Miscellaneous Economist Articles

I caught up on a few weeks of The Economist. Here are a few articles I found interesting.

Orthopaedics: Plastic surgery "DARPA, the research-funding agency of America’s Department of Defence, approached a group of scientists at the University of Texas, Houston, two years ago. DARPA wanted something that army doctors could carry in their bags and use to mend injured limbs on the spot, before amputation became inevitable. The researchers, led by Mauro Ferrari and Ennio Tasciotti (who have since moved to the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in the same city) came up with an idea that could change orthopaedic surgery once and for all: a material that surgeons can implant or even inject; which fixes a fractured bone quickly; and which then leads to its full regeneration, with no need for nails and pins."

Climate science: A fistful of dust "The Sahara and other bone-dry places continually send dust up into the atmosphere, where it may travel thousands of kilometres and influence regional weather, the global climate and even the growth of forests halfway around the planet."

A nice interactive graphic of Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states?Liquid radio describes how "America’s navy is developing an antenna made of seawater".

The Constant Gardeners explains, "Metrologists will soon try to redefine the scientific world’s unit of mass". "The kilogram is the last bit of the International System of Units (SI) to be tied explicitly to an artefact. Once, the metre was too. It was the length of another platinum-iridium ingot stored in Sèvres. But the metre has been redefined twice since that ingot was deposited in 1889: first, in 1960, in terms of the wavelength of a particular sort of light; then, in 1983, as the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Which, of course, raises the question of what a second is. Not, as you might think, a sixtieth of a sixtieth of a twenty-fourth of the period of the Earth’s rotation. No. A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of a phenomenon called microwave transition in an atom of caesium-133. The remaining four basic SI units, the ampere (electricity), kelvin (temperature), mole (quantity of atoms, molecules or other particles) and candela (light), followed suit—though the ampere, candela and mole are linked to the kilogram, and so indirectly to the Sèvres prototype. The reason why the kilogram has taken so long to ditch its historic deadweight is that Planck’s constant (h), the most promising candidate for its remodelling, pertains to the subatomic scale. On that scale, strange things happen and particles start behaving like waves."