A new material helps transistors become vanishingly small
Jul 18th 2020THERE IS AN old joke in the semiconductor business that the number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years. This refers to another prediction, made in the 1970s by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a giant chipmaker, that the number of transistors which can be…
Housing was the business cycle
Jul 18th 2020AMERICANS HAVE long understood the link between the state of the housing market and the health of the wider economy. When Paul Volcker, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates to eye-watering levels in the early 1980s, furious builders sent him lumber in protest, and the unemployment rate soon rose…
China’s world-beating growth rate of…3.2%
AT THE START of the year no one would have predicted that China would crow about such slow growth by its lofty standards. Yet on July 16th it proudly reported that GDP grew by 3.2% in the second quarter compared with a year ago, rebounding from its coronavirus lockdown (see chart 1). This makes it,…
Malaysia’s government cobbles together a parliamentary majority
Jul 18th 2020IT CAME DOWN to just two votes. On July 13th Malaysia’s prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, finally secured a parliamentary majority—more than four months after taking the top job. His coalition, Perikatan Nasional, plus an assortment of informal allies from the Malaysian part of Borneo, notched up 111 votes in favour of changing the…
Illegal drugs have become deeply rooted in Burmese society
Jul 18th 2020UNDER COVER of darkness, one night in 2017, Seng Naw and some 150 like-minded men revved up their trucks and drove a couple of miles from the town of Mohnyin in Kachin state, in remote northern Myanmar. Where the rice paddies give way to forest and mountains they found something that resembled a…
Covid-19 has throttled South Africa’s economy
Jul 18th 2020JOHANNESBURGCHRISTINA MOTHIBA had always wanted to return home, but not like this. In 2006 she left Laaste Hoop, her village in Limpopo, South Africa’s most rural province, and moved in with her sister in Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub. It took four years but eventually she found a job, as a tea-lady in…
The end of the Arab world’s oil age is nigh
THEIR BUDGETS don’t add up anymore. Algeria needs the price of Brent crude, an international benchmark for oil, to rise to $157 dollars a barrel. Oman needs it to hit $87. No Arab oil producer, save tiny Qatar, can balance its books at the current price, around $40 (see chart).So some are taking drastic steps.…
Magnetometers based on diamonds will make navigation easier
Jul 18th 2020MAGNETIC COMPASSES have guided sailors for centuries, but a compass tells you only in which direction you are pointing, not whereabouts you are. A new form of magnetic navigation being developed by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) can do better. It employs magnetometers made from tiny diamonds to indicate an…
Comet NEOWISE lights up northern skies
Jul 18th 2020A VISITOR IS hanging in the night skies of the northern hemisphere. Comet neowise was discovered on March 27th by the eponymous Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, an orbiting telescope belonging to nasa, America’s space agency. neowise was originally just “wise”, an instrument launched in 2009 to map the entire sky at…
The row over taxing tech firms heats up
Jul 18th 2020WASHINGTON, DCWHEN G20 FINANCE ministers meet on July 18th and 19th, avoiding a new trade war will be high on the agenda. Cash-strapped governments around the world are planning to whack taxes on online services. But America regards these as a grab for its companies’ profits, and is considering retaliation against ten digital-tax…