The Fukushima disaster was not the turning point many had hoped
Mar 6th 2021IITATE, OKUMA and TOKYOIN THE HILLY village of Iitate, in Fukushima prefecture, stands a new community centre built with parts pulled from abandoned buildings. Windows from one, doors from another. A chalkboard from a beloved school with no children to attend it. One cloudy day last autumn, a crowd gathered to celebrate its…
India’s government follows Bangladesh’s in policing social media
MUSHTAQ AHMED, a Bangladeshi writer, knew the risk he was taking. To attack his government’s handling of covid-19, not least by likening the health minister to a cockroach, as he did on Facebook last spring, was to challenge the Digital Security Act. Passed in 2018 by the thin-skinned regime of Sheikh Hasina Wajed, now in…
How a spilled basket of tomatoes paralysed Nigeria
IT STARTED WITH a squashed tomato that led to a killing. It has since escalated into clashes that have taken at least 20 lives and a standoff between northerners and southerners that has paralysed Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or…
On gay rights, young Africans share the intolerance of their elders
Mar 4th 2021WHEN GAY Nigerians took to the streets to join massive protests against police brutality last year, it was not just the police who attacked them. Fellow protesters also hurled insults at them, ripped up their rainbow flags and tore placards from their hands. “I felt like a lot of people just wanted me…
SpaceX is making progress on its next rocket
But it still has a long way to goMar 4th 2021IT WAS, the wags of Twitter noted, the quickest relaunch of a SpaceX rocket yet. SN10, the latest prototype of the next-generation rocket, Starship, with which the company’s boss, Elon Musk, hopes to send people to Mars, took off from the company’s facility in Boca…
A new generation of electric motorboats takes to the water
Feb 17th 2021LIKE ELECTRIC cars, electric boats are not a new idea. In the early 1900s Clara Ford preferred driving her electric car around Detroit instead of one of the noisy gasoline-powered Model Ts her husband Henry had begun making. Around the same time, posh electric launches cruised silently along the River Thames in Britain,…
Why people are worried about the bond-equity relationship
Buried in the quant argot is a fear of a return to 1970s-style inflationMar 6th 2021MOST PEOPLE have little time for quants. They find the language of quantitative finance far from illuminating. Even fairly numerate people struggle to grasp what comes easily to pointy-headed number-crunchers. Take the idea of correlation, the co-movement of two or…
Antarctica Sees Another Giant Crack, Should We Expect the Worst?
Published on Mar 3, 2021 by AnneA giant crack in Antarctica made headlines again for the past few days and many people are worried. A rift has caused a huge chunk of the glacier to break off into the ocean in a part of Antarctica known as the Brunt Ice Shelf. Also known as glacier…
Cracking the security on a trove of 17th-century letters
Before envelopes, there was “letterlocking”Mar 3rd 2021A MODERN CORRESPONDENT wanting to communicate privately can use computerised encryption. Three hundred years ago, origami would have been a better bet.Before gummed envelopes became common in the 1800s, letters were posted with no security wrapper. Privacy-minded writers relied instead on a cunning combinations of folds, tucks, slits and…
Cracking the security on a trove of 17th century letters
Before envelopes, there was “letterlocking”Mar 3rd 2021A MODERN CORRESPONDENT wanting to communicate privately can use computerised encryption. Three hundred years ago, origami would have been a better bet.Before gummed envelopes became common in the 1800s, letters were posted with no security wrapper. Privacy-minded writers relied instead on a cunning combinations of folds, tucks, slits and…