Posts from the ‘Print’ Category
The Indian government needs to open its eyes and realise that the technological utopia it envisions in the low-cost tablet is no cure for poor education, poverty or inequality.
Aakash is no silver bullet, The Hindu, 29 March 2013. References used here.
Image credit: The Hindu
X-ray crystallography has shaped modern chemistry. It is arguably the most powerful tool for molecular structural analysis. But it suffers from one big drawback: it can only analyse materials that form well-defined crystals. This may now be about to change. Researchers in Japan have used ‘crystal sponges’ to hold molecules that can’t be crystallised, allowing them to be analysed using x-ray crystallography.
Molecular cages to end crystallisation nightmare, Chemistry World, 27 March 2013.
Image credit: Yasuhide Inokuma
On Sunday American researchers reported that a baby girl has been effectively cured of HIV infection with the use of standard antiretroviral drugs. This is an exciting development giving hope that AIDS, which is caused by HIV, may be cured in young children, but there are many steps to be taken before that can happen.
Researchers ‘cure’ HIV infection in a baby, The Hindu’s science blog, 5 March 2013.
Image from here.
A group of scientists from Norway, Germany, South Africa and the U. K. have discovered a submerged continent in the Indian Ocean. Their measurements predict that the continent, which they have named Mauritia, lies under Mauritius and its broken chunks today extend more than 1000 km northwards till Seychelles.
A submerged continent found, The Hindu, 28 February 2013.
Image from here.
What is the commonest living thing on Earth? Until now, those in the know would probably have answered Pelagibacter ubique, the most successful member of a group of bacteria, called SAR11, that jointly constitute about a third of the single-celled organisms in the ocean. But this is not P. ubique’s only claim to fame, for unlike almost every other known cellular creature, it and its relatives have seemed to be untroubled by viruses. This assumption is no longer true.
Flea market, The Economist, 16 February 2013. Also available in audio here.
Image credit: Lynn Ketchum
Optics has changed no end since the world’s oldest known lens was ground nearly 3,000 years ago in modern-day Iraq. Yet its Assyrian maker would instantly recognise today’s lenses, which continue to be made much as they were then: by fashioning a piece of transparent material into a solid with curved surfaces. Lenses remain bulky, especially by the standards of modern electronics. Now, Federico Capasso of Harvard University and his colleagues have created a lens that is completely flat and the width of two human hairs. It works because its features, measured in nanometres (billionths of a metre), make it a “metamaterial”, endowed with some weird and useful properties.
Changing focus, The Economist, 1 December 2012. Also available in audio here.
First appeared in The Economist’s Babbage blog, 16 October 2012.
Image credit: Francesco Aieta
They pop up without warning, distract attention and clog computers. Users have many reasons to shun online ads—and find it easy to do so. Though global online-advertising revenues rose by 22% in 2011, websites that depend on selling their viewers’ eyeballs are worried. Around 9% of all online page views come from browsers armed with ad-blocking software, such as Adblock Plus, downloaded nearly 180m times since 2007, and 3.5m times in October alone.
Clicked Off, The Economist, 10 November 2012. Also available in audio here.
Free image from here.
Controversy about pain relief is usually between those who worry about addiction, black markets and over-prescription, and those who just want patients with long-running or fatal diseases to get the best pills. But a lesser-known issue is gaining attention, too: the treatment of acute pain.
Grim and bear it, The Economist, 3 November 2012. Also available in audio here.
Free image from here.
Is it possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers. The reason for doing this is to treat a rare, but nasty set of diseases.
Hello mothers, hello father, The Economist, 27 October 2012. Also available in audio here.
This article also had an editorial that ran with it.
This story was mentioned on the cover page of the print issue and made it to the front page of Reddit and Digg, receiving over 250,000 views in two days.
Image credit: The Economist
In September Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority launched a public consultation on what sounds like a crackpot idea: to create children with three genetic parents. Yet this could be a way to eliminate a set of rare but nasty diseases caused by problems with pieces of cellular machinery called mitochondria. According to research published this week, the basic technique of substituting problem-free mitochondria has now been tested in a laboratory and the researchers seem confident that, given the green light, they could bring a healthy child into the world.
Most of a child’s genes would come from the couple it would learn to call mum and dad. A tiny fraction of the DNA, however, would come from a female donor who would provide part of the egg from which the child grew. At present the law in Britain, like that in most other places, prohibits any genetic modification of embryos. It should be changed.
Powering a cure, The Economist, 27 October 2012. Also available in audio here.
This editorial also had an accompanying article with it.
Free image from here.
