A call to reform the IPCC

IF THIS week’s report into the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a council of national academies of science were the sort of report children take home from school, its main themes would be expressed as “could do better” and “needs to show workings”. Stern parents might read it as calling for a Gradgrind-like clampdown; more indulgent ones as an inducement for the little darlings to try a little harder.

At a meeting in Busan, South Korea, this October, the parents in question—the representatives of the IPCC’s member governments—will decide which sort they want to be. Read in detail, the report suggests that if they want credible climate assessments, a firm hand will be required. ...

Graham “Mont” Liggins, investigator of the mysteries of birth and breath, died on August 24th, aged 84

HE FORGOT about the sheep. He had meant to dump it in the incinerator on the way home from work. It was still in the car boot, and starting to smell. When he remembered, and forced it down the incinerator chute, it was already bloating, and the gassy innards instantly caught fire. The force of the explosion sent ash 200 feet into the air over Auckland.

Graham Liggins (grinning, above) was trying to find out what triggered labour. As a New Zealander, he had naturally turned to sheep. But his pursuit led to some of the most important discoveries in obstetrics, and the saving of hundreds of thousands of tiny, struggling lives. ...

Crowdfunding: Artists, musicians and writers are using the internet to aggregate lots of small donations to fund their work

WIKIPEDIA, a giant online encyclopedia compiled by volunteers, is the product of the aggregation of lots of people’s spare time. An example of “crowdsourcing”, it demonstrates that on the internet, as in the real world, many hands make light work. Can the same approach be applied to money as well as time? That is the idea behind “crowdfunding”, in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.

As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed. Millions of dollars, in increments as small as $5, have poured into efforts that connect artists, musicians, writers and others with people willing to fund their projects. Venture capitalists have also shown an interest by investing in start-ups that facilitate crowdfunding. ...

Emergency medicine: Field medicine, for soldiers and civilians alike, gets smarter as medical monitoring technology improves

HALF way through a flight from Mumbai to London, a male passenger complained of a swollen right hand and an inability to bend his fingers. The flight attendants were uncertain about what to do and hooked the passenger up to a small device which took and transmitted vital signs, including his pulse, blood pressure and a picture of his hand, to a ground-based medical team.

As the passenger’s condition worsened, the device was also used to transmit an electrocardiographic (ECG) trace. The resulting information was used to rule out heart problems, and the passenger was stabilised and monitored with the assistance of a doctor on the flight. The decision was made to continue the journey rather than divert to the nearest airport. ...

Jet engines: A nifty new engine design promises to improve combustion efficiency, thus cutting fuel consumption and reducing emissions

IN A world worried about global warming, improving the cleanliness and efficiency of jet engines is a priority for airlines and aircraft manufacturers. It is not just altruism: greener engines also use less fuel, and so cut costs. Incremental improvements over the years have made a difference. Modern jets burn only half as much fuel per unit of thrust as their 1960s counterparts. But some people think it is time for a radical redesign. One of those people is David Lior, the boss of a small Israeli firm called R-Jet Engineering.

Jet engines rely on Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a jet is running, a compressor at the front draws in air and compresses it (see illustration). This air is guided and diffused by static blades to allow for easier ignition when it is mixed with fuel and ignited in a combustion chamber. The reaction comes in the form of rapidly expanding hot gases, which blast out of the rear of the jet and thus drive the aircraft forward. As they do so, they pass through another set of static blades which direct and accelerate the hot gases to turn a turbine. The turbine is connected by a shaft to the compressor at the front, thus turning it and keeping the whole process running. ...

Geothermal power: Deriving energy from subterranean heat is no longer limited to volcanic regions. By drilling deep wells into the ground, it can be made to work almost anywhere. Just watch out for the earthquakes

OVER the course of the next ten years a company called Geodynamics, based in Queensland, Australia, is planning to drill as many as 90 wells, each 4,500-5,000 metres deep, in the Cooper Basin, a desert region in South Australia with large energy reserves. But the company is not drilling for oil or gas. It is looking for an energy source that is far cleaner and more abundant than any fossil fuel: heat emanating from hot rocks deep beneath the Earth’s surface, a promising emerging form of geothermal energy.

Conventional geothermal power exploits naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water, close to the Earth’s surface, to generate electricity. (Heat from the water is used to boil a fluid and drive a steam turbine connected to a generator.) Because such conditions are rare, the majority of today’s geothermal power plants are located in rift zones or volcanically active parts of the world. In Iceland, around one-quarter of the country’s electricity is produced by geothermal power stations; at the Svartsengi power station, the naturally occurring hot water also flows into a lagoon, which is a popular (and photogenic) bathing spot. ...

Technology and development: A growing number of initiatives are promoting bottom-up ways to deliver energy to the world’s poor

AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones. ...

Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual-reality technology, has more recently become an outspoken critic of online social media

FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?

No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.” ...

Biomedicine: Doctors are rerouting nerves to give patients more natural control of prosthetic arms and bring paralysed limbs back to life

IT IS known as “phantom limb syndrome” or “phantom pain”. But this strange phenomenon feels all too real to the people it affects, and can be agonisingly painful. Amputees and people who have become paralysed may still “feel” a missing limb or a part of their body, even though it is no longer connected to their nervous system. Yet such sensations offer confirmation that even when a limb has been severed or cut off from the nervous system, the nerves that once serviced it remain alive and well. Doctors are now finding ways to put these nerves to good use, by rewiring them to control prosthetic limbs or reanimate paralysed limbs.

Moreover, rewiring the nervous system should allow amputees to gain a sense of “embodiment” of a prosthetic. That is, by controlling and sensing the prosthetic using the same neural pathways and parts of the brain that once governed the real limb, the prosthetic can be made to feel and act like a genuine extension of the user’s body. And by stimulating the nerves in the legs or arms of paralysed patients—nerves that have been cut off from the central nervous system—it is possible to create co-ordinated movement of great subtlety. For example, the hands of paralysed patients have been stimulated to enable them to grasp and turn door knobs. And with careful control and co-ordination of the muscle groups in their legs, patients can even rise from their wheelchairs and take steps. ...

Software: A new approach to speech recognition gives users the chance to fix misunderstandings without having to repeat themselves

THERE is often something sweet, intimate even, about couples who finish each other’s sentences. But it can also be a source of irritation, especially when they get it wrong. A similar irritation (minus the sweetness) is often felt by users of speech-recognition software, which still manages to garble and twist even the most clearly spoken words. Might the solution lie in a more intimate relationship between the user and the software?

Modern speech-recognition programs do not merely try to identify individual words as they are spoken; rather, they attempt to match whole chunks of speech with statistical models of phrases and sentences. The rationale is that by knowing statistical rules of thumb for the way in which words are usually put together—an abstract probabilistic approximation of grammar, if you will—it is possible to narrow the search when attempting to identify individual words. For example, a noun-phrase will typically consist of a noun preceded by a modifier, such as an article and possibly also an adjective. So if part of a speech pattern sounds like “ball”, the odds of it actually being “ball” will increase if the utterances preceding it sound like “the” and “bouncy”. ...