Economist Science & Technology

IN THE 1970s researchers lounging on bean bags at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) churned out the inventions that would trigger the coming revolution in information technology. The computer mouse was born here, as were icons, windows, Ethernet networking and the laser printer. Today, although the bean bags are long gone and PARC was spun out as a subsidiary a decade ago, its researchers are once again experimenting with printing. This time they are hoping to produce the technologies for a 21st-century revolution in clean energy.PARC’s Hardware Systems Laboratory is developing electric-vehicle lithium-ion batteries that can hold 20% more energy than traditional designs. Making a battery that can store more energy requires a larger cathode containing more lithium ions. However, the thicker the cathode, the slower the ions will move through it. This reduces the battery’s power, leading to sluggish acceleration.PARC wants to evade this trade-off by constructing cathodes from two materials: one dense, and optimised for storage; the other porous, for the speedy transfer of charge. Wide storage regions would alternate with narrow conductive regions. That will enable a larger and more energy-dense battery to be constructed without sacrificing its power.This basic idea has been understood for some time. The trick is building the regions small enough (about 100 microns...

THOSE who take part in clinical trials often have to do nasty things, from taking new drugs to forgoing sleep. Participants in a trial organised by Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio, had a decidedly easier task: eating steak. After reading Dr Hazen’s conclusions, though, they may be inclined to eat rather less of it.A link between red-meat consumption and heart disease was perceived by epidemiologists several decades ago, but the nature of this link has never been properly explained. Blame’s finger usually points at saturated fats and cholesterol. Red meat contains both. But a big recent study showed no connection between saturated fat and heart disease, so something else is probably involved. Dr Hazen thinks he knows what. As he outlines in a paper just published in Nature Medicine, he believes the blame actually lies with the microbiome—the collection of 100 trillion or so bacteria that live in the human gut.Generally, members of the microbiome get on well with their host. They digest complex carbohydrates that human enzymes cannot handle, thus increasing the nutritional value of food. They also fend off infections by hostile bugs...

Drowned by a sea of troubles FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S widely cited maxim—“that which does not kill him makes him stronger”—is often taken as truth. Yet as sensible as it might seem, the saying has rarely been tested. Psychologists have little idea whether unpleasant experiences really do increase resilience. A study just published in Psychological Science suggests they do exactly the opposite.In 1995 David Almeida, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, began an experiment involving 1,483 people. He asked them to take two tests. The first involved reporting, on a scale of one to five (where one was “none of the time” and five was “all of the time”), how often during the previous 30 days they had felt worthless, hopeless, nervous, restless or fidgety; how much of the time everything felt like an effort; and how often they were so sad that they felt nothing could cheer them up.The second test asked whether any of several types of stress had happened during the course of the previous day. These stresses included arguments; situations in which participants felt they could have argued but chose not to; problems at...

MEN have long wondered what exactly it is that women want. Some pore over men’s magazines, with their promises of “washboard abs”, for guidance. The more scientifically minded look for experimental data. The latest evidence comes from a group of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University. They gathered 105 heterosexual Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist ratio and flaccid penis size. The women were asked to rate the men as sexual partners.In an article just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Mautz and his team describe their results. Happily for the insecure, although the women did indeed find a larger penis alluring, it was not the most important factor. That honour went to the combination of broad shoulders and a narrow waist, which accounted for around three-quarters of the variation in attractiveness all by itself. Height was also only a weak predictor of appeal. That is odd, says Dr Mautz, because other studies have linked height with all sorts of benefits,...

LESS is sometimes more. That was the message delivered this week by Meghna Das Thakur of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, in Emeryville, California, to the American Association for Cancer Research’s meeting in Washington, DC. If a cancer evolves resistance to the drug being used to treat it, withdrawing that drug can sometimes stop the cancer in its tracks as effectively as prescribing treatment in the first place. Oncologists have suspected this for a while. Dr Thakur has, however, proved it is true—at least in the specific case of malignant melanoma and a drug called vemurafenib.In oncological circles vemurafenib has been a wonder of the age. It was one of the first reasonably reliable treatments for metastised melanoma. In those who respond, it causes tumours to shrivel within weeks. The problem is that continual mutation within what little of the tumour remains usually throws up resistant cell lines, and so most patients see their tumours rebound between six and nine months later. Once that happens, little can be done.Or so it seemed. But Dr Thakur and her colleagues wondered if the apparently counter-intuitive approach of withdrawing treatment might have a positive effect.Roughly half of melanomas—and all of those that respond to vemurafenib—are driven by a mutation in the gene for a protein called BRAF. This protein helps regulate the cycle of growth...

Meet Australopithecus sediba, which lived about 2m years ago. Parts of six A. sediba skeletons were found in 2008 near Malapa, South Africa, by a team led by Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand. The three most complete ones were used to make this reconstruction, published in this week’s Science. A set of accompanying papers describe the fossils and speculate about their significance. A. sediba, like other species of Australopithecus, displays a mixture of features that reflect its simian past and anticipate its human future. It has a chimpanzee-like foot, for example, but a human-like pelvis, hands and teeth. Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University concludes from the anatomy of its foot that A. sediba was still quite arboreal. Other papers examine its jaw, hands, backbone and rib cage. A. sediba is the most recent australopithecine known. Where it fits into the human family tree is unclear. It is contemporary with the earliest member of the genus Homo, H. habilis, so it cannot be a direct ancestor. But it is probably a close relative of that ancestor.

Highways of thought AFTER much trailing, the reality is out. On April 2nd President Barack Obama announced that America’s government will back a project intended to unlock the mysteries of the human brain. It was, according to the trails, to have been known as the Brain Activity Map. But someone clearly spotted that BAM, as an acronym, is a hostage to fortune and the project is now to be known as the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative. By what is no doubt a complete coincidence, that spells “BRAIN”.The crucial part of the initiative—the bit everyone had been waiting to hear—is the money. Mr Obama will ask Congress, in the budget he submits on April 10th, to approve $100m for its first year of operation. That is a small amount, compared with the $5.5 billion spent each year on neuroscience by America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). But it is more, even adjusted for inflation, than the $28m spent on the Human Genome Project in its first year.Comparisons with the genome project are inevitable, but misleading. That operation had an objective that was both clear and finite. The size of the human...

Waste not, want not COFFEE is big business. One consequence is a lot of caffeine-rich waste which cannot be thrown away willy-nilly because caffeine is a pollutant. It inhibits both the germination of seedlings and the growth of adult plants, so it must be collected and dumped at approved sites.This is a pity for two reasons. One is that it increases the cost of a cup of coffee. The other is that the waste is rich in nutrients. If it could be decaffeinated, it might be used as animal feed—thus adding to coffee companies’ revenues rather than subtracting from them. But that would require a cheap way to decaffeinate it. Which is what Jeffrey Barrick of the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues hope they have found. Their research, published in Synthetic Biology, suggests the answer lies with genetically modified bacteria.The idea of using bacteria to decaffeinate waste is not new. Past studies showed that a species called Pseudomonas putida can chew the molecule up. But it does so in small quantities, and no one knew enough about it to work out how to increase its efficiency. Dr...

THE climax of “Sleeper”, a futuristic fantasy from the 1970s that was directed by, and starred, Woody Allen, has Mr Allen’s character throw the preserved, disembodied nose of a dictator beneath a steamroller. In a movie filled with orgasmatrons and car-sized bananas, it is a last absurd gesture that vanquishes the villains. If the film were made today, though, those villains might simply print another nose.The idea of printing organs has moved beyond the realm of fantasy, as the technology of three-dimensional printing (in which layers of material are laid down one at a time to create a solid object) has improved. Though implantable organs are still beyond reach, researchers have used the technique to build layers of cells into living tissues. And as several recent papers—including one this week in Science by Hagan Bayley, a chemical biologist at Oxford University—show, this approach is evolving fast.The first of these papers, published in Biofabrication on February 4th by Wenmiao Shu of Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, described a machine gentle enough to print human embryonic stem cells in a distinct pattern. Such cells are pluripotent, meaning they are able to become any type of cell in the body. That makes them valuable research tools. They can, for example, be turned into pure samples of human tissue on which to test...

 IF YOU thought the Higgs boson was elusive, consider the case of dark matter. The Higgs—the particle that gives other subatomic species mass—was predicted in 1964 but actually nabbed only last year. That 48-year hunt, though, was a breeze compared with the one for dark matter. Physicists have known the stuff must exist since 1933, when Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astro-physicist, coined the term to describe a substance which cannot be seen but without which visible galaxies would fly apart as they rotate. The latest results from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite suggest it makes up 85% of all the matter in the universe (up from an earlier estimate of around 80%).Like the Higgs boson, though, the actual particles of which dark matter is composed have proved elusive. Eight decades after Zwicky’s observations, and dozens of experiments later, they remain undetected. But on April 3rd an experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) offered the most tantalising hints yet.Although Samuel Ting, the Nobel laureate who heads the effort, presented the findings at CERN (Europe’s, and the world’s, principal particle-physics laboratory), they...

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does...

Ready for take-off THE best-known examples of natural selection in the modern world are where people have set out to kill members of other species en masse, and those species have pushed back: antibiotic resistance in bacteria; insecticide resistance in mosquitoes; herbicide resistance in weeds. These are well studied because cause and effect are clear, and the consequences are serious for humanity. But people can create evolutionary pressures accidentally as well as deliberately, and Charles and Mary Brown of the Universities of Tulsa and Nebraska-Lincoln have discovered an intriguing case in a population of vertebrates: American cliff swallows.The cliff swallow, as its name suggests, likes to build its hardened-mud nests on cliff faces. Its predicament is that humanity has provided a lot of handy extra cliffs in the form of road bridges. That is useful for the birds, but also dangerous if they land on the road underneath, and for 30 years the Drs Brown have been collecting and measuring swallows killed by cars and lorries, and also living specimens they capture in mist nets. Their conclusion, published this week in ...

ONCE a year, on December 10th, Stockholm hosts the dishing out of the Nobel prizes. It is quite a party: the white-tie award ceremony itself, complete with orchestra, happens in the city’s concert hall and is broadcast live on television. Some 1,300 lucky luminaries then transfer to the city hall for a banquet, also broadcast (a fashion expert even provides a running commentary on the gowns worn by the women). Finally, students at Stockholm University host a less formal but more raucous after-party for the laureates and their guests. For that, mercifully, the TV cameras are switched off.The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a brand-new award, is a conscious attempt to sprinkle a similar kind of stardust onto engineering, which has long worried that it is seen as a bit of a poor relation to more academic science. At a half-hour ceremony held on March 18th at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the prize committee honoured Marc Andreessen, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin, all of whom were instrumental in the development of the modern internet. The Swedish-style pomp and circumstance will come on June 25th, when the queen will...

AMONG the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not—for neither teeth nor claws existed.Then, in the 20m-year blink of a geological eye, animals arrived in force. Most of the main groups of the animal kingdom—arthropods, brachiopods, coelenterates, echinoderms, molluscs and even chordates, the branch from which vertebrates went on to develop—are found in the fossil beds of the Cambrian. The sudden evolution of this megafauna is known as the Cambrian explosion. But two centuries after it was noticed, in the mountains of Wales after which the Cambrian period is named, nobody knows what detonated it.A group of Chinese scientists, led by Zhu Maoyan of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology...

A NOVEL radar will soon be helping to keep an eye on aircraft flying over London. Conventional radar uses a rotating antenna to sweep the sky, sending out radio pulses and detecting those which are reflected back from aircraft. The experimental system that will begin operation in June does not send out any signals of its own, but instead relies on a network of receivers to pick up television programmes.It is hard to imagine British TV staples like “Cash in the Attic”, “Downton Abbey” and endless repeats of “Top Gear” being used to detect aircraft. But that, in effect, is what will be happening. By measuring the slight differences between the original broadcast signal and the signals reflected from aircraft flying in the vicinity, it is possible to plot the position of aircraft on a screen, just as is done with conventional radar. The difference is that a system that relies on signals already in the air can be simpler, cheaper and use a lot less power.The London trial is being run by Thales UK, an engineering group, Roke Manor Research, an R&D consultancy, and NATS, which manages Britain’s air-traffic control. It is backed by the British government’s Technology...

THE heavens do not lend themselves to poking and prodding. Astronomers therefore have no choice but to rely on whatever data the cosmos deigns to throw at them. And they have learnt a lot this way. Thus you can even (see article) study chemistry in space that would be impossible in a laboratory. Some astronomers, though, are dissatisfied with being passive observers. Real scientists, they think, do experiments.It is impossible—not to mention inadvisable—to get close enough to a star or a black hole to manipulate it experimentally. But some think it might be possible to make meaningful analogues of such things, and even of the universe itself, and experiment on those instead.Ben Murdin of the University of Surrey, for example, has been making white dwarfs. A white dwarf is the stellar equivalent of a shrunken but feisty old-age pensioner. It has run out of fuel and is contracting and cooling as it heads towards oblivion—but taking its time about it. As they shrink white dwarfs pack a mass up to eight times the...

MOST people think of the empty space between the stars as being, well, empty. But it is not. It is actually filled with gas. Admittedly, at an average density of 100-1,000 molecules per cubic centimetre (compared with 100 billion billion in air at sea level), it is a pretty thin gas. But space is big, so altogether there is quite a lot of it.Most of it, about 92%, is hydrogen. A further 8% is helium, which is chemically inert. But a tiny fraction—less than one-tenth of a percent—consists of molecules with other elements, such as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, in them. Though these other elements are a mere soupçon of the interstellar soup, they do give it real flavour.Signs of lifeSo far about 180 types of these molecular ingredients have been detected in space from their microwave spectra—the energy produced when molecules rotate around their chemical bonds. There are two reasons for wanting to study them. One is that these molecules are probably the precursors of life. The other is that the rarefied nature of astrochemistry changes the way processes work. It means the individual steps in chemical reactions can be disentangled from one another in a way that is hard—...

EARLIER this year, the scientists operating a spacecraft called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter started making plans to look at something other than Mars. Their calculations showed that a newly discovered comet called ISON will come within 10m kilometres (6m miles) of their spacecraft in September. Comet ISON is causing quite a stir in astronomical circles, because if, after whizzing past Mars, it survives a close shave with the sun, there is a good chance that it will go on to emblazon itself spectacularly across the skies of Earth. How handy, astronomers thought, that there should be a spacecraft near enough to the comet’s inbound track to break off from its day job and take a first good look at this newcomer from the outer depths of the solar system.Now Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s operators have a second comet to study, and this one looks like coming 200 times closer than comet ISON will. This particular comet has the awkward name C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring). It was discovered on January 3rd by astronomers at the Siding Spring observatory in Australia. Calculations of its trajectory by researchers at NASA have it...

IN JOURNALISM, cynics suggest, three data points are enough for a trend. As of March 4th, AIDS researchers hope two might be sufficient. On that day Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University announced to the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, in Atlanta, Georgia, that a patient under her care had been cured of HIV infection. The announcement was hedged with caveats (“functionally cured” was the exact term used). But the bottom line was clear. Dr Persaud thinks her patient, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, has joined Timothy Brown, a man known to many as the “Berlin patient”, as a human who was once infected with HIV and now no longer is.The girl was born infected because her mother was infected but was not under treatment at the time (which would normally prevent mother-to-child transmission). She was given standard anti-retroviral drugs almost immediately and for 18 months afterwards. Doctors then lost track of her for five months and when she returned to their attention, they found the virus had vanished. Half a year later, despite the fact that she is no longer taking anti-AIDS medicine, there is no sign of HIV having returned.This is a...

THIS may look like a nondescript lump of rock, but it is, in fact, a sunstone. That, at least, is the opinion of Guy Ropars of Rennes University, in France, and his colleagues. Sunstones are legendary items supposed to have been used by Viking sailors in the days before magnetic compasses. Looking at the sky through one, it is said, would reveal the sun’s direction even on a cloudy day or when that fiery orb was below the horizon.Dr Ropars thinks sunstones were real, and were actually crystals of Iceland spar, a form of calcite that polarises light (and therefore reacts to polarised light). Light from the sky is polarised and, as he discovered in 2011, looking through a piece of Iceland spar reveals the direction of polarisation, and thus the direction of the sun, to within 5°.Dr Ropars also believes the use of sunstones persisted until at least the 16th century. Their existence is mentioned in church records, and they would have been useful because although magnetic compasses were known by then, they were unreliable for reasons not then understood, such as proximity to the large amounts of iron in ships’ cannons.He thinks this block of mineral is such a stone. It was...