How the shark forgot his skeleton
Sep 12th 2020VERTEBRATES—THOSE animals with a backbone—are a diverse bunch, encompassing everything from tuna and budgerigars to snakes, chinchillas and human beings. One way biologists divide them up concerns the composition of their skeletons. Most vertebrates sport hard, calcified bones, and are dubbed the osteichthyans. A second, much smaller category is the chondrichthyans, whose members…
How weird weather can span the world
Sep 12th 2020ON SEPTEMBER 7TH in Denver, Colorado, the temperature reached 34°C (93°F), 6°C above what is normal for the time of year. The city was sitting under the dome of hot air encouraging record fires across the American West (see article). The next day snow started to fall. By midnight the temperature was below…
Why so many Indonesians want to be public servants
WHEN THE government rang to tell Budi (not his real name) that he had been hired as a tax collector, it was like a dream come true. When he graduated from university in 2013, the only work he could find was as a stevedore at the local port. Jobs in his hometown of Ende, a…
Asia’s migrant workers are having a rough time under covid-19
Sep 19th 2020THE 200-ODD Bangladeshi and Indian men engaged to build a new resort on Baa atoll in the Maldives were becoming increasingly desperate. Since covid-19 closed the island nation to tourists in March, migrant workers had been forced to work without pay. They were living in cramped, squalid conditions and were short of food,…
Ethiopia’s democratic transition is in peril
“FREEDOM IS NOT a gift doled out to people by a government,” Abiy Ahmed said in his inaugural address as Ethiopia’s prime minister in 2018. “Rather [it is] a gift of nature to everyone that emanates from our human dignity.” His words marked a remarkable turn for a country that over the past five decades…
How an overpriced warplane complicates diplomacy in the Middle East
DON’T BE FOOLED by the nondescript buildings of the Nevatim air base, deep in the Negev desert. Lately the facility in southern Israel has served as something like an advanced testing ground for the most state-of-the-art warplanes made in the West. Take the American-made F-35 stealth fighter jet, which Israeli pilots flew over Lebanon, Syria…
Why is America’s economy beating forecasts?
Sep 24th 2020“WHEN AMERICANS vote in November, unemployment will be below 6%,” declared Lars Christensen, a maverick economist, in May. Given that lockdowns had sent the unemployment rate soaring to 14.7% only the month before, it was a bold prediction. In June at least 14 of the Federal Reserve’s 17 interest-rate-setters forecast that quarterly unemployment…
Will Japan see a new generation of zombie firms?
ECONOMISTS USING the term “zombie” used to have Japanese companies in mind. Firms that are dead competitively but continue to haunt their living peers proliferated in the decade or so following Japan’s financial crisis of 1990, as banks tided unprofitable borrowers over, at times with the government’s encouragement. By 2001 zombies made up more than…
Commercialising quantum computers
Sep 26th 2020BIG, STABLE quantum computers would be useful devices. By exploiting the counterintuitive properties of quantum mechanics they could perform some calculations (though only some) faster than any conceivable non-quantum machine.For one thing, they would probably be much more rapid than any classical computer at searching a database—an elemental operation with a thousand uses.…
Tanks have rarely been more vulnerable
Sep 12th 2020TANK BATTLES are rare these days. Crews that wish to prove themselves can turn instead to the Tank Biathlon, part of the International Army Games—a sort of Olympics with guns—organised each year by Russia. On September 5th Russian tanks raced and blasted their way to victory over teams from China, Belarus and Azerbaijan.A…