Mating strategies: Robocopulation

“HOW do robots have sex?” sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke. Yet for Stefan Elfwing, a researcher in the Neural Computation Unit of Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), it is at the heart of discovering how and why multiple (or polymorphic) mating strategies evolve within the same population of a species. Because observing any species over hundreds of generations is impractical, Dr Elfwing and other scientists are increasingly using a combination of robots and computer simulation to model evolution. And the answer to that opening question? By swapping software “genotypes” via infrared communications, ideally when facing each other 30cm apart. Not exactly a salty punchline.Charles Darwin was intrigued by polymorphism in general and it still fascinates evolutionary biologists. The idea that more than one mating strategy can coexist in the same population of a species seems to contradict natural selection. This predicts that the optimum phenotype (any trait caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors) will cause less successful phenotypes to become extinct.Yet in nature there are many examples of polymorphic mating strategies...



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Nuclear power: All at sea

THERE are many things people do not want to be built in their backyard, and nuclear power stations are high on the list. But what if floating reactors could be moored offshore, out of sight? There is plenty of water to keep them cool and the electricity they produce can easily be carried onshore by undersea cables. Moreover, once the nuclear plant has reached the end of its life it can be towed away to be decommissioned. Unusual as it might seem, such an idea is gaining supporters in America and Russia.The potential benefits of building nuclear power stations on floating platforms, much like those used in the offshore oil-and-gas industry, were recently presented to a symposium hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers by Jacopo Buongiorno, Michael Golay, Neil Todreas and their colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with others from the University of Wisconsin and Chicago Bridge & Iron, a company involved in both the nuclear and offshore industries.Floating nuclear power stations (like the one in the illustration above) would have both economic and safety benefits, according to the researchers. For one thing, they could...



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Asteroid impacts on Earth: Skyfalls

This map shows the location of every asteroid impact since 2000 with an energy higher than 1 kiloton of TNT (the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima packed around 15 kilotons). The data are from the B612 Foundation, which tries to raise awareness of the dangers posed by asteroids, using information from a worldwide network of low-frequency microphones, designed to detect nuclear explosions and run by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation. Such rocks almost always detonate high in the atmosphere, which limits the effects on the ground. But big ones can cause damage anyway: 1,500 people were injured in Chelyabinsk, in Russia, in 2013, after a 500 kiloton explosion 30km up. In 1908, 2,000 square kilometres of Siberian forest were flattened by a 10-15 megaton impact. Since Earth is mostly ocean and countryside, the odds of a strike on a city are fairly low. But the consequences could be disastrous.



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Manganese poisoning: Subtle effects

MANGANISM has been known about since the 19th century, when miners exposed to ores containing manganese, a silvery metal, began to totter, slur their speech and behave like someone inebriated. The poisoning was irreversible, and soon ended in psychosis and death. Nowadays workers are exposed to far lower doses and manganism is rare. But new research suggests it could be some way from being eradicated entirely. The metal’s detrimental effects on human health may be subtle but widespread, contributing to diseases known by other names.For the past ten years Brad Racette, a neurologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has been tracking those effects, paying special attention to welders, since they are exposed to more manganese than most people. Being harder than iron, manganese is often used to strengthen steel and is present in many industrial emissions, including welding fumes.In one study, Dr Racette found that symptoms resembling Parkinson’s disease (PD) were 15% more prevalent in welders than in other kinds of workers. In another, he found that in a small sample of welders who had not yet reported any neurological symptoms, brain scans showed signs of damage to a part of their brains called the striatum that co-ordinates movement and is damaged in PD. In the case of PD, it has been clearly shown that the first symptoms appear only after the striatum has lost...

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Elizabeth Warren: Mass. appeal

Turning the airwaves blue

AMONG the people who noticed that something was wrong with how banks were issuing credit before the financial crisis was a Harvard professor called Elizabeth Warren. Her prescience helped to propel her from obscurity to Congress, where she is now the senior senator for Massachusetts. Politics occasionally provides openings for youthful candidates to soar. Mrs Warren’s ascent is more unusual: she was a 63-year-old grandmother when she first stood for election. After little more than a year in office she has become one of her party’s stars, constantly fending off questions about a presidential run in 2016.The strength of Mrs Warren’s appeal to Democrats requires some explaining. Republicans have become skilled, perhaps too much so, at tapping into anti-establishment feelings among their base. Mrs Warren inspires similar feelings among Democratic activists, though the establishment she has in mind, which consists of the country’s financial elite and its supporters in Congress, is a different one. Though Democrats are less prone to fratricide than Republicans, Mrs Warren’s willingness to take on members of her...



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Cameron Todd Willingham: Irrevocable

Was the real villain a faulty wire?

ON THE morning of December 23rd 1991 a fire destroyed a home in Corsicana, Texas shared by Cameron Todd Willingham, his wife and their three daughters. The fire killed the girls; Mrs Willingham was at the Salvation Army store shopping for Christmas gifts. Mr Willingham survived. The next year he was convicted of setting the fire. He was sentenced to death and executed in 2004.His conviction rested on arson investigators’ findings and the testimony of Johnny Webb, a jailhouse informant who claimed that Willingham had confessed to him. Shortly before the execution, Willingham’s lawyers sent the governor and parole board a report from Gerald Hurst, another arson investigator, detailing multiple flaws in the first investigation. He concluded that the fire was caused by a space heater or faulty electrical wiring. Officials appear to have received this report before Willingham’s execution, but did nothing with it. Several independent arson investigators reached similar conclusions.Willingham insisted on his innocence, refusing to plead guilty even to avoid execution. Mr Webb testified that, as he was...



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Personalised car stickers: Family portraits on wheels

The latest mobile lonely-hearts app

IN THE Middle Ages, heraldry allowed knights to show off family histories in amazing detail, lugging shields or banners into battle that explained their ancestry, whether they had married an heiress and their status as a first or younger son. Eight centuries later American drivers are catching up, thanks to personalised “family stickers”: tiny stick-figure depictions of an entire household (most typically displayed in one corner of a minivan’s rear-windscreen). Though the trend’s origins are obscure, there is a consensus that it began in Mexico several years ago and at first involved generic outline figures, revealing only the number of children in a family. (A separate Mexican fad for displaying family names on cars caused controversy, because it was said to tempt kidnappers.)Now the stickers are well established north of the border. And, thanks to a combination of American individualism and advances in custom-manufacturing, they are morphing into ever-more-detailed family chronicles.Chroma Graphics of Tennessee, a supplier to such firms as Walmart, recently designed its first kits to celebrate...



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House prices: Buy now or later?

WORKING out the right time to buy a house is always hard. Homes are horribly expensive. The slightest up- or down-tick in the market can cost or save huge sums. In America, those mulling a purchase are hearing particularly confusing signals. Prices have soared for the past couple of years, suggesting that those who wait will suffer. But slowing prices, weak construction data and jitters about a possible interest-rate rise (among other worries) suggest that prices might drop, as they did five years ago. Perhaps scrambling onto the housing ladder now is unwise after all?Homebuyers have cause to be nervous: during the crisis of 2008 and 2009 prices fell by 60% in some places. Yet since then America has bounced back remarkably. Median property prices in the north-east are well above previous highs, having risen by 51% between 2009 and 2013. Prices in the Midwest and South pipped previous peaks in 2012. Only in the West are homes worth less now than in the bubbly mid-2000s. Yet prices there are rising fast: by over 11% in 2013. At that pace, they will beat past records by the end of this year.Some worry about this rebound. Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, warns that a new bubble is forming. Mr Wallison reckons rents are a good yardstick: house prices that rise in line with rents make sense, since both are a sign of high demand. But...

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The Cliven Bundy stand-off: Cowboys v Feds

CHILDREN frolicked in a river, the aroma of barbecue wafted through the air and a has-been rocker creaked his way through a set on a jerry-built stage. Cliven Bundy’s “Patriot Party”, held on April 18th at a cattle ranch 70 miles north-east of Las Vegas, was like any other rural mini-festival, if you ignored the armed men in military fatigues sternly patrolling the grounds.A week earlier over a thousand such freedom-lovers had answered the call of Mr Bundy, a cattle-rancher with a fondness for online rabble-rousing, to stare down armed officials from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The agents were seeking to enforce a court ruling that Mr Bundy should remove, on environmental grounds, his 900-odd cattle from the federal land on which they grazed. Supporters drove hundreds of miles in pickup trucks bearing patriotic stickers, bringing with them an awesome armoury. After a brief but tense stand-off, during which the protesters trained assault rifles on their adversaries, the officials released the 400-odd cattle they had rounded up and beat a retreat, leaving behind a jubilant mob and a rancher secure in his defiance.Mr Bundy has been defying the BLM for over 20 years, racking up unpaid fees worth over $1m. His family, he says, has been ranching on the land for longer than the BLM has existed; he also denies the existence of the United States, reserving his allegiance...

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Lexington: Because men are not angels

JAMES MADISON, most cerebral of the Founding Fathers, would have been hopeless on Twitter. As a rising political star, seeking to understand why the infant American republic was so fragile, he took to the library of his Virginia plantation, Montpelier, for several months. He emerged having written a 39-page study of previous attempts at political union, from the Achaean League to the Belgic Confederacy, as well as a memorandum on “Vices of the Political System of the United States”. Amid all that scholarship lurked ideas about government that he would champion throughout his career, as drafter of the constitution, a leader in Congress, his country’s chief diplomat and its fourth president.Sound-bites were few and far between, reducing his modern-day fame. He was small in stature, soft-spoken and reserved to the point of rudeness, at least among strangers; so his influence often lay in things that did not happen (he was a good dealmaker) or remained unsaid (he repeatedly reined in the fieriest impulses of his friend Thomas Jefferson). Montpelier, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, works hard to explain the importance of its former owner. One stately room...



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Succession planning: Chucking out the chosen one

Moyes sent on by Fergie: wrong sub

WHEN Alexander the Great was 33 years old, legend goes, he wept because he had no worlds left to conquer. Alexander may have been an unrivalled general but his succession planning was lousy. Asked on his deathbed who should rule in his wake, he supposedly answered, “the strongest”. This sort of woolly thinking drives business professors mad. Before long, a power struggle caused the empire Alexander had built to crumble.Titans are hard to follow. Last year a modern-day Alexander also faced the tricky problem of handing over a thriving kingdom. Sir Alex Ferguson retired as the most successful football manager in English history. In 26 years at the helm of Manchester United he won 13 Premier League titles and two Champions League finals. On April 22nd the outsider he had recommended to replace him, David Moyes, formerly at Everton, was given the boot; the team that cantered to success the year before are now languishing.Others prefer to promote from within. Liverpool, United’s bitter rivals, conquered all in the 1970s and 1980s by promoting managers from within their “boot room”. In business, Ford...



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Mobile telecoms in Pakistan: At last, 3G

Now we can really start shopping

IN PAKISTAN, as in other poor parts of the world, mobile telecoms are vital to the country’s development, bypassing obstructive bureaucrats and bringing services directly to the masses—from banking to voter registration. Yet it is the only country in South Asia that does not have high-speed mobile internet, because only this week, after eight years of delays and regulatory snarl-ups, did it at last hold an auction of the spectrum required to roll out 3G and 4G services.Demand for the licences fell short of the government’s hopes. The finance minister, Ishaq Dar, had talked of the auction raising $2 billion; in the end it produced just under $1.2 billion. Successful bids were made by two local operators, Mobilink and Ufone, and two foreign ones, China Mobile and Telenor of Norway. Two other big foreign firms that had been expected to take part, Saudi Telecom and Turkcell of Turkey, got cold feet after, it is said, having their request for exclusive one-year licences rejected.

...

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Television in America: The bandit of broadcast

CHET KANOJIA, the founder of Aereo, wonders which actor will play him, when Hollywood makes a film about his startup disrupting the television industry. “Probably a white guy,” Mr Kanojia, who is Indian-American, says drolly. Whether his firm will feature on the big screen or rapidly be forgotten depends on the outcome of a lawsuit between Aereo and America’s big free-to-air broadcast networks—such as ABC, CBS and Fox—which is being weighed by the Supreme Court. Oral arguments in the case were heard on April 22nd and a decision is due within months.Mr Kanojia and Aereo are not yet household names, but are the subject of much debate among geeks, copyright lawyers and TV executives. Aereo picks up the signals of free-to-air channels and streams them to its subscribers over the internet, so they can watch them with the same good picture quality as they get via cable, but for a fraction of the average monthly cable bill. Each subscriber is assigned one of a huge number of thumbnail-sized aerials in Aereo’s warehouses. Aereo claims this is in principle no different—and thus no less legal—than the subscriber putting an antenna on his roof. But broadcast bosses see it differently. They say Aereo is violating copyright law by not paying them for a “public performance” of their content.So far Aereo is available in only 11 cities. But broadcasters worry that it threatens a fast-...

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Pharmaceuticals: Time for a simpler look

Injectable toxins, poison pills

SPRING is in the air, and drugs firms are in a frenzy of dealmaking. Since January there have been $93.2 billion-worth of mergers and takeovers in the industry, reckons Thomson Reuters, an information provider, the busiest start to a year since 2009. The drugs industry has accounted for 9% of 2014’s deals so far, up from 2% in the same period last year.Among the most recent developments, on April 20th the Sunday Times of London reported that Pfizer, an American drugs giant, had approached AstraZeneca, a British company, about a possible takeover. The next day brought news that Valeant, an American drugmaker, had teamed up with an activist investor to bid $46 billion for Allergan, whose products include breast implants and Botox anti-wrinkle treatments. The day after that Novartis, a Swiss drugs giant, said that it would transform its business by shuffling assets with two competitors, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly.The big branded-pharmaceuticals makers face a common set of opportunities and threats—chief among them rising demand from emerging markets, increasing stinginess in...



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Knole and its history: The story of the Sackvilles

The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal. By Robert Sackville-West. Bloomsbury; 308 pages; £20. To be published in America in January 2015. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST, seventh Lord Sackville, lives at Knole in Kent, a Tudor palace so vast that it struck Virginia Woolf as more a town than a house. His family have lived there for 400 years, and in his earlier book, “Inheritance” (2010), he described them carrying their splendid burden down the generations, swerving past their younger sons, widows and daughters, staggering under debts and dilapidations, until at last, in 1946, they collapsed into the arms of the National Trust. A theme of that book was the law of primogeniture, and the bitterness of the disinherited. Here, in “The Disinherited”, he follows the same theme down a branch of the family that was only sketched in there—a bastard branch of “illegitimate” Sackvilles.These were the children of Pepita, a celebrated Spanish dancer who, in 1852, captivated a young British diplomat, Lionel, later the second Lord Sackville. Pepita had a husband already, although they were separated...

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Schumpeter: The ascent of brand man

G.K. CHESTERTON got it half right: when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in brands. Companies spend as much time thinking about their brands as their products. Countries and cities hire brand consultants. Up-and-coming footballers want to brand it like Beckham. Writers cultivate their brands as assiduously as their literary style.The idea that not just bars of soap but organisations, people and places can have brands is such a commonplace that it is easy to forget how recent it is. In the 1960s admen concentrated on devising brands and campaigns for specific products and markets, rather than on creating an identity for the companies that made those products. The industry that churned out these campaigns was dominated by a handful of giant ad agencies, each divided between an officer corps of “suits” (who managed the accounts) and an army of lower-status “creatives” (who wrote the jingles).Wally Olins started his career as an officer in one of these companies: as a history graduate of Oxford University he could, in those days, hardly be a private. He spent five years running Ogilvy & Mather’s office in Mumbai (and kept...



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The politics of foreign aid: Poor and benighted

Let me teach you how to plant a tree

Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International Co-operation in a Complex World. By Ben Ramalingam. Oxford University Press; 440 pages; $40 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukThe Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. By William Easterly. Basic Books; 394 pages; $29.99 and £19.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukTHE fat reports favoured by international development agencies are full of lofty goals like “making poverty history”, not to mention grand claims about big victories. By contrast, people who work in development prefer tales about bizarre...



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The sharing economy: Boom and backlash

AT LYFT’S base in Clara Street, in San Francisco, all is bustle. New staff are being shown the ropes. At least three dogs are tucked under desks or following their owners around. At 15,000 square feet (1,390 square metres), the place is almost four times as big as the old office, but it is already cramped. Lyft is about to move again, to a space of 60,000 square feet.Lyft is a darling of the “sharing economy”, which uses the internet to bring together people with underused assets—anything from spare rooms to spare time—and others who might like to rent them. Lyft’s stock-in-trade is seats in cars: it registers and vets drivers who are willing to offer a ride in return for a “donation” and to place Lyft’s trademark fluffy pink moustache on the front of their vehicles; passengers request a Lyft, and pay, via a smartphone app. The two parties rate each other afterwards, also through the app, which is a common practice in the sharing economy. Fifteen months ago the service operated only in San Francisco. Now it is in over 30 American cities and entering more by the week. This month it raised $250m from venture capitalists.It is not travelling alone. SideCar, a similar...



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France between the wars: Turning dark

The Embrace of Unreason: France 1914-1940. By Frederick Brown. Knopf; 368 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukEVER since 1789, France has served as a metaphor: the national embodiment of universalist ideals that transcend even the holy triumvirate of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Guillotine aside, the home of Voltaire and Montesquieu became, after the revolution, a symbol for the entire project of the Enlightenment: most importantly, the triumph of human reason over the caprice of circumstance.But certain French intellectuals never accepted these principles. After the revolution the likes of Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre and Pierre-Simon Ballanche advocated the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the political pre-eminence of the Catholic church. Later in the 19th century, after the French army was embarrassed by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) and the subsequent Paris Commune uprising, that counter-revolutionary struggle moved even further to the right.In a time of national soul-searching, a generation...

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Airbnb versus hotels: Room for all, for now

EVEN as they lobby regulators to crack down on residential sharing services, hoteliers play down the threat such companies pose to their industry. The top brass at the Marriott, Four Seasons and Hilton chains have all said that these firms do not compete for their core market of accommodating high-end and business travellers; a vice-president of The Ritz-Carlton group recently claimed she had not even heard of Airbnb. And Airbnb itself agrees, arguing that it does not displace existing lodging but is creating new demand. “I’m optimistic that there isn’t going to be a war” with hotels, Brian Chesky, its boss, said in January.A recent study seems to confirm that, for now at least, Airbnb is only nibbling at the hotel industry’s lunch rather than eating it whole. A team at Boston University examined hotel revenues in Texas, where Airbnb has grown much faster in some cities (like quirky, left-wing Austin) than others (like Fort Worth, more of a cowboy town). They could not find a significant influence from Airbnb on business and luxury hotels. But in places where it has established a presence, it cut the revenues of budget hotels by 5% in the two years to December 2013.If Airbnb were to keep growing at its current rate—its listings are doubling every year—the Texas study suggests that by 2016 the dent in budget hotels’ takings will be 10%. With their high fixed costs, that...

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