Every Story Every View
In 1690 Daniel Schrön, a German physician, described a patient with “ulcers” throughout her peritoneum, bladder, intestines, uterus and cervix. It was long thought to be the first documented appearance in medical literature of endometriosis, a painful and debilitating gynaecological condition that today affects as many as 190m women worldwide. Uteruses are lined with the
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“I can’t believe it worked!” says Nat Friedman, co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, which offered $1m in prizes to anyone who could use artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher papyrus scrolls carbonised by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. But work it did. On February 5th Mr Friedman announced that a three-person team had been
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RESEARCHERS DIVIDE Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, into two types. “Sporadic” cases usually occur in people over 65. Rarer “familial” ones are associated with a handful of mutations that run in families. Symptoms can begin in a patient’s 30s. But evidence is mounting that a third, much rarer type exists as well.
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ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, an American firm, can give passable answers to questions on everything from nuclear engineering to Stoic philosophy. Or at least, it can in English. The latest version, ChatGPT-4, scored 85% on a common question-and-answer test. In other languages it is less impressive. When taking the test in Telugu, an
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“Magnets, how do they work?” asked Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo, in their 2009 song “Miracles”. A flurry of recent papers suggests physicists did not quite have the full picture either. A new type of magnetic material may, it seems, have been hiding under their noses. Most people are familiar with ferromagnets. These have
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FOR DECADES the search for a drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease had seemed a costly wild-goose chase. Then, in 2021, a drug called aducanumab received regulatory approval in America. A second, lecanemab, got the nod in January this year. Now a paper published on July 17th in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that
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THE ECONOMIST is looking to hire a writer on science and technology, ideally based in London. The writer will mainly be responsible for covering emerging technologies—topics such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology or space. They will help shape The Economist’s thinking on new technologies and how they could affect society, business and economics. Some examples of
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Rishi Sunak is Britain’s prime minister. If some advertisements on Facebook can be trusted (which they cannot) he also appears to be flogging get-rich-quick schemes. One such advert shows Mr Sunak endorsing an app supposedly developed by Elon Musk, a businessman, into which viewers can make regular “savings”. The video is fake. Generated with the
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IN 1776 THOMAS PAINE, a traitorous Englishman living in the American colonies, published a seditious 47-page pamphlet. Called “Common Sense”, it became a best-seller. It argued that the colonies should seek independence from British rule. Later that year they did exactly that. Appeals to common sense are a staple of politics, especially when an insurgent
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PRIMATES RESIST cloning. For some, that is a blessing, since it postpones the awkward day when somebody proposes cloning people. For others it is a problem. Medical researchers would find the genetic standardisation which cloning brings useful, especially if it could be applied to the two species of monkey—crab-eating and rhesus macaques—that are the mainstay
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THE ECONOMIST is seeking promising journalists and would-be journalists to apply for the 2024 Richard Casement internship. The successful candidate will spend three months with us in London writing about science and technology, and receive payment. No previous experience is required. Applicants should compose a letter introducing themselves and an article of about 600 words
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image: The Economist Last year was the hottest ever recorded. Data from Copernicus, an EU climate-monitoring service, put the average global temperature for 2023 at 1.48°C above the pre-industrial average. Much of the heat came in a run of six record-breaking months. More data from American and British agencies is due on January 12th, which
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BIRDERS GET nervous when they see landscapes covered in wind turbines. When the wind gets going, their blades can spin at well over 200km per hour. It is easy to imagine careless birds getting chopped to bits. Campaigners often point to the possibility when opposing the building of new wind farms. No one doubts that
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A RASH OF small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019 the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September
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In maritime legend, the Flying Dutchman traversed the world’s oceans undetectable except to the naked eye. Its mysterious voyages have inspired poems, novels, an opera, and, it would seem, an armada of imitators. According to a new study in Nature, three-quarters of all industrial fishing vessels and a quarter of transport and energy ships (a
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THE COMMITTEES which award the Nobel science prizes (chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine) are hard to second-guess. Last year, for instance, the physiology prize went to Svante Paabo, who helped invent the field of fossil DNA, and then used that invention to shed copious light on human evolution. A worthy winner. But some thought
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INSIDE ATOMS, things move fast. An electron zooms around a nucleus, changing its position or energy in mere fractions of an attosecond. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second—a unit of time so short that there are as many attoseconds in a single second as there have been seconds since the
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THE QUANTUM world is full of paradoxes. Is light made up of particles or waves? How can entangled particles seemingly influence each other faster than the speed of light? And if, officially at least, the Nobel committee does not decide on its prizewinners until late morning, why did Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, a pair of
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Since the 1960s engineers around the world have been fiddling with a novel type of jet called a rotating detonation engine (RDE), but it has never got beyond the experimental stage. That could be about to change. GE Aerospace, one of the world’s biggest producers of jet engines, recently announced it was developing a working
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Humans work hard to dodge viruses. Sick people are quarantined, diseased livestock are killed and fields of infected crops set ablaze. All for good reason. Viruses are everywhere: from snowy mountain-tops to grimy lake floors. Bringing old ones back to life seems like an idea from science fiction. Resurrecting an ancient virus would surely be
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It was, Dante Lauretta told his audience at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, like seeing an old friend after “seven years [and] a journey of 3bn miles”. Sitting in front of him in the Utah desert on the morning of September 24th, “a little charred and worse for wear”, was a capsule
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“Shake, shake, shake, shake,” Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados “Shake it off” is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the
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THE FIRST mouthful of “cultivated” meat is both remarkable and dull. In a homely kitchen at the California headquarters of Eat Just, a startup, a playing-card-sized slice of meat has been glazed and grilled. It is served with a sweet-potato puree, maitake mushrooms and some pickled peppers. The meal is remarkable because the meat was
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