No one has yet been killed by re-entering space junk
Aug 10th 2019EVERY DAY a tonne or two of defunct satellites, rocket parts and other man-made orbiting junk hurtles into the atmosphere. Four-fifths of it burns up to become harmless dust, but that still leaves a fair number of fragments large enough to be lethal. It is testament to how much of Earth’s surface is…
A tale of elephants, ants, trees and fire shows how complex nature is
Aug 8th 2019ECOLOGY IS A complicated thing. Given the facts that elephant damage often kills trees and bush fires often kill trees it would be reasonable to deduce that a combination of the two would make things worse. Counter-intuitively, though, as research just published in Biotropica, by Benjamin Wigley of Nelson Mandela University in South…
How to wring power from the night air
Aug 1st 2019MONTREALSOLAR POWER is all very well, but it is available only during daylight hours. If something similarly environmentally friendly could be drawn on during the hours of darkness, that would be a great convenience. Colin Price, an atmospheric scientist at Tel Aviv University, in Israel, wonders if he might have stumbled across such…
Astronomers are probing faraway planets with greater sophistication
Aug 3rd 2019IN THE DELUGE of planets found beyond the solar system over the past decade, those of system TOI-270 might not seem special. There are three of them, orbiting a star 73 light-years away. This is neither the closest system known, nor does it contain the most Earthlike exoplanet. It has, though, sent a…
Raids and arrests cast doubt on the Holy See’s clean-up
Oct 10th 2019VATICAN CITYTHE BLOCK of shops, offices and apartments at 60 Sloane Avenue was once a warehouse for Harrods of London. Now it is the focal point of the latest financial scandal to rock the Vatican—potentially the worst since Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, whose buccaneering presidency of the Vatican Bank in the 1970s and 1980s…
New South Korean investment schemes aim to prop up domestic industry
Oct 12th 2019SEOULA STATUE OF Admiral Yi Sun-Shin, famous for his victories over the Japanese navy in the 16th century, casts a fierce eye over Gwanghwamun Square in the centre of Seoul. Recently he has also been staring down at visitors in branches of Nonghyup, a local bank. A picture of the man in full…
How stories can help explain booms and busts
Oct 10th 2019EVERYONE KNOWS, or thinks they know, the story of the Wall Street shoeshine boy. In 1929 Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Boston-Irish political clan, had an epiphany while his shoes were being cleaned. When the boy who shined his shoes offered him stock tips, he realised the stockmarket was about to implode. Kennedy…
The issuer of a star cryptocurrency is being sued for $1.4trn
Oct 10th 2019LAUNCHED AS REALCOIN in July 2014, Tether aimed to become a more reliable alternative to Bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency. With a $4.1bn market capitalisation, it is now the fifth-largest virtual currency. But its efforts to gain investors’ trust have fallen short. On October 6th a group filed a class-action lawsuit in New York,…
Even provincial towns in South Korea are becoming more cosmopolitan
Sep 26th 2019GIMHAEPROVINCIAL TOWNS in South Korea, like their counterparts in other countries, are not known for a great variety of culinary offerings. Lunch options are typically stew, noodles or barbecue. Not so in Gimhae, a sprawling city of 550,000 in the far south of the country. A stroll around the old market area takes…
Burning forests are blackening the skies of South-East Asia
Sep 21st 2019SINGAPORETHE AMAZON is not the world’s only smouldering rainforest, alas: fires are also raging in the jungles of Indonesia, blanketing much of South-East Asia in thick smoke. Some 3,300 square kilometres on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo have gone up in flames. The government has deployed more than 9,000 people and 52…