SpaceX successfully reuses a rocket booster

IT WAS a nice piece of marketing. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 6.27pm on March 30th by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocketry company, had already been into space once. But there was to be no talk of “used” hardware. Instead, insisted the company, the booster was “flight proven”. And in the end, its mission—to deliver a communications satellite into geostationary orbit—went off without a hitch.

PR aside, successfully relaunching a used rocket is another impressive achievement for the firm. When Mr Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, his goal was a drastic cut in the cost of getting things into orbit. He has already delivered, to some extent: launch costs for a satellite on a Falcon 9 are substantially lower than on other rockets. But he has always insisted that cheap spaceflight will only be truly possible once rockets become reusable.

It is hard to argue. Aside from the Falcon 9, all the rockets flying commercially today are one-shot affairs. No airline would dream of destroying its planes after every flight. Yet once rockets have done their job, they are either dropped into the sea or abandoned in space. SpaceX hopes to change…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Managing supplies of vaccines is a huge problem

KEEP a tomato cool in a refrigerator and it will stay fresh far longer than it would at room temperature. Accidentally freeze it, though, and you will reduce it to a disgusting mush.

A similar problem plagues the storage of vaccines. About six in ten of those procured by UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, must be stored at a temperature between 2°C and 8°C. Generally, the focus of efforts to do this is on the top end of the range, with the establishment of “cold chains”, the links of which are refrigerators on the journey from factory to clinic, to stop vaccines overheating. Less effort is put into making sure a vaccine never gets too cold. But a vial of vaccine that has been accidentally frozen, and then thawed, may lose its potency as surely as one that has been warmed up.

A study published this week in Vaccine, by Celina Hanson of UNICEF and her colleagues, suggests that the overchilling of vaccines is alarmingly common. Dr Hanson and her team reviewed research that measured how often vaccines were exposed to temperatures below the lower limit. They combed through papers published between 2006 and 2015, and found 21 relevant studies conducted in 18 countries. Though not a representative global sweep, the studies in question covered both rich countries and poor ones, from several continents. Among the places they examined…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Elon Musk enters the world of brain-computer interfaces

EVER since ENIAC, the first computer that could be operated by a single person, began flashing its ring counters in 1946, human beings and calculating machines have been on a steady march towards tighter integration. Computers entered homes in the 1980s, then migrated onto laps, into pockets and around wrists. In the laboratory, computation has found its way onto molars and into eyeballs. The logical conclusion of all this is that computers will, one day, enter the brain.

This, at least, is the bet behind a company called Neuralink, just started by Elon Musk, a serial technological entrepreneur. Information about Neuralink is sparse, but trademark filings state that it will make invasive devices for treating or diagnosing neurological ailments. Mr Musk clearly has bigger plans, though. He has often tweeted cryptic messages referring to “neural lace”, a science-fictional concept invented by Iain M. Banks, a novelist, that is, in essence, a machine interface woven into the brain.

Although devices that can read and write data to and from the brain as easily as they would to and from a computer remain firmly in the realm of imagination, that has not stopped…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Small-brained birds get killed by cars

I’m okay. I know the Green Cross Code

NATURAL selection is a harsh interrogator at the best of times. But if you are a bird, it has an extra question, not asked so forcefully of animals that cannot fly: “is that extra gram of weight really necessary?” Contrary to the insult “bird-brained”, birds are not notably more stupid than mammals, but the pressure to keep organs light applies to the cerebrum as much as it does to anything else.

For the past century, though, birds have faced a new enemy that might require them to get smarter: the motor car. These days, cars and other motorised vehicles kill around 250m birds a year. That sounds like a significant selective pressure, so Anders Moller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Sud, in France, decided to find out whether it really was.

Dr Moller’s hypothesis was that avoiding vehicles needs intelligence, and intelligence needs a big brain. The conclusion of this syllogism is that small-brained birds are more likely to be road-kill than large-brained birds are. To test this idea, though, he needed data on a lot of dead birds.

That serendipity plays a part…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Airborne particles cause more than 3m early deaths a year

GOVERNMENTS fret over traffic and other local nuisances that create filthy air. But research just published in Nature by Zhang Qiang, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and an international team including environmental economists, physicists and disease experts, suggests the problem has a global dimension, too. Dr Zhang’s analysis estimates that in 2007—the first year for which complete industrial, epidemiological and trade data were available when the team started work—more than 3m premature deaths around the world were caused by emissions of fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5, because the particles in question are less than 2.5 microns across).

Of these, the team reckon just under an eighth were associated with pollutants released in a part of the world different from that in which the death occurred, thanks to transport of such particles from place to place by the wind. Almost twice as many (22% of the total) were a consequence of goods and services that were produced in one region (often poor) and then exported for consumption in another (often rich, and with more finicky environmental standards for its own manufacturers).

In effect, such rich countries are exporting air pollution, and its associated deaths, as they import goods. As far as China is concerned, that phenomenon is probably abating. Chinese coal…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A simple device designed to detect chemical weapons

NERVE agents such as sarin and VX can kill quickly in low doses. Kim Jong Nam, half brother of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, was recently murdered by having VX smeared on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport. Though the use of nerve agents is supposed to be banned by treaty, governments and terrorists have deployed them, and may do so again in the future. At the moment, there is no simple way for soldiers in the field, or inspectors looking for manufacturing and storage sites, to detect nerve agents. The electrochemical sensors involved are bulky and awkward to use.

On civvy street, meanwhile, similar chemicals are employed as pesticides to ward off insects that might otherwise damage fruit and vegetable crops. If such crops are not thoroughly washed after picking, or have been overdosed in the first place, then they, too, may present a health hazard. Yet inspecting them to see if they are contaminated can also be a hassle.

It would be better all round if people had suitable detection technology available at their fingertips. And Joseph Wang of the University of California, San Diego, reports in ACS Sensors that he has a system that achieves this quite literally.

Sarin, VX and their kind are chemicals called organophosphorus compounds, which can be deactivated by an enzyme known as organophosphorus hydrolase. Existing…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Analysing brain signals to let a patient control his arm

DURING a 250km (150-mile) bike ride for charity in Ohio, William Kochevar found himself cycling behind a mail van when it pulled over to make deliveries. Distracted and tired, Mr Kochevar did not brake in time. The accident, in 2006, left him paralysed from the shoulders down. Now, with the help of electrodes that transmit signals from his brain to his muscles, he has been able to grasp a fork and feed himself for the first time in over a decade. The procedure that allowed Mr Kochevar to achieve the feat is reported in the Lancet this week.

Bolu Ajiboye and Bob Kirsch, biomedical engineers at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate nerve cells responsible for arm movements in the motor cortex of Mr Kochevar’s brain. The technique highlighted a patch of his brain to which the blood supply increased whenever Mr Kochevar imagined moving his arm. The team then implanted at that spot two 4x4mm chips, each with an array of 96 tiny electrodes, to measure the electrical activity of the 100 or so nerve cells there. They also implanted 36 stimulating electrodes in the muscles of his right hand and arm.

With the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly

ON JANUARY 1st the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did something that may help to change the practice of science. It brought into force a policy, foreshadowed two years earlier, that research it supports (it is the world’s biggest source of charitable money for scientific endeavours, to the tune of some $4bn a year) must, when published, be freely available to all. On March 23rd it followed this up by announcing that it will pay the cost of putting such research in one particular repository of freely available papers.

To a layman, this may sound neither controversial nor ground-breaking. But the crucial word is “freely”. It means papers reporting Gates-sponsored research cannot be charged for. No pay walls. No journal subscriptions. That is not a new idea, but the foundation’s announcement gives it teeth. It means recipients of Gates’ largesse can no longer offer their wares to journals such as Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, since reading the contents of these publications costs money.

That will hurt. Publication in…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Powerful whirlwinds explain an odd feature of the Atacama desert

Crystal clear?

THE Salar de Gorbea, at the southern end of the Atacama desert, in Chile, is one of the most hostile places on Earth. It receives virtually no rainfall and the little water it does host is contained in ponds both acidic and salty. It therefore has no vegetation. It is, though, the site of some of the most extraordinary dunes on Earth.

Most dunes are made of sand: grains of silica that are 2mm across, or less. There are exceptions. The White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, for example, is so called because the ingredients of its dunes are sand-grain-sized crystals of gypsum. But this exception proves the rule, because the point about a dune is that it is created by the wind, and when it comes to minerals, the wind can generally pick up and move around only sand-sized objects. The dunes of Salar de Gorbea, however, are an exception that proves no rule at all. They, too, are white, because they are also made of gypsum. But the gypsum in question includes crystals more than 20cm long. How such dunes could form by wind action has long been a mystery. Kathleen Benison, of West Virginia University, thinks, however, that she has solved…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A new way to classify dinosaurs

AS EVERY school-aged aficionado of dinosaurs knows, those terrible reptiles are divided into two groups: the Saurischia and the Ornithischia—or, to people for whom that is all Greek, the lizard-hipped and the bird-hipped. The names go back 130 years, to 1887, when they were invented and applied by Harry Seeley, a British palaeontologist.

Seeley determined that the arrangement of the bones in a dinosaur’s pelvis—specifically, whether the pubic bone points forwards (Saurischia) or backwards (Ornithischia)—could be used to assign that species to one of these two groups. In his view, and that of subsequent palaeontologists, the evolution of other features of dinosaur skeletons supported the idea that these two hip-defined groups were what are now referred to as clades, each having a single common ancestor. Seeley thereby thought he had overthrown the dinosaurs as a true clade themselves: he believed Saurischia and Ornithischia were descended separately from a group called the thecodonts.

Subsequent analysis suggests he was wrong about that. The dinosaurs do seem to be a proper clade, with a single thecodont ancestor. But the basic division Seeley made of them,…Continue reading
Source: Economist