Face-masks can give the immune system a helpful hand
Mar 6th 2021FACE-MASKS HELP reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. Several studies have reported the more surprising finding that, even if wearers do become infected, their disease is usually milder. Now Joseph Courtney and Ad Bax, a pair of researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, think they…
The race to teach sign language to computers
Mar 6th 2021USING A computer used to mean bashing away at a keyboard. Then it meant tapping on a touchscreen. Increasingly, it means simply speaking. Over 100m devices powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, rest on the world’s shelves. Apple’s offering, Siri, processes 25bn requests a month. By 2025 the market for such technology could…
With growth on track, China starts to unwind stimulus
Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.This article has been updatedTHE PHRASE “first in, first out” has become shorthand for China’s experience of the covid-19 pandemic: it is both where the virus started spreading and the first large country to control it. Its early…
Greensill Capital’s woes will reverberate widely
Mar 6th 2021SUPPLIERS HATE being made to wait for the cash they are owed almost as much as their customers hate parting with it. What if high finance could help? Specialist firms have indeed sprung up, offering to pay suppliers up front, then cashing in their customer’s cheque as the bill comes due weeks later.…
Countries that curbed covid-19 fast have been slow to vaccinate
Mar 6th 2021AUSTRALIANS ARE proud of their country’s impressive if stringent handling of the coronavirus pandemic: just over 900 deaths to date out of a population of 25m, with a mere eight or so new cases each day. That achievement is one reason why the scene after the men’s final at the Australian Open tennis…
Retailers in the Philippines have been refusing to sell pork
Mar 6th 2021LAST MONTH retailers in Manila went on a two-week “pork holiday”. That was not a fad diet, nor even a few days off scarfing sausage and bacon. They simply refused to sell the stuff, in protest at a price cap imposed by presidential decree.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy…
Politicians in Lebanon jumped the queue for covid-19 vaccine
AT FIRST GLANCE one might have thought the cardboard box was a visiting head of state. On February 13th Lebanon’s first batch of covid-19 vaccines emerged from a jet at Beirut’s international airport. A delegation of officials drove out to meet it; local media broadcast the event live. Never mind that the shipment contained a…
The pope is heading for Iraq, where Christians remain afraid
THINGS ARE moving quickly in Qaraqosh, a sleepy Christian town just outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Pope Francis arrives on March 7th, four years after Islamic State (IS) was chased out. So local priests have been hurriedly cleaning up al-Tahira, their cathedral and one of Iraq’s largest churches. They have refurbished its burnt interior and…
Spy agencies have high hopes for AI
Mar 6th 2021WHEN IT comes to using artificial intelligence (AI), intelligence agencies have been at it longer than most. In the cold war America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) explored early AI to help transcribe and translate the enormous volumes of Soviet phone-intercepts they began hoovering up in the 1960s…
Seagrasses and mangroves can suck carbon from the air
Mar 6th 2021OFF THE coast of Formentera, an island in the Spanish Mediterranean, lives an organism that stretches 15km from one end to the other. Posidonia oceanica, more prosaically known as seagrass, spreads by sending shoots out beneath the sediment. Entire meadows, covering several hectares, can thus be made up of a single organism. The…