At sea in the city

City rapids

MANY Chinese cities offer “sea views”, but of a kind that arouse fear and anger rather than raise spirits. The term is often used scornfully by Chinese media to describe the floods that render roads impassable and sometimes kill people during heavy downpours. They are largely the product of woefully inadequate drains. Urban areas have more than doubled in size since 1998, but officials have scrimped on arrangements for keeping them dry.

During the summer rainy season, the complaints of urban residents swell as fast as the foul water in the streets. They are targeted at the government. Even the state-controlled press joins in. On July 28th China Youth Daily said it was “beyond understanding” that city planners should give priority to high-profile “vanity projects” while ignoring the need for storm drains and the like. “Money doesn’t seem to be a problem,” it said. Residents of Beijing still harbour bitter memories of flooding in 2012 that killed 79 people (mostly outside the urban core) and caused 12 billion yuan ($1.9 billion) in damage. Much of the mayhem was caused by the flooding of...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1Io8Nl6

Silent waves

IN THE dog days of August, Beidaihe is a sea resort unlike any other. Swimmers, waddling through the streets with flotation rings around their waists, pause at road crossings as paramilitary police, in tight single-file with ramrod straight backs, march past. Visitors entering town are stopped at checkpoints. Cars require special certification. And tourists know their fun can only go so far: just beyond the westernmost public beach, guards stop anyone approaching a tree-lined boulevard leading to villas where very important people are, apparently, discussing very important matters.

Exactly who these people are is a secret. China’s leaders—President Xi Jinping; the prime minister, Li Keqiang; ministers, provincial bosses and retired senior officials—are probably all now at the resort on Bohai Bay, two hours from Beijing by high-speed train. But ordinary citizens will not find out. Since the earliest years of Mao’s rule, the government has never published a list of attendees at these annual conclaves.

Warm breezes and shaded gardens are thought conducive to debates about policy. “Top leaders have the luxury of time to discuss serious...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1MSqJaS

Summon the comfy chairs!

WALT DISNEY’S film version of “Mary Poppins” features a scene in which, at a click of the protagonist’s fingers, cupboards, drawers, bedside tables and trunks fly open and her young charges’ clothes and toys leap inside them. Self-tidying clothes and toys are still some way away, unfortunately. But furniture that collaborates, Poppins-like, with its owners may be just around the corner. If groups of researchers working on the idea in America and Europe have their way, you may soon be able to call a robot footstool, so that you can put your feet up at the end of a long day, make use of a robotic toolbox when doing-it-yourself of a weekend and even—yes—install a robot toybox in the nursery that will encourage your children to tidy up after themselves.

These devices and others like them will, their inventors hope, plug a gap in the market between basic robotic appliances such as Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner made by iRobot, and multipurpose ’droids like Pepper, a humanoid domestic servant launched recently by Softbank. The secret of success, they believe, is not just to devise furnishings that will do what they are told, but to give them...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Eb0u8f

Zoology to the rescue

MUCH is made, in academic circles, of the virtues of interdisciplinary research. Its practice is somewhat rarer. But fresh thinking and an outsider’s perspective often do work wonders, and that may just have happened in the field of antibiotic resistance.

Adin Ross-Gillespie of Zurich University is a zoologist, not a physician. But his study of co-operative animals such as meerkats and naked mole rats has led him to think about the behaviour of another highly collaborative group, bacteria. He and his colleagues have just presented, at a conference on evolutionary medicine in Zurich, a way of subverting this collaboration to create a new class of drug that seems immune to the processes which cause resistance to evolve.

Antibiotic resistance happens because, when a population of bacteria is attacked with those drugs, the few bugs that, by chance, have a genetic protection against their effects survive and multiply. As in most cases of natural selection, it is the survival of these, the fittest individuals, that spurs the process on. But Dr Ross-Gillespie realised that, in the case of bacteria, there are circumstances when the survival...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Eb0u8c

Cluster bombing

THE outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11,000 people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in dozens, rather than hundreds, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.

The vaccine, developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada and called rVSV-ZEBOV, smuggles one of the Ebola virus’s coat proteins into a person’s body in a Trojan horse called a vesicular stomatitis virus. This horse-and-cattle virus does not cause human illness, but its presence is enough to activate the immune system, which learns to recognise and react to the Ebola coat protein—and thus, the vaccine’s inventors hope, to clobber Ebola if it should encounter it.

The trial that the Lancet reports was conducted on more than 7,600 people in Guinea by a group of researchers led by Marie Paule Kieny of the World Health Organisation and John-Arne Rottingen of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. It involved a procedure called ring vaccination, in which clusters of people who were particularly at risk were offered the chance to be...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Eb0tRU

Ten, nine, ten...

RUSSIA had Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. In 2003 China put a man in space. Even India is exploring the heavens: last September an Indian probe began circling Mars. Brazil thinks of itself as the peer of these big emerging economies (all are members of the BRIC grouping). But when it comes to space, its efforts are earth-bound. It has put up just six smallish, non-commercial satellites, four built with Chinese help and launched on Chinese craft.

Brazil’s space programme suffered a blow in July when President Dilma Rousseff scrapped an 11-year-old agreement with Ukraine to launch satellites aboard Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rockets from Brazil’s Alcântara spaceport in the northeastern state of Maranhão. The official explanation implied that the much-delayed project, which had been budgeted at 1 billion reais ($290m), had become too expensive. Brazil may also fear that Ukraine will not fulfil its part of the deal, not least because its space industry is located near Donetsk, which is controlled by Russian-backed separatists.

Brazil started well. In the 1950s and 1960s it sent rockets to the upper atmosphere. Its National Institute for Space Research runs a world-class satellite-testing facility in São José dos Campos, 100km (62 miles) from São Paulo. But Brazil’s attempts to construct its own satellite-bearing rocket were tragically...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1MSqI6S

An edifice in search of a function

AT MITAD DEL MUNDO (“Middle of the World”), a park in an Andean valley outside Quito, Ecuador’s capital, a stone monument marks the line of the equator. Just a couple of hundred metres to the south rises a striking new building clad in silver and black glass, its two cantilevered wings describing a U. It is the headquarters of the South American Union, or Unasur, opened last year.

The host government of Rafael Correa, then flush with oil money, agreed to finance the planned construction cost of $66m. It is a grand architectural statement. But it is still half-empty, and its splendid conference rooms are sparsely used. The building poses a question: just what is the point of Unasur?

Formed in 2008, its origins lie in the South American Community, a Brazilian-inspired push to merge Mercosur and the Andean Community, two would-be common markets, and to develop cross-border infrastructure linking the countries of South America. Under the influence of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s socialist strongman, the group changed both its name and its purpose. It shed its economic mission in favour of “political co-operation”. The more or less explicit...

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

Evil orbs

Microbeads, macroproblem

ANTHONY RICCIARDI, a scientist at McGill University, was looking for evidence that an invasive Asian clam had colonised a warm spot in the St Lawrence river when a member of his team made a more headline-worthy discovery. Peering through a microscope at sand scooped up from the riverbed, the student saw hundreds of tiny plastic spheres that stood out for their unnatural roundness and vivid colours.

Microbeads, widely used as an abrasive in toothpaste and face soap, are common in the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers. Scientists had assumed that they floated in fresh water and were flushed downriver to the sea. Now Mr Ricciardi has shown that some sink to the bottom of lakes and rivers, where they are eaten by bottom-feeding fish, some of which, such as yellow perch, end up on dinner plates.

This finding adds to alarm over plastic pollution in the Great Lakes, which contain a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Sherri Mason, a chemist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, found 1m plastic particles per square kilometre in Lake Ontario. According to a team from the University of Waterloo, the...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1MSqI6H

Long, but not boring

THE hard-nosed, frontiersman’s personality of Stephen Harper has dominated Canadian politics for a decade. However it turns out, therefore, the federal election on October 19th will be fateful. If the Conservative prime minister wins a fourth consecutive term in office, he will be the first leader to do so since 1908. If he loses, it will be the end of an era, and what comes next will be very different. The election might well bring to power the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), which has never governed Canada before.

To forestall that prospect, Mr Harper triggered the campaign earlier than he had to. On August 2nd he asked the governor-general to dissolve parliament, giving his Conservative Party 11 weeks to put its case to the voters. That is double the length of recent election campaigns.

He needs the extra time. The slogan emblazoned on the Conservative campaign bus is “Safer Canada/Stronger Economy”. Although the country feels relatively secure, its economy is hardly vigorous. As the world’s fifth-largest producer of oil, Canada has been hurt by the collapse in prices. The economy contracted in the first five months of 2015....

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

Searching and slouching

Book of Numbers. By Joshua Cohen. Random House; 580 pages; $28. Harvill Secker; £18.99.

WEIGHING in at nearly 600 pages, “Book of Numbers” is an unabashedly ambitious novel. It considers some of the most pressing concerns of this technology-fuelled era, such as the illusion of privacy and the loneliness of hyper-connectedness. It features not one but two characters with the same name as the author, Joshua Cohen, which has become a favourite device of writers keen to seem playful by toying with meta-narrative profundities. Sprawling and messy, spanning continents and styles, the book is already being heralded as a “Ulysses” for the digital age.

This would all seem a bit much, and yet there is indeed something remarkable about Mr Cohen’s prose. From the first page it tumbles forth in a heady, headlong rush, the rhythmic sentences crammed with sharp observations, obscure allusions and deliciously unique language. The book’s plot, such as it is, is about a frustrated sad-sack of a writer named Joshua Cohen who must ghostwrite the autobiography of a tremendously successful tech magnate with the same name, who...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Isq4rn

What lies beneath?

NOTHING has inspired generations of archaeologists like the discovery in 1922 of the treasure-packed tomb of Tutankhamun. What if another untouched Egyptian trove lies buried, not in a distant patch of desert, nor even nearby amid the overlapping tomb-shafts of Luxor’s Valley of the Kings, but instead just a millimetre’s distance from plain view?

This is the dramatic hypothesis of a just-published paper by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist who co-discovered an undisturbed Egyptian tomb in 2000, and who is at the University of Arizona. His key evidence is disarmingly simple, and in fact free to see on the internet in the form of photographs published by Factum Arte, a Madrid- and Bologna-based specialist in art replication that recently created a spectacular, life-sized facsimile of Tutankhamun’s tomb, intended for tourists to visit without endangering the original.

What Mr Reeves found in these ultra-high-resolution images, which reveal the texture of walls beneath layers of paint in the original tomb, was a number of fissures and cracks that suggest the presence of two passages that were blocked and plastered to conceal...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Isq4rf

Of lions and men

Confession of the Lioness. By Mia Couto. Translated by David Brookshaw. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 192 pages; $25. Harvill Secker; £16.99.

MIA COUTO’S writing fuses stark and rich imagery and is steeped in the history, superstitions and political turmoil of his native Mozambique. In his latest novel, “Confession of the Lioness”, his characters—and by extension, readers—are forced to sift shaky facts and conflicting testimonies to get the full, devastating picture.

The novel comprises two alternating narratives. One follows Mariamar Mpepe in her village of Kulumani. After the horrors of Mozambique’s civil war (fighting stopped in 1992) comes new danger in the form of marauding lions. For her safety, Mariamar’s father locks her up, leaving her with little to do but reminisce about her sunny childhood with her grandfather, and about her relationship with a hunter 16 years ago.

The exploits of that hunter, Archangel “Archie” Bullseye, constitute Mr Couto’s second narrative strand. A lovesick Archie returns to Kulumani with a ragtag entourage to eliminate the lions, vowing it will be his last hunt.

As the hunting begins, Mr Couto expertly sprinkles hints as to the real source of the recent savagery. The darkest threat, it transpires, may not be lurking out in the bush but festering deep within the village. The reader...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Isq2jb

With a cause

Heroic, but hardly alone

The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma. By Delphine Schrank. Nation Books; 312 pages; $26.99 and £17.99.

THE story of Myanmar’s astonishing political transformation since 2011 is usually told as a kind of top-down revolution. An army, having ruled the country brutally, ineptly and corruptly for half a century, decided to embrace change. The role of the opposition in this version of events tends to be described in terms of individual heroism: the patient, steadfast, impeccably moral stand of its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, through her long years of house arrest and confinement.

Delphine Schrank’s remarkable book is a reminder that this analysis is flawed in two ways. Miss Suu Kyi was the figurehead for a movement with deep roots in Burmese society, in which generations of heroes had risked their freedom and lives to defy and undermine military rule. Secondly, the 2011 decision by Miss Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), to rejoin politics and contest elections, was as big a concession as that made by the...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Isq4rb

Burning down their house

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and its Jihadi Legacy. By Jean-Pierre Filiu. Oxford University Press; 311 pages; $24.95. Hurst; £15.99.

THE Arab spring unleashed more than hopes for change in one of the world’s most politically repressive regions. It also inspired a wave of books heralding the freedom and democracy about to engulf the Middle East. Now, as the tide of history has gone out with a vengeance, exposing violent ideologies, raging civil wars and renewed despair, comes a sobering reappraisal of where it all went wrong.

Among authors trying to make sense of why the uprisings of 2011 largely failed, Jean-Pierre Filiu stands out. His new book combines passion, scholarship and insight to present a convincing explanation of the deep malaise afflicting the Arab world. Despite being a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sciences Po in Paris, Mr Filiu is mercifully disdainful of academic jargon. What the Arabs are experiencing right now, he says bluntly, is a brutal counterrevolution, “this systematic war of the Arab regimes against their people”.

This judgment may...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Isq22L

Breaking the code

Life’s Greatest Secret: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code. By Matthew Cobb. Basic Books; 434 pages; $29.99. Profile Books; £25.

IN 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick, with the help of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, described the structure of the molecule at the heart of life. Deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA, was, they said, a double helix, two spirals joined across the middle by pairs of four chemical bases, like a twisted ladder. That work earned Messrs Crick, Watson and Wilkins a Nobel prize and a place in the history books. The image of the double helix now often stands for biology, or even science, itself.

But this was merely the most visible breakthrough in a long struggle to understand the engine of life—how traits are inherited, mutated and weeded out by natural selection, and how the whole mysterious process works at the biochemical level. It is that lesser-known history that Matthew Cobb, a professor of animal behaviour at the University of Manchester, aims to sketch in his book, which has been shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Winton prize for science writing.

The result is a fascinating reminder of just how hard-won are the seemingly obvious facts of modern biology. The development of genetics was a tale of confusion, accident, frustration and the occasional flash of...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1IZgzFE

Time to fix patents

IN 1970 the United States recognised the potential of crop science by broadening the scope of patents in agriculture. Patents are supposed to reward inventiveness, so that should have galvanised progress. Yet, despite providing extra protection, that change and a further broadening of the regime in the 1980s led neither to more private research into wheat nor to an increase in yields. Overall, the productivity of American agriculture continued its gentle upward climb, much as it had before.

In other industries, too, stronger patent systems seem not to lead to more innovation (see article). That alone would be disappointing, but the evidence suggests something far worse.

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils. An early study found that...

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

A question of utility

THE Great Exhibition, staged in London in 1851, was intended to show off the inventive genius of Victorian Britain. In doing so it sparked a hardfought debate on intellectual property. On one side were public figures horrified at the thought of inviting the whole world to see the nation’s best ideas, only to have most of it go straight home and copy them. They called for the patent system to be made cheaper and easier to navigate, and for the rights it conferred to be more forcefully upheld. These demands, though, were met with a backlash. Supported by economic liberals who had successfully fought for the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws a few years earlier, this side of the debate argued that free trade and competition were good for the economy; that patents were a restraint on both; and that therefore patents should be not reformed, but done away with.

The Economist, founded by opponents of the Corn Laws, was an enthusiastic promoter of this abolitionist movement. A leader in our July 26th issue that year thundered that the granting of patents “excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1KSNs4f

Quants and quaffs

“ALTERNATIVE assets” suggests a class that offers something to enjoy. Philatelists delight in rare stamps; petrol-heads in classic cars; and oenophiles in that most liquid of assets, fine wine. The wine futures market, though, is pretty inefficient. Prices hinge on tastings of stuff that is still in the barrel, long before its reaches its fullest bloom. This en primeur pricing happens on experts’ palates, not in the equations of quants. Tristan Fletcher, of University College London, is among those who would like to change that, using some of the most probing equations computer science has yet devised.

There have been a few attempts over the years to tame the fickle wine market into an equation. These have relied on using what are known as linear regression models to make a palatable blend of facts about a given vintage out of particulars of the weather that year, the vineyard’s history of medallion-winning and so on. Linear regression takes the unseemly spray of these data points and draws through them the straight line that, over the course of time, has most closely approximated the price. Pick the point on this line where a...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1KPq5bU

Asexual discrimination

This curious fernlike fossil is a rangeomorph, a member of a group believed (though no one is quite sure) to have been sessile animals. They lived on the seabed 565m years ago, during the Ediacaran period, which preceded the explosion of animal life during the Cambrian. The specimen shown is part of a study led by Nick Butterfield of Cambridge University, just published in Nature. Dr Butterfield and his colleagues wondered if they could work out how rangeomorphs reproduced. They looked at three places in Newfoundland where large fields of the fossil creatures are exposed, and mapped the precise location of individual specimens using the global positioning system. The pattern suggested rangeomorphs lived in groups that grew, by asexual reproduction, from a single individual (as a beech tree might put out suckers that grow into a copse). The founding individuals themselves, by contrast, grew from “propagules” that drifted through the ocean, as the larvae of many modern sea creatures do.

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

Graduating from destitution

THE poor do not just lack money. They are also often short of basic know-how, the support of functioning institutions and faith in their own abilities. As a result, note Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in their book, “Poor Economics”, published in 2004, it takes “that much more skill, willpower and commitment” for the poor to get ahead. No wonder escaping extreme poverty—usually defined as living on less than $1.25 a day—is so hard.

Even the most successful schemes to lift (and keep) people out of dire poverty seem to work only for some people, in some places, some of the time. For example, microcredit works best for the relatively enterprising, who are rarely the very poorest. Similarly, cash transfers linked to school attendance are useful, but require a working education system. What succeeds in one country may fail elsewhere, thanks to different conditions and cultural norms. And the poorest are often the hardest to help.

This dispiriting picture makes a new paper* by...

from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1Jymf8h