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Image: National Geographic

Issue no. 5, 2011 Published: Feb 04, 2011
Can complexity theory explain Egypt's crisis?
EU sees alarming innovation gap for European firms
Biologists produce plants that detect contaminants, explosives
Zapping the brain sparks bright ideas
Malay scientists use tropical fruits to make batteries
Google lets you explore the world of fractals

Can complexity theory explain Egypt's crisis?
Scientists who study complex systems have been warning that ever-tighter coupling among the world's finance, energy and food systems would result in waves of political instability. Some say that is now happening in the Middle East. Current models show that complex interdependencies can generate cascading change, or revolution, but they can also collapse. Because so many aspects of Egypt's daily life are interlinked, the country is walking a fine line between the two. Food is a political issue in Egypt: Egyptians are the world's biggest wheat importers and consumers, and most are poor. As a result, the government maintains order with heavy subsidies for bread. It also runs the ports where imported wheat arrives, the trucks that haul it, the flour mills and bakeries. 'Such hierarchical systems are both stable and unstable,' says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By this he means that they are fine so long as the top of the hierarchy is in place, and can recover quickly. But take the top away - as is happening in Egypt - and the entire system risks collapse. The early signs of this are showing. Bread is getting scarce in Egypt's capital, Cairo. Bakeries are closing for lack of flour and there have been reports that a baker who tried to raise prices was killed. Imported wheat is sitting in ports as cranes and lorries stand idle. The interlocking dependencies that tie modern economies together spread dislocation further. Even where there is food, Egyptians have little money to buy it, as businesses and banks close, cash machines empty and wages dry up. The good news, says Bar-Yam, is that if you replace the top of the hierarchy, things start up again. The stresses of decades of dictatorship might have turned the entire Middle East into a 'self- organised critical system' he says. The build-up of stresses makes such systems vulnerable to cascades of change triggered by relatively small disruptions. Bar-Yam is trying to build mathematical models of the world's interlocking economic systems that might predict where the next instabilities will arise.
New Scientist Feb 03, 2011	back to top

EU sees alarming innovation gap for European firms
Europe faces an 'innovation emergency' because its businesses are falling behind US and Japanese rivals in terms of investment and new patents, the European Commission says. Businesses in Brazil and China are also catching up fast with rivals in the EU, the Commission's data shows. Sweden is top for innovation in the 27-nation EU, closely followed by Denmark, Finland and Germany. The data is collated in a new 'Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010' by UNU-MERIT, a joint research institute of Maastricht University and United Nations University in the Netherlands. The scoreboard compares performance in areas such as research systems, funding for innovation, business investments and use of intellectual assets. The Commission says one of Europe's biggest weaknesses is in generating revenue from high-impact patents, that is, those that make significant returns for companies in global markets. The EU needs to improve the functioning of its internal market for protected knowledge, the Commission says. The dynamism of Chinese firms in particular means that China "continues rapidly to narrow its performance gap with the EU", the statement adds. However, the report on Tuesday said the EU was outperforming the US in public research and development spending and exports of knowledge-intensive services.
BBC News Feb 01, 2011	back to top

Biologists produce plants that detect contaminants, explosives
Researchers at Colorado State University have shown that plants can serve as highly specific detectors for environmental pollutants and explosives. The team enabled a computer-designed detection trait to work in a plant by rewiring its natural signalling process so the plant turns from green to white when chemicals are detected in air or soil. The work could eventually be used for a wide range of applications such as security in airports or shopping malls, or monitoring for pollutants such as radon in a home. Based on research so far, detection abilities of these plants are similar to or better than those of dogs, according to the team. The detection traits could be used in any plant and could detect multiple pollutants at once - changes that can also be detected by satellite. First a computer program was used to redesign naturally occurring proteins called receptors. These re-designed receptors specifically recognize a pollutant or explosive. The team then modified these computer redesigned receptors to function in plants, and targeted them to the plant cell wall where they can recognise pollutants or explosives in the air or soil near the plant. The plant detects the substance and activates an internal signal that causes the plant to lose its green colour, turning the plants white.
PhysOrg / PLoS ONE Jan 27, 2011	back to top

Zapping the brain sparks bright ideas
Zapping the brain with electricity helps people think outside the box to solve a task, according to researchers of the University of Sydney in Australia. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a safe and non-invasive method of temporarily altering the activity of neurons by passing weak currents through electrodes on the scalp. It can enhance mathematical skills, memory, attention and language learning. The team trained 60 volunteers to solve arithmetic problems expressed in Roman numerals constructed from matchsticks. The point of this was to get their brains in the habit of solving problems in a particular way: the participants corrected false calculations by moving matchsticks around to create different numbers. The volunteers then worked on two further matchstick problems that required a different approach, swapping an equation's symbols, while they received tDCS over their anterior temporal lobes (ATL), brain structures found on each side of the brain near the temples. The right-hand ATL is known to be involved in perceiving the world in a new light. Some participants received an excitatory current over the right hemisphere of the brain and inhibitory current over the left, while others experienced the opposite pattern or a sham treatment. Excitation of the right hemisphere and inhibition of the left made the participants three times more likely to figure out the correct answer within six minutes compared with those who received the sham treatment. The result confirms that the right ATL is associated with insight and novel meaning. The combination of excitation and inhibition may force participants to examine problems with fresh eyes instead of relying on old routines, say the authors.
New Scientist / PLoS One Feb 03, 2011	back to top

Malay scientists use tropical fruits to make batteries
Malaysian engineers are harnessing the country's biodiversity to find alternative raw materials for high-tech electronic products such as electric vehicle batteries. They have discovered that bamboo, coconut shells and durian fruit skins can be converted into an activated form of carbon used to make the components of electric batteries known as 'supercapacitors'. Activated carbon is normally made from coal but now researchers at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) say it could be sourced from a natural, renewable source, providing income to rural people. The plants are readily available in the tropical nation, allowing for sustainable and environmentally friendly sourcing of such components. And the new process will reduce the material cost of producing battery components by up to 30%, the researchers said. The researchers intend to make full use of this property by tailoring supercapacitors for specific purposes or applications, such as energy storage for wind and wave power plants, emergency doors on aeroplanes and mobile devices.
SciDev Feb 01, 2011	back to top

Google lets you explore the world of fractals
Google has previously mapped the Earth, Moon and Mars, but it's now turned its cartography skills to the mathematical world of fractals. Julia Map allows fractalnauts to explore the infinite beauty of the famous Mandelbrot set and the more general Julia sets. Fractal generators have always been a popular way to push computers to their limits, but modern hardware and software is now powerful enough to render them in-browser. Julia Map relies on the new HTML5 standard in combination with Web Workers, a piece of software that lets web applications take full advantage of the multi-core processors within newer computers. All this technology makes it possible to perform the hardcore number-crunching required for drawing fractals. These mathematical figures are generated by repeatedly solving equations, feeding in each output as a new input in order to calculate the intricate and self-similar fractal detail (http://juliamap.googlelabs.com).
New Scientist Feb 02, 2011	back to top