Space 2.0

Last week I was in Mojave, hearing Virgin Galactic update the world on its progress in creating the world’s first commercial space line. Rolling out of the hanger was White Knight 2. This is a giant new composite aircraft that will loft a spaceship to high altitude. She looked stunning: shiny, colourful and ever-so slightly alien. The work of Burt Rutan’s team at the company Scaled Composites. A lot of work remains. Much testing and firing of engines, followed by flights that get incrementally higher.

As ever, the press unveiling was handled with just a little bit of PR pzazz by the Virgin team. Partway through the press conference, a giant curtain was zipped away to reveal White Knight 2 standing on a bit of airstrip that the press had been walking over just half an hour before. Behind her, perfectly lined up for the press photos, was one of Virgin America’s new planes. The Airbus was called “My other ride is a spaceship”.

There is less progress to report with the spaceship. She was in the Scaled hangar, covered by black dustsheets but clearly unfinished. Although she is 60% or 70% complete (depending on who you speak with) no work has been done on her for the last year. Work stopped after an explosion almost a year ago that killed three engineers and seriously injured three others.

A report on this is imminent, and word has it that work on the spaceship will resume after the report... and that the project will continue with its use of hybrid rockets.

Someone mentioned to me that the team will be modifying the engine to make sure that nitrogen oxidiser in the engine does not flow over composite material at all, only metal parts. I’ve no idea how this could have been involved in any explosion, but if any readers do--you can email me at natashaloder@economist.com

Links to the piece follow:

Knight in shining armour

Private space tourism is just the beginning Jul 31st 2008

Pesky-cides

On the face of it, writing about European pesticides legislation doesn't appear to be the most fascinating exercise. But this is a subject that is getting everyone very hot under the collar. European legislators want to remove some of the most hazardous substances from use as pesticides--because of their potential to harm people and the environment through misuse. And when they are looking at harm to people, they don't just mean consumers but also the people who apply pesticides.

Such a hazard-based approach annoys lots of people who see this as politics interfering in what was previously a scientific approach. Previously this approach was entirely risk based. A substance can be very hazardous, but in actual day-to-day use pose little risk to anyone because of the way it is used. Conceivably, something that is less toxic, may be harming more people because of the way it is applied (say just before harvest).

In any case, it seems that there is little chance of much change to this legislation when it reaches Parliament for its 2nd reading this year.

A balance of risk. Pesticides keep food edible and cheap. On the other hand they are, by definition, poisonous. Europe’s legislators thus face a dilemma. Jul 3rd 2008

Reader comments:

Random Scientist wrote:
July 03, 2008 18:26
The cost of pesticide tests will go sky high. The market will be handed over to few biggest companies, those which either have some approved pesticides or can afford tests. Did anarchic greens want to create oligopoly of big corporations? Anyway, they did it.

Fastfish wrote:
July 03, 2008 23:27
More proof that we base sustainable population calculation on an unsustainable foundation. The common tone expressed is that there is no point in considering any other option. Can the Economist provide more than a window onto Purgatory or Hell?

Aroman wrote:
July 04, 2008 04:37

I agree with Random Scientist. This "prove that this is safe" policy is the same that we have seen in chemicals (REACH) and medicine. In all cases the effect is the same: old and trusted substances are driven from the market because nobody invests to prove them safe and we are left with expensive substances that for many years will stay on patent. And the threshold for further innovation becomes nearly unsurmountable.

I don't understand why the old policy of periodically outlawing the most unsafe substances has become obsolete.

Mine, all mine

The article on June 19th on the endowment effect caused a range of reactions. Some readers thought it was brilliant, others thought it was brainless. The endowment effect is a quirk whereby once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it. I looked at the possible evolutionary origins of this phenomenon in the article:

It’s mine, I tell you, Jun 19th 2008
Mankind’s inner chimpanzee refuses to let go. This matters to everything from economics to law

The reason that the endowment effect still upsets a few people is because it undermines this idea of rational economic man, which has been the core of a lot of economic theory for some years. But behavioural economics and evolution keep chipping away at this idea.

fostercj wrote on June 23 had a different idea for why people keep trying to insist we all act rationally: "That's the endowment effect at work. I'd rather hold on to the theory I've got than trade it even if the new theory is the one I'd have chosen if offered both to begin with. That definitely has some policy implications."

But awinkle on June 22 had a different view: "The endowment effect is NOT irrational. Purchasing items requires time and resources. That is where the added value comes from. If I trade my ashtray for yours, that is a fair trade. If you pay me sticker price for my ashtray, then I have to go out and buy a new one, that is a waste of time for me!table and I'm told to pick one."

Some picked up on the more philosophical aspects of stuff. Genghis Cunn wrote on June 23:
"The Buddha explained the process by which humans develop attachment and craving, a process which with a little training each of us can observe within ourselves."

Along with the article, I co-wrote a jokey leader (op-ed):
The curse of untidiness: DNA all over the place, Jun 19th 2008
Clutter is not just an evolutionary adaptation, but also a business opportunity

Hair raising tales

Going bald upsets a lot of people, mostly men. Everyone looses hair as they get older, but some men in particular loose most if not all of it in what is called male pattern baldness.

Male pattern baldness is the number one reason (when I looked a few years ago) that men are having cosmetic surgery in America. These days a hair transplant doesn't leave you a head like a cheaply woven Chinese doll. No more giant plugs of hair in little plantations, hair is transplanted in tiny, naturally occurring little groups. It is, naturally, very costly. But it works. Hair moved from the back of the head doesn't wilt and die like the stuff that lived on the top. The only problem is that for many men, they simply do not have enough hair at the back of their heads to replace what has been lost at the front and top.

But, you've guessed it, science comes leaping into the room to offer a solution. Intercytex, a Manchester-based company thinks it can create new hair, something described in this week's article in The Economist. Don't get too excited. For whatever reason, the UK authorities have decided that Intercytex's technology is a drug treatment and it must therefore go through trials from phases I to III (it is up to II at the moment). So it will take up to five years before anything appears on the market. But it does offer hope, at last, to the world's baldies.

Regenerative medicine
Hair today, hair tomorrow. A cure for baldness Jun 5th 2008

Drugs bust

Few correspondents liked our leader line on drugs.

Reader William Rising, from Indonesia, wrote in to raise the issues that we didn't delve into, namely how will society adapt to the changes that cognition enhancing drugs and will it be fair for people to take them in competitive situations. These are important questions but difficult to answer without knowing the specifics of the drugs available and how good they really are. We don't worry about people taking coffee or Ritalin at the moment to improve their performance in exams. Maybe we should.

Dr Giorgio Cometto, from London, says that any argument that likens the use of caffeine to the abuse of drugs that are prescribed for a specific person, reflects "a shallowness of analysis that beggars description".

Trying not to be too shallow, I'd like to point out that millions of people use Viagra every day as a recreational drug and nobody really cares because it is largely harmless. The point of the leader was that before getting upset about new psychoactive drugs, we need to bear in mind that many of them may not be harmful and possibly even quite beneficial.

Jil Hellemann from Warwick says that the question really should be about whether the increasing medicalisation of everyday life is a good thing. "You should have questioned the desirability of a society which makes drug usage a predicate to living 'useful' lives and rendering us all disabled".

Similarly Tuure Pitkänen, from Finaland, says that instead of marveling at new medical breakthroughs I should have contemplated why life has become so intensive that one has to consume psychoactive substances to keep up.

Alagbe Taiwo from Nigeria wonders whether students will simply get more lazy as a result of all the drugs available to boost their brains.

And Lynda Cord, from Australia, dislikes the fact that our leader advocates the use of cognition enhancing drugs and wonders if the person who wrote it was working for the drugs industry.

I'm not, and it is highly unlikely that drugs companies will go to the trouble of getting approval for the sale of cognitive enhancers to the general population. Too much trouble. Far easier, instead, to sit back and watch as people decide for themselves that they would like to take these drugs "off label". Off label means using using medication for a condition that has not been approved by the FDA.

Modafinil was approved as an orphan drug (one for very rare diseases) for narcolepsy, yet today has sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars every year. There simply are not enough narcoleptics to support that kind of volume of sales. Everyone knows that off-label use is rife. Nobody is in much hurry to do anything about it.

Girls vs boys

Girls, we have been told, are rubbish at maths. Not so, says a new study. Girls are just as good as boys if brought up in a society where men and women are treated more equally, at least according to new research in Science. If they live in Turkey they don't do nearly as well on standard tests, whereas if they live in Norway, they do just as well. Raising girls in more equal societies allows them to do just as well in maths. The only thing that boys do retain an advantage at is geometry.

Education and sex: Vital statistics
Girls are becoming as good as boys at mathematics, and are still better at reading May 29th 2008

And this also may be of interest from a few years ago. Rereading it I realise the article sort of falls flat at the end and doesn't really reach a conclusion about whether biology or culture has a greater impact on differences between men and women.

In the editorial meetings, we had a lot of arguments about what all the data actually meant and many of my colleagues had strongly held views about the origins of these differences.

My feeling then, as now, is that when it comes to inbuilt differences between the brains of men and women, ignoring the sex-related ones (which are large), the differences are mostly small. I think the cultural influences, on the contrary, can be much much greater. What this means is that, potentially, a lot of the differences we see in the differences between the brains of men and women are actually derived from upbringing.

Differences between the sexes: The mismeasure of woman. Aug 3rd 2006
Men and women think differently. But not that differently

On the mind

In laboratories around the world, scientists are hard at work at making drugs to treat diseases based in the brain such as Parkinson's, Alzheimers and schizophrenia. Many of the drugs they are creating are specific to the disease, others are not and these offer to enhance cognitive abilities such as memory and learning. The fascinating thing about these drugs is that if taken by normal people, they may offer cognitive enhancement.

This is the lesson we have already learnt from drugs such as Ritalin and Provigil. Many people with no form of disease or disorder are now taking them as cognitive enhancers. In the case of Ritalin, it is reasonable to state that the drug is possibly one in which the risks of off-label use outweigh the benefits. It is an amphetamine-like drug that can be addictive. In the case of Provigil (also known as modafinil) the side effects are smaller, and people using it to maintain alertness when they are working late are likely to report far fewer side-effects than drinking a lot of coffee.

The comparison of coffee is worth bearing in mind. It is a drug that practically everyone takes, and it does have side effects. Just because it comes from nature doesn't make it any better than something out of a laboratory.

This brings us to the question of whether we should welcome or fear the new generations of cognitive enhancing drugs that are likely to arrive? And as they arrive, so will the potential for use "off label" by people who are not sick. People worry about a society where everyone is doing drugs but they forget or choose to ignore the various stimulants already used from caffeine to ginseng. While it is true that there are potentially medical risks of a new generation of cognition-enhancing drugs (as well as ethical issues), it be wrong to fear their arrival and legislate against them as a whole.

Policies need to be based on the each drug's potential for harm. If these new drugs are generally safe, and people want to take them, it would be wrong to criminalise this behaviour or even set up punitive measures. Some of these drugs may be a good thing, offering us real benefits—particularly as we age. Mental acuity starts to fail when we get older. Just because such mental failings are not given (at present) any specific medical label, doesn't mean that they don't have a legitimate use for cognition enhancing drugs.

Even if you hate the idea of a society where lots of people are taking cognitive enhancing drugs or one where many people feel obliged to take them, there is very little that can be done to eradicate it. People need to be realistic about what government legislation can, in any case, do about off-label drug use.

Taking a punitive approach to cognition enhancers pre-judges who has a legitimate use for them. In twenty or thirty years from now, many impairments of the brain will be recognised as legitimate reasons for the use of cognitive enhancers. Wouldn't it be a shame if the first generation of people who found a use for them were punished.

Cognitive enhancement: All on the mind
Prepare for drugs that will improve memory, concentration and learning May 22nd 2008

Leaders: Smart drugs