane, for the first time. Unlike other companies such as SpaceX, which has contracts to launch satellites and resupply the International Space Station, Virgin is focusing on the tourist trade. For $200,000 a seat, customers will get a joyride just over the 100km-high (62-mile) Karman Line, which marks the boundary of space. After six minutes of weightlessness, SpaceShipTwo will ferry its passengers back to a landing strip in the Mojave desert. The successful test-firing is a milestone for a firm repeatedly hit by delays: passenger flights were originally scheduled to begin in 2007.

SOME people are convinced they are already out there: swarms of tiny flying drones discreetly surveying the world on behalf of their shadowy masters. In 2007 anti-war protesters in America claimed they were being watched by small hovering craft that looked like dragonflies. Officials maintained they really were dragonflies. Whatever the truth, robotic flies actually are now getting airborne.This week the successful flight of what are probably the smallest hovering robots yet was reported in Science by Robert Wood and his colleagues at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. These robots (pictured above) are the size of crane flies. Most small flying robots are helicopters—kept aloft by one or more rotating wings. These, though, are ornithopters, meaning their wings flap. Wingtip to wingtip they measure 3cm and they weigh just 80 milligrams. Like true flies (those known to entomologists as Diptera), and unlike dragonflies or butterflies, they have but a single pair of wings.Dr Wood, as he is quick to point out, is not trying to build a military drone. Rather, it is the basic science behind flying insects that he and...

Your pizza is on its way ON MAY 25th 2012 a Californian firm called SpaceX made the first privately run supply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). It was a vindication of NASA’s decision to outsource such missions to the private sector. Still, purists could argue that something was missing: a proper market has competition, but SpaceX was the only firm capable of doing it.That may be about to change. On April 21st, at NASA’s Wallops flight centre in Virginia, another rocket built by another firm—Virginia-based Orbital Sciences—lifted off from the pad, after several delays. A launch attempt on April 17th was scrubbed after a data cable came loose. Another try on April 20th had to be abandoned because of high winds. This time, though, nothing went wrong. A few minutes after the launch the Antares rocket was safely in orbit, prompting cheers and sighs of relief on the ground.Admittedly, the flight was only an initial test. The Antares went nowhere near the ISS itself. Nor was it carrying one of Orbital’s Cygnus space capsules, which, if all proceeds according to plan, will one day perform the actual docking with the ISS. But it...

ALTHOUGH it is the weekend, a small factory in the Haidian district of Beijing is hard at work. Eight machines, the biggest the size of a delivery van, are busy making things. Yet the factory, owned by Beijing Longyuan Automated Fabrication System (known as AFS), appears almost deserted. This is because it is using additive-manufacturing machines, popularly known as three-dimensional (3D) printers, which run unattended day and night, seven days a week.The printers require an occasional visit from a supervisor to top them up with the powdered materials they use as their “inks”, or to remove a completed item, but apart from that they can be left on their own. They build up the objects they are making one layer at a time, as the ink is sintered into place with a laser in a way that creates little waste and can make shapes impossible to achieve using the traditional “subtractive” technology of lathes, milling machines and cutting tools.Though it is not yet ready for use in mass production (building things up is slower than trimming them down), 3D printing is excellent for making prototypes, customised jobs and short production runs, for there is no need to retool each time...

TO MOST people, bumblebees are charming, slightly absurd creatures that blunder through garden and meadow with neither the steely determination of the honeybee nor the malevolent intention of the wasp. If you are a plant, though, things look rather different—for from the point of view of some flowering plants many bumblebees are nothing more than thieves. They...

PANCREATIC cancer is a dreadful disease. Even in rich countries, only about 4% of those diagnosed with it are still alive after five years. In America it is the third-most-common cause of cancer deaths among women, after lung and breast cancer; among men it is fourth, after lung, prostate and colorectal cancer. Dispiritingly, there has been little progress in treating it for more than a quarter of a century.The reason pancreatic cancer is so deadly is that it metastasises quickly. This spreading of secondary tumours around the body damages other organs and has proved impossible to stop. But a group of researchers led by Claudia Gravekamp of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, have an intriguing idea for changing that. As they describe in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they plan to do it by infecting people with radioactive bacteria.Dr Gravekamp came up with the idea following her discovery that weakened bacteria (specifically, a modified form of Listeria monocytogenes) she was using for other purposes in tumour-afflicted mice, and which were cleared from most of the animal’s body by its immune system over the course of a few days, remained in the tumours. This was thanks to the ability cancer cells evolve to suppress the immune system’s activities within their purview. Without...

At the centre of this picture is a blob thought to be the parachute from the first mission to survive a trip to Mars’s surface—the Soviet Union’s Mars 3, which arrived in 1971. The picture is part of a larger image taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an American craft that has been circling the planet since 2006. The work of hunting through the 1.8 billion pixels in the original image was done by Russian space enthusiasts. Besides the parachute, they reckon they have found Mars 3’s heat shield and the probe itself. It is the latest development in the nascent field of space archaeology, which studies the history of space flight. In March a team led by Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, made the biggest discovery yet, when it raised engine parts from one of America’s Saturn V moon rockets from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

IN FEBRUARY an 87-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Shanghai. What started as a cough progressed to a fever. One week later, unable to breathe and with his brain inflamed, he died. Shortly afterwards, a 27-year-old pork butcher was admitted to the same hospital with similar symptoms. He died too, within a week. A 35-year-old housewife who went to hospital in Anhui on March 19th lasted only slightly longer. On March 31st officials confirmed these were the first three cases of a strain of influenza, H7N9, that had never before been seen in humans.The government responded quickly—a far cry from its reaction, ten years ago, to a similar cluster of cases in Guangdong. That infection turned out to be SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). At first, officials tried to hide that disease. The deceit served to ensure its spread and it went on to kill nearly 800 people. Much has changed in the past decade. This time officials quickly posted H7N9’s genetic sequence, then published a detailed report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even so, H7N9 has infected at least 82 people and killed 17 of them. The virus’s path of transmission is not...

A POKER face. It is the expressionless gaze that gives nothing away. To win at poker, the face must be mastered, and master it is what the best players try their best to do. But a study just published in Psychological Science by Michael Slepian of Stanford University and his colleagues suggests that even people with the best poker faces give the game away. They do so, however, not with their heads but with their hands.Mr Slepian made his discovery when he showed 78 undergraduate volunteers video clips of players placing bets at the 2009 World Series of Poker. (Bets in poker are placed by pushing chips into the middle of the table.) The clips were 1.6 seconds long, on average, and featured different parts of the players’ anatomies. Some showed everything visible from the table up: chest, arms and head. Some showed just the face. And some showed only the arms and hands. Each volunteer watched only one of the three types of video, but was shown several examples.After each viewing, volunteers were asked to rate the quality of the player’s hand on a seven-point scale. Then, when they had finished watching all the clips, they were asked to rate their...

Examining the case THE nine justices on America’s Supreme Court must apply their minds to the thorniest of legal questions. On April 15th they were presented with a particularly testing puzzler: should the law allow people to patent human genes?The case is the culmination of a battle that began in 2009. It pits America’s Association for Molecular Pathology and various other interested parties—represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union—against Myriad Genetics, a biotechnology firm that holds patents on two human genes, called BRCA1 and BRCA2. That makes Myriad the sole producer of tests to detect mutations in those genes. Such mutations often increase a woman’s risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer.It is an emotionally charged question. Patent offices around the world have been granting patents on genes, human and otherwise, for decades, but time has done little to soften opposition to the idea. Laymen are often baffled when they find out that it is possible to patent parts of the human genome. Anti-patenting campaigners argue that the idea of claiming a patent over the...