A handy collaborator

THE most popular event at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Seattle at the end of May, was the Amazon Picking Challenge. Dozens of humanoid robots competed to move items ranging from rubber ducks to paperback books between shelves and a plastic bin, thus simulating the process of assembling an order at the retailer’s warehouse. An enthusiastic crowd of academics and roboticists gathered to applaud every success. In the event their cheers were few and far between. Many robots failed to grasp a single item. Even the winner picked just ten during its 20-minute test.

The problem is that although robots are good at precise, complex activities like welding a car, they are terrible at tasks humans find trivial, such as recognising objects and planning how to navigate or work around them. Building a robot that can move (slowly) through a home or workplace also requires lots of computing power, sophisticated actuators (a type of motor), a host of sensors and a hefty battery. Little surprise, then, that some of the robots in the Amazon competition cost as much as half a million dollars.

A more sensible solution, according to Walterio Mayol-Cuevas of the University of Bristol, in England, is to use people for navigation and planning and give robots the freedom to do what they do best. In a paper he presented at the conference, Dr...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1dh8U70

Chop-chop

HELICOPTERS have clear advantages over fixed-wing aircraft. But they also have a big drawback: they are slow. The fastest struggle to exceed about 320kph (200mph)—less than the cruising speed of a second-world-war-era propeller plane.

At an aircraft-testing facility in Florida, though, a strange-looking helicopter has taken to the skies that may help to close that gap. There are two striking things about the Sikorsky S-97 Raider. The first is its set of two rotors, mounted one on top of the other and turning in opposite directions around a central shaft—much like the radio-controlled helicopters sold in toy shops. The second is the absence of a tail rotor. In its place sits a backwards-facing “pusher” propeller.

Start with the rotors. Such a “coaxial” arrangement has been found in a few helicopters over the years. Kamov, a Russian company, makes one that is often used to lift heavy loads. But the mechanical complexity and the risk of the blades hitting one another has made such machines unpopular. Modern engineering methods, together with the use of stiffer carbon-composite blades that are less likely to flex and collide, promise to...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1G9aQK6

Reviving ancient shells’ colours

The pigment molecules that give living things their dazzling colours are delicate things that degrade over time, which is why the palaeontological specimens in museums often look dull. But a trick discovered in the 1970s helped: dipping ancient shells in sodium hypochlorite (the active ingredient in household bleach) and then exposing them to ultraviolet light revealed colours and patterns that could not otherwise be seen. The approach remained little-known, but this week a study in PLOS ONE hugely extends the age of shells examined with it. Specimens from the Jurassic period, unearthed in France, showed complex patterns that researchers thought did not arise until 100m years later. The shells’ colours arise from leftover, degraded pigment fragments, so they are unlikely to be those the creatures displayed in life. But the patterns will be a great help in piecing together how these ancient gastropods and bivalves led to today’s.

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1G9aS4u

And then there were five

THERE are, broadly speaking, four ways to fight cancer. You can cut a tumour out, with surgery. Or you can try one of three different ways of killing it. Radiotherapy targets tumours with radiation. Chemotherapy uses chemicals that poison all rapidly dividing cells, cancerous ones included. “Targeted therapies”, as their name suggests, recognise particular features specific to cancer cells.

Singly and in combination, these four types of treatment have contributed to a steady increase in the survival rates for most kinds of cancer. Now they may be joined by a fifth. At this year’s meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), in Chicago, the assembled researchers heard about the latest progress in “immuno-oncology”.

Modern medicine provides every reason to think that the immune system—which, after all, is there to keep the rest of the body safe—can and does attack cancers. People whose immune systems have been weakened, either by disease or by medicines designed to help them tolerate organ transplants, run a greater risk of malignancies. Many risk factors for cancer, such as a bad diet, heavy drinking, stress and smoking...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1G9aQJU

The world’s lawyer

Lynch shoots. She scores!

TO RUSSIA’S foreign ministry, the American mass indictment of FIFA officials is just another example of the superpower trying to “set itself up as a judge far outside its borders”. Few would take Russia’s counsel on international law, but in this case it is on to something. American prosecutors like Loretta Lynch (pictured) do indeed reach much farther than their peers elsewhere—sometimes too far.

They can do so partly because of America’s financial pre-eminence and the global status of the greenback. America’s crime-busters claim the right to go after anyone who uses its banking system (including indirectly, using “correspondent” banks to clear payments) or plans an illegal scheme on its soil. Some of the accused FIFA officials and marketing executives allegedly discussed or engaged in palm-greasing while in America. Several banks and branches that handled transactions are American, and some of the implicated associations and marketing companies have offices there.

American prosecutors are also unusually creative, using a different law when the one that appears most relevant lacks...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1M7QSzs

Taxi for Blatter!

IN THE afterglow of his re-election for a fifth term as president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter posed the question himself: “Why would I step down? That would mean I recognise I did wrong.” Four days later, on June 2nd, the 79-year-old Swiss who has run football’s governing body for 17 years announced his resignation, which will take effect when a successor is chosen at a special congress by March 2016.

Accounts differ as to why Mr Blatter decided to call time on his 40-year stint at FIFA. One likely explanation is that he had been warned that investigations into corruption at FIFA by the FBI and Swiss prosecutors were already lapping at the door of his Zurich office and that his lawyers advised him that he would be in a better position to fight charges, should they come, if he were to resign.

Mr Blatter will have been disturbed by reports the day before that American investigators were linking his deputy, Jérôme Valcke, to payments worth $10m in 2008 to people including Jack Warner—the disgraced and now-indicted former head of CONCACAF, the governing body of football in North and Central America and the Caribbean. The payments are alleged to...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1M7QQrh

Good money, bad money

SPORTS fans love to lament the corrupting influence of money on their favourite games. And the scandal at FIFA would appear to prove them right. If only athletes could just exemplify virtues like perseverance and teamwork, as the organisers of the Olympics insist they do. In the real world, however, sport cannot be separated from money. And the very trend that the purists decry—the transformation of supposedly innocent games into big business—provides some of the best protection against malfeasance.

Corruption in the sports world comes in three flavours: cheating to win (such as doping), cheating to lose (match-fixing) and cheating off the field (kickbacks for marketing rights and other business deals). The first, regrettably, is widespread and almost impossible to eradicate. Competitive athletes will always seek an edge and their chemists will always be one step ahead of the testers. The other two are patchier, because they emerge from poor management, and are a little easier to attack.

Match-fixing has faded from most Western fans’ memories since the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, when American baseball players took bribes to...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1AMqhaR

Making labour joyful

BIRTH is an unpredictable affair. One moment you are contentedly showering your enormous, overstretched self, or lying on a hard hospital bed with nothing much to do; the next all hell is breaking loose, the midwife screaming, rubber gloves flying, monitors beeping, partner fled to the loo, and the Mozart tape you brought to usher the new soul into the world completely beside the point. The only entity in control is Nature, crushing through you with a propulsive force sufficient to dislodge the planet.

Now, said Elisabeth Bing, things should not be like that. Birth would often be surprising, but the prospective mother could also stay in charge: awake, alert, undrugged, and even to some degree enjoying herself. First, she should have spent many weeks on relaxation exercises, learning to let the rest of her body droop pleasantly while the uterus did all the work. Next, she would have practised breathing, greeting each contraction with a “deep cleansing breath” and bidding it farewell with a smile. Even the strongest spasms could be crested with a speedy set of puffings and blowings, while her equally well-instructed partner massaged her back and...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1MppopT

Eating greens

PEOPLE who live in São Paulo say their restaurants are the equivalent of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches: the main sites of recreation and refuge from the teeming city. These days they are emptier than usual. When they eat at home, paulistanos are switching from beef to chicken and vegetables, which are cheaper.

This change in dietary habits is caused by the gloom that has enveloped Brazil for much of the past year. A recession is looming (see chart 1). The economy shrank by 0.2% in the first three months of 2015, and by 1.6% between that period and the same quarter a year before. Employment and real incomes are contracting (see chart 2); interest rates and inflation are rising. The country feels leaderless: the president, Dilma Rousseff, has been weakened by a mammoth scandal at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, as well as by the economy’s dismal performance.

And yet...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1JomMdn

Truth and consequences

Hello, assimilation

FOR more than a century, Canadian governments removed aboriginal children from their homes and put them in residential schools modelled on Victorian poor houses. Some 150,000 passed through 139 of these Dickensian establishments from 1883 to 1998. In the 1940s they housed nearly a third of aboriginal children of school age. Half were physically or sexually abused and around 6,000 died. Today Canada’s 1.4m aboriginal people have lower incomes on average and higher rates of incarceration, suicide and disease than the general population. Those brutal boarding schools are part of the reason.

In 2008 a “truth and reconciliation commission” was set up as part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by survivors against the government and churches that operated the schools. The government has so far paid out C$4.4 billion ($3.5 billion) in compensation. On June 2nd, after seven years of sometimes excruciating testimony, the commission issued 94 recommendations. Together, they are meant to be a blueprint for reconciliation between non-aboriginal Canadians and the country’s three indigenous groups,...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Igxfog

Mixing tequila and caipirinha

YOU can tell that a relationship is dire when one of the parties trumpets that it is being “reinvented” while the other urges that the couple shouldn’t “turn their backs on each other”. The first declaration came from Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president. The second was made by Dilma Rousseff, his Brazilian counterpart, who was paying her first state visit to Mexico on May 25th-27th. The two promised a new start. They pledged to boost trade and signed agreements to facilitate investment and expand air links. And they toasted each other with Mexican tequila and Brazilian cachaça, the cane liquor used in caipirinhas.

Brazil and Mexico are the two giants of Latin America. Between them they account for more than half of the region’s population, GDP and exports. And yet they have largely ignored each other. True, bilateral trade has doubled over the past ten years, but only to $9.2 billion a year; neither is among the other’s top seven trading partners. When in 2012 Brazil found itself with a negative trade balance in cars under a free-trade pact, it tore this up and replaced it with a quota system.

Investment is an exception to the...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1JomMdj

Quickie kidnappings

TWO cars pulled up as a university student and her boyfriend were leaving a party in Caracas last December. Four men wrestled the student into one, her boyfriend into the other. “They drove around the city and negotiated with us over the phone while my daughter sat in the back seat,” says the student’s mother, Martha González, a teacher. The car never left Caracas; the abduction lasted just two hours. A ransom was agreed; Mrs González’s daughter and her boyfriend were freed.

Classic kidnappings are elaborately planned, with rich victims and prolonged negotiations. If all goes well for the miscreants, large ransoms are paid at the end. In Latin America such set-piece kidnappings are increasingly outnumbered by swifter abductions with lower pay-offs. In Venezuela, where the number of abductions is rising, “express kidnappings” are the most common sort, according to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory (OVV), a think-tank based in Caracas.

Elsewhere, the total number of kidnappings appears to be dropping while the proportion of express abductions is probably rising. In Colombia the number of snatches dropped from 3,572 in 2000 to 277 last year, in part because the FARC, a leftist guerrilla group, has largely pulled out of the business. The value of ransoms has fallen in tandem, say police. In some Brazilian cities “lightning kidnappings”, in which victims...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1MpoEkv

Entangled

IN THE mid-1990s a celebrated Syrian playwright captured the anguish of living under an Arab autocrat with the lament, “We are condemned to hope.” Almost 20 years later, even hope has withered.

The Middle Eastern order sustained by the United States has collapsed. Civil wars are devouring Syria, Iraq and Libya. Black-robed jihadists from Islamic State (IS) have carved out a caliphate. Vying with Iran for regional influence, Saudi jets are strafing Shia rebels in Yemen. Peace may not return to the Middle East for a generation.

For most Arabs, including presidents and kings, the lesson is that American power has had its day. For most Americans, including the man in the White House, the lesson is that outsiders cannot impose order on chaos. Both claims are exaggerated. The Middle East desperately needs a new, invigorated engagement from America. That would not only be within America’s power, it would also be in America’s interest.

Desperate times

The starting-point is to understand what has gone so disastrously wrong in the Arab world. Democrats in Washington will tell you that the villain is George W....

from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1KcbYOQ

Rus in urbe redux

IN LEIPZIGER TOR, people are giving way to grass, flowers and potatoes. So many prefabricated 1950s apartment buildings have been razed in this working-class district of Dessau-Rosslau, a city in eastern Germany, that the plants receive all the light and rain they need. And the local planners have other buildings in their sights. Some residential blocks are half-empty. An abandoned school is succumbing to weeds. They too will probably be demolished and replaced by meadows.

Many of the world’s cities are having to cope with rapid growth. Dessau-Rosslau’s challenge is to manage decline. Since 2007 its population has dropped by almost 10,000, to 81,500. Everybody, from the city authorities to the man in the street, reckons the trend will continue. What will Dessau-Rosslau be like in ten or 20 years’ time? “Smaller,” says Rolf Müller, a longtime resident, as he carries a box of groceries out of an Aldi supermarket.

The condition from which Dessau-Rosslau suffers is increasingly common. From 1950 to 1955 only ten of the world’s largest conurbations lost people, according to the UN (see chart). The tally rose steadily over the next few...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1FiInO3

Do you see what I see?

HUMAN beings are not born with the knowledge that others possess minds with different contents. Children develop such a “theory of mind” gradually, and even adults have it only imperfectly. But a study by Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman at the University of Chicago, published in Psychological Science, finds that bilingual children, and also those simply exposed to another language on a regular basis, have an edge at the business of getting inside others’ minds.

In a simple experiment, Dr Fan and Dr Liberman sat monolingual, bilingual and “exposure” children aged between four and six with a grid of objects placed between them and an experimenter. Some objects were blocked from the experimenter’s sight, a fact the children could clearly see. With a large, a medium and a small car visible to the child, but the small car hidden from the adult, the adult would ask “I see a small car” and ask the child to move it. Both bilingual and those in the exposure group moved the medium-sized car (the smallest the experimenter could see) about 75% of the time, against 50% for the monolinguals. The successful children were less likely even to glance at the car the experimenter could not see.

This study joins a heap of others suggesting that there are cognitive advantages to being bilingual. Researchers have found that bilinguals have better...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PQ6Hkv

Pack power

Don’t let the grey hair fool you

LIKE people, wolves have found that there are benefits to be had living in a group. Together they can more effectively take down large prey, raise families and defend their territory. The received wisdom is that there are also costs to group living, not least a greater risk of death from catching a contagious disease. Now a team of ecologists working in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming have found evidence that for wolves, at least, that is not always the case.

Wolves were driven to extinction by hunting in the Yellowstone region in the early 20th century, but were reintroduced in 1995 and have been closely monitored ever since by the National Park Service. This includes tranquillising 25 or so wolves a year and fitting them with radio collars so they can be tracked. Among the wealth of information this effort has produced, in 2007 researchers were alerted to a contagious illness creeping into the population.

Known as mange, the disease is caused by parasitic mites that burrow into the flesh of wolves, causing an extreme allergic reaction and driving them to scratch...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1clcufn

Waterworlds

FOR decades, researchers looking for life elsewhere in the solar system have stuck to a simple rule: “follow the water”. The stuff is essential to life on Earth, and its peculiar properties mean those hunting aliens think the same will be true elsewhere. This is one reason that Mars has received so much of their attention. Mars has water vapour in its atmosphere, and water ice in the shining cap at its north pole. Liquid water—which is the form life needs—may well exist underground, and may still sometimes be seen at the surface, where dried-up rivers and lakes suggest it was once commonplace. Orbiting spacecraft have seen mysterious dark channels appear on crater walls; recent results from Curiosity, the newer of the two American rovers now exploring Mars, suggest these could be trickles of brine, kept liquid in the bitter cold by their high salt content.

But for all that, Mars is at best a desert with a few wet patches. Farther from the sun there are a number of icy bodies that seem to boast whole oceans of liquid water beneath their solid surfaces. Even by the standards of space exploration, this water—billions of...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PQ6Btk

Coping with adversity

Snap a wheel off a robotic vacuum cleaner and it will circle hopelessly. For a rover plonked onto a distant planet or a search-and-rescue robot sent into perilous surroundings, the consequences of damage can be more dire. A fixed number of contingency plans can be programmed into the device, but a research effort reported this week in Nature aims to teach robots how to compensate for any kind of damage.

Antoine Cully at Paris-Sorbonne University in France and his colleagues have developed software that permits a robot to build a three-dimensional map of every motion it can carry out, assigning a value to each—for not every joint and movement is as crucial to the machine’s motion, or can be as easily compensated for, as every other.

Guided by this understanding of their physical selves, robots tested by the team could adapt to all manner of injuries. A six-legged robot reduced to five legs, as in the picture, or a robotic arm broken in any of 14 different ways, discovered how to carry on their missions in less than two minutes of adjusting to their new limitations.

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1clcrjM

Lost and found

STUDENTS called him the “phantom”: an elusive, furtive figure who haunted Princeton’s libraries and lecture halls. The garbled formulae he scrawled on blackboards, uninvited and unread, evinced a scholarly background. Other jottings made even less sense: “Mao Tse-Tung’s Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months and 13 days after Brezhnev’s circumcision.” Sometimes he banged his head in mental agony. Myths abounded. Had maths broken his mind? Or a love affair his heart?

The numerology, conspiracies and supernatural beings arrived in John Nash’s mind with the same sparkling clarity as his insights into the isometric embeddability of abstract Riemannian manifolds in Euclidean spaces. Those thoughts had made him one of America’s most promising young mathematicians. So he took the other ones seriously, too.

His gift was insight, not theory—he solved problems first, finding out how he had done so later. His work on manifolds (crudely: proving that a line drawn on a multidimensional idealised piece of paper remains the same length no matter how tightly it is crumpled) could have won him the greatest mathematical prize, the Fields Medal, had an...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1LMyrjM

The economics of bluffing

WILL Greece default on its debts and leave the euro? Will Britain decide to leave the European Union? Politicians in the two countries have threatened, implicitly or explicitly, to take these drastic steps if their European colleagues do not offer them inducements to stay.

Many people regard these threats as a bluff. They think that Greece does not really want to leave the euro, and that David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, does not want his country to exit the EU. When push comes to shove, Greece will do a deal (see article) and Mr Cameron will persuade British voters to stay in the EU in his planned referendum. But there are risks that neither outcome will turn out as planned. In both cases, political leaders are making a risky bet.

The financial analogy is with writing (selling) an option. In the markets, an option is the right to buy (a call) or sell (a put) an asset at a given price; say shares of Apple at $130. In return for granting the buyer of the option this right, the...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Aw1CY2