Discover the forces shaping our future
Discover the forces shaping our future
Many people think The Economist is only about economics. It’s not. It’s about pretty much everything.
From politics to business and finance, from science and technology to the arts – we bring our readers clear analysis of the issues that lie behind each week’s global news stories. We satisfy the naturally curious with a distilled view of world affairs that is intelligent, insightful and thought-provoking.
Whatever is happening across the globe, we have an opinion on it. Which is why we tell our readers: The Economist is your essential guide to the events and issues that are shaping our world.
Here is a selection of specially curated content on developments that are shaping our future.
The Economist explains
Why eating insects makes sense
INSECTS offer crunchy solutions to boosting the food supply and feeding people sustainably
Sep 25th 2014, BY ECONOMIST.COM
Watch Why eating insects makes sense
THE world’s population is projected to reach 11 billion by the end of the century.
Feeding that many people will be a challenge, and it is further complicated by the impact of climate change on agriculture. That is why some people advocate an unusual way to boost the food supply and feed people sustainably: by eating less meat, and more insects.
About 2 billion people already eat bugs. Mexicans enjoy chili-toasted grasshoppers. Thais tuck into cricket stir-fries and Ghanians snack on termites. Insects are slowly creeping onto Western menus as novelty items, but most people remain squeamish. Yet there are three reasons why eating insects makes sense.
First, they are healthier than meat. There are nearly 2,000 kinds of edible insects, many of them packed with protein, calcium, fibre, iron and zinc.
A small serving of grasshoppers can contain about the same amount of protein as a similar sized serving of beef, but has far less fat and far fewer calories.
Second, raising insects is cheap, or free. Little technology or investment is needed to produce them. Harvesting insects could provide livelihoods to some of the world’s poorest people.
Finally, insects are a far more sustainable source of food than livestock. Livestock production accounts for nearly a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions - that’s more than transport.
By contrast, insects produce relatively few greenhouse gases, and raising them requires much less land and water. And they’ll eat almost anything.
Despite all this, most Westerners find insects hard to swallow. One solution is to use protein extracted from bugs in other products, such as ready meals and pasta sauces.
Not having to look at the bugs, and emphasising the environmental benefits, might make the idea of eating insects a bit more palatable.
Perovskites may give silicon solar cells a run for their money
May 16th 2015 | From the print edition
ON THE desk of Chris Case, chief technology officer of Oxford Photovoltaics, there sits a small but heavy vial filled with a canary-yellow liquid. “That’s enough for a kilowatt,” he says. The material in the vial is called methylammonium lead iodide, and enthusiasts such as Dr Case believe it, and materials like it—known collectively as perovskites—could lead to a dramatic increase in the world’s use of power from the sun.
Oxford Photovoltaics is one of many firms, both small and large, that see promise in perovskites. These are compounds that share a crystal structure and are named, collectively, after the mineral that was the first substance found to have this structure. Often, they are semiconductors. This means that, like the most famous semiconductor of all, silicon, they can be used in solar cells.
The first perovskite solar cells were made in 2009. They converted 3.8% of the light falling on them into electricity. Now, the best hoover up around 20%. This rate of conversion is similar to the performance of commercial silicon cells, and researchers are confident they can push it to 25% in the next few years.
Moreover, unlike silicon, perovskites are cheap to turn into cells. To make a silicon cell, you have to slice a 200-micron-thick wafer from a solid block of the element. A perovskite cell can be made by mixing some chemical solutions and pouring the result onto a suitable backing, or by vaporising precursor molecules and letting them condense onto such a backing. If these processes can be commercialised, silicon solar cells will have a serious rival.
Solar cells, perovskite ones included, all function in broadly the same way. When light hits a crystal of the material they are made from, it frees electrons (which are negatively charged) and leaves behind what are, in effect, positively charged holes in the crystal lattice. This formation of electron-hole pairs is characteristic of semiconductors exposed to light. Neighbouring materials then capture the positive and negative charges and transport them to electrode layers on the cell’s outer faces, where they generate a current.
This general theme, though, is capable of variation. Last year, for example, Michael Grätzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Lausanne, devised a cell in which the perovskites were infused into the electron-capturing material, rather than being a separate layer. That design, he thinks, will make cells cheaper to manufacture, and more stable. Dyesol, an Australian firm with which Dr Grätzel is collaborating, agrees. It is building a factory in Turkey, planned to open in 2017, to manufacture solar cells that are based on the Grätzel infusion principle.
But the variations on the photovoltaic theme that most excite researchers at the moment are tandem cells, which have layers of both perovskite and silicon in them. These will permit more of the spectrum to be converted into electricity. Perovskites can be made to many different formulae, which means they can be tuned to absorb different parts of the spectrum. The top layer of a tandem cell is a perovskite that has been tweaked to absorb strongly at the blue end of the spectrum. Beneath it is a layer of silicon, which mops up the red.
The first such tandem was unveiled in March by researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It had an efficiency of 13.7%. This week, Oxford Photovoltaics showed off one that has an efficiency of 20%. It hopes to see its first commercial tandems roll off production lines in 2017. This marriage of convenience between the old and new ways of doing photovoltaics may not, however, last long. Henry Snaith, Oxford Photovoltaics’ founder, looks forward to all-perovskite tandems that have cells of different composition, each tuned to harvest a particular part of the solar spectrum.
The main obstacle to the march of perovskites is water: they decompose in it. Perovskite solar panels must thus be totally watertight. But technology exists to make effective seals on solar cells. The standard tests for cells, including those for watertightness, are set by a body called the International Electrotechnical Commission. One of these tests requires that cells sustain their performance for more than 1,000 hours at 85°C and 85% humidity. Others put cells through drastic temperature swings, artificial hailstorms and so on. Dr Snaith says that Oxford Photovoltaics’ cells have passed the 1,000 hour test and are well on the way to making 2,000 hours.
Another way around the problem of a potentially limited lifetime is to find applications where it does not matter. In these, perovskites should do well. Some firms, for example, hope to enter the mobile-device market—reasoning that such devices are usually replaced by their owners every few years and so do not require a long-life cell. Saule Technologies, in Poland, and VTT, in Finland, are experimenting with flexible perovskite cells intended to charge mobiles. Olga Malinkiewicz, Saule’s founder, says that her company has made prototype flexible cells which are 3% efficient, and she thinks its engineers can get to 10% in the next two years. When Saule’s cells are commercialised, she plans to make them using inkjet printers that spray perovskite precursors onto adhesive backings. This will permit the cells to be stuck onto any device that needs power.
Oxford Photovoltaics and Dyesol, though, are looking at larger-scale, longer-lasting products. They hope to glaze buildings with panes covered in semi-transparent perovskite cells, allowing such edifices to declare, if not independence then at least autonomy from the power grid. The ultimate dream, though, would be to feed that grid itself with power from perovskite cells. At the moment, solar energy contributes a little over 1% to the world’s electricity production. Silicon cells are teetering on the brink of being properly competitive with fossil fuels, but a new way of doing things might push costs down dramatically. Perovskites could be that innovation.
Too much food gets thrown away
Sep 1st 2012 | From the print edition
INTERNATIONAL shindigs are noted for fine dining. But delegates at the recent World Water Week Conference in Stockholm, which discussed the looming global food crisis, practised what they preached: lunches were meatless, and any leftover quorn or quinoa was sent to make bio-gas.
Would that others were so thrifty. Torgny Holmgren of the Stockholm International Water Institute, which organised the event, reckons up to half of the food the world produces goes uneaten. In India up to 40% rots on the way to market. Americans bin 40% of what they buy, wasting $165 billion.
But America does have the thrifty “doggy bag” in which restaurants pack surplus food, nominally for canines, but often for humans. Most countries shun them: perhaps for fear of seeming stingy, or because of worries about hygiene. Travel blogs even warn Americans not to risk disdain by asking for doggy bags when eating out in France or Spain.
In Britain, where restaurants throw away 600,000 tonnes of food a year, the Sustainable Restaurant Association has launched a “Too Good to Waste” campaign to promote its doggy boxes. It has signed up eateries including the Foyer Bar at Claridge’s, one of London’s best-known hotels.
Thrift with food can help poor people too. Urban Gleaners, a charity in Portland, Oregon, collects unused food from hotels, shops and eateries. FareShare, a British one, collects it mainly from manufacturers. It estimates that 1% of the country’s 3m tonnes of annual food waste could provide 70m meals.
How to stop overfishing on the high seas
Jul 16th 2016 | From the print edition
FISH are slippery characters, with little regard for international agreements or borders. The speediest, such as crescent-tailed bluefin tuna, can slice through the ocean at 70 kilometres per hour. Their routes take them beyond areas that come under the jurisdiction of individual coastal states, and into the high seas. These wildernesses were once a haven for migratory species. No longer.
Under international law the high seas, which span 64% of the surface of the ocean, are defined as “the common heritage of mankind”. This definition might have provided enough protection if the high seas were still beyond mankind’s reach. But the arrival of better trawlers and whizzier mapping capabilities over the past six decades has ushered in a fishing free-for-all. Hauls from the high seas are worth $16 billion annually. Deprived of a chance to replenish themselves, stocks everywhere pay the price: almost 90% are fished either to sustainable limits or beyond. And high-seas fishing greatly disturbs the sea bed: the nets of bottom trawlers can shift boulders weighing as much as 25 tonnes.
Introducing private property rights is the classic answer to this “tragedy of the commons”. That is the principle behind the exclusive rights given to coastal states to maintain territorial waters. A clutch of regional organisations have been set up to try to manage fish stocks in the high seas. But as a result of overlapping remits, vested interests and patchy data, the plunder continues apace (see article). Since 2010 the proportion of tuna and tuna-like species being overexploited has grown from 28% to 36%.
A fresh approach is needed. Slashing fishing subsidies is the most urgent step. In total these come to $30 billion a year, 70% of which are doled out by richer countries. By reducing fuel costs, subsidies bring the high seas within reach for a few lucky trawlers, largely from the developed world. Just ten countries, including America, France and Spain, received the bulk of the bounty from high-seas catches between 2000 and 2010, even though Africa has more fishermen than Europe and the Americas combined. That is unfair and short-sighted.
The next step is to close off more areas to fishing. As of 2014 less than 1% of the high seas enjoyed a degree of legal protection. A review of 144 studies published since 1994 suggests that to preserve and restore ecosystems, 30% of the oceans should be designated as “marine protected areas” (MPAs). Individual countries can play their part, by creating reserves within territorial waters: last year Britain created the world’s largest MPA, an area bigger than California off the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific. But to get anywhere near that 30% share, mechanisms must be found to close off bits of the high seas, too. The UN’s members have rightly agreed to work out how to do so.
Progress towards even these limited goals, let alone more ambitious ones such as a total ban on high-seas fishing, will not be easy. The fishing industry is adept at protecting its interests. Questions of governance and enforcement dog every effort to police the high seas. Demand for fish is rising: humans are each consuming 20kg on average a year, more than ever before.
So in parallel with efforts to protect wild stocks, another push is needed: to encourage the development of aquaculture, the controlled farming of fish. In 2014, for the first time, more fish were farmed for human consumption than were caught in the wild; farmed-fish output now outstrips global beef production. Unfortunately, feedstocks are often poor and storage facilities inadequate. By boosting basic research and infrastructure for aquaculture, governments could hasten a welcome trend. Eventually, efficient fish-farming will be the best guardian of stocks on the high seas.
Silicon Valley gets a taste for food
Tech startups are moving into the food business to make sustainable versions of meat and dairy products from plants
Mar 7th 2015 | From the print edition
A PLANT-BASED hamburger patty that bleeds. Meatless chicken strips with the same fleshy and fibrous texture as cooked poultry. Mayonnaise made without eggs that is creamy and smooth. And a vegan beverage that contains all the ingredients for human sustenance, making it unnecessary to bother eating ordinary food every again. Hungry yet?
These are the offerings from a recent crop of Silicon Valley-funded startups which are trying to change the way people eat. The idea of making such products is attracting entrepreneurs and venture-capital firms who think that the traditional food industry is ripe for disruption because it is inefficient, inhumane and in need of an overhaul. The companies have different approaches, but they share the ambition of creating new plant-based food that they say will be healthier, cheaper and just as satisfying as meat, egg, dairy and other animal-based products—but with a much lower environmental impact.
“Animal farming is absurdly destructive and completely unsustainable. Yet the demand for meat and dairy products is going up,” says Patrick Brown, founder of one such startup, Impossible Foods, based in Redwood City in the heart of Silicon Valley. It has raised $75m to develop plant-based meat and cheese imitations.
Watch Meat Makers: the artificial beef revolution
According to the United Nations, livestock uses around 30% of the world’s ice-free landmass and produces 14.5% of all greenhouse-gas emissions. Making meat also requires supplying animals with vast amounts of water and food: in the United States producing 1kg of live animal weight typically requires 10kg of feed for beef, 5kg for pork and 2.5kg for poultry. Yet between now and 2050, the world’s population is expected to rise from 7.2 billion to over 9 billion people—and the appetite for meat to grow along with it. To keep up with demand, food production will need to increase significantly.
It is a big challenge, but also an economic opportunity. “Anytime you can find a way to use plant protein instead of animal protein there’s an enormous efficiency in terms of the energy, water and all sorts of other inputs involved—which translates at the end of the day to saving money,” says Ali Partovi, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and investor in tech startups, such as Dropbox and Airbnb, as well as half-a-dozen sustainable-food companies.
The problem is many people shun vegetables and prefer to eat meat or dairy products. Dr Brown and others think the solution is to mimic the taste of meat and other animal-derived foods with plants and take the animal out of the equation. In theory at least, there would be plenty of food for everyone and fewer resources needed to produce it. “We’re reinventing the entire system of transforming plants into meat and milk,” he says. Other startups have similar aspirations. Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based chicken strips and beef “crumbles”, is already selling its products in stores. As is Hampton Creek, whose eggless mayonnaise has become a bestseller at Whole Foods Market, a big American chain.
Of course, the food giants already offer a variety of meat and dairy alternatives that many vegetarians and vegans buy. What is different with this new approach is that the startups are not targeting the small percentage of the population who largely live on a plant-based diet already. They are after people who love meat and dairy products, and that means replicating the meaty, cheesy or creamy flavours and textures that so many people crave. “We want to have a product that a burger lover would say is better than any burger they’ve ever had,” says Dr Brown.
This is also different from “growing” meat in a laboratory using tissue engineering, which involves culturing cells taken from live animals. Modern Meadow, a New York company, is working on this technology, although its more immediate aim is to grow unmarked cultured leather.
“Change happens by making something so delicious and so affordable, everyone chooses it”
Josh Tetrick. CEO of Hampton Creek
Introducing a new food category is risky as it takes a lot of time and money. Big food firms prefer to acquire innovative products rather than develop them internally, explains Barb Stuckey, chief innovation officer at Mattson, a California-based food and beverage consultancy which has developed many new products. “It may take someone from outside the food industry to really disrupt it,” reckons Ms Stuckey. And Silicon Valley has enough hubris to do so.
The business has already attracted a fair share of famous venture-capital firms and investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and others. “If we can provide [plant-based] food that’s healthier, tastes equal to better, at an equal to lower cost, it’ll go everywhere,” says Khosla’s Samir Kaul. If the companies they are backing succeed, the returns could be massive. The US beef industry alone is worth $88 billion. And even for condiments, such as mayonnaise, the market totals $2 billion. Still, not everyone is bullish on the prospects. These are high-risk endeavours and some of them might fail, cautions Michael Burgmaier of Silverwood Partners, an investment bank involved in dozens of food and beverage deals. The question is, he says: “Is the consumer ready for some of these products?”
Impossible Foods’ Dr Brown thinks they are. The inventor of a DNA chip now widely used in gene-expression analysis, his firm has been developing meat and cheese imitations from plants for three years. For meat, the aim is to recreate its key components—muscle, connective and fat tissue—using suitable plant materials. The company’s first product, a hamburger patty, already looks and cooks like meat, and will taste as good or better by the time it reaches the shops, Dr Brown promises.
To do this he has assembled a team comparable to one at a biotech or pharma company. It is largely made up of molecular biologists and biochemists, as well as some physicists; only a few members of his staff have a background in food science or have culinary training. In the company’s laboratory scientists break down plant materials and extract individual proteins with functional properties that can, for example, make foods firm up or melt down during cooking or baking.
The company has also spent a lot of time working out what gives meat its unique flavour. According to Dr Brown, the secret to a burger’s taste is haem, a compound found in all living cells, including plants. It is especially abundant in haemoglobin in blood, and in muscle tissues as myoglobin. It also gives a burger its red colour. During the cooking process haem acts as a catalyst that helps transform the amino acids, vitamins and sugars in muscle tissue into numerous volatile and flavourful molecules, he explains. To create the meaty flavour in its burger patties, the company uses a heme protein equivalent to one found in the roots of legumes.
Development of the burger has come a long way. Dr Brown says one person described the taste of the very first prototype as “rancid polenta”. Recent versions have been reviewed much more favourably as “better than a turkey burger”. In terms of nutrition, the patty’s protein content may be slightly higher than that of a conventional burger and have at least as many micronutrients. Because it is made from plants, it will not contain any traces of antibiotics, hormones or cholesterol. The company hopes to start selling the burger before the end of this year.
Getting the flavour
Beyond Meat, based in Southern California, has also been studying the components of meat to emulate its texture and flavour. “We’re smart enough now to understand the architecture and the composition of a piece of muscle,” says Ethan Brown (no relation to Dr Brown), the company’s CEO. The firm’s flagship product, Beyond Chicken Strips, has been on sale since 2012, and has a surprisingly authentic feel when eaten. When several Whole Foods Markets accidentally sold mislabelled chicken salads with the company’s plant-based strips there were no complaints. Only when an employee discovered the mix-up after two days were the salads officially recalled. The product’s texture is based on years of research at the University of Missouri, and it can now be created in a process that takes less than two minutes. An extruder rapidly heats, cools and pressurises a mixture of proteins and other ingredients into a structure that mimics the fibrous tissue of muscle.
The company’s most recent product, the Beast Burger, was released last month. It has more protein, more iron and is overall more nutritious than actual meat burgers. “The entire quest for meat in human evolution is really about a nutrient-dense source of food,” explains Mr Brown. “I wanted to build on that theme.”
But marketing plant-based burgers to carnivores is not easy. “My view is that meat has a masculine bent to it. You can’t sell it the same way you sell lettuce,” says Mr Brown. Hence the company is building the brand with images of vitality, fitness and health. In promotions it is using athletes. David Wright, captain of the New York Mets baseball team, has already signed up. In return, he is getting a small stake in the company.
Still under development is what may be Beyond Meat’s most ambitious product to date—a raw ground beef equivalent which it hopes will be offered in supermarkets’ meat sections right next to actual beef. Due for release later this year, it can be cooked and moulded into a meatloaf or meatballs—or, as Mr Brown hopes, even supplied to a fast-food chain to make burgers.
“It’s much easier to make a cookie dough without egg than it is to create a scrambled egg without egg”
Barb Stuckey, chief innovation officer at Mattson
San Francisco-based Hampton Creek has replaced eggs with plant proteins in the products it has released so far. Its Just Mayo and Just Cookie Dough are now distributed in 30,000 stores, including Kroger and Walmart. Other items in the works include a ranch salad dressing, a scrambled-egg alternative and pasta. The goal is to create products that make it easy for people to choose sustainable plant-based foods over conventional items. “Change happens by making something so delicious and so affordable, everyone chooses it,” says the firm’s boss, Josh Tetrick.
To accomplish this, Hampton Creek has assembled a team that includes experts in biochemistry, bioinformatics and food science along with a number of chefs. Scientists extract and isolate proteins from plant materials and conduct basic biochemical studies to understand their characteristics and possible applications for a variety of foods. The promising ones are tested in recipes in the company’s bakery and culinary sections to see how they perform.
So far, Hampton Creek has analysed more than 7,000 plant samples and identified 16 proteins that might prove useful in food applications. Several are already being used in its commercial food products, including a type of Canadian yellow pea in its mayonnaise. The team are looking for proteins with functional properties such as foaming, gelling and moisture retention. Mayonnaise, for example, requires a substance that binds the right amount of oil with water to create a stable emulsion. For its version in stores the company tested more than 1,500 different formulations.
Dan Zigmond, the former lead data scientist for Google Maps and now Hampton Creek’s vice-president of data, is in charge of simplifying the process of finding useful proteins. There are an estimated 400,000 plant species in the world, each of which may have tens of thousands of proteins. To search this vast number more efficiently, his team are feeding data the company has already gathered into machine-learning models, which are designed to predict which types of proteins could be useful in specific food applications without having to go through all the biochemical tests.
Last October Unilever, a consumer-goods giant, sued Hampton Creek for false advertising, saying its product should not be called “mayo” because it does not contain eggs. (Based on food standards from America’s Food and Drug Administration that date back to 1938, mayonnaise includes eggs.) Unilever also complained that the plant-based product had taken market share away from its well-known brand Hellmann’s, which is made with eggs. Some people saw the lawsuit as a frivolous food fight in which a big company tries to bully a fledgling one. Andrew Zimmern, a celebrity chef who had preferred Just Mayo over Hellmann’s in a blind taste-test, even started an online petition to urge Unilever to drop the lawsuit. It gathered over 100,000 signatures.
“This was great for Hampton Creek because it got their name out there and people on their side,” says Matthew Wong, a research analyst at CB Insights, an analytics firm. Initially Unilever demanded that Hampton Creek rename its product, take existing inventory off the shelves and pay damages. But in December, the company suddenly dropped its lawsuit. It was on the same day that Hampton Creek announced its latest funding round of $90m, bringing its total raised to $120m.
Hampton Creek has been successful with the products it already sells. However, it is not trying to build a burger patty from scratch with plants, as Impossible Foods is trying to do, and it has not yet released its scrambled-egg replacement. “It’s much easier to make a cookie dough without egg than it is to create a scrambled egg without egg,” says Mattson’s Ms Stuckey. In a cookie dough or mayonnaise there are plenty of other ingredients to work with. But in creating an egg or meat analogue there is a higher bar in the consumer’s mind, she adds, because the product is not combined with other ingredients it can hide behind.
Perhaps the most radical approach to disrupting the food industry comes from Soylent, whose beverage is designed to be a complete substitute for food and not just one of the many diet drinks or nutritional supplements. Sold as a powder to be mixed with water, it contains all the ingredients needed for sustenance, says Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s founder. It also eliminates the need to plan meals, cook and clean up afterward. “I see it as a life-simplification tool,” he says.
The name originates from the sci-fi novel “Make Room! Make Room!” in which people in an overcrowded, apocalyptic world live on foods made of soy and lentils. (A twist in the movie version “Soylent Green” is that its secret ingredient is human flesh.) The company moved from the San Francisco area to Los Angeles in late 2013 in search of cheaper office space.
Some users of the first version of the beverage complained of flatulence because of the high fibre content. That problem has now largely been solved by changing the carbohydrate blend and adding some digestive enzymes. Mr Rhinehart likens the improvements to the continuous updates to software that tech companies make. Soylent 1.3, the most recent version, has a smoother texture than the original, a more neutral taste and its omega-3s now come from algae as opposed to fish oil.
Out with the dishes
Mr Rhinehart himself uses Soylent for about 80% of his dietary needs. As a result he has not made a trip to the grocery store in years. He owns neither a fridge nor dishes. And he has turned his kitchen into a library. “I’ve also been able to separate the feeling of biological hunger from the craving of food from an experiential aspect,” explains Mr Rhinehart, who still enjoys “recreational food” on occasion.
As of mid-February his firm had a four-to-five-month backlog for new orders. Customers subscribe online to receive monthly shipments with a “meal” costing roughly $3. According to Mr Rhinehart, his company is already profitable and will use a recent $20m cash infusion to expand production and sales.
Mr Rhinehart is, to put it mildly, a little extreme. Not everyone may want to separate eating into utility versus pleasure. Impossible Foods’ Dr Brown does not believe such a compromise is necessary. “I don’t see any reason why you can’t have it all—the best tasting food, healthiest, best for the planet and most affordable.”
But even if the scientific hurdles of making plants taste like meat and other animal-based products are overcome, the bigger obstacle these companies face may be cultural. People have been eating meat and having meals together for thousands of years. Meat in particular is not only prized for its taste but also perceived as a force of vitality, strength and health.
A recent study by the Humane Research Council, an animal advocacy group, says most vegetarians and vegans, about 2% of America’s population, go back to eating meat eventually. In the future that may not be an option. “We can’t sustain the number of people that we’re going to need to feed over the next couple of decades with the current way that we’re eating,” says Ms Stuckey. Whether out of necessity or choice, Silicon Valley’s vision of a big shift to plant-based foods may be inevitable.
Oil in your coffee
A new source of fuel production
Feb 4th 2009 | Online extra
RUNNING a diesel engine on a plant-based fuel is hardly a new idea. Indeed, one of the early demonstrations shown by Rudolph Diesel, the German engineer who invented the engines at the end of the 1800s, operated on pure peanut oil. Diesel fuel made from crude oil eventually won the day because it was easier to use and cheaper to produce. Now new forms of biodiesel are starting to change the picture again. And one of the latest sources comes from the remains of a drink enjoyed the world over: coffee.
Biodiesels are becoming increasingly popular. In America, Minnesota has decreed that all diesel sold in the state has to contain 2% biodiesel (much of it from the crops grown by the state's soya farmers). Biodiesel can also be found blended into the fuel used by public and commercial vehicles and by trains in a number of countries. Aircraft-engine makers are also testing biofuel blends. Because biodiesels can be made from materials derived from plants, which use carbon dioxide to grow, they potentially have a much lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based fuels.
Coffee is also a plant product, but once the beans are ground and used they end up being thrown away or put on gardens as compost. Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra and Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno have found that coffee grounds can yield by weight 10-15% of biodiesel relatively easily. Moreover, when run in an engine the fuel does not have an offensive smell—just a whiff of coffee. Some biodiesels made from used cooking-oil leave a car exhaust smelling like a fast-food joint. And after the diesel has been extracted, the coffee grounds can still be used for compost.
The researchers' work began two years ago when Dr Misra, a heavy coffee drinker, left a cup unfinished and the next day noticed that the coffee was covered by a film of oil. Since he was investigating biofuels, Dr Misra enlisted his colleagues to look at coffee's potential. The nearby Starbucks was happy to oblige by supplying grounds.
They found that coffee biodiesel is comparable to the best biodiesels on the market. But unlike soya and other plant-based biodiesels, it does not use up plants or land that might otherwise be planted with food crops.
Unmodified oils from plants, like the peanut oil used by Diesel, have a high viscosity and require engine alterations. Diesel fuel is less thick and usually can be burned in an engine with little or no tinkering. The diesel-extraction for coffee grounds is similar to that used for other vegetable oils. It employs a process called transesterification, which reacts the grounds with an alcohol in the presence of a catalyst.
The researchers start off by drying their coffee grounds overnight and then pour in some common chemical solvents, such as hexane, ether and dichloromethane, to dissolve the oils. The grounds are then filtered out and the solvents separated (to be reused with the next batch of coffee grounds). The remaining oil is treated with an alkali to remove free fatty acids (which form a soap). Then transesterification takes place by heating the crude biodiesel to about 100 degrees Celsius to remove any water, and treating it with methanol and a catalyst. On cooling to room temperature and left to stand, the biodiesel floats up, leaving a layer of glycerine at the bottom. These layers are separated and the remaining biodiesel cleaned to remove any residues.
Although some people try to brew their own diesel at home from leftovers and recycled cooking oils, coffee-based diesel seems better suited to larger-scale processes. Dr Misra says that 1 litre of biodiesel requires 5-7 kg of coffee grounds, depending on the oil content of the coffee used. In their laboratory his team has set up a one-gallon-a-day production facility, which uses between 19-26kg of coffee grounds. The biofuel should cost about $1 per gallon to make in a medium-sized installation, the researchers estimate.
Commercial production might be suitable for an operation that collects coffee grounds from big coffee chains and cafeterias. There is plenty available: a report by the United States Department of Agriculture says that annual world coffee demand consumes more than 7m tonnes of coffee, which the researchers estimate could produce some 340m gallons of biodiesel. Time, perhaps, for another cup before refilling the car.
VR and the future of computing
Awaiting its iPhone moment
Virtual reality is a promising technology, but will not go mainstream in its current form
Aug 29th 2015 | From the print edition
IS IT vividly realistic—or is it still just vapid razzmatazz? Virtual reality (VR), a technology that flopped in the 1990s, is making a glitzy comeback. The dream of a headset that can immerse you in a detailed, realistic 3D world is now being pursued in earnest by a gaggle of startups and the giants of technology alike. Last year Facebook bought Oculus, the most prominent VR fledgling, for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, says “immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video.” Google supports VR in several of its products and is backing a secretive new company called Magic Leap. Microsoft, having missed the boat on smartphones, has developed an impressive VR system named HoloLens. Tech leaders have decided that VR could be the next big thing after the smartphone. Are they right?
The VR devices appearing in the next few months will focus on video-gaming, where VR is a natural fit. But the technology will eventually have many other uses: in data visualisation, education, communication and entertainment (including VR pornography, which is already starting to appear). Whether the 3D world is computer-generated or captured using special cameras, rendering it fast enough to seem realistic—and for it not to cause nausea—requires processing power, high-resolution screens and motion sensors. Happily, all those things can be found inside modern smartphones, which is making VR hardware cheaper to put together. Smartphones have also boosted VR thanks to adaptors that turn phones into basic headsets, the cheapest of which (devised by Google) are made of cardboard and cost $10. These cannot compete with high-end VR headsets, but they offer much of the experience for less than 5% of the price. Over the past year this has led to a surge in the experimental production and consumption of VR content.
As well as hastening the rise of VR, smartphones provide an analogy for how the technology is likely to develop. VR today is where smartphones were in 2001. Back then it was clear that mobile phones, connected to the internet and armed with cameras and colour screens, were going to be important. Sure enough, people now use phones for everything from maps and music to payments and picture-sharing. But the strongest advocates of the smartphone revolution, such as Nokia, failed to anticipate how it would play out, with the result that others now dominate the new industry. The turning-point was Apple’s iPhone. With its touchscreen and elegant apps, it set the model for the entire industry. VR has yet to have its iPhone moment. The idea is sound and the gear works, but today’s chunky headsets are unlikely to conquer the mass market.
The future is a mixed picture
How might VR triumph? One intriguing possibility would be to overlay graphics onto reality rather than replace it entirely—a technique called mixed or augmented reality (AR). Architectural models will seem to stand on your desk and video-game aliens will jump out from behind your sofa. Microsoft’s HoloLens is taking this approach. Magic Leap, meanwhile, is thought to be working on the technology for smaller and lighter AR headsets: people would sooner wear sunglasses and headphones than spend their day inside a motorbike helmet. AR could be the missing ingredient, just as the touchscreen was for the smartphone.
For the time being, VR remains a promising technology, worth watching closely, but still in a primitive incarnation. The offspring of today’s VR systems will be ubiquitous in 2030, by which time current devices will look as clunky as the folding camera-phones of 2001 do today. If the smartphone is anything to go by, the rise of VR will wrong-foot incumbent technology giants and turn obscure startups into household names. Sci-fi novelists have already sketched out a bewildering range of uses of AR, from head-up displays for soldiers to virtual jewellery that is drawn around the wearer by other people’s headsets. Such fiction provides a helpful guide to the potential impact of this emerging technology which, like the internet and smartphone, promises to touch every field of human endeavour. Just not very rapidly.
Watch RecoVR: Mosul, a collective reconstruction to see how The Economist is using virtual reality to preserve history
Every drop counts
And in Singapore every drop is counted
Singaporeans have a supply of water that is clean, predictably delivered and reasonably secure
May 20th 2010 | From the print edition
NO COUNTRY manages its water as well as Singapore. Admittedly, it has high rainfall and it is a tiny country, but that is exactly the trouble. As an island-city-state, it has little land on which to collect enough water for its 4.8m people, and not much room to store it. To supplement its bounty from above, it takes the salt out of sea water and imports supplies from Malaysia. But relations with its big neighbour are often strained; the two treaties under which the water is provided, both about 50 years old, expire in 2011 and 2061 respectively; and Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the nation, never forgot that the invading Japanese blew up the water pipeline when they seized Singapore in 1942.
The first measure taken to escape foreign dependency in the years after independence in 1965 was a general tidy-up. Industry and commerce were shifted into estates and messy pig and duck farms closed down. That made it easier to purify the rainwater that in Singapore is fastidiously collected wherever it can be—in streets and ponds, even on tall buildings and bridges—before being taken by drains to reservoirs, and thence to treatment plants where it is cleaned to drinking-water standards. The catchment area was increased by the creation of a pair of reservoirs, finished in 2011, meaning the rainfall-catchment acreage was extended to two-thirds of the island’s total land area.
Little is wasted in Singapore. Used water is treated and then either safely disposed of, reused for industrial purposes or air-conditioning, or mixed with reservoir water for drinking. Together, recycled waste and desalinated water are expected soon to meet 25-30% of demand, and local industries, many of them with a need for the cleanest supplies, are more than happy to use it. Most of the discarded sewage, once treated, is carried 5km out to sea.
Demand is also being contained. Subjected to constant water-consciousness campaigns, Singaporeans are obliged to install low-use taps and loos, and expected to be equally thrifty with their showers and washing-machines. As a result, domestic water use per person has fallen from 165 litres a day in 2003 to 151 today. The pricing system also encourages virtue. Both the tariff and the water-conservation tax rise for domestic users after the first 40 cubic metres a month, and there is a fee for various sanitary appliances. Industry faces much higher charges.
How is all this achieved? The most important ingredient is a sense of seriousness about water at the highest levels of government and a society that is generally regarded as pretty free of corruption. Then comes an autonomous water authority, professionally run by excellent, highly paid professionals (the boss is said to receive $700,000 a year). They are not afraid to bring in private-sector partners, and do what they believe needs doing, not what politicians want done. So money is invested in everything from dams and drains to membranes and bioreactors.
Singapore's water industry—over 50 companies, both local and foreign—is now thriving. Nanyang Technological University has three water-related units, and Singaporean companies are winning contracts in such countries as Qatar and Algeria. Singaporeans still import 40% of their needs. Even so, they have a supply of water that is clean, predictably delivered and reasonably secure. Sixty years ago they had floods, pollution and rationing.
March of the machines
What history tells us about the future of artificial intelligence—and how society should respond
Jun 25th 2016 | From the print edition
EXPERTS warn that “the substitution of machinery for human labour” may “render the population redundant”. They worry that “the discovery of this mighty power” has come “before we knew how to employ it rightly”. Such fears are expressed today by those who worry that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy millions of jobs and pose a “Terminator”-style threat to humanity. But these are in fact the words of commentators discussing mechanisation and steam power two centuries ago. Back then the controversy over the dangers posed by machines was known as the “machinery question”. Now a very similar debate is under way.
After many false dawns, AI has made extraordinary progress in the past few years, thanks to a versatile technique called “deep learning”. Given enough data, large (or “deep”) neural networks, modelled on the brain’s architecture, can be trained to do all kinds of things. They power Google’s search engine, Facebook’s automatic photo tagging, Apple’s voice assistant, Amazon’s shopping recommendations and Tesla’s self-driving cars. But this rapid progress has also led to concerns about safety and job losses. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others wonder whether AI could get out of control, precipitating a sci-fi conflict between people and machines. Others worry that AI will cause widespread unemployment, by automating cognitive tasks that could previously be done only by people. After 200 years, the machinery question is back. It needs to be answered.
Machinery questions and answers
The most alarming scenario is of rogue AI turning evil, as seen in countless sci-fi films. It is the modern expression of an old fear, going back to “Frankenstein” (1818) and beyond. But although AI systems are impressive, they can perform only very specific tasks: a general AI capable of outwitting its human creators remains a distant and uncertain prospect. Worrying about it is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars before colonists have even set foot there, says Andrew Ng, an AI researcher. The more pressing aspect of the machinery question is what impact AI might have on people’s jobs and way of life.
This fear also has a long history. Panics about “technological unemployment” struck in the 1960s (when firms first installed computers and robots) and the 1980s (when PCs landed on desks). Each time, it seemed that widespread automation of skilled workers’ jobs was just around the corner.
Each time, in fact, technology ultimately created more jobs than it destroyed, as the automation of one chore increased demand for people to do the related tasks that were still beyond machines. Replacing some bank tellers with ATMs, for example, made it cheaper to open new branches, creating many more new jobs in sales and customer service. Similarly, e-commerce has increased overall employment in retailing. As with the introduction of computing into offices, AI will not so much replace workers directly as require them to gain new skills to complement it. Although a much-cited paper suggests that up to 47% of American jobs face potential automation in the next decade or two, other studies estimate that less than 10% will actually go.
Even if job losses in the short term are likely to be more than offset by the creation of new jobs in the long term, the experience of the 19th century shows that the transition can be traumatic. Economic growth took off after centuries of stagnant living standards, but decades passed before this was fully reflected in higher wages. The rapid shift of growing populations from farms to urban factories contributed to unrest across Europe. Governments took a century to respond with new education and welfare systems.
This time the transition is likely to be faster, as technologies diffuse more quickly than they did 200 years ago. Income inequality is already growing, because high-skill workers benefit disproportionately when technology complements their jobs. This poses two challenges for employers and policymakers: how to help existing workers acquire new skills; and how to prepare future generations for a workplace stuffed full of AI.
An intelligent response
As technology changes the skills needed for each profession, workers will have to adjust. That will mean making education and training flexible enough to teach new skills quickly and efficiently. It will require a greater emphasis on lifelong learning and on-the-job training, and wider use of online learning and video-game-style simulation. AI may itself help, by personalising computer-based learning and by identifying workers’ skills gaps and opportunities for retraining.
Social and character skills will matter more, too. When jobs are perishable, technologies come and go and people’s working lives are longer, social skills are a foundation. They can give humans an edge, helping them do work that calls for empathy and human interaction—traits that are beyond machines.
And welfare systems will have to be updated, to smooth the transitions between jobs and to support workers while they pick up new skills. One scheme widely touted as a panacea is a “basic income”, paid to everybody regardless of their situation. But that would not make sense without strong evidence that this technological revolution, unlike previous ones, is eroding the demand for labour. Instead countries should learn from Denmark’s “flexicurity” system, which lets firms hire and fire easily, while supporting unemployed workers as they retrain and look for new jobs. Benefits, pensions and health care should follow individual workers, rather than being tied (as often today) to employers.
Despite the march of technology, there is little sign that industrial-era education and welfare systems are yet being modernised and made flexible. Policymakers need to get going now because, the longer they delay, the greater the burden on the welfare state. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s that “there cannot be a more legitimate object of the legislator’s care” than looking after those whose livelihoods are disrupted by technology. That was true in the era of the steam engine, and it remains true in the era of artificial intelligence.
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Welcome to the Drone Age
Miniature, pilotless aircraft are on the verge of becoming commonplacee
Sep 26th 2015 | From the print edition
THE scale and scope of the revolution in the use of small, civilian drones has caught many by surprise. In 2010 America’s Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) estimated that there would, by 2020, be perhaps 15,000 such drones in the country. More than that number are now sold there every month. And it is not just an American craze. Some analysts think the number of drones made and sold around the world this year will exceed 1m. In their view, what is now happening to drones is similar to what happened to personal computers in the 1980s, when Apple launched the Macintosh and IBM the PS/2, and such machines went from being hobbyists’ toys to business essentials.
That is probably an exaggeration. It is hard to think of a business which could not benefit from a PC, whereas many may not benefit (at least directly) from drones. But the practical use of these small, remote-controlled aircraft is expanding rapidly. After dragging its feet for several years the FAA had, by August, approved more than 1,000 commercial drone operations. These involved areas as diverse as agriculture (farmers use drones to monitor crop growth, insect infestations and areas in need of watering at a fraction of the cost of manned aerial surveys); land-surveying; film-making (some of the spectacular footage in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was shot from a drone, which could fly lower and thus collect more dramatic pictures than a helicopter); security; and delivering things (Swiss Post has a trial drone-borne parcel service for packages weighing up to 1kg, and many others, including Amazon, UPS and Google, are looking at similar ideas).
Watch Drone Rangers: how the technology can catch poachers and save lives
The drones’ club
Nor is commerce the only area in which drones are making a mark. A glance at the academic world suggests many more uses await discovery. Because drones are cheap, geographers who could never afford conventional aerial surveys are able to use them to track erosion, follow changes in rivers’ sources and inspect glaciers. Archaeologists and historians are taking advantage of software that permits drones fitted with ordinary digital cameras to produce accurate 3D models of landscapes or buildings. This lets them map ancient ruins and earthworks. Drones can also go where manned aircraft cannot, including the craters of active volcanoes and the interiors of caves. A drone operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, has even snatched breath samples from spouting whales for DNA analysis. And drones are, as might be expected, particularly useful for studying birds. A standard shop-bought drone can, for example, be used unmodified for counting nests high in a forest’s canopy.
Public servants, too, are putting drones through their paces. In the case of nest-counting, the idea is not to disturb the wildlife in question. In Ottawa officials have taken the opposite approach, with a “goosebuster” drone that is fitted with speakers which play the calls of birds of prey. This has kept a city park on Petrie Island free from the hundreds of geese whose droppings were causing problems. Police in Michigan are considering using drones for mapping the scenes of accidents, so that roads can be reopened more quickly. And drones can save lives, as well as keeping parks clean and traffic moving. In June, for example, Frank Roma, a fireman, rescued two boys from a river in Maine with the help of a drone. The boys were stuck on a rock in the middle of a powerful current. Mr Roma employed a drone to carry a line out to them, along which he passed life jackets that they were able to put on before an inflatable boat went out to perform the tricky manoeuvre of picking them up.
Other roles for drones are more questionable. Their use to smuggle drugs and phones into prisons is growing. Instances have been reported in America, Australia, Brazil, Britain and Canada, to name but a few places. In Britain the police have also caught criminals using drones to scout houses to burgle. The crash of a drone on to the White House lawn in January highlighted the risk that they might be used for acts of terrorism. And in June a video emerged of KATSU, a pseudonymous graffito artist, using a drone equipped with an aerosol spray to deface one of New York’s most prominent billboards.
How all this activity will be regulated and policed is, as the FAA’s own flat-footed response has shown, not yet being properly addressed. There are implications for safety (being hit by an out-of-control drone weighing several kilograms would be no joke); for privacy, from both the state and nosy neighbours; and for sheer nuisance—for drones can be noisy. But the new machines are so cheap, so useful and have so much unpredictable potential that the best approach to regulation may simply be to let a thousand flyers zoom.
The trailblazers of the field—the Mac and the PS/2 of the drone world, if you like—are the AR and the Phantom. The AR, built by Parrot, a French company, became a bestseller in 2010. It is an easy-to-fly quadcopter that beams video back to a smartphone. Then, in 2013, a Chinese firm called DJI introduced the Phantom. That brought professional-quality aerial photography within the reach of general users. The Phantom’s latest incarnation, which costs less than $2,000, can shoot 20 minutes’ worth of footage before it has to land.
How long these two firms will dominate the world of drones is anybody’s guess. Andrew Amato of Dronelife.com, an American consultancy, says that the Phantom’s limited flight time makes it vulnerable. A drone that could fly for significantly longer—an hour, perhaps—would change the marketplace, as would one that was fitted with “sense-and-avoid” technology that would stop it running into obstacles by mistake. Researchers are busy in both these fields.
Up, up and away
Sense-and-avoid, needed for drones to operate safely in shared airspace without close human supervision, is hard without extra sensors, such as radar. Using a drone’s own video camera to recognise objects in real time requires tremendous computing power. Some firms are, however, attempting to do just that. One, Bio Inspired Technologies of Boise, Idaho, is tackling the problem with a hard-wired neural network, a type of device that is good at learning things. This can, the firm’s engineers believe, be trained to recognise and avoid aerial obstacles. Alternatively, a conventional, if high-end, computer can be programmed with algorithms pre-designed to recognise and evade threats, by understanding how objects visible to a drone’s camera are moving. Percepto, a firm based in Tel Aviv, uses this approach, which it dubs “intelligent vision”. Percepto’s system might also be used to frame camera shots, by taking into account such things as lighting angles.
Whichever approach—training and learning, or pre-cooked recognition software—wins, drones that are able to understand their environments to even a limited extent will be a lot more useful. They could, for example, recognise their operator and home in on him when required. They might be set loose on frost-damaged roads, to look for potholes. They could be released to cruise over forests to spot fires early, or sent off to seek errant hikers who have failed to report in when expected.
Extended flight time will make all these putative uses more plausible, and many people are working on that, too. The most common approach is to switch in mid-air from being a helicopter, which relies on power-hungry rotor blades to stay aloft, to being an aeroplane, which gets its lift, more efficiently, from fixed wings.