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Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(8-9)The mismeasure of womanMen and women think differently. But not that differentlyIN THE 1970s there was a fad for giving dolls to baby boys and fire-engines to baby girls. The idea was that differences in

behaviour between the sexes were solely the result of upbringing: culture turned women into ironers, knitters and chatterboxes, and

men into hammerers, drillers and silent types. Switching toys would put an end to sexual sorting. Today, it is clear why it did not.

When boys and girls are born, they are already different, and they favour different toys from the boys and girls—and men and women—are programmed by evolution to behave differently from one another is now

widely accepted. Surely, no one today would think of doing what John Money, of Johns Hopkins University, did in 1967:

amputating the genitalia of a boy who had suffered a botched circumcision, and advising the parents to bring him up as a girl. The

experiment didn't work, and the consequences were tragic. But which of the differences between the sexes are “biological”, in the

sense that they have been honed by evolution, and which are “cultural” or “environmental” and might more easily be altered by

changed circumstances, is still fiercely sensitivity of the question was shown last year by a furore at Harvard University. Larry Summers, then Harvard's

president, caused a storm when he suggested that innate ability could be an important reason why there were so few women in the

top positions in mathematics, engineering and the physical as a proposition for discussion, this is unacceptable to some. But biological explanations of human behaviour are making

a comeback as the generation of academics that feared them as a covert way of justifying eugenics, or of thwarting Marxist

utopianism, is retiring. The success of neo-Darwinism has provided an intellectual underpinning for discussion about why some

differences between the sexes might be innate. And new scanning techniques have enabled researchers to examine the brain's

interior while it is working, showing that male and female brains do, at one level, operate differently. The results, however, do not

always support past clichés about what the differences in question actually ences in behaviour between the sexes must, in some way, be reflections of systematic differences between the brains of

males and females. Such differences certainly exist, but drawing inferences from them is not as easy as it may a start, men's brains are about 9% larger than those of women. That used to be cited as evidence of men's supposedly

greater intelligence. Actually, the difference is largely (and probably completely) explained by the fact that men are bigger than

women. In recent years, more detailed examination has refined the picture. Female brains have a higher percentage of grey matter

(the manifestation, en bloc, of the central bodies of nerve cells), and thus a lower percentage of white matter (the manifestation of

the long, thin filaments that connect nerve cells together), than male brains. That, plus the fact that in some regions of the female

brain, nerve cells are packed more densely than in men, means that the number of nerve cells in male and female brains maybe , though, the main connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, which is known as the corpus callosum and is

made of white matter, is proportionately smaller in men than women. This may explain why men use only one side of the brain to

process some problems for which women employ both differences in structure and wiring do not appear to have any influence on intelligence as measured by IQ tests. It does,

however, seem that the sexes carry out these tests in different ways. In one example, where men and women perform equally well

in a test that asks them to work out whether nonsense words rhyme, brain scanning shows that women use areas on both the right

and the left sides of the brain to accomplish the task. Men, by contrast, use only areas on the left side. There is also a correlation

between mathematical reasoning and temporal-lobe activity in men—but none in women. More generally, men seem to rely more

on their grey matter for their IQ, whereas women rely more on their white an exceptionalismThe world's biggest insurance market is too splinteredKANSAS CITY, Missouri, is known more for its historical role as a cattle town than as a financial hub. But it is to this

midwestern city, America's 26th largest, that regulators and insurance executives from around the globe head when they want to

make sense of the world's largest—and one of its weirdest—insurance it is in Kansas City that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) is housed. It oversees a market

accounting for one-third of premiums written worldwide. Outside Kansas City, the market becomes a regulatory free-for-all. Each

of America's 50 states, plus the District of Colombia, governs its insurance industry in its own way.

In an increasingly global insurance market, America's state-based system is coming under strong pressure to reform. Insurance

has changed dramatically since the NAIC was set up in 1871, with growing sophistication in underwriting and risk management.

Premiums in America have ballooned to $1.1 trillion and market power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of big players

(some of them foreign-owned) that are pushing for an overhaul of the state-based system. “It's an extremely expensive and

Byzantine process,” says Bob Hartwig, an economist with the Insurance Information Institute, a research a fiercely political issue, congressional support for simplifying the system is gaining ground. Both houses of Congress

are looking at proposals to change the state-based system. Big insurers favour a version that would implement an optional federal

charter allowing them to bypass the state-bystate regulatory process if they choose. A similar system already exists for ents of the changes see more efficiency, an ability to roll out products more quickly nationally and, ultimately, better

offerings for consumers as a result. Yet some consumer groups favour state-based regulation. They believe it keeps premiums lower

than they otherwise would be. Premiums as a percentage of gross output are lower in America than in several other political headwinds are strong: insurance commissioners are elected officials in some states (California, for instance) and

appointed by the governor in others. The industry is also split: most of the country's 4,500 insurers are small, and many of them

have close ties with state-based regulators, whose survival they support. But even these forces may eventually be ere in the industry in America, there are other calls for reform. In a backdoor form of protectionism, American

reinsurance firms have long benefited from a regulation that requires foreign reinsurers writing cross-border business into America

to post more collateral than they do. “If you operate outside the borders of the US, they don't trust you one inch,” laments Julian

James, head of international business at Lloyd's of London, which writes 38% of its business in collateral requirement was established because of worries about regulatory standards abroad, and the financial strength of

global reinsurers. Today regulatory standards have been tightened in many foreign markets. A majority of America's reinsurance

cover now comes from firms based abroad, including many that have set up offshore in Bermuda (for tax reasons) primarily to

serve hot to handleDell's battery recall reveals the technology industry's vulnerabilitiesTHERE is the nail test, in which a team of engineers drives a large metal nail through a battery cell to see if it explodes. In

another trial, laboratory technicians bake the batteries in an oven to simulate the effects of a digital device left in a closed car on a

sweltering day—to check the reaction of the chemicals inside. On production runs, random batches of batteries are tested for

temperature, efficiency, energy density and the rigorous processes that go into making sophisticated, rechargeable batteries—the heart of billions of electronic gadgets

around the world—were not enough. On August 14th Dell, a computer company, said it would replace 4.1m lithium-ion batteries

made by Sony, a consumer-electronics firm, in laptop computers sold between 2004 and last month. A handful of customers had

reported the batteries overheating, catching fire and even exploding—including one celebrated case at a conference this year inJapan, which was captured on film and passed around the internet. The cost to the two companies is expected to be between $200m

and $ some ways, Dell is a victim of its success. The company was a pioneer in turning the personal computer into a commodity,

which meant squeezing suppliers to the last penny, using economies of scale by placing huge orders, and running efficient supply

chains with little room for error. It all created a volatile environment in which mistakes can have grave lithium-ion batteries were introduced in 1991, their capacity to overheat and burst into flame has been well known.

Indeed, in 2004 America banned them as cargo on passenger planes, as a fire hazard. But the latest problems seem to have arisen

because of the manufacturing process, which demands perfection. “If there is even a nano-sized particle of dust, a small metal shard

or water condensation that gets into the battery cell, it can overheat and explode,” says Sara Bradford of Frost & Sullivan, a

consultancy. As the energy needs of devices have grown rapidly, so have the demands on computing industry's culture is also partly to blame. Firms have long tried to ship products as fast as they possibly can,

and they may have set less store by quality. They used to mock the telecoms industry's ethos of “five-nines”—99.999%

reliability—because it meant long product cycles. But now they are gradually accepting it as a benchmark. That is partly why

Microsoft has taken so long to perfect its new operating system, Windows ed with other product crises, from contaminated Coca-Cola in 1999 to Firestone's faulty tyres in 2000, Dell can be

complimented for quickly taking charge of a hot situation. The firm says there were only six incidents of laptops overheating in

America since December 2005—but the internet created a conflagration.

Keeping the faithMixing religion and development raises soul-searching questionsWORLD Bank projects are usually free of words like “faith” and “soul.” Most of its missions speak the jargon of development:

poverty reduction, aggregate growth and structural adjustments. But a small unit within the bank has been currying favour with

religious groups, working to ease their suspicions and use their influence to further the bank's goals. In many developing countries,

such groups have the best access to the people the bank is trying to help. The programme has existed for eight years, but this

brainchild of the bank's previous president, James Wolfensohn, has spent the past year largely in limbo as his successor, Paul

Wolfowitz, decides its future. Now, some religious leaders in the developing world are worried that the progress they have made

with the bank may progress has not always been easy. The programme, named the Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics, faced

controversy from the start. Just as religious groups have struggled to work with the bank, many people on the inside doubted if the

bank should be delving into the divine. Critics argued that religion could be divisive and political. Some said religion clashes with

the secular goals of gh the bank does not lend directly to religious groups, it works with them to provide health, educational and other

benefits, and receives direct input from those on the ground in poor countries. Katherine Marshall, director of the bank's faith unit,

argues that such groups are in an ideal position to educate people, move resources and keep an eye on corruption. They are

organised distribution systems in otherwise chaotic places. The programme has had success getting evangelical groups to fight

malaria in Mozambique, improve microcredit and water distribution in India, and educate people about AIDS in Africa. “We started

from very different viewpoints. The World Bank is looking at the survival of a country, we look at the survival of a patient,” says

Leonardo Palombi, of the Community of Sant'Egidio, an Italian church group that works in gh the work continues, those involved in Mr Wolfensohn's former pet project now fret over its future. Some expect the

faith unit to be transferred to an independent organisation also set up by Mr Wolfensohn, the World Faiths Development Dialogue,

which will still maintain a link with the bank. Religious groups are hoping their voices will still be heard. “If we are going to make

progress, faith institutions need to be involved. We believe religion has the ability to bring stability. It will be important for the

bank to follow through,” says Agnes Abuom, of the World Council of Churches for Africa, based in religious groups, large institutions such as the bank can resist change. Economists and development experts are

sometimes slow to believe in new ideas. One positive by-product of the initiative is that religious groups once wary of the bank's

intentions are less suspicious. Ultimately, as long as both economists and evangelists aim to help the poor attain a better life on

earth, differences in opinion about the life hereafter do not matter and deliverFor the first time since the epidemic began, money to fight AIDS is in plentiful supply. It isnow time to convert words into actionKEVIN DE COCK, the World Health Organisation's AIDS supremo, is not a man to mince his words. He reckons that he and

his colleagues in the global AIDS establishment have between five and seven years to make a real dent in the problem. If they fail,

the world's attention span will be exhausted, charitable donors and governments will turn to other matters and AIDS will be

relegated in the public consciousness to being yet another intractable problem of the poor world about which little or nothing can be

now, though, the money is flowing. About $8.9 billion is expected to be available this year. And, regardless of Dr De

Cock's long-term worries, that sum should rise over the next few years. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are eager to spend of those people—some 24,000 of them—have been meeting in Toronto at the 16th International AIDS Conference. An

AIDS conference is unlike any other scientific meeting. In part, it is a jamboree in which people try to out-do each other in displays

of cultural inclusiveness: the music of six continents resonates around the convention centre. In part, it is a lightning conductor that

allows AIDS activists to make their discontent known to the world in a series of semi-official protests. It is also what other

scientific meetings are, a forum for the presentation of papers with titles such as “Differing lymphocyte cytokine responses in HIV

and Leishmania co-infection”. But mostly, it is a giant council of war. And at this one, the generals are trying to impose a complete

change of military AIDS was discovered, there was no treatment. Existing anti-viral drugs were tried but at best they delayed the inevitable,

and at worst they failed completely. Prevention, then, was not merely better than cure, it was the only thing to talk about. Condoms

were distributed. Posters were posted exhorting the advantages of safe sex. Television adverts were run that showed the

consequences of years ago, though, a new class of drugs known as protease inhibitors was developed. In combination with some of the

older drugs, they produced what is now known as highly active anti-retroviral therapy or HAART. In most cases, HAART can

prolong life completely changed the picture. Once the AIDS activists had treated themselves, they began to lobby for the poor world

to be treated, too. And, with much foot-dragging, that is now happening. About 1.6m people in low- and middle-income countries,

1m of them in sub-Saharan Africa, are now receiving anti-AIDS drugs routinely. The intention, announced at last year's G8 meeting

in Scotland, is that the drugs should be available by 2010 to all who would benefit from r, those on drugs remain infected and require treatment indefinitely. To stop the epidemic requires a re-emphasis of

prevention, and it is that which the organisers have been trying to , deconstructedThe DNA that may have driven the evolution of the human brainONE of the benefits of knowing the complete genetic sequences of humans and other animals is that it becomes possible to

compare these blueprints. You can then work out what separates man from beast—genetically speaking, at human brain sets man apart. About 2m years ago it began to grow in size, and today it is about three times larger than that

of chimpanzees, man's closest relative. Human intelligence and behavioural complexity have far outstripped those of its simian

cousins, so the human brain seems to have got more complex, as well as bigger. Yet no study has pinpointed the genetic changes

that cause these differences between man and a group of scientists believe they have located some interesting stretches of DNA that may have been crucial in the

evolution of the human brain. A team led by David Haussler of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in California, compared the

human genome with that of mammals including other primates. They reported the results in researchers looked at the non-human genomes first, seeking regions that had not changed much throughout evolutionary

history. Regions that are untouched by normal random changes typically are important ones, and thus are conserved by evolution.

Next the researchers found the equivalent regions in the human genome to see if any were very different between humans and

chimps. Such a sudden change is a hallmark of a functional evolutionary found 49 regions they dubbed “human accelerated regions” (HARs) that have shown a rapid, recent evolution. Most of

these regions are not genes as commonly understood. This is because they code for something other than the proteins that are

expressed in human cells and that regulate biological processes. A number of the HARs are portions of DNA that are responsible

for turning genes on and uingly, the most rapidly changing region was HAR1, which has accumulated 18 genetic changes when only one would

be expected to occur by chance. It codes for a bit of RNA (a molecule that usually acts as a template for translating DNA into

protein) that, it is speculated, has some direct function in neuronal 1 is expressed before birth in the developing neocortex—the outer layer of the brain that seems to be involved in higher

functions such as language, conscious thought and sensory perception. HAR1 is expressed in cells that are thought to have a vital

role in directing migrating nerve cells in the developing brain. This happens at seven to 19 weeks of gestation, a crucial time when

many of the nerve cells are establishing their t more research, the function of HAR1 remains mere speculation. But an intriguing facet of this work is that, until now,

most researchers had focused their hunt for differences on the protein-coding stretches of the genome. That such a discovery has

been made in what was regarded as the less interesting parts of the human genome is a presage of where exciting genomic finds

may lie in the g it realHow to make digital photography more trustworthyPHOTOGRAPHY often blurs the distinction between art and reality. Modern technology has made that blurring easier. In the

digital darkroom photographers can manipulate images and threaten the integrity of endeavours that rely on them. Several

journalists have been fired for such activity in recent months, including one from Reuters for faking pictures in Lebanon. Earlier

this year, the investigation into Hwang Woo-suk showed the South Korean scientist had changed images purporting to show

cloning. In an effort to reel in photography, camera-makers are making it more obvious when images have been way of doing this is to use image-authentication systems to reveal if someone has tampered with a picture. These use

computer programs to generate a code from the very data that comprise the image. As the picture is captured, the code is attached to

it. When the image is viewed, software determines the code for the image and compares it with the attached code. If the image has

been altered, the codes will not match, revealing the r way favoured by manufacturers is to take a piece of data from the image and assign it a secret code. Once the image

file is transferred to a computer, it is given the same code, which will change if it is edited. The codes will match if the image is

authentic but will be inconsistent if tampering algorithm is the weapon of choice for Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Digital

images have natural statistical patterns in the intensity and texture of their pixels. These patterns change when the picture is

manipulated. Dr Farid's algorithms detect these changes, and can tell if pixels have been duplicated or removed. They also try to

detect if noise—the overexposed pixels within the image that create a grainy effect—was present at the time the photograph was

taken or has been added r, forgers have become adept at printing and rescanning images, thus creating a new original. In such cases, analysing

how three-dimensional elements interact is key. Long shadows at midday are a giveaway. Even the tiny reflections in the centre of a

person's pupil tell you about the surrounding light source. So Dr Farid analyses shadows and lighting to see if subjects and

surroundings are its part, Adobe, the maker of Photoshop software, has improved its ability to record the changes made to an image by

logging how and when each tool or filter was used. Photoshop was the program used by the journalist fired by Reuters; his

handiwork left a pattern in the smoke he had added that was spotted by bloggers. Thus far the internet has proven an effective check

on digital forgery. Although it allows potentially fake images to be disseminated widely, it also casts many more critical eyes upon

them. Sometimes the best scrutiny is simply more people eral damageWhy the war in Iraq is surprisingly bad news for America's defence firmsWHEN Boeing announced on August 18th that it planned to shut down production of the C-17, a huge military cargo plane,

the news sent a shiver through the American defence industry. As it winds down its production line at Long Beach, California, over

the next two years, Boeing will soon begin to notify suppliers that their services will no longer be needed. It had to call a halt,

because orders from America's Defence Department had dried up and a trickle of export deals could not take their place. The

company would not support the cost of running the production line for the C-17 (once one of its biggest-selling aircraft) on the off-chance that the Pentagon might change its mind and place further wider worry for the defence industry is that this could be the first of many big programmes to be shut down. A big part of

the problem is that America is at war. The need to find an extra $100 billion a year to pay for operations in Iraq means there is

pressure to make cuts in the defence budget, which has been provisionally set at $441 billion for the fiscal year beginning in

October. American defence budgets involve a complicated dance starting with what the Pentagon wants, what the White House

thinks it should get and, finally, what Congress allows it to get away with. Although the armed forces' extra spending on

ammunition, fuel, provisions, medicines and accommodation in Iraq does not strictly come out of the same budget as new weapons,

the heavy bill for fighting eventually leads to calls to save money on shiny new r this month, for example, the Congressional Budget Office expressed “major concerns” about Future Combat Systems, a

$165 billion project to upgrade all of the army's vehicles and communications networks. The scheme is the Pentagon's second-biggest development programme and is intended to give the soldiers on the ground access to real-time battlefield information from

sources such as satellites and unmanned aircraft. But the programme was initially expected to cost about $82 billion, half the latest

estimate, and critics are also worried about how well it will work and whether it will be delivered on week the army issued a glowing progress report on the project and insisted that Boeing and Science Applications

International Corporation, the lead contractors, are on schedule. This was welcome news to defence contractors worried that the

grandiose project might fall victim to pressure for budget cuts. Even so, the prospects for many other big weapons programmes are

less problem is not just the cost of the fighting in Iraq, but also its nature. The shift in the style of warfare, towards such

“asymmetric” conflicts, means that there is now less demand for big-ticket weapons systems. Things were simpler in the cold war,

when the Pentagon spent about $150 billion a year on new weapons. That fell to around $50 billion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

America's 15 main defence contractors reacted by consolidating into today's top five. When he became president, George Bush

promised to increase defence spending, and he has done so: the procurement budget is back up to nearly $160 billion, despite the

lack of a Soviet a result, the five main defence contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and

Raytheon—have had a wonderful five years. Since the terrorist attacks in September 2001, their sales have risen by around 10% a

year. Last year their combined profits increased by 25% to almost $13 billion. Although most of the defence budget is spent on big

weapons systems that are of little or no use in the fight against terrorists, the political climate after the attacks of September 11th

2001 made it impossible to oppose the administration's desire to increase defence spending. Besides, such spending means more

jobs, often in areas where there is little other media, less newsNewspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive orhigh-mindedTHE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the

firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own.

Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast

as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive

vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out

how the Norwegians have done it. “Otherwise we'd get several visits every month,” he says. The company has used its established

newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses

such as Sesam, a search engine that competes with Google, and , a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was

the company's best ever for revenues and unately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed

world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet

for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share

of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with

IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years.

Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose

another five percentage points by the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can

reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most

have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it

in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is

beginning to offset some of the decline in pers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested. In many developed countries their owners

have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past,

newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and ng connectionsFatherhood alters the structure of your brain—if you are a marmosetPARENTING has obvious effects on mothers, but fathers appear to be affected, too. A study published this week shows that

fatherhood increases the nerve connections in the region of the brain that controls goal-driven behaviour—at least, it does in

ncy and motherhood have long been known to bring about changes—many of them positive—to the female brain.

Pregnant and nursing rats have a greater number of neural connections, particularly in the region of the brain that controls hormones

and maternal behaviour. The brain changes coincide with improvements in spatial memory and speedier foraging skills, which

might help a mother rat protect and feed her what effect parenting might have on the brains of fathers has remained an open question, however. Male rats sometimes

eat their young rather than nurture them, which makes them a poor model for studying how fatherhood affects the brains of species

that frown on infanticide. Marmoset fathers on the other hand are a model of paternal devotion. They carry their babies for more

than half the time during the offspring's first three months, passing them to the mother only when the babies need to be eth Gould of Princeton University and her colleagues compared the brains of marmoset fathers with those of males that

lived in mated pairs, but lacked offspring. They found substantial differences. The nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex of fathers had

more tiny projections, known as dendritic spines, than those of non-fathers. Because dendritic spines are the sites of connection

between neighbouring nerve cells, the increased number may mean more activity in the fathers' brains than in those of the

nonfathers. The nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex of the fathers also contained more receptors for vasopressin, a small peptide that

influences social behaviour and researchers also showed that, as the offspring aged and fathers became detached from them, the abundance of vasopressin

receptors fell. This suggests that the parental behaviour is associated with the changes in the brain. The work is published this week

in Nature Neuroscience.

What does this mean for human fathers? It is hard to tell. The attention of marmoset fathers makes them an extreme example

of fatherhood. Human fathers do not usually get involved to anything like the same extent. That said, the scientists looked at the

marmoset's prefrontal cortex because earlier studies had shown that activity in the prefrontal cortex of human parents—male and

female alike—increases when they see their own offspring. Thus the same brain region is active in parenting in both Kinsley of the University of Richmond, Virginia, who did the work with rat mothers, speculates that Dr Gould's new

findings may reflect human behaviour quite closely. “There is a lot of interest in the idea that having children forces responsibility

on males in many respects. If you consider that the prefrontal cortex plays a major role in planning, judgment and the anticipation

of the consequences of behaviour, you could make a clear argument that the changes in that part of the brain would be involved

with judicious attention toward offspring.”Life 2.0The new science of synthetic biology is poised between hype and hope. But its time will soonComeIN 1965 few people outside Silicon Valley had heard of Gordon Moore. For that matter, no one at all had heard of Silicon

Valley. The name did not exist and the orchards of Santa Clara county still brought forth apples, not Macintoshes. But Mr Moore

could already discern the outlines. For 1965 was the year when he published the paper that gave birth to his famous “law” that the

power of computers, as measured by the number of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip, would double every 18 months

or decades later, equally few people have heard of Rob Carlson. Dr Carlson is a researcher at the University of Washington,

and some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that he drew a few years ago look suspiciously like the biological

equivalent of Moore's law. By the end of the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to

synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to

species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful

as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but

that may not stop it from sticking) is making that the short run such engineering means assembling genes from different organisms to create new metabolic pathways or evennew organisms. In the long run it might involve re-writing the genetic code altogether, to create things that are beyond the range of

existing biology. These are enterprises far more worthy of the name of genetic engineering than today's tinkering. But since that

name is taken, the field's pioneers have had to come up with a new one. They have dubbed their fledgling discipline “synthetic

biology”.No intelligent designer would have put the genomes of living organisms together in the way that evolution has. Some partsoverlap, meaning that they cannot change jobs independently of one another. Others have lost their function but have not been

removed, so they simply clutter things up. And there is no sense of organisation or hierarchy. That is because, unlike an engineer,

evolution cannot go back to the drawing board, it can merely play with what already exists. Biologists, who seek merely to

understand how life works, accept dirt

Buckets, not big irrigation systems, can prevent the world running dryWILL the world run short of water to grow crops? Not if it invests in the right projects, according to a group of scientists and

economists that has been studying the question for the past five years. The “Comprehensive Assessment”, co-ordinated by the

Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an international network of research institutes, will not be released until

November. But at a recent conference in Sweden, they revealed some preliminary findings. The good news is that small

investments in infrastructure for water can yield big returns. Unfortunately, governments and donors have concentrated on more

grandiose but less helpful schemes, leaving a third of the world's population—some 2 billion people—short of lture sucks up perhaps 95% of the water humans use. It takes roughly 3,000 litres to grow enough food for one person

for one day, or about one litre for each calorie. Moreover, the world's population is growing, and people are eating more than they

used to. So the assessment's projections suggest that if nothing changes, agriculture will consume twice as much water by 2050 as it

does is a tall order: as it is, some 900m people, the assessment finds, live in river basins where humans consume more than 75%

of the water, leaving barely enough to keep rivers flowing and lakes filled. Another 700m live in basins rapidly approaching this

“closed” state; 1 billion more live within reach of adequate water supplies, but cannot afford to gain access to them. The water table

is falling fast in densely populated and poor regions of China, Mexico and theory, the world should still have more than enough water to feed everyone under most circumstances, thanks to sodden

places like Canada and Russia. But exploiting the surplus would require much more trade in food from damp spots to the parched

ones. A few poor, dry and teeming countries, such as Egypt, along with the odd rich one, like Japan, already depend on imports of

food. But most governments are loth to put their citizens at the mercy of the world's imperfect d, governments have tended to try to increase agricultural output through expensive irrigation projects. But smaller

investments in simple devices, such as pumps to tap groundwater, are faster to deploy, yield greater returns on capital and bring

fewer environmental and social problems. A recent study of vegetable farmers in Ghana, for example, found that those irrigating

their fields with wastewater carried by buckets earned a 230% return on their investment, versus 30% for big state-sponsored

assessment argues that modest outlays on rain-fed agriculture, in particular, could drastically improve the productivity of

farming in poor countries and so help both to raise farmers' incomes and also to cut the need for an expansion of agriculture

elsewhere. More than half of the world's food comes from rain-fed farms, as opposed to irrigated ones. If the rains fail, so do the

crops. Channels to harvest and direct rainfall and small, sealed reservoirs or tanks to store it, would not only see farmers through

dry spells, but also allow them to entice bigger or more valuable harvests out of the same fields. More reliable income, in turn,

allows farmers to invest more in seeds, fertiliser and Tanzania rainwater harvesting allows farmers to grow rice or vegetables instead of staples like sorghum and maize. These

dearer crops bring in at least twice the revenue and up to seven times as much in good years. If adopted on a grand scale, the

assessment argues, such techniques could double crop yields. In that case, the area under cultivation globally would have to rise by

only 10% to satisfy growing demand for food by 2050—and there would be plenty of water to go the hiking trailGlobalisation is generating huge economic gains. That is no reason to ignore its costsVISITORS to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, normally see a few moose and buffalo and sometimes even a bear. But in late August

each year some really strange creatures can be spotted: central bankers and economists, meeting for the annual symposium of the

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, one of the high points (literally) of the economic calendar. This year's conference focused on

how the rise of China, India and other countries is reshaping the world wages. It is commonly believed that the wages of unskilled workers in rich countries are being depressed by the shift of

jobs to low-wage countries. However, a paper presented at the symposium by Gene Grossman and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of

Princeton University offered a much rosier view, arguing that offshoring can actually increase the wages of unskilled workers.

Moving jobs abroad boosts firms' productivity and profits and so enables them to take on more workers at home, which pushes up

the wages for work that cannot easily be outsourced abroad. The authors are right to point out that the impact of offshoring on jobs

is not as bad as it is usually portrayed. But their own calculations show that between 1997 and 2004 this positive “productivity

effect” was not large enough to offset the downward pressure on wages, both from having more workers in the world and from

cheaper labour-intensive goods as a result of imports from low-wage countries. The net impact is still to depress the wages of

lowskilled workers.

Indeed, the evidence is that the low-skilled are not the only people being squeezed. In America, the euro area and Japan, total

wages have fallen to their lowest share of national income in decades, whereas the share of profits has surged. This is exactly what

would have been expected, given that the integration into the world economy of the emerging economies has sharply increased the

ratio of global labour to capital. Yet this fact barely got a mention in Jackson Hole. In their eagerness to applaud the benefits of

globalisation to economies as a whole, economists were strangely reluctant to admit that in recent years the average real pay of

rich-country workers has stagnated or even Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was one of the few to voice the case for helping the losers. The scale and

pace of globalisation, he argued, is unprecedented and the overall gains will be huge. But there is a risk of social and political

opposition as some workers lose their jobs. Policymakers, he said, need “to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration

are sufficiently widely shared” so as to maintain support for free trade and to stem protectionism. The snag is that the number of

losers—including those facing lower real wages—may be bigger than he non-denial of the non-selfHow philosophy can help create secure databasesIN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you

could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to

keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage. However, a number of

computer scientists, led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel's notion as the germ of an eminently practical

scheme. They are applying such negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data. The idea is to create a negative

database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that concept of a negative database took shape a couple of years ago, while Dr Esponda was working at the University of New

Mexico with Paul Helman, another computer scientist, and Stephanie Forrest, an expert on modelling the human immune system.

The important qualification concerns that word “everything”. In practice, that means everything in a particular set of interested Dr Esponda was how the immune system represents information. Here, “everything” is the set of possible

biological molecules, notably proteins. The immune system is interesting, because it protects its owner from pathogens without

needing to know what a pathogen will look like. Instead, it relies on a negative database to tell it what to destroy. It learns early on

which biological molecules are “self”, in the sense that they are routine parts of the body it is protecting. Whenever it meets one

that is “not self” and thus likely to be part of a pathogen, it destroys it. In Hempel's terms, this can be expressed as “all non-good

agents [pathogens] are non-self”.The analogy with a computer database is not perfect. The set of possible biomolecules is not infinite, but it is certainly huge,

and probably indeterminable. The immune system does not care about this, because it has to recognise only what is not in its own

database. Make one adjustment, though, and you have something that might work for computers. That adjustment is to define

“everything” as a finite set, all of whose members can be known—for instance, all phrases containing a fixed maximum number of

characters.A database of names, addresses and Social Security numbers (a common form of identification in America) might require only

200 characters to contain all possible combinations. That would limit the total number of character combinations. A positive

database containing all the data in question would be a small subset of those combinations. The negative counterpart of this

database would be much larger and contain all possible names and addresses that were not in the positive database plus a lot of

gibberish. But it would not be infinite. By looking at the negative database, it would be possible to deduce what was in the positive

database it would not guarantee security against a search for the presence or absence of a particular name and address. Indeed, the

whole point is that such searches should be possible. But it would prevent fishing expeditions by making it impossible, for example,

to look for the Social Security numbers of all the people living on one you fly in chattering class?

The use of mobile phones on planes moves another step closerLIKE it or not, the prospect of being able to use mobile phones on aeroplanes is inching ever closer. Last week Ryanair, a

European low-cost carrier, announced that it would equip its entire fleet of Boeing 737s with small base stations, called picocells,

provided by OnAir, a technology company backed by Airbus, Europe's aviation giant. The picocells will use satellite links to allow

mobile phones to be used during flight without interfering with ground-based networks. (Such interference, rather than safety

concerns, is the primary reason that in-flight use of mobile phones is banned at the moment.) Taking a cut of the resulting revenues

will help Ryanair to keep its ticket prices down, according to Michael O'Leary, the firm's it is uncertain just how popular, and hence how lucrative, in-flight calling will be. The technical obstacles have been

overcome and regulatory approval is expected soon—at least in Europe. Regulators are expected to issue guidelines in the next few

weeks defining which frequencies can be used and national aviation authorities will start certifying airlines' installations early next

year. OnAir says it expects its technology to be approved in time for Air France to launch in-air calling on an Airbus A318 in the

first quarter of phones must still surmount social obstacles, however. Will people flock to airlines that offer inflight calling, or avoid

them? And how much will callers be prepared to pay? OnAir, its rival AeroMobile and other firms have conducted a series of

surveys in an attempt to find ing to the latest survey, released by OnAir this week, 80% of airline passengers approve of the idea of being able to use

telephones on aircraft, even if they do not plan to do so themselves. Indeed, only 54% of business travellers and 41% of leisure

travellers said they would switch their phones on during a flight. One reason is cost: George Cooper, the boss of OnAir, says that at

prices above $3 per minute, “demand drops off considerably”, according to the firm's research. He expects $2.50 per minute to be

the norm when services based on his firm's technology are launched by Air France, Ryanair, bmi and TAP Portugal. But OnAir will

then cut its prices by 10% a year for five years, he the availability of in-flight communications seems likely to vary widely. Offering such a service, or not offering it, could

enable airlines to differentiate themselves on particular routes. They could also impose quiet periods or mobile-free cabins. On

long-haul flights, texting and Wi-Fi access might prove more attractive than voice-calling, provided the price is right—though

Boeing recently axed Connexion, its impressive but little used satellite-based in-flight broadband -flight calling may in fact prove best suited to short-haul, low-cost flights. After all, people choose Ryanair and other low-cost carriers because of their low prices—not because they enjoy the flight. So the prospect of other passengers shouting into their

phones may not put people off. Quite the opposite, in fact, if it can help to subsidise low ticket attackWhy are drug patents now coming under legal attack?AT FIRST blush, the Plavix affair appears to be an astonishing victory for Apotex, a cheeky Canadian drugs firm that

launched a generic version of the world's second-bestselling drug. For a few weeks in August the generic version captured nearly

three-quarters of the American market for the $6 billion-ayear drug—until Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the makers of

Plavix, asked a judge to halt sales, which he did on August closer, though, and it becomes clear that Apotex will be a winner only if it defeats Sanofi's patents on Plavix in a case

that starts in January. Regardless of the outcome, the case raises an important legal question: how can a firm like Apotex bring a

generic drug to market when others own a perfectly valid patent for it? The answer is that the potential prize is simply so large these

days that the reward outweighs the risk of legal defeat. The multi-billion dollar sales of today's blockbuster drugs have invited

greater legal scrutiny of patents and encouraged generics firms to find ways to innovate around result is a relentless legal attack on branded drugs. Eli Lilly has seen its patents on Prozac, Evista and Zyprexa, three of its

biggest-selling drugs, challenged by generics firms. Pfizer faces frequent patent challenges on Lipitor, the cholesterol-reducing

remedy that is the world's bestselling drug. Dozens of other patent challenges are sly, rather than using the law to defend their patents, big firms often settle out of court. Sanofi and Bristol-Myers

Squibb made just such a deal with Apotex, but it was deemed to be illegal. Shire, a British firm that makes a drug to combat

attention-deficit disorder, got Barr Laboratories to agree in August to delay its generic launch until why would a firm with a legal patent strike such a deal? One reason could be that some drugs giants regard settlements as

a way to bribe a generics firm to delay its introduction of a cut-price product. American antitrust officials worry this is to the

detriment of the consumer. Another explanation is that the cost and legal uncertainty associated with patent trials are simply too

great. Daniel Glazer of Shearman and Sterling, a big law firm, argues that even a firm convinced of the integrity of its patents may

well settle “to avoid the all-or-nothing scenario”.But there is a less charitable explanation. The big firm may know that its patent was mistakenly awarded, perhaps because the

purported breakthrough was too minor or obvious. In Barr's ongoing case against Eli Lilly's Evista, the generic firm argues that a

prior patent held by the University of Pennsylvania invalidates Lilly's claims. Kathleen Jaeger of America's Generic Pharmaceutical

Association adds that branded firms try to extend their lucrative monopolies by filing less rigorous secondary patents designed “to

block generics”. David Balto, a former official at America's Federal Trade Commission, says, “Branded pharmaceutical firms have

been stretching the limits of what deserves a patent, and the courts are just catching up.”Ready or notEurope's financial sector is ill prepared for a coming upheavalSOME of the most breathless commentary about Europe's financial markets in recent years has centred on the intrigues and

dalliances of leading financial exchanges. All of them have flirted with, encouraged and snubbed various potential partners in both

Europe and America, although no big deals have yet been completed. Amid the chatter, an important cause of all the matchmaking

and matchbreaking has been largely overlooked: a piece of looming legislation that, for all its drab detail, will alter the European

Union's financial markets ges are not the only ones to feel the hot breath of the unenticingly labelled Markets in Financial Instruments Directive,

known as MiFID, which is due to take effect from November 2007. An important element of the EU's plan for a single market in

financial services, the directive embraces both wholesale and retail trading in securities, including shares, bonds and derivatives. As

such, it will affect companies from investment banks to asset managers and stockbrokers. Some will benefit more than others .Charlie McCreevy, the European commissioner in charge of forging a single market, jokes about the ugly moniker: “This is

not a fearsome man-eating plant.” But he is evangelical about the directive's purpose. He expects MiFID to “transform” the trading

of securities in Europe, reducing the cost of capital, creating growth and increasing Europe's competitiveness in the global directive, which EU member states are supposed to weave into their own laws by January 2007, intends to accomplish allthis in several ways. First, the rules aim to increase competition across borders, by extending the “single passport”, which allows

financial firms to do business across Europe armed only with the approval of their home authorities. To make this possible,

investor-protection rules are also to be harmonised, so as to provide a (theoretically) consistent standard in areas such as investment

advice, order-handling and the completion of securities trades—“best execution”, in the , MiFID aims to change the nature of competition in share trading. Although most shares in Europe are still traded on

exchanges, there is growing interest in alternatives, such as off-exchange trading between investment banks. MiFID could

accelerate this trend. In some countries—notably France, Italy and Spain—existing rules force all share trades through local bourses.

The new rules will end those monopolies. No wonder exchanges, facing the threat of greater competition, are weighing up mergers.A third intention of MiFID is more transparency. In future, investors should be able to subscribe to information services that

let them see the whole market in certain shares, not only what is on offer at the local stock exchange. The goal is to let investors

find the best prices in the market. This will mean competition for the London Stock Exchange, for example, which earns a healthy

sum from selling such information. Investment banks are already banding together to develop alternative reporting ng the thermostatProperty prices are cooling fast in America, but heating up elsewhereHOUSES are not just places to live in; they are increasingly important to whole economies, which is why The Economist

started publishing global house-price indicators in 2002. This has allowed us to track the biggest global property-price boom in

history. The latest gloomy news from America may suggest that the world is on the brink of its biggest ever house-price bust.

However, our latest quarterly update suggests that, outside America, prices are perking a's housing market has certainly caught a chill. According to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight

(OFHEO), the average price of a house rose by only 1.2% in the second quarter, the smallest gain since 1999. The past year has

seen the sharpest slowdown in the rate of growth since the series started in 1975. Even so, average prices are still up by 10.1% on a

year ago. This is much stronger than the series published by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which showed a rise of

only 0.9% in the year to OFHEO index is thought to be more reliable because it tracks price changes in successive sales of the same houses, and so

unlike the NAR series is not distorted by a shift in the mix of sales to cheaper homes. The snag is that the data take time to appear.

Prices for this quarter, which will not be published until December, may well be much weaker. A record level of unsold homes is

also likely to weigh prices down. The housing futures contract traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is predicting a fall of 5%

next ere, our global house-price indicators signal a cheerier story. House-price inflation is faster than a year ago in roughly

half of the 20 countries we track. Apart from America, only Spain, Hong Kong and South Africa have seen big slowdowns. In ten

of the countries, prices are rising at double-digit rates, compared with only seven countries last an housing markets—notably Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, France and Sweden—now dominate the top of the league.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that even the German market is starting to wake up after more than a decade of flat or falling prices,

but this has yet to show up the index that we use, which is published with a long lag (there are no figures for 2006). If any readers

know of a more timely index, please let us economists have suggested that Britain and Australia are “the canaries in the coal mine”, giving early warning of the fate

of America's housing market. The annual rate of increase in house prices in both countries slowed from around 20% in 2003 to

close to zero last summer. However, the canaries have started to chirp again. In Australia average prices have picked up by 6.4%

over the past year, although this is partly due to a 35% surge in Perth on the back of the commodities boom. Likewise British home

prices have perked up this year, to be 6.6% higher, on average, than they were a year ago. Thus it is claimed that housing markets in

Britain and Australia have had a soft the gapPay discrimination between male and female scientistsSEVEN years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research

showing that senior women professors in the institute's school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for

research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study—conducted in Sweden, of all places—showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research

grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a

role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia's school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey

of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year's meeting of the British Association for the Advancement

of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering

and technology is around £1,500 ($2,850) a is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men's and women's

lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking “career breaks” to have children, for example, and thus rising more

slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given

grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over £4,000 a year more than female prove the point beyond doubt, Dr Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by

differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination.

Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay,

which Dr Connolly attributes to s pay, her study also looked at the “glass-ceiling” effect—namely that at all stages of a woman's career she is less likely

than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women

are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a

woman to settle into a professorial course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion.

But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr Connolly's compared the experience of scientists in

universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to

promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research

institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian

world of academia bettingThe industry is splitting in two—and investors are gambling on the expensive bit

IT HAS never been easier to pay less to invest. No fewer than 136 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were launched in the first

half of 2006, more than in the whole of those who believe in efficient markets, this represents a triumph. ETFs are quoted securities that track a particular index,

for a fee that is normally just a fraction of a percentage point. They enable investors to assemble a low-cost portfolio covering a

wide range of assets from international equities, through government and corporate bonds, to commodities. Morgan Stanley

estimates that ETFs control some $487 billion of assets, up 16.7% from a year ago. It predicts they will have $2 trillion of assets by

2011. No longer must investors be at the mercy of error-prone and expensive fund as fast as the assets of ETFs and index-tracking mutual funds are growing, another section of the industry seems to be

flourishing even faster. Watson Wyatt, a firm of actuaries, estimates that “alternative asset investment” (ranging from hedge funds

through private equity to property) grew by around 20% in 2005, to $1.26 trillion. Investors who take this route pay much higher

fees in the hope of better performance. One of the fastest-growing assets, funds of hedge funds, charge some of the highest fees of

first sight, this might seem like a typical market, with low-cost commodity producers at one end and high-charging

specialists at the other. Buy a Rolls-Royce rather than a Trabant and you can expect a higher standard of luxury and engineering in

return for the much greater price. But fund management is not like any other industry; paying more does not necessarily get you a

better index represents the average performance of all investors, before costs are deducted. If the fee paid to the fund manager

increases, the return achieved by the average investor must decline. After fees, hedge-fund returns this year have been feeble. From

January 1st through to August 31st, the average hedge fund returned just 4.2%, according to Merrill Lynch, less than the S&P 500

index's 5.8% total why are people paying up? In part, because investors have learned to distinguish between the market return, dubbed beta,

and managers' outperformance, known as alpha. “Why wouldn't you buy beta and alpha separately?” asks Arno Kitts of Henderson

Global Investors, a fund-management firm. “Beta is a commodity and alpha is about skill.”The fund-management splits began with the decline of balanced managers, which took complete charge of an investor's

portfolio, running everything from American equities through Japanese bonds to property. Clients became convinced that no one

firm could produce good performance in every asset class, nor could they master the art of timing the switch from one asset to

ng upImproved devices may make better use of sunlightMOST of the power generated by mankind originates from the sun. It was sunlight that nurtured the early life that became

today's oil, gas and coal. It is the solar heating of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans that fuels wave power, wind farms and

hydroelectric schemes. But using the sun's energy directly to generate power is rare. Solar cells account for less than 1% of the

world's electricity technological improvements, however, may boost this figure. The root of the problem is that most commercial solar

cells are made from silicon, and silicon is expensive. Cells can be made from other, cheaper materials, but these are not as efficient

as those made from disparity is stark. Commercial silicon cells have efficiencies of 15% to 20%. In the laboratory, some have been made with

an efficiency of 30%. The figure for non-traditional cells is far lower. A typical cell based on electrically conductive plastic has an

efficiency of just 3% or 4%. What is needed is a way to boost the efficiency of cells made from cheap materials, and three new

ways of doing so were unveiled this week in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Chemical cells work by the action of light on electrons. An electron held in a chemical bond in the cell absorbs a photon (a particle

of light) and, thus energised, breaks free. Such electrons can move about and, if they all move in the same direction, create an

electric current. But they will not all travel in the same direction without a little persuasion. With silicon, this is achieved using a

secondary electrical field across the cell. Non-silicon cells usually have a built-in “electrochemical potential” that encourages the

electrons to move away from areas where they are concentrated and towards places where they have more breathing ee Lee of Pusan National University, in South Korea, and Alan Heeger of the University of California, Santa Barbara,

work on solar cells made of electrically conductive plastics. (Indeed, Dr Heeger won a Nobel prize for discovering that some

plastics can be made to conduct electricity.) They found that by adding titanium oxide to such a cell and then baking it in an oven,

they could increase the efficiency with which it converted solar energy into electricity.

The trick is to put the titanium oxide in as a layer between the part of the cell where the electrons are liberated and the part

where they are collected for dispatch into the wider world. This makes the electrically conductive plastic more sensitive to light at

wavelengths where sunlight is more intense. Pop the resulting sandwich in the oven for a few minutes at 150°C and the plastic layer

becomes crystalline. This improves the efficiency of the process, because the electrons find it easier to move throughcrystalline technique used by Dr Lee and Dr Heeger boosts the efficiency of plastic cells to 5.6%. That is still poor compared with

silicon, but it is a big improvement on what was previously possible. Dr Lee concedes that there is still a long way to go, but says

that even an efficiency of 7% would bring plastic cells into competition with their silicon cousins, given how cheap they are to

manufacture.A second approach, taken by Michael Grätzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is to copy nature. Plants absorb

solar energy during photosynthesis. They use it to split water into hydrogen ions, electrons and oxygen. The electrons released by

this reaction are taken up by carrier molecules and then passed along a chain of such molecules before being used to power the

chemical reactions that ultimately make g up the doleA better way to help America's jobless“MANY of our most fundamental systems—the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training—were created for

the world of yesterday, not tomorrow. We will transform these systems.” With these words George Bush laid out an agenda of

domestic reform at the Republican convention in 2004. That agenda, starting with last year's attempt to transform America's vast

state pension system, has gone nowhere. But Mr Bush's basic argument is right. Much of the machinery of America's domestic

economic policy dates from the 1930s and needs repair. Unemployment insurance is a case in d by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, America's dole has barely changed since. It provides temporary income support to

laid-off workers and is financed by a small tax on wages. The details vary from state to state, but full-time workers who lose their

jobs get a cheque worth, on average, just over a third of their previous wage for up to six months. Benefits can be paid for longer if

the economy is in recession, but only if Congress agrees. By European standards, America's dole is short-lived, a characteristic that

encourages people to get a new job a macroeconomic tool, the dole works well. Unemployment cheques support spending when workers are laid off, helping

to smooth the business cycle. But the cash is not aimed at those who need it most. That is because a rising share of the unemployed

are not laid off temporarily, but have seen their jobs disappear for ch by Erica Groshen and Simon Potter, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, suggests that whereas temporary lay-offs explained much of the jumps in unemployment during the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, nowadays structural job

losses dominate. People who are unemployed because their job has gone permanently need to find new lines of work. It takes them

longer to find a job and, when they do, they are often paid considerably less than y Kling, an economist at the Brookings Institution, argues that the unemployment-benefit system ought to distinguish

those who are temporarily out of a job but may find similar, or higher-paid work, and those who face permanently lower income. In

a paper for the Hamilton Project, a research programme at Brookings that seeks new policies for America's centre-left, Mr Kling

suggests that the dole should become less like a handout from the government and more like an insurance policy that individual

workers finance idea is to give every worker an account, unsnappily called a “temporary earnings replacement account” or TERA. While

in work, people could set aside money in these accounts. Those who lose their jobs could take cash out. The level and duration of

withdrawals would be set by the government and would be the same as under today's unemployment consequencesGreen vegetables really do taste horrible“EAT up your greens” is the exasperated cry of many a parent when faced with a fussy child. But the paradox of vegetables is

that they are both good and bad for you. The cultivated plants consumed by all folks except hunter-gatherers have evolved an

ambiguous relationship with people, in which they exchange the risk of being eaten by a human for the reproductive security that

domestication brings. But the wild plants from which these cultivars are descended are very definite about the matter. They do not

want to be consumed and they make that opinion known by deploying all sorts of poisonous chemicals to discourage nibbling

herbivores. In many cases, those poisons have persisted into the cultivated varieties, albeit at lower levels.

Animals, of course, have evolved ways of dealing with these poisons. The best of these, from a plant's point of view, is when

an animal can taste, and thus reject, a poisonous chemical. This has long been assumed to be the basis of the taste of bitterness, but

that theory has only now been put to a clear test. In a paper just published in Current Biology, Mari Sandell and Paul Breslin, of the

Monell Chemical Senses Centre, in Philadelphia, have looked at the phenomenon in that bête noire of presidents and parents alike:

tastes are detected by receptor proteins that are, in turn, encoded by a family of genes known collectively as TAS2R.

Humans have around 200 TAS2R genes, each sensitive to different groups of chemicals. That variety, in itself, indicates the range of

the plant kingdom's weaponry. Dr Sandell and Dr Breslin, though, focused their attentions on just one of these receptor genes,

called hTAS2R38. The protein derived from this gene is known, from laboratory experiments, to be sensitive to a substance called

phenylthiocarbamide (PTC). This compound contains a molecular group called thiourea. And thiourea-containing substances are

known from other studies to inhibit the function of the thyroid erous vegetables, such as watercress, turnips and—most pertinently—broccoli, are rich in a group of thiourea-containing

compounds called glucosinolates. Dr Sandell and Dr Breslin wondered if there might be a connection. And, since different versions

of hTAS2R38 code for proteins that have different levels of reaction to PTC, they wondered if that might be reflected in the fact that

some people like broccoli, and others do two researchers assembled a group of volunteers and checked which versions of the hTAS2R38 gene they had. They then

fed the volunteers vegetables and recorded their reactions. All of the vegetables were thought by at least some people to be bitter,

but not all of them were cruciferous plants. The non-cruciferous ones were plants which, so far as is known, do not contain

results were clear. All volunteers found the non-cruciferous vegetables equally bitter, but their reactions to the cruciferous

ones depended on their genes. Those with two copies of the version of hTAS2R38 coding for the protein that binds best to PTC (one

copy having been inherited from each parent) thought broccoli and its cousins the most bitter. Those who had two copies of the

poorly binding version thought they tasted fine. Those with one of each had an intermediate e broccoli's bad reputation, the most bitter vegetables, according to this research, are swedes and turnips. That accords

well with work which has shown that eating these vegetables suppresses the uptake of iodine into the thyroid gland. Iodine is an

essential ingredient of thyroxine, a hormone produced by that upshot of all this is that the complaints of children (and, indeed, of many adults) that green vegetables are horrid contains

a lot of truth. There is no doubt that such vegetables are good for you. But they are not unequivocally good. As is often observed in

other contexts, there is no free g rings round stormsTrees keep records of passing hurricanesSTUDYING the past is a good way to understand the present, and may even illuminate the future. But the past does not give

up its secrets easily. Hurricane scientists, for instance, would like to know about long-term changes in the frequency and strengths

of the storms they study. That would help to show whether the shifting pattern of hurricanes seen in the past few decades is cyclical,

random or part of a trend that might be caused by global warming. Unfortunately, meteorologists have been keeping systematic tabs

on the relevant data for only about 60 years. Before that, records are sporadic and anecdotal—and that is not enough to see the

bigger records, however, are not the only sort available. Trees are popular with scientists who want to look at what happened

a few hundred years ago, because their annual growth rings mean that their wood can be dated accurately. And Dana Miller, of the

University of Tennessee, and her team have used that insight to search for hurricanes that humanity has failed to record. Their

results, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have identified a number of previously unknown

storms that hit the south-west coast of North America. The trick they used to do this was to look at the isotopic composition of the

oxygen in the wood of local trees.

Water contains two isotopes of oxygen, one of which has two more neutrons than the other, making it heavier. When a

hurricane forms, it tends, initially, to rain water molecules containing the heavier isotope. At that point it is still over the sea.

Conversely, the rain that falls from an old storm has more light oxygen in it—and that is the sort of rain that tends to fall on this rain enters the soil, some of it is taken up by trees and incorporated into their wood. So, by measuring the ratio of

the two isotopes in the rings of trees, and matching the result to the age of the ring, a history of hurricanes spanning the life of the

tree can be reconstructed.

Dr Miller's trees of choice were longleaf pines on the Valdosta State University campus in Georgia. Some were still alive, and

some were in the form of stumps left from logging that took place on the site at the beginning of the 20th test her method, Dr Miller looked first at the period from 1940 to 1990 (America began making accurate hurricane records

in 1940). She was able to identify all 18 years when storms had affected the university campus in that time, though the method also

suggested a storm in one year (1943) when there had been back further into history, she looked at 1855-1939. Here the records for landfalls are still good, although storms were

not tracked accurately before they landed. Again, the method identified all known years with storms (21 in total), and indicated one

other year when a hurricane had passed. That may or may not have been a false positive. Going back further still, to 1770-1854, the

records are much more patchy. In this case the trees suggested hurricanes had passed by in 25 years, whereas only ten stormy years

had been y, the method is not perfect, as the false positive in 1943 shows. But over a period of centuries such errors will come out

in the statistical wash. And, by extending the method to other sites (Dr Miller now has data from South Carolina and Florida, as

well as Georgia), it should be possible to look for longterm patterns in the frequency of hurricanes and to answer questions that are

of interest to insurance companies and environmentalists aloft, justMaglev trains lose some of their magicSCHOOLBOY dreams of everyday travel by magnetic levitation (maglev) have been shaken but not destroyed after an

accident on a test track at Lathen, Germany. On September 22nd a maglev train ploughed into a maintenance vehicle at 200kph

(125mph), killing 23 passengers.

Magnetic attraction and repulsion allow maglev trains to travel along guideways at speeds of up to 500kph. Transrapid, a

consortium of Siemens and ThyssenKrupp, has been testing maglev trains at Lathen since the mid-1980s. Central Japan Railway

(JR Central) has another test track west of Tokyo, which uses more cumbersome technology, relying on super-cooling. This week

JR Central said it would spend ¥355 billion ($3 billion) on lengthening and renewing the track, part of it underground, to

experiment with longer and faster trains. In both cases the technology is expensive, so that maglev trains need public backing. Only

one, which runs the 30km between Shanghai and Pudong Airport in China, is operating commercially. It was built by Transrapid

and helped along by a large subsidy from the German projects are in the pipeline, but none has got beyond a feasibility study. China plans to extend the Shanghai line for

another 160km to the city of Hangzhou. But Transrapid has not yet secured the contract, which may depend on an agreement to

share the Germany, Transrapid and Deutsche Bahn would like to build a 37km link between Munich's airport and the central railway

station, cutting the average journey time from 40 minutes to ten. The federal and Bavarian governments are in favour, but the local

mayor is not: he prefers a conventional railway which would serve non-airport traffic too. Even if he loses the argument, there is no

guarantee the government will find the money for the Transrapid line—whose role would be partly to show off the system to

potential -distance projects in Germany were considered and then rejected, mainly because the country is well served by high-speed trains between big cities. Hamburg to Berlin, which might have been the exception, does not have enough demand from

may be that maglev trains stand a better chance in countries where existing railways are less efficient, such as America and

Britain. But finding public money is a problem for even the most serious schemes: the California Regional Maglev Project, the

Baltimore-Washington Maglev Project and the Pennsylvania High-Speed Maglev Project. Another American scheme, which may

belong more in the realm of science fiction, is SkyTran, proposed by UniModal, of Montana. It involves two-seater maglev bubbles

scuttling around a three-dimensional urban network or between cities at up to atively, of course, they could remain a white elephant. The crash has prompted a closer look at safety, even though the

cause was probably human error. In theory, because of the way they are powered, maglev trains can never collide. Whatever the

outcome, schoolboys will continue to dream of trains that never touch the ballA link between unemployment and inflation is fashionable again

IF HAIRCUTS and dress styles can come back into fashion, then so can economic theories. That is why policymakers have

recently been debating the implications of the shape of that very 1960s concept, the Phillips Phillips curve was named after A.W. Phillips, whose research suggested a trade-off between British unemployment and

wage inflation over the period 1861 to 1957. The curve was widely used in the 1960s. Economists developed models that gave

politicians a neat way to find the right balance between the two factors; for every percentage-point fall in unemployment, inflation

would rise by, say, half a in the 1970s, the trade-off between unemployment and inflation seemed to evaporate; both rose at the same time, a

phenomenon known as stagflation. As Stephen King, chief economist at HSBC, says, “The Phillips curve relationship did exist as

long as governments weren't perceived to be exploiting it. When they did, they ended up with accelerating inflation.”Even before the curve began to break down in practice, Milton Friedman had cast doubt on the theory, as had Edmund Phelps,

another American economist. The doubters argued that workers would demand higher wages to protect themselves against the rise

in inflation. Thus the only effect of government stimulus would be to increase inflation for the same level of employment; in the

long run, the Phillips curve became the Phillips curve fell out of favour and was replaced by its corollary, the NAIRU, or non-accelerating inflation rate of

unemployment (in effect, the natural rate). Economists spent much of the 1980s and 1990s debating what the rate might be. In the

late 1990s indeed, many forecast that the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates to counter inflationary pressures

when unemployment fell below 6% (and then 5%). But the Fed decided that productivity improvements had driven down the

NAIRU and so left policy on hold. Growth duly flourished without causing inflation at the consumer level—although some argue

that the laxity of monetary policy caused the tech has the Phillips curve, displaced by the NAIRU and the output gap (which suggests that inflation will rise when

economic growth is above trend), come back into the economic debate after so long in the cold?In part because, while the NAIRU and the output gap are nice ideas, it is often hard to agree, at any given moment, on the

value of either number. But the main reason is that the relationship between unemployment and inflation has settled down again.

Low unemployment has not been accompanied by significant increases in inflation; in other words, the Phillips curve has flattened

considerably.